The uses and abuses of advowsons: private patronage in the Church of England, 1780-1931

Appointments to more than half the parishes in the Anglican Church in England and Wales were in the hands of private patrons, through a device –  now almost forgotten – called the advowson. Since advowsons were a form of private property, they could be bought and sold, and an extensive and blatantly commercial market culture grew up around their trade. Historians either ignore this fundamental career element in the Church of England, or treat it as a minor and marginal problem. In fact, advowsons copper-bottomed the class nature of the Anglican clergy. Indeed, the system, with or without the scandals associated with it, goes far to explain why so many people in England and Wales rejected the Established Church as a hypocritical racket.   

ADVOWSONS, the right to appoint the incumbent of a parish, were items of property that could be openly sold, the purchasers usually wishing to appoint a relative to a secure and comfortable job.^[1] ('Patrons', as they were called, could even appoint themselves.^[2]) Notoriously, if a parish yielded a large tithe rent and the incumbent parson was advanced in years, the advowson would sell for a large price.^[3] "No one could take up a newspaper without being shocked and scandalised at seeing the number of sales of next presentations, and still more at the style and manner in which they were advertised," admitted the prominent ecclesiastical lawyer R.J. Phillimore in 1853. The spiritual qualities of potential purchasers were hardly mentioned in such announcements,^[4] but the income and outgoings of the 'living' (as the job was called) were specified, along with descriptions of the parsonage and such attractions as a nearby trout stream (a feature often scornfully mentioned by critics).^[5] "It was perfectly well known that in the case of the sales of ecclesiastical presentations no regard whatever was had to the fitness of the purchaser to exercise the trust he bought," claimed Viscount Goderich, a Church reformer in 1853.^[6]

Patrons could also sell the 'next presentation', i.e. the one-off right to appoint to a vacant parish, while retaining the long-term ownership of their advowsons. Known as 'S.G.O.', (his signature on frequent letters to The Times), Sidney Godolphin Osborne was an aristocratic clergyman and outspoken reformer who noted that clergy were prominent among the purchasers of next presentations. "A clergyman is in most cases desirous that one or more of his sons shall follow his own profession. He has no interest [i.e. influence] with those who have Church patronage; he looks about him and finds certain next presentations to livings to be sold; he takes the ages of his sons into calculation, with the ages of the existing incumbents; he buys a presentation to a living, the possession of which he can reasonably expect to come to his own hand or that of his executors about the time when one or more of his sons will be qualified to take it. He has a right to argue: 'If my son is qualified in the eyes of the bishop, according to what the law and spirit of the law of the Church require, he will be appointed.' He thus considers he has done a just and prudent thing."^[7] In dozens of English parsonages, the advowson either belonged to the incumbent (who had presented himself) or represented part of his immediate family's assets. If there was no close relative in holy orders ready to inherit the benefice, it could be sold to provide a nest-egg for old age or a pension for a widow. Hence, although from the eighteen-seventies, bishops began to criticise the trade in patronage, rank-and-file clergy provided an energetic and easily mobilised lobby against reforms that would destroy their capital.

When an advowson was offered for sale, potential purchasers naturally wished to know how long they would have to wait before their nominee could take possession. To avoid the sin (and, notionally, crime) of simony, it was illegal to sell a living after the death of its incumbent. Hence, patrons wishing to secure the best price would try to sell when the current occupant was obviously coming to the end of his life. A more serious problem arose if a middle-aged parson unexpectedly died. In such a case, the solution was to import a reverend gentleman of advanced years, who would obviously prove to be only a temporary replacement. In 1852, Punch gave a light-hearted summary of the procedure. "Because a vacant living is forbidden to be sold, / The trick is to bestow it on a man infirm and old. / Then its next presentation is a marketable thing, / And the older the incumbent, why of course, the more 'twill bring."^[8] But, two years later, Punch criticised the poor taste of an advertisement that stated: "The incumbent is of very advanced age", pointing out that this was a thinly coded way of saying that "the reverend gentleman was likely soon to die". Punch thought it would be more helpful to specify the health problems "which might reasonably be expected to compel him shortly to resign the Church for the Churchyard ...  and it might also be stated whether he was abstemious or given to excess in port wine".^[9]

Between 1838 and 1850, Parliament cracked down on pluralism, making it difficult for clergy to hold two parishes (and the income from them) simultaneously unless they were small and contiguous. 'S.G.O.' cited a case where this well-intentioned legislation led to an abuse of the 'next presentation' procedure. On the death of a rector who had owned the advowsons of two livings, and occupied them both himself, the property passed to a son who had followed him into the Church.  Thanks to the tightening of the law, the inheritor could not hold both preferments, as his father had done. He was not a wealthy man and hence could not afford to make a disinterested choice. It was illegal to sell an advowson or a next presentation while a living was vacant, a prohibition designed to prevent the sin of simony, i.e. the outright purchase of ecclesiastical advancement. (It will be apparent that the sin of simony was narrowly interpreted.^[10]) Hence he could not sell either of the advowsons. In an added complication, patrons were obliged to appoint within six months, after which they forfeited the right of choice to the bishop of the diocese. The young clergyman solved his dilemma in an ingenious manner: he "presented himself to benefice A; was instituted [formally installed]; sold the next presentation to that living; resigned it in time to present himself to living B. In law … this was perfectly justifiable." Morally, of course, the conjuring trick raised other issues, since in accepting induction to a benefice, a clergyman was undertaking to serve its parishioners, a guarantee that obviously could not be honestly given in this case.^[11]

THE USES OF ADVOWSONS  Two parishes in south Essex offer contrasting examples of the way in which the advowson could shape the choice of incumbent. Although the two villages were only four miles apart, there were marked differences between the parishes of Dagenham and Upminster, and these were reflected in the operation of private patronage.

Dagenham The vicarage of Dagenham in Essex illustrates the changing ownership and use of an advowson in the nineteenth century. The parish extended about seven miles from the banks of the Thames north to Hainault Forest. The "long straggling village" was only one of a number of scattered settlements, which offered a challenge to any conscientious pastor. Both located between two and three miles from the village, Becontree (or Bentry) Heath and Chadwell Heath were effectively beyond the range of the parish church. Both hamlets were home to "a poor, thriftless set of people" who lived in cabins on the edge of common land, their "rough character" giving them "an unenviable reputation" to outsiders.^[12] The area of Dagenham – ten square miles – and its population – two and a half thousand by mid-century – combine to explain why the Anglican parish church was losing its grip on the people. In the first half of the nineteenth century, several Nonconformist congregations maintained shadowy existences in outlying districts, and Wesleyan Methodists even defied opposition from the vicar to establish a chapel in the village itself in 1846. Although Dagenham was just ten miles from central London, it remained predominantly agricultural.^[13] Hence the parish generated a bumper tithe revue, which was divided into two categories. The rectorial (or 'great') tithes were commuted to £1,036 in 1844, while the vicarial (or 'small') tithes were valued at £850 that same year. Once the property of nearby Barking Abbey, since Elizabethan times the rectorial tithes had formed the endowment of Brentwood School, which was under the control of the Tower family, landowners at South Weald. The Towers collected the great tithes, and made a sizeable profit from their lease. For three decades from 1811, there were legal disputes between the Tower family and the Fanshawes, who owned the advowson of Dagenham and were consequently interested in the amount of the small tithes, which supported their appointee. The cause of conflict was the development of the cultivation of vegetables, especially potatoes, to supply the London market: did tithes from this new source of prosperity count as great or small? One downside of Dagenham's heavy involvement in market gardening was that London's inexhaustible supply of sewage was spread on local fields as fertiliser: the crops were luxuriant, but there were negative nasal implications for the quality of life. This probably explains why the successful merchants and lawyers who acquired country estates around London left the Fanshawes unchallenged at Parsloes, the Dagenham mansion that had been their home since the seventeenth century. However, the family was not universally popular in the parish that they dominated. At his death in 1825, the miserly bachelor farmer William Ford was discovered to be unexpectedly wealthy. He left his money to establish a school, which was to be "conducted according to the principles of the Church of England" – but the founder also "directed that no person of the name of Fanshawe should act as trustee".^[14] Unusually, the intensity of feeling against them would influence the exercise of the advowson in the years after 1800.

In the late eighteenth century, the advowson of Dagenham was acquired by a member of the Fanshawe family, Sarah Bonynge, the widow of a Jamaica slave-owner.^[15] Her original intention was to appoint her eldest nephew, John Fanshawe, who was also the heir to Parsloes. At the age of seventeen, in 1790, John entered Christ Church, the most aristocratic of Oxford colleges, where he took five years to graduate. In 1796, he was ordained deacon, the first step to full holy orders. Unfortunately, at this point Sarah Bonynge's plans ran into problems. It will be apparent that there was no role for public opinion in the disposal of advowsons and the selection of incumbents. John Fanshawe's proposed career advancement would prove an exception. A dispute between the Fanshawes and the tenants of the Parsloes estate was sufficiently bitter to cast doubt on the project of making the landlord's son custodian of the parishioners' souls. Worse still, a family history made mysterious mention of "an incident in the hunting field". Since the Bishop of London, Dr Beilby Porteus, "did not feel able to ordain him as priest", it seems likely that young heir had been blamed for the death of another hunt follower, presumably by riding dangerously. Fortunately for Fanshawe, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, Dr Crigan, was less demanding – his mainland brethren sometimes complained about the men he ordained – and a voyage to the Isle of Man was enough to secure him full ordination in 1802. However, all thoughts of becoming vicar of Dagenham had been abandoned, and the Reverend John Fanshawe settled down to the life of a country squire. In due course, Christ Church made him vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire and perpetual curate of Torrington in Devon. He adopted an admirable neutrality to solve the competing claims of these inconveniently distant benefices, remaining at Parsloes where he spent his tithe income beautifying and extending the ancestral mansion.

Sarah Bonynge now focused her hopes upon eventually making her youngest nephew vicar of Dagenham. There was no secret about this: a document of April 1812 that formed part of the tithe litigation with the Towers openly stated that Thomas Lewis Fanshawe, then aged nineteen, was in line to become vicar of Dagenham.^[16] She presented four times between 1801 and 1816, probably seeking hopeful clergy who would accept a short-term appointments until the favoured candidate was old enough to step into the role, as he did on the last occasion.^[17] Her first nominee, Henry Morice, was a twenty-six year-old Oxford graduate and a married man but, according to Dagenham tradition, he proved to be an unfortunate choice. "Unhappily, his moral character was not in accordance with his sacred vocation, and conscious that his influence was not for the good of his parishioners, he resigned the living in 1807, and retired into private life". Whatever sin Morice had committed, five years on the sidelines was enough to wipe its stain, for in 1812 he became vicar of Ashwell in Hertfordshire and, four years before his death in 1850, he also received the sacred accolade of a canonry in Lincoln Cathedral. Morice was succeeded by Tempest Slinger, "[a] man of gentle, unassuming disposition, assiduous in the discharge of his pastoral duties", who was much mourned when he died after an accident four years later. He was said to have been a Master of Arts from St John's College, Cambridge but – despite his distinctive name – I have been unable to trace him. With her nephew now about to go to Oxford as a preliminary to ordination, Mrs Bonynge now turned from youth to maturity. Having graduated from Cambridge as far back as 1767, Richard Glover was in his mid-sixties when he was appointed in 1811. As discussed later in this essay, he seems to have been a 'warming pan' whose role was intended to be short-term. Three years later, he secured a comfortable chaplaincy at nearby Ilford, but Mrs Bonynge asked him to retain Dagenham for a further two years. The way was finally open for a long-planned exercise in nepotism.

Thomas Lewis Fanshawe was a delicate youngster. At the age of fifteen, he was hardly expected to live into adult life, which makes all the more inexplicable the family's decision to send him to Eton, where in those days boys led a bleak existence. Even when fully grown, he was of "small physique". He bore a strong resemblance to John Keble, the founder of the Oxford Movement, and was sometimes mistaken for him. He graduated from Oxford in 1816, and took the first step towards orders by becoming a deacon in June 1816. This qualified him to work for a few months as a curate in a Wiltshire village, experience that gave him a 'title' (qualification) for full ordination in September of that same year, a fast-track progression. Six weeks later, on Mrs Bonynge's nomination, he was inducted as vicar of Dagenham. He was twenty-four years of age and had virtually no experience of parish work.

Of Thomas Lewis Fanshawe's forty-one year ministry, there is little that can be said. No doubt he was, in the testimony of one of his successors, "an energetic parish priest". He built a village school, although it was overshadowed by William Ford's project, but his only other lasting contribution to parish life seems to have been an exercise in social control , the gift of stocks at Becontree Heath. At Sarah Bonynge's death, he inherited the advowson, but as none of his three sons entered the Church, he never had the opportunity to resign the living and ensure that a Fanshawe would succeed him as vicar of Dagenham. In 1832, Thomas Lewis Fanshawe leased Parsloes from his elder brother for a nominal rent of five shillings a year. (There was another Fanshawe estate in the Forest of Bowland. By this time, the Reverend John Fanshawe preferred to live his bachelor life in Lancashire, but reserved the right to use Parsloes if he came south for a visit.) The vicarage, a "plain building" in the village street, was let to a retired army officer until the late eighteen-forties, when Thomas Lewis Fanshawe seems to have found his squarson life too expensive: he decided to let Parsloes and moved back, an early sign that the family finances were under pressure.^[18] And so matters continued in their undramatic fashion until June 1854, when London auctioneers Norton, Hoggart and Trist announced that they had received instructions to sell the advowson and the next presentation of the vicarage of Dagenham.

Two reasons probably explain the decision to liquidate the Fanshawe interest in the parish church. One was generational change: the Reverend John Fanshawe had died in 1843, another brother, Henry, was on his deathbed, and the vicar's eldest son and heir, John Gaspard Fanshawe, evidently had no wish to live at Parsloes. He was a clerk in the Board of Trade and had recently married the daughter of an earl. Perhaps his bride did not fancy life in Dagenham, but it may be that his desire to disengage was a response to the changing nature of the local community, and the probability that the growing metropolis of London would encroach in an intrusive fashion. By 1855, he had stripped the mansion of its furniture and fittings.^[19] The other explanation would point to a decline in the health of Thomas Lewis Fanshawe. Possibly the frailty of his early years had finally caught up with him now he was in his sixties. He would resign his preferment in 1857, a few months before his death, and the prospect of an early vacancy would obviously bid up the price of the advowson at auction. The family history attributed his retirement to "ill health", but the local history written by a successor half a century later attributed his exit to "mental breakdown".^[20] It seems possible that the vicar was experiencing the early stages of the onset of dementia. If loss of mental capacity compelled him to resign, it was likely that he would be debarred from exercising his rights as patron to present a successor. Accordingly, the best solution was to cash in the asset and sell the spiritual welfare and the tithe income of Dagenham to a successor.

The balance of content in The Times advertisement illustrates the aspects of the sale that the auctioneers assumed would attract attention.^[21] It began by describing the location of Dagenham, emphasising its proximity to London and the convenience of two nearby railway stations. The new vicar was evidently not expected to bury himself in solitude. "It is situated in the vicinity of good market towns, on a gravelly soil, and in a healthy part of the county of Essex." This assertion was intended to counter fears that the Essex marshes were riddled with a malaria-like ague, a malady that seven years earlier had caused the well-publicised death of the rector of the marshland parish of Little Stambridge thirty miles to the east.^[22] Roughly one-third of the advertisement was devoted to a description of the vicarage, with its six bedrooms, drawing room, dining room, study and "offices", plus "detached stabling, coach-house, harness-room, bath-house, brewhouse, &c. The grounds are tastefully disposed with flower and kitchen gardens." The incumbent would obviously be able to live in some comfort, supported by the commuted tithe rent of £850 a year. In 1851, Hainault Forest in the north of the parish had been enclosed and the woodland was in the process of being cleared. The deforestation was expected to increase the vicar's income, while three acres of glebe also yielded a small income. "The population is about 2,000 and the incumbent is in his 62d year."

Since the advertisements ceased, it seems that the advowson was duly sold at the auction in mid-July 1854, but it would be nearly three years before the Reverend Robert Bewick was instituted as the new vicar, on the presentation of his sister. Bewick was remembered as a man of "dignified appearance" and "an impressive preacher", who lived at the vicarage with his sister as his housekeeper.^[23] He did not stay long, resigning after four years and retiring to the Isle of Wight. It seems likely that brother and sister had hit upon an innovative use of investment in an advowson. By profession, Robert Bewick was a 'surgeon' – nowadays we should think of him as a general practitioner – in Colchester. He had secured ordination as an Anglican clergyman relatively late in life but had not previously undertaken parish work. When his son, another Robert Bewick, was admitted to Cambridge in July 1857, the young man was described as the son of a Colchester surgeon. Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses does not record his graduation, but he 'migrated' (transferred) from St John's College to Queens' in March 1859, and would presumably have tackled his final examinations, whatever the outcome, in 1860 or 1861. Putting an undergraduate through three or four years at Cambridge was an expensive commitment. It seems likely that sister and brother had purchased the advowson of Dagenham to spare Bewick senior the uncertainty of collecting guinea-a-time fees for consultations by securing a tithe income (and a free house) that would pay for Bewick junior's education. Once the young man had finished at Cambridge (whether he left with a degree or without), they sold the advowson. Since Bewick's resignation made it promptly available and therefore capable of fetching a good price, they probably recouped the cost of their original investment. Thus the costs of his son's university training were covered by the tithe rents of Dagenham, meaning that he attended Cambridge in effect free of charge, while his father and his aunt enjoyed the tasteful flower gardens and vegetable crops of the vicarage in exchange for preaching a weekly sermon.

The Bewicks sold the advowson to the Reverend Edward Farmer, the only incumbent in the nineteenth century to present himself. At the time of his institution in 1861, he was twenty-nine and had been ordained for five years. When the first school board was established in Dagenham in 1874, he became its chairman but, otherwise, nothing was remembered about his fifteen years at the vicarage. His father, John Farmer of Cheadle, died in 1876, the year that the vicar of Dagenham resigned his preferment and he, too, "retired into private life". John Farmer was obviously a prominent citizen of the Cheshire town, and there may be a clue to the mystery in the stained glass window to his memory erected in the parish church there. It tells the story of the Prodigal Son, and we may perhaps wonder whether Edward Farmer went into the Church of his own volition or at his father's prompting. Certainly he took the first opportunity to shake the gravel of Dagenham from his feet. Like his predecessor Robert Bewick, he retired to the Isle of Wight, where he lived until his mid-eighties.^[24]

As an example of the uses of the advowson the Dagenham story now entered a more positive phase. As had been the case with every incumbent in the previous sixty years, J.J. Stevenson Moore owed Dagenham to nepotism, being presented to the vicarage in 1876 by his father, a lawyer called T.C. Moore. But Stevenson Moore was an example of a new generation of energetic working clergy. He had been ordained for two decades, and had served as a curate in industrial parishes before spending fourteen years based in Swansea as chaplain of the Missions to Seamen. During his three decades at Dagenham, he was an active force within the parish. The population grew steadily, although the district remained primarily agricultural. Across most of England, the countryside was losing people, but market gardening was labour intensive and vegetable-growing tended to be concentrated in smaller holdings. However, there was a change in the character of the people living in the northern part of the extensive parish. In the mid-eighteen-sixties, the enclosure of common land at Chadwell Heath put an end to the traditional semi-subsistence way of life, while the opening of a railway station began to attract a residential population. Having begun his ministry by driving the overdue restoration of the parish church, Stevenson Moore then turned his attention to the construction of a district church at Chadwell Heath, which was opened in 1886. Nine years later, the northern end of the historic parish of Dagenham was detached to form the new parish of Chadwell Heath. One consequence of this was the division of the tithe rent, which reduced Stevenson Moore's own income to below £500 a year.^[25]

In a curious leap of generations, the advowson passed from grandfather to grandson, so that Stevenson Moore's patron became his own son, who was a judge in the Isle of Man. In 1920, the advowson passed, apparently through an intermediary benefactor, into the possession of the Church Association Trust, the voice of an internal Anglican faction which aimed to ring-fence parishes for the appointment of evangelical clergy. Whatever their own liturgical tastes, the villagers would now have imposed upon them a partisan Low Church vicar. However, the district was about to undergo a radical change. The emphasis upon market gardening meant that Dagenham had remained one of the largest tracts of open countryside close to London. This made it a tempting target for development in the era of Lloyd George's promise of 'homes for heroes' and, in 1921, the area began to be engulfed in the bricks and mortar of the Becontree estate, the largest public housing project in Britain. As new churches were built in response to the influx of people in the decades that followed, private patronage ceased to be an important element in clergy selection, with most of the new advowsons being assigned to the diocesan bishop.

