WARD, Seth (1617-89)

WARD, Seth (1617–89)

cons. 20 July 1662 bp. of EXETER; transl. 12 Sept. 1667 bp. of SALISBURY

First sat 30 May 1663; last sat 19 Nov. 1685

bap. 5 Apr. 1617, 2nd s. of John Ward, attorney of Buntingford, Herts. and Martha Dalto; educ. Buntingford g.s., Herts. c.1627-32; Sidney Sussex, Camb. 1632, BA 1636, MA 1640; ord. Sept. 1641; incorp. Oxf. 1649, DD 1654; incorp. Camb. 1659. unm. d. 6 Jan. 1689; will 30 Apr. 1687, pr. 12 Jan. 1689.1

Chap. to Ralph Freman‡ c.1644-9, Thomas Wenman‡, 2nd Visct. Wenman [I], 1649, Ralph Brownrigg†, bp. Exeter, c.1656-9; rect. Garsington, Oxon. 1659-60, Uplowman, Devon 1661-2, St. Breock, Devon 1662-7;2 proctor, Convocation 1661-2; preb. Exeter 1660-2, Salisbury 1667-d.; precentor, Exeter Cathedral 1660-2; vic. St Lawrence Jewry, London 1661-2, Menheniot, Cornw. 1662-7;3 dean, Exeter 1661-2.

Fell. Sidney Sussex, Camb. 1640-4; praelector, mathematics, Sidney Sussex 1642-4;4 Savilian Prof. of Astronomy, Oxf. 1649-60; fell. Wadham, Oxf. 1650-60; pres. Trinity, Oxf. 1659-60; FRS 1661-d. (council 1666-78); chan. Order of the Garter 1671-d.

Commr. accounts 1667,5 union with Scotland 1670.6

Also associated with: Bishops Lavington, Wilts.; Chandos St., Westminster and Knightsbridge, Westminster.

Likenesses: oil on canvas by J. Greenhill, 1673, Royal Society (and versions at Salisbury Guildhall, Trinity, Oxf., Christ’s, Camb. and Wadham, Oxf.); oil on canvas, The Palace, Exeter; monumental portrait bust, Salisbury Cathedral, Wilts.

Civil Wars and Interregnum

Ward was born into the family of a Hertfordshire attorney ‘of good reputation, for his fair practice, but not rich’.7 At Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge he devoted himself to mathematics but in 1644 contributed to a pamphlet against the imposition of the covenant on university members.8 For his opposition he was put out of all his college fellowships in August 1644.9 In the following years he moved in decidedly moderate circles; he was employed as a tutor for the young Ralph Freman and later served in the Oxfordshire household of the peace party supporter, Viscount Wenman, ‘rather as a companion than chaplain’.10 In 1649 he accepted the position of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. It is not certain whether at this point he took the Covenant and Engagement. His biographer, Walter Pope, claimed that through the influence of Sir John Trevor‡, Ward was dispensed from this requirement while the censorious Anthony Wood was equally positive that Ward threw in his lot with the ‘usurping powers’ by taking the oaths.11

In 1650 Ward became a fellow-commoner of Wadham where he became a close friend and colleague of the energetic warden John Wilkins, later bishop of Chester, and a leading member of the circle of natural philosophers who frequently met in Wilkins’ lodgings during the 1650s.12 He published prolifically on natural philosophy, theology and astronomy, and his 1652 publication on natural theology, A Philosophical Essay towards an Eviction of the Being and Attributes of God, was continuously reprinted until 1677. In 1656 the noted Calvinist Ralph Brownrigg†, ejected bishop of Exeter, offered Ward the post of precentor of Exeter Cathedral. Although at this point there was little hope of the English Church being re-established, Ward nevertheless paid his full fees to take up this office, a wise precaution as it was later to turn out. ‘This’ commented his biographer, ‘was the first fair flower that ever grew in his garden, and the foundation of his future riches and preferment’.13

Bishop of Exeter

Ward also made an adroit political move early in 1660 by allying himself to George Monck, later duke of Albemarle. According to one contemporary, Ward promoted Monck’s candidacy as burgess of Oxford University for the Convention in opposition to Thomas Clayton‡, by telling the heads of houses that Monck ‘desired the honour of being burgess for the university above any other.’ The story may, however, have become somewhat garbled in transmission, since Monck did not seek the seat for himself but for William Lenthall‡, erstwhile Speaker of the Commons.14 In 1661 Ward obtained a City of London vicarage, a benefice in the king’s gift, which suggests that he did have some favour at court despite Wood’s belief that he had collaborated with the regimes of the 1650s. He served as proctor for the Exeter chapter at Convocation in 1661-2, and on 26 Dec. 1661 he was elected dean of the cathedral.

In June 1662 John Gauden, the incumbent bishop of Exeter, was translated to Worcester. According to John Aubrey, Ward was in Devonshire on visitation when the ensuing vacancy became known to the gentry attending him, and hearing this,

with great alacrity the gentlemen [of Devonshire] all cried, uno ore [with one mouth] ‘We will have Mr. Dean to be our bishop’. This was at that critical time when the House of Commons were the king’s darlings. The dean told them that for his part he had no interest or acquaintance at court; but intimated to them how much the king esteemed the Members of Parliament (and a great many Parliament men were then there), and that his majesty would deny them nothing. ‘if ’tis so, gentlemen’ (said Mr. Dean) ‘that you will needs have me to be your bishop, if some of you make your address to his majesty, ’twill be done’.

