Arthur West Haddan

Arthur West Haddan (1816–1873) was an English churchman and academic, of High Church Anglican views, now remembered as an ecclesiastical historian, particularly for Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, written with William Stubbs.

He was born at Woodford, Essex on 31 August 1816, the son of Thomas Haddan, solicitor, and Mary Ann his wife and second cousin, whose maiden name was also Haddan. Thomas Henry Haddan was his brother. He received his early education at a private school kept by a Mr. Fanning at Finchley. In 1834 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, as a commoner, and in the November of that year stood unsuccessfully for a scholarship at Balliol College, but was elected scholar of Trinity College, Oxford. 15 June 1835. He graduated B.A. in 1837, obtaining a first-class in classics and a second in mathematics, proceeded M.A. in due course, and took the degree of B.D.

After graduating he applied himself to theology, and in 1839 was elected to the university Johnson theological scholarship, and to a fellowship at his college. He was deeply affected by the religious revival at Oxford, and was much influenced by Isaac Williams, then a tutor of Trinity. At Trinity the effect of the tractarian movement was to lead some adherents to the study of history in order, in the first instance, to maintain the historical position and claims of the church. Haddan was a loyal Anglican who defended its apostolic character. Having been ordained deacon on his fellowship in 1840, he acted for about a year as curate of the church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, to John Henry Newman. He was ordained priest in 1842, and on being appointed to succeed Williams as classical tutor of his college, resigned his curacy.

He was Dean of Trinity College for several years and afterwards vice-president, and was pro-proctor to Henry Peter Guillemard when in 1845 the proctors put their veto on the proceedings against Newman. An austere scholar, for some time after his ordination he was engaged in work for the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. From the date of its first publication in 1846 he wrote much for The Guardian, the High Church weekly, and he also sent many reviews to the Christian Remembrancer. The judgment on the Gorham case in 1850 troubled him, and for a while he doubted whether he could conscientiously accept a benefice; he found csatisfaction through studying the foundation of the Church of England's claims. Some of the results of his studies on this subject were afterwards embodied in his book on the apostolic succession in the Church of England. In this work, besides stating the nature of the doctrine, its importance, and its scriptural basis, he refuted the Nag's Head fable, which he had already worked on in his edition of John Bramhall's works, concluding the validity of Anglican orders.

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