IT IS May 1934, and Guy Willoughby, 11th Baron Middleton, is in a bit of fix. His rector at Wollaton-cum-Cossall, Nottinghamshire, has departed for a new posting, and, as “patron of the living” there, responsible for sourcing a replacement, he simply cannot find a new incumbent. Even after examining the credentials of 70 parsons, no one fits the bill. He implores his parishioners to be patient, but warns: “Don’t expect to get everything you want. The man you get will be a human being, and I don’t expect you will get a man under 40. I tell you that quite frankly.”
For hundreds of years, aristocratic patrons such as Lord Middleton have had a place in and around the Church of England. Be it in lining up suitable younger sons to convenient parishes in the neighbourhood, or spreading their influence through radical preachers, theirs has been a consistent background position, as owners of advowsons — the right to appoint clergy to a vacant benefice — in the spiritual life of the nation.
Many of the early churches were proprietary churches, “built by someone for their estate — they are in many cases the origins of parish churches”, says the Revd Dr Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford, says. After the Reformation, the whole system was reorganised. “The Crown seized all the rights that were in the hands of religious houses and sold them,” says the Ven. Dr Bill Jacob, who retired in 2014 as Archdeacon of Charing Cross. The result was a large number of lay rectors, those who “bought the right to present”.
By the 18th century, advowsons for about half of all parishes were owned by private individuals. The other half split were between the monarch, the bishops and other clergy, and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Among the private individuals, peers owned about 12 per cent of livings, although these were — as they remain — geographically unbalanced. The highest percentage are in the Peterborough diocese.
But what attracted the nobility to spiritual patronage? As with much concerning the upper class, it comes down to local power. First, “You don’t want the parson in the parish in which your stately home is placed to be at odds with you — if you’re a Tory, you don’t want a Whig in the parsonage.” So says Dr William Gibson, Emeritus Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University,
For the landed patron, it made sense to keep things in-hand. “If a peer owned two or three advowsons in a particular neighbourhood, they dominated,” Professor Gibson says. “For the people that lived there, it wasn’t just a case of the lord of the manor dominating the economic nature of their lives — he dominated the spiritual nature of their lives too.”
That influence could take many forms. From 1908, Frances “Daisy” Greville, Countess of Warwick, appointed a series of socialist clergymen to her Essex livings: first, the fiery Edward Maxted, and then, in 1910, the “Red Vicar”, Conrad Noel, patrician grandson of the 1st Earl of Gainsborough — a priest who, nevertheless, had pinned to his wall at theological college the slogan “Property is robbery.”
ANOTHER reason for owning your local advowson might be self-interest. While eldest sons were bound to inherit estates, younger sons must be helped into a career. The Church was a perfectly appropriate place for providing such men with a living — literally — since this was, like positions in the military and the law, of a status high enough to perpetuate what the author and historian Professor Sir David Cannadine has described as the “patrician position”.
Today, though, the Church is no longer a well-trodden path for unemployed aristocrats. Of the 793 families in the hereditary peerage, very few include clerics. As Trevor Beeson wrote in his 2002 book The Bishops, “there is no one very grand among today’s bishops — not even an Honourable . . . the aristocracy has for several decades failed to produce more than a handful of clergy.” The few exceptions, Beeson continued, included the Hon. Oliver Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, Dean of Lincoln between 1969 and 1989, and the Hon. Hugh Dickinson, Dean of Salisbury from 1986 to 1996 — “both good appointments as it turned out”.
Although the aristocracy having more or less abandoned Holy Orders — and the process of appointments has evolved away from the possibility of slotting your younger children into a parish at will — the upper class retains its ancient position of church patronage. Thanks to parish reorganisations, it is difficult to be sure how many peers remain private patrons, but the general trend has been downward, both as parishes have amalgamated and landownership patterns have altered.