Ward’s supporters rode immediately to London where they presented their case for the dean and, as Ward predicted, Charles II granted their request. Ward’s rise to the bishopric did not pass without opposition. Aubrey went on to note that the older bishops including Humphrey Henchman, then bishop of Salisbury, and John Cosin, of Durham, resented the promotion of ‘a brisk young bishop … but 40 years old, not come in the right door but leap over the pale’.15

The most glaring inconsistency in this engaging story is that Ward does not appear to have been in Devon at the time of Gauden’s translation but was still in London wrapping up the affairs of convocation.16 For his part Pope claimed that Ward owed his promotion to influential west country patrons at court such as Albemarle, Sir Hugh Pollard‡, and ‘some of his western friends’ as well as Ward’s Cambridge contemporary Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich. Pope noted Albemarle in particular as one of Ward’s foremost friends and patrons.17 Gilbert Burnet, the future bishop of Salisbury wrote that it was owing to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, who ‘saw that most of the bishops were men of merit by their sufferings, but of no great capacity for business. He brought Ward in, as a man fit to govern the church’.18 It is likely that all these important figures at court had an important role to play in Ward’s promotion to the episcopate.

Ward was consecrated in July 1662 but did not arrive in Exeter until 9 Sept., where he was immediately confronted with the responsibility of enforcing the Act of Uniformity in his diocese. He has earned a reputation as a harsh persecutor of Dissenters, both in the Exeter diocese and later in Salisbury. In Exeter he followed the letter of the law with his customary efficiency and single-mindedness.19 Burnet claimed that Ward was given the bishopric precisely because he would enforce the law rigorously: ‘to get his former errors to be forgot, [he] went into the high notions of a severe conformity’.20 Ward’s many letters of this period to Gilbert Sheldon, bishop of London (and later archbishop of Canterbury), reveal his attitude to Dissent in his diocese hardening over time. By January 1664 he was supplying Sheldon with lists of justices of the peace, city magistrates and other officials whom he felt were turning a blind eye to conventicles. In the summer of 1665 he conducted his first visitation as bishop of the diocese and was particularly disturbed by what he saw in Cornwall, detailing to Sheldon the powerful men of the county (such as Hugh Boscawen‡, Edward Herle‡ and Thomas Herle‡) who were actively encouraging the services of dissenting ministers. 21

Illness prevented Ward from taking his seat in the House at the start of the session in February 1663, the first session for which he was eligible to sit. He registered his proxy as early as 31 Jan. 1663 with Richard Sterne, bishop of Carlisle. He was able to travel to the capital in April and vacated his proxy when he first sat on 30 May 1663. He left the House again before the end of the session and on 15 July 1663 gave his proxy to Sheldon, who held it until the end of the session 12 days later.

Ward returned to Westminster by March 1664 for the next short session of Parliament. He came to all but five of its 36 sittings. In April he was involved in the proceedings over the bill to make the church recently built in Falmouth (dedicated to King Charles the Martyr) parochial, and he gave his consent before the committee considering the bill on 26 Apr. 1664, on the condition that the church’s founder, Sir Peter Killigrew‡, provided an adequate maintenance for the minister.22

He was back at Westminster in November 1664 to attend three-fifths of the meetings of the 1664-5 session. On 16 Dec. 1664, the committee for privileges upheld his complaint against Gilbert Yard, an attorney at Lyon’s Inn who had been trying to take the bishop to court.23 Whereas in these previous sessions he had perhaps, as a new and young member of the bishops’ bench, been infrequently appointed to select committees (only three in 1663 and 15 in 1664), in the very short Oxford session of October 1665 he was nominated to nearly every committee. At this session the punitive Five Mile Act was passed, and Richard Baxter believed that its chief episcopal advocates were Sheldon and Ward.24 Burnet also asserted Ward’s enthusiasm for this measure, but it must be noted that Ward’s name does not appear in the one contemporary account of the debate on this bill to survive.25 If he did promote it, he would have been assisted by the proxies he held for Gilbert Ironside, of Bristol, and Henry King, of Chichester. Ward’s increased participation in this session – he sat in all but four of the sittings – may have brought him to the attention of the king’s ministers, and he became an increasingly prominent member of the episcopal bench from this time.

