Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/674

 on 23 July 1863 Harriet Mary, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Ainger of Hampstead, and had issue four sons and three daughters. 

WILBERFORCE, ERNEST ROLAND (1840–1907), bishop successively of Newcastle and Chichester, the third son of the Right Rev. [q. v.] by his wife Emily Sargent, was born on 22 Jan. 1840 at his father's rectory at Brighstone in the Isle of Wight. He was educated at Harrow and at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1864 and proceeding M.A. in 1867 and B.D. and D.D. in 1882. In December 1864 he was ordained deacon by his father, and priest in the following year. After serving the curacy of Cuddesdon and for a short time that of Lea in Lincolnshire, he was presented in 1868 to the living of Middleton Stoney, near Bicester, which he resigned in 1870 on account of his wife's health. In the same year he became domestic chaplain to his father, now bishop of Winchester, and in 1871 was made sub-almoner to Queen Victoria by the dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley [q. v.]. On his father's death, 13 July 1873, he accepted from Gladstone the living of Seaforth, then a riverside suburb of Liverpool, but long since absorbed in the industrial quarter. Placed among a congregation of the old-fashioned evangelical type, he introduced a higher standard of churchmanship without causing offence, whilst making himself personally acceptable alike to the working classes and to the Liverpool merchants. Here he began that strong advocacy of temperance principles which henceforth became one of the main interests of his life. In October 1878 he was appointed by bishop Harold Browne, his father's successor in the see of Winchester, to a residentiary canonry in that city, together with the wardenship of the Wilberforce Mission, formed and endowed as a memorial to his father. Owing to a readjustment of the diocesan boundaries, the court of chancery decided that the funds raised for the Wilberforce Mission must be devoted to the diocese of Rochester. Wilberforce retained his canonry and devoted himself with conspicuous success to mission work in Portsmouth and Aldershot. In 1882 he was appointed, on the recommendation of Gladstone, to the newly created see of Newcastle, of which he was consecrated the first bishop on 25 July in Durham cathedral. The occasion required exceptional energy and physical vigour, and Wilberforce, then in his forty-third year, devoted his great powers of work and organisation to recovering to the Church of England a territory which had been well-nigh lost to it. He made his way into the most remote Northumbrian parishes, confirming or otherwise officiating in every parish in his diocese, and inspiring with his own zeal a clergy by whom, in the past, the presence and authority of a bishop had been little felt. The ‘Bishop of Newcastle's Fund,’ inaugurated by him in 1882 was the means of raising, in a very short space of time, upwards of a quarter of a million of money for church purposes in the diocese. Though meeting at first with opposition from the more militant nonconformists, he gradually won the confidence of all classes, and found generous support from the wealthy laymen of the north, irrespective of creed. In November 1895 he was translated by Lord Salisbury to the see of Chichester, vacant by the death of Richard Durnford, and he was enthroned in the cathedral on 28 Jan. 1896. The population of his new diocese was mainly agricultural, but the watering places on the south coast contained several churches in which the ritual was of a very ‘advanced’ description. Wilberforce was by temperament and conviction a high churchman of the old school, uniting a dislike for ritual with pronounced sacramentarian views. A vehement agitation against the excesses of some of his clergy was on foot, while the Lambeth ‘opinions’ of archbishops Temple and Maclagan had comprehensively condemned the use of incense and portable lights and the reservation of the sacrament. Wilberforce strove hard to bring the whole body of his clergy into acceptance of these decisions, endorsed as they were by the entire English episcopate, and he was successful in all but a handful of churches. He steadily refused to institute prosecutions against recalcitrant incumbents, but he declined to exercise his veto in their favour; and he refused to avail himself of the right, which he retained owing to the peculiar form of the patent to his chancellor, of personally hearing ritual cases in his own consistorial court. At the same time he deeply resented any interference with his episcopal authority, and he was brought into sharp contact with the Church Association.