Doncaster Races and the downfall of a Victorian clerical pluralist
Although legislation passed in 1838 severely limited the capacity of Anglican clergymen to hold more than one benefice, nothing was done to disturb those who already enjoyed multiple livings. These pluralists proved to be embarrassingly durable, some of them surviving to draw what was in effect a sinecure income into the eighteen-seventies. There was a rare exception in 1874, when the eighty-one year-old Reverend J.W. King was pressured into resigning both his parishes in the diocese of Lincoln. However, what had angered Bishop Christopher Wordsworth was not King's pluralism, but the fact that he bred racehorses. King was seriously ill at the time and died a few months later.
Thus the 1874 episode in which a bishop actually challenged a pluralist – something upon which, indeed, Christopher Wordsworth's censure only touched indirectly – was not primarily focused on the scandal that the Reverend Mr King had quartered himself on two Lincolnshire parishes for forty years.[1] The King family had been the squires of Ashby-de-la-Launde since the sixteenth century. As lay impropriators, they owned the rectorial tithes, so it made sense (to them) to appoint one of themselves as the vicar thereby completing their control. John William King had been born at about the time Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine. He was a successful student at Oxford, where Corpus Christi College elected him to a Fellowship, a useful step towards a career in the Church. In 1822, his family made him vicar of Ashby-de-la-Launde, which was worth about £300 a year. Ten years later, his College appointed him to a second and more lucrative Lincolnshire parish, Bassingham, which yielded its rector between £650 and £750 a year.[2] The two churches were about twelve miles apart. Bassingham was home to about five times as many people, and the Wesleyan Methodists erected a chapel there in 1839 and, sixteen years later, built their own schoolroom, in competition with the Anglican National Schools. However, the Reverend Mr King lived at Ashby Hall, which he had inherited in 1841, and provided the larger parish with basic spiritual facilities through a curate. Allowing for essential deductions of tax and stipends, King's net income from the two parishes over fifty-two years was probably close to £40,000: applying a generalised inflation multiplier, this would be worth about four million pounds in 2025 prices. Throughout that half century of sometimes turbulent change in the Church of England, bishops came and went at Lincoln Cathedral and no doubt they preached against Catholicism, drunkenness and fornication. However, there does not seem to have been a word of public criticism of the Reverend John King for drawing an income from two parishes, one of which he serviced through a deputy.
Nor was his pluralism the primary reason for his censure by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth in 1874. As the years passed, it is likely that the owner of Ashby Hall became more squire than parson. Indeed, by his eighties, King understandably regarded himself as retired from active ministry, although he retained the titles and the emoluments of his two livings. In effect, he had switched from a religion born in a stable to racehorses bred in his own stables. On the turf he was known by the alias 'Mr Launde' and, although his clerical status was no secret to insiders, the wider racing public seem to have been kept in the dark about his true identity.[3] Sometime after his consecration as Bishop of Lincoln in 1869, Christopher Wordsworth became privy to the secret. Bishop Wordsworth was an active prelate who, among other pronouncements, denounced the trade in advowsons and condemned Methodist ministers for annexing the style "the Reverend".[4] According to his biographers (one of them his daughter), Wordsworth wrote "courteously but very firmly" to King, "remonstrating with him on the subject".[5] King, however, interpreted the episcopal reprimand as a threat of legal action which, as he subsequently explained, "left me, as an Anglo-Saxon (whose ancestors laid down their lives to establish the Reformed Protestant religion), no alternative except the course which I pursued", which was curtly to refer the bishop to his solicitor. At this stage, their exchanges were private.
