‘Our Patriarch’: Bishop Bonaventure Giffard, 1642–1734. An Introductory Sketch

Abstract

The accolade above, applied to Bishop Giffard in the 1720s, was bestowed by Edward Dicconson, then chaplain at Chillington Hall in Brewood, Staffs., the Giffards’ principal seat and hints at the combination of affection and veneration with which he was regarded by clergy and laity alike. The bishop, described by Archbishop Matthew as ‘a very old gentleman of delightful manners and deep piety’, was then about eighty years of age, having been born at Wolverhampton, probably in the opening year of the English Civil War, into a junior branch of that ancient family, referred to by Michael Greenslade as ‘perhaps the most considerable in the history of Staffordshire recusancy’. Frequently known as Joseph but increasingly as Bonaventure, the future bishop was the third of four sons of Andrew Giffard (youngest brother of Peter Giffard of Chillington) and his wife Katherine, daughter of Sir Walter Leveson, kt. of Wolverhampton, a place where the two families, also linked by earlier marriage, possessed substantial influence but which by the 1640s, as Dr Rowlands has shown, was hardly living down to its reputation as a hotbed of popery and a haven for ‘Rome’s snaky brood’, though in the following decade it was still ‘by many styled “Little Rome’”, echoing the title earlier applied to the Viscountess Montagu’s recusant establishment in Sussex.