Almost exactly 100 years after Edward King left Cuddesdon to become Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford, yet one more contingent of ordinands began their training at that same seminary, set in the lee of the Bishop of Oxford’s residence and, in the village of Cuddesdon, east south east of Oxford. Owen Chadwick’s excellent The Founding of Cuddesdon was still in print as was the Cuddesdon Office Book; both of these still bore something of the personality of the second principal, one Edward King. Those fresher seminarians, of 1972, were formed within a similar tradition of prayer and this reviewer writes as part of that very contingent.
There is something remarkable about the resilience of King’s influence inasmuch that by 1972, every form of modernism abounded, only a decade after the publication of John Robinson’s Honest to God and with the echoes of ‘Death of God’ theology still resounding in university divinity faculties. But King had been born just two months after George Stephenson’s Rocket won the Rainhill trials and in the same year that Peel’s Catholic Emancipation Act entered the statute books. Michael Marshall’s biography suggests that King’s influence is by no means lost.
Marshall himself notes the possible pitfalls of writing another full-length biography of Edward King and of the dangers of hagiography, which he acknowledges have been embraced too easily in the past. Very largely he avoids that trap, although there are just some elements of it in the Epilogue. Nonetheless we are very much in his debt for producing such a thorough and attractively written memoir of King – variously described in the subtitle as teacher, pastor, bishop, saint. There is much new material here and Marshall is justly generous in his thanks to John Newton, whose 1977 memoir of King was the latest extensive piece written until Michael Marshall’s new work was published in 2021. Newton himself had embarked upon a full-scale biography, which sadly was never completed before John was engulfed by his final illness. Happily, Rachel, his widow allowed Marshall to use his research. Newton had a good knowledge of German and this allowed such influences to reach the light of day for the first time in this book.
King was unusual, even for his own age – educated privately with tuition at home and then, even before entering university, acting as a ‘pastoral assistant’ to John Day, a tractarian priest in Ellesmere in Shropshire. Day died young, but not before marking King’s spiritual growth most richly. Throughout the book, we are reminded that, despite the famous ‘Lincoln trial’, King was never part of the ultra-ritualistic party which burgeoned into growth in the latter part of the nineteenth century. King’s later impact on Cuddesdon is abundantly clear from the analysis here and has never disappeared, despite mergers and the like.
The importance of the influence on King of the German Roman Catholic academic and later bishop, Johann Michael Sailer, is one of the key new pieces of background issuing from John Newton’s research and Michael Marshall’s careful use of the evidence. This influence remained throughout King’s life and ministry but was understandably important during his time at Christ Church as Professor. King was widely travelled and very much a European, as one of the chapter headings suggests. Alongside this, another very useful piece of work is Marshall’s rehabilitation of Samuel Wilberforce, not only in relation to King (although he was certainly a key ‘Kingmaker’ in all senses here!) but also as an extraordinarily effective, radical (for his time) and balanced diocesan bishop.
Further on, we see the importance of Gladstone’s support for King but also, at the same time, something of the controversy over his succession to the see of Lincoln. As bishop, both his extraordinary pastoral commitment and the drama and, to a large degree nonsense, of the Lincoln trial are well rehearsed. It is encouraging, too, to see the very balanced manner in which Marshall handles issues of sexuality and the rumours and assumptions which surround king as a single bishop who was ‘good with men’. Marshall makes it clear that his pastoral gifts extended throughout all his relationships with men and women. He also argues that modern commentators have too easily applied anachronistic criteria to King in relation to sexuality. The language used in relationships has shifted very significantly, and expressions of warmth and friendship were very differently described in Victorian England.
King’s friendship with Henry Scott Holland and other key influential figures of the period are effectively included. Edward King’s extraordinary contribution to the 1897 Lambeth Conference through his Quiet Day addresses is another important addition to our understanding of this figure who presided over the huge rural diocese of Lincoln for some 25 years. Anglicans have always held back in discussions of how one might proclaim individuals as ‘saints’ and it may be safest to do the same thing here. Suffice to say that King’s contributions to spirituality, prayer, pastoral care and moral thought helped build the foundations for the rediscovery of moral, pastoral and doctrinal theology as one integrated whole that emerged with Kirk and others in the first half of the twentieth century. This would effectively be a reclaiming of the Caroline tradition of the seventeenth century.
