Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/296

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
Alfield
282
Alford

churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn. His works are: 1, ‘The Battailes of Crescey and Poictiers,’ London 1631, 8vo, reprinted in 1633. 2. ‘The Historie of Henrie of that name the Seventh King of England. With that famed Battaile upon Redmore, near Bosworth,’ London, 1638, 8vo. 3. ‘The History of Eurialus and Lucretia,’ London, 1639, 8vo. The last work is a translation from Æneas Sylvius.

[Winstanley's Lives of English Poets; Wood's Athenæ Oxon.]

ALF- [See Ælf-]

ALFIELD or AUFIELD, THOMAS, alias Badger (d. 1585), seminary priest, a native of Gloucestershire, was educated at Eton, and sent thence in 1568 to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge. He was afterwards reconciled to the catholic church, and went over to the English college at Rheims, where he was ordained priest in 1581. He was sent on the English mission the same year. Soon after his arrival in this country he was apprehended and put to the torture. He so far yielded as to consent to go to the protestant church, whereupon he was set free. Afterwards he sincerely repented his weakness, and resumed his functions as a missioner. He imported into the kingdom some copies of Dr. Allen's ‘True and modest Defence of English Catholics that suffer for their Faith,’ and dispersed them with the help of Thomas Webley, a dyer. They were both arrested, and most cruelly tortured in prison. On 5 July 1585 they were arraigned at the sessions hall in the Old Bailey, and having been ‘found guiltie, condemned, and had judgment, as felons to be hanged, for publishing of books, containing false, seditious, and slaunderous matter, to the defamation of our Soveraygne lady the Queene, these were on the next morrow executed at Tyborne accordingly.’ Their offence being felony, they were only hanged, not butchered alive with the knife of the executioner.

[Cal. of State Papers, Domestic (1581–90), 153, 168, 243, 249; Diaries of the English College, Douay; Knox's Letters and Memorials of Card. Allen; Stowe's Annales (1614), 708; Rambler, N.S. vii. (1857), 420–31; Oliver's Hist. of the Catholic Religion in Cornwall, 103; Harwood's Alumni Eton. 182; Dodd's Church Hist. (1737), ii. 64; Challoner's Missionary Priests (1741), 168; Strype's Annals, iii. (i.), 708; MS. Lansd. 33, art. 58; Notes and Queries, 6th ser. ix. 485.]


ALFORD, HENRY (1810–1871), dean of Canterbury, the editor of the Greek Testament, was the son of the Rev. Henry Alford, vicar of Ampton, near Bury St. Edmunds, a parish which he subsequently left for that of Aston Sandford, near Thame. He was born in London, 10 Oct. 1810. His mother died at his birth, and he was during his early life thrown much upon his relations, and was constantly in the family of his uncle, the Rev. Samuel Alford, of Heale House, in the parish of Curry Rivell, near Taunton, of which parish his ancestors for two generations had been vicars. At the age of nine he was sent to a school kept by the Rev. B. Jeanes, congregationalist minister at Charmouth, and was successively at a private school at Hammersmith, at Ilminster grammar school, and at Aston in Suffolk as a private pupil of the Rev. John Bickersteth, with whose sons (afterwards dean of Lichfield and bishop of Ripon) he formed a close friendship. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1829, gained the Bell scholarship in 1831, and graduated 8th classic and 34th wrangler in January 1832. He was ordained in 1833 as curate to his father's parish of Ampton, and began at once to take pupils. He was elected to a fellowship at Trinity in 1834, but early in the next year accepted from the college the post of vicar of Wymeswold, and was immediately afterwards married to his cousin, Fanny Alford, daughter of Mr. Alford, of Heale House, Curry Rivell, above mentioned. There he continued for eighteen years, engaged in parish work and in tuition; and there he published the first volume of the Greek Testament in 1849 (the last was published in 1861). In 1853 he moved to London, and became minister of Quebec Chapel in Marylebone. In 1857 he was appointed to the deanery of Canterbury, which he held till his death in 1871.

As a child he was delicate, and never took much part in athletic exercises; but as a man he had extraordinary powers of mental work, and also travelled a great deal both in England and on the Continent. He had little or no fortune, and made his way by his own exertions. His early marriage brought him only four children, two of whom, his only sons, died in childhood. His daughters were both married in his lifetime. Towards the close of his life he purchased a house, Vine's Gate, near Sevenoaks, as a summer home for the time of his absence from Canterbury. His domestic life was one of peculiar happiness, and he had a large circle of friends, among whom the most intimate were the Rev. E. T. Vaughan, of Harpenden, Herts, and the Rev. J. H. Hamilton, vicar of St. Michael's, Chester Square, in London, and afterwards canon of Rochester.