Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, he was the youngest brother of the poet William Wordsworth,[1] and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1798.

He took holy orders, and obtained successive preferments through the patronage of Charles Manners-Sutton, Bishop of Norwich, afterwards (1805) Archbishop of Canterbury, to whose son Charles (afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons, and Viscount Canterbury) he had been tutor.

He had in 1802 attracted attention by his defence of Granville Sharp's then novel canon "on the uses of the definitive article" in New Testament textual criticism.

On the death of Bishop Mansel, in 1820, he was elected Master of Trinity, and retained that position till 1841, when he resigned.

(1824), and in other writings, he advocated the claims of Charles I to its authorship; and in 1836 he published, in 4 volumes, a work of Christian Institutes, selected from English divines.