1 Origins

By his own admission, John Lyon did not found Harrow School. The Charter he obtained from Queen Elizabeth I dated 19 February 1572 explicitly stated that he was re-endowing (‘de novo erigere’) an existing school. Of a school at Harrow before 1572 there is clear evidence; Lyon himself made provision to support its functions during his life. Neither did Lyon supervise the creation of his new foundation, the so-called Free Grammar School of John Lyon in the town of Harrow-on-the-Hill. This was the work of the Keepers and Governors of Lyon’s bequests after the death of Lyon’s widow in 1608, sixteen years after her husband. Lyon’s foundation only reached physical reality after painful brushes with architects, builders, local hostility, and the court of Chancery in September 1615 when the new schoolhouse opened its door to the first pupils, nearly a quarter of a century after Lyon’s death on 3 October 1592.¹

It is probably true to say that almost all the favoured myths surrounding both founder and foundation are either misleading or downright wrong. Lyon was rich; his school precariously but well-endowed; his statutes in all respects wholly unoriginal; his intentions predictable. The provision for the admission of fee-paying boarders was not unusual in similar contemporary foundations, almost certainly envisaged as a means of increasing, at no cost to the Lyon trusts, the income of the Head Master, thereby attracting a better class of pedagogue. There was no sense of founding a national institution. Indeed, what evidence does survive suggests no special educational ambitions at all. Lyon’s concerns as a founder were pious, charitable, and local, a product, a friend of his attested in 1579, of childlessness and local pressure not vision. ‘I know his meaning is to bestow his lands for the re-erection of a school in the parish of Harrow, as he has no children. Some prefer him to this charge, to spare themselves’.²

These words of Sir Gilbert Gerrard, Attorney-General (1559) and later Master of the Rolls (1581), in many ways Lyon’s eminence grise, confirm the context of the foundation; the continuance or resurrection of an older school on a new and financially more stable basis, protected by trusts rather than the inevitably more capricious charity of well-disposed and well-heeled parishioners. However, the exact nature of this pre-Lyonian school and its relationship both with the school Lyon subsidized during his and his widow’s lives and with the subsequent Free Grammar School of 1615 are not entirely clear.

The plainest evidence for the existence of a school before 1572 comes from two contrasting sources: the records of entrants to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a letter written in 1626 by an octogenarian resident of Bridgewater, Somerset, George Roper. The Caius Registers identify seven names of former pupils at school at Harrow, beginning with Richard Gerrard, who entered Caius in 1567 after, it is recorded, four years at Harrow. (He later migrated to Trinity before returning to Caius as a Fellow.)³ That a school existed a decade earlier is shown by the Roper letter. In it, the aged writer recalled the death, seventy or so years earlier, of his father who had been Henry VIII’s keeper of Enfield Chase, Hide Park and Marilibone’ but who had left his family all unprovided for’.

I remember Queen Mary came into our house within a little of my father’s death and ffound my Mother weeping and took her by the hand and lifted her up-for she neeled-and bad her bee of good cheer for her children should be well provided for. Afterward my brother Richard and I being the two eldest were sent to Harrow to school and were there till we were almost men. Sir Ralph Sadler took order for all things for us there by Queen Mary’s appointment as long as she lived.⁴

On the face of it, this school at Harrow must have had some reputation and standing. The Ropers were effectively royal wards. Of the other known pre-Lyonian Harrovians, the three sons of the local landowner, William Gerrard of Flambards, Richard became not only a fellow of Caius, but a chaplain to the Queen and a wealthy pluralist; Felix received a full education, which included Eton, Caius, and Grays Inn as well as Harrow; and Philip rose to be a bencher of Gray’s Inn. Their nephew, Thomas, followed his uncles to Gray’s Inn. William Greenhill, who spent seven years at the Harrow school (1565–72), proceeded to Caius via Trinity before taking Holy Orders, securing the living of Brixworth, Northants in 1589. He also provided a direct link with Lyon’s foundation, serving as a governor 1586–1613, the sole old boy known to have acted as such until William Fenn in 1683, almost a century later. As he had been admitted as a Sizar at Trinity, which meant he had to perform some menial serving functions to earn his keep at college, this Greenhill may have come from a branch of the extensive local family that had fallen, perhaps temporarily, on hard times. Greenhill’s contemporary, John Stringe (1568–75), was also ordained, rising to be Rector of Elstree (1590–1612), where he apparently kept a school. Edmund Smythe (at Harrow 1575–8), after a similar university and clerical career, was academically even more distinguished, serving as Under (1588–92), then Head Master of Merchant Taylors’ School (1592–9). From the Statutes of Merchant Taylors’ (1561), it can be inferred that Smythe, a scholar of Caius and a MA, was learned in Latin and possibly also Greek.⁵

