Our poster boys …

The images in the banner are, from left to right:

Arthur Lake (1569-1626, engraved by Wenceslas Hollar), bishop of Bath and Wells and a translator for the King James Bible: CCEd id 8541

Beilby Porteus (1731-1808), bishop of Chester and then London, and one of the most intriguing figures of his generation, with evangelical links and a prominent figure in many causes associated with the school: CCEd id 72701.

Richard Watson (1737-1816), the famous bishop of Llandaff sometimes seen as a byword for episcopal inactivity, but in fact better understood as the victim of political circumstances which saw his whig reformism become less palatable to the powers of the time: CCEd id 78573

And while we are at it, we can identify the ‘flying clergyman’ who has decorated our banner for several years now. He is drawn from a marvellous print published by Edward Cooper, the leading London print publisher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and engraved by Nathaniel Parr (act. 1739-1767) entitled The Pluralist. The print was first published around 1744, and depicts a cleric grasping after yet another church while already holding several – a fitting image indeed for the Database, which helps us identify many such pluralists definitively for the first time. The image can be seen in its full glory in that wonderful resource, British Museum Collections Online, here; and is reproduced with kind permission from the British Museum.

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