Thomas Hardy, armiger, fundator
scholae grammaticae Dorcestrie,
1569, obiit in aedibus Johannis
Browne de Frampton, decimo
quinto die Octobris 1599, et
sepultus est 18° die ejusdem
mensis, in parvulo sacello in
australi parti ecclesiae Divi
Petri, villae Dorcestrae, anno
superadicto.

sundry discontented persons . . . complained . . . about the free schoole which they said should be free for all, whereas the deed being produced showed the founder meant it should be free only for poor men's children. Sir Francis Ashley was present at the debate and showed them their errors, yet they went away womanishly and . . . many cried out a free schoole, a free schoole.

The meeting had one outcome useful to posterity, however: in order to clarify the matter several copies of the founder's deed were circulated among the governors, and it is one of these which still survives as Item MJ 63 of the Dorset Archives. The original document, of which there were three copies, has completely disappeared. Despite the care taken, the governors of 1631 appear to have read the deed very largely to suit themselves, since the only reference to parents' financial abilities appears in the phrase "children in all degrees", which suggests that the townsmen were right. Nonetheless, the governors charged - as, indeed, did most of their successors, and most of their counterparts in other comparable schools.
Despite their apparent disregard for the founder's wish, the governors may have beeh wise, even if they were not right. Must of the succeeding headmasters complained about their salary, and one, Gabriel Reeve, who was headmaster during the Civil War, appears to have used his standing quarrel with the governors as an excuse to come or go as he thought fit. At one time he absented himself for almost three years, before blandly resuming his post. When he was finally dismissed in 1650 he refused to move, and instead sent the governors a "demand for arrears of rent and stipend". It took them six months to remove him; they leave no indication of how long it took to pay him.
Several eminent men were approached to succeed Reeve in his post; a couple accepted, but each in turn was encouraged to withdraw by the subsequent headmaster of Sherborne School, who for some reason felt himself obliged to warn them off. Eventually the governors decided to warn him off, particularly as he appears to have tried to set up a rival school:

April 12, 1651. This day Mr. Birstall was sent for into this hall and this Company declared they were not pleased with his taking of a place in this Towne (as they conceive) in opposition unto them, and therefore they cannot approve of his settling in that place . . .

Birstall took himself off, and became headmaster of Sherborne in 1653.
Eventually a successor was found. Samuel Cromleholm, who had been under-Master at St. Paul's School, London, stayed for six years, and if a school is judged by the number of its admissions to Oxford and Cambridge, and by its esteem in the town, Cromleholm was one of the great Dorchester headmasters. When he left, in 1657, it was to become one of the great High Masters of St. Paul's. But Cromleholm was only induced to come after a considerable rearrangement of the school's finances and, at his own stipulation, with the provision that "the freeschole should be free for all mens sonnes". The master had still, of course, to be paid, and an engaging method of supplementing school funds was adopted which might profitably be continued still: to the regular stipend from school lands was added the profit from the town brewery.
Cromleholm's immediate followers were less successful, and at the close of the headmastership of John Stevens (1662-64) the town records noted sadly that "the Schole is much impayred in reputation and number of schollers". Stevens's successor, a more learned man who translated The Whole Duty of Man into Latin, and licensed it for publication in 1678, perhaps repaired the damage slightly: he did at least leave the school one memento, for the bound manuscript of his book is still school property. His successors left more, for though records for the eighteenth century are scanty there is enough to show that, in the words of one commentator, it had become "a seminary of excellence and repute", and its pupils were drawn from well beyond the county's boundaries. John Wesley and the Dorset historian, John Hutchins, both received their education at Dorchester during this period: Wesley's response was to publish, as one of his earliest works, a satire on his headmaster; Hutchins included praise for his in The History of Dorset.
Eighteenth-century progress was not repeated in the nineteenth century, largely for reasons beyond the governors' control. At a time when there was an increasing demand for a broader education, the governors found themselves hampered by an apparent obligation to teach Latin and Greek and nothing else. Again the public stepped in to voice their objections; again the founder's deed was consulted; and on this occasion legal advice was sought. The school would have been better to leave the lawyers out of it. The lawyer, Mr. James Stevens, decided that fees could be charged only for subjects other than Latin and Greek; he also reached the conclusion that the governors were not allowed to teach subjects other than Latin or Greek. There is not a word to this effect in the charter, and the lawyer appears to have made his decision purely on the grounds of practice in other similar schools. His hair-splitting interpretation, if it can be called an interpretation, stood in the way of progress for the next thirty years, with the result that until State intervention in the 1870s Dorchester Grammar School went slowly downhill. The townsmen responded sensibly, by encouraging other schools which offered a more general education. To one of these went the young Thomas Hardy; in another William Barnes taught originally and imaginatively. Barnes's one attempt to become headmaster of the grammar school - it is difficult to believe that he would have been content to accept the lawyer's decision - was blocked because he was not a member of Holy Orders. The regulations became a stranglehold: where the school had once sent pupils, in considerable numbers, to Oxford and Cambridge, it now thought itself lucky if it could prepare them for admission to the better-known public schools. Soon it thought itself lucky if it had any pupils at all. In 1871 the buildings had become decrepit, and a government report stated that

the day scholars have diminished in number, and there are no boarders. The Master receives into his house a lunatic patient, from whom it is said he is paid £400 per annum. He is evidently without influence or public confidence in the town, and it does not seem probable the school will ever recover itself under his care . . .