It is, therefore, clear that the school at Harrow was no mere Dames’ school, to equip children of the locally ambitious but unprosperous with the literacy and numeracy to become apprentices. Still less did it resemble the educational service provided by Elizabeth Snell at Watford who it was said in 1579 ‘teacheth scholars to read and herself cannot read’.⁶ The Harrow school had connections with London and the court, the patronage of parishioners of substance, and contacts with Cambridge University, almost certainly through Dr John Caius (d. 1573), refounder of the college to which he gave his name, who lived at Ruislip. Caius’ college was that chosen by Lyon in 1591 at which to place the two exhibitioners to Cambridge he had determined to provide for in the 1572 Charter.⁷ This association was most probably the consequence of a traditional and local connection, as Caius and his college were notorious for continued affection for Roman Catholicism in diametric contrast to the firmly Protestant nature of Lyon’s foundation. The affinity was, therefore, not doctrinal but, as with so many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of the period, historical, regional, and personal.

The nature and location of the pre-Lyonian school are obscure. Perhaps it resembled the school that was, in 1599, being run by Thomas Hayward down the road at Ealing, a boarding school of eighteen boys, aged between six and seventeen, including sons of gentlemen and merchants as well as yeomen.⁸ Yet it could have been even more domestic. Sometime after the death of Joan Lyon in 1608 and his own death in 1611, the governors elected as ‘schoolmaster at the free schole’ Anthony Rate, described as being the ‘schoolmaster at Flambards’, the seat of William Gerrard on the southern crown of the Hill.⁹ Rate does not appear to have been a graduate, at least of an English university, and four of the nine Harrovians recorded in the half century after c.1555 were Gerrard’s sons and grandson. The school could have been simply the Gerrard’s private school room.

Superficially, the Roper story may lend some credence to this, as Sir Ralph Sadler certainly acted as a colleague of Gilbert Gerrard, William’s brother, in Elizabeth’s reign and may have known the family earlier. However, William Gerrard only came into possession of Flambards in 1566, finally purchasing it in 1573.¹⁰ In 1576 a judgment of the Harrow Rectory Manorial court ordered Elizabeth Elkyn, widow, to remove from her house her maid, Elizabeth, and Matthew Spencer, ‘schoolmaster’.¹¹ If Spencer were the local pedagogue (and as such the first recorded Harrow schoolmaster), his activities, the maid Elizabeth apart, have no stated association with Flambards. Moreover, by 1596, it appears that some sort of school was being or had been conducted in a building called the Church House, in the northeast corner of the churchyard, as Philip Gerrard, a former pupil at the Harrow school, was required to register his receipt of a lease on certain Lyon lands ‘at the nowe Schoole or Churche house of the parish of Harrowe’.¹²

Other references to the late sixteenth-century pre-Lyonian school also suggest a parochial rather than domestic basis. In his letter of 1579 Gilbert Gerrard’s remark that ‘some prefer him [Lyon] to this charge, to spare themselves’ may imply a parochially, not privately, funded school.¹³ Even if the Attorney-General had only his brother’s interests at heart, his words suggest a form of parish responsibility which was being gratefully handed over to a wealthy but childless local worthy. Lyon himself in his 1591 Statutes refers to the yearly payment of thirty marks ‘which I…have used to give and to pay for the teaching of thirty poor children’.¹⁴ As one of the first things the governors did at the opening of the Free School in 1615 was to increase the number of free scholars to forty, thirty may be taken as the scale both of Lyon’s interim foundation and of the core of his intended Free School.¹⁵ Whether that reflected earlier practice can only be guessed at. In 1593, the topographer John Norden simply observed in his Speculum Britanniae that ‘there is a schoole in Harrow, as yet not a free schoole, but intended to be’.¹⁶