He likewise only missed two of the sittings of the session of September 1666-February 1667. This was Ward’s busiest period yet. His abilities as a preacher were becoming increasingly recognized. In early October he gave a celebrated and frequently printed fast sermon to the House of Lords assembled in the Abbey Church for the recent Fire of London. By March 1667 Samuel Pepys‡ records that Ward and Herbert Croft, of Hereford, were ‘the two bishops that the king doth say he cannot have bad sermons from’.26 In the House he was a constant presence and a co-ordinator of the episcopal vote, holding the proxies of two other bishops, William Nicholson, of Gloucester, and Hugh Lloyd, of Llandaff, for the entire session. Throughout October he was closely involved in the discussions between the Houses on the address to the king for the prohibition of French imports. On 12 Oct. he was named to a subcommittee assigned to draw up reasons for the Lords’ disagreement with some points of the address brought up from the lower House; that subcommittee then acted as managers or reporters in four conferences between 17 and 30 Oct. before an address could be agreed upon. In January 1667, during the passage of the bill for Humphrey Wharton‡ for improving lead mines in Durham, Ward was put on a committee of seven bishops to draft a bill to enable the bishop of Durham to lease lead mines to Wharton and others for three lives.27 In the period 4 to 7 Feb. he was involved in four conferences concerning the escalating disagreement with the Commons over just where John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt, should sit during his impeachment hearing.

Translation to Salisbury

Exeter was not a lucrative diocese, and with the death in April 1667 of Matthew Wren, the bishop of Ely, Ward immediately began petitioning Sheldon to be translated to that wealthy see. At one point Ward became too presumptuous and had to send a grovelling letter to Sheldon, in which he tried to dissociate himself from his ‘friends’ who were importunately pressing his claims around the archbishop.28 He failed to obtain Ely, but when Alexander Hyde, of Salisbury, died in August 1667, Ward was quickly translated to that prestigious see instead.

Ward did not arrive in Salisbury until May 1668, detained in London as he was by the next session of Parliament (and the council of the Royal Society).29 He attended 83 per cent of sittings in the House during the 1667-9 session. Here the bill enabling Bishop Cosin of Durham to lease lead mines, which Ward and others had worked on in the previous session, finally got a hearing, and Ward continued to be involved in it, being appointed again to a subcommittee of four assigned to draft an additional clause.30

On 14 Dec. 1667 he and Croft were the only two bishops named to the committee to draw up reasons for the Lords’ dissent from the Commons’ vote in favour of Clarendon’s commitment; they were later appointed to report the ensuing conference on this matter. In the weeks after the fall of Clarendon, John Wilkins, with the backing of his patron George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, collaborated with Richard Baxter and Sir Matthew Hale‡ in drawing up a comprehension bill. Wilkins made the mistake of telling his old friend Ward about this, assuming his support of the measure, but Ward relayed the information to Sheldon. The archbishop immediately organized opposition to the measure, and when Parliament met on 10 Feb. 1668 the Commons launched into an attack on the nonconformists and petitioned the king for the full execution of the penal laws against ‘sectaries’.31 Walter Pope, step-brother of Wilkins (through whom he had become acquainted with Ward) was anxious to emphasize that there was no long-term rupture between the two men owing to this incident: ‘The two bishops continued their old friendship till death, though it is not to be denied, that they … differed in their opinions concerning the bill of comprehension’.32

In the House Ward chaired committees on bills on the ordering of the accounts of probate administrations and on the aulnage.33 On 3 Apr. he was appointed a manager for a conference on taxing ‘adventurers’ in the Great Level and later that month, on 24 Apr., made a reporter for a conference on the Commons’ proposed impeachment of the admiral and Navy commissioner, William Penn‡. He was also appointed a manager for a conference on the Commons’ jurisdiction in the case of Skinner v. East India Company on 8 May 1668, the day before Parliament was adjourned.34

Ward attended a little over three-quarters of the brief session of October-December 1669, but his principal activity and achievement at that point was his successful petition to have the office of chancellor of the order of the Garter returned to the bishops of Salisbury.35

Ward was active in the parliamentary session of 1670-1, being present in the House for 160 of its 165 gatherings and named to 47 committees. He voted against the divorce bill for John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland), entering protests against its second reading on 17 Mar. 1670 and against its passage 11 days later. On both 2 and 6 Apr. he was a reporter for conferences on amendments to the highways bill. His attention was most closely directed towards the passage of the second conventicle bill, and his vigorous advocacy of this bill earned him some notoriety. On 22 Mar. a committee of the whole appointed Ward to a subcommittee to prepare a clause to limit the liability of offenders of the law.36 The bill passed a committee of the whole on 25 Mar. but without a suggested proviso reaffirming the king’s royal supremacy in religion. Ward reported that at this point he was summoned by the king himself who told him that ‘he desired that proviso might pass, for this reason, that the bishops and all his friends might see that he would take care of them and of the nation in the strict execution of that Act, with which he would not dispense’ and ‘he commanded me to let the bishops understand so much, which I did, and the proviso passed without contradiction’, only to be thrown out in the Commons.37 Armed with the proxy of Anthony Sparrow, of Exeter, registered in his favour that day, Ward on 26 Mar. was able to help vote the conventicle bill through. Over the course of the following two weeks Ward was consistently named a manager or reporter for the many conferences the Lords held with the Commons over the disputed amendments to this bill. From 4 Apr. he held Cosin’s proxy which was vacated 9 Apr. 1670, two days before the session was adjourned.

