Ferdinando Warner (1703–3 October 1768) was an English preacher, Church of England vicar and writer of history, theology and biography. His principal works were histories of Ireland and of its 17th-century rebellions and an ecclesiastical history. Well regarded through the nineteenth century, his modern reputation is mixed: noted for his innovative use of primary sources, but criticised for his dismissal of the Irish people and character.
Warner was born in 1703 at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where his father taught at a dissenting academy, including Thomas Secker, the future Archbishop of Canterbury (1758–68).[1] Warner became vicar of the church in Rowde in Wiltshire in 1730 and then lived for a time in Lewisham, then a part of Kent.[2] He was admitted to Clare College, Cambridge on but apparently did not finish.[3] [4]
On, he became rector of the former church of St Michael Queenhithe in the City of London and twice preached before the Lord Mayor, Sir William Calvert.[5] In 1754, he earned an LL.D. at Lambeth. He then served as rector of St Mary's Church, Barnes (then in Surrey, now a part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames) from 1758. He also held senior roles in the governing Court of Governors of Sion College, becoming third assistant in 1757, first assistant in 1758, senior dean in 1759, president in 1764 and (necessarily) the immediate past president and past president, presumably through 1767.[6]
His son was John Warner, a classical scholar, preacher, writer and chaplain from 1790–95 to the British Embassy in France.
Warner's writings covered many subjects and according to Irish history scholar Robert Dunlop "show him to have been a man of wide learning and more than ordinary ability." His earliest works centred on Church of England liturgy and theology, including a 1755 simulated debate on the nature of Revelation between Lord Bolingbroke and Robert Boyle.[7] In 1758, he wrote a biography of Sir Thomas More and appended Gilbert Burnet's 1684 translation of Utopia from the Latin with "slight Alterations" for modernity.[8] Its preface thanks Sir Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington, probably for having conferred upon him the rectory at Barnes.
According to biographer Alexander Chalmers, Warner's "most valuable" contribution was his two-volume Ecclesiastical History to the Eighteenth Century (1756–57), which church historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim praised for "that noble spirit of liberty, candour, and moderation that seemed to have guided the pen of the judicious author."[9] After its success, Warner went to Ireland in about 1761 to gather documents for a history of that island. He was given access to books and manuscripts in Marsh's Library and the Library of Trinity College Dublin and was supported by the historian Charles O'Conor in the hopes he might "write a justificatory history of the Irish" amidst prejudice against the Irish Catholics after the Rebellion of 1641.[10]
However, the resultant work (The History of Ireland, Volume the First, 1763), which covered up to the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1171, included unfavourable generalisations, such as citing the "very strong and remarkable antipathy to all labour" of many Irish and their cynical contentment "in dirt and beggary, to a degree beyond all other people in Christendom." Furthermore, whereas O'Conor attributed the instability after the Viking invasion of Ireland to the failure of elective government, Warner cited the Irish "national disposition to quarrelling and contention".[11] Although Warner claimed it was impartial, historianJoep Leerssen called The History "at times a hybrid of, and at times a vacillation between, the Gaelic and English attitudes", whose contemporary references "read like an uncomfortable combination of a Patriot-style concern for the poor's living conditions, with an old-fashioned dislike for Irish sordidness".[12] Tobias Smollett wrote in The Critical Review after its publication that—[13]
Another critic in The Monthly Review found his introduction absorbing but the history, and his treatment thereof, uninteresting—[14] Warner had intended to publish a second volume, which would have covered up to the reign of Charles I (1625–49), but did not because the Irish House of Commons refused to fund it. Leerssen argued that this experience did not bias Warner's next book, the History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in Ireland (1767), which spanned from the 1641 Rebellion to the 1660 Restoration. Therein, he wrote, Warner kept "an impartial stance" and crtiticised the anti-Catholic penal laws enacted during the Protestant Ascendancy: "Warner does not deny Catholic guilt in the rebellion, but reduces the quantity of the outrages."
Warner also wrote one critique of poetry, commenting on James Macpherson's purported poems from the Gaelic bard Ossian in a published 1762 letter to Lord Lyttelton.[15]
Warner contracted gout sometime in middle age, and dedicated his final work to its relief (A Full and Plain Account of the Gout, 1768). Chalmers lamented: "This was the most unfortunate of all his publications, for soon after imparting his cure for the gout he died of the disorder, and destroyed the credit of his system"; nevertheless, his Account was twice reprinted through 1772.[16]
According to politician and biographer Alfred Webb, writing in 1878, The History of Ireland and the History of the Rebellion were still being "often referred to", while Dunlop in 1899 called the latter "impartial and singularly accurate".[17] Essayist and historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky called Warner in 1892 "the best historian of the Rebellion." The following appraisal from Chalmers in 1817 praises Warner's diligence and sense of evidence—
The History of Ireland was also read by Ireland's 'national poet' Thomas Moore, whose sentimental Irish Melodies (1808–34) discussed the prejudice faced by Irish Catholics and how accord may be reached with England. In fact, Moore cited Warner's account as the source and inspiration for two of the Melodies, "Rich and rare were the jewels she wore" and "Let Erin remember the days of old".
However, modern Irish historians looking to overcome the partial Catholic and Protestant interpretations of controversial events like the Rebellion of 1641 for an objective view have been less favourable of Warner's conclusions. John Gibney, for instance, conjectured that Warner was probably so confused by contemporary depositions when writing History of the Rebellion that he—[18]
Bibliographies of Warner include and exclude different works. The following is that compiled by Bruce Stewart online. Note some titles are truncated.
Warner is also listed as the possible translator (or otherwise Thomas Nugent) of José Francisco de Isla's ecclesiastical satire: