CHAPTER X.CAROLINE AND THE CHURCH.

Inno sphere was Caroline’s influence more marked than in Church affairs; she held the reins of ecclesiastical patronage in her hands, and during her ten years’ reign as Queen Consort or Queen-Regent no important appointment was made in the Church without her consent and approval. George the Second was a Protestant of the Lutheran type, not so much from conviction, for he never troubled to inquire into religious matters, as from education and environment. He had no liking for the Church of England, but as his office compelled him to conform to it, he did so without difficulty. The established Church was to him merely a department of the civil service of which he was the head. He always accepted the Queen’s recommendations, and was as a rule indifferent about ecclesiastical appointments.

Walpole was quite as Erastian as the King and even less orthodox. He had no religious convictions, and did not make pretence to any; provided the bishops were his political supporters, he cared nothing for their Church views; they might disbelieve in the Trinity, but they must believe in him;they might reject the Athanasian Creed (or the Apostles’ Creed too for that matter), but they must profess the articles of the Whig faith. In those days the High Church clergy were Tory, and the Low Church were Whig; therefore Walpole appointed Low Church bishops, but he had as little liking for the one school of thought as the other. A thorough-going sceptic himself, he had a contempt for the latitudinarian clergy, regarding them as men who sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. But he cared nothing about their views; all he asked was that they should keep their heterodox opinions to themselves and not write pamphlets or preach sermons which stirred up strife in the Church, and made trouble for the Government. Early in his political career the Sacheverel disturbance had given him a wholesome dread of arousing theodium theologicum, and he determined never to repeat the mistake he made then, but to let the Church severely alone. In his ecclesiastical patronage he was guided chiefly by Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, and he preferred to appoint safe men, not particularly distinguished in any way, except when he deferred to the wishes of the Queen, who kept an eye on all Church appointments.

Caroline might be described as an unorthodox Protestant. Theology interested her greatly, but her inquiries carried her into the shadowy regions of universalism, and the refined Arianism of her favourite chaplain, Dr. Samuel Clarke. She no more believed in an infallible Bible than in aninfallible Pope. The Protestant Dissenters, whom she favoured with her patronage, would have recoiled in horror from her broad views had they known them, and would have denounced her with little less fervour than they denounced popery and prelacy. But Caroline took care that they should not know her views, and however freely she might express herself to Dr. Clarke and Mrs. Clayton, and at her metaphysical discussions, she kept a seal upon her lips in public. By law it was necessary that she should be a member of the established Church, and she was careful always to scrupulously conform to its worship. She had prayers read to her every morning by her chaplains; on Sundays and holy days she regularly attended the services in one of the Chapels Royal. So particular was she that, one Sunday when the King and Queen were too ill to go to church and had to keep their beds, the chaplain came and read the service to them in their bedroom. The Queen made a point of receiving the Holy Communion on the great festivals of the Church’s year, such as Easter and Christmas; and Lady Cowper comments on the devoutness of her behaviour on these occasions. Paragraphs like the following figured at regular intervals in theGazette: “On Christmas Day the King and Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, with several of the nobility and other persons of distinction, received the sacrament in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s”.97

Nor were the lesser festivals of the Church overlooked: “On the Feast of the Epiphany their Majesties, the King and Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the three eldest Princesses, went to the Chapel Royal, preceded by the King’s Heralds and Pursuivants-at-Arms, and heard divine service. His Grace the Duke of Manchester carried the sword of state to and from chapel for their Majesties, and his Majesty and the Prince of Wales made their offerings at the altar, of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, according to annual custom.” The ending of the day was of a more secular nature. “At night their Majesties played at hazard with the nobility for the benefit of the groom porter; and ’twas said the King won six hundred guineas, the Queen three hundred and sixty, Princess Amelia twenty, Princess Caroline ten, the Duke of Grafton and the Earl of Portmore several thousand.” Even King Charles the Martyr, the latest addition to the prayer-book kalendar, was not forgotten by the family who were keeping his grandson from the throne, for we read: “Yesterday being the anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles the First, their Majesties and the Royal Family attended divine service, and appeared in mourning, as is usual on that day”.98

