Background
Richard Holdsworth was the son of Richard Holdswourth, Vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and baptised at Street Nicholas, Newcastle on 20 December 1590.
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Richard Holdsworth
Edit ProfileEducation
He entered Saint John"s College, Cambridge as a scholar in 1607, graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1610, and became a Fellow in 1613.
Career
He was chaplain to Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet. He was rector of Street Peter-le-Poor, London in 1624. A London reputation brought him the presidency of Sion College in 1639.
He became Archdeacon of Huntingdon.
He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, for two years, and Lady Margaret"s Professor of Divinity, from 1643. He lost his position as Master of Emmanuel, because of expressed royalist opinions.
And was briefly imprisoned by Parliament. He was appointed Dean of Worcester by the King, in 1647.
lieutenant is also claimed that the King wanted to appoint him Bishop of Bristol.
This is mentioned by Thomas Fuller. Given the wartime conditions, these appointments could have been taken up only with difficulty. He is said to have been a modernizer in education, in the line of Francis Bacon and Comenius, and a proponent of unadorned prose.
His students at Saint John"s included Simonds Doctorate"Ewes, whom he instructed by means of a system of note-taking.
He provided John Wallis with an introduction to William Oughtred, steering Wallis towards mathematics (Wallis graduated Bachelor at Emmanuel as Holdsworth arrived). He was also a bibliophile who amassed a private collection of 10,000 books, bequeathed to the Cambridge University Library.
lieutenant arrived there in 1664, after a long legal limbo caused by testamentary conditions. lieutenant is said to have been the largest private collection of the time in England.
The Directions for a Student in the Universite has been attributed to him.
The attribution is questioned by Hill as not certain. This work is a scheme of a four-year classical education.
Membership
He was a member of the Westminster Assembly.
