Clare Heath-Whyte: Biographer of the neglected & ‘unfamous’

Biography is perennially popular, one of the best-selling and most absorbing forms of historical writing.

Many biographies focus on the rich and famous, the movers and shakers, the politicians, warriors, celebrities and adventurers who have changed the world. But one of biography’s unique strengths is that it also allows marginal and neglected voices to take centre stage. Characters who are normally written out of the narrative step forward into the limelight. They may not have won great battles, led international campaigns, or created seismic shifts in global culture, but every life is fascinating and every voice has much to teach.

Last on God’s list

Clare Heath-Whyte specialises in biographies of the unfamous. Her newest book, Last on God’s List (2023), tells the story of Jason Armstrong, raised in urban poverty in the 1970s and 1980s on a council estate in south London. His name is unknown in the annals of national life, though he has a fat file with the Metropolitan Police. Born into a violent home, with a father in prison and a grandmother who ran brothels for the Kray twins, it is little surprise that Armstrong grew into a violent and angry adult. He dropped out of school at 13, began to abuse alcohol and drugs, and was frequently embroiled in brutal fighting. At 17 he was stabbed for the first time. At 26 he was sentenced to five years in prison for nearly killing a man at a party, stabbing him in the neck with a broken champagne flute and missing his jugular vein by three millimetres. Addicted to cocaine, with a chaotic home life and terrified by his encounters with the occult, Armstrong’s life spiralled out of control. He seemed likely to end up on the scrapheap, in an early grave, one of the forgotten.

By telling Armstrong’s story, Heath-Whyte aims to demonstrate that ‘there is nobody that God is not interested in’. At his lowest ebb, about ten years ago, Armstrong turned for help to the local church. There he was led to faith in Jesus Christ and as a result his life has been dramatically transformed. Throughout her lively account, Heath-Whyte gently explains the gospel. She shows how Armstrong believed his biggest problems were ‘disturbing demonic visions’ and an expensive drug habit, but God knew his greatest need was ‘forgiveness and a new life’. Armstrong was literally brought to his knees, at the end of his human resources, forced to recognise his desperate need for God’s intervention.

Last on God’s List is highly accessible, written at a fast pace, with crisp prose and short chapters. It will encourage Christian readers, but is principally designed as an evangelistic biography, perfect to give away. Heath-Whyte concludes: ‘Why not ask for God’s help too? What are you waiting for?’ She urges us to follow Armstrong’s example by reading one of the Gospels, attending Christianity Explored, finding a local church, and turning to Jesus Christ.

Heath-Whyte and Armstrong share a gospel connection, but their cultural and family backgrounds could not be further apart. Clare Roberts, as she was then known, was brought up in rural Hampshire, the daughter of a Cambridge-educated solicitor. Aged 12, she was sent away to boarding school, to Downe House, near Newbury, which claims a string of illustrious alumnae including Clare Balding, Miranda Hart, and Catherine Middleton, now Princess of Wales. The Roberts family were respectable Anglican churchgoers, in their pew every week, and her father served as churchwarden in the beautiful village of Monk Sherborne. But it was a form of Anglicanism with little evident gospel teaching, and Clare and her two siblings dropped out of church as teenagers.

The religious outlook of the Roberts family was profoundly shaken when Clare’s older sister Sian went away to teacher-training college in Cambridge and was converted on her very first Sunday at the Round Church. Sian began to evangelise her sister and brother, telling them that they lacked true Christian faith, but they responded with anger and belittling. Despite this hostile treatment, Sian persisted. On Clare’s 17th birthday, in March 1982, Sian gave her an NIV Bible, a copy of Journey Into Life (an evangelistic tract by Norman Warren), and some study notes on John’s Gospel. As Clare read through the Gospel she came to put her faith in Jesus Christ for the first time. Her twin brother Vaughan (now rector of St Ebbe’s, Oxford) was converted at the same period.

After a gap year travelling through Italy, Roberts went up to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1984 to read history, swapping later to theology. There she focused on church history, especially Reformation studies, under the supervision of Peter Newman Brooks, a leading expert on Thomas Cranmer. Roberts won the Lightfoot Prize in Ecclesiastical History in 1987, awarded to the best church historian in the Cambridge tripos. After graduation, she tried her hand at publishing, employed for a year by Readers Digest producing glossy coffee-table books, but then switched to teaching. She moved to Oxford and taught for five years at Wycombe Abbey, a private girls’ school in Buckinghamshire, where she redesigned the A-level history course with heavy doses of Luther and Calvin.