Thus it will be seen that in the matter of outward conformity to the rites of the established Church the Queen gave no occasion for cavil. She gave large sums to Church charities, such as £500 at a time to the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; sheendowed livings and restored churches, such as Richmond, Greenwich and Kensington, presenting to Greenwich a fine peal of bells, and to Kensington a new steeple. She even feigned an interest in missionary work, and listened patiently to Berkeley when he expounded to her his scheme for establishing a missionary college in Bermuda in connection with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. She did little to forward it, and he somewhat ungratefully declared that his visits to her had been so much waste of time, and called her discussions “useless debates”. Yet, though the Queen did little to convert his heathens, she remembered Berkeley later, and obtained for him the deanery of Down.

But, with all her outward conformity, Caroline never understood the peculiar position of the Church of England, nor did she trouble to understand it. Once, soon after she came to England, Dr. Robinson, then Bishop of London, who was opposed to Dr. Samuel Clarke’s views, waited upon her to endeavour to explain the Church’s teaching, but he met with a repulse. Lady Cowper says: “This day the Bishop of London waited on my mistress, and desired Mrs. Howard to go into the Princess and say that he thought it was his duty to wait upon her, as he was Dean of the Chapel, to satisfy her on any doubts and scruples she might have in regard to our religion, and explain anything to her which she did not comprehend. She was a little nettled when Mrs. Howard delivered this message, and said: ‘Send him away civilly; though he is veryimpertinent to suppose that I, who refused to be Empress for the sake of the Protestant religion, do not understand it fully’.” Caroline’s words show how little she realised, or sympathised with, the position of the Church of England; it was to her a Protestant sect—that and nothing more. The Church of Laud, Juxon, Andrewes, Sancroft and Ken, thevia mediabetween Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, did not appeal to her; in fact she viewed it with dislike. She made no pretence to impartiality in her patronage, or to holding the balance even between the different parties in the Church; all her bishops were more or less of her way of thinking. She would have made Dr. Samuel Clarke Archbishop of Canterbury when Archbishop Wake died, had it not been for Bishop Gibson’s temperate remonstrance. He told her that though Clarke was “the most learned and honest man in her dominions, yet he had one difficulty—he was not a Christian”. To do Clarke justice, he never desired a bishopric, and he had doubts about the propriety of accepting one. Moreover, he preferred his unique position at the court, where he was, unofficially, the keeper of the Queen’s conscience.

It must be admitted that the Queen in her distribution of ecclesiastical patronage always recognised the claims of scholarship and learning, and she took infinite pains to discover the most deserving men. Among the divines to whom she gave high preferment, besides Berkeley, were the learned Butler and the judicious Secker, many years later Archbishop ofCanterbury. Secker, when he was Queen’s chaplain, mentioned to Caroline one day the name of Butler, the famous author ofThe Analogy between Natural and Revealed Religion. The Queen said she had thought that he was dead; Secker said: “No, madam, not dead but buried”. The Queen took the hint, and soon after appointed Butler Clerk of the Closet. He was thus brought into contact with her, and she delighted exceedingly in his psychological bent, and would command him to come to her, on her free evenings, from seven to nine, to talk philosophy and metaphysics. She caused his name to be put down for the next vacant bishopric, and on her death-bed she commended Butler particularly to the King, who carried out his wife’s wishes and made him Bishop of Durham.

