William Van Mildert Saviour's Grammar School, Merchant Taylors' School (then in London) and the Queen's College, Oxford. Loosely attached to the high church party, he was appointed Bishop of Llandaff from 1819 to 1826, a post which he held in commendam with the Deanery of St Paul's between 1820 and 1826, when he was translated to Durham. Prior to this, he had been rector of the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in London and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, where he gave the Bampton Lectures for "1814". Van Mildert is often described as a 'stormy petrel' on account of his outspoken expression of
St Cuthbert Gospel struggle against the Danes by a vision or dream he had of Cuthbert. Thereafter, the royal house of Wessex, who became the kings of England, made a point of devotion to Cuthbert, which also had a useful political message, as they came from opposite ends of the united English kingdom. Cuthbert was "a figure of reconciliation and a rallying point for the reformed identity of Northumbria and England" after the absorption of the Danish populations into Anglo-Saxon society, according to Michelle Brown. The 8th-century historian Bede wrote both a verse and a prose life of St Cuthbert around 720. He