George Herbert

Abstract

George Herbert, the unofficial patron saint of Anglicanism, was born into a prominent family in Montgomery and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had a brilliant career. He had entered Trinity as a King’s Scholar in 1609, and was elected to a Minor Fellowship in 1614 and a Major Fellowship in 1616. In 1618 he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric, and two years later became Public Orator, a post which brought him into contact with the court of King James. In 1624 and 1625 he sat as a Member of Parliament for Montgomery. In 1626 he was ordained as a deacon, and appointed prebend of a ruined church at Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire, which was very close to Little Gidding, where Herbert’s Cambridge friend Nicholas Ferrar had established a religious community. Herbert offered to transfer the prebend to Little Gidding, but Ferrar suggested that he restore the ruined church, which Herbert did. Ferrar’s influence during this period doubtless contributed to the development of a religious sensibility in Herbert. In 1630 Herbert was ordained as a priest and appointed rector of Bemerton (near Salisbury), where he lived for the last three years of his life.