There is, however, no concrete evidence that the school at Harrow had a continuous existence between the pre-1572 institution, the interim Lyon one, and the subsequent Free School. In detail of administration, and possibly curriculum, the Free School was explicitly different from its predecessors. Even after 1608, the appointment of the non-graduate Rate contradicted Lyon’s statutes for the Free School. His apparent successor, one ‘Mr Bradley’, may have been an MA but was only paid £4 a year, rather than the forty marks (£2613s. 4d.) provided for the Master of the Free School. Indeed, Bradley continued to be paid, possibly arrears, and be described as ‘schoolmaster’ into 1616. William Launce, on the other hand, the first active Master of the Free School, an MA of Trinity, Cambridge, was appointed in April 1615 on a seemingly entirely different footing, his terms exactly according to Lyon’s rules.¹⁷

Some have tried to associate the pre-Lyonian school with some familiar literary references, thereby demonstrating its contemporary fame or status. Sentimentalists have long tried to lend Harrow schooling the magic glitter of Shakespearian connections. It is often asserted that Dr Caius of Ruislip appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, this attribution may be spurious. The historical Caius was a Norfolk classicist as well as royal physician; Shakespeare’s, although a doctor with court connections, is a comic Frenchman. If there lies wrapped in this characterization a subtle joke, it is hard to see how it could still resonate twenty-five years after Caius’ death, when the play was written. At most, when lampooning a court physician, the writer may have come across the odd-sounding name of possibly the most famous of the Queen’s doctors. To make him French suggests no very close intentional connection with any actual person of that name.¹⁸

Some have fondly imagined that Maria’s description of Malvolio in Twelfth Night (III. ii) as ‘like a pedant that keeps a school i’ the church’ concealed a reference to the school at Harrow. More—although perhaps only a little bit—serious has been the identification with Harrow of a school mentioned in Loves Labours Lost (v. i) when Don Armado asks the pedagogue Holofernes: ‘Do you educate youth at the Charge House on the top of the mountain?’ and Holofernes replies ‘Or mons, the hill’. It is conveniently assumed that ‘charge’ is a corruption of ‘church’.¹⁹ While it is true that the sixteenth-century Latin for Harrow, as in the 1572 charter, was ‘Harrowe super montem’, it is hard to see that such a specific allusion can either be established or, perhaps, would have been employed when Shakespeare wrote the play in the 1590s. Possibly more concrete is the reference in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair of1614, the central character of which is the gullible young Bartholomew Cokes of Harrow-on-the-Hill, whose misfortunes on his day out in London supplies such unifying plot as exists in the play. At one point, a London cutpurse comments on the luckless Cokes ‘I cannot persuade myself but he goes to grammar-school yet; and plays the truant today’.²⁰ If, and it is a big one, this can be taken as a description of the school at Harrow in its last pre-Free School days, then its nature as a grammar school, one in which Latin and possibly even Greek grammar was taught, would be established. It may equally be that Jonson gave Harrow as Cokes’ home as being a known town, with an easily recognizable name and perhaps a reputation for commerce and supplying the capital with goods, which could have suggested to his metropolitan audience more money than sophistication or sense, with resonances similar to Luton for a London audience today. It may be noted, however, that Jonson, an Old Westminster himself, chose to call Cokes’ servant Humphrey Wasp; there had been residents of Harrow called Wasp or Waps since the fourteenth century.²¹