Many years later Walter Pope praised Ward’s close involvement in the Conventicle Act:

’Tis true, he was for the act against conventicles, and laboured much to get it passed, not without the order and direction of the greatest authority, both civil and ecclesiastical, not out of enmity to the Dissenters’ persons, as they unjustly suggested, but of love to the repose and welfare of the government; for he believed if the growth of them were not timely suppressed, it would either cause a necessity of a standing army to preserve the peace, or a general toleration, which would end in popery, whither all things then had an apparent tendency.38

Before the session resumed in the autumn, Ward again received Sparrow’s proxy, registered on 14 Oct. 1670. In this session Ward’s name was added to the list of trustees in the bill to vest the late duke of Albemarle’s estates in trust during the minority of his son Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle.39 Pope considered the first duke of Albemarle, who had died in January 1670, the most important of Ward’s friends and patrons, as ‘he did him many good offices at court, and defended him against the clamours and calumnies of the fanatics’. Ward in his turn had ‘waited upon him frequently while he was in health, and was never absent from him in his sickness; he was with him in the last moments of his life, he gave him the holy sacrament, closed his eyes, and preached his funeral sermon’.40

In the House Ward was involved in proceedings on the bill to prevent the illegal export of wool. He and Heneage Finch, 3rd earl of Winchilsea, lord lieutenant of Kent, were assigned by the select committee to draw up a clause to stipulate that boats caught illegally transporting wool were to be burned.41 On 10 Dec. 1670 he chaired a meeting of this committee, and two days earlier he had also chaired the committee considering Sir William Smith’s private bill.42 In the new year he was appointed, on 1 Mar. 1671, to a subcommittee to prepare heads for a conference with the Commons concerning the growth of popery, and it may have been owing to his role with this bill that James Stuart, duke of York, later reminisced that ‘in the beginning of March’ George Morley, of Winchester, Ward and Wilkins attempted ‘to introduce comprehensions under another name and pretence, and with so much cunning and art, that it was like to pass the House of Commons … ’.43 Baxter confirms that the three bishops were in discussions about comprehension but dates the episode to the ‘latter end’ of 1670. On 13 Apr. 1671 Ward was further appointed to a subcommittee to ‘draw up the test and oath according to the debate of the committee this day’.44 On 22 Apr. 1671 he was named a reporter for a conference on the long-running wool bill, but this business did not proceed very far as the session was prorogued that day.

Otherwise Ward was involved in committees throughout the session and for two days running chaired the committee on the bill for better settling intestates’ estates, finally reporting its proceedings to the House on 23 Mar. 1671.45 On 18 Apr. he was the only bishop named as reporter for a conference on the bill for the improved maintenance of the London clergy who had suffered because of the Fire, and that afternoon he reported from the select committee considering the bill on workhouses.

Ward reached the pinnacle of his prominence in national life in the 1670s, particularly during the ministry of Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later marquess of Carmarthen and duke of Leeds) with whose pro-Church policies he was closely associated. Richard Baxter records for 1671-2 that Ward was a scourge of nonconformity: ‘Salisbury diocese was more fiercely driven on to conformity by Dr. Seth Ward, their bishop, than any place else, or than all the bishops in England besides did in theirs’.46 As such he was a valuable asset for the government. Burnet’s comment that Ward ‘became the most considerable man on the bishops’ bench’ would seem to refer to the mid-1670s, as does Pope’s report that John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale [S] (and earl of Guilford), considered Ward to be the best speaker in the House of Lords.47

His preaching was still highly regarded, and on 16 Jan. 1674 he was assigned by the House to preach the martyrdom sermon two weeks later. He was often touted for promotion, both to ecclesiastical and lay posts. In 1672, upon the death of John Cosin, Ward’s name was bandied around as his likely successor at Durham. According to Pope, in 1674 Ward turned the offer down because he ‘did not like the conditions’. Pope also recorded that Ward was ‘spoke of both at court, and in the City, as the fittest person to supply the place of the archbishop of Canterbury, lord keeper, or lord treasurer, if any of them should become vacant’.48 As late as February 1680 there were rumours that Ward was studying law to prepare himself to take on the office of lord chancellor, and when Sheldon died in 1677 there was certainly talk that Ward would succeed him as archbishop.49 Ward’s closest episcopal colleague George Morley strongly urged the benefits of Ward’s promotion to Canterbury.50

Yet it is significant that Morley in this letter of September 1677 felt it necessary to defend Ward against the ‘unworthy misprisions’ that were frequently made against him. Respected Ward may have been, but there was throughout his career an undercurrent of mistrust; his ‘sincerity was much doubted’, as Burnet would have it.51 An admittedly hostile, and perhaps apocryphal, anecdote from the papers of the dissenting minister Thomas Woodcock implies that Ward’s star was on the wane from as early as the time of the stop of the exchequer in 1672. Supposedly Ward prevaricated before the king about the amount of money he held in the exchequer for fear that the king’s friendly warning about the impending financial disaster was actually a request for a loan of the bishop’s money: ‘By this he lost his hopes of the archbishop of Canterbury, and £3,000’.52 Ward’s contemporaries, such as Robert Hooke, often found him ‘false’ and ‘a courtier’, while in 1683 (when Ward was definitely in decline) John Evelyn walked in the park with Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, ‘where we fell into discourse of the bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Seth Ward, his subtlety, etc.’.53

