ladies beautiful, gay, and famous in
many ways, severe Divines and College Heads, to whom such surroundings
were unfamiliar and perhaps not uninteresting: masques and revels were
frequent; Christ Church meadow and the grove at Trinity were the resort
of a brilliant throng, more brilliant even than the gatherings which
fill Oxford at Commemoration time in our more sober age. But beneath
this merriment there were doubtless in the minds at least of those who
thought, or stopped to think, terrible anxieties and the grimmest of
forebodings. It was becoming clearer every month that Edgehill had not
broken the rebellion; that the struggle would be long, and that the
issue was uncertain; events soon justified these fears. On January 10,
1643, "the Kinges letters came to all the Colledges and Halls for their
plates to be brought into the mint at Oxford, there to be coyned into
money with promise of refunding it, or payeinge for it again after five
shillings the ounce for silver, five and sixpence for silver and gilt."
The fruitless sacrifice was made by no college with more unhesitating
devotion than by Wadham, which preserves the letter addressed by Charles
I. to "our trusty and well-beloved ye Warden and Fellows of Wadham
College," and the receipt for 124 lb. of plate from the king's officers
of the mint, a liberal contribution from a college only thirty years
old. Few relics of the ancient Collegiate plate are now to be found in
the University; in most instances pieces, either bestowed or given by
special benefactors: the Communion vessels of the Colleges were not
taken by the king--a loyal son of the Church. Six colleges, among them
Wadham, retained theirs through all the confusion of the war, and still
possess them.

In February 1643 warning came of fresh troubles from the north: three
Commissioners representing the nobility, clergy, gentry, and commons of
Scotland presented themselves to the king, "to press his Majestie that
the Church of England might be made conformable in all points to the
Church of Scotland." To Charles, himself a Scot, this request must have
seemed an outrageous insult, inflicted on him by those of his own
household, and an omen of his desertion by his warlike countrymen, whom,
despite their resistance to the English Liturgy, he trusted to be
faithful to a Stuart.

On June 24, 1646, the last fighting Royalist left Oxford. In the
following Michaelmas, Wood returned "to the home of his nativitie." He