BISHOP J. C. RYLE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Te Early Years !" Edited by Andrew Atherstone THE BANNER OF TRUTH TRUST THE BANNER OF TRUTH TRUST 3 Murrayfeld Road, Edinburgh EH12 6EL, UK P.O. Box 621, Carlisle, PA 17013, USA t © Andrew Atherstone 2016 t ISBN: Print: 978 1 84871 686 5 EPUB: 978 1 84871 687 2 Kindle: 978 1 84871 688 9 t Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond Pro at the Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh Printed in the USA by Versa Press, Inc., East Peoria, IL CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xvii Ryle’s Autobiography 1. Family Background 3 2. Childhood 17 3. Early Education 23 4. Eton College 27 5. Oxford 51 6. Conversion 61 7. Henbury Hall 77 8. Bankruptcy 85 9. Exbury 97 10. Winchester 107 11. Helmingham 115 vii BISHOP J. C. RYLE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Appendices 1. Te Ryle Family Bible 155 2. Te Eton Society 167 3. Herbert Ryle on his Father’s Schooldays 191 4. Canon Christopher on Ryle’s Conversion 199 5. Ryle’s Earliest Tracts 215 6. Ryle’s Funeral Tribute to Georgina Tollemache 291 7. Ryle’s Last Will and Testament 333 Index 347 viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NE of the greatest thrills of historical research is the excitement of discovering important manuscripts, previ- ously unknown or lost to scholarship. J. C. Ryle’s auto- Obiography is a prime example – it had only been studied by one historian, shortly after the Second World War, and was last seen half a century ago. Although a poor copy of a copy was published in 1975, the original was presumed lost or destroyed. What a delight it was, therefore, to track down Ryle’s manuscript in December 2015 in the private family archive of Teir Serene Highnesses, John Prince of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg and Bettina Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. I am grateful for their hospitality and permission to publish this critical edition of Ryle’s text, as well as previously unknown photographs from the Ryle family albums and details from the Ryle Family Bible. Other members of the Ryle family have also been of great assis- tance in my hunt for Ryle papers. Special thanks to William Cav- endish and Rupert Ryle-Hodges, cousins of John Prince of Sayn- Wittgenstein-Berleburg, custodians of other parts of the scattered family archive which has descended from Dean Herbert Ryle (1856- 1925). To all three I am grateful for permission to publish family portraits, photographed by the late Eddie Ryle-Hodges (1939-2001). From another branch of the family, descended from Reginald Ryle xiii BISHOP J. C. RYLE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1854-1922), I am grateful to John Ryle for permission to publish the portrait of J. C. Ryle’s father; and to Bridget Ryle, widow of the late Michael Ryle (1927-2013), for permission to publish the portrait of J. C. Ryle’s brother and family photographs. Tanks to Alan Munden, author of Bishop J. C. Ryle: prince of tract writers (Day One, 2012), for so generously sharing the fruit of his own Ryle research. In several ways his help has been invalu- able: by lending Guthrie Clark’s 1947 hand-written copy of Ryle’s autobiography, to enable comparison with the original; by drawing my attention to Ryle’s A minister’s parting words to the inhabitants of Exbury (1843); and by answering a steady stream of queries. He was the frst to solve the long-standing mystery of Jessy Ryle’s fve confnements, when only four children were known; and to identify the title of Ryle’s early anonymous tract, A word in season about the awful accident at Yarmouth (1845). Tanks also to Iain Murray for his friendly encouragements to pursue this project from its incep- tion; and to Ben Rogers, author of a recent doctoral study on Ryle, for some helpful references. For access to archives, I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; Cheshire Record Ofce; Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham; Christ Church Archives, Oxford; Eton College Archives; Hampshire Record Ofce; Lambeth Palace Library; the Latimer Trust; Macclesfeld Library; Marylebone Cricket Club Archives; the National Archives; Oxford University Archives; and Sufolk Record Ofce. Ryle’s speeches to the Eton Society in 1833 are published with kind permission of the provost and fellows of Eton College. A minister’s parting words is published with kind permission of the British Library Board. Tanks also to Michael Dormandy for help with Ryle’s Latin, and to Clayton Croy for help with Ryle’s Greek. It has been a great pleasure to work with Jonathan Watson, John Rawlinson, and the team at the Banner of xiv Acknowledgments Truth Trust, whose popular edition of Five English Reformers was my frst introduction to J. C. Ryle almost twenty years ago. ANDREW ATHERSTONE Oxford May 2016 xv INTRODUCTION ohn Charles Ryle (1816-1900) was one of the most infuential evangelical clergymen of the