William Wareing

Who was William Wareing?

Bishop William Wareing was the first Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Northampton.

Born 14 February 1791 in London, and after studying at Oscott College, William Wareing was ordained as a Catholic priest on 28 September 1815, aged 24, by Bishops Thomas Walsh, Nicholas Wiseman and George Hilary Brown.

He worked first on the mission at Moseley, then at Creswell, Staffordshire, until in 1831 when he moved to Grantham in Lincolnshire. In 1833 he moved on to Stamford where he was the town's first properly resident parish priest since the English Reformation. There, he was at least in part responsible for the erection of the new Catholic chapel, a small Gothic building, in 1834, when it was one of only seven Catholic chapels across the whole of Lincolnshire. In 1838, Wareing was appointed one of three "Grand Vicars" for the Midland District and was consecrated as the titular bishop in partibus of Areopolis. More significantly, in 1840, he was appointed as Vicar Apostolic of the newly established Eastern District, which comprised the nine counties of Lincolnshire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. He selected Northampton as the seat of the Vicars Apostolic, and subsequently the Roman Catholic Bishops of Northampton.