Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp – Evangelical, Catholic and Ritual Revivalism in the Nineteenth–Century Church

Richard Sibthorp, youngest son of a celebrated Lincolnshire family, became through his forceful preaching and acknowledged piety, one of the leading Anglican Evangelicals of the 1820s. During the next decade, close study of the Old Testament turned him into a High Churchman who transformed his chapel on the Isle of Wight into a pioneering centre of ritualism. In 1841, at great personal cost, he converted to Rome. More astonishing was his announcement, in October 1843, that he was returning to the Establishment. Eighteen months as a priest had persuaded him that the Protestant Reformers were right: the Papacy was indeed the prophesied Antichrist, the 'great harlot'. That the elderly Sibthorp eventually returned to Rome and ended his days as a respected priest of Nottingham Cathedral appears only to confirm his reputation as an eccentric whose career may amuse but can offer little instruction. This new biography, however, by carefully analyzing Sibthorp's response to the powerful theological movements that swirled around him, challenges this received opinion. He emerges as a man of impressive spirituality, unwilling to compromise in his search for truth, even at the price of misunderstanding and ridicule.