On September 1, 1693, the Reverend James Blair, rector of James City Parish and commissary of the Church of England in Virginia, prepared himself for an official appearance before the governor of the colony, Sir Edmund Andros, and the members of his council. To this group, which functioned as advisory body to the governor, upper house of the assembly, and high court of the colony, Blair himself also belonged. Blair brought with him the fruit of a two-year stay in England from which he had only recently returned, a charter providing for the establishment in the colony of Virginia of “a certain Place of universal Study, a perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences.” On the preceding February 8, the English monarchs King William and Queen Mary had approved the charter, the only one they or their successors ever granted to an American institution. It was a satisfying and triumphant moment for the Scottish-born clergyman, principal founder, and first president of the new College that took the name of its royal patrons.

At the next session of the General Assembly, the legislative body of the colony, Blair also appeared before the House of Burgesses, its lower house, to present all the papers from his mission. On this occasion the charter also received a ceremonial reading, and both houses of the assembly, the burgesses and the council, adopted a memorial expressing their gratitude to the sovereigns. The members gave their thanks as well to James Blair, both verbally and in the more tangible form that the commissary and president always especially welcomed—provision for an honorarium of £250 plus reimbursement for expenses of some £600. Although much remained to be accomplished-the General Assembly turned almost immediately to finding a location and providing additional funds for the new College—the ceremonies that had taken place before the council and the burgesses marked the culmination of a long effort and a symbolic beginning for a unique American college.^[1]

The precise and immediate origins of the idea of founding William and Mary are, like much about its early history, obscure. The first recorded reference to its founding appeared in a brief comment in Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia of 1705, noting that the governor and the council discussed the possibility in 1689 but could take no action because the House of Burgesses was not in session.^[2]   The date preceded Blair’s appointment to the council in 1691 by two years but came an almost equal length of time after he had married Sarah Harrison, whose family connections among council members were numerous and would have afforded Blair easy access to its deliberations.

By the end of 1689, Blair had gained a new appointment that gave him a position in his own right from which to advance the idea of a college, for it was at that time that the bishop of London, who had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the Anglican church in the colonies, appointed him as his commissary with supervisory powers over the Virginia clergy. When Blair called his first convocation of the clergy on July 23, 1690, he advanced “Several Propositions” for a new college which gained the prompt endorsement of those in attendance.^[3] By the following February, Blair had also discussed his plan with the political leaders of the colony, and then in April 1691 the assembly gave its formal approval, formed a committee to raise funds to support the College, and voted to send Blair to England to launch the campaign that ended so successfully with the grant of the royal charter in February 1693.^[4]

The Question of Origins

So brief a summary can, however, suggest no more than an outline of the manner in which the idea of a Virginia college unfolded. Many of those who have examined the history of William and Mary have, in fact, traced its beginnings back to a much earlier event, the attempted founding of a college at Henrico, a settlement on the north bank of the James River just below present-day Richmond. In 1619, when the colony was still a struggling outpost, the Virginia Company of London provided ten thousand acres of land and raised a large sum of money for the establishment of a school or college for the instruction of both Indian and English boys. In time the company dispatched a hundred laborers to work on college lands, placing them under the command of George Thorpe, a prominent settler, Cambridge graduate, and former member of Parliament. By 1622 company officials had also chosen a rector for this college, the Reverend Patrick Copland, son of an Aberdeen merchant who had settled in London.

Patrick Copland had already achieved recognition as a missionary and educator, but he was never to take up his Virginia post. Within two weeks of his appointment, news reached England that Indians had launched a major attack against settlements in Virginia (March 22, 1622). Henrico had suffered especially, and among those killed was George Thorpe. The company nonetheless ordered work to continue on the building of the college. Patrick Copland retained his appointment as rector and promised to set out “in due course” for Henrico. However, the revocation of the Virginia Company charter on May 24, 1624, and its virtual bankruptcy ended all possibility of opening the college at Henrico.^[5]

There are indeed tantalizing parallels between this early attempt at Henrico and James Blair’s successful foundation of William and Mary seventy years later. Both institutions had strong Anglican church connections; both envisioned the education of Indians and whites; and Copland and Blair were both Scottish-born clerics who had moved to London but had at very different times shared study at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and incorporated features of Scottish education in their plans for New World colleges. Blair’s first Virginia parish likewise included the land on which the first college would have stood. Yet, despite the sometimes persuasive efforts of several of William and Mary’s historians to forge such links-and thereby establish a claim to being the oldest rather than the second oldest college in the English colonies—the claim is tenuous. None of those active in the late seventeenth century effort to found a Virginia college left a record in which such assertion is made.^[6] Moreover, while it possessed lands, at least partially constructed buildings. and a rector, Henrico never had students or faculty. It never in any true sense became a functioning college, however remarkable and pioneering the effort.

