Portal:Anglicanism/Bio Archive
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Portal:Anglicanism/Selected biography/1
James VI and I (19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625) was King of Scots as James VI, and King of England and King of Ireland as James I.
He ruled in Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567, when he was only one year old, succeeding his mother Mary, Queen of Scots. Regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in 1578, though he did not gain full control of his government until 1581. On 24 March 1603, as James I, he succeeded the last Tudor monarch of England and Ireland, Elizabeth I, who died without issue. He then ruled England, Scotland and Ireland for 22 years, until his death at the age of 58.
James achieved most of his aims in Scotland but faced great difficulties in England, including the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and repeated conflicts with the English Parliament. According to a tradition originating with historians of the mid-seventeenth-century, James's taste for political absolutism, his financial irresponsibility, and his cultivation of unpopular favourites established the foundation for the English Civil War. Recent historians, however, have revised James's reputation and treated him as a serious and thoughtful monarch.
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Bede (also Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, (c. 672 or 673 – May 25, 735), was a Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow (see Wearmouth-Jarrow), both in the English county of Durham (now Tyne and Wear). He is well known as an author and scholar known as "The father of English history".
The most important and best known of his works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, giving in five books and 400 pages the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of Caesar to the date of its completion (731). Pilgrims were claiming miracles at Bede's grave only fifty years after his death. His body was transferred to Durham Cathedral in the mid-11th century and to its present location in the Galilee Chapel there in 1370.
His scholarship and importance to the Church were recognised in 1899 when he was declared by the Roman Catholic Church to be the first English Doctor of the Church as St Bede The Venerable. He is also the only Englishman in Dante's Paradise (Paradiso' X.130), mentioned among theologians and doctors of the church.
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Charles II (Charles Stuart; 29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. According to royalists, Charles II became king when his father Charles I was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. After the Protectorate collapsed under Richard Cromwell in 1659, General George Monck invited Charles to return and assume the thrones in what became known as the Restoration. Charles's English parliament enacted harsh anti-Puritan laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he himself favoured a policy of religious toleration. In 1670, Charles entered into the secret treaty of Dover, an alliance with Louis XIV under the terms of which Louis agreed to aide Charles in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay Charles a pension, and Charles promised to convert to Roman Catholicism at an unspecified future date. In 1679, Titus Oates's revelations of a supposed "Popish Plot" sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles's brother and heir (the future James II) was a Roman Catholic. This crisis saw the birth of the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories, and dissolved the English Parliament in 1679, and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685.
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Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was Queen of England, France (in name only), and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. She is sometimes referred to as The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, and was immortalised by Edmund Spenser as the Faerie Queene. A new Act of Supremacy became law under Elizabeth. The queen's title was agreed to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England rather than the more contentious Supreme Head. At the same time, a new Act of Uniformity was passed, which made attendance at church and the use of an adapted version of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer compulsory, though the penalties for disobedience were not extreme. Many Roman Catholics, particularly on the continent, regarded Elizabeth as a heretic. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated her, calling her the "pretended queen of England". This sanction, which in theory released English Catholics from allegiance to Elizabeth, only served to link loyalty to the throne and membership of the Anglican church more closely together. It also placed English Roman Catholics in greater danger, encouraging them to rebel and raising doubts about their loyalty to the crown.
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Thomas Cranmer (July 2, 1489 – March 21, 1556) was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of the English kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. He was an influential theologian who, with Richard Hooker and Matthew Parker, was a co-founder of Anglican theological thought. He helped build a favourable case for Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and guided the English Reformation, which denied papal authority over the English Church, during its earliest days. Following Henry's death, Cranmer became a key figure in Edward's regency government.
Scholars credit Cranmer with writing and compiling the first two Books of Common Prayer, which established the basic structure of Anglican liturgy for more than four centuries. Many phrases from its services passed into the English language, either as deliberate quotations or as unconscious borrowings. Cranmer was executed in 1556 for heresy after Queen Mary I reunited the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church. Anglican culture, particularly the literature of John Foxe, later celebrated Cranmer as a martyr. His impact on religion in the United Kingdom was profound and lasting.
