Despite his early education under the influence of the puritan divine William Twysse, Beaw ‘out of zeal to my religion and my king … took up arms in the cause of both’ and was subsequently captured and imprisoned by the parliamentary forces. After his release and ejection from Oxford he embarked on a series of military and diplomatic adventures. In his own account of his life he claimed that at the Restoration there was no preferment in the Church that was not his for the asking – except that he was not in orders. It was presumably the ‘long and earnest solicitations’ of Robert Skinner, bishop of Oxford, that persuaded him to accept ordination; it was certainly Skinner who ordained him deacon and priest on 8 Aug. 1660.
Although Beaw claimed to have been satisfied with the lucrative living of Adderbury, he was, or so he said,
forced … by some who thought it an indignity (other wise than I thought myself) that my past services should continue unrewarded. Whereupon I was sent so to pitch upon any preferment in the Church (I know not whether a bishopric was intended in the message … it was not excepted) and it should be secured with me.
LPL, ms 930, f. 49; CCED.
Anthony Wood gave the credit for Beaw’s elevation to John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, whose residence at Adderbury House indicates a physical proximity to Beaw. A more recent account emphasizes the importance of the Hyde connection and suggests that it was Laurence Hyde, created earl of Rochester in 1682, who acted in Beaw’s interest.
On 6 Nov. 1680 Beaw took his seat in the House, two weeks into the second Exclusion Parliament. His parliamentary career of more than 25 years was constrained by both age and the rigours of travel to Westminster. Of 20 sessions, he attended 11 (and of those only three for more than half of all sittings) and was named to fewer than 30 select committees. He attended his first session for 64 per cent of sittings and was a consistent supporter of the king and his fellow bishops. In November 1680 he rejected exclusion and voted against the appointment of a joint committee to consider the state of the kingdom. The following year, he made three appearances at the week-long Oxford Parliament in March 1681 before the dissolution. In the summer of 1683 Beaw suffered a compound fracture of the ankle which permanently impaired his mobility and put him in such ‘great torment’ that he ordered prayers to be said throughout his own diocese and instructed a diocesan official to beg William Sancroft, of Canterbury,for additional intercessions.
When Henry Compton, of London, issued a summons for the coronation of James II in April 1685, Beaw refused to attend (citing his difficulty in walking) but indicated that he intended to be present for the new king’s Parliament at the start of the session.
As the reign progressed Beaw opposed the repeal of the Test Acts and resisted the catholicizing drift of James’s religious policies. In the spring of 1688 he sympathized with the Seven Bishops in their challenge to the second Declaration of Indulgence. When a copy of their petition reached Beaw via Robert Frampton, of Gloucester, Beaw described himself as being ‘absent in body only’. He forbade the reading of the Declaration in his own diocese and expressed a hope that the bishops should all ‘be of one mind, and dare to do well in evil times’.
Following the Revolution, Beaw attended the Convention for 47 per cent of sittings. Although he did not join Sancroft as a non-juror, he was clearly uncomfortable with the new political situation, supporting a regency and voting against declaring William and Mary to be king and queen. On 4 Feb. 1689 he voted with the opposition in the abdication debates and, two days later, joined with 11 of his fellow bishops in the formal dissent. He was nevertheless present at the coronation on 11 April.
Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen classed him as an opponent of the court in a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690, adding that he was to be approached by the bishop of London to be absent. In the spring of 1690, however, Beaw attended the House more regularly than at any other time in his career – for nearly 83 per cent of sittings. On 8 Apr., as a reliable ally of Rochester, he objected to the wording of the bill that confirmed the acts of the Convention as ‘destructive of the legal constitution of this monarchy’.
Beaw had long had hopes of a translation to Hereford but, unfortunately for him, Herbert Croft although
old and feeble and sick, and dropping every hour off … thought not good to go out of the world in King Charles’ reign, nor in King James’ reign neither, but deferred his departure till this government when a brother of mine, who was upon the watch, and too quick for me, made the first catch at the bishopric, and caught it.
In 1692 the death of Thomas Wood, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, encouraged Beaw to try again for translation. Realizing that Lichfield was beyond his grasp he made it clear that he was prepared to settle for St Asaph and sought Compton’s help to secure it, but ‘it had been buzzed into the queen’s ears … that a Welsh bishop ought to be a Welshman’, an argument with which John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury, agreed. Beaw was incensed, claiming that Tillotson had insulted former kings and primates who had imposed English bishops on the Welsh Church. English, he insisted, was the primary language in Welsh market towns, where a sermon in Welsh would not be understood. He claimed that he had tried to overcome his anger towards Tillotson, not least since the archbishop often sat close to Beaw on the bishops’ bench ‘as if to invite’ Beaw into conversation. Tillotson subsequently promised that a ‘worthy’ commendam would be added to the bishopric to ease Beaw’s acute financial difficulties but the archbishop’s unexpected death left Beaw’s hopes ‘extinct’.
For the following seven sessions of Parliament, alienated politically from the government and disgruntled with his circumstances, Beaw failed to attend. Nor, according to surviving records, did he ever send a proxy. On 23 Nov. 1696, when the House was enforcing attendance in preparation for the forthcoming proceedings against Sir John Fenwick‡, he was excused after informing the House that he was almost 80 years old and that his age ought to bring ‘a full discharge from all other labour and sorrow than what itself brings’.
Beaw again asserted his privilege of Parliament on 27 Feb. 1697 when he petitioned against two men who had ‘forcibly entered’ his estate in an attempt to recover unpaid debts from his tenants. In August 1699 anticipation of an imminent vacancy in the episcopate through the deprivation of Thomas Watson, bishop of St Davids, prompted him to compile a long letter to Thomas Tenison, of Canterbury, rehearsing details of his career and his thwarted expectations of preferment, and complaining of the ‘indignity’ of a ‘little bishopric’ where living according to his dignity rather than his income left him in need of charity.
With the accession of Anne in 1702, the 86-year-old Beaw made one last ‘pitch’ at translation. On the day of her coronation he drafted a memorandum to the queen and attended the ceremony, walking ‘all the way both forward and backward’.
From 1697 Beaw had exchanged his pinched life in Monmouthshire for the relative comfort of his Oxfordshire vicarage. The medieval bishop’s palace at Mathern slipped into disuse; Beaw was the last bishop to live there. In 1704 the ageing bishop petitioned the queen for assistance for his ‘destitute’ family; the following spring he approached Sidney Godolphin, Baron Godolphin, with a new plea for additional income by appropriating to the bishopric the income of a vacant archdeaconry. All he got, in 1705, was a pension of 20 shillings as ‘royal bounty’.
Beaw died on 10 Feb. 1706 and was buried not in his cathedral but at Adderbury. He bequeathed only five shillings to each of his children and made his wife sole executrix and the residuary beneficiary. Anne granted his widow a yearly pension of £40, but her various costs and debts after the death of the bishop exceeded £500 and she claimed to be owed in excess of £800 by Henry Somerset, 2nd duke of Beaufort, for a lease granted by her husband. With three unmarried daughters still without provision and Beaufort attempting to avoid payment of his debt, she was reduced to a ‘deplorable condition’.