A Determined Pluralist: the Reverend Augustine Bulwer of Heydon Norfolk 1818

 

Cawston Church engraved after John Sell Cotman. Click on Image to Enlarge

The village of Heydon in very rural Norfolk is most unusual; it is family-owned by the Bulwers of Heydon Hall and has been for a very long time. As a result, the village remains picturesque, the houses of uniform appearance untouched by any disfiguring personal taste. Some members of the extended family distinguished themselves in public life and if you know the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents …” then you know the opening words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

The elder brother of the writer of this letter became a general (though on home-based duty) and the writer, Augustine Bulwer (1762-1831), had to find something else to do. He studied at Jesus College Cambridge, chose the Church, and worked if not to maximise then at least to boost his income as younger brother. The heir was always better provided for than the spare. Augustine never held less than two benefices and usually held three, all clustered around his home in Heydon. In the terminology of the period he was a pluralist and that would soon become unacceptable, both outside and even within the church.

Bulwer tried to keep costs down by getting gig workers rather than regular curates to help out with parish duties. As the letter transcribed below indicates this led him into conflict with his Bishop. The Bishop won: in 1820 Bulwer appointed a full-time curate to the large parish of Cawston, the care of which had been in dispute, paying him a salary of £120 a year. But in 1817 annual income from tithes amounted to £775 so it is likely that Bulwer was still going to end up with a handsome income from his benefice even if one allows for additional payments to the four or five people, excluding the curate but including his son, who officiated at Cawston marriages between 1818 and 1831. Bulwer officiated at just two.

The readily-accessible archive records don’t tell us much about the man as a man of God but do reveal something of how clerical business was done. After his ordination as priest, Augustine acquired his first benefices on home territory in 1786 thanks to his father who was patron of the united parishes of Heydon with Irmingland and got to pick their vicar. Augustine kept these two for the rest of his life, the Irmingland a bit complicated because it comprised a desirable rectory and a landmark but apparently disused church of St Peter. Then in 1794 Augustine granted his elder brother General William Earle Bulwer a sixty-year lease on Heydon church’s agricultural land (the glebe), excluding the parsonage house (where Augustine lived), the churchyard (unproductive land), and the local tithes which Augustine collected as vicar. In the same year he leased to William both the glebe and the tithes of Guestwick where he had been instituted as Vicar in the previous year. In 1796, having transferred Guestwick’s assets into his family, he resigned from that benefice and replaced it in his portfolio with nearby Salle. This he held on to until 1818 when he resigned in favour of his younger brother Edward Bulwer, replacing Salle with the larger Cawston benefice; this was to cause him the trouble recorded in the letter below but which benefice he held onto until his death in 1831. Cawston then passed to his son, Augustine Earle Lytton Bulwer. I summarise all this and find myself rather doubting that family conversations dwelt on theological topics but instead probably focussed on harvests, tithes, rents, leases, and the price of curates. Whether the parishioners were contented with the arrangements under which they lived I do not know, apart from the indications in this letter.

The Bishop alerted to what was going on in Cawston was Henry Bathurst, most unusually a liberal-minded Whig who later used his place in parliament to support Catholic Relief and the Great Reform Bill. That Bill was famously opposed by twenty-one of the twenty-three bishops in the House of Lords, enough to secure the Bill’s defeat, and precipitating a nationwide outburst of anti-clericalism during which the palace of the Bishop of Bristol was burnt down. The Times thought it an open question whether the Church of England’s bishops should be sitting as of right in the House of Lords.

Bishop Bathurst’s Registrar was John Kitson, to whom this letter is addressed; he has written at the end a summary of his put-down reply. Correspondence to the Norwich Bishopric Registry from the period when John Kitson was Registrar was at some point disposed of; letters addressed to Kitson are very common in dealer boxes at table top fairs.

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Transcription

Addressed to: J Kitson Esqr   Bishop Registry   Close    Norwich

Datelined: Heydon Novr 28. 1818.

In Kitson’s faint pencil at the top: 48^th Sect 57 Geo 3^rd C 99

Sir. I am astonished at the charge intimated in your Letter, recd. yesterday evening. A charge originating from malice & revenge not for the sake of religion or church discipline I can truly say. The duty of my church at Cawston has been regularly done from … last Michl. [Michaelmas] the time I undertook the care of the parish.  I trust the Bishop will have the goodness & candour to declare, who is this base calumnicter [sic] & tale Bearer. I know of no Act of Parliament that deprives the Incumbent from officiating in his own church, or of the assistance of a Friend. When I have the pleasure of seeing the Bishop I shall communicate further upon the subject.

I am Sir Your most obed^nt   servant      Aug^t   Bulwer

In the margin the recipient Kitson has written a summary of a letter sent in reply, using abbreviations:

Nov 28    Rev Sir I hasten by the Bps des. to refer you to the 48^th Sect. of &c for the correctness of statement in my last as to the necessity of a licd [licensed] Cur. [Curate] & as his Ldp [Lordship] is quite clear that you cannot do the duty of C[Cawston] & H[Heydon] too he begs you to name a regular Cur[ate] since … it is quite imposs. for such a psh [parish] as C [Cawston] to be left to the precarious assist [ance] of frds [friends]. If you wish to see the Bp [Bishop] his Ldp begs you to be here before Wedy. [Wednesday] as he will be gone to Town. I am &c

Acknowledgment and References

Joanne Penn did the archival research needed to establish Bulwer’s church career.

Wikipedia: Heydon. The village is privately owned, by the Bulwer family.

Jacob, W.M. The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century 1680 – 1840 (2007). This is a useful book but strikes me as rather rose-tinted; nonetheless from page 138 I got the £775 figure for tithes collected at Cawston in 1817.

Cawston Church engraved by J Greig after a drawing of John Sell Cotman published in Excursions through Norfolk (1819) 

Correspondence to the Norwich Bishopric Registry from the period when John Kitson was Registrar was at some point disposed of; letters addressed to Kitson are very common in dealer boxes at table top fairs.