Perhaps there is no country with a long history where women have played a smaller part on the national stage than England. But a conspicuous exception must be made--in education they have played a great part, and this part was nowhere greater than in Cambridge. We have the little group of college builders who lived in contiguous centuries--Elizabeth de Clare, Marie de Saint-Paul, Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond--to prove it: but the activity of the xiv and xv centuries was equally apparent between the viith and xth. It was Saxon nuns who carried learning to Germany, and the rôle of the great abbesses in those centuries, while it must be reckoned among the exceptions to the inconspicuous part played by women in English history, also served prominently the cause of education.[443]
The "two noble and devoute countesses" who built Clare and Pembroke, and whom Margaret of Anjou desired to imitate, realised perhaps more than anyone else in the xiv century the extraordinary joy of launching those first foundations with their promise for the
[Illustration: THE GREAT BRIDGE--BRIDGE ST.
This view is painted from the old Quay side. The water-gate of Magdalene College is seen on the right, and in the distance is the Tower in the New Court of St. John's College rising above the tree-tops.]
future:[444] but it was something of this joy which was reserved for their descendants who saw the rise of Newnham and Girton. It was, indeed, not to two but to four noble and devoute countesses[445] that Cambridge owed its most efficient co-operation in the great periods which mark its history--the dawn of the renascence in the xiv, the threshold of our modern life in the xv, and the consolidation of the religious movement in the xvi century:[446] and if Queens' College was built by Margaret of Anjou "to laud and honneure of sexe femenine" Cambridge has repaid her by extending the significance of her ambition.
The women's colleges which we now see did not, then, begin the connexion of women and the university, they completed it. It is a curious thing when one looks down a list of Cambridge benefactors to find that from a college to a common room fire, from a professorship to a Cambridge "chest," from the chapel to a new college to the buttress of a falling college, from a university preacher to a belfry,[447] the names of women never fail to appear as benefactors, but appear in no other way. Not once until the xix century did any woman benefit from the learning which her sex had done so much to inaugurate, to sustain and consolidate.