One of Parker's Finds: The St. Augustine Gospels

I posted yesterday on Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury and his library. Remember that his purpose in saving these works from the Dissolution of the Monasteries was to find evidence that the Church in England had always been independent of the "Roman" Catholic Church. One of the most wonderful books he saved shows the opposite of course, because The St. Augustine Gospels had been brought to England by that most Roman of Catholic missionaries, St. Augustine of Canterbury, dispatched by Pope St. Gregory the Great.

The Parker Library blog explains how this Italian, illustrated book of the Holy Gospels came to be reunited with another object connected with Pope St. Gregory the Great earlier this year:

On Friday, January 15, 2016, the St Augustine Gospels- a 6th century gospel book that is reputed to have been sent with St Augustine on his mission from Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English people- was brought from Cambridge to Canterbury Cathedral for the day to serve as inspiration to the assembled Primates at an extraordinary meeting of the Anglican leadership. The goal was for the manuscript to serve as a physical reminder of the core principles of the church; based on long tradition, the words of the Gospels themselves, and the faith that unites all believers.

The visit was in conjunction with the loan of an ivory crozier which is venerated as a relic of Augustine’s mentor, St (formerly Pope) Gregory, from the monastery of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome. These two items were displayed together in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral during the closing service of the meeting. Following the ceremony, Parker Library staff gave informative talks on the manuscript in the Cathedral library, which were attended by Cathedral staff and visitors. This was an extremely rare opportunity to see the 1,400 year old manuscript out from under glass, as it is typically only available to view in its case in the Parker Library exhibition on one day a month.

Note the parenthetical "(formerly Pope)"--Popes who are also canonized saints in the Catholic Church are referred to as "Pope Saint Insert Name Here": Pope St. Gregory the Great; Pope St. Pius V; Pope St. John Paul II. It's interesting that they are not referred to by their given names: Not Saint Gregorius Anicius; Saint Antonio Ghislieri or Saint Karol Józef Wojtyła. Their name as pope is like their name in religion; religious nuns and priests who are canonized are known by their religious names: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, not St. Edith Stein; St. Therese of Lisieux, not St. Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin, etc. You might note that the Church of England includes Pope St. Gregory the Great on their calendar of "saints" on September 3, but he is referred to as "Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, Teacher of the Faith".

But back to the St. Augustine Gospels: they have had a special role in two papal visits, most recently in 2010:

The St Augustine Gospels—sometimes known as the Canterbury Gospels—are a sixth-century Gospel book of Italian provenance which may have been brought from Rome by St Augustine in 597 on his first mission to re-evangelize Britain. It is the oldest illustrated Latin Gospel book in existence, and has been in England longer than any other book. As a symbol of religion, history, and literacy it is one of the most evocative books in Christendom and upon it the Archbishops of Canterbury still take their oaths of office. 

During the papal visit of 1982 these Gospels were given the place of honour at the ecumenical celebration in Canterbury Cathedral – enthroned on the chair of St Augustine, the cathedra or teaching seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, between Archbishop Robert Runcie and Pope John Paul II. Today they are to be venerated by Archbishop Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict XVI following the reading of a passage from the Gospel according to St Mark.

Pardon my historical irony: the Archbishops of Canterbury take their oath of office on a book sent to England by the Pontiff of the Catholic Church, who has been proclaimed a saint of the Catholic Church as Pope St. Gregory the Great? It seems to me that the St. Augustine Gospels suggest the strong connections between the universal Catholic Church and the Catholic Church in England, not the independence that Matthew Parker wanted to prove!

Illustration: Wikipedia Commons, public domain: Folio 125r of the St. Augustine Gospels (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286), Scenes from the Passion.

The Boy King Crowned

Edward VI was crowned King of England and Ireland on February 20, 1547. This site explains some of the changes made to the coronation ceremony to reflect the religious changes England was about to undergo under Edward VI's Protector, Edward Seymour, and rest of the Privy Council:

Edward VI’s coronation was subjected to substantial revision and interpretation. He was the first monarch to be formally proclaimed king prior to his coronation and the Recognition and the oath were redrafted by his Privy Council. The most radical change of the ceremony was the considerably reduced role of churchmen, traditionally the intermediaries between God and the King. The ceremony itself was shortened because of the boy’s young age: instead of the usual twelve hours, it took “mere” seven.

