Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester by J
From the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester by J. Fendley 2001, Vol. 119, 155-176 © The Society and the Author(s) Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 119 (2001), 155–76 Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester By JOHNFENDLEY Martin Benson1 was bishop of Gloucester from 1735 to 1752. He is remembered as a conscien- tious prelate living at a time when the Bench, as seen by posterity, had a low reputation. The domination of politics in the selection and promotion of bishops has left a picture of worldly men neglecting their proper responsibilities in a struggle for advancement. This description may fit several in the 18th century, but does no justice to those, some of them of the highest calibre, who were devoted to the Church and conscientiously carried out their duties as bishops. Benson was one of their number. Benson was born on 23 April 1689 at Cradley in Herefordshire, where his father, John Benson, was rector. Benson came from a clerical family.2 He was the great-grandson of Samuel Fell, a dean of Christ Church who was deprived of his preferments in 1649, and the great- nephew of John Fell, the reforming dean of Christ Church and later the bishop of Oxford, the subject of the epigram ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell . .’. His paternal grandfather was George Benson, dean of Hereford. An uncle, Samuel Benson, canon and archdeacon of Hereford, was deprived of his offices as a non-juror in 1690. Benson was, in his own words,3 ‘educated in grammar learning’ at Charterhouse School, which was then in the suburbs of London on the site of the former Carthusian monastery.
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