William Vincent

William Vincent
Religion	Church of England
Personal
Born	2 November 1739 Limehouse Street Ward, London
Died	21 December 1815 (aged 76) Islip, Oxfordshire
Senior posting
Based in	England
Title	Dean of Westminster
Period in office	1802–1815
Predecessor	Samuel Horsley
Successor	John Ireland

William Vincent (2 November 1739 – 21 December 1815) was Dean of Westminster from 1803 to 1815.

Vincent born on 2 November 1739 in Limehouse Street Ward, London, was the fifth surviving son of Giles Vincent, packer and Portugal merchant, by Sarah (Holloway).

William was admitted at Westminster School as a 'town boy' in 1747; he became a king's scholar in 1753, and in 1757 was elected to Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating as BA in 1761, he returned to Westminster as usher. He became second master in June 1771, and in the same year was made chaplain in ordinary to the king. He graduated MA in 1764 and DD in 1776, and two years later received the vicarage of Longdon, Wiltshire, which, however, he exchanged within six months for the rectory of All Hallows, Thames Street. In 1784 he became sub-almoner to the king. He shared the tory views of his family, and in 1780 published anonymously a Letter in reply to a sermon preached at Cambridge by Richard Watson. A sermon preached by him in 1792 at St. Margaret's, Westminster, for the benefit of the greycoat charity, attracted attention, and when reprinted in the following year by the Patriotic Association against republicans and levellers, twenty thousand copies were sold.

Meanwhile, in 1788, Vincent had been appointed headmaster of Westminster. He held the position for fourteen years, respected alike for both scholarship and character. His swinging pace, sonorous quotations, and especially his loud call of "Eloquere, puer, eloquere" ("Speak out, boy!") dwelt long in the memory of his scholars. His name is perpetuated by his enclosure of part of the nearby Tothill Fields for his old school as a playground, called Vincent Square after him. As the waste marshlands of the Tuttle or Tothill Fields were beginning to be built over, Vincent simply employed a man with a horse to plough a ditch around an area of some eleven acres; his receipt for the fee is in the Abbey archives. Vincent thus secured for the schoolboys at minimal cost an area of SW1 which two hundred years later would easily be worth a hundred million pounds. In his adherence to corporal punishment he resembled his predecessor, Richard Busby; and in 1792 he expelled Robert Southey for his contributions to an anti-flogging periodical, The Flagellant. The attention he paid to his pupils' religious education rendered him well qualified to answer the attacks of Thomas Rennell, master of the Temple, and Thomas Lewis O'Beirne, bishop of Meath, who had charged headmasters with neglecting this branch of their duties. Vincent's Defence of Public Education, issued as a reply to the latter in 1801, reached a third edition two years later, and occasioned some controversy. In April 1801 he was nominated by William Pitt, the Prime Minister, to a canonry of Westminster. When in the following year Pitt's successor, Henry Addington, offered him the deanery of Westminster "as a public reward for public services", this was understood to refer to his recent publication. He was presented as dean on 3 August 1802, becoming the first dean since the late 17th century not to have held the office in conjunction with that of Bishop of Rochester.

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