Thomas Wagstaffe

Thomas Wagstaffe the Elder (13 February 1645 – 17 October 1712) was a clergyman of the Church of England, after the nonjuring schism a bishop of the breakaway church. Early life Wagstaffe was born on 13 February 1645 at Binley in Warwickshire, and was named after his father, who had settled there and married Anne Avery of Itchington; he was related to Sir Joseph Wagstaffe and to William Wagstaffe the physician. He was educated at Charterhouse School. After a short period at Pembroke College, Cambridge in the early 1660s, he moved on in Lent term 1660 to New Inn Hall, Oxford, and graduating B.A. on 15 October 1664, M.A. on 20 June 1667. Two years later he was ordained deacon by John Hacket, Bishop of Lichfield, and in the same year priest by Joseph Henshaw, Bishop of Peterborough, on his institution to the benefice of Martinsthorpe. He became chaplain to Sir Richard Temple, 3rd Baronet (1634–1697), and was made curate of Stowe. Deprived as nonjuror In 1684 Wagstaffe was preferred to the chancellorship of Lichfield Cathedral and a prebend, by James II, Bishop Thomas Wood being incapacitated through suspension. In the same year, also at the presentation of the king as patron of the rectory of St. Gabriel Fenchurch, London (with St. Margaret Pattens); he was deprived at the Glorious Revolution of both posts, since he refused to take the new oaths. For some time he made his living by practising as a physician, still wearing clerical dress, and treating William Sancroft and Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely. With Archbishop Sancroft he spent some time before his death at Fressingfield in Suffolk. Nonjuring consecration In 1693 the nonjurors exploited the Suffragan Bishops Act of Henry VIII, not in force since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to continue a succession of their bishops. George Hickes went over to Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France in 1693 with a list of nonjurors, from which James II selected the names of Hickes himself and Wagstaffe as bishops. Nonjurors held that James was king, in law, and William Lloyd, whose suffragans the new bishops were to be, was Bishop of Norwich (Sancroft still being regarded as Archbishop of Canterbury); so it was held that the conditions of the act were duly complied with. Before giving his consent James had the approval of Pope Innocent XII, François de Harlay de Champvallon, and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Wagstaffe therefore was nominated bishop of Ipswich, and Hickes of Thetford, both in the diocese of Norwich.