Richard Baxter, in particular, had reason to mistrust Ward’s subtlety. He records that as early as 1670 Ward and Morley, who were to form a close and formidable pair during the decade, often spoke of their fear of popery and their desire to amend the oaths and other requirements of conformity to allow the Presbyterians into the national church. Ward, Morley and John Dolben, of Rochester, ‘spoke ordinarily their desires of it; but after long talk there is nothing done, which make men variously interpret their pretensions, … that they would never have been the grand causes of our present case, if it had been against their wills, and that if they are yet truly willing of any healing, they will show it by more than their discourses’.54

Baxter had in mind the various abortive comprehension bills floated in 1673-5. The first of these bills, ‘for the ease of his majesty’s protestant subjects’, was brought to the House on 21 Mar. 1673, when Ward, who had been absent for most of the session up to that point, had begun to sit regularly. On 25 Mar. he and Dolben were two of the five bishops appointed by a committee of the whole to a subcommittee of 12 to draft a number of clauses. Despite his involvement he was not chosen to represent the Lords in the conferences that met from 29 Mar. to discuss this bill.

Ward was also involved in the anti-Catholic legislation of that session. On 15 Mar. 1673 he was appointed by a committee of the whole considering the Test bill to a subcommittee to draw up a clause that nothing in the act was to prejudice peers.55 Nine days later he was made a reporter for a conference on the Lords’ amendments to the bill, and the following day he acted again as a manager for another conference on the same topic. In the session of early 1674 he supported the comprehension bill first moved by Morley which provided for the repeal of the assent and consent clause and the declaration renouncing the Covenant. When on 19 Feb. the motion to commit this bill passed the House, Ward, Morley, Dolben and John Pearson, of Chester, were singled out for having voted ‘for the commitment and spoke for the thing’. The bill, ‘for the better securing the protestant religion’, passed by a majority of almost 20 but was promptly lost at the prorogation on 24 February.56

The Venetian ambassador reported in November 1674 that Presbyterians were once again offering to negotiate with the bishops about comprehension, but that ‘the bishops, headed by Winchester and Salisbury, oppose the measure, not solely from religious zeal but because they know that once the Presbyterians are admitted they will, by their wealth and intelligence obtain the distribution of church preferment’.57 In January 1675 Ward, with Sheldon, Morley, Dolben, Pearson and three other bishops met with privy councillors and government ministers at Lambeth, under the aegis of Danby to formulate measures ‘to suppress popery and establish the Church of England’.58 He signed the documents and memoranda arising from these meetings, which argued for increased measures against Catholics and the withdrawal of the licenses granted to nonconformists in 1672. The Venetian ambassador suggests that of the five bishops who signed the proposals ‘the turbulent Salisbury and his follower Winchester’ actively promoted the measures while Sheldon, Dolben and Pearson ‘three good and quiet ones’, only ‘gave their silent consent’.59

Baxter recounted that in the early months of 1675 Ward and Morley, with the peers George Savile, Viscount Halifax, and Charles Howard, earl of Carlisle, supported the collaboration of John Tillotson, later archbishop of Canterbury, and Baxter to devise another bill for comprehension. On 11 Apr. 1675, in the days before the opening of the spring 1675 session of Parliament, Tillotson had to admit to Baxter that the bishops had withdrawn their support and that the project was bound to fail in Parliament. Baxter claimed that he never expected otherwise and that the trusting Tillotson was quickly disabused of Ward’s true commitment to the project, for as the drafts of the bill were nearing their final stages, Ward made himself increasingly unavailable for consultation: ‘When they had in general told Bishop Ward how far we had gone, and how fair we were for agreement, and told them some of the particular materials, there was a full end of the treaty, the bishops had no further to go; we had already carried it too far’. 60

The two bishops’ true intent, Baxter suggests, was made manifestly clear in their actions during the session of spring 1675. Ward came to all but one of the sittings and was one of the foremost supporters of Danby’s non-resisting test bill. Baxter listed Danby, the lord keeper, Heneage Finch, Ward and Morley as ‘the great speakers for it’, but the opponents of the bill,

distinguished themselves in the debate; which set the tongues of men at so much liberty, that the common talk was against the bishops. And they said, that upon trial, there were so few found among all the bishops, that were able to speak to purpose, Bishop Morley of Winchester and Bishop Ward of Salisbury being their chief speakers, that they grew very low also.61

Anthony Wood thought that the ‘Country’ pamphlet A Letter from a Person of Quality ‘makes Ward, bishop of Salisbury, a very rogue’, even though the text itself actually nowhere mentions Ward by name.62 Ward was further involved in much of the religious legislation and on 21 Apr. 1675 was named, with Morley and Pearson, to a committee for the bill to explain the act concerning popish recusants. He was also manager or reporter in late May for four conferences about Sherley v. Fagg, including the conference scheduled for 28 May which never took place.

