page_title: Charles James Blomfield
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Charles James Blomfield / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Grave of Charles James Blomfield, All Saints Church (Fulham)
context_page_description: Charles James Blomfield was a British divine and classicist, and a Church of England bishop for 32 years.
context_section_description: Blomfield was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College in 1809. The first-fruits of his scholarship was an edition of the Prometheus of Aeschylus in 1810; this was followed by editions of the Septem contra Thebas, Persae, Choephori, and Agamemnon, of Callimachus, and of the fragments of Sappho, Sophron and Alcaeus.
  Blomfield, however, soon ceased to devote himself entirely to scholarship. Ordained deacon in March 1810 and priest in June 1810, he held a curacy at Chesterford, then the following livings:
  Rector of Quarrington, Lincolnshire (1810–20)
  Rector of Dunton, Buckinghamshire (1811–17)
  Rector of Tuddenham, Suffolk (1817–20)
  Vicar and Rector of Little Chesterford, Essex (1817–24)
  Rector of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London (1820–28)
  Whilst at Dunton he educated George Spencer (later Ignatius Spencer), and they corresponded for several years after. In 1817 he was appointed private chaplain to William Howley, Bishop of London.  In 1819 he was nominated to the rich living of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, and in 1822 he became Archdeacon of Colchester.  Two years later he was raised to the bishopric as Bishop of Chester where he carried through many much-needed reforms.
  In 1828, he was appointed a Privy Counsellor and translated becoming Bishop of London, a post which he held for twenty-eight years.  During this period, his energy and zeal did much to extend the influence of the church.  He was one of the best debaters in the House of Lords (members of the Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation confessed to trimming their quill pens before his arrival!), took a leading position in the action for church reform which culminated in the ecclesiastical commission, and did much for the extension of the colonial episcopate; and his genial and kindly nature made him an invaluable mediator in the controversies arising out of the tractarian movement.
caption: Funerary monument, All Saints, Fulham, London.
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