A POISONED PEN, EXETER, 1840.

 I blog this as a brief example of the fun and games that, for many years, The (Whig) Western Times had when reporting Church news:  

"ORDINATION. - Bishop Phillpotts held an ordination last Sunday, at the Cathedral.  The ceremony did not excite any particular interest, and the following gentlemen had the hands of that distingushed prelate  laid on them, by which they were ordained and set apart for the work of the gospel - some being moved thereto by the prospect of family livings, but all professing to have been moved by the Holy Ghost:"

Whence follows a list of some twenty or so, new Deacons and Priests. 

What wonderful innuendo!  Our reporter clearly had little respect for Exeter's bishop nor for the beneficed clergy ordained under his hands. 

Phillpotts was, in fact, so much hated by the working people of Exeter that they burned him in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night 1841 while he was hiding in his palace protected from his own people by a troop of yeomanry cavalry. But it was the Cornish socialist historian, A.L.Rowse, who oiled Phillpotts with the most vitriol when he wrote that he was: “a nauseating character..., a nasty political pamphleteer who recommended himself thus for ecclesiastical promotion to the Tory reactionaries of before the Reform Bill, who recommended himself still more by marrying Lord Eldon’s niece, a grabber of every scrap of church preferment he could lay hands on to serve his family - he had seven sons in Orders and almost as many sons-in-law; who kept clear of his cathedral city the whole time of the cholera, an oppressor of the poor, who built himself a fine marine villa at Torquay (now the Palace Hotel), from which he administered his diocese and went up to speak in the House of Lords on behalf of every bad cause:"

It is said that, when in the House, Phillpotts fulminated against every reform of the age in a manner that shocked even his fellow diehards while in his diocese, in the name of his personal perfunctory interpretations of Christian doctrine, he put fear rather than love into the hearts of his clergy.

Nevertheless, I myself, with these my ears, have heard a Bishop of Exeter lecture on that distinguished prelate, Henry Phillpotts, for an hour without saying one negative word about him.  No doubt the Holy Ghost or perhaps the Apostolic Succession had something to do with that.

Source:  The Western Times, May 2nd, 1840.