The larger reality was that, given the difficulties of life in early Virginia, the colony was in no position to carry through successfully the foundation of such an institution. The collapse of the Virginia Company, a scattered rural pattern of settlement, an astonishingly high death rate, and an inability of the governing elite fully to establish itself across succeeding generations militated against such an effort. Certainly the general idea resurfaced from time to time, particularly in the first years after 1660, when in England the Restoration had brought about the overthrow of the Puritans and returned the Stuart monarchs to the throne and reestablished the Anglican church, and when in Virginia the staunch royalist Sir William Berkeley had resumed his governorship. The principal evidence of that effort was a pair of resolutions by the General Assembly that the king be petitioned to issue letters patent “to collect and gather the charity of well disposed people in England for the erecting of colleges and schools in this countrye” and that in the colony “there be land taken upon purchases for a colledge and free schools and that there may be with as much speede as may be convenient housing erected therein for entertainment of students , and schollers.”^[7] Both resolutions also stressed the need to train an adequate supply of Anglican ministers to serve in the colony as another justification for a college.

In the short run, neither conditions in England, where growing foreign and domestic crises dominated politics, nor in Virginia, where increasing political turmoil culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, favored the new effort to found a college. Yet, in the years following the Restoration, trends were at work that made Blair’s efforts more productive within another decade or two. For the first time, the colony began to experience a population growth that stemmed from natural increase rather than immigration, and a more stable social and political elite, one capable of passing its positions of leadership to Virginia-born sons, took hold, creating a greater demand for more advanced education. Indeed, the book that first noted the effort to establish William and Mary—Robert Beverley’s History—was the work of a prominent member of the emerging Virginia-born elite. Beverley wrote with an acute sense of both the opportunities and need for improvement that his province presented and actively supported Blair.^[8]

Another indication of a favorable change in the cultural climate of the colony was a rise in the late seventeenth century of university-educated inhabitants of the colony. The number was still small-but sufficiently large that over the entire course of the seventeenth century, Virginia colonists trained at either Scottish or English universities outnumbered their counterparts in New England. A significant number of the group were Anglican clergymen, a number of whom were, like James Blair, graduates of Scottish universities. Oxford, too, was well represented, Cambridge far less so, almost certainly a consequence of its Puritan leanings. The presence of this group, however small, provided a key bloc of supporters for Blair’s efforts and must have been important, too, in making training in divinity one of the purposes of the institution and in allying the effort so closely with the church.^[9] Given the royalist and Anglican leanings of Virginians, the Church connection had, of course, been important in the earlier efforts to found a college, and the 1660 resolutions had made it clear that royal favor was also vital. Thus, a final ingredient in Blair’s success after 1690 was the change in the English monarchy brought about by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. From the Restoration in 1660 until that event, the Stuart monarchs, Charles II and James II, pursued policies of increasingly tighter economic and political control over the American colonies, more authoritarian rule at home, and closer alliance with the Catholic monarchs of France and Spain, accompanied by support for Catholicism in England itself. Nothing in the monarchs’ program favored any philanthropic endeavors in the colonies, least of all a staunchly Anglican college in Virginia. With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution and the accession of the Dutch Protestant William and Mary, his English queen, who quickly demonstrated an interest in charitable and religious endeavors, the political and religious climate dramatically changed.

By the beginning of the 1690s, then, new circumstances in both England and Virginia finally made the founding of a Virginia college possible. Although some Virginians would continue to the very eve of the American Revolution to return to England for more advanced education, the provincial society of the colony had now matured to the point where a relatively stable, increasingly native-born elite sought opportunities for such advanced education for its sons in the colony. Despite an always-chronic shortage of clergy for the established church, a sufficient number of Anglican ministers were now serving in the colony to create another influential group of supporters—witness the first systematic formulation of plans for the College in a convocation of the clergy. They especially sought to associate the effort with their church and secure the backing of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in England. Finally, at home the monarchs and at least some part of the political leadership in the imperial bureaucracy were prepared to support the college.

Securing the Charter

While the founding of a college was now a distinct possibility, the success of the effort was by no means certain. Ardent backers were hardly numerous in either Virginia or England, although their ranks included persons as powerful as the Virginia governor Francis Nicholson and, of course, Commissary Blair, the prime mover. Blair effectively personified the manner in which the ambitions of the Virginia elite, the interests of the Anglican church, and the favorable political climate in England after 1688 all came together in this remarkable, if often disagreeable, man. Blair had quickly linked himself to the provincial elite by marriage and membership on the council; he was the appointed leader of the church in the colony; and before his arrival he had forged ties to high-ranking English clerics who were close to the new monarchs.

