The first wave of the dissolution saw all of Oxford’s religious houses shut down: the Benedictine-run Canterbury, Durham and Gloucester Colleges, and the Cistercian-run St Bernard’s College. Their assets were stripped, their real estate sold off to the highest bidder and their inhabitants turned out onto the streets. Scores of academics and undergraduates now found themselves jobless, homeless and penniless. Hard hit too were the university libraries. College after college was ransacked for its illuminated books (seen as symbols of a despised papist idolatry), which were then carried out in cartloads and destroyed. In New College quadrangle the pages of the scattered medieval manuscripts blew thick as the autumn leaves, reported Layton. One enterprising student, a Master Greenefeld from Buckinghamshire, gathered them up and used them to make ‘Sewells or Blanshers [game-scarers] to keep the Deer within the wood, and thereby to have better cry with his hounds.’9
Oxford reeled under this attack. The developing university had drawn the wealth of the monasteries to the city. Those same monasteries had spawned the abbeys and priories, and they, in turn, had financed the building of Oxford’s first academic halls. And so the university and the city had grown. Even the newer, secular colleges, which escaped the cull but were bludgeoned into a show of loyalty, were dependent on the Church revenue now being siphoned into the Crown’s coffers. The destruction of the monasteries brought academic chaos to Oxford. More pertinently, it also brought festering resentment.10
Some fourteen years later, in 1549, royal agents called on Oxford again. This time they were Edward VI’s visitors, come to enforce his new Prayer Book, the first real doctrinal step towards Protestantism.* Hot on their heels came the German and Swiss mercenary forces of Lord Grey of Wilton. Let Oxford be in no doubt that this regime meant business. Of the thirteen heads of those Oxford colleges still remaining, the visitors could find only two who supported the Government’s religious policy; as the Protestant reformer, Peter Martyr, remarked: ‘the Oxford men…are still pertinaciously sticking in the mud of popery’. But events soon proved that Oxford men were not the only stick-in-the-muds. July of that year burnt with the heat of a countrywide rebellion. On 12 July the Duke of Somerset wrote to Lord Russell, to lament the ‘stir here in Bucks. and Oxfordshire by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself)’. Lord Russell scarcely had time to broadcast the news; just six days later Grey’s mercenaries had quickly and ruthlessly put out the fires. The eleven-year-old King Edward noted gleefully in his journal that Lord Grey ‘did so abash the rebels, that more than half of them ran their ways, and other [sic] that tarried were some slain, some taken and some hanged’. Grey left careful instruction that ‘after execution done the heads of every of them…to be set up in the highest place for the more terror of the said evil people’. The vicars of Chipping Norton and of Bloxham were hanged from the steeples of their own churches, and Johann Ulmer, a Swiss medical student at Christ Church College, wrote home to his patron, the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger, that ‘the Oxfordshire papists are at last reduced to order, many of them having been apprehended, and some gibbeted, and their heads fastened to the walls’.11
The purges soon followed. Magdalen College lost its president, Dr Owen Oglethorpe, forced out in favour of a suitable Protestant candidate. Christ Church lost John Clement, a former tutor in the household of Sir Thomas More, who now fled to the university at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands to join the growing community of Oxford disaffected there. Corpus Christi lost its dean and its president, both arrested and carried off to London, one to the Marshalsea prison for seditious preaching, the other to the Fleet prison for using the old form of service on the preceding Corpus Christi day. These were not the only expulsions and Oxford braced itself for a stormy future.12
And then the weather turned. On 6 July 1553 Edward died, and the chill winds of reform swung southerly, blowing before them, back from the Continent, the exiles of Oxford: Oglethorpe back to Magdalen, Clement back to practise medicine in Essex. They passed on the dockside a new generation of Oxford men, John Jewel of Corpus Christi, Christopher Goodman, the Lady Margaret Professor, off into exile in their turn, as Queen Mary immediately rescinded her brother’s statutes. The next five years brought calm to a city that basked in the warmth of the sovereign’s personal favour. They also brought prosperity. Mary tripled the university’s revenue and oversaw the foundation of two new colleges, Trinity and St John’s, in place of the ruined Durham and St Bernard’s.13
At Corpus Christi the ornaments and vestments hidden from sight during Edward’s reign were triumphantly returned to the college chapel. Communion tables were quickly removed and replaced with new altars; the ‘6 psalms in English’, the ‘great Bible’ and the ‘book of Communion’—all of which had been demanded by Edward’s visitors—were destroyed; and, all around Oxford, people picked up the pieces of lives rudely shattered by statute from London. When ex-Bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, were sent to Oxford for trial, it was signal proof that Mary never doubted the city’s loyalty. That the Government wished to demonstrate in an academic setting the shortcomings of doctrinal heresy and that all the accused were from Cambridge merely underlined the wisdom of the decision. When the three men were burnt in a ditch opposite Balliol College it had little impact on the watching crowd—Latimer’s ‘candle’ of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford.14
Mary was swept into power on a wave of popular support, but she found herself left high and dry on virgin sand as England’s first queen regnant since Matilda’s ill-fated attempt to assert her claim to her father, Henry I’s throne. Matilda had plunged the nation into a nineteen-year civil war; throughout the last bitter summer of Mary’s reign Englishmen can have felt only relief that they had got away so lightly this time around. Still, the previous five years had brought more than their fair share of misery. On her accession Mary had commanded her ‘loving Subjects, to live together in quiet Sort, and Christian Charity, leaving those new found devilish Terms of Papist or Heretic’. Her first Parliament had seemed to speak for the majority of her people. Then had come marriage to the reviled King Philip of Spain, the burning of Protestants and a disastrous war with France, and now those same people, the stench of the execution pyres fresh in their nostrils, awaited her death with impatience. On 17 November 1558 it finally came and ‘all the churches in London did ring and at night [the people] did make bonfires and set tables in the street and did eat and drink and make merry for the new Queen’, wrote Machyn in his diary. At just twenty-five years old, though, that new young queen, Elizabeth, was very much an unknown quantity. While London celebrated, Oxford held its breath and waited for what the royal visitors would bring.15
On Christmas Day 1558, just weeks into the new reign, Dr Owen Oglethorpe of Magdalen, now Bishop of Carlisle and the officiating divine for the festivities, received a message from Queen Elizabeth asking him not to elevate the consecrated host at High Mass that day. The Spanish ambassador, Count de Feria, reported Oglethorpe’s refusal to comply with the request: ‘Her Majesty was mistress of his body and life, but not of his conscience’. Elizabeth heard mass that day until the gospel had been read and then, as Oglethorpe prepared to celebrate the transformation of bread to body and wine to blood, she rose and left the royal chapel. To those who watched and waited this was the first public indication of which way the Queen might jump.16
If Elizabeth herself had wanted a sign of how the battle lines were