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Henry Butts and the turmoil during the time of plague

Dr Philippa Hoskin, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Fellow Librarian, reflects on the life of Henry Butts, Corpus Master 1626–1632, and his turmoil during the time of the Plague.

Henry Butts, Master between 1626 and 1632, is remembered as one of the most unfortunate of masters. As was usual at the time, Henry Butts also served as Vice-Chancellor for part of his Mastership and so, when Bubonic plague came to Cambridge in April 1630, he found himself needing to manage a huge crisis on behalf of the University. As formal University teaching ceased, and the vast majority of students and fellows fled the town to places they hoped were safer, Butts stayed in Cambridge, working alongside the civic authorities, to deal with the immediate problem of containing the epidemic, relieving the suffering of the sick and supporting those who had lost their livelihoods. University records show strategies for containing infectious disease that are still familiar to us: infected households were required to self-isolate, gatherings of people were banned, and the pubs were closed.

In this period Butts remained living in the Master’s Lodge, 'alone … a destitute and forsaken man, not a scholar with me in the College, not a scholar seen by me without’.

This image of a solitary man, struggling to live with memories of terrible suffering has tended to influence popular interpretations of Butts’s suicide on Easter day 1632 when, having failed to turn up to preach at Great St Mary’s, he was found hanged in his room in the Master’s Lodge. Although there are reports that during the crisis he was in poor health and behaving oddly, Butts had many other subsequent worries. Contemporaries and historians have suggested various reasons for his despair including that he suffered overwhelming shame arising from some part of his conduct as Vice-Chancellor: financial misconduct, the granting of honorary degrees to people who were not properly qualified, and the mishandling of the entertainments for a royal visit to Cambridge in 1632.

A contemporary Catholic polemicist even suggested t he heart of the problem was Butts’s belief in the Protestant doctrine of predestination, asserting that such beliefs would inexorably draw people to suicidal despair.

Exactly what troubled Henry Butts so much we will never know, and we know only a limited amount about Corpus at this period since the College chapter book for the period has long been lost. We know much more about his actions as Vice-Chancellor from University records preserved in the University Library. A picture of Henry Butts, painted in happier times shortly after he became Master, hangs in the OCR.

Image: Henry Butts (d 1632), Master (1626–1632).