Chelsea College (17th century)

Chelsea College was a polemical college founded in London in 1609. This establishment was intended to centralize controversial writing against Catholicism, and was the idea of Matthew Sutcliffe, Dean of Exeter, who was the first Provost. After his death in 1629 it declined as an institution.

James I of England was one of its foremost patrons, and supported it by grants and benefactions; he himself laid the first stone of the new edifice on 8 May 1609; gave timber for the building out of Windsor forest; and in the original charter of incorporation, bearing date 8 May 1610, ordered that it should be called "King James's College at Chelsey."

Building was begun on a piece of ground called Thame Shot (or Thames Shot), a site of six acres, crown lands from Westminster Abbey obtained at the dissolution of the monasteries, and leased by Sutcliffe from Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham. The College was to have consisted of two quadrangles, with a piazza along the four sides of the smaller court. Only one side of the first quadrangle was ever completed; and this range of buildings cost, according to Thomas Fuller, above £3,000.

The charter limited the number of members to a provost and nineteen fellows, of whom seventeen were to be in holy orders. The king himself nominated the members. Sutcliffe was the first provost, and John Overall, Thomas Morton, Richard Field, Robert Abbot, Miles Smith, John Howson, Martin Fotherby, John Spenser, John Prideaux, and John Boys, were among the original fellows, while the lay historians William Camden (a personal friend of Sutcliffe) and John Hayward were appointed to record and publish to posterity "all memorable passages in church or commonwealth."

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