author

William Wigan

d. 1700

Best known today as a late 17th-century Anglican clergyman, he left behind a small but vivid printed record through sermons connected with Kensington and court life. His surviving work offers a glimpse of the religious voice and public occasions of William and Mary’s England.

1 Audiobook

A Funeral Sermon Preach'd on the Decease of the Right Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Cutts Late Wife of the Right Honourable the Lord Cutts, on the 5th of December, 1697, at Kensington Church

A Funeral Sermon Preach'd on the Decease of the Right Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Cutts Late Wife of the Right Honourable the Lord Cutts, on the 5th of December, 1697, at Kensington Church

by William Wigan

About the author

Born around 1640, William Wigan was an English clergyman who studied at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford before building a career in the Church of England. He went on to serve as rector of Wennington and Orsett, became a canon of St Paul's, and was vicar of St Mary Abbots in Kensington from 1672 until his death in 1700.

Wigan also served as chaplain in ordinary to William and Mary, placing him close to the religious life of the royal court as well as the parish world of Kensington. That mix of public duty and pastoral work helps explain the tone of the writing linked to his name: formal, devotional, and shaped by important social occasions.

The work most readily associated with him now is A Funeral Sermon Preach'd on the Decease of the Right Honourable the Lady Elizabeth Cutts (1697), preached at Kensington Church. For modern listeners and readers, he is less a widely known literary figure than a historical church writer whose surviving sermon preserves the language, beliefs, and ceremonial culture of late Stuart England.