Whicheote, BENJAMIN, one of the Cambridge Platonists, was born of a good Shropshire family, March 11, 1609, entered Emanuel College, Cambridge, in 1626, and became a fellow in 1633. For ten years a college tutor, in 1643 he took the college living of North Cadbury in Somersetshire, afterwards held by Cudworth, but a year later became Provost of King's College, Cambridge, in the room of the ejected Dr Collins. Yet he was far from being a Puritan, and he protected the interest of the provost and fellows with the most scrupulous care. And his influence upon the university was great. Already as a fellow he had been the tutor of Wallis, Culverell, and John Smith, who says of his master, 'I lived upon him.' At the Restoration he lost his provostship, but held livings first at St Anne's, Blackfriars, together with Milton in Cambridgeshire, and finally the vicarage of St Lawrence Jewry, where he died in May 1683. He himself published nothing; and four volumes of Discourses (i.-iii., edited by Dr Jeffery, 1701; iv., by Dr Samuel Clarke, 1707), and Moral and Religious Aphorisms, collected from his MSS. by Jeffery (1703; new ed. by Dr Salter, containing his correspondence with Dr Tuckney, 1753), notable for vigour and point, are all his work. Whicheote was one of those teachers whose personality was greater than his intellectual productiveness, and his real significance must be sought in the impulse he gave to philosophical theology as seen in his own pupils and contemporaries—in Smith, More, and Cudworth, as well as Tillotson, Patrick, and Burnet.
See Principal Tulloch's Rational Theology (vol. ii. 1872), Bishop Westcott's Essays in the History of Religious Thought (1891), and vol. iii. of Bass Mullinger's History of the University of Cambridge (1892). The Earl of Shaftesbury edited a selection of his sermons in 1698, which was reprinted at Edinburgh by Principal Wishart in 1742. The best edition of his complete works is by Drs Campbell and Gerard (4 vols. Aberdeen, 1751).