A dais had been erected in the richly decorated Abbey. On it was a throne decorated in damask and gold, with two cushions to help raise the small King. The ceremony started with Edward VI taking his coronation oath (promissio regis) on the Sacrament – the usual form since 14th century. After taking the oath, Edward was prepared for receiving unction. From 14th century onwards two special tunic-like shirts, one of white lawn, the other of red tartaryn, were worn by the Monarch for this part of the ceremony. The antiphon “Veni Creator Spiritus” was sung during the preliminaries to anointing.

The task of divesting the King of his clothes in readiness for anointing was traditionally the prerogative of the Archbishop and/or other senior clergymen. For Edward’s coronation, the task fell to the Lord Great Chamberlain. Only two ceremonial tasks were assigned to clergymen: the Bishop or Dean of Westminster dried the anointed places with a cotton cloth and delivering the royal buskins (soft boots) and spurs to the Lord Great Chamberlain.

Edward’s anointing was surprisingly religious, so to speak, because the coronation itself generally played down the notion of the King needing any additional sanctity. Edward received both chrism and holy oil on his breast, elbows, wrists, crown and, uniquely, the soles of his feet. This very thorough anointing was performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury who in his address to the King at the coronation strongly attacked the sacramental nature of the traditional consecration and unction, and denied Popes had the power to make Kings. Among other things, the Archbishop declared that the “solemn rites of coronation have their ends and utility; yet neither direct force or necessity” and that “the oil, if added, is but a ceremony”.

Cranmer’s address also included a repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church’s authority over the crown, a discussion of the significance of coronation rites, the king’s duties ( which include emulating the godly King Josiah of Judah in banishing idolatry from the land), and a blessing on the king’s reign. Among other things, he said: “The bishops of Canterbury, for the most part, have crowned your predecessors, and anointed them kings of this land; yet it was not in their power to receive or reject them… Your Majesty is God’s Vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshiped and idolatry destroyed, the terrain of the Bishops of Rome banished from your subjects and images removed”.

Read the rest there.

Pope St. Gregory Leading the Angels Again

As the 37 primates of the Anglican Communion gather in Canterbury, a very symbolic emblem of papal authority will be on display at the Cathedral, per this Anglican Communion News Service story:

The crozier of the sixth century Pope who sent Augustine to England to begin the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons will be in Canterbury as the Primates of the Anglican Communion gather for their meeting in the city next week.

The ancient carved ivory headed crozier will be on public display at Canterbury Cathedral during the weekends before and after the Primates Meeting after being loaned to the Cathedral by the Roman Catholic monks of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome. Saint Augustine had been prior of the monastery, which had been built by Pope Gregory I before his elevation to the Papacy. Augustine lead a seven-year mission to England and is recognised as the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

“We are very pleased to receive the crozier as a symbol of ecumenical encouragement at this time of the meeting of Anglican Primates and as a link with St Gregory whose vision of the conversion of England caused Augustine to found the community at Canterbury,” the Dean of Canterbury, the Very Revd Dr Robert Willis, said.

Commenting on the loan, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said: “Allow me at this point to congratulate you on the highly symbolic value of the loan of this relic, dear to the Church of England, which venerates Pope St Gregory the Great, the promoter of the evangelising mission to the Anglo-Saxon people and is therefore a mark of the bond that spiritually unites the Catholic and Anglican Churches.”

