Ridding and the Broad Church

Ridding's contemporaries were in no doubt about where he stood on the spectrum of Anglican opinion.Footnote ¹⁶ Both Gladstone and Randall Davidson called him a ‘Broad Churchman’.Footnote ¹⁷ At Oxford he was, in Lady Laura's words, ‘thoroughly infected’ with the Liberalism of his older mentors, Archibald Campbell Tait, later archbishop of Canterbury, Arthur Stanley, later dean of Westminster, and Benjamin Jowett, the great mid-Victorian Master of Balliol.Footnote ¹⁸ He professed admiration for the great Liberal or Broad Church luminaries of the Victorian Church – for Richard Whateley and Connop Thirlwall,Footnote ¹⁹ and for F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley.Footnote ²⁰ His Liberalism scandalised his friends and family, many of whom were of the Tractarian circle of Keble and Pusey.Footnote ²¹ He openly professed Liberal political opinions, too, and supported Liberal candidates publicly when he was at Winchester.Footnote ²² It was his Liberalism that gained him Gladstone's nomination for Southwell. According to Archbishop Benson, the diocese needed a ‘Churchman who recognizes progress and science’.Footnote ²³ Those two words ‘progress and science’ would have sat uneasily on the shoulders of an Evangelical or High Churchman.

The term ‘Broad Church’ was a recent one in Ridding's day, and had originated in the miasma of church ‘party’ controversy following the rise of the Oxford Movement. It was never a precise description. Broad Churchmen did not form a compact body of opinion comparable to Evangelicals and Tractarians, and lacked collective organisation. ‘Broad Church’ was almost a definition by subtraction, distinguishing a loose agglomeration of opinion from specific features of other church parties. Broad Churchmen were contrasted with Evangelicals and High Churchmen above all through their willingness to countenance different schools of opinion in the Church. William Conybeare, who made the term famous through an article on ‘church parties’ in the Edinburgh Review in 1853, said that its distinctive character was ‘the desire of comprehension’.Footnote ²⁴ But this covered a wide range of doctrinal opinion. Many Broad Churchmen, like Ridding himself, were deeply conservative on Christian doctrine, and on Church and State. Yet they could also affirm a faith in the progressive unfolding of human knowledge. Edwin Palmer, who added a chapter on ‘Dr Ridding's mind and thought’ to the biography, said that Ridding tried to combine two apparently antithetical thoughts, namely the ‘progressive character of truth (e.g. scientific truth) and the finality of revealed truth’, and he concluded that ‘To rest in an unsolved antithesis was characteristic of him’.Footnote ²⁵ In effect, Ridding's mind was composed of two different sets of principles, which he never succeeded in relating to each other comfortably. Ridding could deplore the High Church assault on the notorious Broad Church Essays and Reviews, and defend its contributors' freedom to say what they thought, but he could never display the theological acumen required to correct or affirm what they had actually written.Footnote ²⁶ If we lay his political Liberalism to one side, and accept his broadly conservative doctrinal position, in what, then, did his Broad Churchmanship lie?

Three main elements were decisive. First, for all his conservatism, there was a breadth in Ridding's general culture that contrasted with the ethos of much Victorian Evangelicalism and High Churchmanship. The opening sentence of his biography is taken from the Chandogya Upanishad, dividing the life of man into three phases.Footnote ²⁷ It is difficult to imagine an Evangelical or Tractarian biography beginning with a Hindu religious text. Ridding was by training a classicist. Educated at Balliol, he went up in 1846 when Jowett was already a Fellow. There is no evidence that he was ever drawn to the Tractarianism of some of the Fellows, but quickly developed close friendships instead with Liberal Anglican contemporaries such as Stanley, Tait and Frederick Temple.Footnote ²⁸ His reverence for classical learning, as the foundation of the public school and university system, was common enough, but did not lead to a profound study of the church Fathers. In his unpublished papers in the Bodleian are some brief letters from Charles Gore. They are on fasting communion, prompted by some unguarded claims Ridding made in 1893 that the Ritualists' call for mandatory fasting communion amounted to an idolising of rule, a change from ‘Romanising’ to ‘Judaising’, in his words.Footnote ²⁹ In the ensuing correspondence, Gore trounced Ridding in knowledge of the relevant patristic texts.Footnote ³⁰

