Ahundred years before the Blessed John Newman shook the establishment by converting to Rome — at Littlemore in 1845 — Oxford University found itself suspected of being a hotbed of sedition, a safe haven for Catholics wanting to overthrow the Hanoverian monarch.

In 1745, the year of the second Jacobite rebellion — when Bonnie Prince Charlie, grandson of the deposed James II and VI, arrived in Scotland and took Edinburgh — there were alarming reports in London of parties in Oxford at which toasts “to the king over the water” were openly drunk. And even at the opening of the Radcliffe Camera in 1749 a known Jacobite called William King, a friend of the architect James Gibbs, cried “Redeat” six times in the course of a speech — a term construed as a call for the return of the ousted Stuarts.

In her authoritative book published this year by I. B. Taurus, The University of Oxford: A New History, G. R. Evans, a Cambridge professor and a graduate of Oxford, says that the Government faced calls for Oxford to be brought to heel; but she points out: “It was realised that it would be difficult to create regulations for Oxford which would not also have to apply to Cambridge and Cambridge was not thought to have been behaving badly.”

All this troublesome activity in Oxford was to some extent a repeat of what had happened 30 years earlier during the first Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. During riots that year a Baptist meeting house in Tidmarsh Lane was destroyed and, despite denials from the University heads of colleges, Jacobites were blamed. After a second riot in 1716 there was talk of an official House of Lords Inquiry into Oxford.

Government concern was indeed so great that it produced a draft University Reform Bill regretting that “many in those Nurseryes dedicated to Religion, Learning, Loyalty and peace have been infected with principles of sedition” leading to “Riots and tumults”.

Also in 1716 the scholar and diarist Thomas Hearne was “ejected” from his job of librarian at the Bodleian on the grounds that he was a non-juror; that is, someone who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and subsequently to George I.

Part of the University’s difficulty lay in the fact that its Congregation had in 1683 passed a decree that stated unambiguously that it would never countenance the overthrow of an anointed king — which posed a problem when James II was indeed replaced by William and Mary. In the end it was conveniently decided that James had abdicated and not been deposed at all!

In the event, James II played his hand in Oxford so badly that he lost much of his support here. Indeed his decision in 1687 to impose from on high a Roman Catholic president on Magdalen College, acting under the influence of Cambridge man Robert Brady, infuriated Town and Gown alike and helped bring about the Revolution of the following year.

But rightly or wrongly High Church Oxford, as opposed to Low Church Cambridge, continued to be seen as a Jacobite hotbed. It had prospered during the short reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I, (during which of course the Cambridge men Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer were burned at the stake).

During Mary’s reign (1553-8) two new colleges were founded with Royal support: Trinity and St John’s. Founder of St John’s, Sir Thomas White, originally intended that the college should educate a new generation of Roman Catholic clergy. As Ms Evans points out in her book, though, sleeping arrangements at the college would hardly be acceptable these days. She writes: “Separate beds were permitted only to those over 16. Each Fellow was to sleep with a chorister or scholar, if he so wished, in order to ensure that the young had someone to care for them and also to provide the Fellows with convenient servants.”

As for the Jacobite cause, the direct legitimate line of James II died out with the death of his Bonnie Prince Charlie's younger brother Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart who died in Rome in 1807.