Archbishop Howley, 1828-1848

James Garrard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

William Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury 1828-1848, led the Church of England during the beginning and expansion of the Oxford Movement, at a time when the precursor to the Church Commissioners was established, and during the momentous debates and decisions in Parliament which saw the final retreat from the myth of an all Anglican legislature. Howley's chairmanship of the commissions of the 1830s and 1840s which began the gargantuan task of reforming the Church's practices and re-arranging its finances, made him an object of fury and scorn to some of those who benefited from things as they were, most especially in the cathedrals. Exploring the central events and debates within the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century, this book draws on primary and secondary evidence about Howley's career and influence. A section of original sources, including his Charges and other public documents, correspondence and speeches in the House of Lords, places Howley's achievements in proper context and illustrates his prevailing concerns in education, the establishment and political reform, relationships with the Tractarians, and in the early stages of Church reform. Dealing thematically with many of the issues faced by Howley, and exploring his own High Church theological views in historical context, James Garrard offers a fruitful re-appraisal of the intellectual, spiritual and 'party' context in which Howley moved.

Chapter 1
Winchester and Oxford

Education and Early Preferment

William Howley was born on 12 February 1766, the first child of another William Howley, vicar of the parish of Bishop’s Sutton with Ropley in the County of Hampshire. His mother, Mary, was the eighth child of a prosperous wine merchant’s family, the Gauntletts, from Winchester.¹ He had a younger sister, Mary, and the family lived in Ropley where his father served from 1757 until his death in 1796. The medieval Bishops of Winchester had had a residence there, and Winchester College still owned land. Howley was therefore given one of the first chances after any Founder’s Kin to be examined for a scholarship under rules drawn up by William of Wykeham, the fourteenth-century Bishop and Chancellor of England who founded the College. He was elected to a scholarship tenth in the order of merit in 1779 at the age of 12.² The seventy scholars lived separately from the rest of the school’s pupils and followed classical and literary studies which had been designed by Wykeham to be the outstanding example of a Christian education which would inculcate ‘Godliness and Good Learning’.³ At least fifteen hours in the week was given to Latin composition and modern languages were not taught at all until 1821.⁴

Wykeham had also established New College, Oxford as a sister foundation – ‘Sainte Marie College of Wynchester in Oxenford’.⁵ Elections were made at the same time as the scholarships to Winchester, but a scholar could easily fail to get into New College whatever his ability or industry. The number of places available fluctuated every year so junior scholars were nominated for election two or three years before they were expected to move to Oxford. Howley was elected after two years, in 1782, in sixth place.⁶ He entered in 1783, essentially as a probationer Fellow, although still called a scholar.⁷ Like Winchester, New College had seventy scholars, which was almost as many as the scholars of all the other colleges of the university combined. Letters survive between Howley and Thomas Burgess, a scholar of Winchester 1768–75, later Bishop of Salisbury. They give a rare glimpse of Howley’s interests at this time which unsurprisingly mostly concerned classical scholarship. Howley assisted Burgess in translating and revising Lessing’s comments on Aristotle for publication. He evidently learned German, Italian and Spanish well and also studied Hebrew.⁸ This is the earliest remaining evidence both of his command of languages and of his delicate health. He spoke of a nervous fever and severe headaches which he blamed on overwork both to Burgess and to others from time to time.⁹

In 1787, like all Oxford students intending to be ordained, Howley attended the lectures of the Regius Professor of Divinity, John Randolph. A certificate of attendance was required by all bishops before ordination after 1790 but it was already all but universal practice.¹⁰ Howley was ordained deacon on the title of his fellowship of New College by William Cleaver, Bishop of Chester in Christ Church Cathedral on 20 December 1789, and priest by Edward Smallwell, Bishop of Oxford on 19 December the following year.¹¹ The Warden of New College throughout Howley’s time was his uncle Samuel Gauntlett who had attended Winchester and New College in the same way as Howley. Although he was originally chosen as a compromise by two rival factions, he became ‘the beau-ideal of a Warden’ who managed the college estates so well that there was a great improvement in the fellows’ income.

