OTHER LAWYERS.

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last Wills. In 7 parts. Lond. 1590 etc. Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts, etc. Lond. 1686. qu. In which two books the author shews himself an able Civilian and excellently well read in authors of his Faculty. He paid his last debt to nature at York, and was buried in the North Isle of the Cathedral there. Soon after was a comely Monument fastened to the wall near to his grave, with his Effigies in a Civilians Gown kneeling before a deske, with a book thereon, and these verses under :

"Non Viduae caruere viris, non Patre Pupillus,

Dum stetit hic Patriae virque paterque suae.
Ast quod Swinburnus viduarum scripsit in usum,
Longius aeterno marmore vivet opus.
Scribere supremas hinc discat quisque tabellas,
Et cupiat, qui sic vixit, ut ille mori."'

(Ath. Ox. i. 386.)

The handsome gilded and painted monument, in excellent preservation, bears several coats of arms. Dr. Tobias Swinburne, his son, was an

eminent advocate.

ROBERT HALE, father of Sir Matthew Hale, the great Chief Justice, entered Broadgates in 1580. He retired from Lincoln's Inn through 'tenderness of conscience,' holding for immoral the barrister's duty of making the 'worse cause appear the better.' Lord Keeper Littleton's brothers, WILLIAM LITTLETON (1609; serjeant at law), JAMES LITTLETON (B.A. 1618; a master in Chancery, chancellor of Worcester), and JOHN LITTLETON (M.A. 1624; Master of the Temple; ejected in 1644 for being in the King's army), were, with others of the same name, members of this House.

CHAPTER IX.

POETS AND DRAMATISTS.

ONE result of the dissolution of the Religious Houses upon the fortunes of Broadgates Hall was its transference to royal ownership. In 1522 Wolsey persuaded the priory to surrender their house and its belongings into the hands of the King, who gave it to the Archbishop himself. Clement VIII had issued a bull for the suppression of Frideswyde's on condition that Wolsey should establish in room of it a college of secular canons. In 1525, out of the priory revenues (less than £300 a year) and those of other of the smaller monasteries, was begun the 'Collegium Thomae Wolsey Cardinalis Eboracensis.' But before the foundation was actually in law completed the Cardinal fell. All the revenues he had collected passed to Henry, who in 1532 refounded Cardinal College as 'King Henry the Eighth's College,' dedicated to the praise and honour of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the most blessed Virgin St. Mary, and the holy virgin St. Frideswyde. In 1545 however, the King, having formed an entirely new plan, required the surrender of the College once more into his hands, and finally founded the mixed cathedral and academic House known as 'the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford of the foundation of King Henry the Eighth.'

To this noble establishment were granted the following parts of the present Pembroke College:-'A house called the Almes House with the appurtenaunces in the p'she of saincte Aldat,' 'certene chamberes within Brodyats latlie belonginge to the late monasterye of Abendon,' and 'a parcelle of lands within Brodyats, parcelle of the possessione of the late colledge of Frideswids '.'

Without being actually an annexe of the magnificent foundation across the road 2, it is probable that Broadgates was found a con

Dugdale's Monasticon, ii. p. 167.

2 Fitzherbert (1602) says of the existing Halls: 'hae singulae a singulis fere

'A SCHOLAR AND A GENTLEMAN.

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venient receptacle for many young men of position who could not be received at Christ Church. This appears from the number of names assigned either to Broadgates Hall or Christ Church or to both. The matriculations vary greatly from year to year. But it is noticeable that in 1583 there were as many entries (38) at Broadgates as at Christ Church and Exeter put together. In 1581, when all the numbers were much larger, there were forty-eight. At the close of the sixteenth century a new class of undergraduate was largely attracted to Oxford. Residence in a University was becoming the mark of a gentleman, and the attainment of a degree was made easier to men of birth by special statutes. Huber considers that the Elizabethan and Stuart connexion with the gentry class did the Universities no good. The young squires had little taste for learning, and the poorer scholars became a dependent race of tutors and trencher-chaplains, a class described by Bishop Hall in his second Satire. The Inns of Court were surrounded by a nebula of unpractising lawyers from Oxford and Cambridge, whose spirit and doings lent to life in London some of its boldest features, its gayest colours, its most lusty intellectual movement. On the other hand the capital influenced the academies, and lettered tastes, for which no midnight wick burned, usurped the place of paler and severer studies. Youths liberally nurtured, and more likely to play a part in the world than the oldfashioned poor scholar of the middle ages, now received the benefit of University life and training. These would especially be drawn to the Halls, for the Colleges were still chiefly eleemosynary, disciplinary, and religious. Halls have alternately served, it would seem, as the refuge of the luxurious and of the economical. The threadbare ' clerk of Oxenforde' passed away to a great extent with the Old Learning. The twenty books at the bed's head, clothed in black and red, of Aristotle and his philosophy, were by the Elizabethan student no longer always more prized than garments rich, fiddle and psaltery, nor, if money was of his frendes hent,' was it laid out on nothing but learning. Sir Vincentio in the Taming of the Shrew, beating his student son's man, Biondello, cries, 'O immortal gods! O fine villain! A silken doublet! A velvet hose! A scarlet cloak! And a copatain hat! O, I am undone! I am undone! While I play the good husband at home, my son and my servant spend all at the

6

collegiis pendent & ad earum exemplum se plane comparant: in eo solum dissimiles, quod hae, quam illa, legibus disciplinae laxioribus paulo liberioribusque teneantur' (Nicolai Fierberti Oxoniensis Academiae Descriptio, Romae. Elizabethan Oxford, O. H. S., p. 16).

university Even the Colleges now had young men of fortune domiciled in them. The Halls, Fitzherbert notes, were full of them— 'divitum nobiliumque plerumque filiis, qui propriis vivunt sumptibus, assignatae.' These affected Ovid rather than Justinian or the Stagirite. At Broadgates in particular the able race of civilians was succeeded by a brilliant list of scholar-poets and statesmen, men of action and of letters. The West-country was the quarter from which this Hall now drew most of its students.

