Connop Thirlwall

His father was an Anglican priest who claimed descent from a Northumbrian family, served for some years as chaplain to Bishop Thomas Percy before becoming rector of Bowers Gifford in Essex in 1814.

[3] gained the Craven university scholarship and the chancellor's classical medal and served as Secretary of the Cambridge Union Society in the Lent term, 1817.

On his return, "distrust of his own resolutions and convictions" led him to abandon for the time his intention of being a clergyman, and he settled down to study law, though he did not lose interest in other subjects.

In the meantime, he took on the task of translating and prefacing Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher's essay on the Gospel of St Luke.

[4] On Hare's departure from Cambridge in 1832, Thirlwall became assistant college tutor, which led him to join in the great controversy upon the admission of Dissenters which arose in 1834.

Thomas Turton, the regius professor of divinity (afterwards dean of Westminster and bishop of Ely), had written a pamphlet objecting to the admission.

[2] The event marked him out for promotion by a Liberal Government, and in the autumn he received from Lord Brougham as chancellor the living of Kirby Underdale in Yorkshire.

The promotion was entirely the act of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, an amateur in theology, who had read Thirlwall's introduction to Schleiermacher, and satisfied himself of the propriety of the appointment.

He took the liberal side in the questions of Maynooth, of the admission of Jews to parliament, of the Gorham case, and of the educational conscience clause.

He would have made an admirable successor to Howley in the primacy, but such was the complexion of ecclesiastical politics that the elevation of the most impartial prelate of his day would have been resented as a piece of party spirit.

His character, with its mixture of greatness and gentleness, was thus read by Carlyle: "A right solid, honest-hearted man, full of knowledge and sense, and, in spite of his positive temper, almost timid.