‘Happy’ 402nd anniversary to the last time a serving Archbishop of Canterbury killed someone. George Abbot may also be the only person to have become AoC because his mother accidentally caught a fish.
To deal with this in chronological order, the fish story is told in William Oldys’ biography of him:
While his mother was pregnant with this son, she is said to have had a dream which proved at once an omen, and an instrument of his future fortunes. Her dream was this. She fancied she was told in her sleep that if she could eat a Jack, or Pike, the child she went with would prove a son, and rise to great preferment. Not long after this, in taking a pail of water out of the river Wey, which ran by their house, she accidentally caught a Jack, and had thus, an odd opportunity of fulfilling her dream. This story being much talked of, and coming to the ears of some persons of distinction, they offered to become sponsors for the child, which was kindly accepted, and they had the goodness to afford many testimonies of their affection to their godson while at school, and after he was sent to the university. Such was the good effects of his mother’s dream
That’s one of those self-fulfilling prophecies that doesn’t happen outside wizard fiction and Greek myth, if you ask me, but: Archbish he duly became. Just not a particularly impressive one. According to William Donaldson in Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics:
Had he not shot a gamekeeper dead while aiming at a deer, Abbot would be remembered, if at all, as one of the least distinguished of English archbishops
He was not widely liked, and known mostly for being beastly to Catholics. Nor was he popular in his role as Oxford Vice-Chancellor, during which time he apparently sent 140 undergraduates to prison for not doffing their hats in his presence.
But it does seem to be the manslaughter that’s his most noteworthy achievement. William Donaldson made some of the stuff in that book up, but this wasn’t one of them
According to Oldys, Hawkins “had been warned more than once to keep out of the way”, and “this unforeseen accident threw the Archbishop into a deep melancholy”. He “settled an annuity of twenty pounds on the widow, which soon procured her another husband”.
Oh, well — that’s all right, then.
In a book about the King James Version of the Bible in 1959, Gustavus Swift Paine described Abbot as “the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to kill a human being”, and it is true that no serving prelate is known to have stuck anyone with a crossbow bolt since — but the seemingly mild-mannered Robert Runcie, before becoming a priest in 1951, got an MC in WWII, having used a tank to take out three anti-tank guns in March 1945.
In his case, though, taking life (out of necessity) may have increased his understanding of what it is to be human — as shown in his sermon at the post-Falklands War service of thanksgiving:
Dr. Runcie recalled Argentina’s “attempt to settle the future of the Falkland Islands by armed invasion” and said,
“Sometimes, with the greatest reluctance, force is necessary in order to hold back the chaos which injustice and the irrational element in man threaten to make of the world.”
But even in the failure of war there were “springs of hope,” he said, reaching out to comfort those who lost family members in the the conflict.
“There is mourning on both sides of this conflict,” he said, referring to “all those Argentine parents who have lost sons” as well as to British families. Many were in the congregation, including a young widow cradling her baby in her arms.
…which didn’t go down very well in certain quarters:
Other accidental — but, thankfully, in their cases, non-fatal — shootings carried out by prominent figures include, of course, US vice president Dick Cheney shooting a 78-year-old state attorney with a shotgun while quail hunting in February 2006 — and deputy prime minister Viscount (Willie) Whitelaw tripping at a Lincolnshire shoot in 1984, and peppering with shot both the party’s loader and its host Sir Joseph Nickerson. Depending on your source, he caught one of them right in the arse.