The story of the Dagenham advowson from 1801 to 1920 is almost certainly not typical, but it does illustrate many of the shortcomings and even some of the advantages of the system of trading private Church patronage. There were eight transfers of ownership, five by purchase plus one, the last, that was probably a gift, and two inheritances. Three vicars of Dagenham were chosen by close relatives (an aunt, a sister and a father), and only one 'presented' (appointed) himself. Ownership of an advowson, it should be noted, was the only way in which women could influence any appointment in the Church of England, and in Dagenham there were five such examples. Until 1876, the system was worked to the advantage of the lucky recipients: it seems likely that the Bewicks used investment in Church patronage as a shrewd device to pay for the university education of the vicar's son. Tithe income generated more than enough cash to cover his fees and living costs, and the capital could be recouped by reselling the advowson, boosting the price by offering an early vacancy. The advertisement for the sale of the advowson published in The Times in 1854 had recognised that the priorities of any purchaser were focused upon lifestyle and benefits, an approach that discounted obligations and ignored challenges. Yet with the appointment of Stevenson Moore, a process redolent of Mammon and suggestive of simony produced a vicar who played a determined and disinterested role in local Church affairs.

Upminster White's Directory of Essex (1848) was much more enthusiastic about the "pleasant scattered village" of Upminster than it was about nearby Dagenham. It helped that the parish was situated "partly on an eminence" away from the flat lands alongside the Thames. The location attracted London money, so that the village was "surrounded by several handsome mansions, with beautiful pleasure grounds and plantations".^[26] The five square-mile parish contained two small hamlets whose inhabitants were desperately poor, as the ravages of cholera in 1854 would demonstrate, but neither they, nor the scattered population around common land in the north, constituted the kind of challenge to law, order and Anglicanism posed by the two heathland communities in Dagenham.^[27] Like Dagenham, Upminster was good farming country, and agricultural incomes were boosted by the cultivation of peas and potatoes for the London market.^[28]  The living was a rectory, which meant that the incumbent received all the tithes, which were commuted in 1842 for £1,052.^[29]

Upminster, then, was a desirable parish for a patron wishing to secure a comfortable Church appointment for a family member. Sometime in the seventeen-seventies, the advowson was purchased by William Holden, a wealthy Birmingham merchant who had made his money as a saddler and ironmonger.^[30] The patronage had changed hands several times in the previous half century and it is not clear who sold it to William Holden, or precisely when he bought it.^[31] When the rectory fell vacant in 1780, he presented his son, John Rose Holden, who was about thirty years of age and working as a curate in Edgbaston. For simplicity, I style him J.R. Holden I (the First): five Holdens in unbroken succession would become rectors of Upminster, the last retiring in 1971, almost two centuries later. Although he acquired an "elegant Parsonage-house", the new rector seems to have lived mainly in London, employing a succession of curates to provide the necessary services at the parish church. J.R. Holden I is probably best described as a semi-detached parson rather than an outright absentee, since London was close enough to Upminster for him to intervene in local affairs. His relations with the parishioners were not entirely friendly. There was a dispute over the allocation of charity money, which the rector sought to control, and a confrontation over the annual selection of churchwardens. Like most parishes, Upminster had two churchwardens, who were responsible for the day-to-day management of the church. It was common practice for one churchwarden to be chosen by the incumbent and the other to be elected by the people, but in Upminster the custom had grown up for both to be elected, and to represent the north and south of the parish. Rector Holden seems to have regarded this arrangement as conferring too much power on the Branfill family of Upminster Hall, who were substantial local landowners. In 1792, he overruled the election of a Branfill tenant and asserted his right to select a replacement. This coup was supported by the other prominent property-owners in the parish, and became a permanent victory for the rector and his successors.

However, relatively minor disagreements about the authority of the incumbent were probably endemic in the eighteenth-century countryside. Of more lasting import to the community was a dispute over the valuation of tithes that J.R. Holden I initiated in 1798, and which remained virulent for at least five years. In Upminster, as elsewhere, it had become the practice to commute tithes to fixed payments. Collecting tithes 'in kind' involved incumbents in predictable disputes over amounts and quality, after which the produce had to be stored and any surplus over domestic use marketed. It was simpler to strike deals based on the average value of produce from a farm (or cottage garden) and collect the value in cash. Unfortunately, these generally informal agreements were undermined by the rapid rise in agricultural prices that followed the outbreak of war with France in 1793. Put simply, the farmers were doing well out of the war and many clergy wanted their share of the bonanza.^[32] In May 1798, J.R. Holden I gave eleven-and-a-half months' notice that he would begin to collect his tithes in kind the following year, unless he were paid a considerably increased charge of six shillings per acre in cash. He was also planning to hand on the parish to his son, who had been ordained the previous year and was acting as his curate. It is likely that, by 1798, J.R. Holden I had inherited his father's wealth and no longer needed Upminster but, like many other clergy, he was determined to defend his interests in a time of inflation. He would live for a further twenty-eight years after the transfer, but there is no evidence that he was ever active as a clergyman again. For the Holdens, the advowson represented an investment, not a calling.

J.R. Holden II became rector in May 1799, the month in which the new tithe dispensation was to take effect. He was twenty-seven, and would hold the benefice for sixty-two years. His diary records him touring the parish, not to introduce himself to his flock (as his father's curate, he already knew most of them), but to assess the value of their crops, count their cattle and covet their sheep. He encountered organised resistance from the farmers, who no doubt feared that the high prices of the late eighteen-nineties could not be guaranteed to continue. At first they believed that they had the protection of a 'modus', an agreement from time immemorial that limited tithe payments at historically low payments. When it became obvious that no such document existed, they attempted to negotiate. In commercial terms, the Holdens had something of a case for their demands. Six shillings an acre would have yielded a tithe income of about £900 a year – close to the £960 that was returned as value of the parish in 1831, and not far short of the £1,052 of the 1842 commutation award. Young Holden rejected their offer of £610, and raised the temperature further by calling in professional tithe collectors, to whom he leased the proceeds for £700. Their threats were curt and their methods direct – one farmer called them "a parcel of thieves" – but the involvement of an external agency made it impossible for the two sides to reach a compromise during subsequent talks in 1800.^[33] Tempers flared. One farmer set out the tenth of his hay crop due to the rector, but stacked the bales of his own nine-tenths in the gateway to the field to block access. Milk from a cow that had newly calved was excluded from tithes paid in kind because it was poisonous to humans, but the same farmer insisted on throwing it into the tub of tithe milk, rendering the whole consignment useless. Another farmer resorted to abuse, calling father and son "swindlers" and assuring the young rector that he was "no more fit for the station you are in than I as a bishop".^[34]

The Holdens had the law on their side and ultimately they were victorious, at least in cash terms.^[35] But the angry dispute caused a lasting split in the community. The people of Upminster had no option but to pay for the Holdens, but many of them resolved that they would not pray with them. There was already some Nonconformist activity in the neighbourhood – Dissent had been endemic in Essex since the seventeenth century – but in 1799, a substantial secession among prominent inhabitants formed an Independent congregation: the principal organiser had been stout in the resistance to the rector's demands. A Congregationalist chapel was opened the following year, a dignified classical box built on a site that happened to be a few hundred yards beyond the rectory, which villagers would have to pass on their way to worship. J.R. Holden II was almost certainly more interested in the cash in his purse than the numbers in his pews. He could now afford an elegant lifestyle: in 1810, he filled in part of the moat at the historic rectory site to create a sweeping carriage entrance. Indeed, it does not appear that anything was done during the six decades of his ministry to project the parish church as a focus for the local community. At the time of the general election of 1837, his curate preached a violently Tory sermon directed against the squire of Upminster Hall, C.E. Branfill, who was the Whig / Liberal candidate for South Essex. Branfill walked out, and transferred his attendance to the chapel.^[36] The split would prove enduring. A National School, an Anglican primary, opened in 1851, and was almost immediately paralleled by a rival Nonconformist British School.^[37] There were hardly enough available children to justify this double provision, and the two were eventually merged under a School Board in 1885. The chapel and the "handsome mansions" that characterised Upminster attracted two members of the Clayton family, prosperous Congregationalist ministers who lived a generous gentry lifestyle.^[38] Unusually, Upminster became a community in which the Congregationalists had asserted parity of esteem in social terms. It was the Nonconformists and not the Anglicans who opened a preaching station to serve the scattered population in the north of the parish in 1850. By the late nineteenth century, around one third of the local population adhered to the chapel – it attracted worshippers from nearby villages so exact figures are difficult to estimate – but Nonconformists predominated among the worthier inhabitants: when the school board was established in 1885, the majority of its members were Congregationalists. The Holdens had won their battle over tithes but at the cost of sacrificing much of the natural deference which usually clung to a village church and its incumbent.^[39]

The death of J.R. Holden II in 1862 represented a challenge to the family: could the Holden tribe produce a successor at Upminster whose attitudes to the responsibilities of a parish were more in keeping with the serious demands of mid-Victorian England?  The choice fell upon a nephew, Philip Melanchthon Holden, who was a bachelor in his late thirties.^[40] Having been named by his father, another Holden cleric, in honour of a Swiss Reformation theologian – his elder brother had been christened Luther – it might be assumed that he was destined for a career in the Church and programmed to uphold Protestant principles in their most severe form.^[41] However, P.M. Holden, the third member of the Upminster dynasty, did not conform to prediction. Instead of studying for an Arts degree at Oxford or Cambridge – the conventional inside track to a career in the Church – he had trained as a civil engineer at King's College, the Anglican branch of London University. His ordination in 1854 looks like the result of a belated family decision to position him to succeed his octogenarian uncle, J.R. Holden II. Whatever his motives for switching to a career in the Church, the new rector made a favourable impact on Upminster in the years after his arrival in 1862. Indeed, his first decade there seemed to justify the conventional defence of private patronage that it enriched the Church by introducing a variety of personalities and attitudes into its parishes. P.M. Holden was over six feet tall, massively bearded – an unusual feature in a clergyman – and possessed a very loud voice: he could be heard reading a funeral service half a mile away. Eschewing the standard clerical black, he was flamboyant in his attire, and drove a small white coach drawn by an equally tiny white pony. His dramatic Shakespearean readings made him a popular draw at charity events: in an ecumenical gesture, he even performed in the British School. The Reverend P.M. Holden preached fire and brimstone sermons that packed the parish church. That first decade in Upminster seemed to justify the Holden family's decision to appoint this third member of their dynasty.

But then, everything changed. In 1978, the Victoria County History noted that P.M. Holden "lost his earlier popularity when he married his mistress in 1873", but this bald statement – the first published acknowledgement of the scandal – does not reveal very much. More detail has been uncovered in recent years by the local historian Tony Benton, and it tells a story that is hard to credit in Victorian England. In 1871, a new resident appeared in Upminster, attracted by its genteel housing stock. She was Sarah Wilson, a widow in her mid-forties, who arrived from India, where her husband had been an indigo planter in Bengal. She had been born in India herself, at Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, and it was possible that this was the first time she had set foot in Britain. Mrs Wilson obviously had the right social qualities to be welcomed by the rector, and no doubt he was fascinated by her stories of life in the East – after all, she had lived through the Indian Mutiny, the national uprising that had shaken the foundations of the British Raj. But P.M. Holden soon found another attraction that drew him to Mavisbank, the Wilson family home that conveniently, even unavoidably, stood just across the lane from his rectory.^[42] Mrs Wilson was accompanied by a daughter in her early twenties, also called Sarah who was also experiencing England for the first time. Within a few months, she was in a sexual relationship with the forty-eight year-old clergyman. Early in 1872, she became pregnant and was presumably shunted out of the parish to give birth. In December of that year, her child was baptised at a church in Paddington. No father's name was recorded for Sibyl Clare Holden Wilson, but the little girl's paternity was clear enough. Six weeks later, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Reverend Mr Holden made an honest woman of little Sybil's mother. The fashionable church in Trafagar Square hardly suggested a hole-in-the-corner wedding.

While historians should avoid prurient speculation about the lives of their subjects, a Victorian rector impregnating a woman half his age is such an unusual occurrence that it merits some consideration. One of the features of the Reformation settlement in England had been acceptance of a married clergy. Anglican curates frequently endured prolonged engagements before they could afford to lead their partners from the altar to the marriage bed. Conversely, a bachelor clergyman preferred to a parish might quickly discover that he needed a wife as a career accessory. Middle-aged clerics – in Holden's age group – often remarried, especially if they had lost a previous spouse in childbirth and needed help to rear a family. Indeed, the fecundity of the typical English parsonage certainly points to robust clerical enthusiasm for conjugal life. Clearly, there were accepted formulae of courtship and rituals of wooing that assisted the men in black coats and shovel hats to transmute sexual attraction into that socially acceptable form of intimacy called marriage. What went wrong in the Holden-Wilson encounter? Was he trapped in a particularly catastrophic mid-life crisis? She would die, tragically young, of cirrhosis of the liver: did alcohol play a part in lubricating their fornication? It is literally difficult to comprehend how such an unlikely relationship could have started. Upper middle-class life depended upon the exploitation of servants: at Mavisbank and in Upminster's rectory, Miss Wilson and the Reverend Mr Holden could never have been far from servants, cooks and gardeners. How did they find the privacy to become lovers? The most likely reason for an unchaperoned meeting between a young woman and a clergyman would have been for religious instruction: the use of spiritual counselling as a cover for seduction was bound to arouse outrage.^[43] Although Holden was physically a big man, the possibility of rape can hardly be reconciled with their subsequent marriage. Nor was Victorian attire designed to facilitate casual physical intimacy. A century and half later, we may conclude that theirs was a consensual relationship consciously entered into by two willing adults, a liaison that should indeed be regarded as a private matter. But Holden's belief that he could continue as a beneficed (i.e. well-paid) clergyman of the Church of England raised serious public issues. Overall, "he married his mistress" hardly captures the almost unbelievable core of the story.

Local opinion was outraged. It was almost certainly no coincidence that the rectory stables were destroyed in an arson attack in April 1872. Six months later, there was an attempted break-in at the main building. Burglaries were relatively rare in the neighbourhood and the intruders perhaps intended to set fire to the rectory. Matters came to a head in January 1873 on the Sunday following the belated Holden-Wilson nuptials. When the rector mounted the pulpit to deliver his sermon, a large number of respectable parishioners rose and walked out. The bishop now intervened, and it was locally believed that the Reverend Mr Holden was sentenced to two years' deprivation of his living. This report may have been exaggerated, for the concept of parson's freehold made it extraordinarily difficult to oust any incumbent, even for a short period. It is perhaps more likely that Holden was advised by his diocesan to get out of Upminster for a couple of years, in the hope that the scandal would die away.^[44] The newlyweds relocated to a London flat near Regents Park where, one evening, stones were thrown at the windows. The assailant, who was promptly arrested, may have been a disappointed suitor who sought to avenge Sarah Holden's seduction. He had attacked the errant rector on two previous occasions, even attempting to chop off his patriarchal beard, perhaps a symbolic castration ritual.

Life did not become any easier for the couple after their return to the village in 1875. A woman who gave birth outside marriage was invariably treated as a pariah, subjected to social and financial sanctions, and her child branded with the cruel labels of illegitimacy. Upminster opinion saw no reason to regard the rector's paramour as a privileged exception. Holden was accused of overcharging for burials, and subjected to the petty harassment of prosecutions for minor infringements of the law, such as the failure to hold a dog licence. There are hints that these formally recorded challenges formed part of a wider campaign of insult and disdain. The persecution was deplorable but, to a considerable extent, Holden brought the contempt upon himself for his apparent assumption that he could defy conventional morality while retaining the income from one of the most comfortable parishes in the county. His wife sank into alcoholism: bottles of spirits were supplied to the rectory from the local inn, ferried by the couple's pre-teen daughter, who was pointedly described in official reports as "Miss Wilson".  Sarah Holden died in February 1884, aged just thirty-seven. The rector initially agreed to settle debts that she had incurred, but then refused to honour a bill – it was only for £13, twelve shillings and sixpence – submitted by the local innkeeper. When the publican sued, as Holden had scornfully challenged him to do, the defence offered the ingenious argument that nobody could prove that the bottles supplied had actually been delivered to the rector's wife – beyond, of course, the more general fact that she had died of cirrhosis of the liver. The dismissal of the case saved the rector a few pounds, but did nothing to restore his standing in the local community during his remaining thirty years as rector. Perhaps the feeling against him subsided as he entered his ninth decade: as a curate he had published a sermon on humiliation, and maybe this gave him some inner strength to recover his position. P.M. Holden remained active until failing eyesight prevented him from conducting services shortly before his death at the age of eighty-one in 1904. Upminster closed its shops and drew its blinds on the day of the funeral, while obituaries called him a "grand old country clergyman", noting his "cheery smile" and praising his generosity to the poor. But local newspapers tended to avoid provoking their readers by stirring unnecessary controversy. It may not have been fearless journalism, but everyone in the neighbourhood would have known the tale of the rector's uneven private life and editors perhaps concluded that no purpose was served by speaking ill of the dead.^[45] His death might perhaps have been the occasion to reflect that two Holden rectors had spanned the entire nineteenth century (1799-1904) but, with the exception of a single decade, the years from 1862 to 1872, they had proved remarkably divisive imports to the community.

The family's patronage was now bestowed upon a fourth-generation collateral descendant of J.R. Holden II.^[46] Hyla Henry Holden was in his early thirties and had several years' experience working as a curate in London.^[47] Unlike his three forerunners, he felt a dynamic commitment to his calling, and soon made an impact upon the religious life of Upminster, notably by increasing the number of services and (for the first time) installing heating in the church to make the experience of worship less arduous. He set out to involve his congregation in Church life, and himself in local activities. He was undoubtedly helped by the beginnings of suburban development. The pace was slow: by the end of 1909, there were 120 houses in two subdivisions.^[48] However, it was not so much quantity as quality that mattered: Upminster was to be developed on 'garden city' lines, and upmarket housing almost certainly meant that a goodly proportion of the new residents would be practising Anglicans. (The Congregationalists also gained a shot in the arm, as the transfer of their chapel to the centre of the village in 1911 indicated.) Thus H.H. Holden had a splendid opportunity to restate the family role within a changing population, and he took advantage of the changing and broadening character of the local community, from captaining the cricket team to serving on the rural district council. During the First World War, he became a poster boy around the world for energetic clerical patriotism, with a New Zealand newspaper reporting that he was "a sergeant in the Special Constables, captain of the Fire Brigade, chaplain to the Volunteers, a member of the Board of Guardians, and a night orderly at the local hospital for wounded soldiers, for whose vegetable wants he is cultivating a part of his glebe."^[49]

H.H. Holden undoubtedly made an impact on Upminster. However, in one respect, he was a controversial figure. An Anglo-Catholic, he introduced vestments and renamed the Communion service Mass.^[50] It was bizarre that a patron's desire to maintain continuity of a surname should alter the liturgical allegiance of the congregation. His parishioners seemed to accept the change, although on one occasion Protestant militants from outside attempted to disrupt the proceedings. The changing nature of the population probably helped acceptance of the new practices, since the newcomers might well have been familiar with them from London churches. Anyone who objected to the rector's ritualism could decamp to the plain Bible preaching of the Congregationalists. This fourth member of the dynasty spent forty years in the parish, and was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Hyla Rose Holden, whose retirement in 1971 marked the end of the line after 191 years.^[51] He seems to have been a conventional and respected clergyman, but his term of office falls outwith the scope of this study. Both father and son were active Freemasons. In 2026, the Holden family still own the advowson, although the autonomy of the patron has been restricted in modern times.

