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John Montagu

1654/5-1728 Master and Dean of Durham

John Montagu [Mountagu] was the son of Edward Montagu, first earl of Sandwich. He and his father spelt their name Mountagu, though the family later settled on the form Montagu. John Montagu was the fourth son in a family of six sons and four daughters, and had a twin, Oliver. The twins went to school initially at Huntingdon grammar school, from where the twelve-year-olds were summoned one afternoon in October 1667 to be examined by family friend Samuel Pepys. He found them ‘but little, and very like one another; and well-looked children’. Pepys was deeply impressed by how advanced they were in their Latin and Greek, ‘and so grave and manly as I never saw, I confess, nor could have believed—so that they will be fit to go to Cambridge in two years at most’ (Pepys, 8.472). In fact it was five years later, after further education at Westminster School, that John was admitted fellow-commoner at Trinity, on 12 April 1672. He proceeded MA jure natalium in 1673 and was elected Fellow in 1674. He was ordained priest in 1679. There followed two preferments in the gift of his uncle Nathaniel Crew, third Baron Crew of Steane and Bishop of Durham: in 1680 he was made Master of Sherburn Hospital, and in 1683 a prebendary of Durham Cathedral. On 12 May of the latter year he was made Master of Trintiy, and DD on 27 September 1686, both by royal mandate. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1687-8, a tenure that called on him to contribute to the University's publication of commemorative Latin poems on two rather different royal occasions: the birth of James Francis Edward, the first son of James II, and the accession of William and Mary. These were to remain his only publications. He was appointed clerk of the royal closet in 1695, due to the efforts of Archbishop Tenison. He ended his otherwise uneventful career at Cambridge late in 1699, resigning his mastership to become Dean of Durham.

Assessments of Montagu's mastership at Trinity vary from ‘amiable’ and ‘open-handed’ to having ‘enjoyed an ill repute’, depending on the degree to which Montagu was used to set in relief his successor, Richard Bentley. It is certainly true that College records indicate a somewhat distant relation to its affairs, especially after 1695. But Montagu's compliance to royal mandates for fellowships during James's reign, apparently his principal failing, was scarcely imprudent, and indeed was the invariable practice at Cambridge during those years in particular, and almost without contrary precedent generally. In the University's passage through the revolution of 1688, there were distinct advantages for Cambridge in having an ‘amiable’ Vice-Chancellor and Master of its wealthiest college.

Although Montagu does not appear to have been particularly active in the building of the Wren Library, he donated several French and Latin historical works, subscribed £228, and seems graciously to have parted with a further £170 due to him upon leaving the College, but claimed by Bentley for furnishing the Master's Lodge. In 1720 he further aided Bentley in lending him manuscripts from the chapter library at Durham for his projected edition of the New Testament. Montagu is recognized by his College in the display of his coat of arms on the vaulted ceiling of the main staircase leading to the library, along with those of the other masters during whose mastership the library came into being, Isaac Barrow and John North. His portrait, hung in the dining room of the Master's Lodge, shows him as being of medium stature, clean shaven with brown curly hair, and dressed in black gown with broad bands.

The Spalding Gentlemen's Society welcomed Montagu as a member on 22 August 1723. He died, unmarried, at his house in Bedford Row, Holborn, London, on 23 February 1728 and was buried at Barnwell, Northamptonshire, his family's burial-place.

DNB