by Paul Temple
If you’ve been watching the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, you may like me have been surprised by how little higher education featured in the story. (All right, they couldn’t cover every aspect of sixteenth-century English life, but still.) England’s two universities at that time (Scotland of course had four by the end of the sixteenth century) had essential roles as the principal providers of the skilled workforces that expanding commercial, administrative, and legal functions needed – although where Thomas Cromwell himself (played by Mark Rylance) gained his legal and administrative skills remains a mystery: presumably they were picked up during his travels as a young man around Europe. As a study covering a slightly earlier period put it, the medieval university professionalized knowledge, with increasingly specialised courses fitting students for careers in secular professions (Leff, 1968). Religious instruction, sometimes assumed to be the main function of the pre-modern university, was largely undertaken in separate monastic and cathedral schools. These might have developed into universities with secular roles, but instead in England largely faded away.
The significance of England’s two universities is indicated by the powers that Cromwell took to control them in his ascent through English government in the 1530s. At Oxford, he saved the institution that his patron Cardinal Wolsey had established as Cardinal College and turned it into Christ Church College; and in 1534 “wrested the Visitorship of New College [by then 155 years old] from its customary holder as Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner” (MacCulloch, 2018: 275) – Cromwell’s implacable enemy, played creepily in the series by Mark Gatiss. This created another grudge that Gardiner held against Cromwell, and which he would repay with interest. Tensions surrounding what we would now call the governance of higher education had surprisingly important ramifications in the politics of the Tudor court. (Wolsey also established in 1528 a college in Ipswich, his place of birth, but for a number of complicated reasons it was short-lived, and so never, as it presumably might have done, became England’s third university.)
Medieval and early-modern Oxford University was continually engaged in disputes, sometimes violent ones, with the city, and Cromwell was apparently regularly called in to arbitrate. This was the man at the very centre of the administration of the English state: if the Cabinet Secretary dropped in to help your University sort out a planning problem with the local council, it would indicate, I think, that we were looking at a big deal nationally. (We may gain a sense of the scale of these town vs gown disputes by referring to what are known as the St Scholastica’s Day riots of 1354 which led to the deaths of 62 Oxford scholars. As Oxford student numbers have been estimated at around 1,500 at this time, this implies a remarkable death toll of about 4% of the student population. Not for the last time in troubles involving university students, drink seems to have been implicated.)
It seems that Cambridge University felt that they were getting a bit left out, and so in 1534 offered Cromwell the position of High Steward and a year later elected him Chancellor, in place of Bishop John Fisher, who was executed that year – although not, it seems, as a result of any failures in university leadership (MacCulloch, 2018: 276); so unfortunately we cannot properly read this as a warning about the risks involved in university management. It seems that Cromwell’s first job at Cambridge was to deal with the town vs gown hostilities centred around the annual fair held on Stourbridge Common: presumably he was by now something of an expert in managing these conflicts. He was also, it seems, interested in what we would now call curriculum reform, despite having no personal experience of university study: as MacCulloch remarks, under Cromwell’s direction, this was the first time “government had intruded on the internal affairs of Oxford and Cambridge, an interference that has never thereafter ceased” (306). Some of the blame for the activities of the Office for Students must therefore be traceable back to Thomas Cromwell: how did Hilary Mantel miss this plot angle?
References
Leff, G (1968) Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries New York, NY: Wiley
MacCulloch, D (2018) Thomas Cromwell: A Life London: Allen Lane
Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.