Twentieth-century attitudes to the Holden connection have been influenced by a strong sense of local identity in Upminster. The early twentieth-century garden-suburb projects did not survive the First World War, but housing development in the nineteen-twenties and 'thirties was generally upmarket. Just as Dagenham became a byword for a working-class local-authority housing estate, so Upminster was regarded as a leafy suburb for prosperous commuters. The parish was incorporated into the Hornchurch Urban District in 1934, but during the nineteen-fifties there was a campaign to break away and establish a separate authority. Upminster's independence movement ran up against a Whitehall preference for larger local government units, which culminated in the creation of the London boroughs in 1965 but, from the late nineteen-fifties, the suburb's ratepayers' association monopolised the election of Upminster's local representatives to the successive Hornchurch and Havering councils. One manifestation of this sense of specific identity was the work of a Local History Group, which published a series of useful pamphlets around 1960. These implicitly laid claim to Upminster Past as an adjunct to the special quality of Upminster Present. This was not the ideal context to examine the proposition that it was inherently bizarre for one family to have appointed the rector of the parish for a century and a half. Rather, the Holden connection was seen and celebrated as one of the manifestations of Upminster exceptionalism.  Indeed, the tradition remained alive in the form of its fifth incumbent, for the Group's history of the parish church called upon the goodwill of the Reverend H.R. Holden, a context that tended to blunt any criticism of the family connection.^[52] "No doubts [sic] there were faults on both sides" was the Local History Group's verdict on the tithe dispute, despite having presented detailed evidence of J.R. Holden's II covetous campaign of communal disruption. In 1959, there remained a surprising number of Upminster people who could remember P.M. Holden and who talked of "his imposing figure, his wonderful voice, his flair for elocution".^[53] These senior residents had formed their sense of propriety in Victorian times, and it was no doubt in deference to their sensitivities that the Local History Group did not betray the slightest hint of the third Holden rector's irregular private life. Somehow, its research conveyed a picture of a bygone Upminster that Trollope would have recognised, or Jane Austen delighted in portraying.

The fact that the Holden connection became semi-romanticised as part of a suburban mythology does not in itself prove that the advowson had negative implications for Upminster. By later standards – including those prevalent by the end of the Victorian era – the first three Holden rectors were unsuited to their calling, but the harsh judgment of posterity may be unfair to their beliefs and motives. Clearly, the two J.R. Holdens, father and son, saw the parish as a source of income. Nonetheless, the tithe dispute that began in 1798 was not directly linked to the method of their appointment but was rather a symptom of the burdensome system that frequently caused conflict between incumbents and their flocks. It would result in a permanent sectarian split in the parish, but Upminster probably benefited from having a lively community of Congregationalists ready to take part in wider parish activities.  Similarly, P.M. Holden's remarkable private life can, at most, be only loosely linked to his family's ownership of the advowson. The relationship with Sarah Wilson began nine years after his appointment. Sexual immorality was one of the few grounds on which a bishop could refuse to induct a candidate presented to him by a private patron, although it would have been a bold diocesan who would have risked the expense of a legal challenge in doing so. There is no evidence that P.M. Holden was a fornicator when his family sent him to Upminster.^[54] Had he remained a mere curate, he would have had no job security and would surely have been dismissed for seducing a parishioner, but he was in his late forties when he fell from grace, and might by then have acquired his own parish through some other form of appointment. It may be argued that the selection of the fourth rector, H.H. Holden in 1904, simply because he was an available family member, involved the casual imposition of a ritualist on a parish where such practices were unfamiliar. Indeed, it is likely that a system that included some form of consultation with churchgoers would have vetoed the appointment of a High Church incumbent. Even so, not merely the congregation but the wider and burgeoning Upminster community undoubtedly gained this active and positive leader, and his liturgical practices seem to have been accepted. The plain truth is that the Anglican patronage system was eccentric in its entirety. In 1891, the Duke of Bedford owned twenty-seven advowsons. The Duke of Rutland had the right to select the incumbent in twenty-five parishes, the Earl of Derby owned the same privilege in nineteen. The Duke of Norfolk was patron of seven Anglican churches, although as he was a Roman Catholic, he was not allowed to present to them. Of course it was absurd that the descendants of a Birmingham businessman should have the right to appoint a clergyman in an Essex village – Holden clergy usually lived in Upminster, but Holden patrons were strangers – but to single them out from a crazy system would be invidious.

THE ABUSES OF ADVOWSONS Three scandals in the early eighteen-fifties highlighted cynical manipulation of the sale of advowsons. Yet there was little attempt to tackle the abuses, and even less success in occasional campaigns to put an end to them.

Spetisbury A particularly gross 'next presentation' scandal in Dorset spanned the years 1852-5. The parish of Spetisbury (also spelt 'Spettisbury') was merged with the nearby perpetual curacy of Charlton Marshall. It was worth over £600 a year. The wealthy if extravagant lay patron, J.S. Erle-Drax, owned property in the nearby town of Wareham which gave him considerable 'influence' in the constituency, sometimes enough to elect him to Parliament. "The patron is a gentleman of riches and of lands, / Who represents a borough, which is snugly in his hands," sang Punch. This was not wholly correct. Wareham had lost one of its two MPs in 1832, which made competition among its 400 voters for the remaining seat particularly fierce. The constituency had survived by incorporating the former pocket boroughs of Bere Regis and Corfe Castle, small towns that had their own local interests to protect. Reform had done little to change the political culture, and the enlargement of the electorate certainly did not create a more enlightened public opinion. We may assume that Erle-Drax found his repeated electoral contests expensive, all the more so since he spent money freely in support of a flamboyant lifestyle.

Dod's Electoral Facts (1852) characterised Erle-Drax as a Liberal, a label that was starting to oust the tribal term 'Whig', and which loosely described a politician open to reformist ideas. In fact, it is not easy to identify Erle-Drax's political opinions since, although he sat in the House of Commons at intervals through nearly forty years, he never once delivered a speech. Resembling "a villainous Don Quixote", he generally appeared for one evening during each parliamentary session, although in some years he was not seen at all. He treated politics as a feudal rather than an ideological exercise. At one election, he was said to have issued an address denouncing as "a dastardly lie" a report that he wished his Wareham tenants and the tradesmen with whom he did business "to vote according to their conscience. … I have no wish of the sort. I wish, and I intend, that these persons shall vote for me." From 1859, he was more realistically classified as a Conservative.^[55] In addition to his political ambitions, he had spent lavishly on his estates. He was evidently on the look-out for money when the rector of Spetisbury unexpectedly died – he was in his early forties – in November 1851.

This unexpected vacancy created a problem for Erle-Drax, since the law prevented him from selling the next presentation to a vacant parish. Furthermore, selecting a new incumbent for the 1,100 people of Spetisbury-cum-Charlton Marshall was – or ought to have been – a challenging responsibility. Nonconformists were strong on the ground: the Primitive Methodists had a chapel in Spetisbury and there was an Independent congregation at Charlton Marshall. Unusually for rural England, there was also a Roman Catholic presence. Spetisbury was home to a convent, a community of nuns who had fled the French Revolution half a century before. Where there were nuns, there must also be Catholic priests, and two of them were listed as residents in the Post Office Directory for 1855. In the early eighteen-fifties, Protestant opinion in England was mightily exercised by fear of resurgent Catholicism. There had been an overwrought reaction to the 'Papal Aggression' of 1850, triggered by Rome's decision to divide England and Wales into titular territorial dioceses, an administrative move that had been denounced as a challenge to national sovereignty. The Church of England certainly needed a representative in Spetisbury active enough to protect his flock from seduction by the knavish tricks of nuns and priests. As Punch put it, "when this goodly living with so many souls to cure, / Fell vacant, most men would conclude 'twas given, to be sure, / Unto some powerful preacher; who was equal to the place, / Some able-bodied clergyman, at least, in any case." However, Erle-Drax believed in doing as he pleased with his own, and his strategy was designed to maximise the value either of the advowson itself or the sale of the next presentation. Since Spetisbury-cum-Charlton Marshall was worth £521 a year (and other accounts put its annual value as high as £624), it was likely that an ambitious and affectionate parent would pay handsomely for the right to place a clerical son in such a snug berth. Erle-Drax could only sell the living if there was an incumbent in the parish but to make it attractive to potential purchasers, he needed to ensure that it would fall vacant again in a short period.

It was for that reason that he bestowed the prize upon the Reverend John Baskett, who was reported to be eighty years of age.^[56] He had been rector of Compton Abbas, a village about twelve miles away, since 1827. He had succeeded his father, who had held the benefice for almost half a century, and may be assumed to have an old-fashioned attitude to Church appointments. Since Spetisbury-cum-Charlton Marshall represented a pay-rise of about £180 a year, he evidently felt no qualms about agreeing to keep the seat warm while Erle-Drax sold the parish. It was of course no secret that Baskett had secured a dispensation from residence in Compton Abbas on health grounds, and that he lived for some years in the nearby town of Wimborne Minster. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who denounced the transaction, described Baskett as "an aged man, who has long since been considered so infirm as to have been, very properly, placed on the retired list". As 'S.G.O.' pointed out, the patron could not sell the advowson while the living was vacant, "therefore the best policy, under the circumstances of a sudden vacancy attending on a desire to make money by the patronage, is to give the living to some very old man, as of course the value of the next presentation is represented a good deal by the age of the existing incumbent". Initially, he tried to avoid disparaging the recipient – "a most respectable old gentleman ….. I wish he were younger" – but, as the controversy simmered on, so Osborne's waspish self-righteousness became more pointed. Clergy were electing proctors to represent them in the first session of the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury for a century and a half that would actually be permitted to discuss Church affairs. 'S.G.O.' threatened to nominate Baskett, since he "must have great experience" while his recent appointment to an important parish was surely "good evidence of his capacity". A year after the discreditable transaction, he returned to the charge, reporting that the rector of Spetisbury "has never resided, nor I believe has the remotest intention of doing so". The parish was entrusted to two curates, one in each section. Of the two, only the Reverend Henry Bartlett can be definitely identified. A native of Wimborne Minster, he was twenty-six when Baskett was inducted, perhaps a touch inexperienced to act as the front line of defence for the principles of the Reformation. Contemptuously, 'S.G.O.' repeated that it was "notorious that the octogenarian nominee of the patron was only put in to enable the said patron to sell the next presentation at a great advantage".^[57]

The story was so delicious that Punch decided to have another bite at it three months later. This time, the mocking verse was attributed to the auctioneers who specialised in the sale of advowsons. Although the parish was not named, it was assumed that readers would recall the Spetisbury scandal from the earlier coverage. "The zealous would find it a place to their mind, / As there's room in the parish, we own, for improvement; / Since Dissenters abound in the district around, / And of late there've been signs of a Catholic movement." However, the attraction of the living was its likely early availability: "if any buyer should chance to inquire / How long for this living he's likely to wait, he / May learn that, indeed, he will quickly succeed, / As the present incumbent is just turn'd of eighty. / For, in truth, to be sure a good price to secure, / (Since we only may sell you the next presentation) / We looked out on each side, when the last vicar died, / For one whose great age was his qualification." In Punch's satire, the traders in ecclesiastical opportunity were unmoved by those who demurred that their practice did not seem to accord with principles laid down in the New Testament: "if we should be told how they fared, who, of old, / In the Temple would barter and chaffer for pelf,- / We have only to say, had we lived in that day, / We'd have sold, if we could, e'en the Temple itself."^[58]

The Spetisbury advowson was offered at auction late in 1853.^[59] The auctioneer explained that the incumbent "was in the eighty first year of his age, and not considered in a good state of health, so that his duties have to be performed by a curate, which offered the prospect of very early possession of the living, and rendered it a most desirable investment for a son or relative". Nevertheless, Erle-Drax refused an offer of £5,000 for the advowson at auction, and sold the next presentation privately for an undisclosed sum.^[60] When Baskett died in February 1855, he was succeeded by H.B. Vizard, who was about thirty years of age. The right to present had presumably been purchased either by the new incumbent's father, the lawyer William Vizard, or by some affectionate relative with the family's blessing. Here we have yet another glimpse of the extent to which clerical jobbery permeated English society. Vizard senior was a lifelong Whig who had been leading figure in the defence of Queen Caroline, a symbolic campaign of defiance against the power structure in Regency times. A friend and admirer of the controversial Henry Brougham, as his son's initials confirm, he had combined a successful legal practice with a detailed contribution to practical projects of law reform. Remaining active into the eighteen-fifties, he was "not lacking in business sense" and prospered both as a landowner and the proprietor of a colliery. It seems he had no problem in combining reformist politics with indulgence in the sordid trafficking of Church preferments.^[61]

"It was not uncommon that on a living becoming vacant, a minister was presented to it whose sole recommendation was his precarious state of health," Viscount Goderich informed the House of Commons in 1853. He invited MPs to imagine the feelings of parishioners when they saw "an advertisement in the newspapers, that the next presentation to the living was to be sold, and to discover that it had been given to a man whose ill health would enable him to serve as a mere warming pan for the purpose of evading the law prohibiting the sale of a void term, and would thus secure a living for the son, or a portion for the daughter, of the patron?"^[62] Such advertisements certainly did appear.^[63] In 1848, the Athenaeum, a respectable weekly paper, published an announcement that "[t]he Patron of a Rectory of about £700 a year is desirous of presenting it, in the most legitimate manner, to a Clergyman of not less than 80 years of age, of sound High Church principles."  Applications, with testimonials, would be treated in confidence, presumably to encourage an aged clergyman in a poor living to bail out without forewarning his flock. Punch helpfully reworded the advertisement: "Wanted, a Warming Pan for a Rectory. The said Warming-Pan must be a very old Warming-Pan, as it is only needed for a very, very little while; the young gentleman for whom the bed is destined being about to leave College in a very short time, when there will be no further use for the Warming-Pan, the aforesaid young gentleman keeping the bed aired himself."^[64] Elderly clergy even advertised their availability. The Saturday Review in 1856 reported a notice placed by "a clergyman upwards of 80 years of age, of sound principles and unexceptionable references, who will be glad to hold a living of not less than £400 a year." It was hardly necessary for the applicant to spell out the implications of his appointment. Virtually the only deterrent to such transactions came from the activities of extortionists, who made a lucrative business out of threatening beneficiaries of suspect purchases with prosecution under the Simony Act of 1588. "We have reason to know that at the present moment this is a regular practice," the Spectator bleakly reported in 1865.^[65]

St Ervan and Rougham 'S.G.O.' also denounced the scandalous case in 1851 of St Ervan in Cornwall. The patron was the radical politician Sir William Molesworth, who was widely suspected of being an atheist. At the death of the long-time rector, his uncle and namesake, in 1851, he wished to sell the advowson. Molesworth had been criticised during a by-election campaign in 1845 for holding property in the Church.^[66] No doubt he wished to distance himself from an undesirable entanglement, but was equally reluctant to give offence to a close relative by selling the advowson in his lifetime. To get around the problem that he could not do so once the living fell vacant, he installed a clergyman who was "very infirm, paralytic [the term, although italicised, was not intended to imply drunkenness], utterly incompetent to do the duty, and giving every prospect from the state of his health, of affording to the purchaser [of the advowson] a speedy possession". The transitional incumbent was John Pope Cox, who had been ordained late in life. He had entered Oxford at the late age of forty-four in 1827, graduating four years later and accepting the curacy of the small Devon parish of Widworthy, where he acted as deputy to an absentee pluralist who preferred to live in, and off, his other two parishes, in the Essex town of Colchester. Described by a defender as "mild, benevolent, and amiable …. supplying with a totally unsparing hand the wants of all who stood in need", the Reverend Mr Cox worked sixteen years as curate of Widworthy on the starvation wage of £80 a year, before his services were terminated on the death of his absentee superior. It is likely that health problems had driven Cox to retreat into a clerical career in midlife: a correspondent of The Times confirmed that he had been totally unfitted "for any of the duties of a country clergyman". At Widworthy, he had frequently needed help to enter the church on Sundays and had sometimes failed to complete the weekly service and had to be carried back to his parsonage in a chair. In modern times, he would have been recognised as an able and committed clergyman who merited support in his struggle with disability. The Victorians were less generous. St Ervan, worth £405 a year, would have seemed an attractive prospect, and Cox may even have persuaded himself that his health had improved enough to enable him to minister to its four hundred parishioners. But his induction service was a sadly embarrassing spectacle. Two people supported him as he walked up the nave, and during the ritual of 'reading himself in', he was supplied with sustenance – wine and jelly in one account, diluted wine in another. Even so, he "became unwell" half way through the ceremony and had to be removed to a local inn "in an almost fainting state". There he rested, was given lunch and brought back to the church to complete the formal proceedings.^[67]

Rector Cox did not survive for long. Two years later, the Reverend Henry Barton presented himself to the benefice. He was about thirty years of age and his father had made money in India.  Meanwhile, in December 1852, Lord Aberdeen had brought Whigs and liberal Conservatives together in a coalition ministry formed to defend the free trade settlement of the late eighteen-forties. There was room in this broadly based grouping for a radical voice, but the most prominent exponents of advanced opinions were all inconveniently middle class: some even owned factories. Although he was a controversial figure – he had been expelled from Cambridge after challenging his tutor to a duel^[68] – Sir William Molesworth was a landowner and a baronet, qualifications that were enough to give him a seat in the cabinet, even though he had never held any junior office. The St Ervan certainly scandal did not prevent his political advancement. In fact, it seems that nobody outside Cornwall even knew about it until a helpful correspondent briefed 'S.G.O' on the strange episode some months later.