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Edward VI (12 October 1537 – 6 July 1553) became King of England, King of France (in practice only the town and surrounding district of Calais) and Edward I of Ireland on 28 January 1547, and crowned on 20 February, at just nine years of age. Edward, the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, was the third monarch of the Tudor dynasty and England's first ruler who was not Roman Catholic at the time of his ascension to the throne. Edward's entire rule was mediated through a council of regency as he never reached maturity. The council was first led by his uncle, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (1547–1549), and then by John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland (1549–1553). Although Henry VIII had severed the link between the English church and Rome, it was during Edward's reign that further reforms were established. It was during Edward's reign that Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, implemented the Book of Common Prayer. Edward's reign was marked by increasingly harsh religious reforms. Following Edward's death at the age of fifteen, a disputed succession reopened the religious conflicts. Lady Jane Grey was Queen for only nine days, and during that time reigning in name only, before she was replaced by Mary.
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Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was an Irish author and scholar. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature, Christian apologetics, literary criticism, and fiction. He is best known today for his series The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". Due in part to Tolkien's influence, Lewis converted to Christianity, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England" (Lewis 1952, p. 6). His conversion had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.
Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and continue to sell more than a million copies a year; the books that compose The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than 100 million copies. A number of stage and screen adaptations of Lewis's works have also been produced, the most notable of which is the 2005 Disney film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
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Anne Boleyn (1501/1507–19 May 1536) was the second wife of Henry VIII of England and the mother of Elizabeth I of England. Henry's marriage to Anne, and her subsequent execution, made her a key player in the political and religious upheaval that was the start of the English Reformation. In 1525, Henry VIII became enamoured with Anne and began his pursuit of her. It soon became the one absorbing object of the king's desires to secure a annulment from his wife, Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne. As a result of Anne's marriage to the king, the Church of England was forced to break with Rome and was brought under the king's control. Anne gave birth to a baby girl who would one day reign as Queen Elizabeth I of England. When Anne failed to quickly produce a male heir, the king grew tired of her and a plot was hatched by Thomas Cromwell to do away with her. Although the evidence against her was unconvincing, Anne was beheaded on charges of adultery, incest, and high treason in 1536. Following the coronation of her daughter Elizabeth as queen, Anne was venerated as a martyr and heroine of the English Reformation, particularly through the works of John Foxe.
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Sir Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. He showed that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.
Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done." His scientific fame notwithstanding, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. Newton wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. He also placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which agrees with one traditionally accepted date. He also attempted, unsuccessfully, to find hidden messages within the Bible (See Bible code).
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James II (14 October 1633 – 16 September 1701) was King of England, King of Scots, and King of Ireland from 6 February 1685 to 11 December 1688. He was the last Roman Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland. Many of his subjects distrusted his religious policies and autocratic tendencies, leading a group of them to move against him in the Glorious Revolution in 1688. James fled the country. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns, when he landed in Ireland in 1689. After his defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in the summer of 1690, James returned to France.
James is best known for his belief in absolute monarchy and his attempts to create religious liberty for his subjects. Both of these went against the wishes of the English Parliament and of most of his subjects. Parliament, opposed to the growth of absolutism that was occurring in other European countries, as well as to the loss of legal supremacy for the Church of England, saw their opposition as a way to preserve traditional English liberties. This tension made James's three-year reign a struggle for supremacy between the Parliament and the crown, resulting in his ouster, the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession.
