Author: Billinge, Charles
Biography:
BILLINGE, Charles (d 1805: findmypast.co.uk)
Duffy gives his year of birth as 1738 but no record has been located; he may have been born in Lancashire where Billinge was a Catholic family name. He became a Jesuit in 1753 and Prefect of Studies at the College of St. Omer, France, in 1761. He was appointed chaplain to the Catholic Whitgreave family at Moseley Court, Staffordshire, but in 1767 he recanted in Lichfield Cathedral and became a clergyman for the established church. He was appointed curate at Wombourne, near Wolverhampton, and there he married Sarah Collier on 18 Sept. 1769. They had several children and Billinge officiated at the marriage of one son, Charles, at Wombourne on 26 Mar. 1797. Contemporary accounts of him from Catholic sources are undeniably hostile but it does seem that he failed to prosper after his conversion. He never received preferment in the church but occasionally took services for other sick or absent clergymen; he was officiating at the church in Tipton in 1794 when a scandal ensued from the discovery of a mutilated Bible. His book of verse may have been an attempt to curry favour or, at least, some financial aid: it was published by subscription and each of the three sections has a different dedicatee from the local peerage and gentry. He also published a translation into Latin from the English of Alexander Pope, Messias. Idyllium Sacrum (Wolverhampton, 1784). Billinge died in Apr. 1805 and was buried on 15 Apr. at St. Peter’s in Wolverhampton. A story circulated that he died with one of Joanna Southcott’s (q.v.) “passports to heaven” in his pocket. (George Oliver, Collections Towards Illustrating the Biography of the …English, and Irish Members of the Society of Jesus [1845]; Eamon Duffy, “ ‘Over the Wall’: Converts from Popery in Eighteenth Century England,” Downside Review 94 [1976], 1-25; findmypast.co.uk 30 June 2023; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 21 Apr. 1794)