Cloud of Witnesses: The Bishop, the Deacon, and the Poet

The name of T S Eliot may not immediately spring to mind when contemplating Chester’s literary associations, but the enigmatic American poet does have interesting connections with two of the figures in the cloister windows of Chester Cathedral: Lancelot Andrewes and Nicholas Ferrar.

Lancelot Andrewes was a prominent cleric in the Church of England at a time of great change in the country when the crown was passing from the Tudors to the Stuarts. Born in 1555 and ordained in 1580, he was a stout defender of Elizabeth I’s determination to plot a ‘middle way’ for the established church between the competing claims of Catholicism and Puritanism. A friend of Walter Raleigh and William Cecil, Andrewes was consecrated bishop of Chichester in 1605, and he was soon a leading participant in the preparation of the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 (popularly known as the King James Bible). 

In a sermon that he preached to King James I at Whitehall on Christmas Day 1622, Lancelot Andrewes imagined the journey that the wise men might have made to Bethlehem: ‘A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in the very dead of winter.’ Just over three hundred years later, in 1927, T S Eliot took this description from Andrewes’s sermon, almost word for word, as the opening lines of his celebrated poem The Journey of the Magi: ‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey …’ Unusually for Eliot, he made no footnote reference to Andrewes’s Christmas sermon.

In the same year that The Journey of the Magi was published, T S Eliot was baptised into the Church of England, and in a later collection of his essays he did acknowledge the influence of Lancelot Andrewes on his conversion. But Eliot was also influenced by another 17^th century figure who stands next to Andrewes in the south walk of the cloister: Nicholas Ferrar. He is depicted as a middle-aged man in court dress with a blue cloak and buckled shoes. In the background is the church of St John the Baptist at Little Gidding in the diocese of Ely.

Nicholas Ferrar was born into a wealthy family in London in 1592, a generation later than Andrewes, and was brought up as a ‘prayer book Anglican’. After graduating from Clare College Cambridge he spent several years on the continent where he learnt four languages and studied at universities in Padua and Leipzig. Arriving back in London, Ferrar found that he had lost much of his family’s inheritance through unwise investments in the London Virginia Company, which had its charter revoked in 1624.

Now in difficult financial circumstances, Nicholas Ferrar and his extended family left London in 1626 for the largely deserted village of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire where he bought and restored the manor house and the abandoned parish church. Here Ferrar set about creating an Anglican community of work and worship, rooted in the Book of Common Prayer, whose members helped with the education of local children, learnt the art of bookbinding, and wrote poems that elicited the admiration of George Herbert (who is also depicted in a cloister window at Chester). Though Little Gidding was never a formal religious community, Ferrar was ordained deacon while living there.

Nicholas Ferrar died in December 1637 and within twenty years the settlement had largely dispersed; but the name of Little Gidding burst into public consciousness in 1942 when T S Eliot named the last of his Four Quartets after the village. In an oblique homage to Nicholas Ferrar (whom he does not actually name in the poem) Eliot poses the question: why are you here, in Little Gidding? His answer: ‘You are here to kneel, where prayer has been valid’.

Chester seems to have few connections with T S Eliot, but Lancelot Andrewes and Nicholas Ferrar are two of them. As we pass by their images in the cloister we might, perhaps, be inspired to look again at one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century. His work has its obscurities, certainly, but it also reflects a profound understanding of the numinous quality of human life and experience. The Journey of the Magi and Little Gidding may be good places to start.