Trinity College Cambridge Alumni Masters and Fellows of distinction

  • Trinity College Cambridge Alumni Masters and Fellows of distinction

Trinity College Cambridge Alumni Masters and Fellows of distinction

Some intriguing connections to Trinity College Cambridge, a list that will be correlated with various timelines and chronologies including but not exclusively Education, Enlightenment and Intriguing People together with the theme most appropriate to the main occupations of the people concerned.

16th century:

  • Francis Bacon, philosopher and statesman, possibly the earliest influence on the period known as the Enlightenment.
  • the Earl of Essex, a favourite of Elizabeth I

17th century:

  • Poets, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell and John Dryden
  • Isaac Newton arrived 1661 and finally left with breaks in between 1696

18th Century

  • was there a gap n talent in this century? According to Trinity’s own history yes:

 “Although the influence of Newton remained strong, in the middle years of the 18th century Trinity shared something of the torpor that tranquillised many contemporary institutions. “

  • This was overcome by the change in the process of selecting fellows from a private process amongst the selectors to a process for public examination of the prospective candidates. It delivered the results required.
  • This shows that Cambridge in the early to mid 18th suffers from the same malaise and reaction to the Enightenment as broader society. There was almost a nee-jerk reaction that took us backwards  for the short-term.

Early to mid 19th century:

  • Charles Babbage brilliant mathematician, code breaker and computer pioneer, arrived at Trinity  in October 1810. and transferred to Cambridge Peterhouse in 1812, later being given an honorary degree and beoming Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge
  • Byron, Thackeray, and Tennyson  The statue of Byron now in the Wren Library was intended for Westminster Abbey, but the poet’s notoriety was such that the offer was refused.
  •  Charles Earl Grey, prime minister, whose government introduced the great Reform Bill of 1832, is one of Trinity’s six Prime Ministers. (Other PMs include Spencer Perceval who was assassinated, Viscount Melbourne, Henry Campbell Bannerman, Stanley Baldwin and Arthur Balfour)

Late 19th to 20th century:

  • James Clerk Maxwell, author of the theory of electromagnetism
  • J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford, two of the pioneers of atomic physics
  • the historian G.M. Trevelyan
  • philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India
  • and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

Trinity has provided 32 Nobel Prize winners since they were first awarded in 1901, so you can get the gist of just how influential this one college has been throughout it’s and our history.

More to explore

Were you or your family connected with this learned seat, one of it’s otehr colleges or the other Blues at Oxford University?

 

Checkout if you have an Ancestry subscription the Cambridge Alumini records 1201 to 1900 quite an interesting list to browse, who were your family at Cambridge with?

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