Benjamin Culme. 1581–1657, was Dean of St
Patrick’s Cathedral and Prebendary of
Clondalkin in Dublin, the second city of the
Tudor and Stuart Kingdoms, between 1625 and
his death, a period of 32 years. He occupied a
prominent and exposed position at that time
of major and dangerous flux leading up to the
Cromwellian take over. The years from 1649 to
his death in 1657 were spent ‘in exile’ near his
wife’s family in Wiltshire.

His fortunes fluctuated from a ’planter’
incumbency of Virginia at the start of his
career to relative poverty in Dublin after the
1641 rebellion. Culme exchanged letters with
his relations in the West Country of England,
each pleading vainly for financial support
from the other.

Robert Kingston has carried out extensive
research on Culme, some of it in parish
archives in England. While taking account of
the ecclesiastical issues of the period he also
gives us a picture of Culme and his family in
Ireland and in the West Country. In dealing
with the political situation we can see that
people had relations on both the Royalist and
the Cromwellian side so in that sense even
great matters were in some sense family ones.

Culme occupied a key position but has
been overshadowed by more able
contemporaries like James Ussher and John
Bramhall who displayed conflicting and more
extreme views through that period. The basic
conclusion suggested here is that Culme is an
example of the more subdued ‘middle’ ground
of the church, riding the storms whipped up
by Calvinists and Puritans on the one side and
Laudians and Catholics on the other.