Royal Progress day 4

Day 4 Oxford Colleges Walking around the city of dreaming spires on a Saturday is quite and experience. There is a great deal of street theatre and to be encouraged by people dressed as tigers, alligators, dragons and zebras to give money for Meningitis research was a bit surreal. But we cam to see the Oxford Colleges and first up was Magdalen. It was here that a young master Wolsey went to school and the president here was the chap who was sent to escort Catherine of Aragon from Spain to marry Prince Arthur. They have a tapestry of that event but it’s behind where the public are allowed to go and they won’t let me see it. The college chapel has the largest sepia stained glass window I know of and it tells the story of life everlasting. Christchurch College perhaps the most famous of them all, originally an Abbey and endowed by Cardinal Wolsey as a college but he never got to finish it. Henry VIII carried it on and called it Kings college but it then changed to what we know now ad Christ Church. It has many famous people associated with it. In The Cathedral, there is a stained glass window, part of the shrine to Thomas a Beckett. Henry VIII ordered all such shrines to be destroyed in 1538. The face of Thomas was just removed and the rest remains. Elizabeth I stayed here. Other famous people are King Charles I he lodged here when Oxford was his capital during our civil war in the 1640’s. Lewis Carrol author of Alice in wonderland was her and there is a stained glass window of all the characters in the books. Walking along further In the middle of Cornmarket street there is a monument to Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, burnt at the stake by bloody Mary for refusing to covert back to the true faith. Oxford also has the oldest museum and library in the world and there are many other things to see but tucked away in a church which today was surrounded by scaffolding and undergoing major restoration work, on the alter steps is a simple slab showing the last resting place of Amy Robsart, first wife of Robert Dudley, did she fall or was she pushed? the enduring mystery of her death lasts to this day and we shall here more of her later in the week.