Bishop of London; fellow of Merton College, Oxford, 1866; B.A., 1867; tutor; held living of Embleton, Northumberland, 1875–84; rural dean of Alnwick, 1879; took prominent part in organising new diocese of Newcastle, 1881, was examining chaplain to Bishop Wilberforce, 1882; honorary canon of Newcastle, 1883; published, 1882, the first two volumes of his “History of the Papacy” (vols. iii. and iv., appearing in 1887, vol. v., 1894); honorary D.D., Cambridge; first Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history, and fellow of Emanuel College, Cambridge, 1884; first editor of “English Historical Review,” 1886–91; canon of Worcester, 1885; canon of Windsor, 1890; bishop of Peterborough, 1891; represented English church at coronation of Emperor Nicholas II. at Moscow, 1896; first president of Church Historical Society, 1894–1901; Hulsean lecturer, 1893–4, and Rede lecturer, 1895, at Cambridge; Romanes lecturer at Oxford, 1896; bishop of London, 1897; opposed the extravagances of some of the ritualistic clergy; D.D. Oxford and Cambridge; Hon. LL.D. Glasgow and Harvard; Hon. D.C.L. Oxford and Durham; Hon. Litt.D. Durham. His works include “The Age of Elizabeth,” 1876; “Cardinal Wolsey,” 1888; “Queen Elizabeth,” 1896; and numerous sermons, lectures, and historical and other writings. He contributed several memoirs to the “Dictionary of National Biography.”

Personal

  As a preacher, Creighton improved after he became a bishop. In earlier days, he had been dull and dry in the pulpit; of all exercises of his talent, I used to think this the one in which he shone the least. But he was an interesting lecturer, an uncertain although occasionally felicitous orator, and an unrivaled after-dinner speaker…. On all ceremonial and professional occasions Creighton rose to the event. He could so hold himself as to be the most dignified figure in England…. He was noticeably tall, lean, square-shouldered. All through his youth and early middle age his frame was sinewy, like that of a man accustomed to athletic exercises, although he played no games. His head was held erect, the cold blue-gray eyes ever on the alert. His hair was red, and he wore a bushy beard, which was lately beginning to turn grizzled. The clearness of his pink complexion and the fineness and smoothness of his skin were noticeable quite late on in his life. The most remarkable feature of his face, without doubt, was his curious mouth, sensitive and mobile, yet constantly closing with a snap in the act of will. Nothing was more notable and pleasing than the way in which his severe, keen face, braced by the aquiline nose to a disciplinarian austerity, lightened up and softened with this incessantly recurrent smile.

  There was something singularly attractive and also singularly Christian in the kindness which underlay Dr. Creighton’s superficial irony and cynicism. His pecuniary generosity, perhaps the cheapest form of the virtue, is known to have been great. His hospitality was unbounded, and seemed to be part of his nature. There was nothing of the recluse in him. He really and truly loved all sorts and conditions of men. He also, I fancy, felt that most of them had rather a dull time, and he was the more determined that they should not be dull when they were with him. He and Mrs. Creighton adopted the pleasant theory that Fulham was a country-house, to which Londoners might be asked from Saturday till Monday. To his friends the Bishop was more than kind; he was sympathetic, warm-hearted, and affectionate. And he was always the same. Whatever worries he might have in his diocese, he did not inflict them, or the depression they must have caused, upon his guests…. He was the best practical Christian I have ever known.

  In person Creighton was tall, spare, and upright; and his lithe and wiry figure showed great capacity for enduring fatigue. His features were regular and finely cut; his hands long and well-shaped, and he wore a long beard. Extremely scrupulous about his dress and personal appearance, he was not averse to a certain degree of external magnificence on proper occasions, and generally wore his mitre as bishop. Hospitably inclined, with a large circle of friends, he was always accessible, and never appeared hurried or preoccupied. His conversation was sparkling and witty, and he had a large fund of humorous anecdote. A certain love of paradox, a shrewdness which some mistook for cynicism, a notable lack of unction, and occasional lapses into flippancy as a protest against cant or a refuge from boredom, sometimes conveyed a wrong impression, concealing the natural kindliness, the wide sympathy, the deep inner seriousness of a man who was more highly appreciated the more fully he was known. His domestic life was of the happiest, and he left a family of three sons and four daughters.

General

  Dr. Creighton was among the ablest and most learned historians of the century. The work which he did before he became a bishop—I mean his “History of the Papacy during the Reformation”—will long outlast the fruits of his episcopal labours, important as they were.

  Though devoid of the pictorial power of Macaulay and the majesty of Gibbon, his narrative is more picturesque and animated than that of the unimpassioned Ranke; and he fully recognises the existence of general laws controlling individual action, while his good sense shows him that the action is more ascertained than the law. He thus avoids the besetting sins of some modern schools of history, the substitution of mere disquisition for narrative, and the ambitious reconstruction after merely subjective data. Nor did he belong to the more serviceable if less speciously gifted class of writers who imagine themselves to be writing history while they are merely purveying its materials. He aimed and he attained to present a faithful picture of the age he delineated; but this was a picture not from the point of view of the dramatist, or the observer of manners, or the sympathiser with the general condition of the people, but from that of the statesman: and perhaps no reflection upon his History has so frequently visited the minds of those personally acquainted with him as one upon the part he might himself have performed had his lot been cast in an age when the ecclesiastical profession was rather a help than a hindrance to effective participation in public affairs…. We may well claim for the Bishop that he has, beyond all the historians of his day, exemplified the virtue of impartiality.

  Bishop Creighton owed his great reputation to his versatility…. Some of the writings and addresses of Bishop Creighton have been published since his death. Their strength lies in their humanity; their influence is likely to be such as to keep in mind the career of a man who did more to reconcile the differences which separate the intellectual from the clerical classes than any prelate or writer of his time.