WARNER, John (1581-1666)

The son of a wealthy merchant and veteran of the Caroline episcopate, John Warner had been consecrated bishop of Rochester in 1638. By the time of the Restoration he had already held a string of prestigious clerical appointments and acquired a reputation as an uncompromising supporter of the royal prerogative. He had narrowly escaped impeachment in 1641 and in the course of the passage of legislation to expel the bishops from the House in February 1642 spoke in defence of the bishops’ right to vote in Parliament.

On 4 May 1660, Warner met Matthew Wren, bishop of Ely, and Brian Duppa, bishop of Salisbury (soon to be translated to Winchester), to discuss the future establishment of the Church of England. Together they wrote fulsome letters to James Butler, duke of Ormond, and to Charles II. They thanked Ormond for the ‘great zeal’ he had shown to ‘our poor Church’ at a time of ‘grievous persecution’ and to the king they expressed their ‘most unfeigned joy for your long wished for return to your most just inheritance in your three kingdoms’ and for his ‘especial mercy to your lately despised clergy’ and for retaining ‘the care and ordering of the Church, not referring it … to your houses of Parliament’. They then emphasized the point that the bishops, of all his subjects, were the most ‘ready to perform all loyal service’ to the crown. Bodl. Carte 30, ff. 611, 615.

On 2 July 1660, Warner petitioned the Lords regarding the resumption of his clerical income; the House ordered that he should have the benefit of a general order of the House for securing the profits of ministers’ livings. The planning lists drawn up by the court in exile suggested that he had been destined for the see of Norwich. Eg. 2542, ff. 265, 270. That post went instead to Edward Reynolds, and Warner who had clearly expected to reap the rewards of loyalty felt snubbed and overlooked. On 12 Sept. 1660 – three days after the news of Reynolds’ elevation was made public – he wrote an irritable letter to Gilbert Sheldon, of London (later archbishop of Canterbury), narrating his recent experiences and complaining that, although he was ‘utterly forgotten in all’, he had not forgotten ‘to discharge the part of a true and loyal subject to my sovereign’ and that ‘there is not a clergyman living who hath done or suffered … more for the king, the Church, and the poor clergy than I have’. The survival of several similar accounts of his sufferings and merits, all compiled at or about the same time, testifies to his anger and disappointment at his failure to secure a translation to a more prestigious see. Bodl. ms Smith 22, f. 21.

The elderly bishop assisted Duppa in the consecration of five new bishops on 28 Oct. 1660. Pepys Diary, i. 98. On 25 Mar. 1661 he was one of 12 senior churchmen appointed to the Savoy conference to discuss revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. Bodl. Tanner 282, f. 35. When Convocation assembled in the summer, it replaced the angry deliberations at the Savoy, but Warner did not play an active role in its work. On 20 Nov. 1661, at the readmission of the bishops, Warner resumed his seat in the Lords. When he was recorded sick at a call of the House four days later, it was clear that age and frailty would interfere with his parliamentary duties; he attended for one-fifth of the sittings in the spring 1662 session and 38 per cent of sittings in the following session. In February 1662 he began the first visitation of Rochester after a lapse of 25 years, telling his clergy that for the past 20 years ‘the bishops’ power hath been utterly taken away, and in the last two years much suspended; no marvel then that the bishop hath work enough to set all in order that is left undone or done amiss’. J. Lee Warner, ‘A hitherto Unpublished Passage in the Life of John Warner’, Arch. Jnl. xxi. 47. The cathedral, defaced during the civil wars, was in a bad condition, and, over a year later, it was noted that it was still ‘ruinous’, despite having already consumed £7,000 in repairs. CSP Dom. 1663–4, p. 370.

On 14 Feb. 1663 Warner was entrusted with the proxy of Henry King, bishop of Chichester (vacated 5 Mar. 1663).Towards the end of the 1663 parliamentary session, on 3 July, he was named to the committee on the bill to prevent duels. Such a nomination was a rare occurrence: perhaps in acknowledgement of his age and state of health, he was rarely named to select committees even when recorded as present in the House. Warner did not return to the Lords after it reassembled in spring 1664. He registered his proxy to Henry King in March 1664, who used it throughout the passage of the first Conventicle Act, a piece of legislation which Warner, given his loathing for puritanism and opposition to a broader Church of England, would undoubtedly have sanctioned.

Warner died at the age of 86 on 14 Oct. 1666, his epitaph composed by the president of Magdalen College and inscribed on an elaborate marble tomb in Rochester cathedral. He had been a ‘great benefactor’ to his cathedral in his lifetime but still died a wealthy man. His estate ‘came not by, nor was made out of the Church, but chiefly by his narrow manner of life’, and he was able to bequeath over £18,000 to various ecclesiastical, charitable, and academic causes. Lansd. 986, f. 53; Bodl. Tanner 141, f. 102. Perhaps this contradiction between lifestyle and financial legacy explains why Anthony Wood considered him ‘covetous’, whereas to Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, he was one of the most philanthropic of the Caroline bishops. Ath. Ox. iii. 734; Burnet, i. 321n.

Although it is possible that Warner was married, his will made no mention of a spouse and Anthony Wood claimed that he had ‘always led a single life’. Ath. Ox. iii. 733. In the absence of any children, he bequeathed his estate at Swayton to his nephew John Lee, on condition that he adopted the surname of Warner. PROB 11/323, ff. 104–5. He also directed the building of a hospital for the widows of poor clergy. Ibid. The first of its kind in England, the hospital provided an example which was later copied by George Morley, bishop of Winchester, and Seth Ward, bishop of Salisbury. Add. 4224, f. 76. His executors sought private legislation to build it at Bromley. The bill was introduced on 23 Nov. 1669 and given the royal assent on 11 April 1670. LJ, xii. 304, 309, 350. It is perhaps a testimony both to his elite status and to the many connections between the clergy and pious royalists that Warner’s executors were named as lord chief justice of common pleas, Orlando Bridgeman^‡, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, Sir Philip Warwick^‡ (secretary to Southampton and formerly secretary to Archbishop William Juxon), Thomas Pierce (the president of Magdalen), and the archdeacon of Rochester, Warner’s nephew John Lee.