A Puritan college

At its foundation, and for three-quarters of a century thereafter, Emmanuel was often commented on as different from other Cambridge colleges, as a ‘Puritan’ college, where the Chapel lay north and south, not east and west, where they wore no surplices and received the Holy Communion sitting; they were Calvinists, they were Presbyterians, they were nonconformists, they were (it was implied) disloyal to church and state. That these criticisms all concerned matters of churchmanship was fair enough, for the Founder's prime purpose was to establish a place for the education and training of ministers of the church; yet they were facile and often shallow, and there is, and always was, much that could be said in reply. Viewed historically, the orientation of the Chapel (and other College buildings) had as much to do with the bearing of the Roman road through Cambridge as it had with disapproval of Romanist tradition; subsequent history shows that surplices may come and go – and their last disappearance from Emmanuel undergraduates at prayer was in deference to no scruple about ritual but to the exigences of wartime clothes-rationing; and Laurence Chaderton, the first Master, when asked at the 1604 Hampton Court conference what he had to say about ‘sitting communions’, replied that it was ‘by reason of the seats so placed as they be’, but that they had some kneeling also. His response is important not only as evidence that Puritans were not devoid of humour; it typifies Chaderton's view that externals are in the true analysis things indifferent, and that variation should therefore be tolerated in either direction.