When the high churchmen were restored to their positions at Cambridge after the Restoration they were returning to a university where the intellectual climate had changed in their absence, Sancroft said as much in a letter to his old tutor, Ezekiel Wright, in 1663 in which he lamented that the ‘old genius and spirit of learning’ he had known and admired at Emmanuel before the ‘age of sorrow’ were no longer diligently pursued, ‘the Hebrew and Greek learning being out of fashion everywhere … and the rational learning they [now] pretend to being neither the old philosophy nor steadily any one of the new’ (D'Oyly, 1821, 1: 128).

Largely thanks to Henry More, Interregnum Cambridge had become known for its interest in the work of Descartes (Webster, 1975: 134) – thus Glanvill, who graduated from Oxford in 1655, later ‘lamented that his friends did not first send him to Cambridge, because that new philosophy [Cartesianism] and art of philosophizing were there more than here in Oxon’ (Webster, 1969: 360). The study of Descartes led in turn to a more general debate about the fundamentals of natural philosophy which continued to be a part of the university's intellectual milieu after the Restoration, leaving its mark on Newton's early studies (McGuire and Tamny, 1983; Gascoigne, 1985).