Nor was St Ervan the only such irregularity that filled Osborne's postbag. When the Reverend Robert Davers died in January 1853, his parishioners at Rougham in Suffolk – there were about one thousand of them – perhaps hoped that his successor might actually reside among them, for Davers had been an absentee pluralist since his appointment half a century earlier.^[69] However, the patron of the living, Philip Bennet, decided to present the Reverend George Naylor who was eighty-six years of age.^[70] 'S.G.O.' dismissed him as "totally unfitted, in consequence of his infirmities, from discharging the duties" of an incumbent, even if he were prepared to reside. (Naylor's friends denied this, and perhaps it was his attempt to do the job that hastened his death in May 1854.^[71]) Late in November, a rumour swept the local market town, Bury St Edmunds, that the advowson was about to be auctioned. A large and evidently unsympathetic crowd gathered to witness the sale, only to find that the auctioneers had posted a notice denying that any such event was about to take place. Presumably the next presentation was sold privately for, in 1854, the Reverend Morton Shaw became the new (and resident) rector, while Bennet retained the advowson. Here it is only fair to note the point often made in the defence of private patronage, that even its irregularities could produce positive results. Shaw was a Huddersfield man, and it was probably West Riding industrial money that eased him into his Suffolk parsonage. He had a decade's experience as a curate, would go on to publish several abstruse works on Anglican liturgy and would serve as a rural dean, the Church of England's equivalent of a shop steward.^[72]

ATTEMPTS AT REFORM  Despite the obviously negative public response to these three episodes, the practice seems to have continued, for William Connor Magee, the Bishop of Peterborough, denounced it in 1874 as "one of the most grievous evils and scandals connected with patronage". It was "a most wicked breach of trust" that a patron should "choose a man, not for his fitness, but for his unfitness – not because he thinks him capable, but because he knows him to be utterly incapable of discharging the duties of the parish into which he thrusts him, in defiance alike of indignant parishioners and indignant and protesting Bishop."^[73] It may be asked why such irregularities were tolerated. 'S.G.O.' criticised the Bishop of Salisbury, Edward Denison, for sanctioning Baskett's appointment, and queried the quality of legal advice he had received from his diocesan chancellor, who happened to be R.J. Phillimore. Phillimore retaliated, denouncing those who posed as reformers by "writing anonymous letters in newspapers, misrepresenting the state of the law, and calumniating those who were compelled to administer it".^[74] (It was a standard strategy among Church conservatives to insist that ecclesiastical problems were too complex for vocal critics to grasp and that careful deliberation was required to evolve workable solutions which – perhaps predictably –generally failed to materialise.) Phillimore explained that the relevant case, Fox v. the Bishop of Chester, made it impossible to intervene in any next-presentation purchase. Thirty years earlier, Edward Fox had purchased the right to appoint the next rector of Wilmslow in Cheshire, at a time when the current incumbent was literally on his deathbed. Arguing that this deal crossed the fine line that separated acquisition of the right to appoint to a clergyman from the outright purchase of a job in the Church, the Bishop of Chester, Edward Law, refused to institute the nominated successor. Fox sued, but in 1824 the Court of King's Bench supported the bishop in his view that the transaction was "grossly simoniacal".^[75] However, when the case came to appeal in the House of Lords a leisurely five years later, the Law Lords raised the ingenious quibble that there was no legal definition of a fatal illness. The incumbent had indeed been dangerously ill when Fox struck his bargain (at three o'clock in the afternoon), and he had certainly died eight hours later, but "it was impossible to say that the person might not have recovered, and impracticable to define what amount of illness was to be considered as necessarily fatal". Thus, at the moment when the sale of the advowson was concluded, nobody could be absolutely certain that the old rector was about to breathe his last.^[76] Had a miracle occurred, Edward Fox's purchase would have been neither more nor less sordid than any other sale of the right to present that involved a bet on clerical longevity. The result, so Phillimore argued, was that no bishop could question the integrity of a patron's presentation.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to understand why the installation of frail octogenarians was not blocked on other grounds. Bishops surely had both the power and the responsibility to ensure that an appointee was capable of doing the job – or so Osborne assumed. In the late eighteen-forties, the combative Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, had waged a campaign to block the institution to a parish in his diocese of the Reverend G.C. Gorham, whose views on baptism he regarded as heretical. Yet Phillpotts apparently did not concern himself with the health and strength of Sir William Molesworth's geriatric selection for St Ervan. Perhaps the Bishop of Salisbury felt that he lacked a secure reason to query the choice of John Baskett for Spetisbury. True, Baskett had been allowed to be non-resident in his previous parish, but that had been eighteen miles from his home in retirement at Wimborne Minster: Spetisbury was less than half that distance, and Baskett's lawyers might have pleaded that he could work his new living as a commuter. Edward Denison had his own problems with the modernisation process. In 1853, he was the target of press criticism for alleged misappropriation of diocesan funds, one of many examples of the embarrassing problem of windfall income not foreseen by the benefactors of distant yesteryear. Denison used his place in the House of Lords to deliver a lengthy protest against the charges, claiming that his income varied annually and insisting that in years that produced a bonanza, "it was one to the possession and use of which I was rightfully entitled".^[77] In fairness to Denison, he was believed to have given much of his income to charity, and he was certainly not a rich man when he died in 1854, at the early age of fifty-three.^[78] The Bishop of Salisbury was both a product and a prisoner of his times, as I am of mine and, as a historian, I have no right to accuse him of moral cowardice. It is likely that he was alarmed by the nomination of an octogenarian to a parish with a Catholic presence, but Denison would have recognised that any challenge to the combative Erle-Drax would be resisted. After a newspaper exchange of discourtesies in the summer of 1853, Osborne denounced the patron as "a mere vulgar bully".^[79]  Given that Erle-Drax would certainly have protested that he was as "rightfully entitled" to use his property in any way he chose as Denison was to lay exclusive claim to the income of his see, the bishop probably concluded that the larger interests of the Church would not be served by conflict between two of its prominent supporters. The slightest knowledge of the dilatory nature of ecclesiastical and legal procedures would also have ensured that the embarrassment of John Baskett's phantom appointment would disappear, along with the elderly incumbent himself, long before the legitimacy of any episcopal intervention might (or might not) be confirmed by the courts.

According to Bishop Magee, the situation was unchanged two decades later: "physical incapacity forms no legal ground of objection. A patron may present a clerk of 80 or 90 years of age to the largest and most important parish in the diocese, and yet the Bishop cannot refuse, on that ground, to institute him. … there is no sadder or bitterer moment in a Bishop's life than that in which he finds himself reluctantly compelled to give to such a clerk, presented by such a patron, the care and government of souls within his diocese. And yet, such is the present state of our laws ecclesiastical, that the Bishop must do this."^[80] The occasional scandals of forcing an incompetent geriatric on a parish as a cover for the disposal of the advowson might perhaps be brushed aside, but the larger embarrassment of private patronage in Church appointments proved surprisingly persistent in the face of the passage of time. In 1853, Phillimore introduced a bill to prevent the sale of next presentations. This was an unusually sweeping attempt to cut a clerical knot, and it was criticised for being too bold. One MP brandished a letter from an aggrieved purchaser who had spent £15,000 on an advowson and feared that his investment would be wiped out if Phillimore's bill passed. In any case, as was pointed out, the proposal came too late in the parliamentary session to have any realistic chance of becoming law, and the bill was allowed to lapse. He tried again the following year, this time limiting the prohibition to future transactions, only to encounter the same objections to interference with the rights of property, coupled with a general feeling that tinkering with next presentations did little to confront the anomalies of private patronage.

The story was repeated over the decades, and a detailed account lies beyond the scope of this Note. The unashamed sale of advowsons continued on a large scale. In 1874, Christopher Wordsworth, the veteran Bishop of Lincoln, deplored the "unblushing display, month after month, of an unholy traffic in spiritual things" even in the pages of the Ecclesiastical Gazette, widely regarded as the "semi-official" voice of the Church of England. Worsworth estimated that there were 170 livings for sale, while it was claimed that around two hundred purchasers were watching the market. "We have shut up the Slave-market at Zanzibar, but we have opened slave-markets of souls in London."^[81] However, his own attempt to block the induction of a suspect candidate the following year, the Great Coates case, led to a major defeat at law.^[82]  

In a more participatory era, bishops became more sensitive to the feelings of ordinary churchgoers. Archbishop Thomson of York admitted in 1870 that the sale of advowsons aroused "an amount of ill feeling in parishes which was beyond description".^[83] Two years later, Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter, acknowledged that "a great many good people looked upon it as a very wicked and wrong thing that offices in the Church should be, either directly or indirectly, put up for sale". Nonetheless, a few months later, he had no option but to induct an elderly "warming pan" not to some remote Cornish hamlet but as vicar of the port town of Falmouth.^[84] In 1874, Temple identified as "the worst evil of all" in the sale of advowsons as "the shock to the religious feeling of a great number of people, especially of the artizan class, and the lower middle class". Humble churchgoers felt "a personal humiliation when the advowson of the parish in which they live is sold; and I have no doubt at all that in that class a considerable number of quiet, religious people become Nonconformists simply from their hatred of what seems to them so exceedingly wrong in principle".^[85] Archbishop Tait half-apologetically explained in 1875 that "the Bishops feel strongly upon this subject, because they have peculiar facilities for ascertaining what the sentiments of the laity …. We necessarily mix much with the laity of all classes. It is our privilege to mix with those who are great landed proprietors and the distributors of lay patronage throughout the country; and we also mix with the different churchwardens and with large masses of persons in the middle classes who are not the proprietors of this sort of patronage, and we attach very great importance to the feelings of the great middle class of this country on this question."^[86] To this, it might be commented that, although the "great landed proprietors and the distributors of lay patronage" might not have spoken in the loudest voice, they certainly made their influence felt in more persuasive tones. 

From time to time, legislation was attempted, but the projects failed to overcome opposition because they could not secure enough parliamentary time to become law.  The Conservative MP Richard Assheton Cross was unsuccessful in his attempt to abolish next presentations in 1870.  The Bishop of Peterborough, William Connor Magee, secured a parliamentary enquiry in 1874 as a first step towards legislation for reform.^[87]  As Magee feared, hostile amendments to his subsequent bill reduced it to "the little end of nothing whittled down to a point" (interestingly, he seems to have used an Americanism here), forcing him to abandon his campaign.^[88] "Everybody admits that something must be done," said the Daily News in 1878; "but what can be done at present is only sufficient to open the whole question of patronage without settling it."^[89] In 1879, a Royal Commission recommended banning public auctions and all sales of next presentations. To eliminate those seeking a quick profit, no advowson should be resold within five years.  The scandal of elderly warming pans of the Spetisbury and Rougham variety could be eliminated by decreeing that bishops were not "compellable to institute to a benefice any clergyman who has been less than three years in holy orders, or who is over 70 years of age."^[90] Nothing came of these proposals.

Where Anglicans failed, their rivals would step in. A Quaker MP, Edward Leatham, delivered several detailed dissections of the abuse of advowsons from 1878 onwards, but he too failed to secure remedial legislation.^[91] Looking on from afar, an Anglican newspaper in Australia regretted that "corrupt and simoniacal dealings seem to have largely increased of late years, and the system has attained an organisation and dexterity which were certainly lacking in former days".^[92] Punch continued its mockery, publishing a song that satirised the patter of traders in advowsons. "A sphere of extensive or minor utility, / As in much work or little a man may rejoice, / According to energy, zeal, and ability: / You can all pay your money, and each take your choice. … Here's your Livings, with hope of immediate possession: / Whose present Incumbents no physic can save. / Here[,] rapid Decline gives you speedy succession; / There[,] an age of four-score, and one foot in the grave."^[93] Some reverend gentlemen – those outside the patronage magic circle – even resorted to direct action. In 1881, unbeneficed clergy formed what was in effect a trade union, the Curates' Alliance. Its representatives attempted to disrupt a number of auctions by asking awkward questions and shouting protests against the selling of souls. At Saffron Walden in 1882, an exasperated auctioneer bluntly threatened the reverend gentlemen: "They might find themselves going down the steps of that building involuntarily and very quickly if they persevered in obstructing the sale." The protesters fell silent, but the controversial advowson found no buyer that day.^[94] But their campaign was intermittent, and the trade in advowsons continued. In the eighteen-eighties, 'S.G.O.' was still repeating the complaints he had made three decades earlier, that parishes were traded "with no regard to the qualification of the individuals appointed to them". The advowson of a Norfolk parish had been sold at auction with "glowing" descriptions of the parsonage and the income. "It was knocked down for £450. The sale which preceded it was of a malting business".^[95]

Lord Cranborne attempted without success to ban next-presentation sales in 1896.^[96] Later that year and at the age of seventy-five, Frederick Temple was promoted to Canterbury in succession to the cautious Benson. Even before his enthronement, he insisted that the patronage issue must be tackled. "There was a strong feeling and it had grown very much during the last 20 years that the sale of advowsons was wrong in principle and ought not to be permitted." Yet his measured discussion of the challenge revealed, once again, that reformers were trying to square a circle, to eliminate "grave abuses" while recognising the property rights and respecting the integrity of what he called the "hereditary advowsons", those patrons who "exercised their rights, in the main, very carefully, very wisely, and with very good results". But Temple highlighted the astonishing fact that about one-sixth of the Church of England twelve thousand parishes "were on the market, and many of them were constantly bought and sold".^[97]  In 1898 the ecclesiastical lawyer C.Y. Sturge estimated that six hundred livings had been sold by self-presented incumbent patrons "in recent years".^[98] Legislation that placed severe limits on the trade in advowsons was finally passed that year, but their sale was not abolished outright. Perversely, as often happened when reformers tried to ameliorate an inherently bad system, the remaining patronage sales were implicitly legitimised. Ten years later, a commission appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that the sale of advowsons should continue, but only the Church would be allowed to buy them. This would inevitably force down their value – always assuming that the Church could find the cash, or would choose to convey it to propertied patrons rather than poor priests.  

Reformers claimed that the abuses could be eliminated without undermining Anglican patronage as a whole. This evaded the fundamental problem that advowsons were property and that, by definition, property could be bought and sold. As Temple recognised, "a great many good people looked upon it as a very wicked and wrong thing that offices in the Church should be, either directly or indirectly, put up for sale".^[99] The core objection was to the system itself: its abuses merely provided vivid illustrations. The right of appointment of incumbents to two-thirds of the parishes in England and Wales belonged to private patrons. The Duke of Devonshire owned forty-two livings. The spiritual guidance of the people of eight parishes was ultimately the responsibility of the Earl of Aylesford, who had been involved in a sensational high-life divorce case. Introducing his abortive bill to ban next-presentations in 1870, R.A. Cross insisted that "it was of the greatest possible advantage, not only to the Church but to the country, that laymen should hold advowsons as well as corporate bodies, and so long as that was the case advowsons must be the subject of sale like other property."^[100] When the Bishop Magee of Peterborough lobbied politicians to support his plans for reform in 1874, he found "every one very nervous about the subject, and awfully afraid of any damage to 'property'. They do not yet see that identifying property with nuisances is not the best way to preserve it."^[101]

The Royal Commission that reported in 1879 prefaced its relatively minor suggestions for reform by declaring "that the varied system of patronage, public and private, which now prevails, has the advantage of interesting in it all classes of the community, and of ensuring within reasonable limits the due representation of corresponding varieties of thought and opinion in the ministry of our national church."^[102] Of course, this was nonsense: advowsons provided opportunities not for "all classes of the community" but open only to those who had the money to purchase them. It was not surprising that Bishop Magee found it difficult to persuade the House of Lords to endorse reform of the system. It will also be recalled that the patrons of Spetisbury, St Ervan and Rougham had all been members of the House of Commons. The system was so deeply entrenched in the corridors of power that every proposal for change was harassed by quibbles and nibbled away by amendments.^[103] By the eighteen-eighties, as factions proliferated within the Church and solidified into partisan campaigning groups, the patrons had their own organisation which published pamphlets analysing and opposing proposed reforms.^[104] Indeed, Anglicans found it difficult to imagine any alternative. When they did, they tended to think laterally, contemplating the transfer of patronage to bishops or to diocesan appointment boards, the former centralising power to an undesirable extent while the latter carried the bureaucratic danger that the identikit Anglican vicar would become an apostle designed by a committee.^[105] Lord Shaftesbury, the Evangelical activist who possessed eight advowsons himself, was "quite sure that any attempt to substitute some other system for that which exists, would only tend to make matters worse". He strongly objected to any suggestion "that appointments to livings should be made a matter for popular election" and he could not find words to describe his antipathy to increasing the power of the bishops.^[106]

Mentally imprisoned in an ecclesiastical universe dominated by patronage, defenders of Anglican supremacy retreated into delusion and denial. The Earl of Harrowby was an elder statesman who was, in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography, "earnestly devoted" to the Established Church. In 1874, he persuaded himself that "the practical evils arising from the sale [of advowsons], in some shape or other, are much exaggerated" and that, accordingly, "sale in some form or other must exist. I believe it must be admitted and regulated".^[107] It was unlikely that much enthusiasm would be mustered to police a practice that was not perceived to contain major irregularities. Intellectually, Roundell Palmer, the first Earl of Selborne, was one of the most impressive legal statesmen of the nineteenth century. Yet his 1886 rebuttal of the case for disestablishment concluded with the unrealistic statement that the law should be amended "to prevent lay patrons from making a traffic of their patronage to the scandal and detriment of the Church (which, after all, not more than a small proportion of their number do, or have done)".^[108] The law was unlikely to be changed to oblige a grandee who pretended that there were only a few abuses in a fundamentally objectionable system. Reviewing the failure of his own campaign to outlaw the sale of advowsons, Bishop Magee concluded in 1881 "that this evil of traffic in livings is best attacked legislatively, by steadily whittling it down to smaller and smaller dimensions, until at last patrons may care far less about greatly diminished privileges, and the thing be finally abolished with comparatively little difficulty". No doubt this was a sound strategy, but its eventual and very long-term realisation depended upon securing those first steps in curtailment. Few parliamentarians subscribed to Magee's key belief that "property is the incident of a trust, and not trust the incident of a property".^[109] In 1894, the Archbishop of Canterbury, E.W. Benson, dismissed the subject in a bout of hand-wringing. "No one feels more strongly that the Trust of an Advowson ought never to have acquired a money value and that the right way of dealing with sales is to abolish them.... the future will be unable to realise that decent people could have lived under such a scheme. But I can't feel that as Archbishop it is my place to confiscate and set an example of confiscation."^[110] Where private patronage was concerned, property outweighed propriety. As late as 1898, when Parliament did finally place limits on the sale of patronage, Arthur Balfour assured MPs that "a Bill simply abolishing the sale of advowsons is not a Measure which it would be possible to recommend to the House".^[111]

THE COMPARISON WITH SCOTLAND As Archbishop Benson foresaw, the predominant response of hindsight must be astonishment that the advowson system, with all its inherent flaws, could have been tolerated for so long. Yet the absurdity of untrammelled private patronage would have been more clearly perceived had the operation of the English State Church been bleakly viewed in a wider British framework. Indeed, the way in which study of the Anglican Church is necessarily carried out in an English framework still tends to prevent historians – and particularly ecclesiastical historians – from seeing the full absurdity of its patronage system. To underline my point, I offer a simplified historiographical excursion. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, academic study of the United Kingdom that emerged in 1801 was largely carried out within a framework labelled 'English history', an approach that largely ignored Scotland and Wales, and conceptualised what it called the 'Irish Question' as a semi-external 'problem'. The growth of higher education after the Second World War was accompanied by increased research in all parts of the island group which produced autochthonous histories of Ireland, Scotland and Wales – that is, debates about past events in those countries were studied in their own right, and not as a minor-key adjunct to the history of a predominant partner. Research in Irish history in particular benefited from the work of the country's diaspora, who placed the experience of their ancestral homeland in wider perspectives.^[112] A sense that there was a need to integrate these discrete areas of academic ferment led the historian J.G.A. Pocock to issue a call for "British History: a Plea for a New Subject". Yet it is striking to note that this argument in favour of an 'Atlantic archipelago' approach appeared as late as 1975.^[113] Pocock's manifesto attracted considerable attention, but the opportunity to which he drew attention also tended to obstruct its fulfilment. Put simply, in terms of academic output, there was now so much published work on Irish, Scottish and Welsh history that it became challenging to identify common themes, and sometimes overwhelming to process the available material and evidence. Half a century later, the concept of 'English history' still underlies much of the study of the British past.^[114]

In the case of the Church of England, it may not seem a problem if historians portray the bishops of Carlisle and Durham as functioning at the outer edge of the known universe since, with the exception of a single offshore diocese in the Isle of Man, the institution itself exclusively operated within England and Wales.^[115] But the narrow focus does leave open a gaping void in the appreciation of contextual significance. In particular, it may be assumed that, even now, very few practitioners of 'English history' know much more about the Disruption of the Church of Scotland than the date, 1843, and a curt acknowledgement of the numbers involved – a sort of 'Battle of Hastings, 1066, Norman Conquest' notch in a general timeline. In fact, the Disruption was a seismic event with repercussions across the English-speaking world: 470 of the 1,200 ministers of the Kirk withdrew to form the Free Church of Scotland, turning their backs upon job security and removing their families from the comfortable home life of the Presbyterian Manse. 'They come! They come!" shouted the Edinburgh crowd as the seceders walked out of the General Assembly (the present continuous was not then in Scots usage). The explosion was hailed as more of the beginning of new epoch in Scotland's history, even to assert the arrival of a Millennium, than the occasion of a mere party split.^[116]

What points up the importance of the Disruption to the flawed values and structure of the Church of England is that it was a revolt against the principle and practice of private patronage, the right of lairds to force their chosen minister on mutinous congregations. At various times in the past, there had been tension between this property right and the entitlement of Presbyterian parishes to choose their own minister by issuing a 'Call'. In practice, it was possible to view the Call as something of an equivalent to the farcical congé d'élire, which empowered the chapters of English cathedrals to elect a new bishop – and directed them whom to vote for. However, the post-1815 political reform movement north of the Border expressed itself by reasserting the autonomy of the people in spiritual matters, posing potential conflicts with patrons. (The dissidents' sense of their own inherent rectitude was underlined by the adoption of the term 'intrusion' to describe the operation of private patronage.) The post-1832 Whig ministry was reluctant to become involved, and privately urged the Kirk to resolve the matter itself. In 1834, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed the Veto Act, which gave congregations the power to override the selection of objectionable ministers. However, five years later, the House of Lords declared the legislation to be ultra vires, and insultingly dismissed the Call as an outdated fiction. In this instance, the involvement of a 'British' element was only nominally the upper house of Parliament since it was in fact the decision of two judges, only one of whom had any knowledge of Scotland. The invalidation of the Veto Act, compounded by the refusal of Peel's Conservative ministry to intervene, culminated in the fracturing of the Kirk in 1843.