Since the Reverend Mr King had correctly indicated that his diocesan did not have a legal leg to stand on, the matter might have rested, at least for the time being, but for the drama of the 1874 St Leger. Cricket and football, although popular sports, had yet to establish competitive structures, with the result that horse-racing, and especially its five annual 'classic' events, enjoyed massive popular support among secular-minded enthusiasts who debated the merits of steeds that they mostly never set eyes upon. Even the serious and censorious Saturday Review published a breathless account of the big race at Doncaster. The racing fraternity had looked forward to a contest between the Derby winner, George Frederick, and Apology, which had won The Oaks, the race confined to three-year-old fillies. Great was the disappointment across the country when it was announced that both horses were withdrawn from the race by their trainers after reportedly sustaining minor injuries in exercise. But one owner refused to disappoint the racing public. On being notified that Apology was slightly lame, 'Mr Launde' reportedly sent a telegram saying that his mare must run "even if she only had three legs". Faithful to his clerical status, King / Launde did not gamble, but he felt an obligation to send Apology to the starting post because "all Lincolnshire had backed her".[6] There was tension in the paddock before the race, and a general consensus among the punters that Mr Launde's entry was slightly lame, Nonetheless, there was, of course, a fairy-tale ending when the "game, honest, wear-and-tear mare" out-galloped the field and came home the winner (by a length-and-a-half). Across the land, there was praise for the great sporting gentleman who had so dramatically kept faith with the racing public.
This acclaim was not shared by the Bishop of Lincoln, who not only unleashed a further ferocious reprimand but also took the unusual (and, frankly, ungentlemanly) step of promptly publishing it, incidentally exposing to the world the hitherto veiled scandal that 'Mr Launde' was a clerk in holy orders. "It is with very great regret that I see, from the public papers describing the races at Doncaster the day before yesterday, that my former remonstrance with you has been of no avail. I had hoped that you might have been induced, at your advanced age, by regard for your own spiritual welfare as well as for that of others, to listen to my earnest expostulations." As the London correspondent of an Australian newspaper cheerfully put it, Wordsworth was reminding King that he "will soon be under that turf on which he now runs his horses".[7] Continuing "with much sorrow", the bishop complained "that you have shown no signs of remorse for your offence in bringing discredit on your sacred profession and in inflicting injury on the Church of which you are a minister, and in causing scandal to her members, by training racehorses for the turf instead of devoting yourself entirely to the work to which you pledged yourself at your ordination". It was at this point that the bishop decided to throw in an allusion to King's pluralism. "You are the incumbent of two benefices in this diocese – Ashby-de-la-Launde and Bassingham – and the latter of these on which you do not reside, is largely endowed and you hold these two pastoral cures on the condition that you will promote the welfare of the Church and not bring disgrace upon her". It is not easy to comprehend why Wordsworth included this sally, which he did not pursue. He could hardly have implied that training racehorses would have been acceptable had King held only one parish.
Public opinion seems to have been divided over the issue that the bishop had raised. The Times agreed that it was morally wrong for a clergyman to breed racehorses, while Nonconformists in particular were reported to be exultantly indignant. But others felt that "the Bishop of Lincoln has clearly been in the wrong in his mode of dealing with the case".[8] The Spectator regarded his "pompous rebuke" as the product of "a habit of mind which makes a prim and rigid, but not very potent, religion of rather shallow social conventions".[9] Since royalty and aristocracy patronised the turf, episcopal censure of the Reverend Mr King seemed overblown, reminiscent of Puritan intolerance of the theatre.
