SCHOOLS 



I649, 1 'an Act declaring that the Act for abolishing of Deans and 

 Chapters doth not extend to the Colleges of Winchester and Eaton 

 this day read and upon the question passed.' Nor was this all. The 

 Act abolishing deans and chapters 3 contained an express proviso, recited 

 in an ordinance of the Protector, 15 February, 1654, that 'all the 

 revenues, rents, . . . which before i December, 1641, had been or 

 ought to have been paid for the maintenance of any grammar school or 

 scholars, or for or towards the reparation of any almshouse, or for any 

 other charitable use, . . . should be and continued to be paid and 

 allowed as they were.' 



Winchester in particular had little reason to fear damage from 

 Parliament, as there is every reason to suppose that its authorities were 

 on the Parliament side. Winchester was then, far more than it is now, 

 a Hampshire school, and Hampshire as a county was predominately 

 ' Presbyterian true blue.' 



The Bishop of Winchester and the ' sweet cathedralists ' were of 

 course mostly Royalist ; but the college was in the opposite camp. The 

 warden, John Harris, was elected a member of the Assembly of Divines, 

 of which a fellow Wykehamist, William Twisse, rector of Newbury, 

 and formerly headmaster of Southampton Grammar School, was prolo- 

 cutor. Harris was appointed to preach before the House of Commons ; 

 from which however he excused himself on the ground of a weak voice, 

 and on 16 October, 1643, ^ e was excu sed attendance at Westminster 

 to keep his residence as warden at Winchester. He was a friend of 

 Nicholas Love, the eldest son of the headmaster and warden whose name 

 he bore, who held the post of one of the Six Clerks in Chancery, a 

 lucrative and important office, and was a man of considerable influence 

 in London. Several of Love's younger 3 brothers were in college ; but 

 Nicholas' name does not appear on the register. From the extraordinary 

 interest he showed in the college, as exhibited in some of his letters to 

 Warden Harris preserved among the college archives, it would seem 

 certain that he was a Wykehamist, no doubt as a commoner. Of the 

 politics of the headmaster, John Potynger, who succeeded Stanley in 

 1642, the year of the outbreak of the Civil War, nothing is certainly 

 known. But the date of his accession and his holding office till 1653,* 

 point to his being a Parliamentarian. His conforming to the Directory, 

 which was substituted for the Book of Common Prayer, and presumably 

 taking the engagement 5 imposed on 1 2 October, 1 649, show that he was not 

 at least a violent Royalist. His successor William Burt, the headmaster 

 of Thame School, which was under the tutelage of New College, was 

 stigmatized by Anthony Wood as a violent Presbyterian and ' breeder of 



1 Commons' Journals, vi. ^ \ 9. 



9 Ordinances and Proclamations, 1653-6, p. 721 (1649, cap. 24). 



3 Christopher, 1620 ; John, 1624, a captain in the Royalist army, taken prisoner 1644 ; Barnaby, 

 1631 ; Robert, 1631 ; Joseph, 1634. 



4 Not in 1652 as in Annals, p. 345. The fact that he held for another year is important in this 

 connection. 



<> State Papers, Domestic, 1649-50, p. 338. 



325 



