College Shield

Tudor Times

In 1519 Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, built the college Hall. He was then 41 and probably ready to endow Magdalene handsomely; but in 1521 he, like his father, was executed for treason. The College had to wait another twenty years to find a man willing to play the part of great patron. Meanwhile, Henry VIII's campaign known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries closed Crowland Abbey in December 1539. Happily, this adversity for the parent abbey did not have a particularly disruptive effect on Magdalene: the College, it seems, never closed.

One of the Benedictine abbeys involved in the College, Walden, came into the possession of Thomas, Lord Audley, as a consequence of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A former Speaker of the House of Commons, Audley as Lord Chancellor had presided over the trials of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, and helped rid Henry VIII of more than one wife, as well as of Thomas Cromwell. Having acquired a splendid house at Audley End, the Order of the Garter and a peerage, he then re-founded Buckingham College as the College of St Mary Magdalene in 1542. The arms of Magdalene, with the motto Garde ta foy ('Keep faith', not, as it is sometimes misconstrued, 'watch your liver'), and the crest showing the mythic wyvern, are all derived from Audley.

But once again the College was unlucky in the fate of its patron, and Audley soon died, aged 56, in 1544. Audley left behind him a College struggling with extreme poverty. The street front was completed by the generosity of Sir Christopher Wray, Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, in the 1580's.