leader in causes which had society against them, but his sincerity was as unquestionable as his combativeness.
His Life was written, from a sympathetic point of view, with much interesting detail as to the history of secularism, by his daughter, Mrs Bradlaugh Bonner, and J. M. Robertson (1894).
BRADLEY, GEORGE GRANVILLE (1821–1903), English divine and scholar, was born on the 11th of December 1821, his father, Charles Bradley, being at that time vicar of Glasbury, Brecon. He was educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold, and at University College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1844. He was an assistant master at Rugby from 1846 to 1858, when he succeeded G. E. L. Cotton as headmaster at Marlborough. In 1870 he was elected master of his old college at Oxford, and in August 1881 he was made dean of Westminster in succession to A. P. Stanley, whose pupil and intimate friend he had been, and whose biographer he became. Besides his Recollections of A. P. Stanley (1883) and Life of Dean Stanley (1892), he published Aids to writing Latin Prose Composition and Lectures on Job (1884) and Ecclesiastes (1885). He took part in the coronation of Edward VII., resigned the deanery in 1902, and died on the 13th of March 1903.
Dean Bradley’s family produced various other members distinguished in literature. His half-brother, Andrew Cecil Bradley (b. 1851), fellow of Balliol, Oxford, became professor of modern literature and history (1881) at University College, Liverpool, and in 1889 regius professor of English language and literature at Glasgow University; and he was professor of poetry at Oxford (1901–1906). Of Dean Bradley’s own children the most distinguished in literature were his son, Arthur Granville Bradley (b. 1850), author of various historical and topographical works; and especially his daughter, Mrs Margaret Louisa Woods (b. 1856), wife of the Rev. Henry George Woods, president of Trinity, Oxford (1887–1897), and master of the Temple (1904), London. Mrs Woods became well known for her accomplished verse (Lyrics and Ballads, 1889), largely influenced by Robert Bridges, and for her novels, of which her Village Tragedy (1887) was the earliest and strongest.
BRADLEY, JAMES (1693–1762), English astronomer, was born at Sherborne in Gloucestershire in March 1693. He entered Balliol College, Oxford, on the 15th of March 1711, and took degrees of B.A. and M.A. in 1714 and 1717 respectively. His early observations were made at the rectory of Wanstead in Essex, under the tutelage of his uncle, the Rev. James Pound (1669–1724), himself a skilled astronomer, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on the 6th of November 1718. He took orders on his presentation to the vicarage of Bridstow in the following year, and a small sinecure living in Wales was besides procured for him by his friend Samuel Molyneux (1689–1728). He, however, resigned his ecclesiastical preferments in 1721, on his appointment to the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford, while as reader on experimental philosophy (1729–1760) he delivered 79 courses of lectures in the Ashmolean museum. His memorable discovery of the aberration of light (see Aberration) was communicated to the Royal Society in January 1729 (Phil. Trans. xxxv. 637). The observations upon which it was founded were made at Molyneux’s house on Kew Green. He refrained from announcing the supplementary detection of nutation (q.v.) until the 14th of February 1748 (Phil. Trans. xlv. 1), when he had tested its reality by minute observations during an entire revolution (18.6 years) of the moon’s nodes. He had meantime (in 1742) been appointed to succeed Edmund Halley as astronomer royal; his enhanced reputation enabled him to apply successfully for an instrumental outfit at a cost of £1000; and with an 8-foot quadrant completed for him in 1750 by John Bird (1700–1776), he accumulated at Greenwich in ten years materials of inestimable value for the reform of astronomy. A crown pension of £250 a year was conferred upon him in 1752. He retired in broken health, nine years later, to Chalford in Gloucestershire, and there died on the 13th of July 1762. The printing of his observations was delayed by disputes about their ownership; but they were finally issued from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in two folio volumes (1798, 1805). The insight and industry of F. W. Bessel were, however, needed for the development of their fundamental importance.
Rigaud’s Memoir prefixed to Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence of James Bradley, D.D. (Oxford, 1832), is practically exhaustive. Other sources of information are: New and General Biographical Dictionary, xii. 54 (1767); Biog. Brit. (Kippis); Fouchy’s “Éloge,” Paris Memoirs (1762), p. 231 (Histoire); Delambre’s Hist. de l’astronomie au 18me siècle, p. 413.
BRADSHAW, GEORGE (1801–1853), English printer and publisher, was born at Windsor Bridge, Pendleton, Lancashire, on the 29th of July 1801. On leaving school he was apprenticed to an engraver at Manchester, eventually setting up on his own account in that city as an engraver and printer—principally of maps. His name was already known as the publisher of Bradshaw’s Maps of Inland Navigation, when in 1839, soon after the introduction of railways, he published, at sixpence, Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables, the title being changed in 1840 to Bradshaw’s Railway Companion, and the price raised to one shilling. A new volume was issued at occasional intervals, a supplementary monthly time-sheet serving to keep the book up to date. In December 1841, acting on a suggestion made by his London agent, Mr W. J. Adams, Bradshaw reduced the price of his time-tables to the original sixpence, and began to issue them monthly under the title Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide. In June 1847 was issued the first number of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide, giving the time-tables of the Continental railways just as Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide gave the time-tables of the railways of the United Kingdom. Bradshaw, who was a well-known member of the Society of Friends, and gave considerable time to philanthropic work, died in 1853.
BRADSHAW, HENRY (c. 1450–1513), English poet, was born at Chester. In his boyhood he was received into the Benedictine monastery of St Werburgh, and after studying with other novices of his order at Gloucester (afterwards Worcester) College, Oxford, he returned to his monastery at Chester. He wrote a Latin treatise De antiquitate et magnificentia Urbis Cestriae, which is lost, and a life of the patron saint of his monastery in English seven-lined stanza. This work was completed in the year of its author’s death, 1513, mentioned in “A balade to the auctour” printed at the close of the work. A second ballad describes him as “Harry Braddeshaa, of Chestre abbey monke.” Bradshaw disclaims the merit of originality and quotes the authorities from which he translates—Bede, William of Malmesbury, Giraldus Cambrensis, Alfred of Beverley, Henry of Huntingdon, Ranulph Higden, and especially the “Passionary” or life of the saint preserved in the monastery. The poem, therefore, which is defined by its editor, Dr Carl Horstmann, as a “legendary epic,” is rather a compilation than a translation. It contains a good deal of history beside the actual life of the saint. St Werburgh was the daughter of Wulfere, king of Mercia, and Bradshaw gives a description of the kingdom of Mercia, with a full account of its royal house. He relates the history of St Ermenilde and St Sexburge, mother and grandmother of Werburgh, who were successively abbesses of Ely. He does not neglect the miraculous elements of the story, but he is more attracted by historical fact than legend, and the second book narrates the Danish invasion of 875, and describes the history and antiquities of Chester, from its foundation by the legendary giant Leon Gaur, from which he derives the British name of Caerleon, down to the great fire which devastated the city in 1180, but was suddenly extinguished when the shrine of St Werburgh was carried in procession through the streets. The Holy Lyfe and History of saynt Werburge very frutefull for all Christen people to rede (printed by Richard Pynson, 1521) has been very variously estimated. Thomas Warton, who deals with Bradshaw at some length,[1] quotes as the most splendid passage of the poem the description of the feast preceding Werburgh’s entry into the religious life. He considered Bradshaw’s versification “infinitely inferior to Lydgate’s worst manner.” Dr Horstmann, on the other hand, finds in the poem “original genius, of a truly epic tone, with a
- ↑ History of English Poetry (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1871; iii. pp. 140-149).
