Reverend Peter Cunningham

Reverend Peter Cunningham was probably born in 1747 and died in Chertsey on 24 June 1805. For most of his life he acted as a curate and published several poems of a political tendency.

Accounts of Peter Cunningham's life have mostly been gleaned from the writings and correspondence of the Seward family, covering his period as curate at Eyam in 1775-90, and principally from four letters of his that have been preserved from that period. In addition, two accounts of him are given in 19th century works dealing with Eyam, Ebenezer Rhodes' Peak Scenery and William Wood's The History and Antiquities of Eyam. The account of him given in a past edition of the Dictionary of National Biography is vague and conjectural.

Three letters were written to Thomas Seward immediately before and after his installation as curate at Eyam. He there describes himself as the son of a naval officer who would have preferred him to follow a military career and now cannot be bothered to write to him. Instead of a university education, he was privately coached before being ordained in 1772 by the Archbishop of York. He mentions having friends in Kent, and notably in Deal, from which his first letter was written. He has a close connection with a Yorkshire family from some ten years before his ordination, as well as in Scotland, from where the name Cunningham derives. A later letter to a fellow cleric mentions ‘family letters from the West Indies’. Anna Seward described him as having the manners of a gentleman and he frequently mentions warm relations with, and sometimes the patronage of, members of the peerage.

Following his ordination, Cunningham was appointed as curate at the Yorkshire village of Almondbury, which he left after a while to take up a tutorship which turned out badly. His next appointment was at Eyam and he was at pains to assure his future employer that, in his opinion, the Church of England ‘approaches the nearest of all others to the pure religion of the Gospel’, deprecating the schismatic tendencies in Methodism which were then dividing Eyam parish. He also forewarns Seward that he is very deaf. Anna Seward was later to comment on his near-sightedness, which obliged him to wear spectacles, his untidy appearance and affected nasal delivery. Nevertheless, he was soon to become a favourite with the women of the parish and was noted as being untiring in trying to educate the poor children there, as well as tutoring those of the more socially prominent. His sermons were so much admired that Thomas Seward admitted in one of his own sermons that he had left much of the preaching to Cunningham on this account.

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