In 1584 Cambridge saw its first new college since Henry viii had founded Trinity nearly forty years earlier. Both foundations were, in their own way, powerful symbols. Trinity was as much a monument to royal power as to the post-Reformation, humanist learning embodied in its statutes. The foundation of Emmanuel College in 1584 was the result not of royal munificence but of the efforts of private citizens: above all, of Sir Walter Mildmay, an Elizabethan privy councillor and chancellor of the exchequer, and the new college's founder and chief benefactor. Mildmay not only arranged the practical details for his new college – purchasing land in June 1583, seeking a royal licence in January 1584 – he also endowed it with a sense of purpose. His statutes were emphatic: Emmanuel was to have ‘this one aim of rendering as many persons as possible fit for the sacred ministry of the Word and the sacraments’; the ultimate end of this was that ‘the Church of England might have men … to instruct the people’. In fact, both Mildmay and the man whom he chose as the first Master of Emmanuel, Laurence Chaderton, were particularly dedicated to one vision of the Church; a zealously Protestant one, which far exceeded the religious ‘temperature’ of the established settlement.

When the queen accused him of founding a Puritan college, Mildmay is supposed to have replied: ‘I have set an acorn which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof.’ The story is apocryphal but oft-repeated as an encapsulation of a larger truth: historians have seen this foundation as one of the greatest triumphs of Cambridge Puritans. For Peter Lake, it was ‘a monument in bricks and mortar to the penetration of puritan attitudes to the very centre of the Elizabethan establishment’. In this reading the college represents the victory of the godly within this Protestant university: not marginalised but dominant. Even its physicality hints at a battle for reformation won. Built on the former site of a Dominican Priory dissolved in 1538, the new college repurposed the friars’ chapel as their hall in what has been interpreted as a statement of contempt.

If the foundation of Emmanuel was a Puritan triumph, though, it was not long before this victory was called into question.