Dr. Thomas Sherlock, a man eminent for his talents and learning, was much liked by the Queen. She appointed him to the see of Bangor, and later translated him to Salisbury in succession to his rival Hoadley. For some time Sherlock filled much the same position with the Queen that Gibson, Bishop of London, did with Walpole. He was the Queen’s favourite bishop, and she intended to translate him to London when Archbishop Wake should die, and Gibson, whom Whiston used to call “the heir apparent to Canterbury,” should be advanced to the primacy by Walpole. Between these two eminent prelates, Sherlock and Gibson, there existed a most unchristian spirit of jealousy, and Gibson besought Walpole not toallow Sherlock to succeed him in the bishopric of London. Alas! for the mutability of temporal things: when at last Wake died, it was not Gibson, but a comparatively unknown bishop, Potter of Oxford, who succeeded him in the primacy. Before that time arrived Gibson fell out of favour with Walpole, and Sherlock with the Queen, for the part they played in securing the rejection of the Quakers’ Relief Bill. Walpole had yielded to the clamour of the Church party so far as to refuse to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, but by way of compensation to the dissenters he wished to carry a bill for the relief of Quakers. It was a point of conscience with the Quakers to refuse to pay tithes unless compelled to do so by legal force. This force was always applied, and they paid. All they asked for now was that the legal proceedings against them should be made less costly. Walpole was willing to give them this relief and the Queen supported him, but the bishops, headed by Gibson and seconded by Sherlock, elated by their recent victory over the Nonconformists, rose against it to a man, and though the Bill was carried in the Commons it was rejected by the Lords. The King was highly indignant and denounced the whole bench of bishops as “a parcel of black, canting, hypocritical rascals”. Walpole’s resentment was especially levelled against Gibson, and the Queen’s against Sherlock. The Queen sent for the latter bishop and trounced him in terms which recall those which Queen Elizabeth wassaid to address to her recalcitrant prelates: “How is it possible,” said Caroline to Sherlock, “you could be so blind and so silly as to be running a race of popularity with the Bishop of London among the clergy, and hope you would rise upon the Bishop of London’s ruins (whom you hate and wish ruined) when you were going hand in hand with him in these very paths which you hoped would ruin him?... Are you not ashamed not to have seen this, and to have been at once in this whole matter, the Bishop of London’s assistant and enemy—tool and dupe?” She told the crestfallen prelate that in the present temper of the King and Prime Minister he could hope for neither London nor Canterbury, and advised him to go to his diocese and try to live it down. As their dioceses were the last places where Queen Caroline’s bishops were generally to be found, this was equivalent to a sentence of banishment. Many years later Sherlock succeeded Gibson as Bishop of London.

The Queen’s chief adviser in Church matters was her favourite, Mrs. Clayton. Mrs. Clayton had no pretence to learning, and was ignorant of the rudiments of theology—though, like many women of her type, she loved to pose as an authority on theological questions. She had imbibed the Arian principles then fashionable at court, and could repeat parrot-wise the shibboleth of her party. As she held much the same views as the Queen (though without her saving graces of learning and common sense), they often settled betweenthem who should succeed to the vacant deaneries and bishoprics. Walpole came often in conflict with Mrs. Clayton over Church appointments, for she was always urging the Queen to prefer extreme men of heterodox views who gave much trouble to the Government by their indiscreet utterances. At last, after several experiences of the vagaries of these bellicose divines, Walpole remonstrated so strongly that Mrs. Clayton’s recommendations were chiefly confined to the Irish Church. Here for years she appointed practically whom she would. The influence of the Queen’s woman of the bedchamber was well known to aspiring divines, and she was overwhelmed with letters from parsons and prelates pining for preferment. Many of these letters (preserved in the Sundon correspondence) are couched in the most cringing tone, and are full of the grossest flattery. The deans and bishopsin esseorin possegenerally followed up their letters by making her little presents; for instance, we find the Bishop of Cork sending her a dozen bottles of “green usquebaugh, sealed with the figure of St. Patrick on black wax,” and another prelate a suit of fine Irish linen.