Nevertheless, Lyon’s interim arrangements, possibly from 1572, certainly in place by 1591, were evidently more academically elaborate than the most basic. Whether, if he indeed taught at Harrow, Matthew Spencer’s pupils in the 1570s were supported by Lyon’s largesse or not, the school he ran, like many others in Tudor England, could well have offered basic Latin as well as literacy in English. Whether there was more to it than that, either before or during Lyon’s intervention, is probably unknowable. The Roper story is not inherently unlikely. In 1561 the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Nicholas Bacon, was urging a scheme on the Secretary of State, William Cecil, to provide adequate schooling for royal wards, albeit those of greater means than the Ropers.²² The mystery of the Ropers’ sojourn at Harrow in the 1550s lies not so much with the putative curriculum—to George Roper’s overt regret his family seemed to have been destined to sink in the social race after their father’s death—than in the choice of guardian. Sir Ralph Sadler, a former Secretary of State, diplomat, and Privy Councillor, lived at Standon in Hertfordshire during Mary’s reign, in political retirement if not exile. An associate successively of Thomas Cromwell and Protector Somerset, Sadler had been in favour of the Protestant politics and religious changes under Edward VI and was only to be restored to court favour, office, and patronage under Elizabeth.²³ Queen Mary’s generosity may have been less than magnificent except in the rosy reminiscence of an octogenarian. In any case, it is strange that the queen should have appointed somebody in such disfavour to supervise her support for her wards.

The question remains of the origins of whatever school existed in the parish of Harrow in the 1550s. One clue may be its association with the Church House in the churchyard, as the romantics would have it, Shakespeare’s ‘Charge House’ on the Hill. The objective evidence for a school there dates only from 1596.²⁴ The Church House existed by 1475 and is mentioned again in 1538; on each occasion, as in 1596, it is the place at which legal conveyancing was conducted. The magisterial view of W. O. Hewlett, who did so much to clarify the early history of the parish of Harrow and its school, proclaimed nor can there be any reasonable doubt that the School of the time of Queen Mary was held in the same building’.²⁵ If so, it appears to have doubled as the local land registry, perhaps even court house. Lyon’s own Statutes of 1591 envisaged his new schoolhouse being where rents were paid each half-year.²⁶ The 1596 phrase nowe Schoole or Churche house of the parish of Harrow’ could imply recent occupation by the beneficiaries of Lyon’s interim charity. That this was to be temporary is suggested by a lease granted by Lyon in 1572 that indicated his intention to house the schoolmaster of his Free School on a site to the south of the church and vicarage (where in fact the schoolhouse was later built), although, apart from his intentions as to the nature and capacity of a new schoolhouse outlined in 1591, neither he, his widow, nor the governors began to implement this scheme until after 1608.²⁷ On the other hand, it remains entirely possible that the Church House had been used by the Harrow school long before 1596.

It has been inferred from Court Rolls of the Harrow Rectory Manor, based on the Rectory which stood on the site now occupied by The Grove, that there was a school at Harrow as early as 1384. This evidence is essentially negative, that a bond-tenant of the manor was punished for sending his son to a school outside the manor and without his lord’s (i.e. the Rector’s) permission. This could imply the existence of a manor or parish school run by the church to which the offender, John Intowne, could have sent his son, William, presumably for a fee. William went outside Harrow in pursuit, the judgment stated, of learning in the Liberal Arts, a syllabus incorporating but going beyond grammar which may not have been available locally.²⁸

If there existed a pre-Reformation school, the history of the sixteenth-century school and the role of John Lyon could become clearer, if only by inescapable analogy with dozens of similar institutions that nearly or actually collapsed in consequence of the ecclesiastical disendowments between 1536 and 1547. However, if such a school did exist before 1536, whether housed at Church House or elsewhere, perhaps in the mid-fifteenth-century parvise, erected above the South porch by Rector John Byrkhede, builder of the spire, no unequivocal record of it survives.²⁹