The catalogue of writers of the great Tudor age who were bred at Broadgates begins somewhat earlier with JOHN HEYWOODE, 'the old English Epigrammatist,' styled by Mr. J. A. Symonds a prose Chaucer.' He was the first, says Wharton, 'to draw the Bible from the stage, and introduce representations of familiar life and popular manners.' Of the merry Mixed Plays or Interludes which succeeded the older Mysteries, Miracle Plays, and dull Moralities, and in which allegorical and real characters were combined, he was the most noted composer. Dr. A. W. Ward calls Heywoode a lineal descendant of the mediæval minstrels.

In his Interludes personal types superseded personified abstractions. Though familiar on the Continent, they were the earliest of their kind in England. 'Nothing so good of the same kind was afterwards produced. The bridge to English comedy was thus built, and Heywoode, whose name to Ben Jonson meant uncouth antiquity, deserves the chief credit for its building.... Though his humour is bold and broad, it is wholesome and compatible with unaffected piety.' As he died about 1580, there are but a few years between Heywoode and the consummate art of Shakspeare. The 'Mery Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte,' written probably before 1521, was produced in 1533, in the same year as 'A Play between Johan the Husband, Tyb the Wife, and Sir Johan the Priest.' Later came 'The Four P's. A newe and a very mery Interlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedlar.' Strachey speaks of Heywoode's 'innocent and artless transcripts from real life.' There is spirit and humour in his comedies, but not much story or dramatic characterization. His longest work, or 'Parable,' is trifling and tedious. Holinshed says of it: 'One also hath made a booke of the Spider and the Flie, wherein he dealeth so profoundlie and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himselfe that made it nor anie one that readeth it can reach unto the meaning thereof.' The work was three and a half centuries too early.

Heywoode was born at North Mims, near St. Alban's. Bale (p. 110) calls him 'civis Londinensis.' He studied at Oxford 'in that

1 But Ford describes the poor student too: 'I have been fain to heel my tutor's stockings at least seven years.'

HEYWOODE.

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ancient hostle called Broadgates in St. Aldate's Parish. But, the
crabbedness of Logick not suiting with his airie genie,

'he retired to [London], and became noted to all witty men, especially
to Sir Tho. More (with whom he was very familiar), wrot several matters
of Poetry, and was the first, some say (but I think false1) that wrot
English plays, taking opportunity thence to make notable work with the
Clergy. He had admirable skill also in instrumental and vocal Musick.
He was in much esteem with K. H. 8. for the mirth and quickness of his
conceits, and tho he had little learning in him, yet he was by that King
well rewarded. Heywoode wrote of himself to Burleigh on April 18,
1575, as an old man of seventy-eight. He was therefore born in 1497.
His 'Nature of the iij Elements,' probably written in 1517, alludes to the
discovery of the New World by Amerigo Vespucci. Two years earlier,
in 1515, he appears in the King's Book of Payments as receiving 8d.
a day. In 1519 he is called a ‘singer,' and in 1526 ‘player of the king's
virginals,' receiving quarterly £6 13s. 4d., but in 1538 his quarter shot
was but 50s. In that year 'Hans Holbein, Paynter' was receiving
£8 10s. 9d. a quarter. An earlier entry in 1529 shows that 'John
Haywood, player at virginalles' or 'of thinstrumentes,' was granted
a pension of 4s. yearly for life, and in 2 and 3 Edw. VI this sum is
entered as paid to 'John Heiwood plaier on the Virginalles 3. More,
his neighbour 'whom he much resembled in quickness of parts, both
undervaluing their friend to their jest, and having ingenium non eden-
tulum sed mordax' (says Fuller)-helped him with his Epigrams, and
wrote the Utopia at North Mims. He introduced his friend to the notice
of the young Princess Mary, a woman of culture. In 1538 Heywoode
received 40s. for playing before her an interlude with his 'children ’—
those boy actors for whom Shakspeare had a professional dislike. While
Mary was in disgrace, he wrote his pleasing Description of a Most
Noble Ladye. After she came to the throne, Heywoode 'was much
valued by her, often had the honor to wait on and exercise his fancy
before her: which he did even to the time that she lay languishing upon
her death bed.' In his allegory already mentioned the spiders are the
Zwinglians, the flies the Catholics, and Queen Mary is a maid executing
with her broom (the civil sword) the commands of her Master and of her
Mistress (Holy Church). In spite of his satires on freres and pardoners,
he was a convinced adherent of the old order. Harington says that under
Edward VI Heywoode narrowly escaped hanging and the 'jerke of the
six-string'd whip.' Probably he means under Henry VIII; but it was
for denying the Supremacy, not the Six Articles, that Heywoode was
arraigned. He was allowed to make a public recantation at Paul's Cross
on July 6, 1544. By Edward, Puttenham states, he was 'well benefited'
for the 'myrth and quicknesse of his conceits.' The King thought that

1

1 Palsgrave, whose play Acolatus was printed in 1529, is sometimes called the
first dramatist.

2 Ath. Ox. i. 116. 'Butter would not melt in her mouth' is first found in his
Epigrams.
3 Trevelyan Papers.

H