Among Mrs. Clayton’s Irishprotégéswas Dr. Clayton, a kinsman of her husband, for whom she procured, despite the protest of the Primate of Ireland, the bishopric of Clogher. Bishop Clayton made several attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity, and once proposed in the Irish House of Lords to abolish from the prayer-book the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in a speech of which one of hiscolleagues remarked, “it made his ears tingle”. Dr. Clayton was not much of a scholar, and less of a theologian, and he adapted his views to meet the approval of his patroness. The letters of this spiritual pastor to Queen Caroline’s woman of the bedchamber are models of subserviency. Once Mrs. Clayton rebuked him for a sermon he had preached on the death of Charles the First, which seemed to her to praise the King overmuch. He at once wrote to express his regret, and said he would tone it down by adding “bred up with notions of despotic government under the pernicious influence of his father”. He placed his patronage, like his opinions, at her disposal, and kept her informed of everything that went on in Ireland—acting, in fact, as a sort of spy in the court interest. His complaisance was rewarded by his patroness, who caused him to be successively advanced to the wealthier sees of Killala and Cork. Most effusive was his gratitude: “Mrs. Clayton cannot command what I will not perform,” he writes, and again: “Could you but form to yourself the image of another person endued with the same steadiness of friendship, liveliness of conversation, soundness of judgment, and a desire of making everybody happy that is about her, which all the world can see in you, but yourself, you would then pardon my forwardness in desiring to keep up a correspondence.... If I am free from any vice, I think it is that of ingratitude.”99

Bishop Clayton’s view of the rules that should govern ecclesiastical preferment are worth quoting. The particular candidate he was recommending was a son of the Earl of Abercorn, who had taken holy orders. “What occurs to me at present,” he writes to Mrs. Clayton, “is the consideration of ecclesiastical preferments in a political view. It has not been customary for persons either of birth or fortune, to breed up their children to the Church, by which means, when preferment in the Church is given by their Majesties, there is seldom any one obliged but the very person to whom it is given, having no relatives either in the House of Lords or Commons that are gratified or are kept in dependence thereby. The only way to remedy which is by giving extraordinary encouragements to persons of birth and interest whenever they seek for ecclesiastical preferment, which will encourage others of the same quality to come into the Church, and may thereby render ecclesiastical preferments of the same use to their Majesties as civil employments.”100Of the higher interests of the Church or of religion, it will be noted, this servile prelate makes no mention; but the fear of the world and the bedchamber woman was always before his eyes.

Mrs. Clayton had a large number of poor and obscure relatives, many of whom benefited at the expense of the Church. One of her nieces, Dorothy Dyves, whom she had made a maid of honour to the Princess Royal, fell in love with the Princess’syoung chaplain, the Reverend Charles Chevenix, who was not unmindful of the avenues to preferment thus opened to him. Mrs. Clayton at first refused her consent: she did not consider a poor chaplain good enough for her niece, but Chevenix made the following appeal toher:—

“My salary as chaplain to her Royal Highness will, I hope, be thought a reasonable earnest of some future preferment, and, could I ever be happy enough to obtain your protection, I might flatter myself that I should one day owe to your goodness what I can never expect from my own merit—such a competency of fortune as may make Miss Dyves’s choice a little less unequal. My birth, I may venture to add, is that of a gentleman. My father long served, and at last was killed, in a post where he was very well known—a post that is oftener an annual subsistence than a large provision for a family, and that small provision was unfortunately lost in the year ’20. One of my brothers is now in the army, a profession not thought below people of the first rank; another, indeed, keeps a shop, but I hope that circumstance rather deserves compassion than contempt.”101

