Two only of the men they represent can be said to attain to the first
rank among England's worthies--Robert Blake, second as an admiral
only to Nelson and Oxford's greatest fighting man until the present
war, and Christopher Wren, "that prodigious young scholar" (as John
Evelyn calls him), who, as has been well said, would have been second
only to Newton among English mathematicians had he not chosen rather
to be indisputably the first of British architects. It is interesting
to note that Wadham shares with All Souls' two of the greatest names
in the Scientific Revival of the seventeenth century: both Wren and
Thomas Sydenham, the physician, migrated from Wadham to fellowships
at All Souls'.
Their connection with Wadham is part of what is probably the most
interesting single episode in the college history. When the
Parliament triumphed, and the King's partisans were turned out of
Oxford, the Lodgings at Wadham were given to the most distinguished
of her Wardens, John Wilkins, who, no doubt, owed his promotion to
the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. In his
own day everyone knew him; he was a moderate man, who interceded for
Royalist scholars under the Commonwealth, and tempered the penal laws
to Non-Conformists, when later he was Bishop of Chester.
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