William Van Mildert

Mildert was the fourth child and second son of Cornelius, a gin distiller, and Martha Hill, both his great and great-great grandfather were deacons of the Dutch reformed church. He toured the Netherlands in the summer of 1792 and in 1779 entered Merchant Taylor’s School in preparation for university where he graduated BA in 1787 and MA in 1790. He married but never had any children. In 1789 he was ordained deacon of the Oxford curacy of Sherborne in Hampshire and in December of the same year was ordained priest of the curate of Witham, Essex. His Boyle lectures in 1802 depicted Judaism, Islam, popery, freemasonry, and the French revolution as satanic conspiracies. He narrowly escaped bankruptcy in 1810 due to fellow members of the Hackney Phalanx offering financial aid. The same year he accepted Lord Liverpool’s offer of the regius professorship of divinity at Oxford where he became a canon of Christ Church college, a BD and DD. In 1819 he was concecrated Bishop of Llandaff. He supported the founding of both the University of Durham and King’s College London as he believed they could dissuade the founding or success of secular universities. He was against the catholic emancipation.