Such advantages had not come easily to James Blair. Born about 1655, the son of a Scottish clergyman who spent most of his ministry in a rural Banffshire parish, he began study at age twelve at Marischal College, Aberdeen, an institution that remained strongly Calvinist, presbyterian, and antiepiscopal despite Charles II’s restoration of bishops in the Church of Scotland. After two years at Marischal, Blair enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1669, receiving his master of arts in 1673, and then proceeding to theological study at Edinburgh for six years under a celebrated teacher, Laurence Charteris.^[10]

In a Scottish church that remained badly divided between episcopalian and presbyterian factions, James Blair, like his father, remained a strong advocate of a Scottish episcopacy—in that respect, at least, Marischal had not affected him. At the completion of his theological training in 1679, he had received ordination by the bishop of Edinburgh and appointment to a modest, rural parish near Edinburgh. For all his episcopalian convictions, Blair was also staunchly Protestant and in 1681 refused to take a test oath required of all Church of Scotland clergy by which they agreed to accept the future monarch, the Catholic James II, as head of the Scottish church upon his succession to the throne.

Removed from his parish as a consequence and barred from serving in Scotland, Blair, as did many other Scottish episcopalians, moved to London. Here he gained the patronage of another Marischal graduate, Gilbert Burnet, then chaplain of the Rolls Chapel but later bishop of Salisbury. Through Burnet he met other leaders of the Church of England, most notably Henry Compton, bishop of London, whose duties included supervision of the Anglican clergy in the colonies. By 1685 Compton persuaded Blair, who was at this time barely thirty years of age, to go to Virginia as rector of Varina Parish.^[11] Although his patrons fell into disfavor with James II, who had succeeded to the throne in the year of his departure for Virginia, Blair was now in a comparatively safe position of which he took full advantage. He rapidly became a leader among his fellow clerics and in 1687 married Sarah Harrison, allying himself with one of the most powerful families among Virginia’s governing elite.^[12]

With the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution, the accession of William and Mary, and the restoration of Blair’s ecclesiastical patrons to their positions of influence, Blair’s position grew even stronger. A new lieutenant governor for the colony, Francis Nicholson, arrived in June 1690, bringing with him the commission that named Blair as Bishop Compton’s commissary for Virginia.^[13] It seems likely that Compton had a hand in Nicholson’s appointment no less than Blair’s. The two men for the present became close allies, although the friendship between them would eventually turn to unremitting hostility.^[14]

Within a few weeks of receiving his commission as commissary, Blair called his first convocation of the Virginia clergy on July 23, 1690, at Jamestown, this being the meeting at which he first introduced his plan for the College, the “Several Propositions.” The detailed nature of Blair’s scheme—it spelled out at some length the basic structure of grammar school, college, and divinity school, defined faculty positions, and specified the amount of faculty salaries and allowances—strongly suggested that Blair had begun its formulation well in advance of the convocation, perhaps in cooperation with his new ally, Nicholson.^[15] The commissary’s fellow clergy promptly endorsed the propositions, as we know, and also authorized a petition to the General Assembly asking members to add their support.^[16]

The assembly did not meet again for almost a year—in April and May of 1691—but there is at least one suggestion that in the interim Blair and others continued to discuss and refine the college proposal. In a May Day 1699 student oration on the founding of the College, the young speaker described a meeting, “of some private gentlemen” at Jamestown in February 1691 and identified John Page as “the person that had the chief honour to be the first mover in procureing such a meeting.”^[17] Page was a landholder at Middle Plantation, where the College would eventually be located, and a member of the governor’s council who must from this time be associated with Blair and Nicholson as one of those taking a lead in planning for the College.

We know that when the assembly met in April 1691, it lost little time in doing its part by its petition to the king and queen, plan for raising money, and, above all, authorization of Blair’s trip to England. Only one item seemed to cause the members much concern, an article in the original proposals that recommended “that a convenient place may be appointed as near as may be the Center of the Country for the seating of said Colledge, and a sufficient Quantity of land purchased for the same.” First defining the center as north of the York River in Gloucester County, the assembly changed its mind and settled instead on a location to the south of the York River in York County.

One dissident attempted without success to have the petition forwarded in the mails, thereby saving the expense of sending Blair to England. But the commissary was to have his trip, his first return to the home country since he had arrived in the colony. By June he had departed, armed with a detailed set of instructions built around obtaining a charter and a grant of arms, searching for private gifts, and finding a teacher for the Grammar School. The stage was set for Blair’s two-year effort to accomplish these ends.^[18]

When Commissary Blair reached London at the beginning of September 1691, he must have hoped, even though he had much to accomplish, that matters would move more promptly than they did. Instead he encountered repeated delays, some unintended and a consequence of unforeseen circumstances but many the inevitable product of the bureaucratic and political maze through which he had to work his way. We can still experience a certain tedium in following his progress. What we know comes largely from Blair’s intermittent letters to Governor Nicholson and a few official records. Apart from Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s comments in the History of His Own Time, which remained unpublished until the nineteenth century, no one in England appeared to refer to Blair’s efforts outside the public records.^[19]

Upon his arrival Blair found first off that virtually everyone whom he needed to see was away from London—the Virginia colonial agent in Wales, King William on the continent, several of the bishops whom he knew in their dioceses. The bishop of London, Henry Compton, was on hand but ill and out of favor with William. Hence, he proved “unwilling to meddle in any court business.” Ultimately, however, several other bishops whom Blair had known from his days in London were helpful. Edward Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, had the confidence of Queen Mary and advised Blair that she was the most likely source of support for charitable projects.^[20] Bishop Burnet offered to use his influence, and, finally, John Tillotson, the archbishop of Canterbury, succeeded in attracting even the king’s attention.