Howley received his MA degree in December 1790. New College held its own internal examinations for degrees, a situation which was only regularised after 1822.¹² Fellows were under no obligation to teach or study. The teaching of undergraduates was done by tutors drafted in from outside the college. Some of the more dramatic accounts of the poor state of the university’s tuition and scholarship at that time are overplayed, but there was malaise. Although the pastoral care offered throughout the university was better than the caricature, discipline could remain lax – as James Woodforde (who became a scholar at New College in 1759) said himself.¹³ The Warden and the thirteen senior fellows of the college had a dining table and a common room separate from the junior fellows who were in turn separate from the newly arrived scholars. Any fellow who became incumbent of a parish that paid more than a set income (which had been reckoned at £120 a year in 1764) or any fellow who got married, had to give up his fellowship after a year. As the eighteenth century progressed fewer and fewer fellows left the college and as a result the number of new elections sank to an average of four or five a year. Howley did become a senior fellow, but resigned in 1794 when elected a Fellow of Winchester, since his income then greatly exceeded £120. As late as 1860, the Warden of Winchester received £1,750 a year and the ten Fellows divided £6,598 between them.¹⁴

Howley’s appointment as the Marquess of Abercorn’s Domestic Chaplain in 1792 was highly significant for his future. Abercorn’s first wife, Catherine, bore his heir, James, Viscount Hamilton, and two daughters. As John James Hamilton, Abercorn had occupied a distinguished place in the Court of George III and had used his huge wealth to help a poverty-stricken Pitt.¹⁵ Like many domestic chaplains Howley was also a tutor, to Abercorn’s son.¹⁶ He made a particular friend of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen who married Hamilton’s sister, Katharine, in 1805. A future cabinet minister, Foreign Secretary (1841–46) and Prime Minister (1852–55), Aberdeen relied heavily on Howley, particularly during Katherine’s final illness in 1811, for consolation and religious assurance. Howley was popular and a peacemaker ‘from the drawing room to the scullery’.¹⁷ In 1796 he was appointed to succeed his father as Vicar of Bishop’s Sutton and Ropley by the private patron of whom nothing is known beyond his name, the Revd W. Ralph. After Howley’s resignation in 1811 the advowson (the right to appoint his successor) was sold to Abercorn, who appointed two further incumbents before selling the patronage himself.¹⁸

In 1802, Howley was also appointed Vicar of Andover. It was one of Winchester College’s most significant parishes and the incumbent was nearly always a Fellow. Samuel Gauntlett had been the incumbent from 1778 until 1788. The 13 acres of a former Priory and two other gifts of land had been made to the College by Cardinal Beaufort in 1413. Howley paid the curate he appointed to act in his place about £100, a good salary of its kind from the income of around £400. Howley resigned from Andover in 1811 to take on another Winchester living, Bradford Peverell in Dorset.¹⁹ In 1805, shortly after his appointment to Christ Church, he married Mary Frances Belli, the daughter of John Belli, a former Private Secretary to Warren Hastings when Governor-General of India.²⁰ He was 39, she 22.

Christ Church

Howley was appointed Canon of Christ Church by the Crown on 27 April 1804 after the promotion of Robert Holmes to the Deanery of Winchester. No correspondence survives but Abercorn’s closeness to Pitt must be surmised as the most influential factor. The Dean and Chapter administered Christ Church’s huge estates and regulated its internal economy. They exercised a large ecclesiastical patronage by electing Students and by appointing to parishes in the College’s gift. The canons were by long tradition accorded the status of Heads of Houses and as such did not teach undergraduates. They were not formally concerned with educational policy which was the preserve of the Dean. From 1783 until his retirement in 1809 this was the formidable Cyril Jackson. He had made the college system of Collections into a real test of study.²¹ Howley did do some examining of undergraduates by virtue of being Treasurer from 1808 to 1812.²²

Christ Church appointed ‘Students’: something of a cross between a privileged undergraduate and a junior fellow. The majority were Westminster Students (the school stood in a somewhat similar relation to Christ Church as Winchester did to New College) who were elected by the Dean and the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. There were also Canoneer Students, positions in the gift of the Dean and individual canons, but there were not enough vacancies to allow a regular annual election so the Dean, Sub-Dean and canons filled up a list of candidates in their order of seniority. Howley only ever made four nominations in nine years. Cyril Jackson was responsible for some improvements to the system, enforcing residence and giving most of his studentships on merit.²³

As Treasurer, Howley was responsible both for domestic outgoings (he personally checked off individual payments to scouts, porters and kitchen staff) and for the college’s vast estates.²⁴ The income from the ‘fines’ on leases of Christ Church estates ran into thousands of pounds every month. A fine was the term for a payment for renewal or on a new lease after the death of the previous holder. The system was unsatisfactory because income fluctuated wildly from year to year based as it was in the main on nothing more predictable than a tenant’s mortality. For that reason, it became increasingly ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Winchester and Oxford
• 2 The Diocese of London
• 3 Early Years at Canterbury
• 4 The Reform of the Church
• 5 The Oxford Movement
• 6 The 1840s
• Conclusion
• Primary Sources
• Section I Printed Works
• Section II Parliamentary Speeches
• Index