The Revd Wyndham Carlyon Madden: Soldier, Clergyman and Vicar of Fareham

The Revd Wyndham Carlyon Madden served as Vicar of Fareham from 1846 to 1852. His six years at St Peter & St Paul were relatively brief, but his life before entering parish ministry was unusually eventful.

Madden was born on 31 August 1793 in the Madras Presidency in India. He was educated at Westminster School and then entered the Army at a remarkably young age, joining the 43rd Regiment of Foot when he was only fourteen.

The 43rd was one of the regiments heavily involved in the Peninsular War. Madden served during that conflict, part of the long campaign in Portugal and Spain in which British and allied forces fought Napoleon’s armies. His early adult life was therefore formed in the military world of the Napoleonic Wars rather than in a parish or university.

After the war, Madden changed direction completely. In 1820 he entered Queen’s College, Cambridge, preparing for a life in the Church. By the middle of the nineteenth century he was an Anglican clergyman, and in 1846 he became Vicar of Fareham.

His arrival came at a significant moment in the town’s history. Victorian Fareham was growing, while nearby Portsmouth continued to expand around the Royal Navy and Dockyard. The district was becoming more urban and more closely connected by road and railway, while the parish church still served as one of the principal institutions of local life.

Madden’s ministry also fell during a period of considerable change within the Church of England. The Oxford Movement had been reshaping Anglican worship and theology since the 1830s, while evangelical Christianity remained influential across the country. Questions about liturgy, church buildings, parish ministry and the identity of the established Church were increasingly prominent.

In 1852 Madden left Fareham and became Rector of Bergh Apton in Norfolk. He was presented to that living by Lord Abergavenny, a relative of his wife Charlotte Leeke, and was formally instituted in December that year. He remained Rector of Bergh Apton until his death on 13 May 1864.

His family continued in clerical life. One of his sons, also named Wyndham, later became Rector of Longford in Shropshire.

Wyndham Carlyon Madden’s story stands out among the vicars of Fareham because his path to ministry was so unusual. Before preaching at St Peter & St Paul, he had already been a teenage soldier and served through the Napoleonic Wars.

For six years, Fareham’s vicar was a man whose life had moved from colonial India to the British Army, from the battlefields of the Peninsula to Cambridge, and finally into parish ministry in Hampshire.