Caius Court · The Gate of Virtue · The Gate of Honour · The Bateman Auditorium and Room 

The route through the College from Tree Court to the heart of the Old Courts takes you through the Gate of Virtue and into Caius Court where you can see the Gate of Honour. This is the architectural highlight of the College and, in the words of the architectural historian Mark Girouard, ‘arguably the most exquisite classical building put up in Elizabethan England’. 

First, however, members and visitors will pass through the Gate of Virtue which originally marked the entry into the College from the pathway that led from the street via the old Gate of Humility. The Gate of Virtue is dated 1567 and it follows the pattern of several prestigious late Elizabethan buildings where on the Tree Court side, the columns and capitals of the classical orders, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, are stacked up vertically to define the storeys. Intriguingly, the arch that opens onto Caius Court on the west side has a gothic rather than semi-circular profile, perhaps a way of expressing the marriage of the new – the renaissance tower – with the traditional gothic forms of the old college. The mason Humphrey Lovell was probably the designer of the gate, shortly after he had carried out work at old Somerset House in London where there was a similar composition. The Gate’s decorative stonework has recently been fully restored, with the newly carved replacement cartouche above the arch on the Caius Court side installed in 2025. 

The design of the gates and of the east and west blocks of the Court itself was innovative when John Caius built them in the 1560s and it is likely that he himself was responsible for all the details and symbolism of the composition. What made the Court unusual was that the south side was open rather than enclosed by a wing of rooms. Caius, a physician, thought that this was a healthier way of building; at the same time he cleaned up Gonville Court, which he said had become such a mess that it resembled the Augean Stables. 

The Gate of Honour, although very small, dominates this open side. Students of the College pass through it only on their way to graduation in the Senate house on the other side of the passage beyond the College walls, thus completing their progress through the three symbolic gates. The design is essentially one of a temple placed over a Roman triumphal arch. Caius seems to have had a copy of the fourth book of the 1537 treatise of architecture by the Italian Mannerist architect Sebastiano Serlio where there is an illustration of a similar composition, and he was probably also aware of a similar gate that had been erected in Antwerp to mark the visit of Philip II of Spain. Originally, the Gate of Honour was painted in a colourful way. 

It is likely that Caius worked with an architect on the design of the Gate, and if so that may have been Theodore Haveus, because he is known to have been paid for his role in the creation of Caius’ own memorial in the chapel. After Caius’ death in 1573, Haveus constructed a sundial for the court with 60 faces, presumably in the form of the dodecahedron mounted on a column which can be seen in the background of his portrait in the Panelled Combination Room; the fascination of Elizabethan scientists for these instruments can be seen also in the ones atop the Gate itself. 

In 1883, some time after completing Tree Court, Alfred Waterhouse designed a small building to function as the College’s lecture hall, on the south-western corner of the College site behind Caius Court. In 1995-96 the building was converted into the modern Bateman Auditorium, with an adjacent smaller teaching space called the Bateman Room, by Donald Insall Associates. 

ARCHITECTS 

Theodore Haveus (fl. 1573-76), possibly also named Theoderic Hake, is known only for his work at Caius although he also carried out some minor carving and decorative work afterwards for Queens’ College. He came originally from Cleves in Flanders but lived in King’s Lynn and was possibly trained by Humphrey Lovell. 

Humphrey Lovell (d. 1585) may have come from Wiltshire because his earliest known attributed work seems to have been at the church of Steeple Aston. Other than that, almost nothing is known about his early life. He worked for the Duke of Somerset and at Longleat House in Wiltshire before arriving in Cambridge and became a Master Mason in the Office of Works. He ended a gentleman of some means, with property in Berkshire. 

For Donald Insall, see: West Road 

FURTHER READING 

Binski, Paul, ‘Humfrey Lovell and the Gates of Gonville and Caius College: A Note on the Sources’. Journal of the British Archaeological Association 166.1 (2013), 179-188. 

Girouard, Mark, Elizabethan Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009. 

Girouard, Mark, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture 1540-1640. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2021. 

Watch a Caius video with Professor Paul Binski on the restoration of the Gate of Virtue here.