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, commented on the importance of Pope St. Gregory the Great to Christianity in England when Pope Benedict XVI and he prayed Evening Prayer together in Westminster Abbey (September 17, 2010):

Christians in Britain, especially in England, look back with the most fervent gratitude to the events of 597, when Augustine landed on these shores to preach the gospel to the Anglo-Saxons at the behest of Pope St Gregory the Great. For Christians of all traditions and confessions, St Gregory is a figure of compelling attractiveness and spiritual authority – pastor and leader, scholar and exegete and spiritual guide. The fact that the first preaching of the Gospel to the English peoples in the sixth and seventh centuries has its origins in his vision creates a special connection for us with the See of the Apostles Peter and Paul; and Gregory’s witness and legacy remain an immensely fruitful source of inspiration for our own mission in these dramatically different times. Two dimensions of that vision may be of special importance as we reflect today on the significance of Your Holiness’s visit to us.

St Gregory was the first to spell out for the faithful something of the magnitude of the gift given to Christ’s Church through the life of St Benedict – to whom you, Your Holiness, have signalled your devotion in the choice of your name as Pope. In St Gregory’s Dialogues, we can trace the impact of St Benedict – an extraordinary man who, through a relatively brief Rule of life, opened up for the whole civilisation of Europe since the sixth century the possibility of living in joy and mutual service, in simplicity and self-denial, in a balanced pattern of labour and prayer in which every moment spoke of human dignity fully realised in surrender to a loving God. The Benedictine life proved a sure foundation not only for generations of monks and nuns, but for an entire culture in which productive work and contemplative silence and receptivity—human dignity and human freedom—were both honoured.

So yesterday I posted the story about Vespers according to the Catholic Liturgy of Hours being celebrated in the Hampton Court Palace Chapel, today about the papal crozier being sent from Rome to Canterbury during the crucial meeting of the Anglican Communion. Archbishop Welby is hoping to avoid further division in the Anglican Communion over the issues of so-called "gay" marriage and women priests and bishops. In his message to the primates, Welby noted:

“We have no Anglican Pope. Our authority as a church is dispersed, and is ultimately found in Scripture, properly interpreted. In that light I long for us to meet together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and to seek to find a way of enabling ourselves to set a course which permits us to focus on serving and loving each other, and above all on the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ."
"We have no Anglican Pope": perhaps that's the problem!

And this Religious News Service story mentions an even more important relic coming to England while the primates meet, which should remind them again of Catholic unity:

In December, a much more eye-catching “holy” (sic) relic will be flown in from Rome – the bloodied vestment worn by St. Thomas Becket when he was beheaded at the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral by four armed knights loyal to King Henry II, after a quarrel between the king and his archbishop.

(Why would a media organization with the title Religious News Service put scare quotes around the word holy?)

Pope St. Gregory the Great; St. Augustine of Canterbury; St. Thomas a Becket: the way to unity is certainly symbolized through the relics on display at Canterbury! May the unity of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church with the Vicar of Christ lead the Church of England home to Rome through the Anglican Ordinariate! Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Orlando Gibbons, Archbishop Laud, and St. John's, Oxford

This is really an Advent text, but since today is the Baptism of the Lord by St. John the Baptist in the Jordan River (in the Ordinary Form) it kind of fits--here is Orlando Gibbons' setting of "This is the record of John":

This is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not, and said plainly, I am not the Christ.

And they asked him, What art thou then? Art thou Elias? And he said, I am not. Art thou that Prophet? And he answered, No.

Then said they unto him, What art thou? that we may give an answer unto them that sent us. What say’st thou of thyself? And he said, I am the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord. (John 1: 19-23)

According to the webpage for St. John's College Chapel:

William Laud endowed the college richly during and after his presidency, and the fine pre-Reformation ecclesiastical vestments that he gave are displayed every term. Laud’s friendship with Orlando Gibbons led to the composition of ‘This is the record of John’ for the choir of St John’s, and this superb setting of a text from the first chapter of John’s gospel is sung regularly in chapel: after centuries of neglect, it is now recognised as one of the supreme English anthems.

The St. John's Chapel Choir has also recorded the anthem. Laud was President of St. John's from 1621 to 1633, after being a Fellow and receiving both his B.A. and M.A. degrees from St. John's.

