Even to readers of this Journal the name MacNeice probably suggests Louis the poet rather than his clerical father who was a prominent bishop in the Church of Ireland during the last eleven years of his life and a figure of some authority and influence in that body even before his elevation to the episcopate. The fame of the son exceeds his father's; and the life of the former has confused as well as obscured understanding of the latter. Now, in a distinguished work of revisionist scholarship, David Fitzpatrick of Trinity College, Dublin, has restored the bishop to his proper place; and in so doing he makes the poet better understood also.

John Frederick McNeice (only later in his life was the second Christian name preferred and an ‘a’ added to the surname) was born on Omey Island, County Mayo in 1866; his father was a schoolmaster with the Irish Church Missions, the Evangelical proselytising society (the mission was directed explicitly to work among Catholics). The ICM shaped much of Frederick's life; despite his later liberal reputation he long remained a supporter, even inviting its superintendent T. C. Hammond to preach for him in Carrickfergus. The society was resented by many of the Catholics among whom it operated. One priest in the area alleged that the ICM promoted souperism (conversion for material inducements), a charge that MacNeice's father denied. After disorderly episodes and various trials, the McNeices were forced out, all leaving by September 1879. Nine years later Frederick was himself an ICM schoolmaster. But in 1892 he sat the entrance examination for Trinity and started life as an Irish Anglican ordinand; in 1895 he was made deacon. Three years later he moved to Belfast; the rest of his life (a few years as bishop of Cashel and Waterford apart) was spent in Ulster. He served in a number of parishes in the city, among them St Clement's, where he succeeded an alleged ‘ritualist’, William Peoples, who had been forced out of the parish. Peoples, later the author of an anti-Vatican tract ‘Roman claims in the light of history’, was guilty of nothing more than putting crosses on the altar cloth, turning to the east at various points during the liturgy and placing flowers on the altar; this case was one of number over ritual in the fifty or sixty or so years after Irish Church disestablishment took effect in 1871. Although MacNeice's churchmanship at this stage of his life was more empatically Protestant than his predecessor's, the select vestry at St Clement's was to criticise him for celebrating early communions.

In 1908 he moved to Carrickfergus; his appointment to St Nicholas's aroused controversy which the new rector had to defuse. His time there has been the source of misunderstanding. In 1912 MacNeice declined to sign the Ulster Covenant. Louis MacNeice himself, as well as Jon Stallworthy, his authorised biographer, and other writers, have stated or assumed that the rector was a Home Ruler. This was not so. In a letter to Archbishop Davidson in 1914 (cited, not by Fitzpatrick but by Andrew Scholes in The Church of Ireland and the Third Home Rule Bill, Dublin 2010, 61 – one of the few sources to have eluded the author of the work under review) MacNeice declared: 'I am a Unionist. I am not a Volunteer, I am not a Covenantor.’ MacNeice's unionism was of a type then unusual in Ulster but more common outside the province. Nevertheless, he was prepared to address a church parade of the UVF, the pro-union militia founded in 1913 to resist any attempt to implement coercively Home Rule.

MacNeice's membership of the Orange Order was another facet of his life of which his son and daughter seem both to have been unaware. (In footnotes to her brother's posthumously published The strings are false: an unfinished autobiography, London 1965, Elizabeth Nicholson, corrected much of his account of their rectory childhood but she did not comment on his account of their father's politics.) He reached the rank of deputy grand chaplain of Belfast Grand Lodge and remained in the order until at least 1915. As a bishop, however, he confided to his diary a question about Orangeism: ‘But what does it all mean, & why are clergymen in it?’ (p. 259). He was also a Mason until he resigned in 1923. Partition dismayed MacNeice, just as it did many Irish Anglicans; even before partition was introduced he thought that it would be worse than Home Rule. He remained a monarchist to the end and hoped for some sort of reunification under the crown; he had proposed a federal solution for Ireland as early as 1917.

He returned south in 1931 on becoming bishop of Cashel and Waterford but came back to Belfast as diocesan of Down and Connor three years later. He died in office in 1942, having achieved praise (and Ulster being Ulster) blame also for his eirenicism during disturbances in Belfast in 1935 – some of the blame came from his own clergy. Fitzpatrick also provides a nuanced account of the controversy over the proposed placing of a union flag above Carson's tomb in St Anne's Cathedral, Belfast; he shows that (contrary to myth) MacNeice was not the main opponent of the idea. MacNeice was also prescient – a brief Munichois moment excepted – about Nazism. He was on good terms with Jacob Shachter, rabbi of the Belfast Hebrew Congregation – a circumstance which may compensate to a degree for the faint antisemitism of his reaction to Louis's first marriage to a Jewish bride. He attended the last great pre-war ecumenical gatherings in Edinburgh and Oxford (at the latter of which he came across his son's publisher, T. S. Eliot).

Fitzpatrick's biography presents an attractive picture of its subject. (His attractiveness is enhanced by the cover photograph of the bishop and his grandson Daniel MacNeice paddling; the somewhat surreal image shows the boy's grandfather in episcopal frock coat with his gaiters rolled up.) Its author's erudition is characteristically exceptional; his prose is fluent; the book should be enjoyed by the general reader as well as the specialist. Blemishes are few and relatively trivial. The Ulster medievalist Helen Waddell was never a Dame. Fitzpatrick is occasionally uncertain about ecclesiatical terminology: an instance being the caption to a photograph of Bishop MacNeice which purports to show him in ‘regalia’ (sic). It is a pity that he does not mention that MacNeice's early mentor, Canon Richard Clarke, was the father of the great Somerville medievalist, Maud Violet Clarke. The claim that without his second marriage to a wife who was much wealthier than he, he ‘could scarcely have contemplated becoming a bishop and a formidable figure in the Church of Ireland’ is not implausible but ultimately is unconvincing. MacNeice's gifts were his own regardless of his marriage; by the time of his remarriage, he was already the rector of St Nicholas's, Carrickfergus, a prominent parish, several of whose recent incumbents before MacNeice had been elevated to higher office. In any case, by the time of his election as bishop in 1931 the Church of Ireland had ceased to be the socially grand body that it had been before disestablishment. (Between 1800 and 1893 every archbishop of Armagh, with one exception, was the son or grandson of a peer – and that one exception, Marcus Beresford, was related to the marquesses of Waterford.) As MacNeice was the son of a non-graduate elementary schoolmaster, it probably is the case that his social origins were humbler than those of any his contemporaries on the Irish bench of bishops but Fitzpatrick offers no evidence that his subject's background impeded his rise up the clerical ranks.

Along with Seaver's life of Archbishop Gregg (John Allen Fitzgerald: archbishop, London 1963), this is the most thorough life of any twentieth-century Irish Anglican cleric (and, unlike the earlier work, this provides the reader with a full body of references). Fitzpatrick has made an outstanding contribution both to the study of the Church of Ireland and to literary criticism: students of the poet MacNeice cannot ignore this book. Quite simply this is a superlative work.