Trinity College, Cambridge exists because a queen talked Henry VIII out of closing colleges
In 1545 Henry VIII took the power to seize any college he liked. Catherine Parr persuaded him to build one instead, and he merged two old foundations into Trinity. Its members have since collected 34 Nobel Prizes, and the college owns land at Britain's busiest container port and the O2 Arena.
Having stripped the monasteries, Henry turned a hungry eye on Oxford and Cambridge, which were rich religious bodies. The Dissolution of Colleges Act 1545 let him suppress any college. Cambridge lobbied his sixth wife, and instead of closing colleges the king founded one in 1546, but without spending royal money: he fused Michaelhouse, dating from 1324, and King's Hall, from 1317, with seven hostels.
The college took its grand shape under Thomas Nevile, Master from 1593, who built Great Court between 1599 and 1608, often called the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe, and began the court that bears his name. His spending left Trinity in debt until the 1640s. Christopher Wren's library, finished in 1695, holds two Shakespeare First Folios and letters by Isaac Newton. The statue of Henry above the Great Gate holds a chair leg in place of a sceptre; in 1983 an undergraduate briefly swapped it for a bicycle pump, and in 2023 the college gave him a sceptre for the King's 75th birthday.
The alumni list is dense: Newton, Maxwell, Rutherford and Bohr in physics, Ramanujan and Babbage in mathematics, Byron and Tennyson in verse, Wittgenstein and Russell in philosophy, and six prime ministers. Byron reputedly kept a pet bear in college. King Charles III took a lower second in 1970. The New Court tree is sometimes pointed out as Newton's apple tree, but it is a horse chestnut, and Newton worked out gravity at home in Woolsthorpe.
Trinity also invented a version of crème brûlée called Trinity burnt cream, and in 1848 hosted the meeting that drew up the Cambridge rules of football. It is the richest Oxbridge college, with land alone valued at £800 million.
Source: Trinity College, Cambridge
