GAUDEN, JOHN, was born in 1605 at .Mayland in Essex, his father being vicar of that pariah. His school-education was received at Bury St. Edmunds; whence he removed to St. John's College, Cambridge, and took his degree in arts in the ordinary course. About 1630 he removed to Oxford, and became a tutor in Wadham College ; and at a later period he took the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor in Divinity. In 1630 he was appointed chaplain to the Earl of Warwick, through whose patronage he received two ecclesiastical preferments, a rectory in Berkshire, and a vicarage in the county of Cambridge. In the earlier part of his history, led perhaps by the turn of his patron's politics, he inclined strongly to the popular side ; and a sermon which he preached before the House of Commons, in 1610, was rewarded by a public present of a silver tankard. Next year the parliament pre sented him to the lucrative deanery of Hocking in Essex; to which however the cautious doctor thought it right to have his title confirmed by Archbishop Laud, then a prisoner in the Tower. After the break lag out of the civil war, Gauden submitted to the Presbyterian govern ment, but with a hesitation which was suspicious, and which appears to have been punished by his exclusion from the Westminster Assembly of Divines after he had been named a member of that board. He gave up the use of the liturgy in the service of the church, but not till the last moment that it was possible to preserve it : and he subscribed the covenant, but not till be had written a treaties against it. Ho thus retained his preferments, but gradually approached nearer to the royalist church-party, and contracted with some members of it rela tions which, by his own account, led to important consequences. Upon the Restoration, Dr. Gauden was appointed chaplain to Charles IL; and before the close of the same year he was created bishop of Exeter, whence in 1664 he was translated to the see of Worcester. Shortly afterwards, on the 20th of September in that year, he died of a dis ease which was either caused or aggravated by his disappointment in being obliged to put np with the bishopric of Worcester in place of the more valuable one of Winchester, which he had very eagerly solicited.
In the coarse of tbia solicitation the assertion was made which gives interest to Bishop Gauden's history and character. He alleged that ho was the real and sole author of the famous work called Eikon Bud like, the i'ortrsicture of his Sacred Majesty iu his Solitudes and Suffer ings,' which, purporting to contain meditations and prayers composed by Charles 1. in his captivity, had been published in 1643, a few days after his decapitation, and had excited a very lively sympathy towards the supposed author. The bishop's claim, urged privately in letters to Lord Clarendon and the Earl of Bristol, did not at once become the subject of open discussion ; but the controversy was commenced in 1692, by an assertion of Gauden's authorship, published by a clergy man who had resided in his family. The curious question thus raised has been discussed again* and again by our historical writers. An ela borate history of the controversy is given by Dr. Wordsworth in his two works upon it : Who wrote Icon Basiliko / Considered and Answered,' 8vo, 1824; and ' King Charles the First the Author of Icon Basilike, further proved,' 8vo, 1823. Upon the merits of the controversy, it will be enough to say, that Warburton, in pronouncing doubtfully In favour of the genuineness of the work, had reason to declare the matter to be " the most uncertain he ever took pains to examine; " that in our own day, and since Dr. Wordsworth entered the field, the claim of Gauden has been strenuously supported by Mr. Hal lam and by other writers of authority ; and that the balance of opinion now inclined decidedly in favour of Gauden as the author.
Gauden was the acknowledged author of a large number of sermons and tracts, chiefly bearing upon questions of ecclesiastical polity. A list of these, containing nineteen or twenty pieces, is given in the article under his name in the Biographia Britannica.'