Robert South

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Robert South (September 4, 1634 - July 8, 1716), was an English churchman. He was the son of Robert South, a London merchant, and Elizabeth Berry.

He was born at Hackney, Middlesex, and was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church College, Oxford. Before taking orders in 1658 he was a champion of Calvinism against Socinianism and Arminianism. He also showed a leaning to Presbyterianism, but on the approach of the Restoration his views on church government underwent a change; he was regarded by many as a time-server, though not necessarily a self-seeker.

On August 10, 1660 he was chosen public orator of the university, and in 1661 domestic chaplain to Lord Clarendon. In March 1663 he was made prebendary of Westminster, and shortly afterwards he received from his university the degree of D.D. In 1667 he became chaplain to the Duke of York. A zealous advocate of the doctrine of passive obedience, he strongly opposed the Toleration Act, declaiming in unmeasured terms against the various Nonconformist sects. In 1676 he was appointed chaplain to Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, ambassador-extraordinary to the king of Poland, and he sent an interesting account of his visit to Edward Pococke in a letter, dated Dantzic, December 16, 1677, which was printed along with South's Posthumous Works in 1717. In 1678 he was presented to the rectory of Islip, Oxfordshire.

Owing, it is said, to a personal grudge, South in 1693 published Animadversions on Dr Sherlock's Book, entitled a Vindication of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity, in which the views of William Sherlock were anonymously attacked with sarcastic bitterness. Sherlock published a Defence in 1694, to which South replied in Tritheism Charged upon Dr Sherlock's New Notion of the Trinity, and the Charge Made Good. The controversy was carried by the rival parties into the pulpit, and occasioned such keen feeling that the king interposed to stop it. During the greater part of the reign of Anne South remained comparatively quiet, but in 1710 he ranked himself among the partisans of Henry Sacheverell. He declined the see of Rochester and the deanery of Westminster in 1713. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

South had a vigorous style and his sermons had homely and humorous appeal. His wit inclines towards sarcasm, and his quarrelsome temperament may have prevented his promotion to a bishopric. He was noted for the extent of his charity. He published a large number of single sermons, and they appeared in a collected form in 1692 in six volumes, reaching a second edition in his lifetime in 1715. There have been several later issues; one in two volumes, with a memoir (Bohn, 1845). His Opera posthuma latina, including his will, his Latin poems, and his orations while public orator, with memoirs of his life, appeared in 1717. An edition of his works in 7 vols. was published at Oxford in 1823, another in 5 vols in 1842. See also WC Lake, Classic Preachers of the English Church (1st series, 1877). The contemporary notice of South by Anthony Wood in his Athenae is strongly hostile, said to be due to a jest made by South at Wood's expense.

South gave orders that his ashes should rest near those of his Master Busby at Westminster Abbey. At the south wall of the sanctuary stands a large monument of white marble with a reclining figure, right arm on a cushion, and hand on a skull, and a closed book in the left. The background is framed by two fluted Corintian column, on either side of an inscription tablet, surmounted by a glory, and two cherubs on drapery. On the cornice is an armorial cartouche decorated with flora festoonns, between two flaming urns.