MARY DE ST POL COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE, BARONESS OF WEXFORD IN IRELAND, AND OF MONTIGNAC, BELLAC AND RANÇON IN FRANCE, was the daughter of Guy, Count of St Pol in the Pas-de-Calais, head of the younger branch of the great French house of Châtillon of Châtillon-sur-Marne. During the Middle Ages this family numbered among its great men Constables of France, Cardinals, a Pope who was canonised and another Saint, St Charles of Blois, a cousin of Mary de St Pol, and no family during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries married more often into the royal line than the family of Châtillon. Their arms were gules, three pales vair with a chief or, and this coat was said to have been granted to a warrior of the family who was one of a party of Crusaders surprised by the Turks when they had neither banners nor blazons. They therefore cut up the scarlet cloaks lined with fur which they were wearing, and displayed these strips instead of banners and coats of arms. Having achieved victory they all vowed that they would never display any heraldry in future other than gules and vair. This legend is however discredited by Andre Duchesne, the seventeenth-century historian of the Maison de Chastillon. The father of Guy de St Pol had added to these arms, “for difference”, a label of five points azure. Guy de St Pol married Mary of Brittany, who was the daughter of John de Dreux, Duke of Brittany, and Beatrice daughter of King Henry III of England.

MORE THAN ONE OF AUBREY ATTWATER's FRIENDS regretted that he did not write a book; they consoled themselves, however, with the knowledge that he was with ever-growing enthusiasm preparing the material for what would have been a scholarly, humane and definitive history of the College that he most lovingly served. For several years before his death Aubrey had spent the greater part of his leisure in the study of College documents, and the more he studied them, the more deeply was he fascinated by them. From time to time he would display the first fruits of his labours in the form of a paper read to The Martlets on the Foundress or on Richard Crossinge, or on Gabriel Harvey, or on the history of the older College rooms. Such papers were, in fact, early drafts of chapters to be included in the History and provided clear evidence of the generous and scholarly scale on which the work was being planned. Or, again, he would contribute an essay on Pitt or on the College Plate or on the Servants or on the Buildings to the Annual Gazette of the College Society. Everyone who heard, or read, one of these papers rejoiced that the formidable task of writing a history of Pembroke was being faced in so gay a spirit.

The first sixty years of the history of the College provide but a scanty record. Though the royal charter allowed thirty or more scholars, of whom twenty-four were to be Fellows and six Scholars, tradition records that the Foundress herself only provided for six Fellows and two Scholars. Down to the year 1400 less than forty names of members of the College can be traced, and most of these are but names. Even the succession of the Masters is uncertain. In 1354 Robert de Thorpe is named as Master in a receipt for “first fruits” paid for Saxthorpe to the Pope's collector. He was certainly not the famous Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor under Edward III, often wrongly called the first Master of Pembroke. In the fourteenth century a man's place of birth often did duty for his surname, and there are many places called Thorpe in England. Our Robert de Thorpe was probably a Suffolk man, who had held a living in the gift of our Foundress, and had played some part in the endowment of Denny Abbey. In 1363 or 1364 he resigned the Mastership of the College and was succeeded by Thomas de Bingham, who had been Proctor of the University in 1363. The change may mark a certain step in the independence of the College, for among the College deeds is a note that the papal bull for the foundation of the College, hitherto kept by the Foundress, “en la garde madame”, was on November 25, 1365, handed over in London to “Maistre Thomas”.

When Fox founded his College of Corpus Christi in Oxford, the statutes which he made for it showed him a patron of the New Learning of the Renaissance, and it may have been his reputation as such which caused Dean Colet to send to Pembroke from St Paul's his promising scholar, Thomas Lupset. Lupset, who was to become the friend of More and Erasmus and other leading spirits of the English Renaissance, made but a short stay at Pembroke and the College cannot claim any other leading scholar of the new movement; but under Robert Shorton, who succeeded Fox as Master, Pembroke became a nursery of the Reformers of the English Church.

Shorton, a Yorkshireman, was originally at Jesus College and was elected a Fellow of Pembroke in 1505; on the foundation of St John's College in 1511 he became its first Master. He was active in the supervision of the buildings and finance of that College, and in the contract which he signed for the chapel he stipulated that much of the work should be like that in the chapels of his two former Colleges, “or larger and better in every poynte”. After five years he resigned his Mastership of St John's, and soon after Cardinal Wolsey's visit to Cambridge in 1517 he became Dean of his private chapel. Wolsey's star was now almost at its zenith, and Fox was retiring from public life; doubtless the fact that Wolsey was Shorton's patron weighed with the Fellows of Pembroke when they chose him as Master.

Since the accession of Queen Elizabeth the College had elected Masters, whose religious bias had been towards puritanism. Grinda's leniency to the puritan preachers and their “prophesyings” had brought him into disfavour with the queen. Hutton was one of those whose plea for conciliation in the controversy about surplices had drawn from Archbishop Parker the advice to Cecil, not to listen to a “bragging brainless head or two”, and Whitgift, who had also signed this petition, had not at the time of his election to the Mastership of Pembroke adopted that via media which enabled him to play so great a part in consolidating the Elizabethan settlement. Young had been a chaplain of Grindal, and a friend of Archdeacon Watts, Fulke had by his writings earned the title of “acerrimus papamastix”. Under Lancelot Andrewes, who succeeded Fulke in 1589, the College began to develop into one of the strongholds of the High Church party. During the sixteenth century Edmund Spenser, the poet of Platonical puritanism, had been one of the chief glories of the College; Richard Crashawe, the Catholic mystic, was to be the poet of the seventeenth century.

Fourteen years before Joseph Turner's death Gilbert Ainslie had been elected into a Fellowship. He was the son of Henry Ainslie, the former Fellow. In 1816 while still a Bachelor of Arts he became one of the Tutors with William French, and when French was in 1820 elected Master of Jesus, Ainslie became Senior Tutor, first with John Phear, afterwards Rector of Earl Stonham from 1824 to 1881, and then with Henry Tasker, afterwards Vicar of Soham from 1832 to 1874 and a Benefactor of the College. In 1821 he was Senior Treasurer, and in the following year he persuaded the College to buy in certain leases of parts of Paschal Close, the property belonging to Corpus Christi College which lay between the Fellows' large garden and Pembroke Street. Ainslie himself has written the account of these negotiations.