Aside from classics, Ridding was especially interested in science and history. He studied mathematics at Oxford, and lectured on science, including optics, botany and physiology at Winchester.Footnote ³¹ His sermons and charges are shot through with a faith in the advance of knowledge and in moral progress: ‘[I]n my belief … moral progress is real and general amongst us’, he argued.Footnote ³² And again, ‘Christianity is not a foe to science. It is a spirit of progress, and all knowledge of truth is congenial to the Church.’Footnote ³³

Faith in moral and intellectual progress was characteristic of Victorian Liberalism. But in Ridding, as in many other Liberal Anglicans, it coexisted with the development of a quasi-scientific conception of the study of history, including an interest in philology and archaeology.Footnote ³⁴ These were disciplines in which Broad Churchmen had had a decisive influence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Along with Julius Hare, people like Thomas Arnold, Connop Thirlwall, Richard Trench and Frederick Farrar had pioneered the historical study of languages and cultures in England.Footnote ³⁵ To them history, and the history of language and literature in particular, was like a sacred text, displaying the creative and redemptive purposes of God even in movements and events that seemed remote from Christian interpretation. Fact, knowledge, science, truth interpreted God to the world. One of Ridding's favourite words was ‘reality’, which had a special metaphysical loading for him, signifying not so much the surface or appearance of things, but their inner spiritual truth. That is why he could argue, in terms that would otherwise be confusing, that ‘all ideal schemes require Christian perfection to make them real. The more Christian, i.e. the more real men we become, the more chance there is for great schemes’.Footnote ³⁶

This conception of history as self-evolving yet divinely ‘steered’ or inhabited was a product above all of the Romantic movement, with the indirect influence of German Idealism. Its general features were identified over fifty years ago by Duncan Forbes, in a close study of the work of Arnold, Thirlwall and others.Footnote ³⁷ According to Forbes, their view of history presupposed the imperfectibility of human societies, which, with an organic life or ‘personality’ of their own, proceeded through a cyclical pattern of rise, prosperity and decay, though in such a way as to include the possibility of general moral progress. Ridding was no professional historian, and it would be impossible to pursue Forbes's description closely through his work. But his general intellectual frame of mind undoubtedly was influenced by the Liberal Anglican view of history.