Here, then, is a stark contrast between the two Establishments that points up the supine acquiescence by Anglicans in the permeation of property rights, with all their abuses, in their Church, compared with the Scots insistence on making the legitimacy of patronage itself an issue capable of breaking the Kirk. The point of principle may be further underlined by noting that, in reality, there were very few irreconcilable disputes over the selection of ministers across Scotland. The Veto Act was invoked ten times during its brief operation, remarkably few instances given the disputatious nature of Presbyterianism. There is little evidence that patronage was traded, and those who exercised it generally avoided confrontational disputes since they regarded themselves as entrusted with an inherited position at the apex of their deferential communities: the essence of patronage was paternalism. Nor were congregations necessarily qualified or even fair judges of the capacity of a potential pastor. The Earl of Aberdeen, Peel's Foreign Secretary, was an anglicised Scot who sought compromise to resolve the Ten Years' Conflict. He had his own difficulties as patron of Methlick, the local parish of his home at Haddo House. Aberdeen's nomination of a minister in 1839 was criticised on the grounds that his candidate was guilty of immorality. An exhaustive investigation – conducted by the congregation itself – dismissed these charges, but an irreconcilable minority continued to argue that a minister about whom there were unsubstantiated rumours was not acceptable. Aberdeen's refusal to back down indicated that a concerned patron could act as a disinterested referee in the face of an intolerant and irresponsible faction.^[117]  Indeed, Thomas Chalmers, the driving force behind the Disruption, was no democrat and feared popular election of ministers. He did not wish to abolish patronage, but believed that the Veto Act created a mutually restraining balance: parishes were protected from the imposition of unsuitable ministers; patrons were reminded of the constraints upon their choice – limitations that were virtually non-existent in England -- thereby ensuring that a single person or institution accepted the duty of making a sound nomination. Presbyterian practice might seem inherently democratic but within it lurked the Calvinist theory of the godly elect: the Kirk needed to find some balance that would locate and legitimise the sanctity of the saved. It is hardly necessary to point out that no such theological debate surrounded the uses and abuses of advowsons in England.

Clearly, there were very different political, social and theological approaches to the issue of private patronage in the two kingdoms. There were, too, important distinctions in structure and context. The Church of Scotland had representative and consultative institutions at every level, from Kirk Sessions in the parishes to groupings of clergy in presbyteries, through regional synods to the crowning dignity of the General Assembly, and all of these were decision-making bodies in their own spheres. The Church of England had virtually no parallel machinery. Parish vestries essentially handled local government issues. Nobody would have dreamt of asking their opinions about liturgy and, when their administrative duties were transferred to elected councils, they mostly became moribund. An ad hoc hotchpotch of diocesan conferences developed between 1866 and 1882 – by which year only three bishops still resisted them – but they were largely talking shops. After a century and a half of silence, the Convocation of Canterbury was actually allowed to discuss Church questions from the eighteen-fifties, and the Province of York followed more cautiously in the following decade. An unofficial body calling itself the Church Congress also emerged at about the same time. Canterbury agreed to add a House of Laity in 1885, but with the proviso that it could not be consulted on doctrinal issues.^[118] Such a restriction would have been unthinkable in Scotland. None of these Anglican gatherings challenged the Erastian supremacy of Parliament, despite obvious discontent within the Church at the failures of legislators to respond to major problems. Not until a devolved system of limited self-government, the Church Assembly, was first met in 1920 did it become possible for dedicated clergy and concerned laity to initiate action on their own behalf. Thus it was that, in England, patronage scandals never became patronage issues. It was obvious enough that irregularities like Spetisbury aroused that indefinable and often ephemeral sentiment called 'public opinion' but Archbishop Thomson's acknowledgement in 1870 of the hurt caused by the sale of advowsons in the parishes concerned seems to have been the first instance of a prelate openly recognising the importance of the feelings of the men and women in the pews.

The representative and decision-making structures of the Kirk were all the more potent because the institution could still be seen as embodying the Scottish nation at prayer. There had been earlier secessions from the Church of Scotland, but on a relatively small scale, and there were enclaves around the country where Catholicism had survived and Episcopalianism lingered. But, overall, the Established Church north of the Border retained its hold on the mass of the people to a much greater extent than in its counterpart England. There, a religious census in 1851 revealed that almost half of those who worshipped attended Nonconformist chapels (and many more stayed away altogether).^[119] The disruption of the English Church – as distinct from its surviving rump, the Church of England – had long antedated the split in Scotland. In short, the elements that would eventually have repudiated the irregularities of the advowson system had left to become Dissent in the seventeenth century or joined the Methodists in the eighteenth.

Linked to the question of the comprehensiveness of Church membership was the more fundamental issue of authority. Chalmers declared in 1843 that "though we quit the Establishment, we go out on the Establishment principle".^[120] In a sense, although the massive secession of the Disruption was an astonishing achievement, it fell dramatically short of the success its projectors had dreamed of.  The aim had been to persuade so many ministers – and laity – to leave the Kirk that the remaining structure would have collapsed, making it possible for the seceders to return to lay claim to a purified successor. The Scottish nation would assert itself through the renewal of its Kirk. The key here was not simply a sense of rectitude but an assumption that spiritual authority rested with those who had walked out. By contrast with this bottom-up approach, in the Church of England, authority rested with Parliament and flowed from the top down. The Oxford Movement strove to find some alternative source to which it might appeal, at least on doctrinal matters. Keble and Pusey saw Anglicanism as a branch of the universal Church, and believed that authority could be found in the Fathers of the Church and the decrees of its early Councils. But the Fathers sometimes disagreed and the pronouncements of the Councils were not always clear. What institution could clarify obscurity and police disagreement? Scottish Presbyterians turned inward to seek authority in their own consciences. In England, where the intentions of Parliament were ultimately interpreted by lay judges in secular courts, those who sought the reassurance of spiritual certainty could only look outward and turn to Rome. The vast majority who remained had no choice but to accept the constraints and shortcomings of parliamentary control. One of those flaws was the entrenched position of the property rights inherent in advowsons. Hence the Scottish comparison tells us that the problem about advowsons for the Church of England lay not in their 'abuses' or the 'scandals' associated with them but was to be identified in the much more fundamental problem that the system of private property, and its concomitant features of purchase and sale, constituted a fundamental and incurable element in English (and Welsh) Anglicanism. (The geographical limitations are important here, not so much in relation to Scotland, as with regard to the 'daughter' churches overseas which never allowed such an abomination to evolve.) Relatively few flashpoint confrontations had been enough to trigger the Disruption in Scotland because they touched upon fundamental principles and perceived identify of the Kirk, but in Victorian England repeated scandals were resentfully accepted as part of a wider framework of privilege, Thus Auchterarder, Marnoch and Strathbogie became place-names symbolically embedded in the collective memory of Scottish Presbyterianism, but Spetisbury, St Ervan and Rougham left no ripples in the Anglican tradition. Scotland, Bishop Wordsworth warned in 1874 "teaches us this lesson. If we neglect to adopt measures for a salutary reform in Church Patronage, we may have cause ere long to rue a revolution with regard to it".^[121] The lesson was ignored, but the revolution never happened.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ADVOWSON SYSTEM  One of the more eccentric manifestations of Englishness is the argument that, although an institution or a process may seem bizarre, it can be defended on the grounds that 'it works'. Were there advantages in the advowson system that outweighed occasional abuses? "At present there were nearly two-thirds of the patronage of the livings in England vested in private families," remarked an MP who opposed Phillimore's attempt to abolish next-presentation sales in 1853: he challenged the reformers by asking "whether that patronage was not honestly administered?"^[122] In his comments of 1872, Bishop Frederick Temple did not accept that all patrons discharged their responsibilities in a disinterested spirit. "Many were led to hold that the most important consideration was to use their patronage for the benefit of their friends and families, and that the duty of selecting the best ministers was but a secondary matter." Indeed, he seemed to denounce the entire system of private patronage. "It was no answer to point to the results, and to say that they were not so bad as might have been expected…. It was no answer to this to say that under the system many worthy men were put into proper positions; it was no answer to say that clergy so preferred did their work well."^[123] In fact, patrons acquired livings for a variety of reasons, noble and base: in 1891, Gladstone purchased the advowson of Liverpool, apparently with the aim of making some return to the city of his birth. (It was pointed out that the gesture appeared to undermine his warnings about the imminent menace of disestablishment.) When the dubious financier Ernest Hooley declared bankruptcy in 1898, he listed three advowsons among his assets. For a time these seem to have been vested in one of his companies that manufactured the meat extract, Bovril.

Yet Church spokesmen continued to argue that its system of mixed patronage – parochial clergy being selected by individuals, institutions, the government and the bishops – "ensures that men of very different types and views will be appointed".^[124] That claim was perhaps more credible in reference to theological opinions than to social origins. In fact, provision for appointment of clergy by individuals prosperous to own advowsons reinforced the class bias within the Anglican Church. Even when patrons resisted the temptation of nepotism, they were inclined to choose incumbents in their own image, especially if they were squires who sought congenial neighbours. In 1898, T.C Fry, a headmaster and later a cathedral dean, blamed the system for one of the great scandals of the Church, the hard-working clergymen still a mere curates at the age of fifty, "who would, one is reasonably sure, long before have secured promotion had they had influential connexions.… As long as patronage is free from any control, direct or indirect, as long as without control patronage and property are united, so long will social standing have the power to turn the scale against merit, ability, and service."^[125] As Archbishop of York in the nineteen-thirties, William Temple was hugely amused by an exchange with a county magnate who reported that he had planned to present an excellent candidate to a vacant living of which he was patron. "How did you find him?", Temple asked. "Advertised for him in Horse and Hound – capital fellow!" was the reply. The problem that some of these random selections were unsuitable was tacitly ignored. Nonetheless, we should note that many devoted and hard-working clergy owed their preferments to private patronage, although whether they outweighed the undesirables was a question of subjective clerical arithmetic that is beyond this study. 

Another – and generally overlooked – advantage of the private patronage system is that it empowered women, a category of humanity otherwise totally excluded from Anglican decision-making. Queen Victoria made her views known about nominations to senior bishoprics, and it would have been a foolhardy Prime Minister who appointed a Dean of Windsor against her wishes.^[126] Otherwise, ownership of an advowson was the only way in which women could influence any appointment in the Church of England: in Dagenham there were five such presentations between 1801 and 1857. Unfortunately, female involvement in the process was not universally welcomed. On the eve of the First World War, when the extension of the franchise to women was on the political horizon, the Westminster Gazette complained that "the maiden aunt, spinster ladies of all ages, and the wealthy wives of clergymen are usually the readiest purchasers of these rights of presentation. When the incumbent dies they present the man for whom the purchase was made. Nephews who would never secure by force of character or native ability the responsibility of a living are pitchforked into onerous positions. Rich wives nominate their husbands, and frequently these are quite unsuitable for clerical work."^[127] Whether women were worse judges of personnel matters than men it is impossible to say. We should also consider the possibility that some presentations formally made by male patrons were in reality dictated by their womenfolk.^[128]

Gradually, the patronage system was pared back. In 1898, sales of advowsons were banned except where they formed part of a package with a landed estate. The subject was briefly mentioned at the 1908 'Pan-Anglican Congress', the ten-yearly global gathering popularly known as the Lambeth Conference. Delegates were allocated to discussion groups, to give those who had travelled across the world. An Australian bishop, Charles Riley spoke in what we would now call a 'workshop', sidelined from the main agenda, leading discussion in a session on a miscellany of topics, such as the parson's freehold and methods of appointing bishops. No doubt it was interesting to learn how the Bishop of Bunbury had been chosen by secret ballot, but nobody seriously expected that such a device would be adopted in England. "Who dared defend the sale of advowsons; or the sale of next presentations?" Riley demanded. "The traffic had been a terrible scandal at home, and no amount of argument would ever convince him that it was not a disgraceful thing to sell a trust like patronage."  The Bishop of Perth was not some wild colonial boy who failed to grasp the essence of Anglican culture. He was an Englishman, a Cambridge graduate who had carried with him to Western Australia his Imperial patriotism and his devotion to Freemasonry. Finding clergymen for the largest diocese in the Anglican Communion was a challenge – Western Australia covered a million square miles – and his task was not made easier when the colony was hit by a gold rush and a massive influx of rootless population two years after his arrival. Yet his antipodean experience had led him to adopt a point of view wholly different from the mind-set 'at home', which would go no further than deploring the system and toying with half-hearted proposals to phase it out.^[129] A commission appointed by Archbishop Davidson reported in 1908, recommending that the sale of advowsons should continue, but with their purchase confined to the Church. This would acknowledge the rights of property while tending to reduce sale prices by eliminating competition. It was a neat solution, but one that assumed unlimited funds on the part of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. It was also open to the objection that the Church had more pressing uses for its cash. The trade continued: in 1914, the Westminster Gazette disapprovingly reported an advertisement: "Advowson For Sale – Nice, country parish, 2 1/2 miles from a station, and 26 from London. Net income nearly £500, and good house. Incumbent aged 76."^[130]

However, the scaling-down of the abuse coincided with the emergence of an ambitious movement among younger elements that sought to assert the leadership of the Church of England on social issues, idealists to whom it was not the individual scandals of the advowson system that were objectionable but the simple fact of its existence. At the time of the First World War, "a new moral sense was emerging, and these abuses were seen to involve ethical and spiritual principles that could not now be disregarded if the Church was to be qualified to preach of moral duty and responsibility to the nation". The enthusiasts of the 'Life and Liberty' movement refused to accept "that the right to present a priest to a living … could be hawked round the property market like a farm or a suburban villa" was a mere anomaly of no importance.^[131] Nor were these impatient Anglican idealists alone in their concern. The philosopher-statesman Lord Haldane, whose Scottish background made him a detached observer, noted in 1924 "a very reckless sense, among a certain number of owners of patronage, of their rights of dealing with patronage as if it were mere private property".^[132]

Indeed, by the early twentieth century, there was a general desire among Church leaders to bring the issue to some final resolution, but even when these good intentions could frame specific proposals for reform, they encountered the intractable problem of the parliamentary logjam. One of the most practical arguments for Irish Home Rule was that Westminster simply did not have time to deal in detail with the needs of the sister island. Similarly, the enlarged political agenda that required law-makers to deal with a wide range of legal, social and imperial issues left inadequate parliamentary space for the Church: between 1888 and 1913, 217 ecclesiastical reform bills were introduced, but only 33 passed into law.^[133] The concession of a limited form of devolved self-government through the creation of the Church Assembly in 1920 enabled concerned clergy and laity to confront the patronage issue without the drag of the interested parties in Lords and Commons. The Assembly's proposals still had to be carried through Parliament, and the solution to the advowsons issue that it proposed in 1923 would be a test case of its practical autonomy. Archbishop Randall Davidson was characteristically careful in urging the House of Lords to endorse the Assembly's amendments to the 1898 legislation. He invoked the standard language of outrage: among "the so-called blemishes, or even scandals (for that word is sometimes used) that attend a certain part of our Church administration in connection with the State the possibility of the sale of an advowson, as such, has been found to be a stumbling block, a difficulty and a blemish upon our life which we have long been anxious to remove. By this Measure we propose to abolish in future days the recurrence of that which has caused so much anxiety, so much pain, and, occasionally, so much actual wrong in regard to the possession of advowsons."  The owner of the right to present to a benefice "shall be able to exercise that right not once but twice after this Measure becomes law before his power to sell the advowson actually comes to an end". The aim of the reform, he confided, was "really to abolish the sale of advowsons, as such, not at once but after a little time". This hardly pointed to an overnight revolution: if a patron successively appointed two young but long-lived clergymen, the advowson might still be marketable in the twenty-first century. "The sale of the cure of souls will soon be an abuse of the past," wrote Archbishop Garbett in 1947.^[134] Fortunately, the phased transmutation of a patron's advowson into a largely honorific connection with the parish was a compromise that satisfied an increasingly secular and democratic Parliament. The Church Assembly took a further step in 1931, giving parochial church councils the right of consultation before a patron formally nominated a candidate for preferment. (Many patrons already informally consulted churchwardens.) In terms of lay participation at parochial level, this brought the Anglican Church roughly to the point that the Kirk had reached with the Veto Act ninety-seven years earlier. Parishioners were not given the formal power to block an unwelcome nomination but, in practice, it would be counter-productive for a patron to defy their objections, especially since the 1931 Measure (as the Assembly's  enactments were termed) also conferred broader powers upon bishops to block unsuitable appointments.^[135]

Even if the Church's twentieth-century confrontation with the scandal of private patronage was marked by caution, there were wider economic and cultural changes that undermined the system of Victorian times. In relation to a growing population, by the nineteen-twenties there was a marked shortage of available personnel: far from clergy seeking livings, it was now the case that parishes were crying out for rectors and vicars, while curates – especially where they were most needed, in urban areas – had become a precious commodity. Crucially, too, clerical incomes had collapsed, as inflation and reduced tithe rent charges took their toll. The nineteen-twenties were a particularly difficult time, especially for incumbents in country districts. Not only were they still saddled with the maintenance costs of large parsonages set in grounds that required the services of a gardener – properties that later in the century would be sold – but they were usually also burdened with the expense of maintaining a car to get around their parishes.^[136] Indeed, most rural clergy were now serving several communities, and the mergers meant that patrons had to take 'turns' to make use of their right of nomination. In earlier centuries, Oxford and Cambridge colleges had collected advowsons to provide career opportunities for their students and to ensure some turnover in personnel among their dons. But from 1882, colleges mostly ceased to be formally Anglican societies, and many evolved into agnostic communities that resented the historical obligation to choose clergy for distant villages.^[137] There were also fewer private patrons. Twentieth-century taxation policies, landed estates – the only legitimate vehicle for the sale of patronage under the 1898 reforms – ceased to be attractive to investors. In 1958, it was observed that the break-up of family estates and "the detachment of particular families from a parish" had encouraged the transfer of patronage to bishops or diocesan appointment boards.^[138] Meanwhile, advowsons became the target for a different sort of institution, partisan trusts that acquired livings to ensure the appointment of Anglo-Catholic or Low Church incumbents. The defence of "the patronage trusts which existed on both sides of the Church" was that their selections provided "such reasonable continuity in Churchmanship as would prevent the violent upheaval of a parish, and the dislocation of work, which frequently constituted so grave a scandal in their Church life" – as had happened at Upminster in 1904.^[139] One result  – apparently unforeseen – of the 1923 legislation that phased out the sale of advowsons was an increase in sales as indifferent patrons decided to cash in their assets. As a result, "the price has gone down so rapidly that they have become the prey of partisans". As parishes became mere counters in a factional board game, it became harder to defend private patronage as a disinterested exercise in Olympian choice. One of the earliest practitioners of this practice had been the noted Cambridge Evangelical, Charles Simeon, whose Trustees had gained a head start over their Oxford Movement rivals. In 1932, Hensley Henson, the combative Bishop of Durham, published a pamphlet attacking these combines for creating – as he saw it -- alternative focuses of loyalty within the Church. Never keen to take prisoners in ecclesiastical controversy, Henson engaged in some savage word-play on 'Simeon' and 'simony'. However, the Evangelicals, who controlled  the majority of the captured advowsons, were reluctant to forego their advantage.^[140] Nonetheless, Henson's demand that patronage trusts should be outlawed represented yet another damaging attack upon an outdated system.^[141]

As advowsons became a less pressing problem in the Anglican present, so too they mysteriously vanished from accounts of the Anglican past. Histories of the nineteenth-century Church of England tell much about the Oxford Movement and new Biblical criticism of Essays and Reviews, and there is careful analysis of internal reform and external challenges.  We know a good deal about the episcopal high command, but it remains relatively uncommon to encounter discussion of the methods by which the Church's front-line troops were selected. As a result, there is virtually no recognition of the serious flaws that were inherent in a parochial appointments system based on untrammelled patronage. Biographies of Church leaders showed them wrestling with minute theological questions or confronting the massive financial demands of church-building programmes, but such works rarely indicated concern about next presentations and they certainly never mentioned Spetisbury. Sometimes this may have been because the evidence did not exist. Randall Davidson's biography of his father-in-law, a labour of love that took him nine years, says nothing about patronage probably because, during the crucial mid-Victorian century in which he was successively Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait did not treat the issue as his first priority. Tait supported Magee's attempt to curb the sale of advowsons, but his principal concern in 1874-5 lay with the attack on High Church principles in the Public Worship Bill. His praise for "the excellent way in which lay patronage is generally administered" may have been a tactical ploy to reassure the House of Lords that reform was not intended to lead to abolition, but it hardly reflects a driving desire to tackle the glaring problems.^[142]

More often, we may suspect that the fact that the biographies of Anglican prelates were penned by fellow clerics may account for the silence on this issue. Davidson himself told the House of Lords in 1924 that the sale of advowsons was "a blemish upon our life which we have long been anxious to remove", but the impressively detailed biography by his former chaplain, G.K.A. Bell, made no mention of the subject.^[143] Soon after his appointment to Southwark, Bishop Garbett was outraged by an advertisement offering the sale of a parish of 25,000 people that was said to be "in a state of spiritual destitution". Garbett became the first bishop in almost half a century to threaten to refuse induction to any clergyman whom he suspected of having purchased his benefice. No doubt he was on reasonably safe ground: any reverend gentleman seeking Framley Parsonage in 1920 would hardly invest his money in south London. The future Archbishop's biographer, Charles Smyth, gave detailed consideration to his thirteen years at Southwark, which Smyth regarded as the most fruitful period of the future Archbishop's career, but he made no mention of an episode that surely defined both Garbett's views and his methods. Of course, biography depends upon omission, or at the very least requires selection, but it is nonetheless noteworthy that so many solid and impressive works omit all allusion to patronage issues.^[144] A more striking example comes from the 1992 thematic discussion of the work of William Temple by the theologian John Kent, who was himself an ordained minister in the Methodist Church. Kent contrasted Temple's ambitious schemes to modernise Anglicanism with earlier reform movements. "The idea of modernising the Church of England had attracted people throughout the nineteenth century, but for most of them church reform meant little more than doing away with 'abuses' …. The abolition of 'abuses', the sale of livings, for example, fitted into the popular early Victorian political idea of efficiency, and answered a rising demand that the state church should justify its privileges. Temple's idea of modernisation was much wider than this".^[145] Kent's use of inverted commas had the unfortunate and perhaps unintended consequence of seeming to make light of the flaws of the patronage system. More seriously, he seemed to imply that Victorian efficiency and the Church's determination to justify its supremacy resulted in the solution of problems that, as has been demonstrated, it largely failed to tackle.

