Hawker of Morwenstow

Extract

The centenary of the Oxford Movement brings to mind Robert Stephen Hawker, the High Church clergyman and poet who lived right through the hey-day of the Movement entirely unaffected by it, and was received into the Catholic Church on his death-bed. He is the subject of one of the most entertaining of biographies, The Vicar of Morwenstow, by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, which was published in 1876, the year after Hawker’s death. Baring-Gould was a Devonshire High Church parson and squire. He wrote the hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ three or four good novels, and a number of books on West Country traditions and antiquities. He had a huge appreciation of unusual characters and was the ideal biographer for so altogether striking a character as Mr. Hawker.

Robert Stephen Hawker was born at Plymouth in 1804. In his boyhood and youth he had a reputation as a dangerous practical joker. Baring-Gould relates several of the tricks that he played which are classics of their kind. Along with this exuberance he had a religious and poetical mind. At the age of seventeen he issued his first poems in a little book called ‘Tendrils by Reuben.’ He proceeded to the University of Oxford and was destined for the Anglican ministry. When he was twenty the family finances were involved in some misfortune and his career was almost wrecked for lack of means. As soon as he heard what had happened, Robert, who was at home, rushed off and proposed to an old friend of his, a Miss I’Ans, who was forty years old and who had a considerable income. She accepted him. He was able to continue his studies and the marriage was happy and successful.