This outline of Ridding's mindset is significant for his conception of the Church of England, a second feature of his Broad Churchmanship. Like all the Broad Church, Ridding did not see Anglicanism as a competing tradition within a range of Christian denominations. Rather, its distinctive role lay in its comprehensiveness, its ability to hold together different doctrinal positions in the interest of a comprehensive understanding of faith. It is strictly anachronistic to use the word ‘Anglicanism’ here, for in the mid-nineteenth century ‘Anglicanism’ was a High Church term, signifying a distinct ecclesial position marked off from Roman Catholicism and from Protestantism.Footnote ³⁸ Broad Churchmen, by contrast, saw themselves as traditional Church of England men, and were unashamed of the designation ‘Protestant’. As the Church of the English nation, the Church of England's role was to absorb and represent different shades of opinion. But there was a division within the theoreticians of the Broad Church.Footnote ³⁹ For one group, ‘comprehensiveness’ entailed the positive expansion of the national Church to encompass Dissent. Widely differing, and even contradictory, church polities would be included under one overall ecclesial umbrella. This was characteristic of Arnold in particular, and also of his pupil Stanley.Footnote ⁴⁰ Stanley's biographer declared that he desired ‘to stretch the borders of the Church to its widest possible limits, and so to widen its basis that it might more worthily sustain its national character’.Footnote ⁴¹ The Arnoldian view was also held by Jowett.Footnote ⁴² The other group defended the Church of England as already comprehensive enough. This was the position of Julius Hare and F. D. Maurice. Here the influence of Coleridge was paramount, involving a speculative or metaphysical philosophy that owed much to the English Platonic tradition, and was sharply contrasted to the inductive logic of the Arnoldian or ‘Noetic’ school of Oxford liberalism.Footnote ⁴³ For both Hare and Maurice there was a sense – altogether absent in Arnold and Stanley – that the historical institutions and forms of the Christian Church are inherently authoritative carriers of divine truth, sacramentally focusing the action of God in history. Whilst not confining divine grace and the work of the Spirit to particular ecclesiastical forms, and not insisting absolutely on the Tractarian link between apostolic succession and sacramental validity, they implied that the institutions of the Church – including the order of the ministry – were vehicles of theological truth.Footnote ⁴⁴ On that basis, neither Maurice nor Hare were convinced that anything was to be gained by the doctrinal relativism that Arnold seemed to be promoting. Rather than loosen subscription, they promoted renewed attention to the Articles and the liturgy as means of mission and education. Appealing for church unity in one of his earliest pamphlets, Maurice directly criticised Arnold's scheme, since the Church ‘as it now stands, is more really comprehensive than that alteration would make it’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Ridding could not be placed firmly in either group. What evidence there is of his views, however, suggests that he moved from the Arnoldian to the Maurician view. Defending religious liberty in 1864, he advocated a revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles through the summoning of a representative body: ‘the belief of a living Church must advance, be modified, be developed or reformed, with changes of knowledge, of thought, of interpretation’.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was when he was still a tutor at Oxford. But by the time he was a bishop, he had abandoned that position. The Articles were already comprehensive: ‘They are Churchmen's standard of authority against individual teachers' narrowness on either side. They are an embodiment of the principle of comprehensiveness as a true Church idea, more true to knowledge and spirit than Rome or Geneva.’Footnote ⁴⁷ By then he was explicitly rejecting the possibility of modifying the Anglican formularies in the interest of reunion with other Churches.Footnote ⁴⁸ Doctrine was not a matter of indifference, though it could change in expression to adapt to new circumstances.Footnote ⁴⁹ The shift in Ridding's views over some thirty years or so is significant. By the time he was a bishop, exercising pastoral responsibility for a hard-pressed new diocese, he was much more inclined to defend the inherited position of the Church of England than to be seen as an advocate of its modification.

The same is true of his view of Church–State relations, a third feature of his Broad Churchmanship. This was intrinsically linked to his conception of the Church of England as a comprehensive national Church. The Church of England sought to represent the religious aspirations of all the English people. As one historian has recently put it, the Liberal Anglican tradition saw Church and State ‘as two pillars of an organic national community’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Broad Churchmen – spiritual antecedents of the twentieth-century theorists Grimley analyses – were deeply conservative on the question. The role of the state in protecting religious liberty, but also in promoting true belief, was unquestioned. Ridding did not deviate one iota from this line. His writings on Church and State, published posthumously, read like a litany of Broad Church orthodoxy on the matter. The Church was the conscience of the nation; without it, the ‘moral constitution’ of the nation would be ‘at best rudimentary’.Footnote ⁵¹ The true freedom of the Church lay in its possession of national character.Footnote ⁵² The national Church derived its strength from its historic entwining with every stage of the nation's growth.Footnote ⁵³ Dissenters, he said, in a passage that cannot have endeared him to them, were ‘politically members of the National Church, who have made themselves proprietary chapels, which (to put the straitest ecclesiastical aspect of them) they get served by laymen, with a lay elasticity of services’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such comments do not need to be probed very far to reveal the covert assumption that the true basis of the national Church was Protestant, and that Dissent was not so much a betrayal of this Protestantism per se, as schismatic and, by implication, subversive – this despite Ridding's professed warmth towards Dissenters. But Ridding was of his age in this, influenced by the characteristic nineteenth-century elevation of the concept of national character. His work readily demonstrates implicit assumptions about Englishness as marked by tolerance, manliness, openness, liberty, pragmatism, restraint and so on. These were directly connected to his understanding of the Church and the nation as intrinsically and historically Protestant, and were part of a wider discourse in British culture about the relationship of Protestantism and national identity much studied by historians recently, following in part the controversy over Linda Colley's Britons: forging a nation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Ridding avoided the crude, aggressive language of popular anti-Catholicism, which was on the wane by then anyway, but his particular collection of prejudices was a telling example of the way in which a Liberal Anglican elite helped to perpetuate a religious dimension of national (and particularly English) identity well into the twentieth century. In his view of the rise of Ritualism, for example, Ridding shared the common perception that it was quintessentially unEnglish. His censorious verdict on the use of incense illustrates the point perfectly, but also exemplifies his tortuous prose style:

Ridding's commitment to the ideal of the national Church explains much of his episcopal policy. On the positive side, undoubtedly it encouraged a broader, less clerical view of the Church than one could encounter in many of his contemporaries. He could say, in one of his earliest speeches to the Southwell diocesan conference, that ‘Church work is Church work, not clergy work. National Church means National Church, not clergy.’Footnote ⁵⁷ But on the negative side, it assumed that one particular version of Anglican identity and history, inseparably linked to the state, was the only possible one, and in doing so it implied that all those who disagreed with it, and indeed all those who had separated from the national Church, were at best deluded, and at worst schismatic. Breadth of ecumenical spirit, on the one hand, was counterbalanced by insistence on the exclusive national character of Anglicanism, on the other.

The new diocese of Southwell

What Arthur Burns called the ‘diocesan revival’ created the characteristic organisation of the modern Anglican diocese.Footnote ⁵⁸ By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the office of the rural dean had been revived, the process of diocesan visitation reinvigorated and the role of archdeacons reformed. Diocesan bishops had pioneered new forms of theological education, and forced through a much more professional model of clerical training.Footnote ⁵⁹ Though this process still had some way to run by 1870, representative institutions – the synodical system – had been revived, and were being extended to include laity at ruri-decanal and diocesan level.Footnote ⁶⁰ Most of these things we can find in Southwell under Ridding. He simply stepped into a reformed model of diocesan organisation that, by the mid-1880s, was practically universal in the Church of England.

The creation of a new diocese to cover Nottinghamshire had been mooted as far back as 1834, with Southwell Minster already the obvious candidate for cathedral.Footnote ⁶¹ Reorganisation of the diocese of Lincoln under the Established Church Act of 1836, however, and arguments over patronage and endowment in the case of the proposed new diocese, ruled it out for the time being.Footnote ⁶² Population growth kept the suggestion alive, and it was mooted again by an informal advisory committee on diocesan boundaries to Lord John Russell in 1847.Footnote ⁶³ Christopher Wordsworth, bishop of Lincoln from 1869, assumed from the beginning of his episcopate that his new diocese was too large for efficient administration, and circulated a letter to his leading clergy inviting their views on its division.Footnote ⁶⁴ With his support, a measure to revive suffragan bishoprics was passed in 1869, leading to the appointment of a suffragan for Nottingham the following year.Footnote ⁶⁵ The permanent division of the diocese was merely postponed by this means. Money was a stumbling block. Earlier arguments over the creation of new dioceses had led to the enunciation of the principle that, in these cases, calls would not be made on the Ecclesiastical Commissioners' common fund.Footnote ⁶⁶ Money had to be raised locally, or at least by voluntary appeal. Once Richard Cross, Home Secretary, had finally endorsed a recommendation to create a new diocese of Southwell in 1876, difficulties in raising sufficient funds in turn delayed the founding of the new diocese, and the appointment of a new bishop, for another five and a half years.Footnote ⁶⁷

