Author: Wordsworth, Christopher
Biography:
WORDSWORTH, Christopher (1774-1846: ODNB)
Christopher, the youngest brother of William Wordsworth (q.v.), was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, on 9 June 1774 and baptised on 8 July, the son of John Wordsworth (d 1783), an attorney and the agent for Sir James Lowther, and his wife Ann Cookson (d 1778). After the early deaths of his parents he and his siblings were under the guardianship of two uncles. Christopher went from Hawkshead grammar school to Trinity College, Cambridge (matric. 1792, BA 1796, Fellow 1798, MA 1799, DD by royal mandate 1810). He took orders in 1799. While he was a Fellow at Trinity he tutored a son of the bishop of Norwich, Charles Manners Sutton, who presided at his ordination and later became archbishop of Canterbury: this connection undoubtedly accelerated his rise to preferment in the Church, but he was a solid scholar and a committed high-churchman. He gave up his college fellowship on his marriage to Priscilla Lloyd, a sister of Charles Lloyd (q.v.), at the church of St. Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Warwickshire, on 6 Oct. 1804. The couple had three sons but she died in 1815 and he never remarried. Wordsworth held a succession of livings and chaplaincies before being appointed Rector of Buxted, Sussex, in 1820--a position he held for the rest of his life. In the same year, he returned to Trinity as Master of the College. His only published verse belongs to this period, two Cambridge prize poems on the subjects of “The Druids” and “The Invasion of Russia” submitted in 1827 and 1828 respectively. He proved a strict but in some ways reforming head of house until obliged by ill health to resign in 1841, after which he retired to Buxted, where he died in the parsonage house on 2 Feb. 1846 and was buried on 6 Feb. Prose publications include a collection of lives of Anglican churchmen in six volumes, Ecclesiastical Biography (1809); two volumes of sermons; and various contributions to clerical controversies. (ODNB 19 July 2024; CCEd 19 July 2024; ACAD; findmypast.com 19 July 2024) HJ