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V. Gene Robinson (born May 29, 1947) is the ninth bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Robinson was elected bishop in 2003 and entered office on March 7, 2004. Prior to becoming bishop, he served as assistant to the retiring New Hampshire bishop. Robinson is best known for being the first openly gay, noncelibate priest to be ordained to the historical episcopate. Robinson's appointment prompted a group of 19 bishops, led by Bishop Robert Duncan of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, to make a statement warning the church of a possible schism between The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated that "[it] will inevitably have a significant impact on the Anglican Communion throughout the world and it is too early to say what the result of that will be." He added: "[I]t is my hope that the church in America and the rest of the Anglican Communion will have the opportunity to consider this development before significant and irrevocable decisions are made in response." Since his Robinson's election, theologically conservative parishes have aligned themselves with bishops outside The Episcopal Church, a movement called the Anglican realignment. His story has appeared in print and film.
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Henry Martyn (18 February 1781 - 16 October 1812), was an Anglican priest and missionary to the peoples of India and Persia. Born in Truro, Cornwall, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. A chance encounter with Charles Simeon led him to become a missionary. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England and became a chaplain for the British East India Company.
Martyn arrived in India in April 1806, where he preached and occupied himself in the study of linguistics. He translated the whole of the New Testament into Urdu, Persian and Judaeo-Persic. He also translated the Psalms into Persian and the Book of Common Prayer into Urdu. From India, he set out for Bushire, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Tabriz.
On his way to Constantinople, Martyn was seized with fever, and, though the plague was raging at Tokat, he was forced to stop there, unable to continue. On 16 October 1812 he died. He was remembered for his courage, selflessness and his religious devotion. In parts of the Anglican Communion he is celebrated with a Lesser Festival on 19 October.
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Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658) was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army, which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. Cromwell has been seen by some as a regicidal dictator. In Ireland, he is widely hated to this day.
Under Cromwell, Anglicanism was disestablished, presbyterian polity was introduced, the Thirty-Nine Articles were replaced with the Westminster Confession, and the Book of Common Prayer was replaced by the Directory of Public Worship. Despite this, about one quarter of English clergy and countless citizens refused to conform. When the Royalists returned to power in 1660, his corpse was dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded. The Restoration government re-established Anglicanism, the episcopal polity, and issued a new revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662.
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Augustine of Canterbury (died 26 May 604) was a Benedictine monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 598. He is considered the "Apostle to the English", and a founder of the English Church. Augustine was the prior of a monastery in Rome when Pope Gregory the Great chose him in 595 to lead a mission to Britain to convert the pagan King Æthelberht of Kent to Christianity. Æthelberht allowed the missionaries to preach freely and converted to Christianity, giving the missionaries land to found a monastery outside the city walls. Augustine was consecrated bishop of the English, and converted many of the king's subjects, including thousands during a mass baptism on Christmas Day in 597. Pope Gregory sent more missionaries in 601, along with encouraging letters and gifts for the churches, although attempts to persuade the native Celtic bishops to submit to Augustine's authority failed. Roman Catholic bishops were established at London and Rochester in 604, and a school was founded to train Anglo-Saxon priests and missionaries. Augustine arranged the consecration of his successor, Laurence of Canterbury. Augustine died in 604 and was soon revered as a saint. The authority of the Roman Catholic Church over the Church of England remained in place for ten centuries, until the latter broke away in the 16th century during the English Reformation.
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William Wilberforce (August 24, 1759 – July 29, 1833) was a British politician and philanthropist. A native of Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780 and became the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire (1784–1812). A close friend of Prime Minister William Pitt, in 1785 he underwent a conversion experience and became an evangelical Christian. In 1787 he came into contact with Thomas Clarkson and a group of anti-slave trade activists, including Granville Sharp, Beilby Porteus, Hannah More and Lord Middleton.
At their suggestion, Wilberforce was persuaded to take on the cause; he became one of the leading English abolitionists, heading the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade, which he saw through to the eventual passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. In later years Wilberforce supported the campaign for complete abolition, which eventually led to the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833; this Act paved the way for the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire. A tireless campaigner for the abolition of slavery, Wilberforce died just three days after hearing that the passage of the Act through Parliament was secure. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to his friend William Pitt.
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