Chapter IV - The Seventeenth Century

Summary

Since the accession of Queen Elizabeth the College had elected Masters, whose religious bias had been towards puritanism. Grinda's leniency to the puritan preachers and their “prophesyings” had brought him into disfavour with the queen. Hutton was one of those whose plea for conciliation in the controversy about surplices had drawn from Archbishop Parker the advice to Cecil, not to listen to a “bragging brainless head or two”, and Whitgift, who had also signed this petition, had not at the time of his election to the Mastership of Pembroke adopted that via media which enabled him to play so great a part in consolidating the Elizabethan settlement. Young had been a chaplain of Grindal, and a friend of Archdeacon Watts, Fulke had by his writings earned the title of “acerrimus papamastix”. Under Lancelot Andrewes, who succeeded Fulke in 1589, the College began to develop into one of the strongholds of the High Church party. During the sixteenth century Edmund Spenser, the poet of Platonical puritanism, had been one of the chief glories of the College; Richard Crashawe, the Catholic mystic, was to be the poet of the seventeenth century.