The State must take principal credit for the reorganisation and rebuilding which took place between 1877 and 1879. Every educational charity in the Dorchester area was closely scrutinised, and Hardye's original endowment was supplemented by others whose original purpose had been outgrown. The unsatisfactory headmaster was dismissed, the school was rebuilt on the same site, and some of the features of the earlier Jacobean building were retained, including the old schoolroom, and the fine Jacobean screen which still survives in the present school library. It has been left for modern Dorchester to destroy the old schoolroom: had there been the slightest appreciation of its significance it would have been left alone. In that room some of the most far-reaching decisions ever to be made in Dorchester were taken, as we shall see.
When the school was finally reopened in 1883 it was given a new headmaster, H. N. Kingdon, who set about the difficult task of repairing the school's damaged fortunes and reputation. He was largely successful: virtually opening a new school, he slowly reached the total of 85 students, and by doing so became the first modern headmaster to face Dorchester's recurring problem, the demand for more accommodation. The governors' minutes for 1896 have a familiar ring about them:

September 28th . . . to consider the cost of providing chemical laboratories and other means of supplying technical instruction. . . .
December 4th. It was agreed that the erection of a science and technical block should take place. . . .

- there were problems enough, but at least these were the problems of expansion rather than decline. Early in the twentieth century the governors could report that they had successfully advertised entrance scholarships throughout the southern counties of England, and not much later they felt compelled to open a preparatory department to the school. But perhaps the best testimony to their success was shown in 1907, when the vacant headmastership attracted 153 applications - all of whom were required to be "of reasonable pecuniary resources".
Looking back into the previous centuries, one period stands out: the first half of the seventeenth century. In terms of reputation and educational standards the eighteenth century may have been more remarkable, but we lack the evidence to be sure. Thanks to the borough records, and to the private records of two old boys, Denis Bond and William Whiteway, we have an almost day-to-day account of everyday life in Dorchester for the years 1610-1650.
At every stage of its career the town has shown itself interested in the affairs of the school, and at its most successful periods this link between town and school has been strong and beneficial to both. But at no period have town and school been more closely identified than in the years preceding and during the Civil War. This was primarily due to the personalities of two men, Robert Cheeke, headmaster from 1595 until his death in 1627, and John White, Rector of St. Peter's and Holy Trinity, and for a few years personally in control of the school during the absence of Gabriel Reeve, who remained officially the headmaster. The influence of Cheeke and White upon the town was very strong indeed. Both were fervent Puritans. Between them they established an under-school near Holy Trinity church (this was finally absorbed into Hardye's School in the nineteenth century reorganisation); they established a brewery whose profits would benefit the town charities - (this was never incorporated with the school); Cheeke wrote and produced the first school plays ever seen in Dorchester, and the manuscript prologue to one of them survives in the British Museum; above all, both saw to it that Dorchester remained loyal to their own Puritan principles. They may have shown some intolerance: one native of Dorchester, educated at the school and for a while its under-master, was compelled to appeal to Archbishop Laud that he was being unjustly eased out of his position (despite his appeal, he was eased out). But in general they were simply furthering principles which most of the townsmen accepted. Clarendon wrote of Dorchester:

When the great revellion broke out, a place more disaffected to the King England had not. It was the magazine whence other places were supplied with principles of rebellion, and was a considerable place, and seat of great malignity.

Typical of the Dorchester of this time, and of its "malignant" spirit, were two former pupils of the school, and one governor, all of whom made their mark on the Puritan movement in England; and one Puritan old boy who carried his principles far beyond the boundaries of Dorset, and indeed of England.
Denis Bond, a close friend of John White, had been a boy at the school in the late sixteenth century, and he became one of its governors. So strong were his anti-royalist principles that he was selected as one of the judges at the trial of King Charles I, although he was one among a number of them whose signature did not appear on the king's death-warrant. Whatever his reasons for not signing, they were not scruples about the deed, for he became one of the select members of Cromwell's Council of State, and served the Protector wholeheartedly. So whole-heartedly, indeed, that one of the royalist commentators left this account of his death :

On the 30th day of August 1658, being one of the windiest days of the year, he paid his last debt to nature, being then tormented with strangury and anxiety of spirit. At which time, as then the vulgar talk was, the Devil came to take away Oliver Cromwell who then lay on his death-bed, but being not prepared for him, he gave BOND for his future appearance . . .