nineteenth century. A popular Jplatform speaker and prolifc tract writer, he spent 36 years as a minister in rural Sufolk before his surprise appointment by Ben- jamin Disraeli in 1880 as the frst bishop of Liverpool. Whether in a village parish of 300 people, or the bustling northern metropolis of 1.1 million, Ryle sought to apply evangelical principles to the mission of the church. A lover of Reformation and Puritan theol- ogy, he exhorted congregations to walk in the ‘old paths’ when it came to the gospel message, but to break the shackles of Anglican institutionalism in their eforts at innovative evangelism. His legacy for the evangelical movement, especially in the Church of England, was considerable.1 To understand the early decades of Ryle’s life and ministry, his manuscript autobiography is a rich and unparalleled source. It sheds signifcant light upon the development of his character, his upbringing and education, his evangelical conversion and ministry 1 For doctoral studies, see Ian D. Farley, ‘J. C. Ryle, episcopal evangelist: a study in late Victorian evangelicalism’ (PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1988), published as J. C. Ryle, frst bishop of Liverpool: a study in mission amongst the masses (Carlisle, 2000); Bennett Wade Rogers, ‘John Charles Ryle: an intellectual biog- raphy’ (PhD thesis, Southern Baptist Teological Seminary, 2015). For popular studies, see, for example, Alan Munden, Bishop J. C. Ryle: prince of tract writers (Leominster, 2012); Iain H. Murray, J. C. Ryle: prepared to stand alone (Edinburgh, 2016). xvii BISHOP J. C. RYLE’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY priorities. Ryle details his pursuit of academic plaudits and sporting prowess, and the impact of the collapse of the family bank upon his ambitions to enter parliament or establish himself as a landed gentleman. He describes his early friendships, his loves and losses, his experiences as a young clergyman in three diferent parishes, and the deaths of his frst two wives. He ofers a frank assessment of his joys and struggles, and the reasons behind his crucial life choices. Covering 45 years, from Ryle’s birth until his move to a new parish in 1861, his autobiography is essential for a proper appreciation of the man behind the headlines. Written for his children and never intended for publication, Ryle’s narrative reveals the shaping of his life and thought in the years before he reached national and inter- national fame. Biography and Autobiography Te relationship between Ryle’s manuscript autobiography and his mid-twentieth-century biographers is a complex saga in need of unravelling. Te manuscript was inherited by Ryle’s second son, Herbert Edward Ryle (1856-1925), an infuential churchman and scholar, successively president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, bishop of Exeter, bishop of Winchester, and dean of Westminster. When called upon in 1916 to preach at Macclesfeld at the centenary cel- ebration of J. C. Ryle’s birth, Herbert quoted several passages from the autobiography, which he called his father’s ‘memoirs’ – the frst known public reference to this private text.2 It was later amongst the documents lent in 1928 to Maurice Fitzgerald (1877-1963), Herbert’s former chaplain, for his memoir of the dean. Fitzgerald sampled 2 ‘Te dean of Westminster in Macclesfeld: centenary commemoration at the parish church’, Macclesfeld Courier and Herald, 21 October 1916, p. 3. xviii Introduction the autobiography, to illustrate the religious atmosphere of the Ryle home, but was at pains to emphasize that Herbert ‘outgrew’ his father’s evangelicalism, which many by the 1920s believed to be ‘narrow, inadequate, or even distorted’.3 Although J. C. Ryle was largely forgotten during the frst half of the twentieth century, there was an unexpected resurgence of interest in his life and teaching in the decades after the Second World War. His pioneer biographer was Marmaduke Guthrie Clark (1908-71), an evangelical clergyman at Ilfracombe in Devon. Clark had initially encountered Ryle as a teenager, in his frst term as an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford in 1927, when he picked up a cheap second-hand copy of Knots untied from a bookstall in Holywell Street. Clark was immediately captivated and testifed that Ryle ‘cast his spell upon me’ and strengthened him in evan- gelical convictions, an author ‘to whose writings I owe more than I can say’. When twenty years later, in 1947, he was commissioned by Church Book Room Press to write a brief biography of Ryle for the ‘Great Churchmen’ series of booklets, he approached it as a ‘sacred task’.4 ‘What a tragedy it is today’, Clark wrote, ‘that we cannot see more men of Ryle’s stamp.’5 He hunted for Ryle man- uscripts and, with Fitzgerald’s help, traced Herbert Ryle’s surviv- ing son, Edward Hewish Ryle (1885-1952), custodian of the family archive, then living at Navan, County Meath, in Ireland.6 Te Ryle 3 Maurice H.