The new diocese finally came into being in 1884, with the severance of Derbyshire from Lichfield, and Nottinghamshire from Lincoln. As a fusion of two counties, it was thus a modification of the ‘county’ diocese generally favoured by advocates of diocesan reform in the nineteenth century, but one which proved controversial.Footnote ⁶⁸ It was large, poor and divided – some 850,000 people scattered across two counties that, by all accounts, resented being yoked together.Footnote ⁶⁹ In numbers of benefices it was larger than the rump of each of the two dioceses from which it had been carved. Lincoln was half the size in terms of population, and smaller by 100 benefices, Lichfield smaller by twenty-three benefices.Footnote ⁷⁰ Southwell's social and industrial composition was remarkably mixed, ranging from the moorland parishes of the Peaks to the Nottinghamshire coalfields, and the hosiery and lace-making industries of Nottingham itself.Footnote ⁷¹ Recent history had seen determined efforts by the Church of England to make good a relative loss of support in the early decades of the nineteenth century. But these had been of limited success. Nottinghamshire was a ‘classic case of an area in which the Church of England's ability to supply the spiritual needs of its people had been undermined by population growth and industrialization’.Footnote ⁷² Though the average of all church attendances in the county in 1851, at 44 per cent of population, was broadly in line with that of the country as a whole, in Nottinghamshire a national lead of Anglicans over Nonconformists of 3 per cent was turned into a deficit of 5 per cent.Footnote ⁷³ The situation was worse in Derbyshire. Here, though church attendance to population at mid-century was marginally higher than in Nottinghamshire, Nonconformist attendances easily outran Anglican attendances for the whole county, by a factor of eight to five.Footnote ⁷⁴ There is no evidence that Anglican efforts to overcome this deficit succeeded in the second half of the century, despite some success in increasing church attendance (but not the proportion of attendances overall) in larger towns such as Derby and Chesterfield, where further local church attendance censuses were carried out in 1874 and 1881 respectively.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Nottingham, for example, a local census of church attendance in 1881 also showed no significant improvement in the Anglican position relative to Nonconformity, and a probable overall decline in the proportion of those attending any church.Footnote ⁷⁶

The challenges Ridding faced on taking up his appointment, especially given his commitment to the principle of a national Church, were thus immense. They were not improved by the relative poverty of resource he could muster. Earlier reforms by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners had alienated some patronage and endowment from the chapter of Southwell Minster to the new cathedrals of Ripon and Manchester, and suppressed the chapter itself in 1840, turning the minster into an ordinary parish church.Footnote ⁷⁷ Further endowment from the suppression had been used to assist the building of new churches in Nottingham, as well as to repair the minster's fabric, but this had left Southwell bereft of endowment when the minster became a cathedral.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover patronage of livings across the two counties had also been alienated from the minster at the time of the chapter's suppression, and transferred to the bishops of Lichfield and Lincoln.

Ridding and diocesan reform

If all this was inauspicious, it certainly suggested that the new diocese needed a man of energy, proven administrative skill and independent means. Ridding creatively adapted the well-established model of diocesan reform, motivated by his faith in the national Church ideal. The clue is there in the title of his first visitation charge, ‘The Church's efficiency for national service’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Typically, he rambled through a number of pressing contemporary issues with little apparent order. But a number of themes emerged. His concern to protect the comprehensiveness of the Church suggested a moderate policy towards the Ritualists.Footnote ⁸⁰ The Church of England, as the national Church, should be an ‘Institution for the people’, against the sectarianism of Nonconformity.Footnote ⁸¹ The parish system was the bedrock of comprehensive church provision; through it, philanthropic, educational and religious organisations would transform diocesan society. ‘Church work’, Ridding said, ‘is the spread of temperance, and purity, and honesty, and kindness. I should like to know the agencies in each parish, to promote mental, moral and social advance.’Footnote ⁸² The parish was the point of delivery of a whole programme of social and moral amelioration. It was the living expression of the comprehensive national vocation of the Church of England.