Mrs. Clayton was touched by the frankness of this appeal, but the shop remained an obstacle for some time. At last she gave her consent. Chevenix married Dorothy Dyves, and then it was only a question of a little time for the chaplain to blossominto a bishop. He was in due course advanced to the see of Killaloe, and afterwards to the richer one of Waterford. Truly Mrs. Clayton was, as her niece describes her, one of the most “worthy and generous of aunts”. No one could be more mindful of family claims. Her patronage was not entirely ecclesiastical, though she made the Church her speciality; she found for her brother-in-law a comfortable post in the civil service; she obtained for her nephews good military and civil appointments, and her nieces were all made maids of honour. Lord Pembroke sent her a valuable present—a marble table—and obtained something for a poor relative. Lord Pomfret gave her a pair of diamond ear-rings, worth £1,400; a very good investment, for he got in return the lucrative appointment of Master of the Horse. Mrs. Clayton, or Lady Sundon as she had then become, was very proud of these diamond ear-rings, and appeared with them at one of the Queen’s drawing-rooms. This roused the ire of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who had once filled a similar position with Queen Anne. “How can that woman,” said Duchess Sarah in a loud voice, so that all around might hear, “how can that woman have the impudence to go about with that bribe in her ear?” “Madam,” replied Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was standing by, “how can people know where there is wine to be sold, unless there is a sign hung out?”

It can well be imagined that a system of ecclesiastical patronage conducted on these lines didnot result in advantage to the Church. Walpole appointed bishops for purely political reasons, Mrs. Clayton for monetary and family consideration, the Queen because their views coincided with her own. Yet the Queen, though sometimes misled by her favourites, who traded on her ignorance of the English Church, honestly tried to appoint the best men according to her lights. The learning and ability of her bishops were undeniable; their only drawback was that they did not believe in the doctrines of the Church of which they were appointed the chief pastors. Without entering into theological controversy, it may be safely laid down that those who direct an institution ought to believe in the institution itself. This is precisely what most of Caroline’s bishops did not do; their energies were directed into other channels, and their enthusiasms reserved for other pursuits. Some of her bishops, notably those who were appointed to sees in Ireland and Wales, never went near their dioceses at all, while others treated the cardinal doctrines of Christianity with tacit contempt, if not open unbelief. The indifference of the bishops filtered down through the lower ranks of the clergy, and gradually influenced the whole tone of the established Church; if the bishops would not do their duty they could hardly blame their clergy for failing in theirs. Moreover, the policy of the Whig Government, in packing the Episcopal Bench solely with its own partisans, resulted in the bishops being out of touch with their clergy, for the majorityof the parsons, especially in the country districts, were Tory, and clung to their political faith as firmly as to their religious convictions.

BENJAMIN HOADLEY, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.From a Painting by Mrs. Hoadly in the National Portrait Gallery.

BENJAMIN HOADLEY, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.

From a Painting by Mrs. Hoadly in the National Portrait Gallery.

At no period of her history has the Church of England been in greater danger than she was from her own bishops and clergy in the reign of George the Second. On the one hand was a party embittered by defeat, shut out from all hope of preferment, and inflamed by a spirit of intolerance in things political and ecclesiastical; on the other was a party just as intolerant in reality, but hiding its intolerance under the cloak of broad and liberal views, and with leaders using the intellect and learning they undoubtedly possessed, to subvert, or at least to set aside, the doctrines of the Church they had sworn to believe. Indifference in practice quickly succeeded indifference in belief, and herefrom may be traced most of the ills which afflicted the Church of England during the eighteenth century. It was no wonder, when the established Church was spiritually dead, that earnest-minded men, disgusted at this condition of things, and hopeless of remedying it, set up religious bodies of their own. The growth of Methodism in the eighteenth century was directly due to the shortcomings of the Church, which had lost its hold on the masses of the people. The year after Queen Caroline’s death, in 1738, John Wesley returned from Georgia, and, aided by his brother Charles, began the mission which was attended with such marvellous results. True, the Wesleys, in words at least, never waveredin their adherence to the Church of England, but the discouragement they met with from the bishops and the often ill-directed zeal of their followers led in time to the inevitable separation, which was followed later by schisms among the Methodists themselves.

