The fifth earl of Guilford (1766–1827) and his secret conversion to the Orthodox church

Abstract

In September 1725 archbishop Wake of Canterbury wrote to patriarch Chrysanthos of Jerusalem, warning him that the non-jurors were in schism from the official and established church of England; and so the remarkable correspondence between the non-juring bishops and the patriarchs of the east was suspended without ever coming to any decisive conclusion. Wake’s letter marks in many ways the end of an era. During the previous hundred years, from the reign of king James I onwards, there had been a series of surprisingly positive contacts between England and the Orthodox world. Archbishop Abbot, for example, exchanged letters with Cyril Lukaris (1572–1638), patriarch first of Alexandria and then of Constantinople; and as a result of this Cyril not only sent the Codex Alexandrinus as a gift to king Charles I in 1628, but also despatched his most promising disciple, Mitrophanis Kritopoulos (1589–1639), future patriarch of Alexandria, to study for five years at Balliol College, Oxford (1617–22). Later in the century Orthodoxy was made known in England through a series of books, such as Thomas Smith’s An Account of the Greek Church, published in Latin in 1676 and in English four years later, and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, published in 1679. To these should be added John Covel’s magnum opus entitled Some Account of the Present Greek Church, which did not appear until 1722, but which reflects experience gained in the Levant some fifty years before. During 1699-1705 there was even a short-lived Greek College at Gloucester Hall, Oxford. Last but not least, in 1716–25 came the negotiations between the non-jurors and the Orthodox, to which reference has been already made.