Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/102

 phlets are: 1. ‘The Heart's Proper Element.’ 2. ‘The World and its Two Faces,’ 1854. 3. ‘Honest Thoughts for Plain and Honest People.’ 4. ‘The Strange Spirits of the Day, or a Rap for the Rappers.’ 5. ‘Friendly Appeals to the People’ (only two numbers published). 6. ‘Example, its Power for Good or Evil,’ 1855. 7. ‘The Charmed Ring.’ 8. ‘Man, viewed with Reference to his Words, his Deeds, and his Motives.’ 9. ‘Life, its Tints and its Shadows,’ 1856.

 KIDDER, RICHARD (1633–1703), bishop of Bath and Wells, was born at East Grinstead in Sussex in 1633. His father belonged to the class of yeomen or lesser gentry. His mother was a woman of great piety, of puritan sympathies. He was educated at a grammar school in the neighbourhood under the mastership of a Mr. Rayner Harman, of whom he speaks in the highest terms. He was sent to an apothecary at Sevenoaks to study medicine; but his friends raised a sum of money to send him to Cambridge, and in June 1649 he was admitted as a sizar at Emmanuel College. Samuel Cradock [q. v.], then a fellow of the college, directed his studies, encouraged him in a religious life, and helped him with money. He graduated B.A. in 1652, and in 1655 was elected fellow of Emmanuel. In 1658 he was ordained deacon and priest, in one day, by Dr. Brownrigg, the deprived bishop of Exeter. The ordination took place in a private house at Bury St. Edmunds. In 1659 the vicarage of Stanground, Huntingdonshire, which was in the gift of his college, fell vacant, and Kidder was appointed to it. In 1662 he was ejected by the Bartholomew Act, because he ‘did not think fit to subscribe to what he never saw,’ that is, of course, the amended Book of Common Prayer. He declares that he had ‘never taken the covenant or engagement, was entirely satisfied in episcopacy, and with a liturgy; had no hand in the late confusions, and was so far from it that he lamented them, and was deprived of his living only for not subscribing to a book that was not, as it ought to have been, laid before him.’ For a time he took chance duty in London and the country, but in 1664, having by that time ‘conformed,’ he was appointed by Arthur, earl of Essex, to the rectory of Raine (now spelt Rayne), near Braintree. He found the people ‘factious to the last degree,’ and used to call the ten years he spent among them ‘the lost part of his life.’ The great plague of London in 1665 spread to Essex, and added to his troubles; and he also lost (not through the plague) three children there. In 1674 he was offered the living of St. Helen's in London by Sancroft, then dean of St. Paul's, who had known him at Emmanuel College; but though he officiated there for a while, and was much pleased with the people, he would not be instituted on the terms of refusing the holy communion to those who would not kneel. He was appointed also in 1674 preacher at the Rolls by Sir Harbottle Grimston [q. v.], the master, and in the same year was presented by the Merchant Taylors' Company to the rectory of St. Martin Outwich, the next parish to St. Helen's. Soon afterwards he was also chosen to be a week-day lecturer at Blackfriars. In 1680 he lost three children by the small-pox. He was now a popular preacher, and was offered various preferments. In 1681 he was appointed to a prebend at Norwich by the lord chancellor, the Earl of Nottingham, and a few years later was twice chosen lecturer of Ipswich, but declined both times. In 1688 his old friend Sancroft, now archbishop of Canterbury, offered him the living of Sundridge, Kent, and he was also recommended by Robert Nelson to Tillotson, then dean of St. Paul's, for the living of Barnes, but he accepted neither preferment.

In 1689, soon after the accession of William and Mary, he was made one of the royal chaplains, without his knowledge, and was also appointed on the royal commission to consider such alterations in the liturgy, &c., as might give satisfaction to the dissenters in connection with the Comprehension Bill. He prepared a new version of the Psalms, but the commission had not time to examine it. In the same year, on the elevation of Dean Patrick to the see of Chichester, he was appointed by the crown dean of Peterborough, and finally, through the instrumentality of Tillotson, now archbishop of Canterbury, was offered the bishopric of Bath and Wells, of which Thomas Ken had been deprived. He says that he was very unwilling to accept the see, but after some days consented. He afterwards thought that he had not been wise; for ‘though he could not say that he had acted against his conscience, he did not consult his ease,’ and often repented. He was consecrated at Bow Church on 30 Aug. 1691, and ‘presently took up his residence at Wells.’ ‘I am sure,’ he says, ‘no man living could come into a place with a more hearty desire to do good than I did.’ But his position was most unfortunate, for the whole sympathies of the diocese were probably with his deprived predecessor, Ken. Ken himself greatly disliked the appointment, and spoke of Kidder as a ‘latitudinarian traditor,’ a ‘hireling,’