Edward Lee Hicks[2] (23 December 1843 – 14 August 1919) was an eminent[3] Anglican priest[4] and author[5] who served as Bishop of Lincoln[6] 1910–1919.

[9] After a spell as Fellow and Tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford[10] he was Rector of Fenny Compton[11] before becoming Warden of Hulme Hall in 1886.

But at that time Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was the key figure in episcopal appointments and, influenced by Hicks as a ‘strong Liberal in politics’, recommended him to the Crown for the post at Lincoln.

[15] He was accused of cowardice, and produced a strong reply to his critics showing prescience of what the "Great War" would involve.

‘Anyone who knows what war means - its stoppage of industry, its heaping up of debt and taxation, its unemployment, its famine, its missing at home, its paralysis of all effective work and expenditure on Social Reform, not to mention the horrible carnage of the battlefield, the agonies of the wounded, the visitations of disease and pestilence that always follow campaigns and battles - will be the last to tax me with cowardice if I confess to a loathing of war.’[16] During that War, he lost a son, Edwin, in 1917 and gave up part and eventually the whole of his palace, first for the use of Belgian refugees and then to the Red Cross.