Biography

Thomas Cartwright (1634-89), Bishop of Chester, was born in Northampton on 1 September 1634. Cartwright was educated at Northampton grammar school, whence he proceeded to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied logic. He was intruded by parliamentarian visitors into Queen's College in 1649, matriculated from the college on 18 November 1650, and graduated BA on 17 February 1653. Despite his puritan antecedents he chose to be episcopally ordained, served as chaplain of Queen's, proceeded MA on 21 June 1655, and was appointed vicar of Brentwood in 1657. In 1659 he served as chaplain to John Robinson, the London royalist alderman and MP, and published the first of a series of his sermons in print, God's Arraignment of Adam; about this time he became preacher at St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, London. He took his Oxford DD degree on 12 September 1661. In 1676 he became dean of Ripon and at some point in the 1670s, ambitious but still a relatively young man, apparently made a thwarted attempt to put his foot on the first rung of the episcopal ladder by attempting to lay claim to the bishopric of St David's. Cartwright caught a fatal infection of dysentery, from which he died on 15 April 1689.

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