Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Wilberforce, Ernest Roland
WILBERFORCE, ERNEST ROLAND (1840–1907), bishop successively of Newcastle and Chichester, the third son of the Right Rev. Samuel Wilberforce [q. v.] by his wife Emily Sargent, was born on 22 Jan. 1840 at his father's rectory at Brighstone in the Isle of Wight. He was educated at Harrow and at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1864 and proceeding M.A. in 1867 and B.D. and D.D. in 1882. In December 1864 he was ordained deacon by his father, and priest in the following year. After serving the curacy of Cuddesdon and for a short time that of Lea in Lincolnshire, he was presented in 1868 to the living of Middleton Stoney, near Bicester, which he resigned in 1870 on account of his wife's health. In the same year he became domestic chaplain to his father, now bishop of Winchester, and in 1871 was made sub-almoner to Queen Victoria by the dean of Windsor, Gerald Wellesley [q. v.]. On his father's death, 13 July 1873, he accepted from Gladstone the living of Seaforth, then a riverside suburb of Liverpool, but long since absorbed in the industrial quarter. Placed among a congregation of the old-fashioned evangelical type, he introduced a higher standard of churchmanship without causing offence, whilst making himself personally acceptable alike to the working classes and to the Liverpool merchants. Here he began that strong advocacy of temperance principles which henceforth became one of the main interests of his life. In October 1878 he was appointed by bishop Harold Browne, his father's successor in the see of Winchester, to a residentiary canonry in that city, together with the wardenship of the Wilberforce Mission, formed and endowed as a memorial to his father. Owing to a readjustment of the diocesan boundaries, the court of chancery decided that the funds raised for the Wilberforce Mission must be devoted to the diocese of Rochester. Wilberforce retained his canonry and devoted himself with conspicuous success to mission work in Portsmouth and Aldershot. In 1882 he was appointed, on the recommendation of Gladstone, to the newly created see of Newcastle, of which he was consecrated the first bishop on 25 July in Durham cathedral. The occasion required exceptional energy and physical vigour, and Wilberforce, then in his forty-third year, devoted his great powers of work and organisation to recovering to the Church of England a territory which had been well-nigh lost to it. He made his way into the most remote Northumbrian parishes, confirming or otherwise officiating in every parish in his diocese, and inspiring with his own zeal a clergy by whom, in the past, the presence and authority of a bishop had been little felt. The ‘Bishop of Newcastle's Fund,’ inaugurated by him in 1882 was the means of raising, in a very short space of time, upwards of a quarter of a million of money for church purposes in the diocese. Though meeting at first with opposition from the more militant nonconformists, he gradually won the confidence of all classes, and found generous support from the wealthy laymen of the north, irrespective of creed. In November 1895 he was translated by Lord Salisbury to the see of Chichester, vacant by the death of Richard Durnford, and he was enthroned in the cathedral on 28 Jan. 1896. The population of his new diocese was mainly agricultural, but the watering places on the south coast contained several churches in which the ritual was of a very ‘advanced’ description. Wilberforce was by temperament and conviction a high churchman of the old school, uniting a dislike for ritual with pronounced sacramentarian views. A vehement agitation against the excesses of some of his clergy was on foot, while the Lambeth ‘opinions’ of archbishops Temple and Maclagan had comprehensively condemned the use of incense and portable lights and the reservation of the sacrament. Wilberforce strove hard to bring the whole body of his clergy into acceptance of these decisions, endorsed as they were by the entire English episcopate, and he was successful in all but a handful of churches. He steadily refused to institute prosecutions against recalcitrant incumbents, but he declined to exercise his veto in their favour; and he refused to avail himself of the right, which he retained owing to the peculiar form of the patent to his chancellor, of personally hearing ritual cases in his own consistorial court. At the same time he deeply resented any interference with his episcopal authority, and he was brought into sharp contact with the Church Association. His evidence before the royal commission appointed in 1905 to inquire into ecclesiastical disorders contained a vigorous defence of the clergy in his diocese. The success which crowned his policy was largely due to the exercise of what was practically a dispensing power.
These troubles were not allowed to interfere with the general administration of his diocese, and his exertions in setting on foot a regular system of Easter offerings as a means of increasing the stipends of the parochial clergy resulted in the annual collection of a sum which in the last year of his episcopate only just fell short of 10,000l. In 1896 he was elected chairman of the Church of England Temperance Society, and in 1904 he made one of a party of English clergy who visited South Africa on ‘a mission of help.’ Rhodesia and the northern Transvaal were allotted to him, and there his unaffected manners and downright speech proved highly attractive. He died after a short illness on 9 Sept. 1907 at Bembridge in the Isle of Wight, and he was buried at West Hampnett, near Chichester.
In many respects, and especially in speech and intonation, Ernest Wilberforce bore a marked resemblance to his father, from whom he inherited an eloquence which found a freer vent on the platform than in the pulpit. A somewhat chilling manner rendered him a formidable personality to those who had not the opportunity of penetrating beneath the reserve which covered a highly sympathetic and affectionate nature. Devoted to every form of exercise and sport, he spent part of his annual holidays on a salmon river in Norway. Endowed with extraordinary physical strength, he was a type of the muscular Christianity celebrated by Charles Kingsley and Tom Hughes. An oil painting by S. Goldsborough Anderson is in the possession of Mrs. Wilberforce; a replica hangs in the Palace at Chichester.
Wilberforce was twice married: (1) in 1863 to Frances Mary, third daughter of Sir Charles Anderson, Bart., who died in October 1870 at San Remo without issue; (2) on 14 Oct. 1874 to Emily, only daughter of George Connor, afterwards dean of Windsor [q. v.], who survived him, together with a family of three sons and three daughters.
[Ernest Roland Wilberforce, a Memoir by J. B. Atlay, 1912; Life of Samuel Wilberforce, by Canon Ashwell and Reginald Wilberforce; Chronicle of Convocation, Feb. 1908; Church Times, 13 Sept. 1907; Guardian, 11 Sept. 1907; the Temperance Chronicle, 13 Sept. 1907; Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Disorders, questions 18953–19154.]