His father (also Henry) was Rector of Stowe and is buried at our Henry's previous parish of Worton, near Kidlington.  His mother and four siblings are buried in our churchyard, but there is no record of Henry on the tomb.  Standlake has a modern memorial stone to him set into its chancel floor and his wife is buried at Souldern, her family home.  The discovery of Henry's final resting place will have to await further work in the Bucks and Oxon Record Offices.

Henry's nephew, Henry Dison Gabell, was Second Master of Winchester College from 1793-1810 and Headmaster from 1810-23, and it seems highly probable that he was the 'intriguing young clergyman' who befriended Mary Wollstonecraft when they were both travelling to Ireland in 1786 to take up posts as tutors.

William Henry Barnard (1756-1818, Rector 1814-1818) was not at Water Stratford for long but was Vicar of neighbouring Westbury 1797-1800 and Rector of Finmere 1804-1811.  He was first cousin of Prime Minister George Canning, grandson of William Barnard, Bishop of Derry, and nephew of Thomas Barnard, Dean of Derry and Bishop of Limerick.  Thomas was a friend of the great wits of the day like Dr Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, and the latter wrote of him: 
                    Here lies the good Dean, re-united to earth, 
                    Who mix'd reason with pleasure, and wisdom with mirth; 
                    If he has any faults he has left us in doubt, 
                    At least in six weeks I could not find them out, 
                    Yet some have declar'd, and it can't be denied 'em, 
                    That Slyboots was cursedly cunning to hide 'em.

Our William's personal claim to fame, however, is as an artist: the Tate Gallery acquired twelve of his paintings in 1996 and thumbnails of them can be seen here.  When he was an undergraduate at Oxford he was a pupil of John Baptist Malchair, and his work is similar to that of his teacher, tending to depict humble subjects like Oxford street scenes.  According to our registers he was buried in our churchyard on 21st October 1818 but, unusually for that date, there is no trace of his grave.  One source states that he died at Stowe on 13th October 1818.  His son, Sir Henry William Barnard, rose to be a general in the British Army, commanding a division in the Crimea and dying of cholera while directing the siege of Delhi in 1857.

Woolley Leigh Bennett (1775-1839, Rector 1818-1839) immediately followed Barnard but, unlike his exotic Anglo-Irish predecessor, was born just down the road in the neighbouring village of Finmere, where his father was Rector.  He presided over the rebuilding of our church in 1826 and, while there is no suggestion that he financed it himself, his family connections lead us to believe that he could have afforded to.

His direct ancestors include Queen Elizabeth's Latin Secretary, Sir John Wolley, and Pocahontas. His paternal grandparents were a Norfolk gentleman named John Bennett and a Surrey heiress named Mary Leigh, and their descendants include Edwina, Countess Mountbatten.  When Mary died the Surrey country seat passed to their son, also Woolley Leigh Bennett, Rector of Finmere.  Both his sons were clergymen and the elder, John Leigh Bennett, moved to Surrey to become both Squire and Vicar of Thorpe, and demolished Hall Place and built Thorpe Place in its stead.

Woolley senior and his children and grandchildren provide a fascinating insight into the lives of nineteenth century squires who were also clergy, sometimes called 'squarsons'.  Most of the sons went into the church, and daughters either married clergy and died young after producing lots of children or stayed single and lived long and prosperous lives!  A change appears around 1870, however: the agricultural depression greatly reduced the incomes of country rectors and so we find the sons becoming lawyers and the daughters marrying lawyers.

Our Woolley left us an odd inheritance in the form of his 'tomb'.  This was described by John Myres in 1892 as the 'Leigh Bennett vault', but it is not big enough to contain or cover a normal burial.  It is about two feet high and hexagonal in plan, with the parallel sides about three and a half feet apart.  It has a capstone, which would make sense if the contents were cremations, but they are recorded in the church registers as burials.  Woolley presumably designed it himself, as the first burial recorded on it is his unmarried daughter.  The four inscriptions are:

To the memory of HARRIET JANE BENNETT died October 1836 aged 23 years
To the memory of The Rev. WOOLEY LEIGH BENNETT died Feb 2nd 1839 aged 61 years
To the memory of AUGUSTUS FREDERICK second son of the Rev. W. L. BENNETT died January 28th 1849 aged 28 years
To the memory of MARGARET relict of the Rev. WOOLEY LEIGH BENNETT died April 17th 1866 aged 82 years.

