Richard Holdsworth (or Houldsworth, Oldsworth) (1590, in
Newcastle-on-Tyne – 22 August 1649) was an English academic theologian, and Master of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mon ...
from 1637 to 1643. Although Emmanuel was a
Puritan stronghold, Holdsworth, who in religion agreed, in the political sphere resisted Parliamentary interference, and showed Royalist sympathies.
Life
Richard Holdsworth was the son of Richard Holdswourth, Vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and baptised at
St Nicholas, Newcastle
Newcastle Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of St Nicholas, is a Church of England cathedral in Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England. It is the seat of the Bishop of Newcastle and is the mother church of the Diocese of Newcastle. ...
on 20 December 1590. He entered
St. John's College, Cambridge as a scholar in 1607, graduated B.A. in 1610, and became a Fellow in 1613.
He was chaplain to
Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet. He was rector of
St Peter-le-Poor
St Peter le Poer was a parish church on the west side of Broad Street in the City of London. Of medieval origin, it was rebuilt in 1540, and again in 1792 to a design by Jesse Gibson with a circular nave. It was demolished in 1907.
Early histo ...
, London in 1624.
[''Concise Dictionary of National Biography'']
He was in 1629 the first
Gresham College divinity lecturer appointed from the Puritan camp; he held the position until 1637. A London reputation brought him the presidency of
Sion College in 1639. He became Archdeacon of Huntingdon.
He was a member of the
Westminster Assembly. He was
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, for two years, and
Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, from 1643. He lost his position as Master of Emmanuel, because of expressed royalist opinions; and was briefly imprisoned by Parliament.
He was appointed Dean of Worcester by the King, in 1647. It is also claimed that the King wanted to appoint him
Bishop of Bristol; this is mentioned by
Thomas Fuller. Given the wartime conditions, these appointments could have been taken up only with difficulty.
Educational views
He is said to have been a modernizer in education, in the line of
Francis Bacon and
Comenius, and a proponent of unadorned prose. His students at St. John's included
Simonds D'Ewes, whom he instructed by means of a system of note-taking.
He provided
John Wallis
John Wallis (; la, Wallisius; ) was an English clergyman and mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal ...
with an introduction to
William Oughtred, steering Wallis towards mathematics (Wallis graduated BA at Emmanuel as Holdsworth arrived).
He was also a bibliophile who amassed a private collection of 10,000 books, bequeathed to the
Cambridge University Library. It arrived there in 1664, after a long legal limbo caused by testamentary conditions. It is said to have been the largest private collection of the time in England.
The ''Directions for a Student in the Universite'' has been attributed to him. The attribution is questioned by Hill as not certain. This work is a scheme of a four-year classical education.
[ Mordecai Feingold, ''The Humanities'' p. 258, in ''The History of the University of Oxford'' IV, Seventeenth-Century Oxford (1997) edited by Nicholas Tyacke.]
Notes
Further reading
*John A. Trentman, "The Authorship of ''Directions for a Student in the Universitie''," ''Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society'', vol. 7, no. 2, 1978, pp. 170–183.
*Brent L. Nelson, "The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500-1660," ''The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, Second Series'', Detroit: Gale, 2003, pp. 355–377.
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Holdsworth, Richard
1590 births
1649 deaths
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
English Calvinist and Reformed theologians
Masters of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Westminster Divines
People from Newcastle upon Tyne
Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge
Vice-Chancellors of the University of Cambridge
17th-century Calvinist and Reformed theologians
Lady Margaret's Professors of Divinity