To this end Ridding threw his immense energy into his new responsibilities, concentrating at first on organisation and resources. For years he sought earnestly to address the acute shortage of patronage that he had inherited from the dioceses of Lincoln and Lichfield. The biography is frank enough about Ridding's frustration on the matter.Footnote ⁸³ But his unpublished correspondence reveals a deeper layer of anger still. To a friend, he wrote in despair and defiance, ‘These other Bishops have gone & insisted on retaining their patronage for their lives!!!!!! Do they think I shall let them?! In every other case the patronage had naturally gone over at once to the new See.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Patronage was no minor matter. With variability of income, and with no national employment and appointment structure, the exercise of patronage was one of the central tools available to a bishop to shape the ethos of his diocese.Footnote ⁸⁵ This was a crucial battle for Ridding, and it was one that he did not win outright. Eventually his fellow bishops of Lincoln and Lichfield relented and transferred patronage of their benefices in the new diocese to Ridding, but he failed to persuade the bishops of Ripon and Manchester to do the same.Footnote ⁸⁶ If anything, his difficulties were even greater in the matter of the new cathedral chapter. Reconstituted under an Ecclesiastical Commissioners' scheme in 1890, it acquired a canonry from Lincoln and the return of some of the old chapter estates, but a request to neighbouring chapters for the return of alienated chapter livings was not fulfilled, and that evidently rankled still with Laura Ridding nearly twenty years later.Footnote ⁸⁷ Nevertheless, overall Ridding gradually secured enhanced powers of patronage throughout the diocese during his twenty years in office. In Nottingham itself, for example, his power of appointment increased from four livings to twelve.Footnote ⁸⁸ His personal fortune was also used to great effect in church building. With its aid, and with an immense effort of local fundraising as well, sixty new churches had been built by his death, and 193 restored or extended.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similar energy went into tackling the poverty of many livings, with half of the eighty poorest livings receiving a significant augmentation of income by 1904.Footnote ⁹⁰

Personal contact and presence were evidently vital to Ridding. He wanted to be about his diocese, and to be seen, and he exploited the new railways and metalled roads to the full. The disadvantages of having the cathedral at Southwell – hotly contested at the time – were obvious from the start.Footnote ⁹¹ They had to be overcome by a determination to rotate key diocesan events around the diocese. In his first few months as bishop, Ridding and his wife made a comprehensive tour of the diocese, staying at various clergy houses as they went. As Lady Laura wrote to her mother, the countess of Selborne, in September 1884, ‘We are now on our Rural Deanery Tour … George has met the laity & clergy of six of his Rural Deaneries & they are most cordial – & at any rate it shews them that he wants their opinion & advice & ideas in settling all the best organization of this new Diocese.’Footnote ⁹² Within just two years alone he had visited 180 of the scattered rural parishes, and all the parishes in Derby and Nottingham.Footnote ⁹³ Mid- and late Victorian bishops such as Ridding set a standard for episcopal itinerancy that was still being followed diligently in the Church of England well into the twentieth century.