Many parishes had schools based on chantries of which Harrow had two: one, the chantry of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was housed in the parish church, possibly in the south transept. Hewlett, however, at his most final, declared of the chantry ‘it is certain no school was attached to it’.³⁰ His claim is worth investigating, if only to see whether the school John Lyon re-endowed had its origins in the early fourteenth century. The chantry of the Blessed Virgin Mary was established at Harrow by the then Rector, William de Bosco, in 1324.³¹ Given the frequency of medieval chantry schools being reformed, refounded, or re-endowed as grammar schools after the abolition of chantries in 1547, it is tempting to assume that Harrow was no exception. However, none of the Harrow records specifies that its chantry chaplain had duties as a schoolmaster. Hewlett regarded the absence of any such mention in the report of January 1548 by the royal Commissioners appointed to execute the abolition of the Chantries as conclusive.³² More enigmatic is the reference to a chaplain at Harrow, possibly the chantry priest, being fined in 1521 as a common dice player, although whether this would preclude a pedagogic function must be a matter of conjecture and taste.³³ Some modern historians have adopted a similarly literal interpretation of the chantry evidence in general, including in their lists of chantry schools only those that had explicit educational functions attached to them.³⁴ Such a minimalist approach appears at odds with episcopal injunctions to all chantry priests to run schools.³⁵ For the chantry chaplains, teaching was both a method of supplementing income and of meeting the pastoral needs of local children. It has been argued that ‘most of the chantry schools were casual and uninstitutionalized’.³⁶ This made them especially vulnerable, perhaps, after the abolition of the chantries in 1547.

The Harrow chantry of St Mary was certainly adequately endowed to provide sufficient income for a schoolmaster. The Chantry lands, according to the 1548 valuation, brought in £9 16s. 5d. a year, of which £9 6s. 0d. went to the chaplain.³⁷ It has been calculated that the median income of cantarist schoolmasters in Essex at the time of abolition was £8 8s. 10d., something on the high side compared with equivalent figures for Wiltshire (£7 14s. 6d.), Warwickshire (£6), or Yorkshire (£5).³⁸ Indeed, the great ecclesiastical census of 1535, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, indicated that a third of all clerical incumbents claimed annual incomes of less than £5, although there was some understandable underestimation in places: in 1535, the Harrow chantry recorded annual income of only £6, which, even allowing for galloping inflation, looks distinctly meagre when compared with the assessment of 1548.³⁹ Another possible indication that the chaplain of the St Mary’s chantry did more than sing daily masses for the soul of its benefactor is that, by the early sixteenth century at least, presentation to the chantry was in the hands of the parishioners, suggesting a wider parish role. The parishioners who took the lead included members of the extended Page family, from which two of the five original governors designated by Lyon in 1572 came, and, in 1534, one John Lyon, almost certainly the founder s father who died in the same year.⁴⁰

The difficulty with linking any putative chantry school with the Harrow school of the 1550s and 1560s and so with the institution John Lyon rebuilt is compounded by the fate of the chantry lands. It has been said that re-endowment of ex-chantry schools after 1547 ‘was normally achieved through the efforts of local citizens who repurchased property from the court of Augmentations’ (the court which dealt with the profits from the confiscated chantries).⁴¹ Alternatively, but rarely, the crown, on petition of courtiers or influential locals, made grants from central funds roughly equivalent to those of the despoiled chantries. At Harrow, however, the government had sold the chantry lands in August 1548 for £747 6s. 8d. to William Gyes of the Strand. As with the two Harrow manors, formerly held by the archbishop of Canterbury and, indirectly, the Rector of Harrow which were appropriated by the crown from Cranmer in 1544 and 1545 and sold off by 1547, the Harrow chantry was seen as so much lucrative property. Just as the Manors went to nonresidents, the North family and Christ Church, Oxford, so the chantry lands were alienated away from local ownership.⁴² So neither had the crown the lands nor had locals the chance to buy them back in order to maintain or re-endow any school which may have existed. The only direct material link between the Chantry of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Lyon’s provisions may lie in the appointment of Richard Edlyn as one of the 1572 governors, almost certainly a close relative of the John and Robert Edlyn of Pinner who had held chantry land at Hatch End in the 1540s.⁴³

The balance of probability is that Harrow had a reasonably well-endowed chantry under the auspices of which children of the parish received an education beyond the rudimentary possibly in the Church House. This school, like many others, was maintained, at no little cost, labour and charge’, as was recorded in 1570 of the parishioners of Southwark in similar circumstances, by prominent local inhabitants.⁴⁴ Among these, William Gerrard of Flambards became the most conspicuous, if only because he had so many sons of school age. It is likely, therefore, that the medieval school continued on an ad hoc basis until John Lyon stepped in first to support then re-endow it.

