Kempsey. Westwood Park is a mansion of the 16th and 17th centuries, with a picturesque gatehouse of brick; the site was formerly occupied by a Benedictine nunnery. Madresfield Court, between Worcester and Malvern, embodies remains of a fine Elizabethan moated mansion.
See Victoria County History, Worcestershire; T. R. Nash, Collections for the History of Worcestershire (2 vols., London, 1781–1799); Sir Charles Hastings, Illustrations of the Natural History of Worcestershire (London, 1834); W. D. Curzon, Manufacturing Industries of Worcestershire (Birmingham, 1883); W. S. Brassington, Historic Worcestershire (Birmingham, 1893). See also publications of the Worcester Historical Society.
WORDSWORTH, CHARLES (1806–1892), Scottish bishop, son of Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, was born in London on the 22nd of August 1806, and educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a brilliant classical scholar, and a famous cricketer and athlete; he was in the Harrow cricket eleven in the first regular matches with Eton (1822) and Winchester (1825), and is credited with bringing about the first Oxford and Cambridge match in 1827, and the first university boat-race in 1828, in both of which he took part. He won the Chancellor’s Latin verse at Oxford in 1827, and the Latin essay in 1831, and took a first-class in classics. From 1830 to 1833 he had as pupils a number of men (including W. E. Gladstone and H. E. Manning) who afterwards became famous. He then travelled abroad during 1833–1834, and after a year’s work as tutor at Christ Church (1834–1835) was appointed second master at Winchester. He had previously taken holy orders, though he only became priest in 1840, and he had a strong religious influence with the boys. In 1839 he brought out his Greek Grammar, which had a great success. In 1846, however, he resigned; and then accepted the warden ship of Trinity College, Glenalmond, the new Scottish Episcopal public school and divinity college, where he remained from 1847 to 1854, having great educational success in all respects, though his views on Scottish Church questions brought him into opposition at some important points to W. E. Gladstone. In 1852 he was elected bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane, and was consecrated in Aberdeen early next year. He was a strong supporter of the establishment, but conciliatory towards the Free churches, and this brought him into a good deal of controversy. He was a voluminous writer, and one of the company of revisers of the New Testament (1870–1881), among whom he displayed a conservative tendency. He died at St Andrews on the 5th of December 1892. He was twice married, first in 1835 to Charlotte Day (d. 1839), and secondly in 1846 to Katherine Mary Barter (d. 1897). He had thirteen children altogether.
See his Annals of my Early Life (1891), and Annals of My Life, edited by W. Earl Hodgson (1893); also The Episcopate of Charles Wordsworth, by his nephew John, bishop of Salisbury (1899).
WORDSWORTH, CHRISTOPHER (1774–1846), English divine and scholar, youngest brother of the poet William Wordsworth, was born on the 9th of June 1774, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1798. Twelve years later he received the degree of D.D. He took holy orders, and obtained successive preferments through the patronage of Manners Sutton, bishop of Norwich, afterwards (1805) archbishop of Canterbury, to whose son Charles (afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons, and viscount Canterbury) he had been tutor. He had in 1802 attracted attention by his defence of Granville Sharp’s then novel canon “on the uses of the definitive article” in New Testament textual criticism. In 1810 he published an Ecclesiastical Biography in 6 volumes. On the death of Bishop Mansel, in 1820, he was elected Master of Trinity, and retained that position till 1841, when he resigned. He is regarded as the father of the modern “classical tripos,” since he had, as vice-chancellor, originated in 1821 a proposal for a public examination in classics and divinity, which, though then rejected, bore fruit in 1822. Otherwise his mastership was undistinguished, and he was not a popular head with the college. He died on the 2nd of February 1846, at Buxted. In his Who wrote Ikon Basilike? (1824), and in other writings, he advocated the claims of Charles I. to its authorship; and in 1836 he published, in 4 volumes, a work of Christian Institutes, selected from English divines. He married in 1804 Miss Priscilla Lloyd (d. 1815), a sister of Charles Lamb’s friend Charles Lloyd; and he had three sons, John W. (1805–1839), Charles (q.v.), and Christopher (q.v.); the two latter both became bishops, and John, who became a fellow and classical lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, was an industrious and erudite scholar.
WORDSWORTH, CHRISTOPHER (1807–1885), English bishop and man of letters, youngest son of Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, was born in London on the 30th of October 1807, and was educated at Winchester and Trinity, Cambridge. He, like his brother Charles, was distinguished as an athlete as well as for scholarship. He became senior classic, and was elected a fellow and tutor of Trinity in 1830; shortly afterwards he took holy orders. He went for a tour in Greece in 1832–1833, and published various works on its topography and archaeology, the most famous of which is “Wordsworth’s” Greece (1839). In 1836 he became Public Orator at Cambridge, and in the same year was appointed headmaster of Harrow, a post he resigned in 1844. He then became a canon of Westminster, and from 1850 to 1870 he held a country living in Berkshire. In 1865 he was made archdeacon of Westminster, and in 1869 bishop of Lincoln. He died on the 20th of March 1885. He was a man of fine character, with a high ideal of ecclesiastical duty, and he spent his money generously on church objects. As a scholar he is best known for his edition of the Greek New Testament (1856–1860), and the Old Testament (1864–1870), with commentaries; but his writings were many in number, and included a volume of devotional verse, The Holy Year (1862), Church History up to A.D. 451 (1881–1883), and Memoirs of his uncle the poet (1851), to whom he was literary executor. His Inscriptiones Pompeianae (1837) was an important contribution to epigraphy. He married in 1838 Susanna Hartley Frere (d. 1884), and had a family of seven; the eldest son was John (b. 1843), bishop of Salisbury (1885), and author of Fragments of Early Latin (1874); the eldest daughter, Elizabeth (b. 1840), was the first principal (1879) of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
His Life, by J. H. Overton and Elizabeth Wordsworth, was published in 1888.
WORDSWORTH, DOROTHY (1771–1855), English writer and diarist, was the third child and only daughter of John Wordsworth of Cockermouth and his wife, Anne Cookson-Crackanthorpe. The poet William Wordsworth was her brother and a year her senior. On the death of her father in 1783, Dorothy found a home at Penrith, in the house of her maternal grandfather, and afterwards for a time with a maiden lady at Halifax. In 1787, on the death of the elder William Cookson, she was adopted by her uncle, and lived in his Norfolk parish of Forncett. She and her brother William, who dedicated to his sister the Evening Walk of 1792, were early drawn to one another, and in 1794 they visited the Lakes together. They determined that it would be best to combine their small capitals, and that Dorothy should keep house for the poet. From this time forth her life ran on lines closely parallel to those of her great brother, whose companion she continued to be till his death. It is thought that they made the acquaintance of Coleridge in 1797.
From the autumn of 1795 to July 1797 William and Dorothy Wordsworth took up their abode at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. At the latter date they moved to a large manor-house, Alfoxden, in the N. slope of the Quantock hills, in W. Somerset, S. T. Coleridge about the same time settling near by in the town of Nether Stowey. On the 20th of January 1798 Dorothy Wordsworth began her invaluable Journal, used by successive biographers of her brother, but first printed in its quasi-entirety by Professor W. Knight in 1897. The Wordsworths, Coleridge, and Chester left England for Germany on the 14th of September 1798; and of this journey also Dorothy Wordsworth preserved an account, portions of which were published in 1897. On the 14th of May 1800 she started another Journal at Grasmere, which she kept very fully until the 31st of December of the same year. She
