Ezekiel Hopkins

He was born in Devon and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a chorister from 1648 to 1653 and graduated with a B.A. in 1655 and M.A. in 1656.[1] After 1660, he was assistant to William Spurstow in Hackney, but he conformed after the Act of Uniformity 1662, becoming a lecturer in London. In 1666, he became minister of St. Mary Arches, Exeter.[2]

Lord Robartes appointed Hopkins his chaplain upon becoming Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1669. Hopkins became Treasurer of Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford in 1669.[3] In 1670, he became Dean of Raphoe, and the following year, Bishop of Raphoe. His translation to Derry was in 1681. Despite being summoned by James II of England to the short-lived Patriot Parliament in Dublin, in 1689 he returned to England, becoming a preacher at St. Mary Aldermanbury, and dying on 19 June 1690.[2]

His written legacy includes his Expositions of the Ten Commandments, which remains in print in the modern era.

Hopkins married his first wife, Alicia Moore (d.1681), a niece of Sir Robert Viner, sometime Lord Mayor of London, to whom he dedicated his Vanity of the World. They had two sons, Charles (1664–1700), poet and dramatist, and John (born 1675), the author of Amasia. In 1685, at Totteridge, Ezekiel Hopkins married his second wife, Lady Araminta Robartes, the eldest daughter of John Robartes, 1st Earl of Radnor, and his second wife, Isabella, daughter of Sir John Smith.[2] He and his second wife were the parents of Francis, who was the grandfather of Sir Francis Hopkins M.P., 1st Baronet of Athboy, County Meath.

• Works by Ezekiel Hopkins at Post-Reformation Digital Library

Attribution

Dunlop, Robert (1891). "Hopkins, Ezekiel" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 27. London: Smith, Elder & Co.