In 1855, a list of 6509 livings and their 3772 patrons recorded that 300 peers owned almost 1500 livings. A century later, when Roy Perrott’s book The Aristocrats was published, he had found that 800 of the 12,000 livings were owned by peers and their children. Having completed a similar survey to Perrott’s, I conclude that at least 58 peers are patrons of at least 250 livings. Of the 5478 active benefices listed in Crockford, 430 of them have patrons with hereditarily titles. Of these, 100 are sole patrons.
To some, 430 benefices influenced by a member of the upper class is 430 too many: after all, what relevance has the aristocracy to the modern Church? These sentiments are not new: “From the middle of the 19th century, there was a concerted effort on the part of diocesan authorities to buy up patronage wherever possible,” says the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, former Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Dean of Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.
Would the Church like aristocratic patrons to disappear altogether? “You’re making a presumption there which is that the Church of England has a mind of its own which is a single thing,” says Dr Morris, chuckling. Still, the subject is unlikely to face comprehensive reform any time soon: further parish reorganisation is likely to do more to dilute the impact of private patrons than anything that the General Synod suggests. “It’s too big a thing and too marginal to be worth tackling,” Dr Morris says. “For the most part, it doesn’t obstruct what most people would regard as the work of the Church of England.”
SOME of the noble patrons believe wholeheartedly in their inherited positions. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, takes a keen interest in the livings that he presents to in the diocese of St Albans. “I find that, on the whole, the bishops and their suffragans welcome that interest,” he says.
“I’m not sure that’s universal: it’s thought to be a terrific anachronism. What I say to the people who are unfortunate enough to have me as their lay rector or their patron is that it’s just conceivable that the church bureaucracy will behave like all bureaucracies and ride roughshod over their wishes, and sometimes it helps to have an independent voice supporting you.”
Being involved in church life helps him to keep in touch, too. “People, like me, who have large estates and houses to keep up can only survive and prosper if we take part in local community life,” he says.
In Merseyside, Edward Stanley, 19th Earl of Derby, has seven livings and finds himself appointing members of the clergy roughly every other year. He enjoys it — getting involved with conversations about parish reorganisations and attending parish profile-writing meetings. He leaves the candidates to the church — “I only get involved with an interview when it’s down to the last couple of people” — and doesn’t get involved in the interview process, believing instead that “due process should take its journey. I will always read the parish profile if I haven’t been involved in the writing of it; so I know what they think they’re looking for, and I will meet the preferred candidate so they know I’m there.”
Like Lord Salisbury, Lord Derby stays neutral: “I remain there as an interested party, trying not to get too involved with the Bishop or with what the [PCC] want, but sometimes they need a bit of a stir-up.” Over the years, he has had the opportunity, as patron, to present physically the new cleric at the service of installation, a process that he compares to a father giving away his daughter at her wedding: “The wording is literally ‘Bishop, I present to you . . .’”
Dr Morris can witness to peers’ independence of mind. Once interviewed for the parish of All Saints’, Chelsea, where one of the joint patrons is Earl Cadogan, owner of the Cadogan estate, there were two candidates. “The parish went to Lord Cadogan with the name of the other candidate, but he said no, and they had to start the process again.” Dr Jacob remembers the late Lord Cadogan as a particularly interested patron: “No Bishop of London in their right mind would want to cross swords with him. Mutual interest is very important.”
While, on paper, aristocratic influence on the Church might appear consistently strong — since peers can still inherit advowsons — the wider picture has evolved. Self-interest has waned, and, instead, those who exercise their right of presentation do so out of a sense of civic duty. “It’s about working with local people and doing what’s best for the locality,” Dr Morris says.
If, even despite all of this, it still seems a little archaic — well, it is. “I don’t think it does any harm, and I think it does some good sometimes,” Dr Morris says.
For Dr Jacob, it’s a case of better the devil you know; the current system, he says, “works pretty satisfactorily”. After all, he says, with a chuckle, it curtails the bishops. Ought their power be limited? “Oh, yes. There aren’t many levers of power which bishops can pull, but appointments are one of them.”
Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £30 (Church Times Bookshop £27); 978-1-5291-5304-0.
