He was the eldest son of John Stokes of Athlone and Margaret Forster his wife, born on 28 December 1843 in Athlone, Ireland. He was educated at Galway grammar school, Queen's College, Galway, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1864. He subsequently proceeded M.A. 1871, B.D. 1881, and D.D. 1886. In 1866, Stokes was ordained for the curacy of Dunkerrin in the diocese of Killaloe in the then established Church of Ireland, and in the following year was appointed to the curacy of St. Patrick's, Newry. In 1868, he was nominated first vicar of the newly constituted charge of All Saints, Newtown Park, Co. Dublin, which he held till his death. In 1893, he was elected by the chapter of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, to the prebend and canonry of St. Andrew. From the date of his appointment to All Saints, Stokes studied Irish ecclesiastical history of his own country. Dr. Reichel made him his deputy in the chair of ecclesiastical history in the university of Dublin; and in 1883, Stokes was appointed his successor. Ireland and the Celtic Church, published in 1886, achieved an immediate success. It was followed in 1888 by his Ireland and the Anglo-Norman Church, in which the history of Irish Christianity was traced through a further stage. Stokes took on for the Expositor's Bible a "Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles". In 1887, he published, as the second volume of a Sketch of Universal History, a Sketch of Mediaeval History. In 1891, he published an edition of Bishop Pococke's Tour in Ireland. He was an occasional contributor on subjects connected with theology and ecclesiastical history to the Contemporary Review. Among many articles in this periodical, that on Alexander Knox and the Oxford Movement is perhaps the most important ; and he produced numerous papers before the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland, and the Royal Irish Academy. In 1887, he was appointed librarian of St. Patrick's Library, in Dublin, while continuing with clerical duties. In 1890, he was temporarily disabled by a partial stroke of paralysis, from the effects of which he never fully recovered. In 1896, he delivered a series of lectures entitled How to write a Parochial History; and the following year began a course of lectures on Great Irish Churchmen of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, which he did not live to complete; they were edited, under the title Some Worthies of the Irish Church, after his death by the Rev. H. J. Lawlor, who succeeded to his professorial chair. On 24 March 1898, Stokes succumbed, after a brief struggle, to an attack of pneumonia. He was buried at Dean's Grange, Co. Dublin.
Family
Stokes was twice married: first, to Fanny, daughter of Thomas Pusey of Surbiton, Surrey, and secondly to Katherine, daughter of Henry J. Dudgeon of the Priory, Stillorgan, co. Dublin.
