Statue of James II commissioned by Obadiah Walker

Statue of James II commissioned by Obadiah Walker

Expelled for Catholicism

Obadiah Walker (1616-1699), Master of University College from 1676 to 1688, was a man whose conversion to Catholicism would bring about his disgrace and imprisonment in the Tower of London. It was a dramatic set of circumstances that owed much to wider political and religious changes in Oxford and beyond.

In 1685 a Catholic became king for the first time in over a hundred years. James II (1633-1701), brother of Charles II and son of the royal martyr Charles I, sought to undo the religious settlement of the Restoration. To the fury of many, he overturned anti-Catholic restrictions and encouraged Catholic worship in the University and the country at large. He even tried to force the Fellows of Magdalen College to appoint a President of his own choosing. When they resisted, he sacked them, causing outrage. But there were those who supported James within Oxford, and Obadiah Walker, Master of Univ, was one of them. A Catholic convert like the king, he set up a chapel in his College and began printing Catholic literature too. He erected a statue of the king on the tower in the main quad of Univ  – one of the few statues of the king set up in England. James’s fall following the Revolution of 1688-9 – he lost the throne to his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband William of Orange – brought Walker’s career to an end, but former students still remained loyal. Walker is said to haunt the College’s staircase 8 to this day.

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Museum of Oxford

Photo credit: University College, University of Oxford/ Art UK, CC BY-NC 4.0

Stone statue of a man in a stone alcove. He is dressed as a Roman emperor and crowned with a wreath of laurel.