Robert Frampton was the youngest of eight children of an ‘industrious’ Dorset farmer of a property worth some £30 a year. An ardent royalist, his studies were interrupted by the civil wars; he joined the Dorset clubmen and subsequently participated in the battle of Hambledon Hill. Ordained in secret by Robert Skinner, bishop of Oxford, he earned a reputation for recklessly outspoken sermons during the Interregnum. He avoided further difficulty by leaving England. Through a Mr Harvey (possibly Eliab Harvey‡ or one of his close relations, many of whom were prominent Turkey merchants), Frampton obtained a chaplaincy at Aleppo at double the usual salary on account of ‘extraordinary merit’.
Frampton returned to England in the summer of 1666. In September he delivered a sermon to the king that declared the devastation caused by the Great Plague and the Fire of London to be divine retribution on a sinful nation and exhorted the monarch to set an example and ‘invite all those of your court and the nobility and gentry to righteous action and to countenance virtue and discount and punish vice’.
When it became apparent in late 1680 that the bishop of Gloucester, John Pritchett, was about to die, Henry Compton, bishop of London recommended Frampton to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury as Pritchett’s successor.
According to Frampton, Pritchett had left the diocese in considerable disorder. He intended to preach, exhort and rebuke because action was necessary in a ‘world of pitiful vicarages’ that militated against conformity.
His response to the desecration of Barrington parish church in the summer of 1682 by Thomas Wharton (later 5th Baron Wharton) and his brother shows Frampton’s wariness in dealing with a potentially powerful opponent. Having devised a suitable punishment (penance in the church and a contribution to the costs of repair), he sought advice from Sancroft and Compton as to whether this was ‘prudent, practicable and sufficient … though I am an old man I am but young in these affairs, and may misstep if I have not good directions’. He later justified his lenience by insisting that the Whartons were ‘true penitents’ and pointing out that they were not under his jurisdiction as they did not live in his diocese.
Frampton’s emphasis on securing an amicable alliance with the corporation and local gentry was challenged by the feud between the city and his dean, Edward Fowler, later bishop of Gloucester. Fowler, who was opposed to the persecution of dissent and hostile to Toryism, gave a sermon in the cathedral in August 1683 which upset the corporation so much that they voted not to go to church if he were to preach again. Frampton was at a loss as to how to mend the quarrel: he was sure both sides were loyal but both were too ‘warm’ to compromise. Matters deteriorated still further when Fowler had his sermon printed. In December Frampton asked Sancroft to give Fowler ‘some good counsel that he may sacrifice … [and] when he cometh next leave me less embroiled for I am brought into the sewage too on his account and suffer no small reproach because I will not absolutely pronounce against him’.
Despite Frampton’s constant claims of poverty, on the death of William Gulston, bishop of Bristol, in April 1684, he asked for translation to that see. Bristol was worth less than Gloucester but the diocese included Dorset, ‘mine own dear country whereof I am generally beloved by rich and poor’. Frampton may have been wearied by the continuing dispute over Fowler, for in June 1684 he anticipated further confrontations and again beseeched Sancroft to prevent this by giving ‘good counsel’ to Fowler. Indeed, in September, when Fowler again preached in the cathedral, the corporation locked the pews, provoking disorder when the townspeople tried to climb over the rails. Fowler was then charged with assault on a corporation officer (unjustly according to Frampton). For all his earlier claims of harmony between cathedral and corporation, Frampton now referred to the corporation’s ‘affronts and wicked libels with which without any cause I have been pestered for three or four years last past. I am almost weary of my life, but most certainly of my office; were there any way for me to lay it down with decency’. The following month he wrote again of his desire to escape such squabbles and retire into private life.
With the accession of James II, and the calling of a new Parliament, Frampton was in May 1685 at last able to take his seat in the House of Lords. He attended for almost half of the sittings, but was named to only two select committees. On 25 May he was ordered to preach before the House on the anniversary of the Restoration. His preaching soon brought him to the unwelcome attention of the king (who was said to be appreciative of his sermons, despite the hostility of other Catholics at court).
Frampton soon found himself directly experiencing the king’s catholicizing policies. By May 1687 the mayor of Gloucester was a Catholic and the chapter was instructed to elect his priest to a prebend. They refused. Frampton also used the pulpit to criticize Henry Compton’s suspension from office in 1687 and even took up his case with the king.
Frampton took his seat in the Convention on 22 Jan. 1689 but found it difficult to come to terms with the revolution. Before William and Mary were declared king and queen, he pointedly preached before the prince on the theme of ambition; William is said to have observed that ‘the bishop of Gloucester don’t expect a translation’. Frampton opposed all attempts to declare the prince and princess of Orange king and queen. He was present throughout the debates on the wording of the declaration and supported the majority episcopal view that the throne was not vacant. He entered a protest against the final critical vote on 6 Feb.; according to his biographer he signed his name ‘in much larger characters than he had usually entered any other protest’, though Frampton’s limited parliamentary career meant that this was in fact the only protest he ever signed. Frampton himself merely said that he entered his name in capital letters. He is also said to have refused to read prayers in the House for the new king and queen when summoned to do so by Francis Newport, Viscount Newport (later earl of Bradford). A difficult situation was averted only by the arrival of a more junior bishop, relieving Frampton of his obligation.
His refusal to take the new oaths meant that he faced deprivation. On Christmas Eve 1689, Frampton asked Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen (formerly earl of Danby, later duke of Leeds), to move the House to ‘tailor’ the legislation so that a tiny minority, or he alone, might ‘atone’ for clergy facing deprivation.
In his enforced retirement Frampton continued to attend church, to catechize, to give communion and to preach. He was on friendly terms with both Fowler and William Wake, the future bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of Canterbury. He intervened in elections to Convocation. He even declared that if James II were to invade with the assistance of foreigners he would be prepared to take up arms against him. When Frampton was suspected of collecting monies in connection with the Assassination Plot in 1696, Compton defended him, incurring a rebuke from the king. Not surprisingly the non-juror Henry Dodwell regarded him as a turncoat who abetted schism, while George Hickes merely remarked that ‘he never was in my esteem of our Communion’.
By 1703 Frampton was no longer a celebrity, ‘almost as much forgotten, as if he had been long in the grave’. Three years later he was living a solitary life with his books ‘with which amusement he pushes on the heavy minutes, and wonders why he cannot die’.