William Boyd Carpenter

William Boyd Carpenter
"A man Right Reverend and Well-Beloved" Bishop Boyd Carpenter as caricatured by Spy (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, March 1906
Born	(1841-03-26)26 March 1841 Liverpool, England
Died	26 October 1918(1918-10-26) (aged 77) Westminster, England
Nationality	English
Years active	1878–1918
Known for	English clergyman and minister
Spouse(s)	Harriet Charlotte Peers Annie Maude Gardner
Parent(s)	Rev. Henry Carpenter, Hester Boyd
Relatives	Archibald Boyd (uncle) Sir Archibald Boyd-Carpenter MP (son) Francis Wentworth-Sheilds (son-in-law) The Lord Boyd-Carpenter (grandson) Sir Thomas Boyd-Carpenter (great-grandson) The Viscountess Hailsham (great-granddaughter) Prof William Boyd-Carpenter (son) Sir Henry Boyd-Carpenter (great-grandson)

Sir William Boyd Carpenter KCVO (26 March 1841, Liverpool – 26 October 1918, Westminster) was a Church of England clergyman who became Bishop of Ripon and court chaplain to Queen Victoria.

Family

William Boyd Carpenter was the second son of the Rev. Henry Carpenter of Liverpool, perpetual curate of St Michael's Church, Aigburth, who married (marriage licence 1837 in Derry) Hester Boyd of Derry, sister of Archibald Boyd, Dean of Exeter. Her father was Archibald Boyd (born about 1764 of Saint Leonards, Shoreditch, London, England), who married Sarah Bodden there on 13 July 1789.

Carpenter was the uncle of Mrs Henry Williams of Moor Park House, Beckwithshaw, North Yorkshire. In 1897 he consecrated St Michaels and All Angels Church at Beckwithshaw, after she and her husband had funded its construction.

In 1864 Carpenter married his first wife, Harriet Charlotte Peers (daughter of the Rev. J. W. Peers, of Chislehampton), who bore him eight children:

• Henry John Boyd-Carpenter (1865-1923), Inspector-General of schools in Egypt
• Jessie Peers Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1866), a nurse at St Thomas' Hospital who married Dr. William John Edwin Davies
• Minnie Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1867), who married the Rev. Richard Bartram Tollinton
• Mary Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1868)
• William Boyd Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1869), who married Lina Frederica Marie Mordwinoff Haydon
• Annie Boyd-Carpenter (1870-1927), who married the Rt. Rev. Francis Wentworth-Sheilds, Bishop of Armidale
• John Peers Boyd-Carpenter (1871-1936), army officer and colonial administrator
• Sir Archibald Boyd Boyd-Carpenter (1873-1937), Conservative MP and father of John Archibald Boyd-Carpenter (Baron Boyd-Carpenter), also a Conservative MP

Harriet died in 1887 and in 1883 Carpenter married his second wife, Annie Maude Gardner (daughter of W. W. Gardner), who bore him a further four children.:

• Victoria Alexandrina Boyd-Carpenter (1884-1885)
• Beatrice Victoria Margaret Boyd-Carpenter (1885-1977), who married the Rev. Frederick Stanley Pears Lynn Girdlestone, who had been her father's chaplain at Ripon
• Victor Charles Douglas Boyd-Carpenter (1887-1916), a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers
• Hester Macneil Boyd-Carpenter (1893-1960), who married Dr. Arthur Ferguson MacCallan, a ophthalmologist who worked in Egypt

Carpenter's other descendants include:

• John Archibald Boyd-Carpenter, Baron Boyd-Carpenter (1908-1998), a Conservative MP
• Michael Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1932), senior partner at Joseph Sebag & Co, stockbrokers
• Sir Thomas Patrick John Boyd-Carpenter (b. 1938), an army officer
• Sir Henry Boyd-Carpenter KCVO (b. 1939), senior partner at Farrer & Co, the royal solicitors
• Sarah Elizabeth Mary Boyd-Carpenter, Baroness Hogg (b. 1946), a politician and wife of Douglas Hogg
• Stephen Michael Harding Oliver (1950-1992), a composer
• John William Oliver (b. 1977), a comedian

Education and career

Carpenter was educated at the Royal Institution, Liverpool, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and was appointed Hulsean lecturer at Cambridge in 1878. He held several curacies, was vicar of Christ Church, Lancaster Gate, from 1879 to 1884, canon of Windsor in 1882–84, and after 1884 Bishop of Ripon. In 1887 he was appointed Bampton lecturer at Oxford, and in 1895 pastoral lecturer on theology at Cambridge. In June 1901, he received an honorary doctorate of Divinity from the University of Glasgow.

