Charles Wickstead Ethelston

Charles Wickstead Ethelston, also given as Wicksted (1767–1830) was an English cleric, now remembered for the part he played in his role as magistrate on 16 August 1819, ahead of the Peterloo massacre. Early life He was the son of the Rev. Charles Ethelstone (1731–1795), an Oxford graduate, and his wife Margaret Hart (died 1803) of Salford. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School under Charles Lawson, and matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1787, graduating B.A. in 1790 and M.A. in 1793. He was known also by the surnames Ethelstone and Ethelstane. Ethelston became a curate in 1794 at St Mark's Chapel, Cheetham Hill, which was then an urbanising area adjacent to Manchester and Salford. His father, who died the following year, had recently completed it, at his own expense, on the Shooting Butts field at Cheetham; it was a chapel of ease between the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Prestwich and Manchester Collegiate Church, for which Charles Ethelstone the elder had permission to build in 1790, in a hamlet where cotton merchants lived. The chapel was consecrated on 24 July 1794 by William Markham. Later, Ethelston became a perpetual curate there. A Jubilee School was built in Cheetham, and a plot of land obtained from Lord Ducie to build a church to seat 1500. The church was closed in 1982, and demolished around 1998. In 1801, Ethelston was made rector of Worthenbury, near Wrexham. The presentation was presumably (according to Francis Robert Raines) by Sir Richard Price Puleston, 1st Baronet. In 1804 he became a Fellow of Manchester Collegiate Church.