Francis George Widdows

In early 1922 Primus McLaglen decided to appoint his successors as the head of the Free Protestant Episcopal Church, the Ancient British Church, and the United Armenian Catholic Church. On 4 June 1922 in St. Andrew's Church, Retreat Place, London, he consecrated Francis George Widdows (1850 to 1936) and Herbert James Monzani Heard (1866 to 1947) to the episcopate. Bishop Widdows, a former Roman Catholic Franciscan monk, in 1886 had become a non-conformist minister at the Church of Martin Luther congregation at 26 Speldhurst Road, South Hackney. In 1909 this church became affiliated with the FPEC. +Widdows was given the title of Ignatius, Bishop of Hackney and was to become the new Primus of the FPEC at a later date. Bishop Monzani Heard, who was the then headmaster of Raleigh College in Brixton, South London, was immediately made the head of the Ancient British and United Armenian Catholic churches. By that time these three jurisdictions were "paper churches" as there were no formal congregations for any of them; however, the FPEC had canons to organise parishes (the hope) and to allow for independent congregations to be under its bishops oversight (the reality). +Widdows had a chequered history of being in prison on morals charges (he was a known homosexual in an age when it was illegal in the UK to be so) and on the other hand ministering for many years to his extremely loyal congregation. Primus McLaglen apparently had second thoughts about him being his successor as head of the FPEC and within the year had him removed from that succession and had any mention of +Widdows stricken from the official records of the Church. There is some dispute that +Widdows was ever consecrated, but the oral tradition amongst later FPEC bishops plus the writings of other historians state that it was so. FPEC clergy, rather than having explicit FPEC parishes, served as nonconformist ministers in other denominations and public institutions such as hospitals, gaols, and college chapels.