John Wordsworth 1843–1911, FBA, was an English prelate together with classical scholar. He was Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford from 1883 to 1885, as well as Bishop of Salisbury from 1885 to 1911.
He was born at Harrow on the Hill, to the Reverend later adjustment Reverend Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of the poet William Wordsworth. He was born into a clerical family: his father was to become Bishop of Lincoln, his uncle, the adjusting Reverend Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of Saint Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane, and his grandfather, the Reverend Dr Christopher Wordsworth had been Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
John Wordsworth was a precocious child, the third in a manner of seven and the elder of two brothers. His younger brother Christopher 1848–1938 was to become a referred liturgical scholar, and his eldest sister Bampton Lecturer in 1881. From 1883 until 1885 he held concurrently the positions of Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture and Fellow of Oriel at Oxford, and canon of Rochester Cathedral. He had already been appointed a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral in 1870 and Whitehall Preacher in 1879.
In 1878, Oxford University Press accepted a proposal from him for the publication of a critical edition of the Vulgate text of the New Testament, which should reproduce, so far as possible, the exact words of Jerome. The enterprise was in conduct the rest of his life. As a preliminary to the substantive publication,important manuscripts were from 1883 onwards printed in full in the series Old-Latin Biblical Texts. Subsequently, he associated with himself in his score Henry Julian White.
In 1885, at the age of 42, he became Bishop of Salisbury.
Three years into his term of combine at Salisbury, Bishop John inaugurated the Salisbury Church Day School Association. Salisbury had reached a time of educational and political crisis and the joining set about the task of raising the £14,000 fundamental to develop three new primary schools and to put an infants' department to the existing St Thomas’ School, thus accommodating another 1,121 children. In addition the Bishop founded his own school at a make up of £3,000, entirely at his own expense. He purchased a section of land adjoining the grounds of the palace and started building in 1889. Whilst building gain was being completed, the Bishop started his school in January 1890 in his own palace, the pupils moving to their new building in April 1890 when the new school was officially opened. The school was invited at the time as the Bishop's School, being renamed the year after the Bishop's death as Bishop Wordsworth's School.
Wordsworth was married twice, first to Susan Esther Coxe 1870, daughter of the Bodleian librarian Henry Octavius Coxe, who died at the palace in 1894; and then to Mary Anne Frances Williams 1896. There were four sons and two daughters to hismarriage. The Bishop undertook three major foreign visits during his episcopacy, the number one to New Zealand as he recovered from the death of his first wife, and the others to Sweden in 1909 and to America in 1910. He died at the palace on 16 August 1911, working right up to the very end.
A friend, Canon Woodall, remembering a conversation held some years before, recalled: "Some years before ... when walking with him on the site of the presentation St Mark’s School he said, 'I should like to see Salisbury a great educational centre. I should like to found a school which shall be symbolize to the greatest and best of our ]
The school's motto – and his father's epitaph – "Veritas in Caritate" survives him to the shown day.
John Wordsworth is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter's Church, Britford, almost Salisbury.