The Lambeth Library Losses Restored

BBC History Magazine features this story in its April 2013 issue and the BBC News website also covers the news: the Lambeth Palace Library staff noticed quite a few losses from the stacks starting in 1975--and they thought about 60 books had been stolen. As the Lambeth Palace Library website tells the story:

Early in 1975 the Lambeth Palace Librarian noticed a troubling gap on the shelves where some important books had been kept. The books could not be found and a search of the rest of the Library showed that this gap was not unique. On examining the card catalogue it was discovered that the catalogue cards for the missing items had also been removed. This made it difficult to ascertain exactly what was missing but it was thought that around sixty items had been removed from the Library. The police were informed and the bookselling community notified. None of the books was recovered, however, and the trail went cold.

Over thirty-five years later, in February 2011, the newly appointed Librarian, Giles Mandelbrote, was contacted by a solicitor who was dealing with the estate of the culprit, who had recently died. The solicitor had received a letter containing a full confession and giving the location of the books. In a London attic the Librarian and a colleague discovered not 60 books but around 1,400 individual titles. The recovered books included numerous rare and important volumes, many of which were beautifully illustrated. A large proportion of the books had belonged to the libraries of the Elizabethan and Jacobean archbishops John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and George Abbot and had been part of the Library’s original foundation collection in 1610.

This important group of books has come back to Lambeth Palace Library where it is being catalogued and where our team of conservators are repairing the damage that had been done in trying to remove all traces of the original provenance of the books. They will soon be available for consultation by scholars.

That penultimate sentence indicates that the thief must have hoped to sell the books -- and indeed might have succeeded in selling some of the books he or she stole -- because one of notes in the BBC History Magazine is that "booksellers across Britain and beyond" cooperated in the search for the missing books.

As the BBC History Magazine also notes, the recovery of these books and their eventual return to the catalog may be important for further study of of the reigns of these three Archbishops of Canterbury. John Whitgift was Elizabeth I's last Archbishop of Canterbury and at least they agreed upon their dislike of Puritans in the Church of England. Richard Bancroft succeeded Whitgift during the reign of James I and many of the books stolen had been from his reign. George Abbot was a fierce opponent of Catholics and it was during his tenure that many martyrs died during James I's reign.

Frederick Cornwallis

Today a Latitudinarian Archbishop of Canterbury; tomorrow a High Church Tory Bishop of Rochester!

Frederick Cornwallis was born on March 5, 1713 (so was his twin brother, Edward, founder of Halifax, Nova Scotia and Governor of Gilbralter). Frederick was educated at Eton and took degrees at Christ's Church at Cambridge; ordained in the C of E in 1742; Doctor of Divinity in 1748. As he was the seventh son of Charles Cornwallis, the 4th Baron Cornwallis, his progress in the Church was assured. (His eldest brother was Charles Cornwallis, father of the General Charles Cornwallis who would surrender to George Washington in 1781.) In 1746 he became a chaplain to King George II and a Canon at Windsor Castle; then in 1750 he became Canon at St. Paul's in London and Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry.

When Thomas Secker died in 1768 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He was known for his good adminstration of his office, but he was a typical latitudinarian of the 18th century. Therefore he contributed to that lack of enthusiasm for Christian doctrine and worship that lead to the evangelical and High Church reforming movements of the nineteenth century, especially the Oxford Movement. He died on the 19th of March in 1783, 70 years old, and was succeeded in his office by John Moore.

Leap Day, 1604: John Whitgift, RIP

John Whitgift, Elizabeth I's third Archbishop of Canterbury, died on February 29, 1604 (although the stained glass window at right says 1603--unless it is referring to the year of Elizabeth I's death); thus his death anniversary technically roles around every four years.

According to this website, Whitgift was Elizabeth's agent against the Puritans, succeeding Edmund Grindal, whom she had placed under house arrest and deprived of his jurisdiction as Archbishop of Canterbury (fine exercise of Supremacy, there):

John Whitgift was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1583 by Elizabeth I. She knew that Whitgift was anti-Puritans and that he would spearhead a royal desire for religious conformity in England and Wales. In this task, John Whitgift was not to disappoint.

