The Humble Petition of the Ladies
Before the erection of the Senate-House in the University of Cambridge, the annual grand Commencement was held in St. Mary’s, the University church. “It seems,” says Dyer, in his History of Cambridge, “that on these occasions (the time when gentlemen take their degrees”) that is, the degree of M.A. more particularly, “ladies had been allowed to sit in that part of the church assigned to the doctors, called THE THRONE: it was, however, at length agreed amongst them (the doctors) that ladies should be no longer permitted to sit there; and the place assigned to them was under the throne, in the church.” This invasion of what the fair almost looked upon as the abstraction of a right, led to a partial war of words and inuendos, and the matter was at last taken up by the facetious Roger Long, D.D., Master of Pembroke College, who, he adds, in his Supplement to his History, was celebrated for his Treatise on Astronomy, and for his erection of a sphere in his College eighteen feet in diameter, still shown there. On this humorous occasion, he was a dissentient against the Heads, not a little bustle was excited amongst the Cambridge ladies, a subject for a few jokes was afforded the wags of the University, and he produced his famous music-speech, spoken at the public Commencement of 1714, on the 6th of July, which was afterwards published, but is now very scarce. It was delivered in an assumed character, as “being the Petition of the Ladies of Cambridge,” and is full of whim and humour, in Swift’s best manner, beginning—
“The humble petition of the ladies, who are all ready to be eaten up with the spleen,
To think they are to be cooped up in the Chancel, where they can neither see nor be seen,
But must sit in the dumps by themselves, all stew’d and pent up,
And can only peep through the lattice, like so many chickens in a coop;
Whereas last Commencement the ladies had a gallery provided near enough,
To see the heads sleep, and the fellow-commoners take snuff.”
“How he could have delivered it in so sacred a place as St. Mary’s,” says Dyer, “is matter of surprise (though they say, good fun, like good coin, is current any where.”) It is pleasant to see a grave man descend from his heights, as Pope says, “to guard the fair.” Though nobody could probably be much offended at the time, unless the Vice-Chancellor, whom, if we understand the writer’s meaning, he calls an old woman, when he says—
“Such cross ill-natured doings as these are, even a saint would vex,
To see a Vice-Chancellor so barbarous to one of his own sex.”
But the Doctor had