The associations with London, the court, and Cambridge may have owed all to immediate contemporary acquaintances, but the pre-Reformation Harrow school, if it existed, would have been well-placed to acquire a reputation. Not only was the lord of the manor of Harrow the archbishop of Canterbury, but the Rectorship, although a sinecure generally held in plurality, attracted some distinguished and well-connected incumbents, some of whom actually resided in the Rectory, or Rectory Grove or, as now, The Grove. William de Bosco himself had been chancellor of Oxford University. John Byrkhede in the fifteenth century had been closely involved in the foundation of All Souls College, Oxford. Thomas Wilkinson (1479–1511) doubled as President of Queens’ College, Cambridge (1484–1505), forcing a number of his university colleagues to seek him at Harrow, including, in 1493/4 Thomas Pate bibliotiste. In the sixteenth century, the prominent ecclesiastical politician, theologian, and administrator Cuthbert Tunstall (1511–22) cultivated pears in the Rectory garden (the so-called Hanging Gardens where the present Art School stands) before ascending to the sees of London, then Durham. His successor William Bolton (1522–32) was also prior of St Bartholomew’s, London. William Warham (1532–7) was the nephew of Archbishop Warham. Even more prominent was Robert Layton (1537–44), Thomas Cromwell’s chief agent in despoiling monasteries and the state terrorization of the religious orders in the late 1530s. He none the less found time to offer Cromwell lavish hospitality at the Harrow Rectory as well as sending his master some pears from Tunstall’s orchard. His successor, Richard Coxe (1544–6), provides an even stronger link to the new age. In 1546 he effectively engineered the end of the Harrow Rectory (parochial clerical functions having anyway long since devolved completely on the Vicar) by, after the surrender of the Rectory Manor to the Crown (1545), securing its grant, with the all important tithes, to Christ Church, Oxford (1546) of which he just happened to be dean at the time. The last of the Rectors of Harrow, Coxe’s subsequent career as prominent reformist divine, leading Marian exile, and Elizabethan bishop of Ely mirrored the fate of advanced Protestantism, the progress of which provided not the least important setting for John Lyon’s charity. Although having only a fleeting association, Coxe remembered the poor of Harrow in his will (1581).⁴⁵ These Rectors provided, long before the scions of the nobility and gentry arrived, a wider dimension to local affairs not dissimilar to that which later allowed Lyon to obtain a royal charter.

The severance of the connection with Canterbury and the demise of the Rectory sinecure in the 1540s was probably less serious than the loss of church funding. Even after both manors had been obtained by Sir Edward North (1547), the potentially crucial tithes formerly belonging to the Rectory remained with Christ Church. The school continued but the charge’, as Gilbert Gerrard put it, was clearly of sufficient weight as to make the encouragement of a new endowent a matter of interest if not urgency. In one way, however, although the political and fiscal aspects of the Reformation had in all probablity precipitated this problem, the theological developments eased its solution. No longer able to display piety by bestowing charity on chantries, gilds, shrines, etc., the religiously serious-minded found schools a more than acceptable substitute, not so much meritorious good works as channels to fructify the vineyard of the Lord by the raising up of new generations of the godly. Such was Lyon’s implicit purpose. Yet to persuade him to it required a misfortune. From his memorial brass in the parish church, it appears that Lyon may once have had a child. By 1579, and probably for many years before, however, he was childless. It was this that helped persuade Lyon—or helped him be persuaded—to imitate the example of another childless school benefactor, Sir John Port at Repton (1556–7), and commit his fortune not to family but posterity.⁴⁶