Abstract
Who and what was Sheldon? Perhaps about no other personage in history have judgments rendered by both contemporaries and historians been so much at variance. Baxter felt that under no conditions was he fit for the office of bishop and certainly never for that of archbishop of Canterbury. On the other hand Sir Francis Wenman was often heard to declare that Sheldon was “made for Canterbury.” Stoughton concluded that his courtier-like manners, geniality, and easy hospitality fitted him for the position of a county nobleman but never for the service of the Church, while dissenters from Anglican doctrine found in him no sign of geniality whatsoever. Burnet was sure that Sheldon had no deep sense of religion, if any at all, while Samuel Parker considered him totally dedicated to the Church and to his religion. Bosher sees him as a great primate in the medieval tradition of Langton and Becket; Moles-worth charges that he came out of the Civil Wars a complete debauchee.
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Partly, no doubt, Sheldon’s lack of success as a preacher was a result of a lack of imagination. The sermons which have come down to us, show a plodding, logical mind, grimly setting down example after example from the bible and the Church fathers to re-enforce his point. It was probably a case of over-kill. In addition, his sermons show little wit, or humor, and no imaginative flair at all. See Sheldon’s sermon before the king at his return, Gilbert Sheldon, A Sermon Preached Before the King (London, 1660).
Stoughton, III, 219 on.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 217.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 220.
This is, of course, a debatable point and one that probably can never be conclusively resolved. My own feeling is that Anglicans, by 1660, were a minority group in the total English population. However, there is no question but that by 1660, as Christopher Hill has stated in his The Century of Revolution (Edinburgh, 1961), p. 189, the majority of nobles and gentry, driven by a fear of social revolution, had again become enthusiastic supporters of the established Church. This of course accounts for the Cavalier Parliament.
Nearly all of this correspondence is contained in Add. Mss. C. 305, the Bodleian Library.
Ibid., Ward to Sheldon, no date, but in 1661 shortly after Ward arrived in Exeter.
Ibid., Same to Same, Dec. 19, 1663.
Ibid., Same to Same, Sept. 1, 1665.
It was largely because of several letters from Ward and other bishops describing the impact of these resident nonconformist ministers that Sheldon determined to push for the Five-Mile Act.
Add. Mss. C. 305, Sparrow to Sheldon, June 15, 1668.
lbid., Same to Same, March 20, 1674/5.
Ibid.
A. Brockett, Nonconformity in Exeter (Manchester Univ. Press, 1962), p. 39.
Ibid.
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Sutch, V.D. (1973). Conclusions. In: Gilbert Sheldon. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6384-4_9
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