On November 12, accompanied by Tillotson and Lord Howard of Effingham, the governor of Virginia immediately preceding Nicholson, Blair had his audience with the monarch, made his request, and received a favorable response. Blair’s account reported William as observing, “I am glad that the colony is upon so good a design & I will promote it to the best of my power.”^[21] Within two days Blair was instructed to present a detailed financial request to Bishop Compton and Archbishop Tillotson. If they approved, it would then be sent forward to the lords of trade and plantations. Blair followed with a successful meeting with the bishops, providing a memorial pleading the College’s case for their use. He then found himself waiting for eight months while his statement made its tortuous way through the various layers of imperial officialdom, in the course of which it encountered some opposition to the idea of permanently committing crown revenues to the College.

While he awaited the outcome, Blair focused on his need to find private support. First, with the assistance of Bishop Burnet, who had preached the funeral sermon for the renowned scientist Robert Boyle, the commissary succeeded in securing provision by Boyle’s executors for a large portion of the income from Brafferton Manor in Yorkshire to support a school for Indians at the College. Although the plan for an Indian school might have appeared to resurrect a principal objective of the attempted college at Henrico, the idea evidently came not from any memory of that earlier effort in Virginia but rather as a consequence of the trustees’ particular interests and a similar bequest for Harvard College.^[22] The details of the execution of the bequest took time to work out, but when they were completed in 1697, the College thereafter received its share of the Brafferton income every year until the American Revolution.

Blair’s other early success in finding private benefactors came in an agreement negotiated between the lords of trade, the commissary, and the London merchant Micajah Perry under which three accused pirates captured in Virginia waters were to give a fourth of the value of their loot, approximately £300, to the College in return for a pardon and the recovery of the remaining money.^[23]

Blair continued to fight as well for a restoration of the royal revenues that English officials sought to withhold.^[24] One of the often-told, if perhaps apocryphal, anecdotes that illustrates the commissary’s embattled position was recounted in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin. In Franklin’s account, when the possibility of issuing a charter and providing support for the College was discussed, one of the lords of the treasury, Sir Edward Seymour:

oppos’d the Grant; saying that the Nation was engag’d in an expensive War, that the Money was wanted [for] better purposes, and he did not see the least Occasion for a College in Virginia. Blair represented to him, that its Intention was to educate and qualify young Men to be Ministers of the Gospel, much wanted there; and begged Mr. Attorney would consider, that the People of Virginia had souls to be saved, as well as the People of England. “Souls!” says he, “damn your Souls. Make Tobacco!”^[25]

Blair never mentioned this incident in any of his surviving writings, and Seymour, in any event, was not attorney general, as Franklin stated.^[26] He was, however, a key imperial official, and the remark, true or not, was no doubt in keeping with his attitude toward the founding of the College.

Finally, the lords of the treasury made their report to the king, continuing to recommend against several of Blair’s requests for support, specifically a grant from the crown quitrents, the proceeds from escheated estates in the colony, and the income of the office of surveyor general, the last derived from substantial fees paid by county surveyors for their licenses. The officials were willing, however, to provide two large land grants, one near Blackwater Swamp south of the James River and the other on Pamunkey Neck on the upper York and to allow the College to have the proceeds of a tax of one pence per pound collected on tobacco exported from Virginia or Maryland to other American colonial ports.

Blair refused, however, to give up hope of obtaining the entire package of support, and in the end he prevailed. On September 1, 1692, a year from his arrival in London, the College received all that it had sought-a payment from quitrents totaling almost £2,000 to help with the building of the College, the two land grants of ten thousand acres each, the tobacco export tax receipts, and the “Issues, Fees, and Profits” of the surveyor general’s office.^[27] In return, the College would only pay a symbolic annual quitrent of two copies of Latin verses to be delivered on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, an obligation with which over the years, to judge from the survival of some of the verses, the College faithfully complied.^[28]

The commissary’s work was not yet complete, however, for he now faced the task of preparing the actual text of the charter for the king’s approval. In nothing that survives did Blair explain the details of his work. Clearly, he had given much thought to the matter long before he left Virginia so that he could begin with a relatively complete conception of the structure of the institution. Almost certainly there was further consultation with Governor Nicholson, who in particular recommended that he obtain help from two English lawyers, “church of England men . . . [who] were every way qualify’ d.”^[29] One can assume that Blair examined the charters of English and Scottish universities, although the result suggested that he followed no single model.^[30] All in all, apart from the need to frame the provisions of the charter in acceptable legal terms, it is logical to assume that Blair already clearly understood what he wanted the document to contain.