In 1904 and 1913 he visited the United States and delivered the Noble lectures at Harvard. He was chaplain in ordinary to Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and George V. He resigned his see in 1911 on the grounds of ill-health and became a canon and sub-dean of Westminster. He was interested in eugenic issues and served as President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1912.

Publications

William Boyd Carpenter, 1889

His publications include:

• Commentary on Revelation (1879)
• Permanent Elements of Religion (Bampton lectures, 1889)
• Popular History of the Church of England (1900)
• Witness to the Influence of Christ (1905)
• Some Pages of my Life (1911)
• Life's Tangled Thread (1912)
• The Apology of Experience (1913)

Correspondence with Alexandra Feodorovna

William Boyd-Carpenter corresponded with the last empress of Russia, Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse). "In early 1895 she wrote to William Boyd-Carpenter, who as Bishop of Ripon was also court chaplain to her grandmother Queen Victoria, that she was trying hard to come to terms with external trappings of her new faith. ‘Now that I am more used to hear the Russian language I can understand the service so much better, and many things have become clear to me and comprehensible which at first rather startled me. The singing is most beautiful and edifying, only I miss the sermons, which are never preached in the Imperial chapels..."

Ancestry

Sample of a medieval knight with an early Carpenter Coat of Arms on shield.

In the British Museum, London, is a "Life of Lord George Carpenter," published in 1736, five years before his death. It is therein stated of him that he was a son of Warncomb Carpenter, the sixth son of Thomas Carpenter, esq., of the Holme in the parish of Dilwyn, Herefordshire, England where the family have been possessed of considerable estate for over 400 years, proof of the family being there by 1300.

The family bore Arms, which in heraldic parlance reads as follows: "Paly of six, argent and gules, on a chevron azure, 3 cross crosslets or." Motto "Per acuta belli" (through the asperities of war). The 3 cross crosslets denote an ancestor had been in the Crusades or who was a Crusader. What more distinguished one could they have than William de Melun?"

In a letter dated 7 August 1907, from Rev. William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon, Yorkshire, afterwards a Canon of Westminster and chaplain to the reigning sovereign of England, the writer was informed that he, the Bishop, bore the Hereford Arms, and that Sir Noel Paton (See: Joseph Noel Paton) explained to him that originally the crest was a round-handled sword, which in drawing became shortened, until nothing but the cross and globe are left beneath it. These arms were used by John Carpenter, town clerk of London, who died in 1442 ..." This John Carpenter was also known as John Carpenter, the younger (abt. 1372 – 1442) and was the noted Town Clerk of London during the reigns of King Henry V & King Henry VI.

There is no direct male to male Carpenter descent connecting Lord George Carpenter & Sir William Boyd Carpenter. The family connection is by marriage through the females in the family.

The Hereford Coat of Arms should not be confused with the Arms of Bishop Richard Carpenter (c1450s?-1503) presented in the "Visitations of the County of Oxford taken in 1566, 1574, and 1634", published in 1871, which describe the arms displayed in the buildings at the University in Oxford - "In the Lyberarye of Baliall College." - as recorded by the officials performing the visitations in those years. The Visitations describe the arms of Richard Carpenter as: "Paly of nine Gu. and Az. on a chevron Arg. surmounted by a mitre Or, three cross crosslets of—nine pales alternating red and blue, with a silver chevron bearing three gold cross-crosslets.

References

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• Bibliographic directory of William Boyd Carpenter from Project Canterbury
• Works by William Boyd Carpenter at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Boyd Carpenter at the Internet Archive
• "Bishop Boyd Carpenter: Sheep or Shepherd in the Eugenics Movement?" by David Morris, Galton Institute Newsletter Issue 55 (June 2005)