Laura Ridding described her husband's diocesan policy as following three broad lines: diocesan unity and development, the application of Christian principles to present-day needs and the recognition of the national Church as the conscience of the nation.Footnote ⁹⁴ The guiding principle of diocesan unity and development depended on his conviction of the breadth of provision made by the Established Church for the nation. He was closely attentive to diocesan reform. He was never convinced of the rationale for joining together two very different counties, and was a staunch supporter of what one historian has called, somewhat misleadingly, the ‘essentially Erastian’ policy of mapping dioceses onto civil boundaries.Footnote ⁹⁵ From the very beginning of his episcopate, he had quietly supported the eventual separation of the two counties.Footnote ⁹⁶ He reorganised ruri-decanal boundaries.Footnote ⁹⁷ He began one of the early detailed, practical diocesan handbooks, the Southwell diocesan calendar, in 1885.Footnote ⁹⁸ It was a compendium of useful information – dates, contact addresses, local social and political data, minutes of diocesan conferences and so on. He also oversaw the creation of a proper representative structure for the diocese, adapting existing frameworks inherited from Lichfield and Lincoln. In the process he may have given the arrangements a distinctive twist. At this time there were no obligatory parochial church councils. The first layer of representative government was the ruri-decanal conference. In most dioceses the franchise was based on confirmation and communion. This reflected a High Church view of church membership, and was not unrelated to the fact that it was High Churchmen in particular who had pioneered the revival of the Houses of Convocation, in the belief that the Church of England was an autonomous spiritual authority that should have its own power of self-government.Footnote ⁹⁹ Ridding did not share this assumption. Though there is a certain lack of clarity in the evidence, the description of the franchise for Southwell diocese by contrast suggests a broader qualification than was usual at this time – probably one based on baptism, since the significant phrase refers to election ‘by and out of the Churchmen of the parish’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ That suspicion is reinforced by Lady Laura's reference to the diocesan conference also being elected on a ‘wide franchise’, as if that was something out of the ordinary.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If this was indeed so, then Ridding was deliberately operating a wider franchise at parish level than was common in the Church of England at this time. It was only in 1919, with the passage of the Enabling Act and the creation of the Church Assembly, that baptism, rather than confirmation, became officially sanctioned as the franchise of the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁰²

That same impulse towards an inclusive national Church was also at work in Ridding's approach to Ritualism. In her biography Lady Laura minimised the Ritualist difficulties Ridding faced, perhaps in order to present an image of diocesan peace and harmony.Footnote ¹⁰³ But by the 1880s the intensity of Ritualist controversy was abating anyway. The Lincoln trial – when the Church Association brought a suit against Bishop Edward King – began four years after Ridding took up office, it is true, but the wave of prosecutions and imprisonment that followed the passage of the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874 was already spent. There were, however, serious complaints about Ritual practices from a number of parishes, attested in unpublished correspondence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Ridding avoided a heavy hand on Ritual matters, preferring here too as great a latitude of practice as canon law would permit. At Sneinton, for example, towards the end of his episcopate, some scandal was caused by a curate who exhibited a relic – a rib apparently from St Teresa – that he had bought in Spain. Closer investigation showed that the curate had not intended an act of adoration, contrary to the ‘horror of the Protestants’, but merely a historical illustration, and Ridding gently drew a veil over the matter and took no action.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The application of Christian principles to ‘present-day needs’ occurred particularly in the local context. If, to Ridding, the bedrock of the Established Church was the parish system, nevertheless a comprehensive national Church could not be created in his new diocese by church building alone. The parochial system required support from a truly formidable range of voluntary organisations. Ridding was energetic in promoting or founding diocesan agencies of every description, sometimes reflecting his own distinct interests, but more often than not ensuring the existence and flourishing of diocesan or national organisations. By 1890 there were well over one hundred such agencies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ There were seven different bodies catering for various aspects of ‘church extension’ (church building) alone, and some twenty-one diocesan missionary bodies. Characteristically, Ridding took a direct, personal interest in commending the Church of England Purity Society, and encouraged the formation of a Nottingham branch of the National Vigilance Association (an anti-child prostitution organisation).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He also helped to establish the Nottingham Rescue Home in 1885.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But his activity stretched beyond the merely formal or official. In most years he spent several weeks of the summer residing in major centres of population, where, in addition to attending local churches, he would summon large meetings of local lay workers. Between 1885 and 1900 by this means he stayed four times in Derby, five times in Nottingham, and also resided for a time in Chesterfield and in Buxton.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ His instincts were often anticlerical. He commended lay visiting (that is, visiting by lay people, rather than lay people being visited) to his diocese, for example, as ‘surely the Christian right of every Christian family’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ So comprehensive was his view of the parish system, and of the provision it should make for its inhabitants, that he could describe each parish as ‘a little State’.Footnote ¹¹¹

