D'Arcy, Charles Frederick (1859–1938), Church of Ireland clergyman, bishop, and religious writer, was born 2 January 1859 in Dublin, son of John Charles D'Arcy, cashier to the Great Southern & Western Railway, and Henrietta Anna D'Arcy (née Brierly). On both sides of the family D'Arcy was descended from downwardly mobile gentry stock; his father was the unprovided fourth son of a prominent and philoprogenitive Westmeath landowner of Norman descent; his mother descended from improvident Tipperary squires. Consciousness of this heritage made him ill at ease in suburbia; throughout his life he expressed a preference for country life over the town, and entertained nostalgia for what he saw as a paternalistic order swept away by disestablishment and the land acts. The family experienced the theological divisions of nineteenth-century anglicanism; his mother was a moderate evangelical (she transmitted her love of art and literature to her son) while several of his maternal relatives were very high-church and stalwart supporters of the Rev. William Maturin (qv). D'Arcy recalled that their friendly disputes gave him a sense of the importance of religion and philosophy (he believed he had become a Berkeleian at the age of twelve) and reflection on the merits and weaknesses of both parties laid the foundations of his earlier broad-church outlook. His instinctive belief in freedom and modernity led him to distrust the high church, and still more the church of Rome, as formulaic and authoritarian; he always believed that John Henry Newman (qv) had run away from liberalism rather than answering it.
D'Arcy was educated at the Dublin High School and TCD, where he won a first science scholar award and was gold medallist in mental and moral philosophy, graduating BA (1882) and MA (1889). While praising many of his teachers, he later felt he had learnt more from mountaineering and botanising expeditions with friends (particularly Nathaniel Colgan (qv), a major contributor to the second edition of Cybele Hibernica; they delighted in discovering species new to Ireland). Growing awareness of the challenges posed for Christian faith by the discoveries of Charles Darwin, and belief that science properly understood must reinforce Christian faith through revealing the wonders of creation, led him on his graduation to enter the Church of Ireland divinity school (1882–4); he chose to enter the Irish church rather than its English counterpart, in the belief that in the aftermath of disestablishment his mother church needed her sons’ best efforts.
D'Arcy was ordained deacon in 1884 and priest in 1885, and served as curate of St Thomas's, Belfast (1884–90), and rector of Billy, Co. Antrim (1890–93), and Ballymena, Co. Antrim (1893–1900). In Belfast he continued his philosophical studies through books from the Linen Hall Library and discussions with professors at QUB who were members of his congregation; he also developed an admiration for the confidence and strength of northern protestantism (including the Orange order, which he respected without ever becoming a member), and always defended the Ulster protestants against the charge that their religion was merely political.
In 1895 D'Arcy published the first expression of his philosophical views, A short study of ethics, which argued on Berkeleian idealist grounds for the existence of a personal deity (although idealist philosophy was then widely seen as the only alternative to materialism, the dominant idealist schools tended towards pantheism and contempt for institutional religion). It was followed in 1899 by Idealism and theology, which argued that the gulf between self and society, knower and known, could only be bridged by the existence of a God who was both personal and supra-personal (thereby pointing to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity). These works attracted extensive notice and were widely used as textbooks; D'Arcy gave the 1897 Donnellan lectures at TCD (he was invited to do so again in 1913). His appointment as a chaplain to the lord lieutenant (1895) indicated that he was being marked out for ecclesiastical preferment.
He became vicar and dean of Belfast (1900–03; he played a considerable role in the construction of St Anne's cathedral), then bishop of Clogher (1903–7), from which he was transferred to the combined sees of Ossory, Ferns and Leighlin (1907–11) and thence to Down, Connor and Dromore (1911–19). During his period in Ossory he established an extensive web of contacts in Britain and regularly spoke at church congresses; in Down he grappled with the problem of pastoral provision for the growing Church of Ireland population of the developing industrial city of Belfast. D'Arcy was a conscientious bishop, but lacked administrative ability; he liked the intimacy of the small Irish dioceses (whose bishops, in contrast with their English brethren, were able to know all their clergy personally). His memoir states that he considered acceptance of episcopal office, when offered to him, a religious duty; some of his acquaintances, including J. A. F. Gregg (qv), thought it might have been better for him and for the church as a whole if he had instead become a professor of philosophy.
