Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, 1635-1699
Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was the seventh son of Samuel Stillingfleet of the family of Stillingfleet of Stillingfleet, Yorkshire. He was born at Cranborne in Dorsetshire on the 17th of April 1635, and received his early education in the grammar schools of Cranborne and Ringwood. In his fifteenth year he was admitted into St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained a Fellowship in 1653. For several years after leaving college he was engaged as a private tutor, first in the family of Sir Roger Burgoyne of Wroxall in Warwickshire, and afterwards in that of the Hon. Francis Pierrepoint of Nottingham, during which period he was ordained by Ralph Brownrig, the deprived Bishop of Exeter. In 1657 he was presented by Sir R. Burgoyne to the rectory of Sutton, Bedfordshire, and in 1665 the Earl of Southampton gave him the rectory of St. Andrew’s, Holborn. He was also appointed Preacher at the Rolls Chapel, and shortly afterwards Reader of the Temple, and Chaplain in Ordinary to Charles II. In 1667 he was collated to a Canonry in St. Paul’s, London; in 1669 he became a Canon ‘in the twelfth prebend’ in Canterbury Cathedral; in 1677 Archdeacon of London; in 1678 Dean of St. Paul’s; and on the 13th of October 1689 he was consecrated Bishop of Worcester. He died at his residence in Park Street, Westminster, on the 27th of March 1699, and was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where a monument was erected to his memory by his son, with a Latin epitaph by Richard Bentley, who had been one of his chaplains.
Bishop Stillingfleet collected ‘at a vast expence of time, pains and money’ a very choice and valuable library, which contained a considerable number of manuscripts, and upwards of nine thousand five hundred printed volumes, besides many pamphlets. It is stated that there were over two thousand folios in it, and that it cost the Bishop six thousand pounds. Evelyn in a letter to Pepys, dated August 12th, 1689, writes: ‘The Bishop of Ely49 has a well stor’d library; but the very best is what Dr. Stillingfleete, Deane of St. Paule’s, has at Twicknam, ten miles out of towne.’ After Stillingfleet’s death his library was offered for sale. Entries in Evelyn’s diary50 show that great efforts were made to persuade William III. to buy it, but they evidently failed, as the historical manuscripts were purchased by Robert Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford), while the remainder of the collection was acquired by Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop of Armagh, who bought the books for a public library in Dublin which he had founded. He is said to have paid two thousand five hundred pounds for them. Stillingfleet, who on account of his handsome person was nicknamed ‘the beauty of holiness,’ was the author of Origines Britannicæ, or Antiquities of the British Churches, and many controversial works. His collected works were printed in 1710 in six volumes folio, and a volume of his miscellaneous works was published in 1735 by his son, the Rev. James Stillingfleet, Canon of Worcester.
Footnotes
49 John Moore, Bishop of Ely, whose library was purchased by King George I., and presented by him to the University of Cambridge.
50 ‘April 29, 1699.—I dined with the Archbishop, but my business was to get him to persuade the King to purchase the late Bishop of Worcester’s library, and build a place, for his own library at St. James’s, in the Parke, the present one being too small.’
‘May 3, 1699.—At a meeting of the Royal Society I was nominated to be of the Committee to wait on the Lord Chancellor to move the King to purchase Bp. of Worcester’s library.’