William Gresley (16 March 1801 – 19 November 1876) was an English divine. He was a high churchman, who joined in popularising the Tractarian movement of 1833.
Gresley was born in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, on 16 March 1801. He was the eldest son of Richard Gresley of Stowe House, Lichfield, Staffordshire, who was a descendant of the Gresleys of Drakelow Park, Burton-on-Trent, and a bencher of the Middle Temple. His mother was Richard Gresley's first wife, Caroline, youngest daughter of Andrew Grote, a London banker. George Grote was his first cousin on his mother's side.
Having completed Westminster School as a king's scholar, Gresley matriculated at Oxford as a student of Christ Church on 21 May 1819.[1] In 1822 he obtained a second-class degree in classics, graduating BA on 8 February 1823 and MA (an automatic preferment) on 25 May 1825.
An injury to his eyesight prevented Gresley from studying for the bar. Instead he took holy orders in the Church of England in 1825. He was curate for a short time in 1828 at Drayton-Bassett, near Tamworth, and from 1830 to 1837 the curate of St Chad's, Lichfield. During part of that period he was also morning lecturer at St Mary's Church, Lichfield. By then an earnest high churchman, he threw himself into the Tractarian movement of 1833, and worked to popularise its teachings.
In November 1840 Gresley became a prebendary in Lichfield Cathedral, an honorary preferment.[2] About 1850 Gresley moved to Brighton to act as a volunteer assistant priest in St Paul's, Brighton, preaching there every Sunday evening.
In 1857 Gresley accepted the perpetual curacy of All Saints' Boyne Hill, near Maidenhead, Berkshire, where a church, a parsonage house and schools were being erected at the expense of three ladies living in the Oxford diocese. He settled there before either the church or vicarage was ready, and served there for the rest of his working life.
In 1828 Gresley married Anne Wright, daughter and heiress of John Barker Scott, a Lichfield banker. They had nine children, but he survived them all.
William Gresley himself died at Boyne Hill on 19 November 1876, and was buried in the churchyard there.
In 1835 Gresley published Ecclesiastes Anglicanus: being a Treatise on the Art of Preaching as adapted to a Church of England Congregation, and in 1838 his Portrait of an English Churchman, which ran through many editions. In 1839 he began with Edward Churton a series of religious and social tales under the general title of The Englishman's Library, 31 vols., London, 1840–39–46. Of these tales he wrote six:
To describe the influence on his mind of the Oxford movement and to illustrate the "danger of dissent", he wrote Bernard Leslie, or a Tale of the Last Ten Years, London, 1842 and 1859. To The Juvenile Englishman's Library (21 vols., 1845–44–49), edited successively by his friends Francis Edward Paget and John Fuller Russell, he contributed Henri de Clermont, or the Royalists of La Vendée: a Tale of the French Revolution (vol. iii.), and Colton Green, a Tale of the Black Country (vol. xv).
Gresley's 1851 "Ordinance of Confession" caused a considerable stir, although he did not wish to make confession compulsory. Later in life, with a view to checking the spread of scepticism, he published "Sophron and Neologus, or Common Sense Philosophy", in 1861; "Thoughts on the Bible" in 1871; "Priests and Philosophers" in 1873; and "Thoughts on Religion and Philosophy" in 1875. Selection from the last two were published in 1879 as "The Scepticism of the Nineteenth Century", with a short account of the author and portrait of him by a former curate, S. C. Austen.
His other writings include: