30 - The Divine Right of Kings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
Summary
John Neville Figgis was born on 2 February 1866, at Brighton in Sussex, even then something of a place of resort and retirement for the upper middle classes. His father, the Reverend John Benjamin Figgis, was a minister in the sect known as the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, a narrowly Calvinist by-product of the eighteenth-century Methodist movement. In 1886 he went to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to read mathematics; moderate success in that Tripos (1888) was followed next year by a brilliant performance in the Historical Tripos. In reaction against his upbringing, he turned agnostic, in the undergraduate fashion of his day, but his father's powerful personality never let him be himself, and he looked for father-substitutes for the rest of his life. In his early twenties he attached himself to Mandell Creighton, Regius professor of history at Cambridge and later bishop of London; there followed a move into the Anglican Church, ordination in 1894, and an unsatisfactory year as curate in the market town of Kettering (Northamptonshire). From 1896 to 1902 he was very busy indeed, combining a teaching post in history at St Catharine's with the chaplaincy of Pembroke College and a curacy at the University church. Singlehanded he gave to his old College, notorious even in the Cambridge of its day for its low standards and philistinism, a respectable position in the University. But in 1902 preferment called him to the rectory of Marnhull (Dorset) where he spent five rather frustrating years, an intellectual parson in a backward village which respected but hardly understood or used him.
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- Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and GovernmentPapers and Reviews 1946–1972, pp. 193 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1974
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