IRONSIDE, Gilbert (1588-1671)

The son of a Dorset clergyman, Ironside was presented to his first living in 1619 by Sir Robert Miller^‡. His only work of controversy, an anti-sabbatarian piece published in defence of the government’s position on the Book of Sports in 1637, was dedicated to William Laud^†, archbishop of Canterbury. Ironside, Seven Questions of the Sabbath (1637). John Walker, in The Sufferings of the Clergy, recorded that he had lost his Dorset estates valued at £500 per annum, was imprisoned at Dorchester until the Restoration and almost starved to death, though he appears to have continued to officiate in Dorset through most of the Interregnum. Walker Revised, 134; Oxford DNB. In May 1660, he delivered to the Dorset gentry an address on the miraculous return of their ‘David’. By this time he described himself as ‘an old man, much decayed in strength, lungs, parts [and] plundered of abilities as well as books by … our late confusions’. Ironside, A Sermon Preached at Dorchester … at the Proclaiming of His Sacred Majesty Charles the II (1660), preface, 2–4. Nonetheless, he was of independent means and, although he had never held a senior position in the Church, ‘yet being wealthy, he was looked upon as the fittest person to enter upon that mean bishopric’ of Bristol. Ath. Ox. iii. 940.

Ironside took his seat in the Lords at the readmission of the bishops on 20 Nov. 1661, five days before his 73rd birthday. He attended the first session for some 38 per cent of sittings and was present in the House for nearly 70 per cent of sittings in both 1663 and 1664. He was rarely named to committees. Although present for the committal of the 1662 uniformity bill and to hear the king’s recommendation of the revised Book of Common Prayer on 25 Feb. 1662, Ironside did not attend during the stormy period in April when the Lords disputed the ultimately abortive proposals for a royal proviso to the legislation. During this period he registered his proxy in favour of William Nicholson, bishop of Gloucester (vacated at the end of the session). In the summer of 1662 he conducted his first visitation, overseeing the repair of church property and restoring the Anglican liturgy. Articles to be Ministred, Enquired of, and Answered … in the First Episcopal Visitation of … Gilbert, Lord Bishop of Bristol (1662); VCH Glos. ii. 40.

During the 1663 session, Ironside was not named to the committee for the bill to amend the Act of Uniformity on 24 July 1663, although recorded as present for both sittings that day. He arrived for the start of the following session on 16 Mar. 1664 and was nominated to the committee for privileges on 21 March. He remained throughout the passage of the conventicle bill but did not return to the House after 17 May 1664. Thereafter he registered proxies: on 22 Nov. 1664 with John Earle, bishop of Salisbury; on 2 Oct. 1665 with Seth Ward, bishop of Exeter; on 27 Oct. 1666 with Edward Rainbowe, bishop of Carlisle; on 27 Sept. 1667 with William Nicholson; and on three occasions between 1668 and 1670 with John Dolben, bishop of Rochester.

Ironside failed to attend the House again, perhaps finding the maintenance of discipline in a diocese that not only included England’s third largest city but was also a heartland of Quakerism and Independency a sufficiently absorbing task. The corporation of Bristol itself had a jealous regard for its civic traditions and autonomy, and for much of his episcopate, Ironside was involved in a long-running dispute over its attempt to exercise jurisdiction within the cathedral precincts, a quarrel which continued for some years after his death. Pols. of Relig. ed. Harris et al. 165, 170; Bodl. Add. C 305, ff. 41–42. He appears to have done little to suppress nonconformity himself, unlike the hard-line Anglican mayor of Bristol, John Knight^‡, who instigated a particularly vicious bout of persecution under the 1664 Conventicle Act. HP Commons 1660–90, ii. 692; Pols. of Relig. 169; W.C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 100. Yet he perpetually complained that the failure to prosecute Dissenters was the fault of the local magistrates and their failure to co-operate. In October 1666, he asked for the assistance of Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, to punish the more intractable offenders. He received an irritated response: Sheldon was unable to support Ironside’s ‘endeavour … to make the justices a little more warm in their duty’ since the bishop had provided only general information; ‘instance me some particular cases … and then something may be done’. The relationship between the two men seems indeed to have been a frosty one. In June 1666 the archbishop had chastised Ironside for his poor performance in levying clerical subscriptions for the royal loan in 1666: the ‘pitifully mean’ amounts were unsurprising given that they ‘had not the encouragement of your Lordship’s example to lead them on’. Four months later, on 11 Oct., Sheldon wrote again, regretting that Ironside’s ‘indispositions’ would not allow him to attend the House and instructing him to send his proxy since they ‘may suddenly have very earnest occasions for it’. Bodl. Add. C 308, ff. 73, 65.

In July 1669, worrying about the consequences of the lapse of the first Conventicle Act, Ironside wrote to Nicholson asking ‘how the Church affairs are likely either to stand or fall’; he was still complaining that in Bristol the magistrates were ‘averse from doing their duty’ to quash nonconformity. Bodl. Add. C 302, f. 178. He nevertheless failed to attend the ensuing parliamentary session, being recorded as sick at a call of the House on 26 Oct. 1669. For the rest of his life, his proxy was held by John Dolben. In 1670, after the passage of the second Conventicle Act, Ironside came under pressure from Sheldon to implement the legislation and reportedly hired informers to identify Dissenters. Oxford DNB; Bodl. Add. C 302, f. 178.

By 1671, the 82-year-old Ironside was extremely frail. Shortly after new year it was rumoured that he was already dead; CSP Dom. pp. 14, 18. however, he lingered until 19 Sept. 1671. He was buried in his cathedral without any memorial. His son and namesake, Gilbert Ironside, was appointed bishop of Bristol in 1689.