Cambridge Colleges - Part 3 - Clare College

You know the form by now, so here goes.

Clare College.



Clare College is the second oldest of Cambridge’s thirty-one colleges. It was founded in 1326, and generously endowed a few years later by Lady Elizabeth de Clare (Lady de Burgh), a granddaughter of King Edward I (1272-1307). In 1336 King Edward III (1327-77) granted licence ‘to his cousin Elizabeth de Burgo’ to establish a collegium; although it was in the first instance referred to unspecifically as ‘the House of the University of Cambridge’, it became known as Clare Hall as early as 1339 (the present ‘Clare’, dates from 1856).

The original endowment consisted of estates at Great Gransden and Duxford, and provided for the maintenance of a maximum of fifteen ‘Scholars’ (subsequently to be called ‘Fellows’), of whom no more than six were bound strictly by priestly orders. Provision was also made for ten ‘poor scholars’ (pauperes or ‘students’), who were to be maintained by the college up to the age of twenty. In 1359, a year before her death, Lady Elizabeth de Clare instituted a set of statutes by which the new college was to be governed. The remarkably enlightened attitude to learning and university education in these statutes has guided the college for nearly seven centuries: ‘the knowledge of letters ... when it hath been found, it sendeth forth its students, who have tasted of its sweetness, fit and proper members in God’s Church and the State, to rise to diverse heights, according to the claim of their deserts.’

The history of Clare in its earliest days in the later fourteenth century is not well recorded (a fire in 1521 destroyed most of the college’s early documents), and there only exists little more than a list of names of those who were the college’s Masters, of whom the first was Walter de Thaxted. During the fifteenth century, however, the college fought successfully to remain independent of the jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop of Ely. In 1439, a generous bequest by William Bingham provided for the maintenance of a chaplain and twenty-four scholars housed in what was called ‘God’s House’ (the location of which lies beneath the present Old Schools); so, within a century or so of its foundation, Clare Hall had begun to grow in size.
In the early sixteenth century, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47), the nation was in turmoil as a result of the royally-driven movement to religious reform and rejection of papal control of the Church. Debate in Cambridge was as fierce as anywhere, and from the debate emerged one of the principal leaders of the English Reformation, and one of Clare’s greatest alumni, namely Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), who was elected as a Fellow of Clare in 1510, while still an undergraduate. Latimer was renowned for his blameless life, practical tact and trenchant oratory, and he soon rose to national prominence as a result of his preaching in favour of reform.

He became royal chaplain to Henry VIII in 1534 (and to Anne Boleyn) and bishop of Worcester in 1535; he was one of the king’s advisers who supported the dissolution of the monasteries. At the time of the violent counter-reformation under Queen Mary (1553-8), Hugh Latimer refused to recant his protestant beliefs, and, together with Nicholas Ridley (bishop of London), he was burned at the stake in Oxford on 16 October 1555. Although he is known to history as one of the ‘Oxford Martyrs’, he was in fact a Cambridge product and a Fellow of Clare college.

In spite of the turmoil caused by the Reformation, Clare Hall continued to grow in size and wealth during the sixteenth century. A number of endowments of land at Potton, Everton and Gamlingay allowed for an increase in the number of scholarships, and it soon became evident that the college buildings were inadequate to house the increasing numbers of its fellows and scholars. The present college buildings which surround the ‘Old Court’ were built over a period of seventy-seven years, from the mid-seventeenth-century to the early eighteenth (1638-1715). There is no record of the architect who designed these beautiful buildings, the prospect of which, looking across King’s College lawns, is one of the most famous in England. The building programme was prompted by the acquisition of land belonging to King’s across the river to the west of the college (Butt’s Close); accordingly the first new buildings to be constructed were the East and South Ranges (1638) and then the bridge (1639-40). The North and West Ranges, including the hall, were built in 1686-8, and the programme was completed with the construction of the Master’s Lodge in 1715. (The present chapel dates from a somewhat later time; its foundation stone was laid in 1763.)
Shortly after the completion of the North Range, accommodation for the Fellows’ Library was planned (1689-90); it was fitted out in something resembling its present form before 1738. The library possesses some thirty-five incunabula (books printed before 1500) and about 400 books printed in England before 1640; and although books continued to be acquired during the course of the eighteenth century, the Fellows’ Library is essentially a fossil of the seventeenth century. The thirty or so medieval manuscripts which the Library possesses are the result of acquisition in post-medieval times - most of them were acquired as a result of a bequest by John Heaver (d. 1670).

William Whiston (1667-1752) was Isaac Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University; and John Moore, sometime bishop of Ely (1707-14), is best known for the large collection of medieval manuscripts which he bequeathed to the University Library. It was also during the eighteenth century that the college numbered among its fellowship its only Poet Laureate: William Whitehead, who held that position - not, it must be said, with great distinction, judging from the subsequent reputation of his poetry - from 1757 to 1785.

It was during the twentieth century, particularly in the decades after the Great War, that numbers of students grew substantially, to the point where further accommodation became a necessity. Memorial Court was built during the 1920s to a design of Giles Gilbert Scott and dedicated in 1926. Much later the Forbes-Mellon library, intended principally for undergraduate use, was constructed in the large and open court of Memorial Court.

Notable Alumni -
Peter Ackroyd - Actor
Sir David Attenborough - Naturalist and TV pioneer.
Lord Charles Cornwallis - General in the USC War of Independence.
Nicholas Ferrar - Religious Leader
Seigfried Sassoon - War Poet
Richard Stilgoe - Musician
William Whiston - Lucasian Chair of Mathematics after Sir Isaac Newton
Andre Wiles - Celebrated thinker who proved Fermat's last theorem.

There are a lot more notable alumni, but that will have to do for now.