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Updated: May 31, 2025
The Foundress died on May 16, 1618, aged eighty-four. For five years she had watched over the infancy of her College, and had seen it grow into a vigorous child, with the promise of a robust manhood. The mythopoeic faculty is strong in all of us, and in Wadham has grown up a tradition that Dorothy was a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man without character and will.
He was at this time twenty years of age, and had been educated at St. Paul's School, London, and afterwards at Wadham College, Oxford, under the tutorship of Dr. Wilkins, Cromwell's brother-in-law, a learned and philosophical mathematician.
He persuaded the Visitors that Wadham and Trinity were fitted, specially and immediately, in 1651 for freedom to elect their Fellows a privilege of which all the Colleges had been deprived in 1648. The administration of the College estates and finances was carefully revised, and the Statutes were amended. Wilkins' life was varied and full of activities outside as well as within his College.
He was a dreamer, and in no place could he have dreamt more peacefully and happily than there, though sometimes perhaps, even in his first term, he must have been disturbed by the ominous sounds of axe and hammer, pick and spade, busy on the "fortifications in making about the towne on the north and north-west thereof," and, later, on the east, toward Headington Hill and close to Wadham.
But I may particularly mention, on this subject, Bunyan's "Solomon's Temple Spiritualized," and a rare work in folio, by Samuel Lee, Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, published at London in 1659, and entitled "Orbis Miraculum, or the Temple of Solomon portrayed by Scripture Light."
Therefore "Dorothy's Romance" must take its place among the many College stories in which Oxford abounds, and become a forsaken belief. Wright was the first on the long roll of Wadham bishops, and played a not inconsiderable part at a crisis in English history.
He may be called its founder, if that high title can be given to any one of the eminent men who, in Oxford and in London, revived or regenerated the study of natural philosophy. Pope, Aubrey, and Sprat differ from Wallis in their accounts of the origin of the mother of scientific parliaments. The first three find that origin in meetings held in Wadham College under the presidency of Wilkins.
Where Wadham is now, the most uniform, complete, and unchanged of all the colleges, there are only the open pleasances, and perhaps a few ruins of the Augustinian priory. St. John's lacks its inner quadrangle, and Balliol, in place of its new buildings, has its old delightful grove. As to the houses of the town, they are not unlike the tottering and picturesque old roofs and gables of King Street.
We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be interesting but lack of space forbids to compare the discipline prescribed with that administered in Wadham now. Sufficient to say what indeed might go without saying that the lapse of three hundred years has made changes desirable and necessary.
Drayton and Réveillaud and Lawrence had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitchell and Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed. Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he. His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It was aware that his going depended on his own will.
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