Indeed, a more specific embarrassment quickly emerged. One of King's neighbours was a young Lincolnshire squire called Henry Chaplin who was making an impression in the early years of what would become a half-century career in Conservative politics. Chaplin's opposition to the disestablishment of the Irish Church – he proved to be one of Disraeli's chief lieutenants in the resistance offered by the Tories in the Commons – had led Bishop Wordsworth himself to encourage the young politician's participation in the diocesan synod. Indeed, he was regarded as a trusted adviser in cathedral circles. Yet Henry Chaplin also owned racing stables, and had already bred a Derby winner. How did the two cases differ? Moreover, there was a public relations risk in haranguing someone who was eighty-one years of age. Perhaps Bishop Wordsworth did not know that King was already seriously ill, reportedly suffering from "gout of the stomach", which sounds like cancer. Then, a day or two after the St Leger, at about the time when the ink was drying on the episcopal reprimand, the squire of Ashby Hall fell prey to another of the hazards of old age when he fell and broke his thigh. "Such an accident at his time of life… most necessarily give rise to the most serious misgivings."[10] Pluralist or not, the Reverend Mr King was beginning to look like the victim of persecution.[11]
King replied to his bishop, coolly regretting "that your lordship has thought fit to publish your last letter", thereby forcing him, "at whatever cost", to respond from his sickbed. He offered a dignified defence of his equine enthusiasms: "for more than fifty years I have bred and sometimes had in training horses for the turf. They are horses of a breed highly prized, which I inherited with my estate, and have been in my family for generations. ... I cannot think that in my endeavours to perpetuate this breed, and thus improve the horses in this country ... I have done anything to incur your lordship's censure". Punch was certainly persuaded by this argument, asking whether the Bishop of Lincoln had "ever proved himself a greater benefactor to his country than the Rev. Mr King has in keeping up an ancestral usage of breeding horses"? There was amusement when it emerged that a Statute from the reign of Henry VIII had actually required the archbishops and senior clergy to maintain studs. It seemed that the enactment had never been repealed: King had been reprimanded for obeying the law "too thoroughly".[12]
Even Bishop Wordsworth's biographers praised the "great courtesy and good sense" of King's reply,[13] although they chose to overlook the quiet triumphalism of his retreat from combat. Underlining to the bishop the point that "legal proceedings on your part against me would be powerless", he declared his willingness to resign his two parishes rather than part with his stable. In doing so, he acted "not from any consciousness of wrong, or from fear of any consequences which might ensue in the Ecclesiastical Courts, but simply because I desire to live the remainder of my days in peace and charity with all men". King pointedly added that his graceful exit would "save your lordship the annoyance, and the Church the scandal, of futile proceedings being taken against one who … is lying on the bed of sickness at this moment". In short, he was prepared to give up two jobs that he was no longer capable of doing in order to save his diocesan from making a fool of himself.
It is perhaps remarkable that the Reverend Mr King managed to emerge from the episode with what seems to have been a wide degree of public sympathy. Clergy who clashed with their bishops were generally crushed by the crozier, but in this case the timing of the diocesan rebuke caused unease. There was hardly any need for a declaration against clerical participation in horse-racing, for it was unlikely that any other reverend gentleman would cultivate an enthusiasm for horse-flesh. As for King himself, the English correspondent of an Australian newspaper was probably not alone when he commented "inasmuch as the old clergyman never visits a race meeting nor makes a bet, he might have been left to die unbadgered".[14] Hence Wordsworth's heavy-handed censure tended to obscure the fact that, in ethical terms, the Reverend Mr King hardly had a strong hand of cards to play. If he was not as blatantly parasitic a pluralist as Robert Moore or the Pretymans, he had nonetheless drawn an indecently large income as an absentee parson for four decades. Although he did not gamble, he had undoubtedly amassed considerable sums in prize money from the turf: even the sympathetic Spectator wondered "how Mr King employed the great winnings his horse gained for him".[15] Indeed, the amount he had won during his racing career might well have prompted some to wonder why he needed his parochial pickings as well. Yet it seems that such questions were swept aside by feelings of sympathy for an octogenarian who was almost certainly on his deathbed. "Considering Mr King's age, he cannot be a scandal to his Bishop for very long …. We cannot help in our hearts applauding the old gentleman's pluck."[16] At King's death a few months later, in May 1875, the most obvious manifestation of public regret was disappointment that his passing automatically meant that another of his stable, a horse bearing the good Protestant name of Holy Friar, would be ineligible to run in the Derby. There seems to have been no comment, disapproving or otherwise, on the fact that he was a long-time pluralist.
As an episode in the persistence of ecclesiastical pluralism in mid-Victorian England, its key point was that the resignation of the Reverend Mr King was that it represented a very rare example of the ousting of one of the beneficiaries of the practice. One parasite had been compelled to repay a small part of income improperly received; two others gave up one or more appointments.[17] But the vicar of Ashby-de-la-Launde and rector of Bassingham was the only pluralist who felt compelled to make a total surrender of his preferments. Yet he resigned them not because his avarice had been shamed nor his absenteeism condemned, but because his horse had won the St Leger.
