Isaac Williams

Writer

• Born: December 12, 1802
• Birthplace: Cwmcynfelin, Llangorwen, Cardiganshire, Wales
• Died: May 1, 1865

Biography

Isaac Williams was born on December 12, 1802, at Cwmcynfelyn, an estate overlooking the village of Llangorwen, near Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, Wales. He was one of five children born to Isaac Lloyd Williams, a county magistrate, and Anne Davies Williams, the daughter of Matthew Davies of Cwncynfelyn, a former high sheriff of Cardiganshire. Isaac Lloyd Williams also was a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and the family’s chief residence was on Southampton Street in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, although they later relocated to the Belgravia neighborhood.

Williams and his three brothers were tutored by a clergyman named Polehampton. They moved with him to Worplesdon, near Guildford, England, where he was appointed curate. The brothers then moved to Harrow, England, in 1817. In Harrow, Williams capped a glittering career by captaining the cricket team in 1821. Following the death of Matthew Davies, the Williams family settled at Cwmcynfelyn, but the family became impoverished by a lawsuit in which Anne and her sister fought over division of their father’s estate.

Williams matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford University, where he held a scholarship from 1822 through 1831. However, he spent more time in Oriel College, where he met John Keble and other young men who were later to form the core of the sternly reformist Tractarian Movement, more familiarly known as the Oxford Movement. These men included Sir George Prevost, who married Williams’s sister, Jane, in 1828, and Richard Hurrell Froude, who introduced Williams to the Champernowne family of Dartington, where Froude’s father was rector. Williams proposed marriage to the sixteen-year-old Caroline Champernowne in 1827, but the engagement foundered because Froude urged Williams to remain celibate, in keeping with the spirit of the embryonic Oxford Movement.

Williams’s studies at Oxford were aborted because of poor health, but he was granted a B.A. in 1826, an M.A. in 1831, and a bachelor of divinity degree in 1839. After failing to obtain a fellowship at Oriel, he was ordained a deacon in December, 1829, and he took a curacy at Sherborne-in-Windrush. Continually afflicted with asthma, Williams began writing poetry there and continued when he returned to Oxford, having obtained a fellowship at Trinity College in 1831. He lectured in philosophy in 1832, served as dean in 1833, lectured in rhetoric from 1834 through 1840, and was college vice president from 1841 through 1842, providing a model of moral austerity and academic rigor.

Williams gained a reputation as the Oxford Movement’s exemplary poet by means of verses published in the British Magazine that were reprinted in the anthology Lyra apostolica (1836) and other books. However, one of his contributions to the movement’s Tracts for the Times series, A Few Remarks on the Charge of the Lord Bishop of Glocester and Bristol on the Subject of Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge as Taught in the Tracts for the Times, caused considerable controversy; Williams thought it cost him the prestigious position of professor of poetry at Oxford in 1841, when he expected to succeed Keble. He left Oxford thereafter, further disillusioned by a split with John Henry Newman, who quit the Oxford Movement and converted to Catholicism.

Williams finally married the patient Caroline Champernowne on June 22, 1842, at Bisley in Gloucestershire, England, and settled there as curate to Thomas Keble. He fell gravely ill in 1846 but survived and moved to Sticnhcombe in 1848, where he was curate to Prevost. Williams died on May 1, 1865.