Queer Places:
The Old Parsonage, Dartington, Totnes TQ9 6DW, UK
Eton College, Windsor, Windsor and Maidenhead SL4 6DW, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
St Mary, Dartington, Totnes TQ9 6JS, UK
Richard Hurrell Froude (25 March 1803 – 28 February 1836) was an
Anglican priest and an early leader of the
Oxford Movement. Cardinal John Henry Newman, on June 27, 1833, at
Marseilles, wrote a poem, "Separation of Friends," and on February 28, 1836,
the day of Froude's death, added twelve final lines. Froude and Newman's
attachment led later historians to suggest the latter's homosexuality. As
early as 1933, Geoffrey Faber cited their friendship as evidence of Newman's
sublimated homosexuality. "Separation" concerns the heavenly reunion of
friends parted by death.
He was born in
Dartington, Devon, the eldest son of
Robert Froude (Archdeacon
of Totnes) and the elder brother of historian
James Anthony Froude and engineer and naval architect
William Froude. He was educated at
Ottery St Mary school, and went to
Eton
College at the age of thirteen. His mother, the first great influence in
his life, died when he was eighteen; he matriculated at
Oriel College, Oxford, a few weeks later.[1]
At Oxford his tutor was
John
Keble, whose holy life and teaching had a profound effect upon him. In
1823, Keble's mother died and he left Oxford to assist his father and two
surviving sisters.[2]
Froude,
Isaac Williams, and
Robert Wilberforce went to stay with him at
Southrop
to read during the Long Vacation. Williams, who did not know Froude well at
that time, said of him, "There was an originality of thought and a reality
about him which were very refreshing."[3]
Froude took his degree in 1824 with a double second class in Classics and
Mathematics, and became a Fellow at Oriel in 1826. The following year he
became a Tutor with Wilberforce and Newman as colleagues. Froude was at first
shy of Newman, because of Newman's Liberalism. He wrote Wilberforce, "Newman
is a fellow that I like more the more I think of him; only I would give a few
odd pence if he were not a heretic."[1]
Around 1828, Froude brought Keble and Newman together. That same year he
received Deacon's orders in the Church of England; and the year after Priest's
from the Bishop of Oxford.
Froude, who suffered from tuberculosis, spent the winter of 1832–33
travelling in the Mediterranean with his father and Newman for the sake of his
health.[1]
On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the
Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome. In April the Froudes
returned home, while Newman returned to Sicily alone, where he fell
dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever, but recovered.
On his return, Froude contributed to the formation of the
Oxford Movement, a group of Christian theologians, including Keble and
Newman, who argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith
and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. He was associated with
the
Tractarians, named after a series of publications, Tracts for the Times,
which they published between 1833 and 1841 in the early stages of the
movement. Froude contributed four of the Tracts for the Times.[3]
Much of the rest of his life was spent outside England, acting as
mathematical tutor at
Codrington College in the Barbados, to alleviate his medical condition.[4]
He returned to England in 1835. Froude died from the tuberculosis the
following year at the age of thirty-two at the Parsonage House in Dartington,
where he was born.[5]
In 1904 Louise Imogen
Guiney published "Hurrell Froude, Memoranda and Comments."
After his death, Newman and other friends edited the Remains, a
collection of Froude's letters and journals, "an uninhibited assault on
Protestantism" that pushed the Oxford Movement closer to Anglo-Catholicism.[6]
These were later interpreted by Sir
Geoffrey Faber in his work Oxford Apostles, published in 1933 for
the centenary of the Oxford Movement.
My published books:
BBACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrell_Froude
- Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture
by
F. Roden
Springer, Oct 23, 2002 - Literary Criticism - 282 pages