THE KING - AT TRINITY
By WILSON HARRIS
ABOVE the High Table Henry VIII—if not Holbein at any rate very closely after—stood bearded and astride, resplendent in gold and scarlet, calves bulging within white silk or satin stockings. Below him a slight figure in cool lounge suit, much more than any Henry King of all the Britains, and in a different sense Defender of the Faith, proposed the toast of the college that close on thirty years ago was his. So the centuries were spanned, from Tudor to Windsor. In truth, indeed, there was more to span, for the Trinity which Henry founded in 1546 evolved from the earlier King's Hall and Michaelhouse, going back to the earlier half of the fourteenth *century; Chaucer knew of one of them, and called it the Soler Hall. But Trinity is content with the more modest claim. It is enough for her that for four hundred years the college has been producing, as its duty is, a supply of persons qualified to serve God in Church and State—men of humane learning, men of science, men of law, great statesmen and great ecclesiasts, a chosen cohort of them looking still from their frames on those who bear today for their little hour the torch passed on by earlier hands. For four hundred years the succession has flowed on,, teachers in the same studies dining night by night in the same places in the same hall, members all of one great society, open once to privilege, open today in full equality to the humblest and the poorest in ffie land. That at least the sweep of the centuries has brought.
All that King George recalled on Tuesday as he stood beneath King Henry, and "in my own right as a member of this noble and magnificent college," toasted the royal foundation and its present Master, the greatest son of the Cambridge of today in the estimation of everyone but himself. It was a notable day for the Master, from the moment when he sallied forth from the Lodge to greet at the Great Gate the Duke of Gloucester (a Trinity man, too) and the Duchess, and welcome them as forerunners. It was not at the Great Gate (at which, in accordance with custom, Dr. Trevelyan himself had had to solicit admittance on the day of his election) that he met the King and Queen. For the first time since 1848, when Prince Albert and Queen Victoria came to Trinity, the royal guests were borne on (in a very different vehicle from their predecessors) through the gateway, down the gentle slope of a wooden ramp, into, and half round, the court, to come to their final halt before the Master's Lodge. The day was perfect, even with the heat, and the Great Court, not merely unequalletl but unapproached in either university (it is no Trinity man who writes) was looking its incomparable best, Queen Elizabeth, fresh-scoured, gleaming in her niche on the south, the mellow walls, made historic by generations of the illustrious men they housed, warm in the sunlight, the crown on the fountain in the middle supercrowned with Cambridge's traditional domestic emblem. To the history written there in stone a new chapter was. in process of, being added. It was added before eyes from all the
Empire and beyond, for among the undergraduates lined up on the normally =trodden turf as the fanfares rang out and the Royal Standard was broken above the gate were dark Indians and darker Hausas, men from Canada and South Africa and Australia, intelligent, inscrutable Chinese.
Then the formalities of the day began—a short chapel service (" Let us now praise famous men" and "0 God our Help "), the presentation of a deputation from the town and then of the chief officers of the university—Vice-Chancellor and Proctors, High Steward and Deputy High Steward, Heads of Houses, University Members, arriving from the Senate House in slow procession, and after that the central engagement of the day. Never had the high rafters of the ancient hall looked down on a scene more brilliant, as the sun, tempered by the windows' sobering hues, streamed in on the scarlet of the doctors' robes and the more sober gowns and hbods of mere M.A.s, with the college plate gleam- ing down the long rows of tables. The speeches had been kept to two—the King and the Master—but the choir in the minstrels' gallery discoursed appropriate music at appropriate moments, notably a song of royal Henry's own composition, " Pastyme with Good Companye " ; sovereigns then possessed some gifts not universal among the sovereigns of today.
In the hall of Trinity on Tuesday, where Trinity men of the past like Francis Bacon and Chief Justice Coke in one field, Perceval and Melbourne, Newton and Whewell and Rutherford, Byron and Tenny- son in others, had had their places, was gathered all but all the weight of learning of the Cambridge of today—men (and not men only, since for the first time the Mistress of Girton and the Principal of Newn- ham were accorded undisputed place among the Heads of Houses) who trace out the history of our land or work out the practice of its laws, men who keep the spirit of Plato and Virgil and Horace alive in days that need them not a little, men who split the atom and direct to unpredicted ends its immeasurable force, men who think out wise nutrition, men who give their lives, directly or vicariously, to preventing or curing the diseases of mankind.
Not all were Trinity men like the King, but all except visitors bringing greetings from other famous institutions were Cambridge men like him. Among them, most' appropriately, was the American Ambassador, once the President of a Canadian University, sitting at the same High Table where his predecessor, the historian Bancroft, had sat at the tercentenary a hundred years ago. And it was as a' Cambridge man that King, George was• speaking, as one who knew what it would mean to come back to a Cambridge June (if there ever had been quite such a Cambridge June), one who understood from his own experience, like thousands of Trinity and other undergraduates today, what it was to come home from war to the "steadying and mellowing influence" that breathes from those immemorial walls and turn from transience and destruction to the study of what is timeless and immortal. The King said much else, and said it as well as he ever said anything. (The Master mentioned that he had been asked for "a few notes of guidance," but the King had evidently and most properly put them in the waste-paper basket and produced something much better of his own.) But an under- lying note was there for those who were thinking as well as listen- ing—the freedom With which this great heritage is shared today. Probably three-fourths of the men at Trinity and the other colleges, probably indeed more than that, could never have got there un- assisted. The assistance is there, and to them is laid open all that was offered to the privileged "King's Childer " for whom the colleges out of which Trinity rose were built. In giving them of its best the Trinity of King Georg.: is doing higher service than the Trinity Of King Henry.
So the memorable day wore on. From the minstrels' gallery came a choral grace to dose the luncheon, the royal party moved out to the Christopher Wren Library to see the original Charter granted by King Henry in December of 1546, then to a garden party flashing with ladies' dresses and the ever-present scarlet gowns, with the cool green of turf and trees for background, till amid acclamations they moved off for home, leaving Trinity its peaceful self again, with the river gliding lazily beneath its ancient walls—Ilurninaque amiquos subterlibentia muros. So Trinity awaits its quincentenary.
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