The Puritans buried him in Westminster Abbey, but after the Restoration he was, in common with many of the regicides, disinterred and, eventually, reburied in St. Margaret's, Westminster.
His son, John Bond, entering the school in the 1620s, came more directly under the influence of John White. As a result he was equally in support of the Puritan cause. He became preacher to the Long Parliament, Professor of Law at Gresham College (a post which he obtained after the Puritans had removed an unsympathetic occupant), and, in 1658, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought his removal, however, and he died in seclusion in the Isle of Purbeck without ever regaining high office.
As the masters and pupils of the school thought, so did the governors. Chief among these was Denzil Holles, who, despite his earlier friendship with Charles I, raised a regiment of rebel soldiers in Dorset and Somerset when the war broke out. However, he eventually opposed the supremacy of the Army as vigorously as he had opposed the supremacy of the king, and he had the distinction of being imprisoned by Charles I in one decade, and by Cromwell in the next. When the restoration came Holles was closely associated with General Monk in negotiations with Charles II; he was compensated for his pains by the title of Baron and membership of the Privy Council.
One other figure, John Humphrey, had left the school for Trinity College, Cambridge, and had then emigrated to New England. But he, too, had imbibed Puritanism at Dorchester, and he returned in 1642 to become a Colonel in the Puritan army. At the trial of Charles I two old boys of Dorchester were present: on the bench sat Denis Bond; bearing the sword of state before the judges was John Humphrey.
Humphrey had also been involved in a more far-reaching outcome of the Puritan ideal, as his departure for New England shows. It seems to have been a Dorchester merchant, Richard Bushrod, who first put forward the idea of a new Dorchester in America. After many delays Bushrod received permission from the Council of New England to proceed with his plans, and the school-room in Dorchester - the very one so recently destroyed - became the centre for "The New England Plantation Parliament". Dominated by John White, and with a committee made up entirely of associates of the school, the "parliament" gradually prepared the way for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Of the 120 people who made up the original company, some 60 can be shown to be connected with the school as ex-pupils, governors, or teachers. Of these a handful were related, either directly or by marriage, to the school's founder. They may have been less optimistic about the future had they known that a large part of Dorchester, Mass. was to become the negro ghetto of twentieth-century Boston.
Probably Dorchester's only link with these, some of the most significant meetings ever held in the town is the old screen in the Hardye's School library, beneath which a new town and a new state were planned.
These are just a few details of one of the most remarkable periods in the history of Hardye's School. Strictly, of course, they are part of the history of the town: yet at this period, scarcely half a century after its foundation, the school had become so vitally integrated with town life that any distinction between it and the surrounding community seems a false one. If Dorchester was indeed a centre of Puritanism the school, together with the town churches, was its breeding-place. One could argue that a school should not be a centre of extremist opinion, but to do so would be to apply modern conditions inappropriately: the early seventeenth century was an age of extremism, and no school functioning at anything more than a routine level could have avoided involvement on one side or the other.
In a sense the more outstanding and the more decadent moments of the school's career were focussed on July 21, 1927, when Thomas Hardy, O.M. laid the foundation-stone for the new school buildings. For Hardy had never been educated at the school founded by his ancestor. His early years were also the very years of the school's decline, and in his autobiography he merely comments, perhaps over­generously, that the grammar school "was reported to be indifferent just then". But his presence in 1927 also suggested greater hopes for the future, and was a climax to the efforts which had been made since 1883. Most national and local newspapers could see a special significance in the event, and one local columnist wrote:

That a Thomas Hardy, a benefactor of renown in Elizabeth's days, should have founded the school, and that another Thomas Hardy, the greatest figure in English literature and poetry, should, nearly four hundred years later, have laid his hand on the stone which commemorated the building of a school greater than the founder could ever have thought of, is a combination of events to make a vivid appeal to the imagination. . .

Hardy himself paid tribute in his address to the capability and idealism of a new and young headmaster, and added "certainly everything promises well". Had he lived to watch the growth of Hardye's School under that young and vigorous man, the late R. W. Hill, he would have felt his hopes to have been justified. The modern Hardye's School is in many ways different from the school of 1569; yet it remains the same school. And surely the founder would have believed that in 1969, as in 1569, his purposes were being carried out: that the present success and stature of Hardye's School

will tend to the laudable increase for ever of Learning and Learned men, whereby God's glory shall be the more highly advanced and our undoubted Sovragne the more duly obeyed, the Laws better observed, and the Commonwealth, and especially the vulgar sort, the rather reduced from Ignorance and Barbarism to a more singular excellency, and proceeding as well in manners as in learning and virtue from time to time until the end of all eternity. . .

F.R. SOUTHERINGTON.

[Dr. Frank Southerington , a native of Abbotsbury, was at Hardye's from 1949 to 1957, when he went to University College, London with a State Scholarship. After gaining his B.A.(Hons.) in English, he moved on to Magdalen College, Oxford. with a research scholarship, which led to the degree of B.Litt.(Oxon). From 1964 he held appointments at the Royal University of Uppsala, Sweden, as a lecturer in English, and at Abo University, Finland as an English tutor. During this period he worked on a thesis on Thomas Hardy's work, for which he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Oxford University. He is now a Professor of English at the University of Staunton, Virginia, U.S.A.]