The monarchs duly granted the charter under the date of February 8, 1693. Blair now knew that his efforts, begun at least four years earlier, were successful, although the tasks of finding a faculty, constructing buildings, and actually enrolling the first students lay ahead. For now, the charter itself was the important thing, and the commissary could look forward to bearing it triumphantly back to Virginia.^[31]

Behind its stilted and formulaic language, the charter contained several basic provisions which can be summarized as follows:^[32]

1. The opening paragraph defined the College as founded “to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnish’ d with a Seminary of Ministers of the Gospel, and that the Youth may be piously educated in good Letters and Manners, and that the Christian Faith may be propagated among the Western Indians.” It was to be—in the words that are regularly intoned at modem observances of Charter Day—”a certain Place of universal Study, a perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences, consisting of one President, six Masters or Professors, and an hundred Scholars more or less.” The twin emphasis on the study of divinity and the general education in arts and sciences of the youth of the colony met both the objectives of the Virginia social elite for improving the education of their sons and those of the clergy for strengthening the Church of England in the colony. Secular and religious purposes were joined in the new institution from its very beginning. The reference to educating and proselytizing Native Americans was, of course, a response to the Boyle bequest.
2. The control of properties and revenues of the College and the right of nominating faculty rested initially in the hands of a body of eighteen trustees, who were specifically named in the charter. Their ranks included Governor Nicholson, four members of the council, nine members of the House of Burgesses—one was Blair’s father-in-law—and four clergymen, one of them Blair himself. Again the interests of the church and clergy were joined with those of Virginia’s powerful governing elite. No provision was made for choosing new trustees, since they constituted in theory a temporary governing body to serve until the College was fully established with a full complement of faculty, at which time control of property and revenues would be handed to the president and masters, and the charter would be transferred into their hands. Few would have anticipated that the transfer would not take place for more than thirty years and that by that time the trustees would have declined in number by death until only two were still living.
3. In the ninth and tenth articles, the charter also named the trustees and their successors as “the true, sole and undoubted Visitors and Governors of the said College for ever.” It also endowed the group with “full and absolute Liberty, Power and Authority, of making, enacting, framing and establishing such and so many Rules, Laws, Statutes, Orders and Injunctions, for the good and wholesome Government of the said College, as . . . shall from time to time … seem most fit and expedient.” The Board of Visitors, or Visitors and Governors—both designations were employed in the colonial period—was required to have a minimum membership of eighteen, which was the size of the original group, but could be expanded to as many as twenty. A majority of the sitting board could elect their successors or fill vacancies from “the principal and better sort of inhabitants” of Virginia. Following an initial appointment of James Blair as rector of the Board by the terms of the charter, the members thereafter were to elect their rector annually. Thus, the charter conveyed broad but vaguely defined powers to this permanent, self-perpetuating governing body.
4. The charter also resolved the choice of a first president by naming James Blair to serve for life, a tenure that perhaps might be viewed with envy by presidents of today’s American institutions of higher education. In one of his early letters to Nicholson from England, Blair professed not to have thought ahead while still in Virginia as to who might fill the office. Rather, he declared to the governor, the bishops and others with whom he had consulted in England urged the selection of a president as a necessary first step in organizing the College and securing a faculty. While suggesting that good people could be found in England, Blair went on to observe that such a man might be reluctant to go to America or even might not “at all be fitt for such a small College as ours will be.” Blair put himself forward with seeming reluctance. “Though I never sought a place in my whole life time,” he told Nicholson, “I could find it in my heart to seek this.” Nicholson took the hint and managed Blair’s nomination by the Virginia assembly in April 1692. Not surprisingly, the charter in the following year confirmed Blair as president at the same time that it designated him as the first rector.^[33]
5. The charter likewise provided another College office, that of chancellor. As with the post of rector, it named a first chancellor, Henry Compton, bishop of London, but set a seven-year term. Thereafter, the rector and the Board could elect an “eminent and discreet Person” to fill the chancellorship. The charter did not specify any duties or powers, evidently in replication of what was in English and Scottish universities essentially an honorary position. Compton’s designation as the first to hold the office also set a general precedent, although one not universally followed, of appointing an English bishop. Bishop Compton had been far less helpful in securing the charter than several of his episcopal colleagues, and Blair, some years later in 1702, commented on “the imperfect notion we had of him . . . that he was to be a Great Man of the Church of England.”^[34] Yet he was Blair’s superior in his position as commissary , and his supervisory powers over the church in the colonies made him a logical choice from the perspective of English officials.
6. William and Mary, based upon the example of seats held in the English Parliament by Oxford and Cambridge Universities, was to have its own seat in the lower house of the Virginia assembly, with the president and masters having the right of election. The assembly, however, resisted implementing this provision—and the College did not press for it—until the transfer of the charter.
7. As Blair had envisioned from the first, the College was to include the Grammar School, a school of philosophy (that is, instruction in moral and natural philosophy at the collegiate level), and a school of divinity. The charter affirmed these parts of the College but did not provide for the Indian School, although it looked to the conversion of Indians as one of the stated purposes of the College in the preamble. In all that he wrote during the process of securing the charter, Blair was emphatic that initially he envisioned opening only the Grammar School.^[35] Although Blair no doubt made the decision that practical necessity dictated, he had to recognize, too, that the College would not be complete or the charter transferred to the president and masters until it offered advanced instruction in philosophy and divinity.
8. The articles of the charter that defined the governance and institutional structure of William and Mary, although they were particularly important, did not constitute all the provisions of a very long document Several lengthy sections reaffirmed and laid out the detailed provisions of the various grants of land and income that the crown had bestowed on the College. Other articles defined the legal status as a corporate body of the president and masters, provided for the College to have a seal, and specified that the College should provide a council chamber in which the rector and Visitors could convene from time to time.

