Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Bath & Wells & Non-Juror
June 8 · d. 1711
also known as Thomas Ken of Bath and Wells
Thomas Ken was an English bishop and a father of English hymnody, remembered most for the verses you now know as just “The Doxology.” Those verses were originally from two hymns he wrote for his students to frame the Christian day, the morning "Awake, my soul, and with the sun" and the evening "All praise to thee, my God, this night.” You can find both in the Commontide hymnal. As royal chaplain, Ken famously held to his conscience even standing up to monarchs repeatedly on principle. He refused to let the king’s mistress, Nell Gwyn, be lodged in his residence, a refusal Charles II apparently respected, later appointing him Bishop of Bath and Wells. After the Glorious Revolution brought William and Mary to the throne, Ken refused to swear a new oath of allegiance because he believed he remained bound by the oath he had already sworn to James II in exile. He lost his bishopric for it. He is called a Non-Juror confessor (those who do not swear), and is honored for choosing conscience over comfort, a theme throughout his life.
Thomas Ken was an orphaned English priest, born in 1637 at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire and raised at Winchester, the same college whose students he would one day iconically teach to sing and pray. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his older sister Ann and her husband Izaak Walton (who wrote the classic The Compleat Angler).
For his students at Winchester College he wrote a little book of devotions, and into it he put three hymns, one for the morning, one for the evening, one for the dead of night, so that the whole of a Christian day might be carried on song. The morning hymn began Awake, my soul, and with the sun, thy daily stage of duty run. The evening hymn began All praise to thee, my God, this night, for all the blessings of the light. All three of them closed on the same four lines, the lines the English-speaking church has since sung more than any other words: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; praise him, all creatures here below; praise him above, ye heavenly host; praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." His last verses became what we now sing as just “The Doxology” across virtually every Christian tradition.
After standing up to King Charles II, and refusing to endorse or house his mistress, he apparently won his respect and was eventually appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells for his courage. Charles eventually died, and Thomas’s allegiance passed to King James II. When James fled and William and Mary took the throne in 1688, the new king required every bishop to swear a fresh oath of loyalty. Here the plainness and clear conviction that made Ken's hymns so poignant became the thing that cost him everything. He held that an oath sworn before God to a living king could not be unsaid because the politics had changed, and so he would not swear it while James lived. For that refusal he was stripped of his bishopric, his income, and his home, and he passed his last twenty years a guest in another man's house at Longleat in Wiltshire, a bishop of no diocese.
He did not grow bitter. He kept the faith he had always kept, and when he came to write his will he set it down without flourish: I die in the holy catholic and apostolic faith, professed by the whole church before the division of East and West, and more particularly, he added, in the communion with the Church of England. He died in 1711, still outside the settlement his conscience would not let him accept. But the country that had taken his vocation never stopped singing his words. Every morning that a congregation wakes its soul with the sun, and every night it asks to be kept beneath almighty wings, and every time four short lines of praise rise to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Thomas Ken continues to teach the church to pray.
How we know Thomas Ken rests on unusually firm ground for a man of his period. His hymns survive in datable printings from the 1690s, so their wording can be followed edition by edition. One detail rewards the curious: the evening hymn first appeared as "Glory to thee, my God, this night," and Ken himself revised the opening to "All praise to thee" in his edition of 1709, just as he changed the doxology's third line from "ye angelick host" to "ye heavenly host." The forms sung today are typically his own final editions. His public stands are recorded in the acts of states that punished or censured him. In 1688 he was one of the Seven Bishops tried and acquitted for refusing to publish James II's Declaration of Indulgence, and in 1691 he was deprived of his see as a Non-Juror, one of the clergy who would not abjure their oath to the exiled king. His faith at the last is preserved in his own will, quoted verbatim in the Dictionary of National Biography. The standard life is Edward Plumptre's two-volume biography of 1888, built from manuscript and documentary sources. Where later memory softens into anecdote, such as his reported refusal to lodge the king's mistress in his house at Winchester, the incident is attested but the exact words are not.
Ken founded no order and worked no miracles that the church recorded. His commemoration rests on two things instead: the hymns, which entered Prayer Book practice and have never left it, and the memory of his conscience. The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century recovered him as a pattern of apostolic fidelity, a bishop who counted a clear conscience worth more than a cathedral, and the Non-Juror tradition honors him as a confessor, one who suffered for the faith without being asked to die for it. His feast is kept on June 8. The doxology that closes his morning and evening hymns, sung the world over to the old tune called Old Hundredth, is now so woven into common worship that many who sing it have never learned whose words they were.
A Manual of Prayers for the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College(1674 (hymns added 1695))
Where Ken's three day-framing hymns and the doxology first reached the public, written for schoolboys' private devotion.
Public domain: Hymn texts at Hymnary, Cyber Hymnal (Morning / Evening / Doxology)
The Life of Thomas Ken, D.D., Bishop of Bath and Wells(1888)
The standard Victorian biography, sympathetic and document-rich; still the indispensable Life. Public domain, no in-print commercial edition.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Further reading. Edward H. Plumptre, The Life of Thomas Ken, D.D., Bishop of Bath and Wells (2 vols., 1888), remains the standard biography and is freely available. The fullest short account of his life, deprivation, and will is the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. Ken's own hymns and devotions, first gathered in A Manual of Prayers for the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College, are widely reprinted.
Online resources. The texts of the morning and evening hymns and the doxology are at Hymnary.org and the Cyber Hymnal. Plumptre's Life is at the Internet Archive. The DNB entry is at Wikisource.
British (Received Pronunciation): Berkhamsted /ˈbɜːrkəmstɛd/; Hertfordshire /ˈhɑːt.fəd.ʃɪər/
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Thomas Ken to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.