Background
Edward White Benson was the son of a manufacturing chemist.
Edward White Benson was the son of a manufacturing chemist.
After holding various minor ecclesiastical offices, became chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1875.
As primate of all England, he sought to restrain the more extreme followers of the Oxford Movement, although he himself was of the "high church" school, and he took a leading part in establishing a more settled relationship between the various "parties" of the Church of England. Benson was one of those who tried Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, for unauthorized ritualist practices. The famous Lincoln Judgment set the limits of ceremony in the Church of England, though Benson was unwilling to enforce it by legal procedure; after his death on Oct. 11, 1896, its decisions fell into desuetude.