Page:Oxford men and their colleges.djvu/209

 IX.— ALL SOULS'.

IOUS Henry Chichele, the son of a merchant of Higham Ferrars, was one of the first roll of scholars whom William of Wykeham nominated at the opening of his great foundation of New College. He left Oxford with the degree of Doctor of Laws, and soon found both ecclesiastical preferment and a lucrative legal practice. He attached himself to the House of Lancaster, and served Henry IV. so well that he was made Bishop of St. David's, and sent to represent England at the Council of Pisa. In such favour did he stand at Court, that when Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, died in the first year of Henry V., the young king appointed Chichele to succeed him.

For the long term of thirty years Henry Chichele held the Primacy of all England, and played no small part in the governance of the realm. The two main characteristics of his policy, whatever may be urged in his defence, were most unfortunate ; he was a stout supporter of the unhappy war with France, and he was a weak defender of the liberties of the Church of England against Papal aggression. History remembers him as the ambassador who urged so hotly the preposterous claims of Henry V. on the French throne, and as the first Primate who refused to accept the Archbishopric from the King and the Chapter, till he had obtained a dispensation and a Bull of Provision from the Pope.

However great may have been his faults as a statesman, Chichele (like his successor Laud) was throughout his life a liberal and consistent patron of the University. He presented it with money and books, and, mindful of what he owed to his training at New College, resolved to copy his old master Wykeham in erecting one more well-ordered and well-endowed house of learning, among the obscure and ill-managed halls which still harboured the majority of the members of the University. He first began to build a small College in St. Giles' ; but this institution — St. Bernard's as it was called— he handed over unfinished to the Cistercian monks, in whose posses- sion it remained till the Reformation, when it became the nucleus round which Sir Thomas White built up his new foundation of St. John's.

Chichele's later and more serious scheme for establishing a College was not taken up till 1437, when he had occupied the Archiepiscopal See for twenty-three years, and was already passed the age of seventy. It was one of the darkest moments of the wretched French war ; the great Duke of Bedford had died two years before, and Paris had been for twelve months in the hands of the P'rench. The old Archbishop, all whose heart had been in the struggle, and who knew that he himself was more responsible for its commencement than any other subject of the Crown, must have spent his last years in unceasing regrets. Perhaps he may have felt some personal remorse when he reflected on his own part in the furthering of the war, but certainly — whether he felt his respon- sibility or not -the waste of English lives during the last twenty years lay heavy on his soul. Hence it came that his new college became a chantry as well as a place of education— the inmates were to be devoted as well ad orandum as ad studendum — hence also, we can hardly doubt, came its name. For, as its Charter drawn by Henry VI. proceeds to recite : the prayers of the community were to be devoted, " not only for our welfare and that of our godfather the Archbishop, while alive, and for our souls when we shall have gone from this light, but also for the souls of the most illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas late Duke of Clarence our uncle, of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and other noble subjects of our father and ourself who fell in the wars for the Crown of France, as also for the souls of all the faithful departed. Not unwisely, therefore, has the piety of the present generation filled the niches of Chichele's magnificent reredos with the statues of Clarence and York, Salisbury and Talbot, Suffolk and Bedford, and others who struck their last stroke on the fatal plains of France. Nor can we doubt that the Archbishop's meaning was well expressed in

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