211075 Downing Record 07 - Downing College - University of ...

1807: The Laying of the Foundation Stoneand the Making of Downing Collegeby David Pratt MA PhD. Fellow Archivist andDirector of Studies in HistoryFollowing the bicentenary of the College’s establishment, marked in 2000, thisyear has seen a further important milestone, the 200th anniversary of the layingof the foundation stone, which took place on 18th May 1807. It is this date,indeed, which the College remembers annually in its Service and Dinner for theCommemoration of Benefactors, rather than the formal passing of the College’sCharter on 22nd September 1800. 1 This intimate connection with the College’sfounding gave a special resonance to this year’s events of Commemoration, whichthe College also marked with an exhibition, displayed in the Library, of materialfrom the Archives. This issue of the Newsletter provides a further opportunity toreflect on what was in many ways Downing’s true starting-point. For, as her earlyproponents had painfully come to realize, a College was nothing withoutbuildings. The association of the foundation stone with the College’s benefactionis a measure of Downing’s slow and often halting physical construction in theseearly years, hindered among other encumbrances by the limits of her endowmentat the time of foundation.Such realities were barely reflected in the elaborate ceremonial of stonelaying,the climax of much deeper and highly contingent processes which laybehind the College’s establishment. By 1807 more than fifty years had passedsince the death of the founder, Sir George Downing, third baronet, whose willhad ultimately provided the basis for the College’s foundation. Though Sir Georgehad raised the prospect of a College ‘called by the name of Downing’s College’,such an outcome had been contingent on his four named heirs dying withoutlegitimate children. This in itself had been a very unlikely event, but wasmiraculously completed on the death of Sir George’s cousin, Jacob GerrardDowning, in 1764. As is infamously remembered, the University had additionallyhad to contend with the legal claims of Jacob’s widow, Lady Margaret Downing,1. This piece is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Fleet (1936–2006), now also poignantly associatedwith this date, who took a keen interest in the College’s formative years. In what follows I have beenguided by the standard histories, namely H. W. Pettit Stevens, Downing College (1899); S French, TheHistory of Downing College Cambridge (1978); S. French et al., Aspects of Downing History, 2 vols.(1982–9); C. M. Sicca et al., Committed to Classicism (1987); D. Watkin and R. W. Liscombe, The Ageof Wilkins (2000); and now T. Hochstrasser, ‘“A College in the Air”: Myth and Reality in the FoundationStory of Downing College, Cambridge’, History of Universities 17 (2001–2), 81–120, supplementedby Venn, the History of Parliament series, and other standard sources of biographical reference.Citations below are necessarily selective.22