[2] In 1955 he was appointed vicar of Great St Mary's, Cambridge, where his preaching drew large congregations of undergraduates, gaining him a national reputation.

[3] In 1959, at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, appointed Stockwood to the Diocese of Southwark.

[6] He somewhat incongruously, however, in his Sermons from Great St. Mary's,[7] preached in Cambridge, did not hesitate to cast a slur on the characters of kings James I and Richard II whom he associated with this tendency.

[8] Stockwood appeared on the BBC chat show Friday Night, Saturday Morning on 9 November 1979, with Christian broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, arguing that the film Monty Python's Life of Brian was blasphemous.

"[citation needed] Shortly before his death he was one of ten Church of England bishops "outed" (i.e. alleged to be a closet homosexual) by the radical gay organisation OutRage!.

[12] Michael De-la-Noy's biography, Mervyn Stockwood: A Lonely Life (September 1997), paints him as a socialist who loved the trappings of wealth, privilege and royalty.