Career Summary
Cantrell was ordained a priest at Lichfield in 1709. In 1712, the corporation of Derby gave him the vicarage of St Alkmund, Derby, a living he kept for more than sixty stormy years, until his death at the age of eighty-nine.
Cantrell had a quarrelsome nature, and even before his induction as Vicar of St Alkmund's parish he fell out with its vestry, insisting on exercising his right to appoint one of the two churchwardens for the parish. Within months of his appointment, he was preaching against non-conformity, claiming that:
| “ | Dissenting teachers have no authority to baptize, and consequently that children... sprinkled by 'em, ought to be baptiz'd by an Episcopal minister. | ” |
He refused to bury children baptised by dissenters, which led to a furious controversy in Derby. In any event, Cantrell's bishop refused to support his stance.
One of Cantrell's best-known works was a scholarly dissertation denying the claim by the Presbyterian minister Ferdinando Shaw that King Charles I had been baptised only by a Presbyterian and never by an Episcopal minister.
Cantrell was often embattled in defending his clerical rights, including the right to plant trees in the churchyard, to control the contents of the parish register, and so forth, generally claiming the matter in hand was about an important principle and part of a wider defence of clerical rights. In 1729, he defeated the Corporation of Derby (the patrons of his living) in a legal battle over the parish's small tithes, which the Corporation had taken away from him for insulting the Mayor of Derby.
When his battles led to the forced sale of much of his library, he was offered the vicarage of Brecon through the influence of Dr Henry Sacheverell, but declined it.
When Cantrell granted a licence for the secret marriage of Annabella Wilmot of Osmaston, Derbyshire, this led to the Ecclesiastical Courts Bill 1733.
Doubt has been cast on the claim in William Hutton's History of Derby (1791) that at the time of the Jacobite rising in 1745 Cantrell was a Jacobite and drank the health of the Old Pretender.
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