The Cambridge College of Saint John the Evangelist - a brief history

• Cecil, William, (1520-98), Lord Burghley, chief secretary of state and principal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, a master diplomat and politician.

• Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, (1550-1604), English lyric poet, patron of writers; married Anne Cecil, daughter of Lord Burghley; was proposed in the 20th century as a strong candidate for the actual authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

• Cecil, Robert, (1563-1612), son to William, 1st Earl of Salisbury, succeeded his father as the chief secretary in 1598 and skillfully directed the government during the first nine years of the reign of King James I, gave continuity to the change from Tudor to Stuart rule in England.

• Purchas, Samuel, (1577-1626), compiler of travel and discovery writings who continued the encyclopaedic collections begun by the British geographer Richard Hakluyt in Purchas his Pilgrimes.

• Wentworth, Sir Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford, (1593-1641), leading adviser of England's King Charles I; his attempt to consolidate the sovereign power of the king led to his impeachment and execution by Parliament.

• Cavendish, William, 1st Duke of Newcastle(-upon-Tyne), Royalist commander during the English Civil Wars and the patron of the likes of Ben Jonson, John Dryden and René Descartes.

• Bentley, Richard, (1662-1742), British clergyman and classical scholar, master (1700-1742) of Trinity College, Cambridge; gifted with a powerful and logical mind, he was able to do much to restore ancient texts and to point the way to new developments in textual criticism and scholarship.

• Wilberforce, William, (1759-1833), politician and philanthropist, fought for the abolition of slavery.

• Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, (1769-1822), British foreign secretary (1812-22), who helped guide the Grand Alliance against Napoleon and was a major participant in the Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe in 1815.

• Wordsworth, William, (1770-1850), poet, co-authored Lyrical Ballards (1798) with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic period in English Literature; some his works are Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), The Excursion (1814), The Prelude (1850).

• Palmerston, Henry John Temple, (1784-1865), British foreign secretary (1830-34, 1835-41, 1846-51) and prime minister (1855-58, 1859-65).

• Law, Edward, Earl of Ellenborough, (1790-1871), British governor-general of India (1842-44), who also served four times as president of the board of control for India and was first lord of the British Admiralty. He was recalled from India for being out of control and later resigned another office under pressure.

• Henslow, John Stevens, (1796-1861), botanist, clergyman and geologist, made botany one of the more popular subjects at the university, teacher and friend of Charles Darwin, established the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1821 with Adam Sedgwick.

• Butler, Samuel, (1835-1902), writer, major works include the satire Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, the autobiographical novel that is generally considered his masterpiece. See Butlers and Shrewsbury.

• Stout, George Frederick, (1860-1940), psychologist and philosopher who advanced a system of psychology emphasizing mental acts.

• Squire, Sir John Collings, (1882-1958), journalist, playwright, a leading poet of the Georgian school, and an influential critic and editor.

• Jeffreys, Sir Harold, (1891-1989), astronomer and geophysicist, work on planets and earthquakes earned him the Gold Medal of the Royal Society (1937) and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of London (1948).

• Appleton, Sir Edward Victor, (1892-1965), physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1947 for his discovery of the so-called Appleton layer of the ionosphere, which is a dependable reflector of radio waves and as such is useful in communication.

• Cockcroft, Sir John Douglas, (1897-1967), physicist, joint winner with Ernest T.S. Walton of the 1951 Nobel Prize for pioneering the use of particle accelerators in studying the atomic nucleus.

• Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice, (1902-84), physicist, shared Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933 for their discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

• Salam, Abdus, (1926-1996), physicist, shared 1979 Nobel Prize with S. Glashow and S. Weinberg for the construction of a unified theory for electro-magnetic force and weak nuclear force. The first Muslim to win Nobel Prize.

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  Some Present Johnians

• Coggan, (Frederick) Donald, Baron, (1909- ), Anglican archbishop of Canterbury from 1974 to 1980, theologian, educator, and the first Evangelical Anglican to become spiritual leader of the church in more than a century.

• Sanger, Frederick, (1918- ), biochemist, won Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1958 for determining the structure of the insulin molecule; shared (with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert) a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980 for his work on nucleotides in molecules of DNA and RNA.

• Wilkins, Maurice, (1916- ), New Zealand-born British biophysicist whose X-ray diffraction studies of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) proved crucial to the determination of DNA's molecular structure by James Watson and Sir Francis Crick. For this work the three scientists were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.