Danby clearly saw Ward as a key supporter of his ‘Court’ party. In the days before the autumn 1675 session, when he was sending out letters summoning his allies to Westminster, Danby was assured by Roger Boyle‡, earl of Orrery [I], that Morley and Ward had contacted him to say they would be in Westminster in a week, ‘and that they have not been idle’.63 Ward was almost immediately caught up in the controversy still surrounding Sherley v. Fagg at the beginning of the autumn session, which he attended for 71 per cent of sittings. He took part in the debate on the king’s speech about the controversy and suggested that the House should appoint a day to consider what to do upon Sherley’s petition against Fagg rather than go straight to a hearing of the case. He argued that the hearing of causes and appeals was not so important to the House that it should get in the way of more important legislative matters and ‘reasons of state’. He further pointed out that what was at stake was not the House’s judicial role but rather its right to summon Members of the Commons to the bar, a matter of the Commons’ own privilege. In a speech in a committee of the whole on 20 Oct. 1675 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, took issue with, first the claims of Lord Keeper Finch that the Lords did not have the right to summon Members of the Commons to the bar, and then, having excoriated him, turned his attention to the more subtle arguments of Ward. While admitting that Ward was ‘a man of great learning and abilities, and always versed in a stronger and closer way of reasoning than the business of that noble lord I answered before’, he still rejected Ward’s argument that the House’s ‘whole judicature is not in question, but only in the privilege of the House of Commons, of their Members not appearing at your bar’. Shaftesbury disagreed with Ward’s suggestion to appointing a day to consider, for this ‘is no less than declaring yourselves doubtful, upon second and deliberate thoughts, that you put yourselves out of your own hands, into a more than moral probability of having this session made a precedent against you’.64 According to Pope, Ward and Shaftesbury had once been on close terms. Shaftesbury having been ‘a great friend’ to Ward. The two men had visited each other and ‘often consulted about public affairs’ and even ‘after they went several ways in Parliament, though their intimacy was at end, yet their mutual esteem continued’. There may have been rather more than friendship at stake; according to Pope the bishops relied on Ward to observe Shaftesbury closely and assigned him to reply to the earl ‘if he should move anything to the detriment of the Church, for this earl was a person of great ability, and had a peculiar talent to hinder or promote anything passing the House of Peers’.65

Ward came to three-quarters of the sittings of the long, and frequently adjourned, session of 1677-8, but this was one of his busiest yet. He was involved with the committee examining ‘libels’ concerning Shaftesbury’s claim that Parliament had been dissolved by the long prorogation. On 19 Feb. 1677 he submitted to the committee the corrected proof sheets of one of these pamphlets, The Long Parliament Dissolved.66 Throughout April 1677 he was involved in shaping the various pieces of religious legislation going through the House. On 11 Apr. he reported from a committee of the whole considering the bill to take away the writ de haeretico comburendo. He spent the next two days helping to see the bill for the baptizing and catechizing of children through the House, reporting from a committee of the whole House on 12 Apr. that the bishops’ bench should be constituted into a subcommittee to amend several clauses of the bill. The following day he was able to report from another grand committee that the House approved of the revised clauses. He was added to the number of managers for the free conference on the bill for raising money for warships in the morning of 14 April. That afternoon he reported from the committee for the bill to establish a judicature in Southwark after its devastating fire. When the House met briefly again in May, he was able to report from the committee on the bill against clandestine marriages.

Ward was present for all but five of the meetings of the session of summer 1678. On 13 July he was named a manager for a conference on the Commons’ ‘undue method in returning bills’. His most prominent role in this session was as a member of the subcommittee for the Journal, and he examined the record of proceedings on the day after the prorogation. He attended some four-fifths of the session in autumn 1678, holding the proxy of Morley from 23 Oct. 1678 until the end of the session. On 2 Nov. 1678 he received the proxy of Pearson, perhaps for use in divisions on the Test bill. The bill was passed by the House, without Ward protesting, on 20 Nov. 1678, two days before Pearson vacated his proxy upon his return to the House. Ward later voted on 26 Dec. 1678 against insisting upon the Lords’ amendment that the supply raised for disbandment should be put in the exchequer and two days later was a reporter for a conference on this dispute with the Commons.

Although Ward dutifully attended all the meetings of the abortive first week of the Exclusion Parliament in spring 1679, his attendance thereafter was lower than usual as he came to 61 per cent of the days. He once again held the proxy of Morley for the entire session from 13 Mar. 1679 until the dissolution. He took part in the debate on whether the bishops could vote in cases of capital punishment and deemed it ‘not against law for bishops to judge in point of blood’.67 Towards the end of the session he voted against appointing a joint committee to consider the procedures for the trial of the impeached lords and on 26 May was appointed a reporter for a conference to discuss the disagreement between the two Houses on this matter. He also served on the subcommittee for the Journal and signed his approval to some of the official minutes of the House’s proceedings.

Ward was scheduled to be a Lent preacher in 1680, but by the end of 1679 William Sancroft, of Canterbury, was already being informed that he should find a replacement preacher as Ward was ‘out of hopes of recovery of his health to perform that service’.68 Certainly Ward was not able to come to much of the second Exclusion Parliament that ran from October 1680 to January 1681. He did not attend the session after 30 Oct. 1680. On 12 Nov. 1680 perhaps in preparation for the forthcoming vote on Exclusion, he registered his proxy with Pearson. Neither Pearson nor Ward is listed in the presence list for the crucial debate on 15 Nov., but notes of the debate taken by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, list Ward as one of the speakers.69 He attended constantly during the March 1681 Parliament in Oxford, staying in his old haunt of Wadham College, to which he donated £100 at this time.70 He was appointed on 26 Mar. a reporter for a conference on the Commons’ complaints of the Lords’ methods of passing bills.

