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Trinity College, Cambridge

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  • Rev. Marmaduke Blakiston (c.1565 - 1639)
    The Blakistone family of Maryland descends from the Blakistons of Newton Hall, a branch of the ancient family of Blakiston of Blakiston in the Palatinate of Durham. An elaborate pedigree, published in ...
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  • William Hanbury-Tracy, 5th Baron Sudeley (1870 - 1932)
    William Charles Frederick Hanbury-Tracy, 5th Baron Sudeley of Toddington The Peerage, #221113, Born on 19 April 1870 at Hanbury, Worcestershire, England Son of Charles Douglas Richard Hanbury-Tra...
  • Sir Harry Llewellyn, 3rd Baronet (1911 - 1999)
    Sir Harry Morton Llewellyn, 3rd Baronet, CBE (18 July 1911 – 15 November 1999) was a British equestrian champion. He was born in Aberdare, South Wales, the second son of a colliery owner, Sir David Lle...
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    Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903 - 1930)
    Frank Plumpton Ramsey entered Winchester College in 1915 and from there he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. He completed his secondary school education at Winchester in 1920 and he ente...

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England.

The college was founded by Henry VIII, King of England in 1546, from the merger of two existing colleges: Michaelhouse (founded by Hervey de Stanton in 1324), and King's Hall (established by Edward II, king of England in 1317 and refounded by Edward III, king of England in 1337). At the time, Henry had been seizing church lands from abbeys and monasteries. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, being both religious institutions and quite rich, expected to be next in line. The king duly passed an Act of Parliament that allowed him to suppress (and confiscate the property of) any college he wished. The universities used their contacts to plead with his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, Queen consort of England and Ireland. The queen persuaded her husband not to close them down, but to create a new college. The king did not want to use royal funds, so he instead combined two colleges (King's Hall and Michaelhouse) and seven hostels (Physwick (formerly part of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), Gregory's, Ovyng's, Catherine's, Garratt, Margaret's, and Tyler's) to form Trinity.

Trinity alumni include six British prime ministers (all Tory or Whig/Liberal), physicists Sir Isaac Newton, PRS, James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1908 and Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize in Physics 1922, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, the poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Lord Byron, philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 (whom it expelled before reaccepting), and Soviet spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Two members of the British royal family have studied at Trinity and been awarded degrees as a result: Prince William of Gloucester and Edinburgh, who gained an MA in 1790, and Prince Charles, who was awarded a lower second class BA in 1970. Other royal family members have studied there without obtaining degrees, including King Edward VII, King George VI, and Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester.

Masters of Trinity College