Although the charter incorporated some provisions that were suggested to Blair only after he began his work in England and although in some respects the charter rested upon an eclectic borrowing from both English and Scottish precedents, the final document in many important respects largely ratified the ideas that Blair and others had formed in Virginia, reaching back to the commissary’s “Several Propositions.” It was, moreover, a document that continued to blend the secular and religious motivations that had combined to produce the demand by Virginians for a college. In an age that did not rigidly separate the worldly and the spiritual, it remained to be seen how the relationship between the two would unfold in the affairs of the College—and, for that matter, how they would play out in the life of the man who was simultaneously the founder, first president, trustee, and first rector of the new institution while he remained commissary and titular leader of the Anglican clergy of Virginia and an increasingly powerful political leader in the affairs of the colony.

The Charter and the Development of the College

As explicit as the terms of the charter were, much about the character of William and Mary remained to be determined from the day-to-day experience of getting it started and keeping it in operation-no easy task. Thirty-six years were to pass before all the professorships could be filled and the transfer of the charter effected. For another half century thereafter, the College continued to struggle, frequently facing divisive controversies and financial hardship. But for almost nine decades, the Charter of 1693 was its operative “constitution,” its fundamental law, amplified by College statutes and regulations, and by the actions of faculty and Visitors. As such, the royal charter was a unique document in the history of American higher education, one that in some, though certainly not all, respects gave William and Mary a distinctive place within the embryonic system of higher education, nine colleges in all, that developed in eight of the mainland colonies of British North America before the American Revolution.

If William and Mary’s royal charter was the only one granted an American colonial college, it had one possible counterpart within an extended colonial setting that also embraced an earlier but continuing English colonization of Ireland. There, in 1592, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to Trinity College, Dublin, which declared it to be “the mother of a university,” although it contained but a single college, and defined its purposes, rather like those of William and Mary a century later, as instruction in the arts and promotion of religion, that is, Anglican and Protestant Christianity. In 1637, when Archbishop William Laud became its chancellor, the college received a new charter increasing the power of the crown and the provost in its affairs. Trinity came under severe attack and military occupation by the forces of James II in the Glorious Revolution but rapidly revived under the more benevolent treatment of William III.^[36]

No evidence exists of a conscious link between Trinity and William and Mary, even though the two, one being resurrected and the other founded, must have come to the attention of King William and Queen Mary at almost the same time. Trinity might have provided the model for a chartered “colonial” and Anglican institution, although Virginians would have seemed to conceive the idea of a royal charter well before Blair reached England.

Before the end of the colonial era, one other American college of strongly Anglican leanings sought a royal charter, although subsequent to its founding. As early as 1704, the Anglican missionary group, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, conceived the idea of an Anglican college for the “center of English America,” by which it meant the colony of New York.^[37] By the time that the foundation of a New York college came to fruition decades later with the organization in 1754 of King’s College—a predecessor of Columbia University—New York was a religiously diverse colony. As with William and Mary, but perhaps with even greater force, there were strong secular motives for an institution that could train a political and social elite. The New York legislature approved the grant of a provincial charter for King’s that stipulated that the president should be an Anglican and all college religious services be conducted according to the Anglican liturgy. Its governing board, although dominated by Anglicans, also included representatives of four other religious groups, public officials, and lay members chosen without regard to their religious affiliation. The board also included as ex officio members two important English officials, the archbishop of Canterbury and the first lord commissioner of trade and plantations, both of whom might be represented by proxies. King’s was open to students of all religious persuasions, and the board had full power over the appointment and discharge of the president and members of the faculty, the making of rules for the college, and the choice of textbooks.^[38]

