A Cotswold capital

During the Civil War, Oxford briefly became Charles I's capital. Simon Thurley explains how the city was fortified and the university adapted to accommodate the Court

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IN 1644, the Royal Mint struck a unique silver crown coin. It showed Charles I mounted on a warhorse bestriding a detailed panorama of the City of Oxford (Fig 3). Never before had an English city been depicted on the coinage of the land. This accolade was awarded because, for 3½ years between October 1642 and its surrender to Parliamentarian forces in April 1646, Oxford was England's capital city. Charles I had left London in 1642, abandoning it to Parliamentarian forces and, after his humiliating defeat at the battle of Edgehill, he decided to regroup in Oxford, a defensible city with a long history of loyalty to the Crown and a place he regarded suitably magnificent to host the Court.

When the war-battered monarch, with his army and Court, arrived at the gates of the city, he was no stranger to it. He had been lavishly entertained there in 1636 by Archbishop Laud, who was then vice-chancellor of the university, and he had lodged in the Dean's lodgings at Christ Church. Statues of the King and Queen (Figs 1 and 2) dignified Laud's new Canterbury Quad in St John's College.

Christ Church had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey and was intended to be the largest college in Oxford or Cambridge, with a great cloister flanked to north and south by the hall and chapel (Fig 8). The scheme was interrupted by Wolsey's death in 1530 and, although the hall, the most magnificent in Oxford, was completed, the great cloistered quadrangle it formed part of was only half built and the chapel barely begun. Instead, the partly dismantled priory church became the chapel. But not for long. The episcopal reorganisation that took place after the Reformation saw a new diocese of Oxford formed and the chapel become Christ Church Cathedral with its own dean and chapter.