The Black Sheep of Chipping Warden

(chippingwarden.org)

 Not far from Banbury, just over the   Oxfordshire border in Northants, lies   the quiet, "pleasantly situated" village   of Chipping Warden. On the village   green, visitors will find the splendid   medieval Church of Saints Peter and   Paul. For the last decade of the   Victorian period, the rector there - the Rev. Edward Henville M.A. - was denounced by his own bishops, and publicly labeled a disgrace to the Church of England. 

Henville's exact antecedents were shrouded in some mystery. He claimed to be a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. He also claimed to have been ordained while out in India but he refused to name the Indian Bishop who admitted him to holy orders "for reasons of my own." Back in England, he spent several years as a curate before serving as vicar of Shelland & Gipping, impoverished rural parishes in Suffolk. There, he first drew attention for his "begging-letters." He pestered his wealthy correspondents with the pathetic story of a poor cleric unable to support his wife and ten children. The Bishop of Peterborough was moved to assure the public that Henville's story was highly embellished and to please ignore his letters. 

In 1889, Henville finally left East Anglia (and numerous unpaid tradesmen behind) for Chipping Warden. The Lord of the Manor in Chipping Warden was a Catholic and could not have anything to do with the village church. The living, therefore, was for sale. The laws of simony prevented a clergyman from buying his own church but Henville got around that through the generosity of a "Miss Henville of Stanton Hall, Lincoln." (A fine lady - if she existed at all.) There were no other bidders and Henville became rector of Chipping Warden, which came with about £200 a year, a commodious rectory and more than 100 acres of glebe land. 

Notwithstanding his elevated status, Henville's "impudent appeals" continued. Certainly, he was not the only practitioner of the scheme but few had such a system. His letters were professionally lithographed, making them, in effect, early spam. The letters were always the same. His eldest son was "hopelessly insane," the younger was (supposedly) maimed in a shooting accident. The rector asserted he'd been swindled and mistreated by the grandees of the Church of England. He could hardly support his eight daughters. In 1896, one of his unmarried daughters, at the age of 30, delivered a stillborn baby in the Chipping Warden rectory. The "sad affair" and ensuing public inquest added a new scandal to Henville's career. In fact, the rector monetised his daughter's shame by simply appending her plight to his printed list of grievances. 

Henry Labouchere, the editor of the Society weekly, Truth, had a special obsession with begging-letter writers. He singled Rev. Henville out as the worst of them all. "Here is a man who has for many years made a trade of writing lying appeals to wealthy ladies and others likely to be moved by a pathetic story of a starving parish priest. His true character is well known among his parishioners and among his neighbours. What scandal can be more shocking than the spectacle of such a man performing week by week the most sacred functions in the pulpit and at the altar?" That church superiors were unable to remove the "reverend mendicant [was] a scandal of the worst kind." It was Labouchere who dubbed Henville the "Black Sheep of Chipping Warden."

Only a week or so before Queen Victoria's death in 1901 ended her long reign, the Rev. Edward Henville died in his rectory. He was 60. He was replaced by the Rev Stephen Cartwright, son of a local baronet. The announcements noted that Chipping Warden parish had been "so long discredited by the incumbency of the late Rev. E. Henville."

Rev. Henville was not the only begging-letter writing clergyman. The Rev. Richard Marsh Watson, however, combined his money-raising schemes with a bit of blackmail. For more, see my book Clerical Errors: A Victorian Series, Volume Two. Thank you very much indeed.