SCHOOLS 



Council, one of the articles of which was ' he 

 hath caused the gentry to leave the town to 

 the ruin thereof, spoiled the school so that 

 no gentlemen's sons come to it.' The case 

 created such a stir that it was heard by the 

 King in person, and the vicar was eventually 

 got rid of. Whether owing to the excite- 

 ment caused by this, or why otherwise, Crowe 

 committed suicide, lo April 1675. 



John Shepherd, 'sometimes of Wadham Col- 

 ledge Oxford, B.C.L.,'* came in on 17 April. 

 In his time the school boasted of a graduate 

 who was also a poet for its usher, in the person 

 of John Oldham, the son of a Puritan minister. 

 Oldham took his B.A. degree at St. Edmund's 

 Hall, Oxford, in 1670, and then became 

 usher ' to the Free School at Croydon.' Here 

 ' some of his poems being handed about, he 

 was honoured with a visit by the earls of 

 ^^ Rochester and Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley and 

 other persons of distinction. Mr. Shepherd, 

 the Headmaster, was not a little surprised at 

 this visit, and would have taken the honour 

 of it to himself, but was soon convinced that 

 he had neither wit nor learning to make a 

 party in such company.' Oldham left Croy- 

 don in 1678 to become a private tutor, in 

 which capacity, notwithstanding that devo- 

 tion to the bottle which characterized him, 

 like most of the poets of the day, he remained, 

 until smallpox carried him off, at an early 

 age, in 1686. Shepherd's character has been 

 most unjustly aspersed with regard to certain 

 expenses in travelling to look after the school 

 property at Northampton. 2 He is said to 

 have ' charged Lt^ \os. for riding his own horse 

 II days.' The charge is arrived at by com- 

 pounding in one two different items : one a 

 charge of ^£5 \os. for his whole expenses to 

 and from Northampton for himself, his 

 servant, and 2 horses for 11 days, including 

 their hotel bills ; the other, a charge of {,\ \s. 

 for the use of the horses on 2 separate occa- 

 sions, 1 1 days and 3 days each, a very low and 

 reasonable charge. 



The accounts are perfectly open and 

 Shepherd leaves the court without a shadow 

 of a stain upon his character. 



John Caesar, of Christ College, Cambridge, 

 probably from Camberwell (where there 

 was a large family of Caesars), ' entered 

 Schoolmaster and Prior of the said Hos- 

 pital, II June 1 68 1,' on the nomination of 

 Archbishop Bancroft. The libeller has again 

 been at work on his character regarding the 

 accounts of the school. He is alleged to 

 have defrauded the hospital of ^^184 19X. 



* Foster's Alumni Oxon. f. 42. 



2 History of the Whitgift GrammaT School, p. 10. 



The only pretext for the allegation made 

 is a memorandum of 4 December 1702, 

 that ' His present Grace now Lord Arch- 

 bishop (Tenison) hath of his own pious 

 charity given unto the poor of this House, 

 ;£loo, which is now locked up in the chest, 

 and is in lieu of as much money mis- 

 applied by Mr. Caesar the late schoolmaster, 

 which money is at all times to defend law 

 suites.' What Caesar had done was to fail 

 to keep up this nest-egg in the Treasury 

 against the rainy day of law, having divided 

 up the whole income among the inmates. 

 In the less litigious days of the eighteenth 

 century it was not necessary to be always 

 defending titles, as it had been in less settled 

 times. 



Of the state of the school under the next 

 master, the Rev. Henry Mills, of Trinity Col- 

 lege, Oxford, we incidentally get some inter- 

 esting peeps in the ' Bangorian controversy ' 

 a politico-theological pamphlet war which 

 raged fiercely in the years 1717-9. Begin- 

 ning with an assault by Andrew Snape, Pro- 

 vost of Eton, on Benjamin Hoadly, non-resi- 

 dent Bishop of Bangor and resident vicar of 

 Streatham, for his assertion in a sermon of 

 the right of rebellion against authority, it soon 

 degenerated into a personal attack on Hoadly 

 for keeping in his house as tutor, one Francis 

 de la Pillonni^re, an ex-Jesuit and alleged 

 Free-thinker, who had been French usher at 

 Croydon School. It transpired that Dr. 

 Snape's authority for Pillonniere's views was 

 the wife of our Master ; and eventually Mills 

 himself had to publish two defences and 

 counter- charges to the attacks made on him 

 by Hoadly and Pillonniere. So far as it is 

 now possible to form an opinion it would ap- 

 pear that the charges brought by the French- 

 man against Mills were a compound of reck- 

 less inventions and gross exaggerations. In 

 Mills' Full answer to Mr. Pillonniere' s reply to 

 Dr. Snape — the full title is several lines long — 

 some interesting side lights are thrown on 

 Mills' career and on the school by documents 

 printed in it. A testimonial from the Dean 

 and Chapter of Wells, given in view of Mills' 

 application for Croydon, says that he had 

 ' raised the reputation of this school * far 

 above what former masters could effect in 

 many years.' Mills himself claims ' two flour- 

 ishing schools raised by me, the first from a 

 small one, this from none at all.' He was a 

 Prebendary of Wells, and also rector of Dinder, 



3 The Cathedral Grammar School at Wells. 

 After a history of some 600 years the Dean and 

 Chapter of Wells allowed this school to fall into 

 abeyance at the end of the eighteenth century. 



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