Darwin and the Church

St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury
© Shrewsbury Chronicle

• Charles was baptised on 15 November 1809 at St Chad's Church, Shrewsbury. 
  
  

• At the age of nine he became a boarder at Shrewsbury School, a Church of England school which had become one of the best in the country.
  
  
• His father enrolled him at Christ’s College, Cambridge to read theology in 1827, and Charles was intended for the Anglican priesthood.
  
  
• Although Darwin's mentor in natural history in Cambridge, Revd John Stevens Henslow, took Holy Orders in 1824, and served as a country clergyman in Cholsey-cum-Moulsford, Oxfordshire, and Hitcham, Suffolk, his main passion for much of his life was botany. He was Regius Professor of Botany at the time of Darwin's studies in Cambridge.
  
  
• He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, a devout Anglican, in 1839 at St Peter’s Church, Maer, Shropshire.
  
  
• Initial responses from the Church of England to Darwin's theories were hostile - even from former Cambridge tutors Revd John Stevens Henslow and Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), the latter drawing on his faith to propose a difference between moral and physical truths. In 1860, a public debate in Oxford saw the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (1805–1873), known as Soapy Sam due to his passion for public debating, arguing bitterly against the pro-Darwin voices of botanist Joseph Hooker (1817-1911) and biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895).
  
  
• Although Darwin lived in the village of Downe in Kent for many years, the only memorial to him at St Mary's Church is a sundial on the outside of the south wall. There is a stone in memory of some family members outside the church door on the west of the path. Emma and his brother were buried in the east part of the churchyard near the fence bordering High Elms Road.
  
  
• Darwin died in 1882 at Down House, Downe; instead of being buried at St Mary’s, Downe, he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Isaac Newton following a state funeral.