Whitgift was born around 1530. He was the son of a wealthy merchant. His father could afford to educate Whitgift and he attended St. Anthony’s School in London. After this, he went to study at Cambridge University. In 1555, Whitgift was elected Fellow of Peterhouse. During the attacks on Protestants during the reign of Mary, he stayed in England.

Over the next few years, Whitgift acquired a number of posts – Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity (1563), Master of Pembroke (1567) and Master of Trinity (1563). Professionally in the academic world, he got just about as far as he could when he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University.

Whitgift became Elizabeth’s chaplain in 1563. Such a position was very prestigious but it also meant that Whitgift had access to the Queen. Over the years it became clear to her that Whitgift shared her views on conformity, though for the Queen it was as much a political issue as religious. It is likely that Whitgift only took his stand from a religious viewpoint. When Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to condemn prophesying he was replaced by Whitgift (1583). He was the obvious man to support Elizabeth and to place him in the most important religious position in the country gave Elizabeth many advantages. In 1586, Whitgift was given a position on the Privy Council.

Whitgift pursued non-conformists with a vengeance. However, the actual policing of them in a city the size of London was very difficult. Despite his best efforts, groups such as the ‘Barrowists’ grew in Islington. Whitgift produced his ‘Three Articles’, which were designed to effectively trap those he labelled non-conformists. If someone swore to uphold the ‘Three Articles’ they had to leave any non-conformist group they were in. Those who refused to swear to uphold them were, in the case of practicing ministers, deprived of their ministry. Those who held no church positions simply identified themselves as non-conformists to Whitgift. The ‘Three Articles’ were considered by the likes of the highly influential Lord Burghley to be too draconian and he asked for them to be watered down. By degrees they were, but the impact of the ‘reformed’ articles was still as marked.

Whitgift insisted that all clergy uphold Royal Supremacy and the Book of Common Prayer. The Court of High Commission gave what he did the legal clout it needed. The head of the High Commission was Whitgift.

Non-conformist leaders could pay a very heavy price for their beliefs. Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, both leaders in the Congregationalists (though followers of Barrow tended to be known as ‘Barrowists’) were executed for sedition.

However, Whitgift did make one mistake. He concentrated all his resources on enforcing conformity and eradicating non-conformity. As a result, he failed to fully tackle issues within the Church itself and few doubted that problems still existed. As a result, when James I came to the throne in 1603, the remaining Puritans gained new hope and renewed energy. It was Whitgift who crowned James king.

I've been reading a book about Christianity in England by David L. Edwards (Christian England: From the Reformation to the 18th Century) in which the author comments that Elizabeth, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, chose her bishops to do her will but that she "did not really get on with clergymen. She could not flirt with them, she seldom trouble to charm them, and even the bishops who owed their positions to her favour were probably not much attached to her person while she plundered their estates and handed down brutal instructions." (pp. 159-160) Yet, Edwards also points out that she "died gripping Archbishop Whitgift's hand". (p. 83)

"Once I Was a Clever Boy" on Archbishop Laud

John Whitehead on this blog discusses execution of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury on January 10, 1645:

Archbishop William Laud was judicially murderd by the Long Parliament on January 10th 1645. It is in no way unreasonble to see him as a martyr, although officially the Church of England has never recognised him as such - I don't think he made it to the rather curious calendar contained in Common Worship in 2000. [N.B.: St. Mary's the Virgin at Oxford did include him on the plaque honoring the "Reformation" martyrs, Catholic, Puritan, and Anglican.]

He has, of course, always been esteemed by High Anglicans. Whether he can really be classed as an Anglo-Catholic is open to debate. I think he is more what one would term a High Anglican or a Catholic Anglican, and believed in the branch theory. His Arminian (if that is what it was) base does not, I think, quite follow on from the Elizabethan Church Papists, although I am not sufficiently versed in the subject to make a definite assertion as to the influences that formed him. He did of, of course, belong to St John's College, here in Oxford, which had strong Papistical inclinations stemming from its founder Sir Thomas White. . . .

