II - THE AGE OF CONTROVERSY (1537–1661)

Summary

The influences which lay behind Metcalfe's retirement very soon emerged into the foreground. For well over a century thereafter colleges were the centres of bitter religious controversies; it can be said, indeed, that ‘early Puritanism, like early Protestantism, was an academic movement centred on the University of Cambridge’ and not least upon St John's College in that university. This followed inevitably from the fact that religious questions were the dominant intellectual issues of the day and from the very purposes served by academic studies. Those purposes were, as Roger Ascham defined them in 1547: ‘first, that we may diffuse the Lord's gospel among God's people; then, that we may root out, in so far as we can, papism with all hypocrisy, superstition and idolatry’. The circumstances of the Reformation gave to colleges a controversial role, and that role generated divisions within them which were often so deep as to be unbridgeable.

At the same time, such divisions could not be purely private matters. They also concerned the rulers of England because colleges were ‘nurseries of ideas and opinions’ and trained others besides candidates for the priesthood. Ascham again has pointed to the dual role they were coming to play: in vineam Domini mittimus plurimos operarios; in reliquam rempublicam aptos et instructos viros. The climate of opinion in colleges, therefore, was of general and not merely of ecclesiastical significance.