William Stubbs

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William Stubbs bigraphy, stories - British bishop

William Stubbs : biography

21 June 1825 – 22 April 1901

William Stubbs (21 June 1825 – 22 April 1901) was an English historian and Bishop of Oxford.

Final illness and death

An attack of illness in November 1900 seriously impaired his health. He was able, however, to attend the funeral of Queen Victoria on 2 February 1901, and preached a remarkable sermon before the king and the German emperor on the following day. His illness became critical on 20 April. Bishop Stubbs was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Cuddesdon, next to the palace of the bishops of Oxford.

Early life

The son of William Morley Stubbs, a solicitor, he was born at Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and was educated at Ripon Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1848, obtaining a first-class in Literae Humaniores and a third in mathematics.

Modern views of him

In the main his ideas of a confrontational political framework have been superseded by K.B. McFarlane’s ‘community of interest’ theory; the idea that the amount of possible conflict between a king and his nobles was actually very small (case in point, Henry IV, 1399–1413). Historians like Richard Partington, Rosemary Horrox and notably May McKisack, have pushed this view further.

J. W. Burrow proposed that Stubbs, like John Richard Green and Edward Augustus Freeman, was an historical scholar with little or no experience of public affairs, with views of the present which were Romantically historicised and who was drawn to history by what was in a broad sense an antiquarian passion for the past, as well as a patriotic and populist impulse to identify the nation and its institutions as the collective subject of English history, making

…the new historiography of early medieval times an extension, filling out and democratising, of older Whig notions of continuity. It was Stubbs who presented this most substantially; Green who made it popular and dramatic… It is in Freeman…of the three the most purely a narrative historian, that the strains are most apparent.A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past by J.W. Burrow, Cambridge University Press, 1981. ISBN 0 521 24079 4

Education and career to 1889

He was elected a fellow of Trinity College, and held the college living of Navestock, Essex, from 1850 to 1866. In 1859 he married Catherine, daughter of John Dollar, of Navestock, and they had several children. He was librarian at Lambeth Palace, and in 1862 was an unsuccessful candidate for the Chichele professorship of modern history at Oxford. In 1866 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and held the chair until 1884. His lectures were thinly attended, and he found them a distraction from his historical work. Some of his statutory lectures are published in his Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History. In 1872 he founded Oxford University’s School of Modern History, allowing postclassical history to be taught as a distinct subject for the first time. He was rector of Cholderton, Wiltshire, from 1875 to 1879, when he was appointed a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. He served on the ecclesiastical courts commission of 1881-1883, and wrote the weighty appendices to the report. On 25 April 1884 he was consecrated Bishop of Chester, and in 1889 became Bishop of Oxford.

Sources

  • Letters of William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, ed. W. H. Hutton.
  • The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development, (sixth edition 1903),
  • Charles Petit-Dutaillis, Studies and Notes Supplementary to Stubbs’ Constitutional History,

Category:1825 births Category:1901 deaths Category:People from Knaresborough Category:Bishops of Chester Category:Bishops of Oxford Category:English historians Category:Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford Category:Fellows of Trinity College, Oxford Category:Anglo-Saxon studies scholars Category:People educated at Ripon Grammar School Category:British medievalists Category:Members of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques