Trinity College (Cambridge)

Trinity College (Cambridge), college of the University of Cambridge, England. Trinity College was founded by Henry VIII, who amalgamated two 14th-century colleges, King's Hall (founded by Edward II) and Michaelhouse, to create the biggest college in Cambridge. Trinity is also the richest college in Cambridge, with extensive landholdings across Britain. Trinity College admits undergraduate and graduate students of both sexes. The head of Trinity College is known as the Master. Richard Bentley was a celebrated Master of Trinity; notable Trinity alumni include Prince Charles (most recent of many British royal graduates of Trinity), the statesman and thinker Francis Bacon, the soldier and courtier Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex; the politicians William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Stanley Baldwin, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rajiv Gandhi; the scientists Sir Isaac Newton, Adam Sedgwick, John William Rayleigh, Edgar Douglas Adrian, Edward Arthur Milne, and Ernest Rutherford; the historians Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Emerich Acton, and Sir George Otto Trevelyan; the philosophers Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, and Alfred North Whitehead; the poets George Herbert, Sir John Suckling, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and the jurists Sir Edward Coke and Thomas Erskine. Trinity's famous Great Court incorporates remnants of King's Hall, chiefly the Great Gate and the Clock Tower; the rectangular Wren Library on the River Cam is a particularly fine work of Sir Christopher Wren.