"Some persons may say, Why bring these things to light?", Bishop Wordsworth acknowledged when he denounced the sale of benefices in 1874. "Why not throw a veil over them? Why encourage obloquy and swell clamour against the Church?" His reply was that "they shew themselves openly in noonday. They parade themselves before the eye. To attempt to disguise them is to encourage them."^[146] A century and a half later, my defence for dragging advowsons back into the light is precisely the reverse. The patronage system has all but disappeared from the writing of Victorian history, leaving a gap without which it is difficult to appreciate the reasons for the robust survival of Nonconformity, or the sullenly agnostic rejection of the Anglican Church by the masses. Yet it is possible to go further in justifying the rediscovery of advowsons than simply to plead that they constitute another minor element in the eccentric tapestry of England's Established Church. Characterisation of the excesses of the system by terms such as 'abuses' and 'scandals', with or without belittling inverted commas, may miss the point that the inherent commercialisation of private patronage was an embodied feature of the Church, something that was so firmly concreted into the ecclesiastical structure that it was impossible to eradicate, and hence generally preferable to ignore. Yet there is no reason to assume – as, I suspect, was the conclusion of many who converted to Rome – that this permeation of the intractable rights of property in itself proved that the much vaunted Anglican via media produced an institution that was necessarily boneless, flaccid and devoid of integral principle. The system was confined to England and Wales, and never took root in the Church's overseas offshoots. The early nineteenth-century Church of England was marked by the rampant selfishness and brazen corruption of the powerful and socially dominant minority that controlled its offices and assets. But other scandals could be defined, controlled and ultimately eliminated. Pluralism and non-residence were dealt with by legislation, nepotism made unacceptable by the mobilisation of hostile public opinion.^[147] By contrast, the advowson system was not an excrescence, no mere accidental encrustation upon a holy and a healthy structure. Rather, it was fundamental to the Anglican Church in England and Wales. Its existence, its survival and its scandals go a long way to explaining why so many English and Welsh people saw the Church of England as nothing more than a privileged racket.

ENDNOTES I owe warm thanks to Philip Williamson for his help in identifying source material. As ever, I am grateful to Andrew Jones for his shrewd and helpful comments.

^[1] As argued in this essay, advowsons have been largely ignored by historians, and the scandals and abuses associated with them seem to have been buried. For that reason, I have used the Endnotes to quote contemporary discussions of the problems, sometimes at length. Newspaper quotation has been taken from various sources, including three useful online archives maintained by National Libraries of Wales (Welsh Newspapers), Australia (Trove) and New Zealand (PapersPast). The Welsh newspapers are useful as many of them obviously printed press agency reports. The Australia and New Zealand newspapers (the former in particular) filled their columns by reprinting articles from the British and Irish press, some of which are not easily traced.  In drawing attention to the subject of advowsons, I am well aware that there is much still to be studied in press, pamphlet and periodical discussion, as well as extensive material in parliamentary debates.

^[2] Self-nomination to a benefice should be seen in the wider context of lobbying for advancement in the Church, which remained common practice until the mid-nineteenth-century. W.T. Gibson, "'Unreasonable and Unbecoming': Self-Recommendation and Place-Seeking in the Church of England, 1700-1900", Albion, xxvii (1995), 43-63. In 1845, the Reverend M.A. Gathercole presented (appointed) himself as vicar of the Fenland town of Chatteris. He had gone recklessly into debt to purchase the advowson. In 1850, he was declared bankrupt and the income of his living was 'sequestered' (seized to pay his creditors). He was reduced to a curate's stipend but remained the incumbent until 1877. Gathercole was a confrontational and divisive personality who reduced his congregation in a town of 4,000 people to about 250. It is unlikely that any independent appointments process would have chosen him. Ged Martin, "Michael Augustus Gathercole (c. 1802-1886) Controversial Anglican Cleric": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/168-michael-augustus-gathercole-c-1802-1886-controversial-anglican-cleric. A key word search in the 1870 edition of Crockford's Clerical Directory indicates that over five hundred incumbents had presented themselves to their benefices. 

^[3] Abuses are briefly discussed in D. Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church (1968), 12-13; O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 2 (2nd ed., 1972), 208-11. Although still useful on wider issues, W.L. Mathieson, English Church Reform… (London, 1923), 6-7 disposes of the sale of advowsons in a single sentence and a short supporting footnote. Perhaps the most blatant aspect of the trade was the sale of sinecure rectories, which paid comfortable stipends but carried no duties of any kind. When Shorwell on the Isle of Wight (annual value £478) was put up for auction in 1857, the Daily News commented that it "must present unusual attractions for a clergyman who is not fond of hard work". Quoted Pembrokeshire Herald, 25 September 1857. Such advertisements were not rarities but formed a steady stream that was damaging to the Anglican Church. 

^[4] There was a partial exception at the attempted sale in December 1864 of the advowson of Pickworth in Lincolnshire, which the auctioneer promised "formed an agreeable sphere for clerical usefulness". This was a curious claim, since the parish was home to fewer than 300 people. However, the rest of the promotion from the rostrum was conventional: Pickworth was worth £400 a year, the location was healthy, there was "a comfortable stone-built rectory house" and "it was adjacent to the domains of several noblemen, and gentlemen of rank". The auctioneer "added, as an inducement to purchasers, that the present incumbent was an old gentleman eighty years of age" and the purchaser could "calculate upon having a very speedy right of nomination to the benefice". The failure of the advowson to reach the reserve price of £4,000 was attributed to "to the dullness which usually prevailed just before Christmas". Empire (Sydney), 7 March 1865, from an unidentified British newspaper. It seems that the advowson was sold to the Reverend J.N. Andrews, who was able to present himself in 1867. 

^[5] Hansard, 6 July 1853:  https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1853/jul/06/simony-law-amendment-bill. Phillimore's sentiments were repeated almost word-for-word by William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough in 1874: "we are, of course, all of us familiar with the manner in which the clerical agents who sell these benefices puff their wares. We know only too well the announcements of 'eligible livings', with 'charming neighbourhood', 'good society and bracing air' to strengthen the purchaser for the 'light duty attaching to the cure, with its 'good trout stream' and 'adjacent covert', and the 'incumbent in advanced years', and – worst of all –  the ominous announcement of 'immediate possession', which means in nine cases out of ten, immediate breach or evasion of the laws against simony." Two decades had passed between the two statements. Hansard,  21 April 1874: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1874/apr/21/motion-for-a-select-committee.

^[6] Hansard, 13 July 1853: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1853/jul/13/simony-law-amendment-bill. Viscount Goderich sat in the House of Commons because he held a courtesy title. He would later become Marquess of Ripon, sat in Liberal cabinets from 1861 to 1908. Goderich condemned the trade in advowsons: "A system of this nature, by which a man was able to buy the next presentation to a living, and thus provide a means of livelihood for a son who might be too ugly to go into the army, or too stupid to go to the bar, was surely calculated to reflect discredit upon the Church." (The notion that good looks were a prerequisite for a military career is charming.) In 1854, Goderich described a typical sale process: "The patron of a living wanted money; he wrote to his solicitor in London directing him to sell the next presentation, and there were brokers in this city whose chief business it was to conduct such sales. The solicitor and the broker met and discussed the age of the incumbent; they counted up his infirmities; they considered his diseases; and they described the pleasant situation of the parsonage house, and the little there was to do. In short, they carefully went into every question except the fitness of the person to be presented for the sacred trust about to be sold. The purchaser made the best bargain he could, and the seller got all the money that it was possible for him to obtain." Hansard, 22 March 1854: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1854/mar/22/simony-law-amendment-bill#S3V0131P0_18540322_HOC_13. Goderich / Ripon would become a notable aristocratic convert to the Church of Rome.

^[7] A. White, ed., The Letters of S.G.O. … Published in The Times, 1844-1888 (2 vols, London 1888), i, 392-3 (The Times, 1 July 1853). Osborne had also heard of cases where an aged incumbent had agreed to appoint the new patron's choice as his successor (or even, in the case of self-nomination, the new patron himself) as his assistant. The "so-called curate" would then immediately move into the parsonage house, with "only a year or two to wait for the difference between his stipend and the whole proceeds of the incumbency". The Times, 15 July 1852. One such arrangement was at Rivenhall in Essex, a parish worth £950 a year. The incumbent, the Reverend John Lewis, was also rector of Ingatestone, twenty miles away, where he had been appointed in 1796. Choosing to live at Ingatestone, Lewis visited Rivenhall twice a year to preach (one of these occasions probably being the collection of his tithes) but never resided there. In 1830, the next presentation to Rivenhall was sold to the Reverend Bradford Hawkins, who was appointed curate and lived in the rectory. He had to wait twenty-three years to succeed Lewis, but was so confident of his position that he toured the continent in 1840 and purchased valuable stained glass for the church. There was no secret about the arrangement. White's Directory of Essex (1848, 178-9) described the Rivenhall parsonage as "a large and handsome mansion … occupied by the curate (and future rector)". To complicate matters, Hawkins was also vicar of Henham, 35 miles away, where his duties were undertaken by a curate. It goes without saying that Hawkins possessed private means, even though Lewis did keep him waiting for his rectory an inconveniently long time. E.E. Wilde, Ingatestone and the Essex Great Road … (London, 1913), 189-190. In 1898, an ecclesiastical lawyer stated that it was possible to buy an advowson with a secret stipulation that the vendor should pay interest on the purchase money until the vacancy occurred. I have not seen any reference to this practice earlier in the century. C.Y. Sturge in C. Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church (London, 1898), 203. Sturge's essay, "Reform of Patronage" (198-236) offers an important overview of the subject in a historical context.

^[8] Punch, xxiii (17 July 1852), 32.

^[9] Punch, xxvii (1854), 216. Punch repeated the point in 1870, when an advertisement for a valuable living in Gloucestershire specified that the incumbent was 72. "To let one know whether a living to be sold is worth inquiring after, the proprietor should advertise particulars respecting the incumbent's health. It would save me trouble if I were informed whether or no the clergyman of seventy-two above referred to is asthmatic or dropsical as well as aged, and I want to be furnished with a surgical report, on stethoscopical examination, of the state of his lungs and heart. To purchase a living in the dark as to those vital details is to buy a pig in a poke": anyone doing so would be "an exceedingly simple SIMON". The allusion, of course, was to simony, the sin of giving money for an office in the Church: Punch, lviii, 1 October 1870, 145. Intending purchasers of vacant livings certainly did engage in intrusive assessments of the likelihood of an early vacancy. Around 1820, the advowson of Stondon Massey in Essex was offered for sale, the rector being in his sixties. A medical doctor considered purchasing it for his son and decided to make an unannounced call at the rectory to assess the incumbent's health. On a cold March morning, he encountered an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow and wearing no overcoat. On discovering that the gardener was in fact the rector, he concluded (correctly) that the living would not fall vacant for twenty years, and left. The episode was remembered in local tradition. E.H.L. Reeve, Stondon Massey, Essex [Colchester, 1900], 88-9. For another amusing example of intending purchasers checking on the health of the incumbent, Spectator, 9 July 1898, 46.  

^[10]  The Spectator explained the difference in 1865: "if a clergyman buys a next presentation for £1,000, he commits the deadly sin of simony, but if he buys the advowson for £3,000, holds it till the living is vacant, presents himself, and then resells the advowson for £2,000, he has simply engaged in an ordinary business transaction to which no one can attach blame." In the case of the Reverend Robert Bewick in Dagenham, discussed below, there is no reason to assume any loss on the resale of the advowson, since he was ready to resign and make way for a successor. As Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter, said in 1872: "the law attempted what was almost an impossibility, to permit the sale of advowsons and next presentations and yet prevent the sale and purchase of the offices themselves". Spectator, 22 April 1865, 6; Aberdare Times, 27 April 1872. We should perhaps spare a thought for the Reverend James John Merest, rector of Upper Snodsbury in Worcestershire. Believing he had been cheated in the purchase of an advowson, he issued threats against the agent involved. His bishop then secured his conviction for simony in the Court of Arches. He was banned from exercising all clerical functions in the Province of Canterbury, and reportedly died in poverty. This is the only successful prosecution that I have come across in the nineteenth century. 

^[11] Legends grew up around advowsons that may have been ben trovato but almost certainly added to the general discredit attached to the system. One story told of a nobleman out hunting in Yorkshire. He was approached by a man on horseback, who bet his lordship £5,000 that he would not present a vacant living to the stranger's son. The nobleman accepted the bet and, of course, had the means in his hands to collect the wager. The son was duly appointed, and the bet honourably paid. Dunedin (New Zealand) Evening Star, 19 April 1881. When an auctioneer insisted in 1876 that an Essex parish with 41-year-old incumbent would soon fall vacant, a heckler had interjected that "a friend of his had bought the advowson of another parish in Essex, when the rector was fifty, and he was blessed if the man didn't live till he was ninety-seven". Melbourne Age, 7 October 1876. For another example, at Wilmslow in Cheshire, see below.

^[12] White's Directory of Essex (1848), 226-7; J.P. Shawcross, A History of Dagenham… (London, 1904), 262, 275. Shawcross, later first vicar of Chadwell Heath, wrote of its early-19^th-century inhabitants: "They gained a precarious livelihood by cultivating patches of land, lopping trees, and breeding cattle, colts, donkeys, swine, and geese, which they turned into the forest to graze." He commented that "the plebeian natives of Chadwell Heath" had "dark eyes, tawny complexion, and short, curly black hair", features which he attributed to descent from a "gipsy" (Romany) settlement at nearby Hainault Forest. (288) In the early twentieth century, the Becontree Heath community was noted for its high rate of inter-marriage, so much so that "one had to be careful when talking, to realise so much relationship". J. West, Personal Memories of Dagenham Village … (Ilfracombe, 1993), 49.

^[13] Victoria County History of Essex, v, 267-98. Lord Denman, a prominent judge, was the tenant in 1851.

^[14] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 241. William Ford left a massive £10,000 for the school project. It was an odd coincidence that Dagenham later became the home of the Ford Motor Company.

^[15] H.C. Fanshawe, The History of the Fanshawe Family (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1927), 337.

^[16] Essex Archives Online.

^[17] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 87-9.

^[18] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 89; Fanshawe, The History of the Fanshawe Family, 341; White's Directory of Essex (1848), 226.

^[19] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 179.

^[20] Fanshawe, The History of the Fanshawe Family, 342; Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 89.

^[21] The Times, 15 June 1854, and repeated in several issues.

^[22] The Times, 19 February 1847.

^[23] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 89. Shawcross, relying on tradition forty years later, confused the Reverend Robert Bewick with his son and namesake, and assumed that he was unmarried when he was almost certainly a widower. A notice of his Will, in the London Gazette, 6 January 1882, 69 names one of his executors as William Edwin Bewick, lithographer, which suggests that he was a member of the family of the engraver Thomas Bewick.

^[24] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 89.

^[25] Shawcross, A History of Dagenham, 89-90; Post Office Directory for 1908.

^[26] White's Directory of Essex (1848), 206-7.

^[27] The two hamlets were Corbets Tye (now Corbets Tey) and Hacton. Their populations were small and both were about one mile from the parish church. For the impact of cholera on the hamlets, T.L. Wilson, Sketches of Upminster in the County of Essex (London, 1856), 84-5.

^[28] Wilson, Sketches of Upminster in the County of Essex, 11.

^[29] Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 143-63. Upminster has been fortunate in two of its local historians. In the nineteenth century, T.L. Wilson collected detailed material on his native parish. In more recent times, Tony Benton has revealed much that had been tactfully hidden. I gratefully draw upon his work here.

^[30] A good general source is https://upminsterhistory.net/2014/01/11/the-holdens-of-upminster/ from Tony Benton's website.

^[31] P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex, i, 111 named the owner in 1768 as Thomas Bradshaw, who was evidently related to the rector, Samuel Bradshaw "who hath built an elegant Parsonage-house". Samuel Bradshaw died in 1768. He was briefly succeeded by James Bingham, who was in his early thirties. Bingham moved to a parish in Nottinghamshire two years later, and was succeeded by John William Hopkins, who was in his mid-thirties. Hopkins died in 1780 at the age of 46. Perhaps William Holden bought the right to appoint his successor as a long-term speculation, but it may be that the transaction was encouraged by news of a fatal illness.

^[32] There was "undoubtedly an increase" in such tithe disputes at the end of the eighteenth century: E.J. Evans, The Contentious Tithe… (London, 1976), 22 and 74-6 for an example.

^[33] T.L. Wilson, History and Topography of Upminster… (Romford, 1880), 118n for a specimen of the agents' threats: "This is the last warning you will receive from me."

^[34] The Story of Upminster… viii, The Church and its Rectors (Upminster, 1959), 21-3.

^[35] After commutation in 1842, the tithe barn at the rectory was no longer needed, although it had probably been maintained until then in case further disputes made necessary recourse to colelction in kind. J.R. Holden II's successor, P.M. Holden, sold it in 1863. The timbers were used to build a house at nearby Hornchurch: https://upminsterhistory.net/2022/11/24/upminster-rectory-and-the-parish-glebe/. 

^[36] The Story of Upminster… vi, The Branfills of Upminster Hall (Upminster, 1958), 18-19. Branfill was not elected. The family appear to have returned to the parish church not long after: his widow presented the site of the National School a decade later. There was some fence-mending after Holden's younger brother became the curate in 1840.

^[37] There can be no doubt that the projects were competitive: Wilson, Sketches of Upminster in the County of Essex, 108-9.

^[38] In 1846, the Reverend George Clayton built a small Tudor-style country house on the site of a former mansion, a location that came with ready-made parkland. In 1853, he decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (in fact he was a year early) by organising a sports day for children at the British School, but not their National School contemporaries. The youngsters were given a meal of roast beef and plum pudding in a specially erected marquee, and they were also presented with a commemorative medal struck for the occasion. Such events were relatively common in rural England, but they were almost always hosted by an Anglican squire and presided over by the incumbent. Wilson, Sketches of Upminster in the County of Essex, 109.

