The College Record 2022

This stated that fellows were to be elected by open examination, and though the
first to be elected happened to be from Cumbria, the second was not, and he was
followed by JR Magrath who hailed from Guernsey, and would later be provost for 53
years. The monopoly of Cumberland and Westmoreland on the College’s fellowships
was broken forever.
Though the Two Counties had a stranglehold on the fellowship, the College as a
whole developed a wider Northern aspect in the 18th century. In the 1720s Provost
Joseph Smith persuaded Lady Betty Hastings to make a significant contribution to
the College. Daughter of the earl of Huntingdon, she was a Northern lady known for
her evangelical piety and charity. She was keen to establish scholarships that would
support men from the North of England who would become missionaries, but Smith
managed to persuade her to instead support men who would merely be ordained.
So, she gave the College her manor of Wheldale, now subsumed into Castleford,
which proved to be a lucky bequest when a rich seam of coal was discovered
beneath the land in the 19th century.
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The system laid down by Lady Betty for electing her scholars, odd though it seems
today, reflects her character. She nominated twelve schools (eight from Yorkshire and
two each from Cumberland and Westmoreland) who, every five years, could send
their best pupil to the inn at Aberford, near Leeds. There they would be examined
by a group of clergy who whittled their number down to ten. The Provost and a few
fellows then examined the remainder and reduced them to eight. These eight best
pupils then had their names put into a pot and the first five names to be drawn were
elected Hastings Scholars! Lady Betty observed in her codicil that drawing lots like
this ‘may be called by some superstitious’ but she preferred to believe it ‘as leaving
something to Providence’. This system continued until as late as 1861.
There is one more aspect to the College’s northern connections, and that is in its
capacity as a landowner. On founding the College, Robert de Eglesfield gave the
College his estate in Ravenwyk. Now known as Renwick, it is not far from his putative
birthplace. The residential property in Renwick has been sold, but the College still
owns a farm in the village and is Lord of the Manor. But owning property at the
country’s extremities could be dangerous. A small estate in Bowness-on-Solway,
a little to the north-west of Carlisle had been acquired in 1416, but just three years
later, the accounts reveal that no income could be collected due to the ‘devastation
of the Scots’.
We come full circle with a gift from an Old Member, Percy Wyndham. He had come
up to Queen’s in 1886 as an Eglesfield Scholar, and it may well be that association
which led him in 1895, not long after going down, to purchase Moorland Close Farm
in Eaglesfied, the Cumberland village from which the founder’s family presumably
originated. In his will of 1947 he left it to the College, giving us another property
associated with the founder.
College Record 2022 | The Queen’s College 95