Richard was educated at Hertford Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge before studying theology at Cuddesdon and Lincoln Theological colleges. He was ordained as a priest in 1974 and was married in 1982.
He is a Privy Counsellor.
He wrote History of Gresham College 1597 - 1997. This was based upon athree part lecture series given in May 1992, whilst Chartres was Professor of divinity there. During the first lecture of the original lecture series he made allusions to the College as a 'magical island like Atlantis' disappearing and re-emerging from the sea. This was a reference both to the Invisible College and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. At the second lecture he was keen to disassociate himself from any occult references.
Other Gresham lectures by Chartres covered prayer (which he keenly distinguished from magic), Autumn 1991, the Turin shroud, November 1988, and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem where he not only made certain revelations about the Gresham Jerusalem Project but also gave a personal account of a month he spent at an ancient monastery in Egypt where he would go on moonlight walks with a Christian leader who would trace great patterns in the sand as he sought to explain abstruse points of theology, December 1989.