Archibald Campbell Tait and the Oxford Movement

Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, died on December 3, 1882. He had been appointed to Canterbury in 1868. Before that he had been Bishop of Lincoln, starting in 1856, Headmaster of Rugby starting in 1842, Dean of Carlisle in 1849, and Tutor at Balliol College, Oxford starting in 1833. It was in that role that he protested against John Henry Newman's Tract XL, "Remarks on certain Passages of the Thirty-nine Articles":

Newman, in tract 90, repeated the argument of Sta. Clara in Charles I’s time that the XXXIX Articles could not historically be directed against the council of Trent and were at least patient of an interpretation accordant with the theology of the catholic church. Such an argument was familiar enough and could only alarm the ignorant. But this it effectually did. The heads of houses awoke from torpor, and, except the patriarch president of Magdalen and the rector of Exeter, under the influence of four college tutors (one of whom, Archibald Campbell Tait, of Balliol, lived to become archbishop of Canterbury), condemned the tract in March, 1841. Bishops “charged” against the author, and, at the same time, the English church seemed committed to an agreement with Prussian protestantism in the creation of a bishopric for Jerusalem. And then Newman himself received a serious blow to his own intellectual stability. The confidence of his studies in the history of the early church was abruptly broken by an article in The Dublin Review, September, 1839, on the Donatists, written by Wiseman, the leader of the new and dominant party among the English Roman catholics. Other points in the story of ancient heresies seemed to him to look the same way. The “palmary words” of St. Augustine, securus judicat orbis terrarum, struck him in a new light. The bishops’ condemnation weighed heavily on him, and he began to feel that he could not remain in a church which did not allow his sense of the Articles. Early in 1842, he left Oxford and went to live three miles away, but still in his parish, at Littlemore. He resigned his living in September, 1843, and withdrew into lay communion. His last sermon, a lament of singular beauty for the church of England, was preached at Littlemore, on 25 September, 1843. Already, a sermon by Pusey, which a little knowledge of seventeenth century theology would have shown never to have travelled beyond the limits of the Caroline divines, had been condemned by the heads of houses, without a hearing or any statement of reasons. [Source]
Archbishop Tait suffered illness and great loss in his life: five of his children died during a scarlet fever outbreak in 1856 and then his wife and remaining son died in 1878. He died on the First Sunday of Advent in 1882.

November 2, 1610: Richard Bancroft Dies

Richard Bancroft was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1604 to 1610, when he died. He was also Chancellor of Oxford from 1608 until his death. He succeeded John Whitgift in the Canterbury office and he pleased King James I and VI very much in his opposition to Puritanism. He also supervised the Authorized Translation of the Holy Bible into English.

Bancroft pursued a policy of toleration to some Catholics, believing that if they were loyal to England and did not favor or support Spanish and Papal aggression against England, they should be allowed to practice their faith. Of course, Parliament did not support him in this, just as they did not support his efforts to enforce conformity with the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer, nor his efforts to ensure that the Church of England received the tithes and fees due to its lands and holdings.

Bancroft was succeeded as Archbishop of Canterbury by George Abbott, who was a Calvinist, opposed completely to the moderation Bancroft proposed regarding Catholics. Abbott urged the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine and was against the marriage of the Prince of Wales, Charles to the Infanta of Spain. William Laud would succeed Abbott, returning in some ways to Bancroft's policies of Anglican conformity.

The Benson Household

On this anniversary of the death of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, on October 11, 1896, herewith some notes about his family and his household. He married Mary Sidgwick on June 23, 1859 and they had six children, none of whom married. Three of their sons became authors: E.F. Benson, A.C. Benson, and Robert Hugh Benson, who first became a Church of England minister and then converted to Catholicism, became a Catholic priest and wrote several historical novels and other fiction. Daughter Margaret was also an author.

