I FOUNDATION AND EARLY HISTORY OF ETON COLLEGE

TO HAVE FOUNDED A GREAT public school, which has continued from the date of foundation to the present day to be the principal place of education for the sons of the governing classes in this country; to have furnished this school with buildings conspicuous for their beauty, unique in some respects in their construction, and for centuries sufficiently adapted to their original purpose; to have drawn up with his own pen a series of statutes which remained in force with but slight alterations for a period of four hundred years—these are achievements which might have been expected of a strong and lawgiving monarch such as Edward I. or Henry VIII., a scholar such as Erasmus, a zealous Churchman such as Wolsey or Laud, rather than of a delicate, somewhat feeble-minded youth but little more than nineteen years of age. Yet the foundation of Eton College was entirely due to Henry of Windsor, sixth of the name, ‘the good and holy youth,’ whom a turn of fortune’s wheel had brought, when but an infant in arms, to occupy an unstable throne at the outset of a cruel and internecine dynastic struggle.

From his earliest youth Henry VI. had been brought up in an atmosphere of religion and learning. He had been baptized by the great Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose services in the cause of education are well known. His early youth was passed under the influence of his uncle and first guardian and protector, the scholar-statesman Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the Good Duke Humphrey as he was called, more perhaps from his munificent benefactions to scholarship and learning than from his general moral character, which is one of the most perplexing problems in the Middle Ages. Subsequently Henr