We would be very interested to hear from anyone who knows of a similar memorial.

George Coleman (1802-1858, Rector 1839-1858) succeeded Woolley Bennett and, like him, served Water Stratford for nineteen years.  The burial registers tell a poignant story: the huge number of pitiful young deaths of the early Victorian era are recorded in Coleman's firm, legible hand until the last one he entered, where his writing is feeble. The next entry was the Rector himself, and two months later his middle daughter, aged 16, joined him in the grave.  It was to be over forty-three years, however, before the grave was reopened for his widow, Augusta, at the end of 1901.  His only son, George Worsley Coleman, was an Anglican clergyman in Lancashire. 

Joseph Bosworth (1789-1875, Rector 1858-1875) was the immediate successor to George Coleman and rivals John Mason in distinction.  At the same time as he was our Rector, he was also Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.  This post was held by JRR Tolkien from 1925 to 1945, by which time it was called the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship.  The professorship was first established in 1795 by Richard Rawlinson of St. John's College, Oxford, and is associated with Pembroke College, though Bosworth was a fellow of Christ Church.  Another connection with Tolkien can be found here.

Bosworth was born at Etwall, Derbyshire and studied at Repton College and Aberdeen University, becoming a curate in Nottinghamshire in about 1815.  He first came to Buckinghamshire in 1817 on his appointment as Vicar of Little Horwood.  His first marriage took place soon afterwards.  He published an elementary grammar of Anglo-Saxon in 1823 and in 1929 began eleven years as a Chaplain in Holland, publishing a larger Anglo-Saxon dictionary in 1838.  During this period he was granted a place at Trinity College, Cambridge which awarded him BD in 1834 and DD in 1839.  On his return from Holland he occupied the position of Vicar of Waith in Lincolnshire until 1858 though, judging from the censuses, he did not seem to spend much time there.

His first wife died in 1850 and in 1853, aged 65, he married Anne Margaret Elliot, the widow of Colonel Hamilton Elrington, a director of railway companies.  In 1858 he was appointed Professor in Oxford and Rector in Water Stratford and divided his time between the two places for the rest of his life.  His second wife died in 1863 and is buried in our churchyard, and his gift of £10,000 in 1867 brought about the foundation of the 'Elrington and Bosworth' professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge.  The choice of name suggests that the money came primarily from what she brought to the marriage from her first husband.  Bosworth was not finished with marriage, however, and in 1867, at the age of 79, married Emily Stonhouse, the widow of a fellow don. 

Despite being 70 when he came to us he did a lot for our church, putting its affairs and possessions in order and greatly enlarging the Rectory.  Most of our books by John Mason were procured by Bosworth, catalogued, and placed in the church chest.  He also made a copy, in an exquisite hand, of the baptisms, marriages and burials register from John Mason's time.  The original (in very poor condition) and his copy are in the County Record Office in Aylesbury.  Bosworth died in Oxford on 27th May 1876 and was buried with his second wife in our churchyard on 2nd June 1876.

Edward George Andrew (1842-1906, Rector 1875-87) was six when his clergyman father died, and in 1875 he became Hon Secretary of the Clergy Orphan Corporation for the rest of his life.  He presided at our Rectory with his mother, the 1881 census showing them with a housemaid named Hannah Watson, aged sixteen, a member of an extensive local family.  In 1887, however, in the obscurity of Aberystwyth, he married Hannah Watson.  This presumably occasioned his departure from Water Stratford and he became Vicar of Mundon in Essex for the rest of his life. He and Hannah do not appear to have had any children.

Louis Ernest Goddard (1856-?, Rector 1889-1921) did not die in harness in Water Stratford but we retain a link with him through the grave of his daughter, Ethel Frances West, who was buried in our churchyard in 1962.  We think Louis and his wife retired to Cheltenham where her death is recorded in 1925 and their youngest daughter's marriage took place in 1924.  He was born in Lincoln and is notable for his thirty-two year tenure, a span only exceeded in our church's entire history by Henry Gabell above.