ABSTRACT
On 25 June 1731 William Bowman, the vicar of Aldborough,2 climbed into the pulpit of Wakefield parish church to preach the sermon at the visitation of the archdeacon of York, Thomas Hayter. While delivering a visitation sermon was regarded as a chore by some clergy, it was still something of an honour to be selected and it offered a rare opportunity for a minister to address the assembled clergy of the deanery and some prominent diocesan officials. An aspiring clergyman might well see it as an opportunity to stake his claim to preferment and the congregation may well have sighed in anticipation of a discourse by an ambitious young man straining to impress his superiors. We know relatively little about Bowman, but it is clear that, in 1731, this description may well have suited him. The son of another Yorkshire clergyman, Thomas Bowman, he had been educated – oddly, in the light of his political beliefs – at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, that bastion of early-eighteenth-century Tory High Churchmanship.3 He was ordained deacon on
1 An earlier version of this chapter was read as a paper at the North American Conference on British Studies Annual Conference in San Francisco, California, on 11 November 2007. It was a particular pleasure that James Bradley was the commentator on that occasion, and the paper has benefited significantly from his insightful remarks. I am also grateful to the other participants in that session for their comments and to the British Academy for an Overseas Conference Grant that made my attendance possible.
