It’s been almost 400 years since the first donation to support financial aid was given to Harvard in 1643, and 50 years since Harvard Management Company began stewarding the gift as part of its management of Harvard’s endowment.

In that time billions of dollars have helped students access an education at Harvard.

But it may surprise some to know that original scholarship gift came from Anne Radcliffe, who, as a woman, wouldn’t have been able to attend the school for another three centuries (today the Harvard Radcliffe Institute bears her name). Radcliffe became known as Lady Mowlson after she married Sir Thomas Mowlson, a grocer and the former mayor of London, in 1600. While neither ever set foot on the Cambridge campus, nearly half a millennium later the gift continues to support Harvard students with financial needs.

Although the couple had no children who survived infancy, both husband and wife were committed to supporting education. During his lifetime, Thomas Mowlson established a fund in Hargrave-Stubbs, in Cheshire, England, for a chapel, and school for “the government, education and instruction of youth in grammar and virtue.” Radcliffe’s own family had long been involved in philanthropy, and had supported a professorship at Oxford, English university scholarships, and the endowment of two English grammar schools. In 1604 Anne’s father, Anthony Radcliffe, had even tried to help establish a university of higher learning in Yorkshire.

Savvy steward

When Mowlson died circa 1638, he left his wife, Lady Mowlson, half his estate. The remainder, noted Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1937 Commencement address, was divided “among sundry brothers, nephews, cousins, ‘twenty poor ministers,’ and the Worshipful Company of Grocers.” Radcliffe managed her portion so effectively that when a contingent from the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived seeking financial support a few years later, she contributed £100 for the yearly “maintenance of some poore scholler.”

In painting a picture of Lady Mowlson’s life, historian Andrew McFarland Davis wrote in an 1894 article for New England Magazine that her “gift to the college was perhaps significant enough of her political sympathies; but if we need plainer indications, they are to be found in [her] subscription to the parliamentary fund to be paid to the Scottish army which was so soon to participate in the victory over the king’s forces at Marston Moor,” a 1644 battle during the English Civil War between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces. Radcliffe College’s then-President Wilbur Kitchener Jordan noted in November 1949 that, shortly after her husband’s death, it appeared Lady Mowlson “embraced the puritan and parliamentary cause with characteristic vigour.”

Unworthy first recipient

In 1643, Lady Mowlson signed over her gift to Thomas Weld. Pastor of the church of Roxbury, Weld had been appointed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a member of a three-person committee in 1641 to chart a course for England for a range of functions including the procurement of “cotton from some source for clothing.” During the trip, Weld also secured donations for the fledging school near the banks of the Charles River.

On the original parchment document dated May 9, 1643, now weathered and worn and safely nestled in Harvard’s extensive archives, Weld’s swirling script, as transcribed by this historian Davis, notes that he received from Mowlson: “o[ne] hundred pownds current English money the whc she hath freely given to Harvard Colledge in New England to be imp[roved] by the feofees of the sd Colledge for the time being to be the best yearly revenew that may be thought fitt in theire wisdomes which yearly revenew according to her good & pious intention is to be & remaine as a p’petuall stipend for & towards ye yea[rly] maintenance of some poore scholler.”

Weld, according to Kitchener, persuaded Mowlson that his own son John, at the time a Harvard junior, would be the ideal initial recipient of the gift. It was a poor choice. “The first Mowlson scholar, I regret to say,” wrote Kitchener, “was in the first year of his tenure, expelled from Harvard College, after a sound whipping administered personally by President Dunster, since he was caught burglarizing two Cambridge houses from which he took sums considerably in excess of his stipend.”

In the years that followed, little was known about the scholarship, in large part because the fund was initially entrusted to the treasury of the colony “for investment and safekeeping,” writes Kitchener. Only in 1713 was the fund returned to the custody of the Corporation of Harvard College, where it was merged with the general funds of the School. It was not until 1893 that the President and Fellows of Harvard voted to use $5,000 to re-establish the Lady Mowlson scholarship with an annual scholarship of $200.

Gift that keeps giving

Today, her legacy lives on. Since establishing the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative 20 years ago, which put the cost of Harvard College within reach of every applicant, the University has awarded more than $3 billion to thousands of undergraduates. In the coming year, more than 55 percent of College students will benefit from need-based financial aid, with the average family asked to contribute $13,000 in total toward the cost of tuition, room, board, and other fees.

For the most recent academic year (2022–23), Harvard provided $851 millionin financial aid to students across the University, including $246 millionfor undergraduates. Roughly half of that financial support, approximately $440 million, was distributed from endowed funds, leaving the rest to be supplemented by other means. And as costs rise, and the University continues to expand financial aid support, the value of permanent endowed funds like Lady Mowlson’s grows in importance.

“Financial aid has never been more important as we continue to seek students of excellence from throughout the nation and the world,” said Harvard College’s longtime Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons. “Access to Harvard for promising students from all backgrounds is a foundational value and has been since the earliest days of the University. It is who we are.”

The College’s robust financial aid support allows students whose families make less than $85,000 a year — nearly 25 percent of the undergraduate student body — to pay nothing toward their student’s College costs. Additionally, qualifying students also receive a $2,000 “start-up grant” their first year at Harvard to cover living expenses that fall beyond the cost of attending, and another $2,000 “launch grant” at the start of their junior year to help them prepare for job interviews and explore graduate school possibilities.

‘A person who cared deeply about future generations’

In reflecting back on the original gift from 1643, Fitzsimmons said he felt inspired.

“Here she was in England, but envisioning the New World, and the new set of possibilities,” he said. “Anne Radcliffe was clearly a thoughtful person, a person of vision, and a person who cared deeply about future generations. So I’ve always really been inspired by someone with that degree of thoughtfulness and generosity.”

Such generosity also played an important part in his own College career, he added.

“As a first-generation student myself, it certainly hits home because Harvard made such an enormous difference in my life, and financial aid was critically important to me when I was an undergraduate,” Fitzsimmons explained. “I am delighted to report that over 20 percent of the class we just have admitted are first-generation, and again, more than 20 percent will receive Federal Pell Grants. That’s another sign that Anne Radcliffe’s vision of reaching out to people from every possible kind of background is being served by the foundational gift that she made.

“Hers is just a great example of how one person’s thoughtfulness can make a difference literally, in perpetuity.”