ENDNOTES
[1] This Note forms a tailpiece to a larger study of the persistence of pluralism in Victorian England: Individual letters in the correspondence between Wordsworth and King were widely published in the press. All four may be conveniently consulted in Sydney Morning Herald, 6 January 1875, via Trove, the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive. For comment, Spectator, 17 October, 3; 24 October 1874, 2; Saturday Review, xxxviii (19 September 1874), 377-8.
[2] Crockford's (1870), 412 stated the income of Bassingham to be £645 plus a residence; Kelly's Directory of Lincolnshire (1889), 43, gave a higher figure, £742, and this at a time when tithe rent charges were falling. Both parishes had unusually large acreages of glebe. Ashby-de-la-Launde was one of eleven parishes in the South Lincolnshire constituency where the tenants voted solidly for the party of their landlord in all three contested elections between 1841 and 1868. The King family were Conservatives. This was feudal country. R.J. Olney, Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 (Oxford, 1973), 33-4.
[3] "It is a wonder to me that the Reverend Mr King's connection with horse racing was not objected to by his diocesan very many years ago," wrote the London correspondent of the Wrexham Advertiser (17 October 1874): "... the pseudonym has always been transparent enough to Turfmen".
[4] Bishop Wordsworth's concerns are discussed in https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/438-the-uses-and-abuses-of-advowsons. In 1873, Wordsworth had issued an appeal to Methodists calling for their reunion with the Church of England. It was "couched in terms that they could not but find offensive" (Olney, Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885, 185). The following year, a dispute arose over the proposed inscription on the headstone of a Wesleyan minister who had been buried in an Anglican churchyard. His relatives wished to style him 'Reverend'. Wordsworth banned this, although there was no evidence that the Church of England had trademarked the term. "There can, we think, be no doubt that the Bishop was wrong," observed the Saturday Review, xxxviii, 22 August 1874, 239. His clash with the Methodists made the scandal of King's association with the turf doubly embarrassing for the bishop: Methodists denounced all horse-racing, but Wordsworth's attitude was ambivalent.
[5] J.H. Overton and E. Wordsworth, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln… (London, 1888), 254-5. Wordsworth's implied threat of legal action had unwittingly probed ancestral pride. An Ashby-de-la-Launde forebear, Colonel Edward King, had resisted the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts two centuries earlier. C. Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), 225-6.
[6] The story of the telegram may be a fable, invented by King's much younger wife who (unlike 'Mr Launde') did attend Doncaster Races. It should be noted that the rumoured withdrawal of Apology caused instability in the betting odds. The trainer's concern was genuine, but such devices could be used to secure favourable terms for a wager. J.B. Radcliffe, Ashgill… (London, 1900), 248-9, 252.
[7] Melbourne Argus, 14 December 1874.
[8] Spectator, 24 October 1874, 2.
[9] Spectator, 17 October 1874, 3.
[10] Stamford Mercury, n.d., quoted Lyttelton Times, 4 January 1875, via PapersPast, the National Library of New Zealand's online newspaper archive.
[11] In a widely published follow-up letter of 21 October 1874, Wordsworth insisted that he had not known of the accident when he unleashed his anathema.
[12] Punch, 31 October 1874, 181.
[13] Overton and E. Wordsworth, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, 254.
[14] Sydney Mail, 16 January 1875.
[15] Spectator, 17 October 1874, 3. King's winnings were estimated at almost £15,000 in 1874, making him the second most successful owner on the turf. Apology won £14,445 in eight major races; her sister Agility added around £6,000. Welshman, 17 December 1875; Radcliffe, Ashgill, 262.
[16] Saturday Review, xxxviii, 17 October 1874, 492.
[17] The Reverend Lord Guilford had been compelled to repay a very small percentage of the massive booty that he had extracted from the St Cross Hospital at Winchester, multiple parasite Robert Moore had eventually resigned one of his portfolio of livings and retired from his cathedral canonry, while even the perennially absent precentor of St Paul's Cathedral, C.A. Belli, had eventually disgorged a marshland parish that had subsidised his lifestyle for four decades. These cases are discussed in INSERT ESSAY