^[39] The chapel became affiliated to the Congregationalists. In 1911, it was replaced by a more ornate building in the centre of the village, now the United Reformed Church. The original chapel passed through various other groups and in 2026 forms part of a Roman Catholic high school for girls.

^[40] https://upminsterhistory.net/2016/01/19/upminsters-victorian-scandal-rev-p-m-holdens-life-and-times/.

^[41] Luther Holden became a distinguished London surgeon. He married twice, both wives coming from Upminster.

^[42] Mavisbank seems to have been the name given to the house by Mrs Wilson. This perhaps echoes a mansion in Midlothian, and could suggest that her late husband, although born in Yorkshire,  identified as a Scot. 'Mavis' was an alternative name for the song thrush.

^[43] If the Wilson family of Bengal were indeed culturally Scots, Sarah Wilson was perhaps raised as a Presbyterian and hence stood in need of instruction to join the Church of England.

^[44] On Sunday 30 March 1873, the congregation assembled in the church but no clergyman appeared. T.L. Wilson (who was no relation to the family from India) pointedly noted the episode in his 1880 history of the parish and may have been signalling that the rector had been told to clear out. Wilson, History and Topography of Upminster, 204.

^[45] In all of this, I follow Tony Benton: https://upminsterhistory.net/2016/01/19/upminsters-victorian-scandal-rev-p-m-holdens-life-and-times/. The Essex Review which aimed (over-ambitiously) to act as a permanent record of County events, carried an anodyne notice of P.M. Holden's life and the family's connection with Upminster, mentioning his failing eyesight:  xiii (1904) 184-5.

^[46] https://upminsterhistory.net/2014/01/11/the-holdens-of-upminster/. H.H. Holden was the patron's second choice. An older Holden clergyman felt too settled to move from Wiltshire.

^[47] Women surnamed Hyla and Rose had married into the Holden family in previous generations. These had been adopted as quirky forenames for boys, even though they were not distinctively masculine.

^[48] Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 143-53.

^[49] "Without the aid of a curate he conducts two services in the parish church every week-day, and extra ones during Lent, and at least four services every Sunday, when he preaches three times and catechises the children." Auckland Star, 23 June 1917.

^[50] Upminster's historian T.L. Wilson presented a copy of his book to H.H. Holden with his "deep regards". In his description of the church, Wilson (who was a Congregationalist) stated that the piscina was used by the priest to empty "any dregs of what had been consecrated [i.e. of wine]". Holden penned an indignant marginal note: "No Priest would ever do this!!! H.H.H." (title page, 66, personal copy).

^[51] H.R. Holden had previously served as vicar of Caversham in Berkshire. In the crisis of August 1940 he had written to his parishioners: "I am certain the only way that we are going to win this war is on our knees... How splendid it would be if the chain could be spread and Britain be surrounded every night by a defence of prayer": https://www.standrewscaversham.org/history. Radar would prove more effective than ju-ju theology.

^[52] It is worth underlining that the succession of five members of a family to the same job in the Anglican Church was intrinsically odd. In 1920, Hensley Henson, then Bishop of Hereford, visited a parish where family ownership of the advowson had installed a father and son in succession. A grandson was being groomed to take the tradition into a third generation. "Divine vocation by hereditary right! 'Tis a very odd spectacle," Henson noted in his diary. This was a small village in Shropshire. Upminster during the time of the fourth and fifth Holdens was a growing suburb. Diary of Hensley Henson, 17 May 1920: https://henson.durham.ac.uk/journals/20-05-17. It is also noteworthy that the nineteenth-century local historian T.L. Wilson, an encyclopaedic collector of information about Upminster, never quoted from parish records. He was a Congregationalist and it seems that he was refused access to the registers.

^[53] The Story of Upminster… viii, The Church and its Rectors, 23, 25.

^[54] A clergyman guilty of immorality was presented for induction to William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough. Magee interviewed the man, acknowledging that his refusal to proceed would be challenged at law, and that he could not afford the expense of a court case. But this did not mean that he was powerless. "Parliament is now sitting; and whatever I say there is privileged. I will go down to the House of Lords and … tell the whole story of your life and delinquencies, giving name and dates. It will be published in the morning in every newspaper in the kingdom, and then, if you insist upon my instituting you, when you go down to your parish the very dogs will bark at you." The nominee withdrew. J.C. MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee… (2 vols, London, 1896), ii, 21.

^[55] W. Fraser, Disraeli and his Day (London, 1891), 263.

^[56] It is possible that John Baskett was only 79 at the time of his induction to Spetisbury. He had been described as aged 19 on his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge on 12 January 1793, and was recorded as 81 at the time of his death, on 17 February 1855. He had probably been born in 1773.

^[57] The Spetisbury scandal produced a series of letters to The Times over several months. Sidney Godolphin Osborne's principal contributions were on 29 June, 7 August 1852 and 25 June 1853. The last of these was reprinted in White, ed., The Letters of S.G.O. … Published in The Times, 1844-1888, i, 389-91.

^[58] Punch, xxiii (9 October 1852), 155. 'Chaffer' is an archaic word meaning 'to haggle'; 'pelf' carried the connotation of money acquired through dishonourable means. Punch published occasional squibs about the sale of advowsons throughout the mid-Victorian years, evidently assuming that its readers were aware of the issue and, presumably, shared its distaste for the exploitation of older clergy. In 1857, the living of Cold Higham in Northamptonshire was sold by Norton, Hoggart and Trist, the auctioneers who had sold Dagenham three years earlier. Punch whimsically misinterpreted a staccato newspaper report: "'annual value of £500, irrespective of house and gardens. The age of the incumbent, 66. Knocked down at £3000'. The idea of knocking down a man of 66 years of age, and that a clergyman, cannot be contemplated without indignation and disgust.... Many years, however, may yet be added to the life of the reverend gentleman, and we hope he will live long enough to disappoint the party that has speculated on his decease – notwithstanding that he has been knocked down in so barbarous a manner." Punch, 27 August 1857, 91. For another example, see the spoof description of the auction of two livings in Herefordshire, where the incumbents were 74 and "the over-ripe and patriarchal age" of 84: Punch, xxi, 5 July 1851, 20.   

^[59] This report comes from a Tasmanian newspaper, Launceston Examiner, 4 February 1854.

^[60] The Clergy List for 1859 indicated that Erle-Drax was still patron of Spetisbury-cum-Charlton Marshall, and had evidently only sold the next presentation.

^[61] J. Slinn, "Vizard, William (1774–1859)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

^[62] Hansard, 13 July 1853: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1853/jul/13/simony-law-amendment-bill#S3V0129P0_18530713_HOC_27.

^[63]  Desire for advancement in the Church of England fuelled a shockingly broad advertising culture, which the Saturday Review acidly dissected in 1856 (2 August 1856, 317-18). "All the religious journals have a column devoted to serious advertisements, where next presentations with gouty incumbents are recommended to purchasers, and pious footmen out of place can hear of families where they will find liberal wages and opportunities of hearing the Gospel preached." In such specialist publications, "the advertisements are only an excrescence on the theological teaching, and are invariably confined to the special subdivision of a sect whose views are represented in the leading articles". However, Mair's Monthly Register, which functioned as a trade paper for clerical job-seekers and jobbery, was "conducted on the largest principle of toleration. The highest and the lowest churchman meet in its pages on common ground." No charge was made for insertion of advertisements from patrons seeking to sell their advowsons or incumbents wishing to exchange their benefices or hire a curate. (Curates, on the other hand, had to pay a fee to publicise their availability.) Mair made his money through commissions on "the transactions effected by means of his journal", charging five percent on the value of an advowson or on "the first year's salary of the curate who may be fitted with a pulpit". It seemed that business was thriving. Advertisements were streamlined by a set of abbreviations, which included High Ch., Mod. High, Accg. to Prayer Bk., Mod. Evang. and Evang. 'Evang. Extem.' was a bonus, since it meant that the candidate could preach without notes, a useful skill in a Low Church cleric. The law prescribed a curate's minimum wage of £80 a year: incumbents often ignored this. "Stipend, nil" was offered for a curacy whose attraction lay in the location of the parish, near Brighton. Want ads were sometimes fantastically optimistic. A middle-aged Cambridge graduate gave a laconic summary of his qualifications for an ideal job: "Duty easy. Married. Age 48. Views sound." A product of Trinity College Dublin aimed to relocate in style. "London, or a good town. Views Evang. Preaches Extem. £100 and a house." Clergy attracted to parish-swapping also featured in Mair's, e.g. a Yorkshire incumbent who wished to exchange his living, worth £800 a year, for "a benefice in the south, with picturesque country, dry soil and climate, some society, a good house, and a net income of £600 at least". Moving south was worth a drop in income. Amongst all this trafficking, Mair's also sold advowsons. The Saturday Review quoted an advertisement for a "charming paradise" beside the sea in Cornwall. "The climate is good, little or no frost or snow, aspect south, soil dry, air soft, but not excessively moist, living cheap, scenery most beautiful, and incumbent in a precarious state of health. The income is £800, and the price £6000." "Nothing could be more desirable," the reviewer coldly commented, noting that while references to income, dry soil and bracing air were frequent, there was no room in the advertisements for "unsubstantial spiritual aspirations". "The commercial element extinguishes the theological." The preferment scandals that occasionally surfaced were merely part of a larger trade in Church careers. But the Saturday Review sometimes carried such advertisements itself, e.g. (20 August 1864, 254)  "Advowson, or Presentation, with Possession, wanted. £8,000 ready." This staccato statement seemed to imply that the intending purchaser sought a vacant parish, which would be illegal under the law against simony. 

^[64] Punch, xiv (1848), 56. A warming pan was a sealed utensil containing hot coals which was put into a bed to remove the chill. Earthenware hot water bottles were safer, and rubber versions came into general use in the early 20^th century. It had been common practice in the eighteenth century for patrons of public offices to install an interim appointee who supplied a bond promising to resign when some favoured youth was old enough to succeed. The Mastership of Magdalene College, Cambridge was held by such an arrangement between 1760 and 1774. The device remained in use, although it is not surprising that its use was covert: Bishop Magee complained about "resignation bonds" in 1874. (Hansard, 21 April 1874: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1874/apr/21/motion-for-a-select-committee.) In 1898, C.Y. Sturge accepted that "so long as private patronage exists and men continue to regard the livings in their gift as in the nature of a provision for their families, some such legalized device for keeping livings open seems to be inevitable", but resignation bonds were abolished in that year's reform legislation. Sturge in Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church, 208. In the secular context, the temporary occupant was called a 'seat-warmer': the shift of image from seat to bed in the Church context is revealing. If Punch is to be believed, transitional appointees to benefices in the Church did not always secure late-life tenure. Another item from 1848 is a spoof letter from a wastrel undergraduate at Oxford, who planned to pay off his student debts once he acceded to a parish worth £800 a year. "There's a family living waiting for me, and the warming-pan is a very decent old bird, who will turn out when I'm japanned." To 'japan' an item was to paint it with black lacquer. Since clergy wore black coats as an unofficial uniform, 'japanning' was a slang term for ordination, Punch, xiv (1848), 21.

^[65] Saturday Review, 2 August 1856, 317-18; Spectator, 22 April 1865, 6. The advertisement had appeared in Mair's Monthly Register (see above). Other accessible examples include the report in True Colonist (Hobart, Van Diemen's Land), 21 October 1842.

^[66] M.G. Fawcett, Life of the Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth... (London, 1901), 253. The by-election was at Southwark.

^[67] The Times, 28 July, 20 August, 1,5,8,9 September 1853.

^[68] After issuing his challenge, Molesworth crossed the Channel to Calais, innocently expecting his tutor to follow him and fight the duel offshore.

^[69] In fairness to Davers, it should be noted that he was also rector of the nearby parish of Bradfield St George, but I do now know if he lived there either. The combined income of the two parishes was about £1,350. Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses, always keen to stress the achievements of the University's products, states that he was a Master of a local pack of foxhounds from 1797 to 1812.

^[70] Since civil registration of births only began in England in 1837, claims of venerable survival in Victorian England need to be treated with caution. However, Naylor's age is confirmed by his admission to Cambridge in 1786: he was studying for his degree examinations at the time when the Paris mob sacked the Bastille.

^[71] The divergence of opinions on Naylor's ability to discharge parish duties probably reflect differing expectations of the nature of those responsibilities. The Extraordinary Black Book of 1832 (33) gave a sarcastic radical view of the traditional minimalist functions of an incumbent. "In one respect, Church of Englandism is an improvement on the original simplicity of the gospel, by rendering the discharge of its duties almost a mechanical operation…. all her service is written; no extempore preaching or praying; it requires no mind, merely to be able to read is enough. To perform such a puerile and heartless ceremony, it is not surprising a majority of the clergy conceive it unnecessary to reside on their benefices."

^[72] The Times, 13 October; North Wales Chronicle, 3 December 1853. Sidney Godolphin Osborne sometimes rushed into public condemnation without checking his facts. There is another Rougham, in Norfolk, and he assumed that the Bishop of Norwich was complicit in the Naylor dodge. In fact, west Suffolk formed part of the diocese of Ely. The Spectator (22 October 1853, 8) accused him of "a culpable inaccuracy, sufficient to cast a doubt on all the rest". Other accounts recognised that the Bishop of Ely, Thomas Turton, had no legal power to block Naylor's institution.

^[73] Hansard, 21 April 1874: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1874/apr/21/motion-for-a-select-committee. Another 'warming pan' episode was denounced by the Saturday Review in 1864. Beddington in Surrey was worth about £1,300 to its incumbent. The advowson was purchased as a speculation around 1860, reportedly for £8,000: the rector at the time was in his mid-forties. His unexpected death forced the new patron to find a temporary replacement so that the advowson might be put on the market again with the prospect of early availability:"very naturally he looked out for the oldest and most unpromising life in the Clergy List". With its characteristic cruelty, the Saturday claimed that "something very like a competitive examination in senility" led to the appointment of the eighty-five year-old Edward Marsh, "who had been excused from doing duty on account of his age and infirmities" in his previous parish. Marsh was a respected theologian, and there was some surprise that a veteran who had been associated with Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce should lend himself to such a discreditable manoeuvre. It was alleged that he "was seldom able to preach, and from age he was quite inaudible" when he did. However, Marsh demonstrated his commitment to his new job by ordering his own grave to be dug outside the church door in order to encourage his flock to reflect upon eternity. He died in 1864, just short of his ninetieth birthday. The Saturday concluded that "it is something more than a scandal to a parish that it should be compelled to accept for its spiritual pastor and master one who, however excellent, has outlived every capacity, and whose highest qualification is that he is eighty-five, and is supposed to be tottering on the verge of the grave". However, his brief tenure had enabled the patron to sell the advowson of the obviously soon-to-be-vacated living for £17,000 and so reap a considerable profit on the investment. Saturday Review, 24 September 1864, 388.

^[74] Hansard, 6 July 1853: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1853/jul/06/simony-law-amendment-bill. Phillimore's slur was unfair. The identity of 'S.G.O.' was widely known, and so much so that he was treated as an unofficial court of appeal by discontented Anglicans, clerical and lay, who supplied him with allegations of doubtful ecclesiastical transactions. Several of his letters to The Times on Spetisbury and St Ervan were published over the signature 'S.G. Osborne'. 

^[75] Presumably because it was the operative legal precedent, the Wilmslow case was referred to in later debates, whereas the scandals of the early eighteen-fifties seem to have been forgotten. After winning his action, Fox sold the advowson to a man called Chambers. He appointed his son-in-law, William Brownlow, who was in his late twenties when he became rector in 1829. "This poor Mr Brownlow had a great deal to answer for. He was one of those extremely delicate men who are always dying yet never die. For 43 years he acted as a perfect decoy to the spiritual speculators of the district; and no less than three gentlemen in succession purchased the living for their sons, and finally threw up their bargains in despair, all through Mr. Brownlow's unreasonable attachment to life." He eventually expired in 1872, thereby obliging a patron who had bought the presentation for the husband of his daughter – "and I am glad to say that that lady now reigns happily at the rectory", recounted the Quaker MP Edward Leatham six years later. Hansard, 12 February 1878: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1878/feb/12/church-livings-resolution#S3V0237P0_18780212_HOC_66.

^[76] Archibald Campbell Tait, then headmaster of Rugby, was assured by his doctor that he was about to die when he fell ill in 1847. He recovered and survived until 1882, becoming Archbishop of Canterbury.

^[77] Hansard, 24 June 1853: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1853/jun/24/incomes-of-the-bishops-the-see-of. The report of a parliamentary enquiry into episcopal finances in 1851 had led Punch to comment that "the croaking of the Bishops, lest their incomes should not come up to the mark, contrasts with the easy nonchalance with which they pocket the difference when they happen to be above it". 'Croaking' was a pejorative term for complaining without any serious grievance. Although 'nonchalance' was a loan-word (from French), it had been in use for over a century. Its italicisation here was meant to convey un-English amorality. Punch, xxi, 11 July 1851, 25.

^[78] W.M. Jacob, "Denison, Edward (1801–1854)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

^[79] The Times, 9 July 1853.

^[80] Magee explained that parishioners sometimes appealed to their diocesan to block an unsuitable nomination. "Unhappily … the Bishop has little or no power to help them in such a case – I mean, of course, the Bishop of real life, not the Bishop of religious newspapers and much excited speakers, who, as we all know, is a being possessed of vast and indefinite powers, which, however, he is too cowardly or too selfish ever to use, except for his own aggrandizement." Any bishop seeking to take action would find himself "possessed for this purpose of the most limited powers, and constantly doomed to find each weapon of law that he takes up break in his hand as he uses it. Such a Bishop must tell the complaining parishioners that there are, indeed, certain specified grounds on which he may refuse to institute a clerk – as, for instance, heresy, immorality, or ignorance; but that the proof even of these is extremely difficult, and that to attempt it he must begin by making himself a defendant in a costly law suit … the most likely result will be that he will be saddled with heavy costs, and the parishioners with an obnoxious minister." Hansard, 21 April 1874: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1874/apr/21/motion-for-a-select-committee. In 1896, Temple recalled that he had "once refused to institute a clergyman who had been guilty of very immoral conduct, and though there was no question about the facts, the proceedings cost him £1200". Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1896, quoting an unidentified "London paper".

^[81] C. Wordsworth, On the Sale of Church Patronage… (2^nd ed., Lincoln, 1874), 7-9.

^[82] In 1875, Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln attempted to veto the attempt by the Reverend William Walsh to present himself to the living of Great Coates. Walsh had purchased the next presentation from the patron, Sir John Sutton who, as a Roman Catholic, was not allowed to exercise his rights. Unfortunately, both the current incumbent and the patron died within a short time, and Wordsworth ruled that the transaction was simoniacal. He lost the subsequent court cases, and incurred considerable costs in the process. The victorious Walsh was instituted under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury. J.H. Overton, Christopher Wordsworth… (London, 1888), 250-3. Bishop Wordsworth was the nephew of the poet.

^[83] William Thomson, Archbishop of York, Hansard, 4 July 1870: https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/1870-07-04/debates/635726ee-6050-4cea-9311-45e2a8c78683/BeneficesBill%E2%80%94(No130).

^[84] Temple's comments during a visitation to Cornwall in 1872: perhaps he heard about St Ervan: Aberdare Times, 27 April 1872. In January 1873, a clergyman aged 76 was presented to the valuable living of Falmouth to facilitate the sale of the advowson. "It must have cost some trouble to find an incumbent of this age who would be willing to occupy the position of a warming-pan," commented the anti-State Church Liberator (March 1873, 33) "and it would be curious to know what terms were offered to him for the discharge of his part of this bargain of souls; but a rectory of the annual value of £1,750 is not to be met with every year." The inhabitants of Falmouth had protested but "they are more helpless than any slave at an African or Cuban auction mart".

^[85] Quoted by Edward Leatham MP in Hansard, 12 February 1878: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1878/feb/12/church-livings-resolution#S3V0237P0_18780212_HOC_66. "The parishioners probably hear rumours of the sale, but whether they do or not is of small consequence, for they are not consulted and are utterly powerless," said Lord Cranborne in 1896. Hansard, 11 March 1896:  https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1896/mar/11/benefices-bill#S4V0038P0_18960311_HOC_38.

^[86] Hansard, 7 June 1875: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1875/jun/07/third-reading-bill-passed.

