of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. He died 2 April 1828.
A portrait is at Devonshire House, Bishopsgate.
[Obituary notice, Proc. Geol. Soc.; Knight's Dictionary of Biography; Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers; Boase and Courtney's Bibliotheca Cornubiensis; Joseph Smith's Cat. of Friends' Books; Biog. Cat. of Devonshire House Portraits.]
PHILLPOTTS, HENRY (1778–1869), bishop of Exeter, second son of John Phillpotts, by his wife Sybella, was born at Bridgwater, Somerset, on 6 May 1778. His father had sold the estate of Sonke, in the parish of Langarren, Herefordshire, which had been in the family for two centuries, and had become the proprietor of a pottery and brick factory at Bridgwater. In September 1782 he removed to Gloucester, where he bought and kept the Bell Inn and became land agent to the dean and chapter. Henry Phillpotts was educated at the Gloucester College school, and matriculated at Oxford, as scholar of Corpus Christi College, on 7 Nov. 1791; he graduated B.A. on 3 June 1795, won the chancellor's prize for an essay ‘On the Influence of Religious Principle,’ and was shortly afterwards (25 July 1795) elected to a fellowship at Magdalen College on the Somerset foundation. He there won the prize offered by the Asiatic Society for a Latin panegyric on Sir William Jones, and graduated M.A. on 28 April 1798. On 25 July 1800 he was elected prælector of moral philosophy, was appointed in 1802, and again in 1803, one of the examiners for honours, and under the influence of his friends, Routh and Copleston, took deacon's orders on 13 June 1802, and priest's orders on 23 Feb. 1804. On his marriage, on 27 Oct. 1804, with Deborah Maria, daughter of William Surtees, esq., of Bath, and niece of Lady Eldon, he vacated his fellowship. He was select preacher before the university for the first time in November 1804, refused the principalship of Hertford College in 1805, graduated B.D. and D.D. on 28 June 1821, and was elected an honorary fellow of Magdalen on 2 Feb. 1862.
His first preferment, probably due to his wife's connection with Lord Eldon, was to the vicarage of Kilmersdon, near Bath, a small crown living worth a little over 200l. a year. He never seems to have resided there. On 24 Dec. 1805 he received the benefice of Stainton-le-Street, Durham, and in 1806, on Dr. Routh's recommendation, became one of the chaplains of Shute Barrington [q. v.], bishop of Durham. This post he held for twenty years. His first appearance as a controversialist was in 1806, when he issued an answer to an anonymous attack, supposed to have been made by Dr. Lingard, upon one of his bishop's charges, and his defence met with considerable success. Early in 1806 he resigned the living of Kilmersdon, and on 28 June 1806 was presented to the crown living of Bishop Middleham in Durham, where he resided two years, holding it with Stainton. In 1808 he was collated by the bishop of Durham to the valuable living of Gateshead; in 1809 was promoted to the ninth prebendal stall in the cathedral of Durham, and on 28 Sept. 1810 was presented by the dean and chapter to the parish of St. Margaret, Durham, as well. In this parish, where peace did not always dwell among the parishioners, he earned a reputation as a tactful but firm administrator, and a zealous parish priest. His next preferment was to the second prebend, better endowed than the ninth, on 30 Dec. 1815.
He now began to appear as a writer upon public questions. Sturges Bourne raised the question of settlement under the poor law by a motion in the House of Commons on 25 March 1819. Phillpotts, an active justice of the peace for the county of Durham, published a pamphlet in defence of the existing system. A few weeks later he issued, on 30 June, an anonymous pamphlet against Earl Grey's bill for the repeal of the Test Act, temperate in tone, and expressing a certain willingness to relieve Roman catholics, but only upon strong guarantees for the maintenance of the existing arrangements in church and state. Next he published a pamphlet in vindication of the part played by the government in the collision of the mob on 16 Aug. 1819 with the troops at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, which was known as the Peterloo massacre, and to a scathing review of his pamphlet in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ No. 64, he issued a rejoinder. His energy, political and professional, won him further preferment. The bishop of Durham collated him, on 20 Sept. 1820, to the rectory of Stanhope-on-the-Wear, one of the best livings in England. He resigned his stall at Durham, spent 12,000l. in building a parsonage, and devoted himself to his duties as a priest and a magistrate without ceasing to take part in politics. He promoted an address to the crown from the clergy of Durham in support of the policy of the ministry towards Queen Caroline, and vigorously attacked Earl Grey's advocacy of her case and of the cause of reform. When John Ambrose Williams was prosecuted for a libel on the cathedral clergy in August 1822, the legal proceedings were currently, but wrongly, attributed to Phillpotts, and he was attacked
