WADHAM COLLEGE (2) HISTORY

“But these were merciful men, whose righteousness
hath not been forgotten. . . .  Their bodies are buried
in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”

          
                                    Ecclesiasticus, xliv. 10, 14.

The collection of pictures In Wadham Hall is probably the best of any college in Oxford—­always, of course, excepting Christ Church.  It has no single picture to be compared with the “Thomas Warton” at Trinity, or the “Dr. Johnson” at Pembroke (both excellent works of Reynolds), nor does it give so many fine examples of the work of recent artists as do Trinity or Balliol; but it makes up for these deficiencies by the number and the variety of its pictures.

Two only of the men they represent can be said to attain to the first rank among England’s worthies—­Robert Blake, second as an admiral only to Nelson and Oxford’s greatest fighting man until the present war, and Christopher Wren, “that prodigious young scholar” (as John Evelyn calls him), who, as has been well said, would have been second only to Newton among English mathematicians had he not chosen rather to be indisputably the first of British architects.  It is interesting to note that Wadham shares with All Souls’ two of the greatest names in the Scientific Revival of the seventeenth century:  both Wren and Thomas Sydenham, the physician, migrated from Wadham to fellowships at All Souls’.

Their connection with Wadham is part of what is probably the most interesting single episode in the college history.  When the Parliament triumphed, and the King’s partisans were turned out of Oxford, the Lodgings at Wadham were given to the most distinguished of her Wardens, John Wilkins, who, no doubt, owed his promotion to the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell.  In his own day everyone knew him; he was a moderate man, who interceded for Royalist scholars under the Commonwealth, and tempered the penal laws to Non-Conformists, when later he was Bishop of Chester.  He was even better known to the “philosophers” as the inventor of a universal language and as curious for every advance in Natural Science.  But, in our day, he is only remembered for his connection with the Royal Society; that most illustrious body grew out of the meetings held weekly at his Lodgings and the similar meetings held in London; when later these two movements were united, Wilkins was secretary of the committee which drew up the rules for their future organization, and thus prepared the way for the Royal Charter, given to the Society in 1662.  When the Royal Society celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1912, many of its members made a pilgrimage to “its cradle” (or what was, at any rate, “one of its cradles").