One of the most typical of the Georgian bishops was Hoadley, who became successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester, “cringing from bishopric to bishopric”. Hoadley’s career was a striking illustration of the superiority of mind over body. When he was an undergraduate at Cambridge he had an illness which crippled him for life; he was obliged to walk with a crutch, and had to preach in a kneeling posture. His appearance was exceedingly unprepossessing, but he completely overcame these natural disadvantages by the sheer force of his will. He had taken up the Church as a profession, and from the professional point of view he certainly succeeded in it; but he does not seem to have believed in the teaching of the Church whose principles he had nominally accepted. He was a conformist simply because it paid him to conform. Even a favourable biographer writes: “So far indeed was Hoadley from adhering strictly to the doctrines of the Church that it is a little to be wondered at on what principles he continued throughout life to profess conformity”.

Hoadley early threw in his lot with the Whig party, and in Queen Anne’s reign was looked upon as the leader of the Low Church divines, and a staunch upholder of Whig principles. He did not obtain anyconsiderable preferment until George the First came to the throne, when he was made a royal chaplain, and soon after advanced to the bishopric of Bangor. He did not once visit his bishopric during the whole of his six years tenure of the see, but remained in London, as the leader of the extreme latitudinarian party, which, since the Princess of Wales’s patronage, had become the fashionable one, and offered the best prospects of promotion. He therefore broke with the orthodox section of the Low Church party, who came to regard him with little less dislike than High Churchmen. Hoadley’s love of polemics soon brought him into conflict with Convocation, and led to what was known as the “Bangorian controversy”. The bishop had preached a sermon before King George the First on “The nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ,” in which he denied that there was any such thing as a visible Church of Christ, or Church authority. Convocation censured the sermon, and would have proceeded to further measures against the recalcitrant bishop had not the Government, by an arbitrary exercise of power, suspended it altogether. Convocation thus prorogued was not summoned again until the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. It would weary and not edify to enter into the details of this dreary Bangorian controversy; the tracts and pamphlets written upon it numbered nearly two hundred, and the heat and bitterness were such as only a religious dispute could engender.

Hoadley did not heed his ecclesiastical enemies,for he had staunch friends at court; he enjoyed not only the favour of the King and the Princess of Wales, but had the ear of Mrs. Clayton, soon to become a dispenser of patronage. His letters to her are some of the most fulsome preserved in her correspondence. “I compare you in my thoughts,” he writes, “with others of the same kind, and I see with pleasure, so great a superiority to the many, that I think I can hardly express my sense of it strongly enough. Compared with them therefore, I may justly speak of you as one of the superior species, and you will supply the comparison if I do not always express it, and not think me capable of offering incense, which I know you are not capable of receiving.”102

In 1721 Hoadley was translated from Bangor to the richer see of Hereford, and two years later to Salisbury, which was wealthier still. At Salisbury he so far remembered his episcopal duties as to deliver a primary charge to his clergy, a poor composition. He was not content with Salisbury, and cast envious eyes upon the rich see of Durham, which then maintained a prince-bishop. Walpole, who disliked him as being aprotégéof Mrs. Clayton’s, passed him over in favour of Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Oxford.

Hoadley owed much of his influence with the Whig party to the fact that he had always shown himself very friendly to Dissenters, and was in favour of abolishing the iniquitous Test and Corporation Actsand other disabilities under which they laboured; the animosity of his enemies arose quite as much from this fact as from their dislike of his opinions. The Protestant Nonconformists were the backbone of the Whig party, and the staunchest supporters of the House of Hanover; they therefore, not unnaturally, expected, in return for their great political services, that the disabilities which pressed upon them should be removed. From time to time they gained certain points, and the Acts were rendered practically innocuous by annual indemnities; but still they disfigured the Statute Book, and to this the Dissenters rightly objected. In 1730 a determined attempt was made by the Dissenters throughout England to secure the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and they resolved to present a monster petition to Parliament praying that the matter should be proceeded with forthwith. This action put the Government into a position of considerable difficulty, and it was entirely opposed to Walpole’s policy of letting sleeping dogs lie. Though both he and the Queen (we will leave the King out of the question, as he does not count) had the fullest sympathy with the aspirations of Dissenters; yet they saw that to raise this question at the present time would be to fan the smouldering embers of religious controversy, and would put new heart and strength into the Opposition. The clergy of the established Church, almost to a man, would be against them, and, with a general election impending, that would mean that the Government would have an active enemy inevery parish and hamlet in the kingdom. Such a reform, though just and reasonable in itself, would have the effect of alienating a number of the Government’s lukewarm supporters, and would give an opportunity for the Roman Catholics to assert themselves and claim relief also, for they were far more cruelly oppressed than the Protestant Dissenters.

