IN RETROSPECT: The Very Revd F R Bolton Dean of Leighlin 1963-83
FREDERICK Rothwell Bolton - (he was in practice always called “Deric”) - was an example of a vanished species; a scholar who was also a country clergyman – other examples being George Vivillers Jourdan and St John Drelincourt Seymour. Although his father – the landscape artist John Nunn Bolton - was Irish, he was born in Warwick and he read History and English at Cambridge. He then proceeded to Lincoln Theological College, as had his predecessor at Leighlin, the Revd Tom Smith. Ordained in 1933, Bolton served no less than three curacies and seemed set to spend his ministry in the Church of England. But then he was struck by a life of Jeremy Taylor, the 17th century Bishop of Down & Connor, which was published in London by C J Stranks in 1952. He thought he could do much better and the result was The Caroline Tradition of the Church of Ireland with particular reference to Bishop Jeremy Taylor, which appeared in 1958. This was the only book which Bolton wrote, but it went on to be the definitive work of the period, not excluding the writings of Archbishop Henry McAdoo. This led to the award of a Cambridge BD, which is regarded as the equivalent of a PhD in lesser universities. It also led to a move to Ireland in 1955 and to his marriage in Dublin in the same year to Florence Miller, who survived him until November 2017. At the age of 47, this was, for him, a late marriage and they adopted two sons. Some of us have a memory of them arriving at a country rectory, he clutching a baby with one arm and raising his hat in greeting with the other. The perfect post His first Irish parish was Kilscoran Co. Wexford, from which the late Bishop Tyndall soon carried him o to Donegal to help with St Ernan’s, then being used as a Retreat Centre. But in 1963 the then Bishop of Ossory Ferns and Leighlin, Henry McAdoo. found the perfect post both for his erudition and his rural skills by appointing him Dean and Incumbent of Leighlin, where he served happily for the next 20 years. McAdoo was, of course, a fellow Caroline scholar but arguably a somewhat less objective one than Bolton, although even Bolton was aware that his own acclaimed work “may have given a somewhat one- sided impression of our church”. Bolton’s The Caroline Tradition... is described by Alan Ford in The Church of Ireland and its past (2017) as “path breaking and the product of thorough historical research”, seeking to identify a distinctive high-church theology and attitude towards worship and church architecture, and show how it continued to shape church life from the Restoration right through to the 19th century.
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Robert MacCarthy
was formerly Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.