Archbishop of Canterbury. He served in this position from 1896 until his death. He was born in Santa Maura, one of the Greek Ionian Islands, the son of Major Octavius Temple, who was subsequently appointed lieutenant governor of Sierra Leone, and eventually settled in Devon, England. He received his education at Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon and won a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford, England. While at Balliol, he became associated with the Oxford Liberal Movement (also known as the Tractarian Movement) that sought reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. In 1842 he took a double first and was elected fellow of Balliol, and lecturer in mathematics and logic. Four years later he was ordained and with the aim of improving the education of the very poor, he accepted the headship of Kneller Hall at Whitton, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, which was a college founded by the government for the training of masters of workhouses and penal schools. The experiment was not successful, and in 1855 he advised its abandonment. He then accepted a school-inspectorship, which he held until he went to teach at Rugby School at Rugby, Warwickshire, England in 1858, and also earned a Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity Degrees. In the meantime he had attracted the admiration of Prince Albert, the husband of English Queen Victoria, and in 1856 he was appointed Chaplain-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. In 1857 he was select preacher at his university. While at Rugby he strengthened the school's academic reputation in the classics, but also instituted scholarships in natural science, built a laboratory, and recognized the importance of these subjects. He reformed the sporting activities, in spite of all the traditions of the playing fields. Initially, his own tremendous powers of work and rough manner intimidated the pupils, but he soon became popular, and raised the school's reputation to a high standard. His school sermons made a deep impression on the students, teaching loyalty, faith and duty. In 1860 the volume entitled "Essays and Reviews" caused a controversy. The first essay in the book, "The Education of the World," was written by him. The authors of the volume were responsible only for their respective articles, but some of these were deemed so destructive that many people banned the whole book, and an opposition led by Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, called on him to dissociate himself from his comrades. His essay had dealt with the intellectual and spiritual growth of the race, and had pointed out the contributions made respectively by the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and others. Though accepted as harmless, it was blamed for being in the book. He refused to repudiate his associates, and it was only at a much later date (1870) that he decided to withdraw his essay. Meanwhile, he printed a volume of his Rugby sermons, to show his own religious position. Politically, he was a follower of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and he approved of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. He also wrote and spoke in favor of the Elementary Education Act 1870 of William Edward Forster, and was an active member of the Endowed Schools Commission. In 1869 Gladstone had offered him the deanery of Durham, England but declined because he wanted to stay at Rugby. Later in the same year, when the Bishop of Exeter Henry Phillpotts died, Gladstone offered the bishopric to Temple and he accepted and was consecrated in December amid controversy from some of the religious and political leaders. In 1885 he was transferred to the bishopric of London, England and was elected an honorary fellow of Exeter College in Oxford. While there, he began to go blind and offered to resign, but on the sudden death of Archbishop of Canterbury Edward White Benson in 1896, he accepted the position. The following year he presided over the decennial Lambeth Conference and he and Archbishop of York William Maclagan issued a joint response to Apostolicae Curae, an encyclical of the pope which denied the validity of Anglican orders. In 1899 the two archbishops again acted together, when an appeal was addressed to them by the united episcopate, to rule on the use of incense in divine service and on the carrying of lights in liturgical processions. After hearing the arguments the two archbishops decided against both practices. During his archbishopric he became distressed by the divisions which were weakening the Anglican Church, and many of his most memorable sermons were calls for unity. In 1900 he presided over the World Temperance Congress in London, and on one occasion preached in the interests of women's education. On August 9, 1902 he presided over the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, but the strain at his advanced age took a toll on his health. During a speech which he delivered in the House of Lords on December 2, 1902 on the Education Bill of that year, he became ill. Although he revived sufficiently to finish his speech, he never fully recovered and died three weeks later in London at the age of 81. His son, William Temple, also became the Archbishop of Canterbury from April 1942 until his death in October 1944.