Walpole knew that Hoadley had influence with the Dissenters, and he and the Queen talked it over, and resolved to ask Hoadley to see the heads of the dissenting party and endeavour to persuade them not to bring forward their petition. As Walpole had given offence to Hoadley by refusing him Durham, the Queen undertook this delicate mission. She sent for the bishop, and used all her eloquence to bring him round to her way of thinking. She dwelt on her admiration of his principles and writings; she said it was in his power to be of great use to the Government, and to place her, the Queen, under a personal debt of gratitude, which she would be slow to forget. She pointed out the danger that would arise from the religious question being raised at the present time, and she therefore desired him to ask the Dissenters to postpone their request. Hoadley demurred a good deal, possibly because the hint of promotion was not definite enough, and pointed out that as he had always urged the repeal of the offending Acts, he could hardly turn round now and eat his words. But he said he would feel the popular pulse, and if it appeared that the presentwas an inopportune moment for raising the question, he would endeavour to persuade the Dissenters to postpone it to a more convenient season.

Soon after this interview a report was promulgated by Walpole to the effect that “the Queen had sent for the Bishop of Salisbury and convinced him that this request of the Dissenters was so unreasonable that he had promised her not to support it”. This report had the very opposite effect to what was intended. It caused the Dissenters to be suspicious of their friend, and consequently tended to nullify any advice he might give them. The bishop went to Walpole in a rage and said he could be of no service in the matter whatever, and that so far from persuading the Dissenters from bringing forward their petition, he should now encourage them to do so. Walpole tried to soothe Hoadley by fair words, but finding him not amenable to them, he gave him a strong hint that if he persisted in his intention, he would ruin any chances of promotion he might have from the Government or the Queen. This brought the bishop to his bearings; he had more conferences with the Queen on the subject, and was ultimately bought over to complaisance by the promise of the next reversion of the see of Winchester. The Dissenters fell into a trap. From all over England they sent delegates to London, who on their part entrusted the negotiations with the Government to a committee of London Nonconformists. As this committee was composed of tradesmen in the City, or lawyers eagerfor promotion, Walpole was able to buy them over singly and collectively, and so, betrayed by the bishop and their delegates, the Dissenters went to the wall.

Hoadley had the misfortune to please neither the Government nor the Dissenters, for neither trusted him; but he probably did not mind, as he received what he worked for—the see of Winchester. Soon after his translation to Winchester he proceeded, after the approved fashion of Mrs. Clayton’s favourites, to show his independence and disburden his soul, by publishing a pamphlet calledA Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. This set the clergy by the ears, and they promptly started a heresy hunt, to the great discomfiture of the Government responsible for Hoadley’s promotion.