A recent biography of Mary Sidgwick Benson, As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson by Rodney Bolt has received some good reviews in the British press, including this one from The Independent:

Mary ("Minnie") Sidgwick, the subject of Rodney Bolt's biography, was a mere 11 years old when her 23-year-old undergraduate cousin Edward Benson first took a shine to her. Within a year, despite a certain amount of maternal anxiety, there was a semi-official betrothal, whereupon Edward, whose punctiliousness in the matter of Minnie's intellectual development was painful to behold, set about moulding his intended's character.

They were married in 1859, the bride a tender 18. Looking back on her continental honeymoon from the vantage point of middle age, Mary noted: "Wedding night – Folkstone [sic] – crossing – oh my heart sank – I daren't let it... misery – knowing that I felt nothing of what people ought to feel... How I cried at Paris! Poor lonely child, having lived in the present only... The nights! I can't think how I lived."

Harrowing as all this is, it would be a mistake to mark Mrs Benson down as a sacrificial victim at the altar of the Victorian child bride. She admired and sympathised with her exacting husband ("He restrained his passionate nature for seven years, and then got me!"), pined to assist him with his great work but was frightened of his temper, as were the children. The hero of Arthur's first novel writes the words "I hate Papa" on a piece of paper and buries it in the garden. Later she embarked on a series of intense but essentially decorous female friendships, one of them with Dame Ethel Smyth, the advocate of Suffragism.

Bolt's technique in this panorama of Mary's life and times is to construct a running commentary made up not only of material from the Benson archive, Arthur's journals and Fred's autobiographical novels, but extracts from fiction and diaries. Mary's honeymoon, for example, is trailed by Amelia Sedley's wedding night from Vanity Fair and Dorothea Brooke's dusty dealings with Mr Casaubon.

Archbishop Benson dropped dead attending Gladstone's parish church at Hawarden. His relict survived a further 22 years, sustained by a relationship with Lucy Tait, herself an archbishop's daughter, who made a willing replacement in the marital bed. As Good a Good, as Clever as the Devil is an example of an accelerating trend in Victorian biography, the book that seeks to coax a hitherto neglected wife from the shadows cast by her domineering husband. But whereas Caroline Dickens – to make the most obvious comparison - is merely a representative mid-Victorian home-maker, Mary Benson is something else altogether: a woman whose personality shines off the page, and who seems at least as much an influence on her multi-talented children as croziered Cantuar. My only complaint about Rodney Bolt's consistently absorbing study is that it isn't twice as long.

The Daily Mail excerpts the biography here.

As The Daily Mail reminds us: "Benson is best remembered for devising the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols while Bishop of Truro. It was first used in Truro Cathedral on Christmas Eve, 1880. Now used around the world, every year it is broadcast by the BBC from King's College, Cambridge."

George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury

George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, died on August 5, 1633. Abbot became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1611, after Richard Bancroft died. He was succeeded by William Laud during the reign of Charles I, after years of being away from Court.

Abbot was born on October 19, 1562 in Guildford, Surrey. Like Hilaire Belloc, whose birthday we recently celebrated, he attended Balliol College at Oxford. Unlike Belloc, however, Abbot was a Puritan, which sometimes caused conflict with both James I and Charles I. Nevertheless, he did support the Apostolic Succession of the Bishops in the Church of England. Abbot was one of the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible, the King Jame's Bible, contributing to the work on the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Book of Revelation. He supported the marriage between the Princess Elizabeth and Frederick, the Elector Palatine and did not support the marriage beween Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. Abbot pursued and persecuted Catholics--fifteen Catholic priests and laity were executed during his tenure. Although seven were martyred in 1616, the king's diplomatic efforts created gaps in the persecution--in the 1620's for example.

He famously suffered from depression, and his ability to fulfill his duties was questioned even when he was cleared from manslaughter charges, after he accidently shot a keeper while aiming his crossbow at a deer. Nonetheless he attended James I when the king was dying. He further angered Charles I by refusing to allow a sermon supportive of finances for the king and stayed away from Court until his death and Laud's succession. He was buried in Holy Trinity, Guildford.