George Hickes (divine)

• 1. Introduction

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  George Hickes tried and failed to prevent the execution of his brother John in 1683. John was a nonconformist minister, one of the refugees from Monmouth's rising at Sedgemoor, among those sheltered by Alice Lisle. The older brother who could not save him was on his way to becoming one of the senior churchmen in England. Within a decade, he would throw away that seniority rather than swear loyalty to a new king. How George Hickes navigated that wreckage is one question his life raises. Why he spent so much of his exile studying dead languages is another.

• 2. Formation and Ascent

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  Thomas Rymer sat alongside George Hickes at Northallerton Grammar School in 1652. Hickes had come from Newsham, a small village near Thirsk in Yorkshire, where he was born on the 20th of June 1642. Oxford opened to him in 1659, through St John's College. After the Restoration he moved through Magdalen College and then Magdalen Hall. He settled at Lincoln College, where he was elected a fellow in 1664. He took his M.A. the following year.

  Divinity occupied him through 1673, when he graduated in that degree. Two years later he was rector of St Ebbes in Oxford. In 1676 he accompanied the Duke of Lauderdale, the royal commissioner, to Scotland as private chaplain. The University of St Andrews awarded him a doctorate in divinity in return for that service.

  London followed. In 1680 he became vicar of All Hallows, Barking. By 1681 he was chaplain to the king. The deanery of Worcester came in 1683. Before that appointment, he had already been publishing anonymously on contested events in Scottish religious life.

• 3. The Anonymous Pen

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  James Mitchell was executed on a charge of attempting to murder Archbishop James Sharp. The Presbyterian ministers John Kid and John King were executed for high treason and rebellion. These Scottish events gave Hickes his first material for publication. He published his responses anonymously. Ravillac Redivivus appeared in 1678, and The Spirit of Popery speaking out of the Mouths of Phanatical Protestants followed in 1680.

  His Jovian, appearing in 1682, was a direct reply to Samuel Johnson's Julian the Apostate. Hickes used it to argue that the Roman empire was not hereditary. He also maintained that Christians living under the emperor Julian had recognized a duty of passive obedience. The passive obedience arguments of Jovian would face their most demanding test six years later. Hickes would confront the revolution of 1688 personally, and be asked to swear loyalty to a new sovereign.

• 4. Conscience Over Office

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  Hickes had opposed both James II's declaration of indulgence and Monmouth's rising. Both positions placed him within a strict Anglican loyalty to the established order. When the revolution of 1688 required a new oath of allegiance to William and Mary, he declined. His suspension from the deanery followed, and then his full deprivation of the position. On learning that a successor had been appointed, he walked to Worcester Cathedral. He fixed a written protestation and claim of right to its doors.

  A period of concealment in London followed. William Sancroft and the other nonjurors selected Hickes for a mission. He would travel to James II, then living in exile in France. The purpose was to secure the continuation of episcopal succession for the non-juring church. Hickes returned from France in 1694. He was consecrated suffragan bishop of Thetford, making him a bishop in a church that English law did not recognize.

  In 1713 Hickes persuaded two Scottish bishops, James Gadderar and Archibald Campbell, to assist him in a series of consecrations. The three men consecrated were Jeremy Collier, Samuel Hawes, and Nathaniel Spinckes, each named a bishop among the non-jurors. The years of concealment gave Hickes unusual amounts of uninterrupted time. He used it to pursue a scholarly project whose culmination would be described as celebrated.

• 5. The Old Languages

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  The Institutiones Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae appeared in 1689. It was Hickes's first systematic attempt at describing the grammar of Old English and Gothic. His larger work, the Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, came out in two volumes between 1703 and 1705. It surveyed Old English, Gothic, and several other ancient northern languages in comprehensive detail.

  The Bodleian Library holds a manuscript that sketches Hickes's life up to 1689. His letters also survive in various collections. His reputation now rests largely on the two grammar books, not on the theological and political controversies that occupied most of his adult life. The theological arguments he published from 1707 onward would produce a dispute that outlasted him by years.

• 6. The Bangorian Provocation

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  Of the Christian Priesthood and Of the Dignity of the Episcopal Order, both by Hickes, appeared in 1707. They set out a high-church view of priestly authority and episcopal succession. The works were reprinted more than once. They eventually occupied three volumes of the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, published in 1847.

  Bishop Hoadly attacked these high-church positions in two separate publications. The first was a work called Preservative Against the Principles of the Nonjurors. The second was Hoadly's famous 1717 sermon, The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ. Hickes is credited as having offered the provocation that set off the Bangorian Controversy.

  A posthumous publication, The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, appeared in 1716. It too is said to have given rise to the Bangorian Controversy. Hickes had died on the 15th of December 1715, the year before the book appeared.

  Collections of Controversial Letters appeared in 1705 and again in 1710. A collection of Sermons followed in 1711. His Apologetical Vindication of the Church of England found its place in Edmund Gibson's Preservative against Popery. A volume of Posthumous Discourses appeared in 1726. Eleven years after the death of George Hickes, his arguments were still considered worth preserving.