^[87] Punch (2 May 1874, 181) urged him on. "Who has not sighed to own that pleasant Rectory / With drawing-room, refectory, / Coverts adjacent, stream where trout grow lusty, / An air that's never fusty, / A village population, not too many, / Rector who, growing old, feels 'twould be wiser, / Before he dies, to turn a final penny, / And so turns advertiser?... Go on, Magee: expose a crying scandal, / That asks rare pluck to handle: / Needs both sharp-pointed wit and keen-edged humour / To lance this ugly tumour. / Those parish homes that should be altars holy, / Hallowed by saints' pure life, and blood of martyr, / It is a consummation melancholy / To see them brought to barter." But the sharp-tongued Magee felt inhibited by the need "to show the Lords that an Irishman can make a moderate speech".

^[88] MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 15 (19 November 1874). " Every foolish peer and member of Parliament will have a chance of grafting his little bit of folly into the Bill, and what we shall get in the end, if we get anything, heaven only knows," he grimly predicted as his proposals began their parliamentary ordeal." "My bitterest enemies are proving to be clerical patrons", he noted as the bill was chopped down. They were "acting very unwisely for their own interests in opposing the whole Bill so bitterly as they are doing" since his failure to carry mild reform might leave the way open to a more sweeping attack on their privileges. Magee concluded that "clergy in a panic are like horses in a stampede – nothing will hold them". (ii, 16, 21, letters of 9 December 1874, 29 March 1875).

^[89] Daily News, n.d., quoted Monmouthshire Merlin, 15 March 1878. Calls for action continued, without result. Bishop Campbell of Bangor "hoped the time was not far distant when the sale of advowsons and next presentations would be prohibited". Bishop Temple "said it would be worth the Church's while to pay a very heavy price to free herself from such an evil and scandal". South Wales Daily News, 11 August; Wrexham Guardian, 17 July 1875. In 1877, the Anglo-Catholic Church Times advertised the sale by auction of the advowson of Wycliffe in County Durham (the village presumably gave its name to the proto-Reformer John Wycliffe). A Welsh newspaper quoted disapprovingly: "The age of the present rector is 58, but the vendor understands that there is a strong probability of the living becoming vacant at a very early period." It would be "rather a delicate question" to ask what caused such confidence in the probable vacancy, "but we can allow the imagination a little liberty". Wrexham Advertiser, 22 September 1877. The Times, 27 April 1878, was said to have carried six advertisements for the sale of advowsons, and 22 notices in all regarding aspects of the practice.

^[90] British Parliamentary Papers, 1879, C2375, x. The term "compellable" presumably meant that bishops retained the right to induct saintly youths or sprightly veterans. The loophole would have provided excuses for rejected candidates to sue.

^[91] E.g. Speech of E.A. Leatham, Esq., M.P. in Moving his Resolution with regard to the Traffic in Livings (London, 1881): https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/mar/29/patronage-of-benefices-church-of-england#S3V0260P0_18810329_HOC_102 for the debate.

^[92] Church of England Messenger (Melbourne), 10 May 1878. In 1879, the Archdeacon of Salop, the Venerable John Allen, argued that the sale of advowsons was not in the interests of the beneficiaries of such transactions: "he was convinced, taking the lowest view of the matter, that a very poor pecuniary return was commonly got for the money so invested. A clergymen who had part of his capital spent in the purchase of a benefice lost a chance of having his position bettered by preferment. No clergyman who was believed to have had any hand in purchasing a cure of souls for himself could go to that cure with the same freshness and fragrance as he who went from the patron's choice. Lastly, a clergyman who strove to do his duty in a parish would be sure to meet with difficulties…. The Archdeacon gave instances of the misery visited upon several clergymen whose livings had been got in that manner." (Such problems would only affect clergy who took their duties seriously.) Nonetheless, Allen "did not wish to put any hindrance in the way of the sale of advowsons" for "[t]he mixed system of patronage seemed to him a healthful state of things". Cambrian News, 7 November 1879.

^[93] Punch, lxxiii, 7 July 1877, 305. The verse was reprinted in Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 3 August 1878.

^[94] South Wales Daily News, 5 July 1882. The episode was evidently widely reported, e.g. Christchurch Star, 30 August 1882.

^[95] White, ed., The Letters of S.G.O., ii, 36 (letter to The Times, 4 January 1886).

^[96] Sturge reviewed failed attempts at legislation from 1881 to 1898 (but the matter was "steadily ripening") in Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church, 219-21.

^[97] Temple was speaking as Archbishop-designate at a Church conference in Ealing in November 1896. The report come from Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1896, from an unnamed "London paper". A longer extract illustrates the careful line that a Primate needed to tread. The frequent sale of advowsons "was felt by many to be a scandal to the Church, because the parishioners strongly resented having a clergyman thrust upon them by someone whose only right to do so was that he possessed sufficient money to buy the advowson, and had so invested it. The system led to grave abuses, because the owner of an advowson might – and sometimes did – appoint to the living an old or weak clergyman, [or] one who was overwhelmed with debt, and only desired the living in order that he might pay his creditors, or even a man whose character had been smirched, and who wanted the position in order that he might retrieve the place in society. When these things happened they did, undoubtedly, constitute a grave scandal. The great difficulty in the way of reform was that these advowsons had become a form of property, and when the sale of a thing had been permitted for centuries, it would be hard and unjust to say to the last purchaser, 'It is true you have bought it but you shall by no means sell it'. The idea of abolishing the sale of advowsons was therefore impracticable. The remedy was to be found in emphasising the fact that an advowson was not merely a property, but also a trust, and that that trust was not properly discharged by the appointment of an incompetent or unsuitable person. It was, therefore, proposed to stop the sale of the first presentations to livings, which were obviously bought with a view to the appointment of particular persons, and to invest the bishop with power to refuse to institute clergymen whom he might believe to be unfit for the position they sought. … It might be said that bishops already had power to refuse to institute unfit clergymen, and that was quite true. But the Act was so costly and so uncertain in its working that it was practically inoperative."

^[98] C.Y. Sturge in Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church, 205. Unfortunately, the well-informed Sturge did not define "recent years".

^[99] Aberdare Times, 27 April 1872.

^[100] Hansard, 22 February 1870:  https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1870/feb/22/benefices-bill-leave#S3V0199P0_18700222_HOC_36.

^[101] MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 4 (letter of 27 March 1874).

^[102] British Parliamentary Papers, 1879, C2375, vii. "The Commission did not defend sale of advowsons on the ground that it secured variety of view and freedom of opinion in the Church," explained Bishop Magee. "This was their reason for defending existing varieties of patronage, e.g., private, collegiate, episcopal, Crown, and so on; but not for acquiescing in sales of patronage." MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 151 (letter of 26 January 1881). Nonetheless, the statement can be read as a defence of the private patronage element in the system.  

^[103] For an example of a detailed challenge to a forgotten attempt at reform: E.P. Hatheway, The Church Patronage Bill of 1894 (London, 1894).

^[104] J.L. Altholz, "The Simony Press", Victorian Periodicals Review, xxii (1989), 16-18. The 'ecclesiastical agent' W. Emery Stark was a prolific pamphleteer who issued The Private Patrons' Gazette. Opponents of reform advanced ingenious and sometimes plausible arguments against the abolition of the sale of advowsons. The right to choose an incumbent might be inherited by an unworthy heir, and would be better transferred to a responsible owner. An advowson or next presentation might have been purchased for a young man studying at university, but the intended beneficiary decided not to seek ordination. A patron might need money to pay medical bills for a family member. And so on.

^[105] Temple in 1872 toyed with the idea of "the appointment in each archdeaconry of a small body of patrons – two chosen by the clergy and two by the churchwardens". Aberdare Times, 27 April 1872. In 1947, the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, argued that diocesan boards would lead to ring-fencing "and appointments from outside the diocese would be rare". C. Garbett, The Claims of the Church of England (London, 1947), 151-2.

^[106] E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury… (3 vols, London, 1886), iii, 329 (speech of May 1873).

^[107] MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 5 (letter of 4 April 1874). In 1869, Harrowby had moved the rejection in the House of Lords of the bill to disestablish the Church of Ireland.

^[108] Earl of Selborne, A Defence of the Church of England against Disestablishment (London, 1886), 293.

^[109] MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 2, 151 (letter of 26 January 1881).

^[110] A.C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson (2 vols, London, 1899), ii, 92 (23 July 1894, apparently a diary entry).

^[111] Hansard, 7 March 1898: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1898/mar/07/benefices-no-2-bill#S4V0054P0_18980307_HOC_178. In 1873, the advowson of an attractive Devon parish failed to find a buyer at the reserve price of £1,000. The auctioneer attributed the slow bidding to "fears which might be entertained with regard to future legislation" but insisted that "no legislation in England could ever destroy vested interests". "If such scandals as the open sale of Church livings in public auction rooms are continued," remarked Punch, "the Church itself may be found to be 'going, going – gone!' sooner than is expected." Punch, 8 March 1873, 95. C.Y. Sturge in 1898 summed up the insoluble problem: "the sale of advowsons is a necessary incident of private patronage. Get rid of the one and you will get rid of the other; but so long as the system of private patronage, in favour of which there is much to be said on many grounds, continues to be upheld by Parliament and by public opinion, it is idle to talk of forbidding sales". Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church, 223-4.

^[112] Symbolic of the inversion of perspective was Ireland's English Question… (1971), by Patrick O'Farrell, a New Zealander of Irish parentage working in an Australian university.

^[113] "British History: a Plea for a New Subject", Journal of Modern History, xlvii (1975), 601-21. Although born in England, Pocock identified with his New Zealand upbringing. Pocock's article as based on a lecture delivered in 1973 at the University of Canterbury.

^[114] The three massive and outstandingly scholarly volumes of the New Oxford History of England series, dealing with the years 1783-1914 – a crucial era of interaction that pointed to a Four-Nations 'British' history – were published between 1996 and 2006. The authors were Boyd Hilton, K. Theodore Hoppen and G.R. Searle.

^[115] The Church in Wales was detached and disestablished between 1919 and 1921.

^[116] My account of the Disruption draws generally on the insightful biography by S.J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, 1982), esp. 223-8, 296-9, 299-312, 323-46.

^[117] L. Iremonger, Lord Aberdeen … (London, 1978), 327-32.

^[118] Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 2, 359-64.

^[119] The 1851 religious census is widely discussed: O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 1 (3^rd ed., London, 1971, cf. 1^st ed., 1966), 363-9 for an outline. Selborne, A Defence of the Church of England against Disestablishment, 267-79 made a desperate attempt to discredit its findings.

^[120] Often quoted. I take pleasure in citing the work of my Edinburgh neighbour, Bill Ferguson: Scotland: 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh, 1968), 312. This was part of the 4-volume Edinburgh History of Scotland that formed a landmark in the process, discussed above, of crafting an intellectual history of the island group that was not centred on England.

^[121] Wordsworth, On the Sale of Church Patronage, iii. His brother was a bishop in the Episcopal Church of Scotland.

^[122] Hansard, 13 July 1853: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1853/jul/13/simony-law-amendment-bill (George Butt, MP for Weymouth).

^[123] Aberdare Times, 27 April 1872. Although he was outspoken, Temple could not confront the implications of his criticism. "He did not object to private patronage as such. On the contrary … the patronage of the Church of England was in itself an excellent thing. It tended more than anything else to shelter a great variety of opinions, and it tended towards that healthy breadth and large toleration which was one of the most valuable characteristics of the Established Church."

^[124] Garbett, The Claims of the Church of England, 151, a defence from 1947.

^[125] T.C. Fry in Gore, ed., Essays in aid of the Reform of the Church, 301. In 1898, Fry was headmaster of a second-rank public school, Berkhamsted, and became Dean of Lincoln in 1910. 

^[126] The importance of the Deanery of Windsor to the Queen is shown in W. Gibson, "'A Great Excitement': Gladstone and Church Patronage 1860-1894", Anglican and Episcopal History, lxviii (1999), 372-96. For the Queen's interventions in senior Church appointments, D.W.R. Bahlman, "The Queen, Mr. Gladstone, and Church Patronage", Victorian Studies, iii (1960), 349-80.

^[127] Westminster Gazette, quoted Christchurch (New Zealand) Press, 18 May 1914. The Quaker MP Edward Leatham had commented in 1878 that "it is wonderful how eager ladies are to buy next presentations".

^[128] In one case, pressure from a noted political hostess influenced a Crown (ministerial) patronage appointment. During their brief period in office (1806-7), the Whigs secured a parish for the Reverend Sydney Smith. "I gave you the living because Lady Holland insisted on my doing so," the Lord Chancellor, Erskine, assured the grateful recipient; "and if she had desired me to give it to the devil, he must have had it." A. Bell, Sydney Smith (Oxford, 1980), 73.

^[129] The Pan-Anglican Congress, 1908…. Reprinted from The Times (London, 1908), 158; P. Boyce, "Charles Owen Leaver Riley (1854–1929)", Australian Dictionary of Biography: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/riley-charles-owen-leaver-8213.

^[130] Quoted Christchurch (New Zealand) Press, 18 May 1914.

^[131] F.A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury … (London, 1948), 222.

^[132] Hansard, 4 June 1924: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1924/jun/04/benefices-act-1898-amendment-measure-1923. In 1931, Archbishop Lang recalled urging a well-intentioned patron of a vacant parish to appoint "a younger man who could get in touch with the young lads and youth of the parish. He appointed a most excellent relative of his own, so pious that I could envy his piety, but a man who was partly deaf and hardly able to walk from his vicarage to the church." Hansard, 17 June 1931: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1931/jun/17/benefices-exercise-of-rights-of. 

^[133] "Governments have a way of quietly strangling Bills they don't like without seeming to do so," said Bishop Magee. MacDonnell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee, ii, 2 (letter, 12 March 1874).

^[134] By the twentieth century, the prefaces to Crockford's Clerical Directory acquired authoritative status in clergy circles, at least as warnings. In 1931, the editor repeated the 'property' argument in relation to advowsons. "It may be extremely undesirable that an advowson should be treated as a piece of property of which the owner can dispose as he may think fit. But it has been so treated, alike in law and in fact, for many centuries both by the Church and the State, and has thereby acquired a certain value in the open market. Summarily to destroy the value of a piece of property belonging to some one else, without being prepared to pay the owner adequate compensation should he desire it, is a high-handed proceeding and not, to say the least, easy to defend on any moral ground." Crockford's reminded its readers that Parliament had the final say on Church Assembly 'Measures'.  Crockford Prefaces: the Editor Looks Back (London, 1947), 109 (1931). Echoes of the problem remained as late as 1970, when a Church exercise in stock-taking noted that legislation passed by the Church Assembly had "virtually provided for the abolition of the sale of advowsons, and gave to parishes a voice in the choice of incumbents". These "important reforms diminished the rights of patrons" but they raised "considerable difficulty, for here the rights of the individual are plainly in question. We do not think that there can be any question of giving a general power to the Church to legislate on this subject without recourse to Measure in Parliament. Nor, at this stage, when the general question of patronage is under consideration, does it seem profitable to consider ways of simplifying the law." The issue was side-stepped, and the use of the adverb "virtually" suggests a continuing hope that it would somehow go away. Church and State: Report of the Archbishops' Commission (London, 1970), 53.

^[135] W.L. Mathieson, English Church Reform… (London, 1923), 6n.; R. Lloyd, The Church of England 1900-1965 (London, 1966), 345; Hansard, 4 June 1924: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1924/jun/04/benefices-act-1898-amendment-measure-1923; Garbett, The Claims of the Church of England, 151. The 1931 Measure was criticised in the House of Lords (which approved it by 65-18), in a debate which rehearsed many of the arguments for and against private patronage during the previous hundred years: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1931/jun/17/benefices-exercise-of-rights-of. 

^[136] See the plaintive complaints of the Reverend J.W Hayes in Essex Review, xl (1931), 178-81. At Dagenham around 1920, farmers "would drop off a bag of potatoes and other produce" to the hard-up incumbent, while the family of a local businessman "would make sure that he was not short of coal to heat the large vicarage". West, Personal Memories of Dagenham Village, 18. The Bishop of Exeter, Lord William Cecil, told the House of Lords in 1931 that "it is often very difficult indeed now to find a clergyman to take a living". His brother of Norwich, Bertram Pollock, was even more revealing: "you cannot get first-rate men for all the benefices in the country. A great many will have to be staffed by mediocre men, and it is a mistake to proceed upon the assumption that there are plenty of first-rate men ready to accept benefices. Some of the poorer benefices are very difficult to fill." Hansard, 17 June 1931: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1931/jun/17/benefices-exercise-of-rights-of. 

^[137] I believe it is standard practice for Oxford and Cambridge colleges to consult the diocesan bishop when called upon to appoint to a parish. As late as 1934, Magdalene College Cambridge (which clung to a traditional Anglican identity for longer than its more dynamic neighbours) accepted a bequest of two advowsons in Suffolk.

^[138] G. Mayfield, The Church of England… (London, 1958), 45.

^[139] E.A. Eardley-Wilmot, Prebendary of Wells, speaking in 1908: The Pan-Anglican Congress, 1908…. Reprinted from The Times, 159.

^[140]   H. Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (2 vols in 1, London, 1943 ed., cf. 1st ed., 2 vols, 1942), ii, 295-300. W A Evershed, "Party and Patronage in the Church of England 1800-1945...", Oxford DPhil, 1985 is a useful discussion of the subject. Archbishop Lang deplored the increase in sales in Hansard,  17 June 1931: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1931/jun/17/benefices-exercise-of-rights-of

 ^[141] In preparation for his insightful but irreverent book The Church of England (1962/4). Paul Ferris sent a questionnaire to 120 clergymen, chosen at random from Crockford's Clerical Directory. Only 30 replied, much to the author's disapproval since he had supplied a stamped return envelope. So small a sample must be treated with reserve and many respondents were noncommittal on specific questions. Those who replied generally held small-c conservative views: only 3 favoured unilateral nuclear disarmament, 9 supported disestablishment. Asked whether "patronage vested in party [i.e. Low Church / Anglo-Catholic] trusts is abused to any significant degree?" replies were: Yes, 1; No. 14. "Is any other kind of contemporary Anglican patronage [i.e. Crown, episcopal, collegiate, private] abused?" produced an unusual degree of agreement: Yes, 0; No 14. "No one thought much of this question." It seems that the patronage issue had been defanged: shortage of clergy and low incomes had no doubt contributed to making it less important. P. Ferris, The Church of England (rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1964, cf. 1^st ed., 1962), 279.

^[142] Hansard, 7 June 1875: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1875/jun/07/third-reading-bill-passed.

^[143] Bell became the saintly Bishop of Chichester whose memory was traduced by the Church of England in the Welby era.

^[144] J.C. MacDonnell's life of Magee is an exception: he was chaplain and confidant to his subject.  A.C. Benson, a questing layman, touched upon his father's unease about advowsons.

^[145] J. Kent, William Temple… (Cambridge, 1992), 33. Son of Frederick Temple, William Temple was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 to 1945 – the only father-and-son duo to have held the Primacy. It is hard to explain how he became such a massively overrated figure. The fact that his brief tenure was cut short by his unexpected death fostered the sense of a lost leader. Coming between the awful Lang (remembered for his sneering Abdication broadcast – "Old Lang swine / How full of Cantuar") and the appalling Fisher (who claimed that on Coronation Day, 1953, Britain was "not far from the Kingdom of Heaven"), Temple was perhaps bound to look good. His grandiose projects for national leadership (which were carefully spaced out to avoid drawing attention to their failure) were essentially the superficial pronouncements of a perennial President of the Oxford Union: his Oxford tutor observed that Temple often thought "that he had found a solution, when he had found a phrase". Ferris commented that he "became a power in the land – a power that always seemed on the point of connecting with society in order to change it, yet never quite performed this difficult feat". K. Martin, Britain in the Sixties: the Crown and the Establishment (Harmondsworth, 1963 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 1962), 11; Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 57. Ferris, The Church of England, 155. I discuss Temple in https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/421-archbishop-davidson-the-general-strike-and-the-revised-prayer-book-1926-1928.

^[146] Wordsworth, On the Sale of Church Patronage, 7.          

^[147] ESSAY TO FOLLOW