Stop throwing bricks! You might hit a bishop’s niece
‘Damn! Another bishop dead!’ said Lord Melbourne in 1834, adding, ‘I think they do it to vex me.’ The departure of one bishop meant he had to make a new one, and that involved writing (in his own hand, for security reasons) disagreeable letters on matters in which he took little interest. In his time, however, there were only 26 bishops, and no more than two died, on average, in any one year. Today there are 114 bishops, and when one dies, or half a dozen for that matter, it is, to use Talleyrand’s distinction, a news-item, not an event. The Anglican Church is a shrinking phenomenon. In Melbourne’s day, 80 per cent of the population were baptised into the Church of England: today it is 15 per cent. There were more than three million weekly church-goers. Today there are less than a million though the population has quadrupled. But the fewer Anglicans there are, the more bishops they are given. There are over 800 throughout the world. At the recent Lambeth Conference, an entrepreneur found it worth his while to set up a shop selling antique crosiers. In his 1930s tract, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote:
In a Lancashire cotton town you could probably go for months on end without once hearing an ‘educated’ accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the south of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.
There were fewer than 50 bishops in the Thirties: what would Orwell write today? Nothing, for no one is interested in bishops.
It was a different matter in the old days. I often go for walks in Little Venice and St John’s Wood, land which once belonged to the Ecclesiastical Commission. It was an area where grandes horizontales had their villas — I often pass Lillie Langtry’s. Incongruously, when the Commission developed the area, and laid down new streets, they called them after prominent bishops. Thus there is Blomfield Road, after the hyperactive Bishop of London, much denounced by Sydney Smith for his busybody ways. He is said to have built over 400 churches, one of which he paid for out of his own pocket, to the fury of his nieces, let alone his nine children. He was the first to refuse to wear an episcopal wig, though he kept the apron, quipping: ‘I need it when Mrs Blomfield requires me to help with the washing-up.’ This was a joke not much relished among poor perpetual curates, for the Blomfields had a dozen indoor servants.
Nearby is Howley Place, commemorating the diminutive Archbishop, who sat on the throne of Canterbury for many years. Far from abandoning his wig, he kept up many old and lordly customs. He always wore, in his shoes, buckles of solid gold, and when he poked his nose out of one of his various palaces, he travelled in a coach drawn by six horses. At Lambeth, an old canon law decreed that no woman might enter the palace. Howley always ate his dinner there, in solitary splendour, but afterwards he would go to ‘Mrs Howley’s Lodgings’, being lit there by footmen carrying flambeaux. But he was not without a certain dry wit on occasion. Having voted against the first Reform Bill in the House of Lords, he and his coach were beset by a mob in the streets of Canterbury. His chaplain, who was with him, whined piteously, ‘Your Grace! Your Grace! I have just been hit in the face by a dead cat!’ Howley replied, ‘You should thank Almighty God that it was not a live one.’ My favourite bishop of all is Wilberforce of Oxford, usually known as ‘Soapy Sam’. He got this title after Lord Chancellor Westbury, in an attack on him in the House of Lords, pounced on his rhetorical evasiveness, and accused him of uttering ‘a well-lubricated set of words, a sentence so oily and saponaceous that no one can grasp it’. But the bishop did not mind being called Soapy. He commented: ‘Indeed yes! Though often in hot water, I always come out of it with clean hands.’ His ability to be slippery on contentious issues has been imitated by many prelates since, not least by the current druid. What I particularly like about Wilberforce is his end. He was out riding, in 1873, with the foreign secretary, Lord Granville, when he was flung from his horse and died instantly. The Victorian public were stunned by this arbitrary act of God against their most formidable ecclesiastic. Lord Shaftesbury noted: ‘This event struck me like an earthquake. I was all but horror-struck... absolutely thunderstruck with horror and terror.’ But Lord Granville was quick to point out that the bishop’s death was essentially prelatical: ‘He must have turned a complete somersault. His feet were in the direction in which he was going. His arms straight by his side. The position was absolutely monumental.’ Yes, bishops knew how to die in a dignified and churchman-like manner in those days. So did kings. William IV’s last words were: ‘The Church! Oh, the Church!’ The last Archbishop of Canterbury to live up to the level of the primacy was Cosmo Gordon Lang. Not everyone liked him. There is a superb portrait of him by Sir William Orpen — one of his very best. It now hangs at Bishopthorpe. Lang disliked it. He said one evening at All Souls, of which he was a fellow: ‘It makes me look proud, pompous and prelatical.’ At this, Bishop Hensley Henson of Durham, also a fellow, slyly asked: ‘To which adjective does Your Grace principally object?’ But who was Henson to talk? He entitled his autobiography Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. The work, however, consists of two weighty volumes. Actually, in my youth I used to think that Dr Fisher had a good shot at being an Archbishop of Canterbury in the old style. A rebuke from him really stung. Indeed he was a practitioner of punitive ecclesiology. It was said that, while headmaster of Radley, he had accused the school of ‘having a low tone’, and beaten every boy in the course of a long afternoon. He also said: ‘The Church of England is about spotting talent and advancing it.’ Not everyone has always agreed. In Melbourne’s day, Lord Westmorland is recorded as saying: ‘Merit indeed! We are come to a pretty pass if they talk of merit for a bishopric!’ If you ask a pope how he got where he is, you may get the answer: ‘It was all the Holy Ghost’s doing.’ But in Anglicanism, luck — and the old school tie — may play a part. In 1894 Lord Rosebery was Prime Minister, and the Bishop of Adelaide, George Kennion, was on home leave. An undistinguished Old Etonian, he was an easy butt for rags. At the Athenaeum, some japers asked him: ‘Well, Kennion, been to see the PM yet?’ ‘No, of course not. What do you mean?’ ‘Oh, don’t you know? All colonial bishops are supposed to leave their card at Number 10.’ A little flustered, Kennion hastened to do so, only to discover Rosebery didn’t live there but at his own house, 38 Berkeley Square. So he went there, to be told: ‘His Lordship is at the Derby.’ He left his card all the same. In fact Rosebery was watching his horse, Ladas, win the race. He returned in good spirits, and afterwards appeared on the balcony, glass of champagne in hand, to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, who had won money. Returning to the drawing room, he was handed Kennion’s card. ‘Hm. Decent of him to call. Remember him at school. A good fellow. What? Bishop of Adelaide? That will never do. Surely there’s something better on offer.’ To his secretary: ‘Any bishop died recently?’ ‘Yes, my lord, the Bishop of Bath and Wells died this morning, here’s the telegram.’ ‘Ah! That will do nicely.’ So Kennion became Bishop of Bath and Wells at Wells, one of the best episcopal residence in England. He lived for another 28 years, lucky fellow.
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