Who gets the deanery?
PERSONAL COLUMN HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
Who is to be dean? they are all asking. The Revd This? The Revd That? I suppose that some deanery is shortly to become vacant; and vacant office always provides room for enjoy- able speculation. My only objection, in this matter, is that the speculators are =so timid. They mention only clerical candidates. This, it seems to me, is to impose artificial restraints alike upon the patronage of the Queen and upon their own imagination.
Is it really only clergymen of the Established Church who can become deans of our cathedrals? Historically, they have no such monopoly. Indeed, unless some recent whiggish statute has temporarily entrenched upon the royal supremacy, Mr Wilson can advise the Queen to appoint Mr Balogh as dean of St Paul's and Colonel Wigg as dean of West- minster. In doing so he would simply be returning to the practice of the best age of the Church: the age of Hooker and Donne and Lancelot A nd rewes.
Consider the policy of the late Queen Elizabeth I, of glorious memory. She had firm views about deans, which she showed in 1563. The deanery of Durham was then vacant. Doubtless there were plenty of clerical aspirants, but the Queen's final choice hovered between two learned laymen. One was William Whit- tingham, a courtly, travelled scholar who had `fitted himself for state employments' and spoke perfect French, but whose views were some- what radical. As an exile in Mary's reign he had got into bad company: he had associated with Knox and Goodman, expressed revolu- tionary political views, and translated the Geneva Bible. The other was Thomas Wilson, also a scholar, also a politician, also an exile. But he was more conservative and his scholar- ship was more universal; he had written on 'rhetoric,' had translated Demosthenes, and would write a classic treatise on usury.
The Queen preferred Wilson and indeed 'half promised' him the deanery; but Whittingham had a powerful patron and carried it in the end. He held it for sixteen years and was evidently an excellent dean, resident, 'affable' and hospitable. He also became much less radical, dropped puritanical 'singularities,' and pro- vided Durham cathedral with exquisite music (there is an enchanting epitaph, in the Galilee chapel of the cathedral, to the organist intro- duced by this 'puritan' dean). In 1572 Whit- tingham nearly returned to 'state employments.' There was talk of making him secretary of state. But this time the Queen was determined to put in her own candidate; so Dr Wilson— now Sir Thomas Wilson, MP, ambassador and economist, got that post. Seven years later, when Whittingham died, the Queen completed her `half promise' and appointed his old rival to succeed him as second lay dean of Durham.
At first there was some mumping at these appointments. Conservative critics complained that Whittingham was 'neither deacon nor minister according to the laws of this realm, but a mere layman'; and radical critics said the same about Wilson. But the Queen sensibly ignored the fuss and continued the process. She appointed another useful public servant— Robert Weston, her Lord Chancellor of Ireland —to the deanery first of St Patrick's, then of Bath and Wells; and when he died, she re- placed him, as dean of Bath and Wells, by another layman, Valentine Dale. Like Wilson, Dale was a lawyer, ambassador and MP. By the 1580s nobody saw anything odd in lay deans, and in 1587 Sir Julius Caesar, a judge of the admiralty, 'thought it perfectly natural to write to Lord Burghley asking 'that it may please Her Majesty to give him the grant of the first deanery that shall fall void, either of York or of Durham or of Bath and Wells or of Winchester.' These, of course, were the four most attractive deaneries. But Sir Julius Caesar did not in fact get any of them. He had to plod away at the civil law and died fifty years later as Master of the Rolls.
In the next reign, Durham had another lay dean. This was Adam Newton, a scholarly Scotsman, learned in Greek and Latin. After a roving youth spent as a pedagogue on the Continent, Newton found his way to the court of King James in Edinburgh. The King promptly appointed him first as tutor, then as secretary, to the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry. If we can believe the tributes to the Prince's learning which were showered on his prema- ture coffin by the disappointed 'reversionary interest,' Newton did his job well. He was also well rewarded. When the court moved to London, he married the Lord Keeper's daughter and became dean of Durham; where- upon he set about building himself a fine Jacobean house—admittedly rather a long way from Durham. This was the beautiful Charl- ton House near Greenwich, now open to the public. Dean Newton was clearly a man of taste, though perhaps he did not visit Durham much. He held the deanery for fifteen years and then exchanged it for a baronetcy.
