The seventeenth century was one of almost equally great turbulence and fluctuating, almost contradictory, fortunes for both universities. Until the Civil War their numbers were rising strongly. Cambridge grew from a total of 1600 in 1550 to 3000 in the 1620s and 30s. Oxford moved more or less in step. Their influence rose proportionately. Oxford was particularly good at flattering the royal vanity of King James I. University MPs were introduced during his reign, but perhaps more significant was a very substantial increase to about a third in the proportion of the House of Commons that was Oxford or Cambridge educated.
The Civil War brought the increase in numbers to an end. Oxford became the Royalist capital, while Cambridge spawned the Earl of Manchester and Cromwell, although it was Oxford that had to accept the latter as its Chancellor in 1650. Cambridge saw ten of its sixteen colleges have their heads of houses removed from office - three colleges twice experienced the change - during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. Oxford took more enthusiastically to the Restoration and - a very Oxonian touch -led the way in establishing a one-day coach service to London and thus strengthening its links with court and government. In both universities, however, the long torpor of the eighteenth century was casting its shadow before it, numbers were falling heavily, and influence was declining. The intake of freshmen per year fell at Oxford from 460 in the 1660s to 300 in the 1690s. It became little more than a seminary for the Anglican church. Cambridge avoided such a complete retreat to a church bastion, but its total size was reduced by a third before the nadir of the 1770s.
Perversely, this period of academic and worldly decline was marked by the most glorious architectural flowering. Wren, Hawksmoor and Gibbs gave Oxford a large part of what one would most enthusiastically show to a first-time visitor. Between 1660 and 1730 there arose the Sheldonian Theatre, the Clarendon Building and the Radcliffe Camera in the university area, the Codrington Library and the North Quad of All Souls, Tom Tower and the completion of Tom Quad as well as Peckwater Quadrangle and the Library at Christ Church, Magdalen New Buildings and almost the whole of the Queen’s College, including its baroque façade on to the High Street.
From the same architects Cambridge gained Trinity Library, the chapels of Pembroke and Emmanuel, the Senate-House and the Gibbs Building at King’s. It is perhaps less dependent on the period than Oxford because it had more to show before. And for Cambridge the contrast between the splendour of buildings and the poverty of intellectual enquiry was less sharp, for it was the age of Newton as well as the age of Wren, although it could be argued that Newton found London and the Royal Society more stimulating than Trinity. After he had gone, however, and even though Bentley, the great classicist who was Master of Trinity for nearly fifty years, lingered on until 1742, the mid-eighteenth-century sleep into which Cambridge fell was even more profound than that of Oxford, which could at least claim to have sustained the century by educating Wesley, Johnson, Blackstone, Gibbon and Bentham, even though the last two did not think much of their alma mater.
What is the case is that the eighteenth century, the last century in which Oxford and Cambridge maintained their English university monopoly, and the century widely thought of above all others as that of the gentleman scholar, the easy-going squire/classicist who was as at home in his library as on his horse, at the production of which type they should have been so adept, was undoubtedly the first century amongst seven in which neither Oxford nor Cambridge was pre-eminent amongst the centres of learning of the territories within the realm of their sovereigns. Edinburgh was superior and so, after its foundation within his Electorate of Hanover by George II in 1737, was Göttingen.
The surprising thing is that Oxford and Cambridge, having been thus overtaken in the eighteenth century, regained their British intellectual pre-eminence in the nineteenth century although some would say that they took longer and the assistance of several Royal Commissions to get back to the top European league. How did they do it? The short answer is that Cambridge did it through mathematics and Oxford through religion, and that mathematics being on the whole a more serious subject than religion (at least as pursued by the Oxford liturgical disputes of the second quarter of the nineteenth century), there stemmed from this a certain Cavalier/Roundhead bifurcation which had not really occurred in the seventeenth century but which in the nineteenth century sent Oxford in a more metaphysical, frivolous and worldly direction and Cambridge on a more enquiring, serious and austere course.
The remarkable achievement of eighteenth-century Cambridge was that within a clerical shell it shed theology as its central subject and hatched out mathematics as its replacement. The ladder of wranglers as well as the tripos was established, and already when George III came to the throne the Senior Wrangler-ship was a coveted position strenuously striven for. Muscular intellectual competition began in Cambridge a good fifty years before cricket and rowing, the two first organized games to be brought into either university from the schools.