Institutional history is a tricky genre, so prone to over-reverence, so likely to be tedious to anyone but those attached to the institution described. So it was superficially brave of a commercial press to commission a quincentenary history of a Cambridge college: brave, that is, until one discovers that its authors include Quentin Skinner, the late Roy Porter, David Canna- dine and Simon Schama amongst others, all of them alumni of the Jack Plumb school of history, which was based in Christ’s during Plumb’s long postwar reign there as history tutor and which became the forcing house for an engaged, literate, civic style of historical writing which can make even the introspective mores of a Cambridge college interesting.
What David Reynolds, the editor of this volume of essays, has decided to do is to invite a number of historians, all of them in some way associated with the college, to contribute a chapter which illuminates the history of the college. It makes an intriguing volume, beginning with an essay which is the closest thing to conventional institutional history, in which Barrie Dobson, a late mediaeval historian, disinters the exact motives of Lady Margaret Beaufort in establishing what had previously been known as God’s House as a separate college by letters patent issued on 1 May 1505. I remember being told that the window which overlooks the college hall from the Master’s Lodge was put in to enable Lady Margaret to check whether her fellow scholars were behaving at dinner (she, of course, would not have been permitted to join them). But this is perhaps a myth. She certainly made every possible effort to ensure that they behaved themselves, forbidding playing with dice or cards except at Christmas.
Quentin Skinner, who has been a Fellow of Christ’s since 1962, provides a fascinating, extremely tightly focussed analysis of the style of teaching that Milton would have received as a student at the college, which began with a study of logic and went on to rhetoric, but also included a considerable amount of classical literature, particularly Homer. Later in his life, Milton disparaged the education he had received there, describing it as ‘monkish and miserable sophistry’, but this no doubt greatly underestimated its influence upon him, since efforts were made to keep him as a college fellow and he was subsequently to thank them as ‘ingenuous and friendly men who were ever the countenancers of virtuous and hopefull wits’.
Unfortunately the weakest of the chapters is the one by Roy Porter, who writes about what he knows about — the relationship between religion and science in the 18th century — but without making much effort to relate it to the history of the college beyond the apparently accidental fact that both Henry More, one of the leading Latitudinar- ians of the late 17th century, and William Paley were both fellows of the college. Had Porter lived, he might perhaps have made more of the theme announced at the beginning of his chapter of the long-standing tension in the college’s history between science and religion, which was still an issue in the mid-20th century when Charles Raven as Master of the college was grappling with the apparent inconsistencies between science, natural history and Christian revelation.
John Burrow, a historian of ideas, provides a cogent account of late 19th-century secularisation and the widening of horizons, which included the introduction of science and sport, the establishment of the history and law triposes in the 1860s, and the election of John Seeley as a Fellow, who went on to become one of the great apologists of the British empire (his Expansion of England, which was based on the lectures he gave to candidates for the Indian Civil Service, sold over 80,000 copies in the first two years of publication).
In some ways the most interesting chapters are those that cover the history of the college in the 20th century. The first is an analysis of the college in its institutional formation by Barry Supple, an economic historian who provides a measured and balanced account of the contrast, which is probably evident in the history of any Oxbridge college, between its tendency to introspective conservatism, witness the resistance to change of the college council, as contrasted to the ability of the college to act as a platform for figures of national and sometimes international significance. This is an issue which has escaped critics of the Left: how- ever much they may revile their self-interest and parochialism, colleges have simultaneously provided an effective environment for the nurturing of independent and original research.
David Cannadine provides a characteristically brilliant, fizzing description of the postwar era, particularly the warfare between Lord Todd, a gloomy and immensely able, conservative Scot, who was determined that the college should promote his field of research in chemistry, and Jack Plumb, who was small and energetic and sarcastic, and was equally determined to promote the study of history. This was the era that was satirised by C. P. Snow in his novel The Masters and led to Snow’s description of the intellectual divisions between the two cultures.
The book ends with Simon Schama’s description of his time at the college as an undergraduate and college lecturer. It is testimony to Plumb’s powers of academic patronage that he was able to recognise and promote Schama on the basis of his very evident intellectual brilliance at a time when it was famously unrecognised by the university, who consistently refused to appoint Schama to a university lectureship, thereby losing him to, first, Oxford, and then the United States. Throughout the volume, it is this combination of narrow-mindedness and deep conservatism with exceptional intellectual and academic creativity which provides the dramas of college life.
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