An answer was written to the pamphlet by Dr. Brett, in which Hoadley was attacked with violence and bitterness. The King, who objected to Hoadley, asked the Queen what she thought of Brett’s answer, which he had much enjoyed reading, not because of the nature of the controversy, for which he cared little, but because of the personal abuse of a prelate whom he disliked. The Queen, who was very much annoyed at Hoadley’s indiscretion, however much she might agree with his opinions, began to explain her views on the subject of the controversy. But the King cut her short testily, and told her, “She always loved talking of such nonsense and things she knewnothing of;” adding, that “if it were not for such foolish persons loving to talk of those things when they were written, the fools who wrote upon them would never think of publishing their nonsense, and disturbing the Government with impertinent disputes that nobody of any sense ever troubled himself about.” Walpole had evidently entered his protest too, aimed not only at Hoadley but at Mrs. Clayton. The Queen, who made it a rule never to oppose her liege in anything, bowed assent and said: “Sir, I only did it to let Lord Hervey know that his friend’s book had not met with that general approbation he had pretended”.

“A pretty fellow for a friend,” said the King, turning to Hervey, who was standing by. “Pray, what is it that charms you in him? His pretty limping gait?” (and then he acted the bishop’s lameness) “or his nasty, stinking breath?—phaugh!—or his silly laugh, when he grins in your face for nothing, and shows his nasty rotten teeth? Or is it his great honesty that charms your lordship—his asking a thing of me for one man, and, when he came to have it in his own power to bestow, refusing the Queen to give it to the very man for whom he had asked it? Or do you admire his conscience that makes him now put out a book that, till he was Bishop of Winchester, for fear his conscience might hurt his preferment, he kept locked up in his chest? Is his conscience so much improved beyond what it was when he was Bishop of Bangor, or Hereford, or Salisbury(for this book, I hear, was written so long ago)? Or was it that he would risk losing a shilling a-year more whilst there was nothing better to be got than what he had? My lord, I am very sorry you choose your friends so ill; but I cannot help saying, if the Bishop of Winchester is your friend, you have a great puppy and a very dull fellow, and a great rascal for your friend. It is a very pretty thing for such scoundrels, when they are raised by favour so much above their desert, to be talking and writing their stuff, to give trouble to the Government that has shown them that favour; and very modest, and a canting hypocritical knave to be crying, ‘The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world,’ at the same time that he, as Christ’s ambassador receives £6,000 or £7,000 a year. But he is just the same thing in the Church that he is in the Government, and as ready to receive the best pay for preaching the Bible, though he does not believe a word of it, as he is to take favours from the Crown, though, by his republican spirit and doctrine, he would be glad to abolish its power.”103

Having delivered himself of this lengthy exordium, the King stopped and looked at the Queen, as much as to say who dare gainsay him. She had not been able to get a word in edgeways, but by smiling and nodding she tried to signify her approval of everything her lord and master said.

This is the only instance on record we have of the King’s direct interest in ecclesiastical affairs, for,during the Queen’s lifetime, Church patronage remained in her hands, and even after her death her expressed wishes were carried out. But when all these were fulfilled, many aspiring divines, since the Queen and Lady Sundon were no longer available, paid their court to the King’s mistress, Madame de Walmoden, afterwards Countess of Yarmouth, and, for the rest of George the Second’s reign, the royal road to bishoprics ran through the apartments of the mistress.

FOOTNOTES TO BOOK III, CHAPTER X:97London Gazette, 27th December, 1729.98Daily Courant, 31st January, 1733.99Sundon Correspondence.The Bishop of Killala to Mrs. Clayton, Dublin, 17th April, 1731.100Ibid., 19th March, 1730.101Sundon Correspondence.The Rev. Charles Chevenix to Lady Sundon, London, 24th November, 1734.102Sundon Correspondence.Bishop Hoadley to Mrs. Clayton [undated].103Hervey’sMemoirs.

97London Gazette, 27th December, 1729.

98Daily Courant, 31st January, 1733.

99Sundon Correspondence.The Bishop of Killala to Mrs. Clayton, Dublin, 17th April, 1731.

100Ibid., 19th March, 1730.

101Sundon Correspondence.The Rev. Charles Chevenix to Lady Sundon, London, 24th November, 1734.

102Sundon Correspondence.Bishop Hoadley to Mrs. Clayton [undated].

103Hervey’sMemoirs.

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