Southwell awaits a proper, critical exploration of the formation and early history of the diocese.Footnote ¹¹² What can be said, finally, in assessment of Ridding's episcopate? It was less of a ‘great, triumphant progress’ than Lady Laura liked to think. Ridding was an efficient and energetic example of episcopal leadership, but almost nothing he did was out of the ordinary. In most respects Southwell exemplified patient, thoroughgoing diocesan reform. Even so there were some limitations. For one thing, Ridding contained but did not – could not – eradicate internal Anglican divisions. His vision of a united, comprehensive national Church was surely undermined by this means. For all the efforts poured into diocesan reorganisation, there is no evidence that Southwell fared any better in reinvigorating local Anglican practice than did other dioceses in the same period – though arguably, without Ridding, it might all have been much worse. Diocesan unity also remained elusive. For all of his episcopate, the uneasy yoking together of the two counties was a geographical and social difficulty, and it is significant that he insisted upon the formation of a number of separate county-wide church agencies in anticipation of the eventual division of the diocese (which came in 1927 with the formation of the diocese of Derby). He was clearly attentive to the varying needs of his diocese, and his wife was proud of his attempts at intervention in a number of industrial disputes, including the great coal lock-out of 1893, the ‘coal war’.Footnote ¹¹³ He certainly visited the industrial communities of his diocese, and frequently spoke of their needs, but there is no evidence that he ever seriously grappled with the depth of the challenge these areas presented to the Church, or had much awareness of the growth of the labour movement. Furthermore, for all the fervour of his commitment to moral advance – to the causes of purity, temperance and education – the parish system was being asked to carry far too heavy a burden of responsibility for social renewal. As the history of the twentieth century was to demonstrate, social welfare was increasingly to be a state matter. Just as, in national politics, the mid-Victorian ideal of the national Church faded in the early twentieth century, so its instantiation at local level also began to falter.Footnote ¹¹⁴

In Ridding's Broad Churchmanship there was a typical Victorian combination of conservatism and reformism. The watchword of the Whigs in 1832 was reform, in order to conserve. Ridding was an ecclesiastical Whig. He certainly believed in leadership by an elite of education and birth. From an affluent gentry family, with his second marriage to a daughter of the earl of Selborne he joined the outer circles of the aristocracy. He was a paternalist. He had a profound conviction of the possibility of the moral transformation of society, led by those who were intellectually and morally placed to exercise power responsibly. The solution to the ills of industrial society to him lay in the extension of the moral influence of the respectable, through church work, and through philanthropy. Society, to him, was indeed progressing. This was an exciting, a romantic venture. There is an extraordinary sense, running through his speeches and writings, of confidence in the ability of British society to overcome its difficulties. His experience at Winchester reinforced all this. ‘Catch a noble spirit’, he told the school in his last sermon there as Head, ‘and develop and advance its forms, and then let the encrustations of old forms fall away, like the last year's slough, to make way for the new.’Footnote ¹¹⁵

Ridding's approach to diocesan management was a ‘command’ strategy, placing great emphasis on energy and direct leadership, and thus on the person of the bishop himself, at a time when centralised, professional diocesan bureaucracies were in their infancy.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It was a form of leadership that particularly suited ex-headmasters. Ridding here was in great company, and he continued to be so into the second half of the twentieth century – arguably Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury from 1944 to 1961 was the very last of the great headmaster-bishops. Yet, if much that Ridding achieved as first bishop of Southwell was characteristic of late Victorian diocesan management and reform, much of it also owed something to his Broad Church sympathies. His optimism, his faith in intellectual and moral progress, and his conviction that, through the parochial system, and through the comprehensive ideal of the national Church, not only could the Church itself be revitalised, but society as a whole could be improved, were all aspects of a template of ecclesiastical leadership that flowed from the theological and social preoccupations of a particular group of Anglicans whose influence on the late Victorian episcopate has perhaps been overshadowed by the attention historians have devoted to High Churchmen.