The period between the end of the English Civil War (and its associated conflicts in Ireland and Scotland) and the mid-eighteenth century has not generally been regarded as one of great intellectual distinction in the universities of these islands. Their number remained the same throughout the period, showing no increase on those in existence at the end of the sixteenth century. There were Oxford and Cambridge in England; the newly founded (1592) Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland; and in Scotland the fifteenth-century foundations of Glasgow and St Andrews, the recent (1582) Edinburgh, and in Aberdeen King’s College and Marischal College, which were united in one university in 1641 and separated just after the Restoration in 1660.

Twentieth-century commentators have been caustic about the situation in England and Ireland. V. H. H. Green describes the period 1660–1800 in Oxford as ‘the university in decline’. Cambridge was not much better: ‘The university of Cambridge in the eighteenth century has been convicted of violating its statutes, misusing its endowments and neglecting its obligations. It is impossible to dispute the essential justice of this verdict.’ Nor were matters much better in Ireland. Trinity College, Dublin, was severely disrupted by the events following the rebellion in 1641. No new entrants were recorded between 1645 and 1652; a military occupation followed in 1689. The college reached a low point in the early eighteenth century. McDowell and Webb remark that ‘it must be confessed that few of the Fellows of the time showed evidence of even a blighted promise or of intellectual creativity’, and from 1722 to 1753 they could not trace ‘a single publication written by anybody who was at the time in possession of a Fellowship’.