By that time the deanery of Windsor had also been given to a layman. At least he was technically a layman in the Protestant Church, being the Italian archbishop of Spalato, Marcantonio de Dominis. De Dominis was a learned man, of scientific interests and pre-- cocious ecumenical ideas. His learning recom- mended him to King James and his reunionist ideas made him hated in Rome. So he arrived in England in 1616. Once installed in his new deanery, de Dominis discovered a living in Berkshire that was conveniently vacant, and in his gift as dean. He thereupon presented himself to it, and for this purpose contrived to read the 39 articles; but even this pre- liminary had not been thought necessary when he took the deanery. We may therefore count him too as a lay dean.
Canonries, at that time, were also available for deserving laymen. Such was Sir Edward Stanhope, another civil lawyer, who was canon both of St Paul's and of York. Minster, as well as chancellor of the dioceie of London and vicar-general of the archbishop of Canterbury. He died in 1608, 'estant' (as a fellow lawyer wrote) `de £40,000 welth et de nul expense Some years ago, when working on the records of moneylending in the Public Record Office, I was surprised to find that this canon was one of the biggest professional moneylenders of his time. But then canons. of St Paul's frequently surprise us by their extra-capitular activities.
The reason behind the appointment' of lay
deans is clear enough. Deans and canons have not, as deans and canons, any cure of souls. Indeed, it was precisely for this reason that the puritans, with their tiresome utilitarian beliefs, wished to abolish them as 'fat, lazy and un. profitable drones'—and did abolish them when they got the chance. If a dean were to take a cure of souls in addition to his deanery, then of course, like Archbishop de Dominis when he became rector of East Ilsley, he had to assume a clerical function. But as long as he was only a dean, there was no functional necessity of clerical orders. His benefice was sine cum animarum, a 'sinecure,' no different, in itself, from (say) the Provostship of Eton. This was also, technically, a clerical office—the founder, Henry VI, had stipulated, by statute, that the Provost should be in orders; but Queen Elizabeth and King James overlooked that obstacle and the two most famous provosts of Eton, Sir Henry Savile and Sir Henry Wotton, were both admitted as laymen. They were scholarly public servants, like the lay deans. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth had tried to fob Savile off with the deanery of Carlisle, but he stood out for Eton, which was far more convenient. It is a mere historical accident that the Provost- ship of Eton. has retained this open character, given to it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, while cathedral deaneries, similarly opened by her, have since become, once again, closed.
However, no mere custom need be permanent. Nullum tern pus occurrit regi, as the lawyers say: the rights of the Crown are not eroded by mere time; and I trust that the excellent pre- cedents set by the Deborah of our Church and the British Solomon will not be altogether for- gotten. There are times when they could be usefully revived. Before the war, I recall, there was a great controversy about the deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, which, like the provost- ship of Eton, is annexed to a college. It was thought, at the time, difficult if not impossible to find a clergyman of the established Church (at least in England) who could fulfil both functions. While conservatives despaired and ransacked the Commonwealth for candidates, radicals pressed for legal secularisation of the office as the only solution—only to be told that such secularisation would entail consequences from which even they shrank back in alarm. Separation of chapter and college, they were assured (by the legal pundit of the chapter), would mean that the chapter would appropriate the buildings, the endowments and the historic name, while the college could migrate with a pittance to the suburbs. . . .
How much simpler and more attractive is the solution adopted, in similar circumstances. by that great pragmatist, Queen Elizabeth 1! She would simply have stuffed in, pro hac vice, a suitable layman. Thus the royal patronage would remain inviolate. The sacred fabric of our venerable ecclesiastical constitution would remain untouched, indeed confirmed. The participation of the laity in the Church would be usefully emphasised. The work of society would suffer no interruption from a temporary dearth of clerical talent. The most deserving candidate, from a widened field, would be appointed; the purely spiritugl functions would be performed, for the time being, by a clerical sub-dean; and the clergy, kept alert by this free competition, would no doubt see to it that. at the next vacancy, they were better prepared• I am surprised that this modest proposal was not made at the time. I make it now as a small contribution to our long promised revival of the glories of the Elizabethan age.
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