for her first Warden a clergyman, Dr Robert
Wright, whose _beaux yeux_ touched the heart of the lone widow: she
loved him, and would fain have married him and reigned with him after
the necessary alteration of the Statutes; but he was cold and
irresponsive: the obligation of celibacy, save in the case of Warden
Wilkins, remained incumbent on a Warden of Wadham till 1806, when it was
removed by a special Act of Parliament. Modern criticism respects a
love-story no more than it respects the Pentateuch. A comparison of
dates shows that Dr Wright was fifty-four years old at the time of his
appointment in 1613, and the Foundress was then seventy-nine. The
difference of a quarter of a century makes the truth of the story not
indeed impossible but improbable; the coy Warden held his office only
for two months: the cause of his resignation or expulsion is not known,
but was probably not "spretae injuria formae": the hero of the story
wished to marry somebody else, and resigned his post because he was not
permitted to do so, as Mr Wells informs us, adding a prosaic explanation
of the lovers' quarrel, a disagreement about the appointment of an
under-cook. Therefore "Dorothy's Romance" must take its place among the
many College stories in which Oxford abounds, and become a forsaken
belief. Wright was the first on the long roll of Wadham bishops, and
played a not inconsiderable part at a crisis in English history. In
December 1641, as Bishop of Lichfield, he was one of the twelve bishops
who presented to Charles I. the famous protest against their exclusion
by mob violence from the House of Lords, declaring all proceedings in
their absence null and void: for this they were sent to the Tower as
guilty of high treason. Wright was soon released, and died two years
later defending his episcopal seat, Eccleshall Castle, against the
Parliamentarians,--a member of the Church militant like Ancktill.

[Illustration: DOROTHY WADHAM.]

The history of the College from its foundation to the beginning of the
Civil War is uneventful, one of great prosperity. Among the Fellows
admitted in 1613, three, Smyth, Estcott, and Pitt, became Wardens: four
of the Fellows were drawn from Exeter, then, as now, a west-country
College like Wadham, though it has, more than Wadham, maintained its
connection with the West of England. The Foundress showed her resolve
that her husband's countryside should be well represented among the
first members of the foundati