Trinity College

Trinity's Great Court

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford. Trinity considers itself to be "a world-leading academic institution with an outstanding record of education, learning and research."

Like its sister college, Christ Church, Oxford, it has traditionally been considered the most aristocratic of the Cambridge colleges — and it has generally been the academic institution of choice of the Royal Family (King Edward VII, King George VI, Prince Henry of Gloucester, Prince William of Gloucester and Edinburgh and Prince Charles were all undergraduates).

Trinity has a strong academic tradition, with members having won 31 Nobel Prizes (of the 83 Nobel Prizes awarded to members of Cambridge University), four Fields Medals (mathematics), one Abel Prize (mathematics) and two Templeton Prizes (religion).

Trinity has many notable alumni — including princes, spies, poets and prime ministers (it has educated six British prime ministers) — but perhaps its two most distinguished are Isaac Newton and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Trinity has many college societies. Its Rowing club is the First and Third Trinity Boat Club. Trinity's May Ball, named after the Boat Club, is one of the largest of Cambridge's May Balls. Trinity also has the oldest mathematical university society in the United Kingdom, the Trinity Mathematical Society.

The first formalised version of the rules of Football, known as the Cambridge Rules, was drawn up by Cambridge student representatives of leading boarding schools at Trinity College in 1848.

History

The college was founded by Henry VIII in 1546, from the merger of two existing colleges: Michaelhouse (founded by Hervey de Stanton in 1324), and King’s Hall (established by Edward II in 1317 and refounded by Edward III in 1337). At the time, Henry had been wiping out and seizing church lands from abbeys and monasteries. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, being both religious institutions and quite rich, expected to be next in line. The king duly passed an Act of Parliament that allowed him to suppress (and confiscate the property of) any college he wished. The universities used their contacts to plead with his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. The queen persuaded her husband not to close them down, but to create a new college. The king did not want to use royal funds, so he instead combined two colleges (King’s Hall and Michaelhouse) and seven hostels (Physwick (formerly part of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Gregory’s, Ovyng’s, Catherine’s, Garratt, Margaret’s, and Tyler’s) to form Trinity.

Contrary to popular belief, the monastic lands supplied by Henry VIII were alone insufficient to ensure Trinity's eventual rise. In terms of architecture and royal association, it was not until the Mastership of Thomas Nevile (1593–1615) that Trinity assumed both its spaciousness and courtly association with the governing class that distinguished it until the Civil War. In its infancy Trinity had owed a great deal to its neighbouring college of St John's: in the exaggerated words of Roger Ascham Trinity was little more than a colonia deducta. Its first four Masters were educated at St John's, and it took until around 1575 for the two colleges' application numbers to draw even, a position in which they have remained since the Civil War. In terms of wealth, Trinity's current fortunes belie prior fluctuations; Nevile's building campaign drove the college into debt from which it only surfaced in the 1640s, and the mastership of Richard Bentley (notorious for the construction of a hugely expensive staircase in the Master's Lodge, and Bentley's repeated refusals to step down despite pleas from the Fellowship) adversely affected applications and finances.

Most of the Trinity’s major buildings date from the 16th and 17th centuries. Thomas Nevile, who became Master of Trinity in 1593, rebuilt and re-designed much of the college. This work included the enlargement and completion of Great Court, and the construction of Nevile’s Court between Great Court and the river Cam. Nevile’s Court was completed in the late 17th century when the Wren Library, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was built.

In the 20th century, Trinity College and King’s College were for decades the main recruiting grounds for the Cambridge Apostles, an elite, intellectual secret society.

The full name of the college is The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the Town and University of Cambridge.