Hereford Cathedral - Eminent Persons

Eminent Persons

Among eminent men who have been associated with the cathedral – besides those who have already been mentioned – are Robert of Gloucester, the chronicler, prebendary in 1291; Nicholas of Hereford, chancellor in 1377, a remarkable man and leader of the Lollards at Oxford; John Carpenter, town clerk of London who baptized there on December 18, 1378; Polydore Vergil, prebendary in 1507, a celebrated literary man, as indeed with such a name he ought to have been; and Miles Smith, prebendary in 1580, promoted to the See of Gloucester – one of the translators of the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

Another famous prebendary was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who was appointed to a stall in 1510. The list of post English Reformation prelates includes Matthew Wren, who, however was translated to Ely in the year of his consecration (1635); Nicholas Monck, a brother of the George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, who died within a few months of consecration (1661); and two bishops around whom ecclesiastical storms raged, Benjamin Hoadley and Renn Dickson Hampden. Hoadley, by his tract against the Non-jurors and his sermon on the Kingdom of Christ, provoked the Bangorian Controversy and so led to the virtual supersession of Convocation from 1717 to 1852; the appointment of Hampden to this see by Lord John Russell in 1847 was bitterly opposed by those who considered him latitudinarian, including the Dean of Hereford, and was appealed against in the Court of Queen's Bench. Dr. Hampden went his way, which was that of a student rather than that of an administrator, and ruled the diocese for 21 years, leaving behind him at his death, in 1868, the reputation of a great scholar and thinker.