King’s in its first years lacked the royal charter and full-fledged Anglican character of William and Mary, although its Anglican ties were strong. On the eve of the Revolution, however, under the leadership of the second president of King’s, the Oxford-educated cleric Myles Cooper, New York Anglicans set out to remake the institution. By 1771 Cooper had introduced new statutes based in some part on Oxford, overseen successful efforts at raising money in Great Britain, and begun to increase a student enrollment that had failed as yet to reach forty. Three years later, at Cooper’s urging, the board of governors had prepared a charter for submission to English officials. As one historian has observed, “it was a remarkably ambitious blueprint.” The framers adopted their own version of the wording of the 1592 Trinity College charter by designating King’s “the mother of the American University in the Province of New York.” King’s was to form the core of an expanded number of colleges. Its president, who would still have to be Anglican, would also serve as president of the larger university, and the board of governors of King’s would be expanded and become the university board with full governing powers. The new university would enjoy two seats in the provincial legislature, and the number of Anglicans and royal officeholders who served as governors would increase.

The proposed charter was indeed an ambitious document, little short of breathtaking in its expectations for an institution that had still enrolled only a handful of students at any given time, but during late 1774 and early I 775 it met an initially favorable reception from the crown and royal officials. A rapidly developing Revolutionary crisis, however, left no place for such an undertaking. Far from becoming the man to implement such a plan, Myles Cooper, an avowed Loyalist, in May 1775 fled the colony and took refuge on a British warship. There was to be no American University in the Province of New York—and no royal charter.^[39]

Had the effort of Cooper and his supporters succeeded, the charter that William and Mary had received eight decades earlier might have seemed a less significant document. For almost a century, however, while simultaneously embodying in common with all the other colonial colleges the aspirations of its provincial elite, William and Mary remained an institution that expressed a more traditional Anglican and imperial vision of the social and religious order. While the charter had not provided an active imperial voice in its governing structure, the close review of the document by the lords of trade before its confirmation, the permanent provision for financial support granted by the crown, and the appointment of a high ecclesiastical official of the established church as its first chancellor signified something more than a onetime token of royal favor. Although sometimes hostile to the president and masters and more supportive of the provincial Board of Visitors in college disputes, a succession of royal governors took their involvement in the affairs of William and Mary seriously, generally maintaining a tradition of imperial patronage of learning and religion.

Although in English practice the position was conceived as largely honorific, the act of selecting the bishop of London as first chancellor established a continuing relationship between the College and ecclesiastical and imperial authority that at times proved influential. A succession of bishops of London—and occasionally an archbishop of Canterbury or a lay official of the British government—continued to fill the chancellor’s post, and the more active of them were especially influential in the recruitment of faculty and in an increasing predominance of Anglican clergymen among the group. Given their political connections with the home government, they could from time to time advance the interests of the College among imperial officials. Such an avenue of communication was often of particular benefit to the president and the masters, providing a source of influence and power that after the time of James Blair they did not possess in the colony itself. That link between the faculty and the hierarchy of the Church of England-an outgrowth of custom and practice, not a specific provision of the charter-proved especially important in light of the complexity, indeed ambivalence, present in its provisions for transfer of the charter itself and control over property and resources to the president and masters, while simultaneously awarding the Board of Visitors power over appointments and rules and regulations.

Indeed, the most compelling question about the charter, one that has aroused considerable debate among historians of American higher education, concerns the extent to which its provisions made the faculty a self-governing, autonomous corporation in the tradition of the universities of medieval origins, such as, in the case of England, Oxford and Cambridge.^[40] Older histories of William and Mary long maintained that provisions in the William and Mary charter, such as the grant of representation in the Virginia assembly on the model of the Parliamentary seats held by Oxford and Cambridge or the mandated transfer of the charter from the original trustees to the president and faculty, established the critical influence of the English university tradition of an autonomous faculty on William and Mary alone among the American colonial colleges. The counter position, most recently and cogently advanced by Jurgen Herbst, asserts the weakness of such a tradition at William and Mary and emphasizes its operation as no more than a grammar school for its first thirty-six years. It points also to a strong Scottish influence on the charter, one that transferred to Virginia an alternate tradition of governance of schools and colleges by a powerful external authority—in this instance, the Board of Visitors and Governors.^[41]

The essential thrust of Herbst’s argument is that all of the early American colleges, Anglican William and Mary included, developed forms of external governance as a consequence of religious influences on education arising in the first instance out of the Protestant Reformation, but reinforced in the American colonies by the initial smallness and fragility of the early colleges, limiting the competence of their faculties to govern themselves. In the areas of Europe swept by the Reformation, universities became essentially territorial institutions answerable in part to civil authority, and although they were founded to advance the Protestant faith, they always had strong secular purposes as well. The Reformation produced, moreover, a tier of lower schools—gymnasia in Continental terminology—not offering degrees but providing a classical and religious education at a preuniversity level. Being locally organized, without a charter from higher authorities, unable to grant degrees, but offering much of the instruction and taking on some of the characteristics of a university, these institutions were nonetheless more easily made subject to control by local authorities outside the institution and more likely at the most to allow their faculties a minor voice in purely internal affairs.^[42]