At a newcomers’ tea at St Ebbe’s Church in October 1989, Roberts met a young trainee pilot, David Heath-Whyte, who was learning to fly at Oxford Airport. They married in December 1991, and named their first child Katie after Katie Luther, one of Clare’s Reformation heroes. David flew for British Airways, as first officer on short-haul flights around Europe, but his goal was to join the Mission Aviation Fellowship, supporting evangelical missions in isolated communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, David was called into local church leadership, training at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford before Church of England ordination in 1998. Thus Clare Heath-Whyte found herself unexpectedly catapulted from being a history teacher and a pilot’s wife, into the role of ‘busy vicar’s wife’, as she is described on the cover of her books. Parish ministry has taken them to the dioceses of Oxford, St Albans, and now Southwark.

Women’s voices

Heath-Whyte brings all these life experiences – her passion for the gospel, her love for history, her local church ministry, and her role as a wife and mother – into her biographical writing. In the early 2000s, she was invited to lead seminars at the Proclamation Trust wives’ conferences, on contemporary lessons from ministry wives in evangelical history. These have flowered into her popular trilogy, Old Wives’ Tales (2013), First Wives’ Club (2014), and For Richer, For Poorer (2018).

Christian biography, according to John Piper, is ‘the most powerful kind’ of theology ‘because it bursts forth from the lives of people’. He calls it ‘one of the most enjoyable, edifying, and efficient ways to read history’. For 27 years in succession, between 1988 and 2014, Piper delivered a biographical address at his annual Bethlehem Conference for Pastors in Minneapolis, many of them now published to wide acclaim. They are ‘unashamedly hortatory’, seeking to encourage readers by focusing upon ‘God-centred, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated saints’. Yet all Piper’s subjects are men. Heath-Whyte helps to redress the balance with her 19 biographical vignettes which are Piper-esque in style, but focused on women’s voices. We hear about Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Whitefield, Edwards, Newton, Spurgeon, Moody, and many more. But their first names are Katie, Anna, Idelette, Elizabeth, Sarah, Mary, Susannah, and Emma.

Again, it is forgotten voices that Heath-Whyte brings back to our attention. A few of her chosen subjects led impressive ministries – like Selina Countess of Huntingdon, patron of church planting, and Elizabeth Fry, prison reformer – but most were just plain ‘ordinary’. And that very ordinariness it the genius of Heath-Whyte’s biographies. Most of these women left no impression on the literary record, and might therefore have disappeared from history, but Heath-Whyte reconstructs vibrantly rich portraits of their lives from the letters of their husbands. There are tales of hardship, daily drudgery, true romance, and volatile relationships. Pregnancy, miscarriage, illness, bereavement, ‘blended families’, wayward children, and simple survival are dominant features. We learn of Susannah Wesley, for example, that she was ‘often simultaneously pregnant, in pain, caring for small children and grieving for the loss of a child’. Some of the accounts are deeply moving, as Heath-Whyte reminds us of the difficulties and heartache which surround these unglamorous lives.

Heath-Whyte is not a hagiographer and makes no attempt to hide unattractive features. She demonstrates that a lamentable number of famous preachers have neglected their family responsibilities, too absorbed in their ministries. Not only itinerants like George Whitefield, who refused to let his marriage vows impact his long absences from home, but also home-based evangelists like George Muller who rejoiced that God had ‘lovingly spared’ him from being present during his wife Mary’s painful labour. Heath-Whyte wryly comments: ‘Mary had to endure every second of those painful three hours.’ She also strongly criticises the ‘couples culture’ which pervades modern evangelicalism and the unwise rush to marriage, like Calvin who was ‘steamrolled down the aisle by his well-meaning colleagues’. But the pathos is woven with humour too. Who knew that Luther only changed his bed sheets once a year, or that D. L. Moody wore the same unwashed shirt for several weeks at a time, before their wives tried to domesticate them?

In all Heath-Whyte’s biographies, the Christian gospel runs through from beginning to end like a golden seam. She highlights stories of conversion, spiritual transformation, and God’s provision and protection in the midst of many troubles. All her subjects attempt to witness for Christ, with greater or less success, in their families and their local communities. Their stories are mostly undramatic and unremarkable, like the vast majority of Christian disciples down the centuries. And yet here is whole point. They are highly relatable precisely because, as Heath-Whyte observes, ‘most of us are just plain ordinary’. This is one of the joys of evangelical biography as a historical genre. It brings forgotten voices back into focus and teaches us that every Christian can live to the glory of God, through the ups and downs of life, no matter how ordinary we may be.