D'Arcy's appointment to an Ulster see was significant, given his strong support for Ulster unionism and his belief that the principal hope for the Church of Ireland lay in the numbers and commitment of the north. He played a prominent role in the unionist campaigns of 1911–14, ardently supporting Edward Carson (qv), whom he regarded as a personal friend; his name was fourth after Carson's among signatories of the Ulster covenant. D'Arcy rejected criticisms that the church should not be involved in a political campaign whose methods could be described as contingent treason; he believed that the ‘deep conviction in the heart of the Ulster protestant’ was as much religious as political, and that Ulster unionists were being oppressed, misrepresented, and driven to extremism. He was an outspoken supporter of the Ulster Volunteers, declaring that their formation prevented riots and violence by channelling potential rioters into disciplined drilling and training. Although D'Arcy issued pastoral letters exhorting his flock to moderation, J. E. B. Seely (later Lord Mottistone) who served as war minister during the Ulster crisis and resigned after mishandling the Curragh mutiny, called him an ‘arch hypocrite’ who by holding blessing ceremonies for UVF colours gave his approval to the threatened use of force. When three Church of Ireland bishops signed an anti-partition manifesto in 1917 (in association with the majority of the catholic hierarchy) D'Arcy publicly declared that this did not mean the Church of Ireland had altered its opposition to home rule for all of Ireland, and stated that in his opinion if partition could not be averted by keeping Ireland within the union, he believed the church as a whole would be best served by keeping Ulster within the union. In 1915 D'Arcy was strongly supported by the lay section of the general synod in the contest for the vacant archbishopric of Dublin; the lay representatives felt that the successful candidate, J. H. Bernard (qv), was too theologically and politically accommodating.
D'Arcy later became archbishop of Dublin (1919–20) and archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland (1920–38); this unusual succession to the two Church of Ireland archbishoprics within ten months was engineered by episcopal colleagues who wished to keep the maverick Benjamin Plunket (qv) from becoming an archbishop. As a churchman, D'Arcy was regarded as a popular and ‘democratic’ bishop, free from intellectual snobbery, and opposed to the view that a bishop should maintain a conscious remoteness from his flock, ‘a human occupying an inhuman position’. He was later described as ‘the layman's bishop’ (contrasted with his successors J. G. F. Day (1874–1938), ‘everyone's bishop’, and Gregg, ‘the churchman's bishop’). He was, however, somewhat shy and retiring and often found it difficult to socialise. D'Arcy, who frequently acknowledged his intellectual debt to presbyterian theologians and in May 1935 described presbyterianism as ‘one of the most splendid churches in the world’, favoured reunion with the nonconformist protestant churches on terms that treated episcopal ordination as desirable but not indispensable; he was opposed by those (such as Gregg) who held the traditional anglican view that episcopacy was of apostolic origin and feared for relations with the Orthodox and Old Catholic churches.
D'Arcy wrote several works which attempted to reconcile science and theology, with particular reference to Darwinism. His later works included God and freedom in human experience (1915), God and the struggle for existence (1919), Science and creation (1925), and God in science (1931). He presented evolution as ‘the splendid epic of creation’, arguing that its development could be seen as progressing through several created orders, culminating in the human mind and culture. He attempted to provide a Christian version of Jan Christian Smuts's holistic philosophy, holding that the universe could only be understood by seeing it as a single entity, the product of a divine Mind; less happily, his interest in Darwinism led him to advocate eugenics. His autobiography, The adventures of a bishop (1934), presented itself as a statement of the under-explored Irish unionist/anglican experience and was prefaced with the explanation that ‘even a bishop, especially if he is an Irishman, may be pardoned if he finds a thrill in the events of his life. To the writer, the sense of the adventure of life has always been the salt of all his efforts and attainments.’ Some critics believed the memoir gave only a superficial picture of its author (the long list of friends can give the impression of namedropping and snobbery; its author's intellectual side is not fully disclosed, though one chapter is characteristically headed ‘St Patrick and Einstein’). Hugh Shearman's satirical novel The bishop's confession (1943) was partly intended as a humorous comment on it; however, Shearman's bishop (a secret agnostic) is not a portrait of D'Arcy.
D'Arcy's achievements as theologian and mathematician led to his being awarded honorary degrees from QUB and the universities of Oxford and Glasgow; in 1927 he was elected FBA. As archbishop, D'Arcy lived a life of relative opulence, taking a less than exacting approach to his duties (though this can partly be explained by the need to minimise controversy in the post-partition restructuring of the church). After his wife's death during a West Indies cruise (July 1932), his last years were lonely; he sought solace by proposing marriage in December 1934 to an old friend, Mary Alice Young of Ballymena, who turned him down but expressed pity for his situation in her journal. This sadness was secret; D'Arcy remained outwardly ebullient. Always a lover of travel, in 1936 he attended the Anglican Church of Australia's centenary conference and wrote several articles on his experiences for the Church of Ireland Gazette.
D'Arcy died 1 February 1938 in Armagh. In a tribute published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, A. A. Luce (qv) dissented from his idealist philosophical approach but thought D'Arcy not unworthy of comparison with Berkeley (qv); Gregg's funeral panegyric declared that D'Arcy's philosophical writings derived their merits from their author's having been kept in touch with reality through his pastoral care for human souls, and said that the dead primate had seemed perpetually young because he never lost his sense of wonder.
He married (12 August 1889) Harriet Le Byrtt, elder daughter of Richard Lewis of Comrie, Co. Down. Their union was happy and fulfilling; they had three daughters and a son, John Conyers Darcy (1894–1966), who joined the British army, was wounded twice in the first world war, and later became a lieutenant-general.