Author: BATHURST, William Hiley
Biography:
BATHURST, William Hiley, formerly BRAGGE (1796-1877: ancestry.co.uk)
At birth his surname was Bragge: his father, a politician, took the name Bathurst in 1804 when he inherited the encumbered Lydney Park estate in Gloucestershire. Charles Bragge and his wife Charlotte Addington had married in 1788 and had four children who survived infancy; William was born on 28 Aug. 1796. He was privately baptised at Mangotsfield, Gloucestershire, on 4 Nov. 1796, and received publicly into the church at St. George the Martyr, Queen’s Square, London, on 13 June 1798. He attended Winchester before matriculating at Christ Church, Oxford, on 22 Dec. 1814 (BA 1818, MA 1822). He was ordained a deacon in 1819 and a priest in 1820. Appointed rector at Barwick in Elmet, Yorkshire, in 1820, he married Mary Ann Rhodes by license on 2 Sept. 1829 in Roundhay, Yorkshire. The 1841 Census shows the family living in Barwick in Elmet with six children, a governess, and seven servants. Bathurst was president of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society and published An Essay on the Limits of Human Knowledge in 1827. Scruples over aspects of services in the Book of Common Prayer led him to resign his rectorship in 1852. They moved to Darley, Derbyshire, where Mary Ann died in 1863. He was living at Lydney Park when he died on 25 Nov. 1877. He wrote 132 of the 150 psalms and all of the 206 hymns in Psalms and Hymns for Public and Private Use (1831; 2nd edition 1842). He also published The Georgics of Virgil (1849) and Metrical Musings, or Thoughts on Sacred Subjects in Verse (1849). His son Charles prepared his Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park for publication in 1879. (ODNB [for Charles Bathurst] 28 Feb. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 28 Feb. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 28 Feb. 2023; Julian 117-18; J. Holland, The Psalmists of Britain [1843] II. 322-23; Bristol Mirror 19 Sept. 1829; Gloucester Journal 1 Dec. 1877; Illustrated London News 8 Dec. 1877) SR