The Revd James Turner: Twenty-One Years as Vicar of Fareham

The Revd James Turner served as Vicar of Fareham from 1668 to 1689, remaining at St Peter & St Paul for twenty-one years. The church’s own historical list of vicars confirms those dates.

We currently know very little with certainty about Turner himself. There were several clergymen called James Turner in seventeenth-century England, and there is not enough evidence to attach their biographies confidently to the Vicar of Fareham. What we can reconstruct much more clearly is the extraordinary world in which he ministered.

Turner arrived only eight years after the restoration of Charles II and six years after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 had re-established the Book of Common Prayer and required clergy to conform to the restored Church of England. Ministers who could not accept the settlement had been removed from their livings. Turner therefore inherited a parish still living through the consequences of the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration.

Fareham itself was already an established market town and small port, trading through Fareham Creek. Nearby Portsmouth was becoming increasingly important to the Royal Navy. During the seventeenth century Portsmouth and Gosport grew much faster than much of the surrounding area, and investment in Portsmouth Dockyard accelerated after the Restoration. New naval facilities and fortifications were being constructed while Turner was serving just a few miles away.

Naval affairs would therefore have been difficult for Fareham to ignore. Turner began his ministry only a year after one of the most humiliating episodes in Royal Navy history: the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1667, when Dutch forces penetrated the English naval base at Chatham and destroyed or captured numerous warships. The disaster helped drive reforms that contributed to the increasingly professional Royal Navy of the following century.

Religion remained equally unsettled. During Turner's ministry Parliament passed the Test Act of 1673, requiring holders of many public offices to demonstrate conformity with the Church of England. Fear of Roman Catholic influence grew during the 1670s, followed by the Exclusion Crisis over whether the Catholic James, Duke of York, should be allowed to succeed Charles II.

Then, in 1685, Charles II died and James II became king. Within three years the country was again in political and religious crisis. Seven bishops were prosecuted after resisting James’s religious policy, William of Orange was invited to intervene, and James fled England during the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Turner’s final year as Vicar of Fareham, 1689, was therefore another turning point. Parliament established William III and Mary II on the throne, while the Toleration Act gave legal recognition to many Protestant Nonconformists outside the Church of England. That settlement helped define the constitutional position of the Church of England for generations afterwards.

We may know little about James Turner personally, but we know that for twenty-one years he stood in the same parish church in Fareham while England passed through naval war, fierce religious controversy, three monarchs and a revolution.

Children he baptised in 1668 would have been young adults by the time he left. Families he married would have grown up around him. Through all that change, Turner remained the Vicar of Fareham.

His name in the succession of St Peter & St Paul therefore gives the parish a direct connection with one of the most important periods in the formation of modern Britain and the Church of England.