: Peter Alexander Thompson
: Two Shades of Blue A History of Oxford and Cambridge Universities 1200-1700
: BookBaby
: 9798350957402
: Two Shades of Blue
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 718
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
At a time when the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are again under sustained attack from activists and politicians, Two Shades of Blue takes the reader in two volumes from their founding in the early Thirteenth Century up to the reforms and advances of the modern era. Two Shades of Blue - a reference to the sporting colours of dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge - paints a brilliant picture of both Universities evolving from their monastic roots into secular institutions in which class and wealth were paramount in determining the status of every student. Indeed, England's supreme halls of learning were symbols of white male privilege until the Nineteenth Century. The first volume examines how University life developed despite religious conflict, political upheaval and the enmities that developed between 'the town' and 'the gown' at both locations. It exposes the impact on the colleges of the Renaissance and the Reformation of Henry VIII, and it studies the bloody consequences of the schism between Catholics and Protestants during the reigns of his children, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, ending in the Stuart coup of 1603 that brought the Scottish King, James I, to the English throne. It explores the rise of the Puritans at both Universities and the Civil Wars of Charles I that tore them apart, leading to the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. It covers the events following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, including the Scientific Revolution under Isaac Newton and culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that deposed James II and handed the crown to William of Orange and Mary II. Volume I ends in 1714 with the death of Mary's sister, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, and the arrival of King George, the first of the Hanoverians. Two Shades of Blue will appeal to the general reader in many parts of the globe, as well as academics and students.

Award-winning author Peter Alexander Thompson, a London-based former Fleet Street editor, has written twenty-one books on war, royalty and big business. His titles include Maxwell: A Portrait of Power, the first biography to expose the criminality of the media magnate Robert Maxwell, and Cudlipp's Circus, a memoir which reveals how the author collaborated with the BBC's Panorama team to make 'The Max Factor', the TV documentary that precipitated Maxwell's dramatic fall. Thompson won the Blake Dawson Prize for Business Literature, with co-author Robert Macklin, for The Big Fella: The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton. Other works are The Private Lives of Mayfair, an historic account of Mayfair personalities over 350 years; Pacific Fury, a best-selling one-volume history of the Pacific War; The Battle for Singapore 1942 and The Quest for Freedom, a biography of Alexander Kerensky and the Russian Revolution. His new book, Two Shades of Blue, is the first of two volumes that will cover the histories of Oxford and Cambridge Universities from their founding in the Thirteenth Century up to the reforms and advances of the modern era.

Author’s Note
‘The Heart of Dear Old England’


It is easy to fall in love with Oxford and Cambridge. Whatever else they may be – imperious, self-obsessed, antiquated – they are incurably romantic. Every street is paved with history and a romantic spirit fills the air. You can hear it in the chimes of Great Tom and the Merton bells competing across Christ Church Meadow; you can feel it in ‘the measured pulse of racing oars’ along the Cam; you can see it in the mystical light filtering through the stained glass of the Bodleian. Romance hovers over the Round Church, takes tea at Fitzbillies and meanders along The Backs. It is everywhere.

The Universities’ special position in British life is one of the themes in Thomas Hughes’s novelTom Brown at Oxford, the sequel toTom Brown’s School Days. Published in serial form inMacmillan’s Magazine in 1859, it describes Oxford University in the early 1840s. Tom Brown’s friend Hardy (a relative of Nelson’s shipmate, no less) tells the young protagonist, ‘I shouldn’t go so serious, Brown, if I didn’t care about the place so much. I can’t bear to think of it as a sort of learning machine, in which I am to grind for three years to get certain degrees I want. No – this place and Cambridge, and our great schools, are the heart of dear old England.’1

Despite Hardy’s endorsement, there was no escaping the fact that, in his time, the Church of England revelled in its primacy as the Established Church and both Universities were strictly theocratic institutions in which class and wealth were paramount in determining the status of every student who passed through their massive iron-bound gates. Hardy might have been living at the heart of dear old England but as a servitor from an impoverished naval family he had no tassel on his cap and was not allowed to take his meals with his fellow students. Indeed, the nation’s supreme halls of learning were symbols of white male Anglican privilege, and the wealth of preceding generations, whether legally, corruptly or forcibly obtained, had gifted them a rare heritage.

‘It is no good being priggish about this or saying that the earliest colleges were founded for poor scholars,’ the Cambridge historian John Steegmann wrote in 1940. ‘The two universities exist very largely for those who are privileged by birth or income.’ As only communicants of the Church of England were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge in the three centuries following the Sixteenth-Century Reformation, they provided a steady stream of clergymen for the Established Church, as well as conformist doctors, lawyers, teachers, parliamentarians and empire-builders. Many of the Christian explorers, soldiers and administrators who spread British Colonialism around the globe had been exposed to their arcane and intolerant doctrines.2

According to Anthony Wood, the chronicler of late Seventeenth Century Oxford, ‘It is well known that the Universities of this land have had their beginnings and continuances to no other end but to propagate religion and good manners and supply the nation with persons chiefly proficient in the three famous faculties of Divinity, Law and Physics.’ As Divinity supplied vastly more graduates than Law or Physics, the theological studies of its scholars defined the boundaries of orthodox intellectual life.3

Religion was the adhesive that bound families and communities together; it was also the primary cause of great misery and constant warfare. One of the dominant themes of this work is the impact of religious conflict on the Universities and their societies of masters, fellows and scholars. From the medievalism of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, through the English Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement to the Civil Wars, the Interregnum and the Restoration of the 1600s, religion was the revolutionary force that turned entire social and political orders on their heads. ‘I would have all reformations done by public authority,’ Elizabeth I’s Protestant spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, decided in the 1580s. ‘It were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal should carry sufficient authority of reforming things amiss.’4

It was, of course, too late for that - the Age of Reformations had already polarised the peoples of Europe as never before. Slowly but surely, the joy, hope and harmony of the Christian message was dissipated under dark shadows of suspicion and intolerance. Even the Golden Rule – ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – was trimmed with exceptions. The corroding threads of greed and corruption eroded Christian principles from the holiest to the lowliest as one set of clerics and oligarchs were deposed and another set took their place. The Pope was either the Holy Father or the Antichrist, while Martin Luther