The first three American colleges—Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale—all in Herbst’s view were “more closely related in conception and governmental practice to the contemporary academic institutions of Reformed Europe . . . than to the medieval universities.”^[43] All began and continued for some years as grammar schools, even though they intended to offer collegiate instruction and ultimately did so, and all had from their inception external trustees or governing bodies. Even without the close links between civil authority and established churches, Puritan or Anglican, that prevailed in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Connecticut where the first three American colleges were established, all the later colleges followed a similar pattern. Four, New Jersey (later Princeton), Queen’s (later Rutgers), Dartmouth, and Rhode Island (later Brown), were founded by religious groups caught up in the Great Awakening; and two, King’s and the College of Philadelphia (later Pennsylvania), were founded in colonial cities that contained great religious diversity and exhibited increasingly secular educational concerns. Yet, all developed their own forms of external control of their governance.^[44] William and Mary, as an Anglican institution with a royal charter might, as Herbst recognizes and its early historians strongly maintained, present an exception to this general pattern, but Herbst concludes that, in fact, it did not. In his view, even Oxford and Cambridge were developing some tendencies toward external control. More important, England had developed numerous grammar schools, often with a strong principal as the chief administrative officer but also with a powerful external body of governors or trustees. Indeed, the idea of a trusteeship became especially popular in the last half of the seventeenth century, so that the use of this model as a transitional arrangement for William and Mary was a logical step.^[45]

Even more decisive was the extent of the power assigned by the William and Mary charter to the Board of Visitors. While the president and masters would receive the charter and control revenues, the Board became the “true, sole, and undoubted visitors and governors of the said college forever,” and the rector—the Board’s presiding officer—a powerful figure in college affairs. It was in this provision and also in the combination of a grammar school with authority to grant university degrees that Herbst found the Scottish influence on William and Mary especially strong. James Blair was obviously the likely agent for transmitting that influence. These charter provisions—and the general thrust of the curriculum—were a close replication of the charter provisions for Marischal, Blair’s own school. Edinburgh, where he had taken his degree in divinity, was likewise an institution established by royal grant and governed by the external authority of the town council under a rector.^[46]

Herbst’s analysis is in many respects convincing. James Blair clearly expected to launch William and Mary as a grammar school and to add collegiate instruction later. He had from the start collaborated closely with the legislature of Virginia in promoting the idea of a college and looked to the provincial government for some part of its financial support, steps that certainly carried the implication of a voice by political authorities in the control of the institution. The charter indeed opened the way for a powerful Board of Visitors on which political leaders would often play a dominant role. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Board sought to put the widest possible interpretation on its assigned powers, challenging the faculty time after time.

Yet, the charter had also conveyed a marked degree of authority to the president and masters, and there was a certain symbolism in their physical possession of the charter, once the transfer had taken place. The faculty, too, sought, where any point in the charter was vague, to extend its powers, as, for example, the right to approve degrees. In addition, the eventual predominance on the faculty of English-born clerics and their relationship with politically powerful Anglican prelates who served as chancellors afforded faculty members a more powerful voice in college affairs than they might otherwise have achieved. They saw William and Mary as embedded in an imperial culture, tied closely to the mother country, and looked at times to Oxford and Cambridge, especially the former, as the appropriate model for a Virginia institution.

The consequence was a long, bitterly contested fight between Visitors and faculty through much of the later colonial period, when William and Mary had filled out its faculty and begun to offer instruction on the collegiate level. If the decision went eventually in favor of external governance by the Board of Visitors, bringing William and Mary in line with the other early American colleges, the route was at times rocky and the outcome uncertain. Indeed, the faculty made their strongest and most nearly successful effort to shape William and Mary in conformity with their ambitions on the very eve of the American Revolution. Only with independence did the Visitors emerge victorious. Their triumph may therefore have been achieved later and have been less foreordained than Herbst suggests, even if he is entirely correct about the eventual outcome.

In 1693, however, such a conflict was hardly conceivable. There was no reason to fight over control of an institution that did not yet exist, one that faced a long struggle to survive. Blair, moreover, had established personal control over both avenues of governance contained in the charter. He was simultaneously its president, a powerful trustee, and an influential member of the Board of Visitors. He presided over a faculty of two, the Grammar School and Indian masters, who held academically inferior appointments and lacked any claim to the status of a university faculty. His political power and that of his family connections were such that no one in the colony wished to challenge him. Some may well have been indifferent to the idea of founding the College, but none had the least interest in wresting control of it from him.