Draft:William Cartwright, Nonjuring Bishop in Shrewsbury

William Cartwright (1730-99) was a Bishop of the Orthodox British Church, a small nonjuring church formed in the 1730s.

Cartwright was born in Newcastle-under Lyme, Staffordshire, and baptised there in August 1730. His parents were William Cartwright, a baker, and his wife Elizabeth Walthall, daughter of Rev Thomas Walthall, Vicar of Leek.[1]

He trained as an apothecary in Shrewsbury under Mr John Dod. [2]

In the early 1750s joined the Orthodox British Church in Manchester, being ordained as a Priest in 1759.

The Orthodox British Church was founded by the nonjuring Scots Episcopalian Bishop Archibald Campbell who consecrated Roger Lawrence and Thomas Deacon as Bishops in 1733.[3] The church was nonjuring, refusing to recognise the reigning Royal family, and was sympathetic to a Stuart restoration, with several of its congregation fighting in the Jacobite Manchester Regiment in the 1745 Rising. However, its primary focus was to create a church that returned to the primitive origins of Christian worship which would unite the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.

The church’s leading figure was Dr Thomas Deacon (1697-1753) of Manchester, whose eldest daughter, Sarah Sophia, Cartwright married in 1754.[4]

In 1758 Cartwright moved to London to manage the church’s small congregation and here incurred the wrath of the writer and collector Horace Walpole, who accused Cartwright of treasonous Jacobite activity.[1]

After a decade in London Cartwright moved back to Shrewsbury and worked as an Apothecary, which at this date involved preparing and administering medicines for the public.[5] He opened a church within his Mardol home and was assisted by Thomas Podmore, a former Jacobite Manchester Regiment soldier and peruke maker who had become Master of a school in the town.

Cartwright was consecrated as a Bishop in 1780 by Bishop Kenrick Price, but the church was sinking into obscurity with only small congregations in Shrewsbury and Manchester.

In the early 1780s the church came close to consecrating Rev Samuel Seabury as America’s first Episcopalian Bishop, but in November 1784 the Scots Episcopalians performed the act. A few years later Cartwright attempted to join with the Scots church but was eventually rebuked. Despite a lifetime of opposition to the Church of England it is alleged that Cartwright was reconciled with the church on his deathbed.[6]

Before his death Cartwright had consecrated Thomas Garnett as a Bishop to ensure the survival of the church. Garnett would go on to consecrate Charles Booth but the small Manchester congregation was broken up in the first decade of the nineteenth century.[1]

Cartwright and his wife are buried in St Giles churchyard in Shrewsbury. Despite a recent search it has not been possible to find the gravestone, which is covered by undergrowth at the south eastern edge of the churchyard.

Cartwright's papers were collected in the C19th by Rev H.H.Norris of Hackney and are lodged with the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. [7] These include Cartwright's correspondence with the Bishop of Carlisle, John Douglas who had contacted Cartwright at the desire of the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Moore. Norris collected Cartwright's letters, and even published extracts, to serve as a warning against schism at a time when the Oxford Movement or Tractarians were thought to be considering leaving the Church of England. Many of the early Oxford Movement tracts showed similarities to the work of the Orthodox British Church with a shared belief in primitive worship and independence from the State.

References 1. 'One that asketh for the old paths' Bishop Cartwright of Shrewsbury and the orthodox British Church by Steven Robb - Shropshire History and Archaeology, Transactions of the SAHS, Volume 96 (2021) 2. William Cartwright, Nonjuror, and his Chronological History of Shrewsbury, by William Phillips, Transactions of the SAHS (1914) 3. The later non-jurors by Henry Broxap (1924) 4. A biography of Thomas Deacon by Henry Broxap (1911) 5. William Cartwright - Bishop Apothecary by WB Howie, The Practitioner (1977 6. The Nonjurors, their lives, principles, and writings by Canon JH Overton (1902) 7. Bodleian Library Ref; MS Add D 30