Author: Shepherd, Richard
Biography:
SHEPHERD, Richard (1732-1809: ODNB)
He was baptised on 10 Oct. 1732 at Mareham-le-Fen, Lincolnshire, the eldest of three sons of Rev. Henry Shepherd (1703-64), rector, and Susannah Hamerton (1707-94), who had married in 1731. His early education is not known but he proceeded to Corpus Christi College, Oxford (matric. 1749, BA 1753, MA 1757, BD 1765, DD 1788, Fellow 1760-1772). He originally intended a career in the army but then entered the church. He was ordained deacon (1757) and priest (1758) and became curate then vicar of Friskney (1757-76), rector of Belchford (1775-93) and Wrangle (1776-84)--all in Lincolnshire. He was chaplain to Thomas Thurlow, bishop of Lincoln, who secured the archdeaconery of Bedford for him in 1783. He was rector of Wetherden and Helmingham, Suffolk (1792-1809). In 1781 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society and was Bampton lecturer at Oxford, publishing his lectures as The Ground and Credibility of the Christian Religion (1788). He married Mary Bloxham (1744-1813) on 23 July 1772 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster. They had three sons. He died on 3 Jan. 1809, aged 78, at Wetherden, where there is a monument to him and his wife. His verse prior to the listings here was mostly reprinted in Miscellanies (1776) including Odes, Descriptive and Allegorical (1761). He also published An Essay on Education(1784). His theological prose was highly regarded in its day but is no longer read. It included an important response to Soames Jenyns’s Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1759), with the second edition (1768) containing further essays on conscience, inspiration and a paradisaical state. Other theological works included The Requisition of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles and Liturgy (1771), Reflections on the Doctrines of Materialism(1779), Sermons on Several Occasions (1803), Religious Union Perfective, and the Support of Civil Union (1807) and No False Alarm, or, A Sequel to Religious Union (1808). (ODNB 22 May 2024; DNB; Copsey 1: 433-4; ancestry.co.uk 22 May 2024; findmypast.co.uk 22 May 2024; CCEd 22 May 2024; OJ 14 Jan. 1809; GM Jan. 1809, 91-92; John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century [1812] 2: 328-9) AA
Other Names:
- R. Shepherd