[1] Founded or refounded in 1562,[2] one source states that the school was established by the Corporation of Plymouth in the reign of King Henry VII, paying the schoolmaster £10 a year and providing rooms over an ancient chapel.
At the school he taught at least four boys who went on to become notable artists, Benjamin Haydon,[5] Samuel Prout,[6][7] Philip Hutchins Rogers,[5] and Charles Lock Eastlake, and also Nathaniel Howard, later a classical and Persian scholar who translated Dante,[8] and the electrician William Snow Harris.
[9] There was a charitable trust founded in 1732 by the will of a Plymouth apothecary, Henry Kelway, which was to educate and clothe as many boys born in Plymouth or Saltash as the funds would stretch to, with preference for Kelway's own descendants, and if possible to send them on to Oxford to be prepared for holy orders, which by 1818 occasionally happened.
The trust funds left by Kelway then amounted to £4,860, invested in Bank Stock, equivalent to £448,222 in 2023.
They consisted of a school-room, described as a narrow, gloomy apartment with "forms for seven classes", and a house and garden for the master, the Rev.