Ward was an energetic instrument of the Tory reaction that followed the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament and continued for the rest of Charles II’s reign.71 His task ought to have been facilitated by his appointment of his nephew and namesake as diocesan chancellor in November 1681.72 He nevertheless ran into local difficulties the following year when he decided to conduct a visitation of the cathedral, provoking a bitter jurisdictional dispute with Thomas Pierce, dean of Salisbury. Pierce, already angry over his failure to secure preferment for his son from Ward, refused to accept the episcopal visitation of the chapter, claiming that the cathedral was a royal free chapel and had been under the jurisdiction of the monarch before episcopal authority was established in Salisbury.73 It was presumably at least in part, the fallout from this very visible local dispute, involving as it did accusations that he had usurped the royal prerogative, that influenced Ward’s complaint in May 1684 that ‘Matters in this place seem to me to be (by the perverseness of some persons whom I need not name) brought to such a crisis that it will be very hard for the number of very wise and good men who are here, to withstand the inundation of atheism and all means of profaneness and debauchery which (by the countenance of some of our grandees) are visibly breaking in upon this Church’.. The conflict rumbled on into the reign of James II, but in July 1686 Sancroft sent an episcopal commission to Salisbury which was able to report that ‘the very day of our coming hither, the dean in chapter yielded up most of the material points that have been so long in dispute’.74

There were other problems during this time as well. In March 1684 a commission of knights of the garter investigating the funds of the order found that Ward had mishandled the funds allocated to him as chancellor and ordered him to return £2,169.75 By 1684 Ward was slipping into senility. Walter Pope commented sadly how his old friend, one of the most brilliant men of his age, now would forget in mid-sentence what he had been speaking of and would ask after long-dead friends such as Wilkins.76

Despite this disability he still attended almost all of the sittings of James II’s Parliament, although not surprisingly he was not active in this session. Throughout 1687-8 he was consistently listed as one of the Members of the House of Lords who would be opposed to James II’s attempt to repeal the Test Act and penal laws. By May 1688, when there appears to have been a slight improvement in his health and it was reported that ‘he goes abroad often’, he signed himself as an ‘approver’ of the petition of the Seven Bishops.77 It is not clear whether his mental state allowed him to understand the full import of what he was signing, for later it was ‘credibly reported’ to Roger Morrice that Ward was one of the few bishops who intended to publish James II’s Declaration of Indulgence throughout his diocese.78

On 6 Jan. 1689 Seth Ward died at his London house in Knightsbridge, just as the Convention was gathering to decide the fate of the English Crown; not that Ward, by this time wholly senile, was aware of the important events around him. He had barely been aware of the importance of his visitors when James II stayed at the Bishop’s Palace during the brief encampment of his army at Salisbury, followed shortly thereafter by William of Orange who also stayed in the episcopal residence en route to the capital. Having remained unmarried throughout his life Ward was able to leave his considerable fortune to members of his extended family and to numerous charitable bequests.79

Ward’s activities (as an intellectual, an ecclesiastical administrator and as a statesman) and the vigour and pragmatism with which he prosecuted them provoked strong feelings from all sides. What had always been at issue in the career of Ward was his murky record in the 1640s and 1650s. Unlike so many of the other Restoration bishops who had suffered deprivation and poverty for their commitment to the English Church during the mid-century tumults, Ward had prospered, even after being deprived of his academic positions in Cambridge in 1644. His transition from being a ‘complying’ member of Oxford University and supplanter of ousted royalists in the 1650s, to becoming a respected and aggressively rigorous representative of the established Church in the 1660s and 1670s suggested a pliancy that many of his contemporaries found offensive.

In his manuscript notes and drafts for the Athenae Oxonienses Anthony Wood scathingly characterized Ward’s rehabilitation after the Restoration as having been procured ‘by cringing and money’.80 His biography of Ward in the 1692 edition of the Athenae, which appeared only three years after the bishop’s death, is more temperate in tone, but here Wood still castigated Ward for his search for preferment and his ‘cowardly wavering for lucre and honour sake, of his putting in and out, and occupying other men’s places for several years’.81 Ward’s successor at Salisbury, William III’s devoted follower, Gilbert Burnet, castigated Wood for having ‘barbarously attacked’ his illustrious predecessor. Burnet himself, however, was hardly complimentary about Ward, describing him as ‘a very dexterous man, if not too dexterous; for his sincerity was much questioned. He had complied during the late times, and held in by taking the Covenant; so he was hated by the high men as a time-server. … He was a profound statesman, but a very indifferent clergyman’.82

In 1697, Ward’s old friend and secretary Walter Pope, who had known Ward since their days in Oxford, published a defence of the bishop, The Life of the Right Reverend Father in God, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury. Although obviously partisan and anecdotal, Pope’s account of the details of Ward’s life stands up to scrutiny from independent sources, and it still remains the principal source for a biography of the bishop.

C.G.D.L./B.A.

