Mansfield is filled by portraits of English dissenters, the Puritans who were ejected from the Church of England in 1662. I had always wondered the relevance of those 60+ portraits to the college’s history, and the link between Mansfield and puritanism (and, to a certain extent, Oliver Cromwell) had eluded me for the longest time.
Recently I read a piece by Evie Williams, a theologian at Mansfield about the significance of those portraits which included that of Thomas Cartwright, John Foxe and Thomas Goodwin. A portrait of Cromwell hangs above the fireplace in the Senior Common Room.
I remembered stumbling upon Thomas Jolly’s portrait one evening in the hallway and a fellow intoxicated student remarked to me, “Bloke’s holding a pint of Guinness.” In my own drunkenness, I believed him for a moment.
Today, Mansfield is secular and liberal. Strangely, one of its links to its Nonconformist history is thousands of miles away–her born-again son who has just started to feel his way into puritan Christianity.