  • 1 TNA, PROB 11/394.
  • 2 CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 441.
  • 3 Ibid. p. 441.
  • 4 E.A.O. Whiteman, ‘The Epsicopate of Dr. Seth Ward, Bishop of Exeter (1662-7) and Salisbury (1667-89)’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1951), 6.
  • 5 LJ, xii. 88.
  • 6 HMC Var. iv. 10.
  • 7 W. Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury (1697) 4.
  • 8 Certain Disquisitions and Considerations Representing to the Conscience the Unlawfulness of the … Solemn League and Covenant (1644).
  • 9 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 13-16.
  • 10 Ibid. 16-18.
  • 11 Ibid. 13-16, 18-24; Ath. Ox. iv. 248; Wood, Life and Times, i. 363.
  • 12 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 27-29.
  • 13 Ibid. 29-31, 45-46, 48.
  • 14 Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 12, f. 152; HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 361.
  • 15 Aubrey, Brief Lives, ii. 286-7.
  • 16 Whiteman, ‘Ward’, 21-22.
  • 17 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 54, 85-86.
  • 18 Burnet, i. 350-1.
  • 19 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 177-8; Whiteman, ‘Ward’, 23, 112-58.
  • 20 Burnet, i. 350-1.
  • 21 Bodl. Add. C305, ff. 140-63.
  • 22 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, pp. 446, 448.
  • 23 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/2, pp. 3-6.
  • 24 Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 2-3.
  • 25 Burnet, i. 412; BIHR, xxi. 221-4.
  • 26 Pepys Diary, viii. 116.
  • 27 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 137, 140, 156-7.
  • 28 Bodl. Add. C305, ff. 192-201.
  • 29 T. Birch, Hist. Royal Society, passim; Boyle Corresp. iv. 9, 12, 40, 45.
  • 30 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 213-16.
  • 31 Thorndike, Theological Works, v. 306-7; Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 23-36.
  • 32 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 54.
  • 33 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 247, 255-7.
  • 34 HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, p. 173.
  • 35 E. Ashmole, Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (1672), 242-3; CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 11; HMC Var. iv. 10.
  • 36 PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/16.
  • 37 G. Lyon Turner, Orig. Recs. of Early Nonconformity, iii. 49.
  • 38 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 68.
  • 39 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 352.
  • 40 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 85-86; The Christian’s Victory over Death. A Sermon at the Funeral of George, Duke of Albemarle (1670).
  • 41 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 365; HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, p. 138.
  • 42 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, pp. 384, 387.
  • 43 Macpherson, Orig. Pprs. i. 57-58.
  • 44 PA, HL/PO/CO/1/2, p. 451.
  • 45 Ibid. 434.
  • 46 Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 86-7.
  • 47 Burnet, i. 350-1; Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 88.
  • 48 Durham UL, Cosin Letter Bk. 5b, nos. 158, 159, 165; Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 90-91.
  • 49 Bodl. Carte 39, f. 113; Verney ms mic. M636/30, W. Denton to R. Verney, 21 Nov. 1677.
  • 50 Add. 17017, ff. 159-60.
  • 51 Burnet, i. 350-1.
  • 52 Cam. Misc. xi. (Camden Soc. ser. 3 xviii), 78.
  • 53 Diary of Robert Hooke, 198, 264-5; Evelyn Diary, iv. 318.
  • 54 Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 84.
  • 55 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, p. 29.
  • 56 Bodl. Tanner 42, f. 89; 44, f. 249; Add. 23136, f. 98.
  • 57 CSP Ven. 1673-5, p. 312.
  • 58 Verney ms mic. M636/28, R. to E. Verney, 25 Jan. 1675.
  • 59 CSP Dom. 1673-5, pp. 548-51; CSP Ven. 1673-5, pp. 337, 353, 357; Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 153.
  • 60 Reliquiae Baxterianae, iii. 156-8.
  • 61 Ibid. iii. 167.
  • 62 Wood, Life and Times, ii. 330.
  • 63 Browning, Danby, i. 172.
  • 64 Timberland, i. 165-74.
  • 65 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 88-89.
  • 66 HMC 9th Rep. pt. 2, p. 69.
  • 67 Carte 81, f. 563.
  • 68 Tanner 38, ff. 109-10, 112.
  • 69 BIHR, xx.31-6.
  • 70 HMC Var. iv. 10.
  • 71 Tanner 36, ff. 17, 196.
  • 72 W.H. Jones, Fasti Ecclesiae Sarisberiensis, 342.
  • 73 Tanner 143, ff. 1-35, 212-13, 236, 249; A Vindication of the King’s Sovereign Rights (1683).
  • 74 Tanner 143, ff. 159, 173.
  • 75 Whiteman, ‘Ward’, 46-48.
  • 76 Pope, Life of …, Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 181-4.
  • 77 Tanner 28, f. 35; Longleat, Bath mss, Thynne pprs. 43, f. 69.
  • 78 Morrice, Entring Bk. iv .274.
  • 79 Some Particulars of the Life, Habits and Pursuits of Seth Ward, 50-55.
  • 80 Wood, Life and Times, i. 363.
  • 81 Ath. Ox. ii. 686.
  • 82 Burnet, i. 350-1.