456 ([return])
[ See the Mercuries for September 1689, and the four following months. See also Welwood's Mercurius Reformatus of Sept. 18. Sept. 25. and Oct. 8. 1689. Melfort's Instructions, and his memorials to the Pope and the Cardinal of Este, are among the Nairne Papers; and some extracts have been printed by Macpherson.]
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[ See the Answer of a Nonjuror to the Bishop of Sarum's challenge in the Appendix to the Life of Kettlewell. Among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library is a paper which, as Sancroft thought it worth preserving, I venture to quote. The writer, a strong nonjuror, after trying to evade, by many pitiable shifts the argument drawn by a more compliant divine from the practice of the primitive Church, proceeds thus: "Suppose the primitive Christians all along, from the time of the very Apostles, had been as regardless of their oaths by former princes as he suggests will he therefore say that their practice is to be a rule? Ill things have been done, and very generally abetted, by men of otherwise very orthodox principles." The argument from the practice of the primitive Christians is remarkably well put in a tract entitled The Doctrine of Nonresistance or Passive Obedience No Way concerned in the Controversies now depending between the Williamites and the Jacobites, by a Lay Gentleman, of the Communion of the Church of England, as by Law establish'd, 1689.]
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[ One of the most adulatory addresses ever voted by a Convocation was to Richard the Third. It will be found in Wilkins's Concilia. Dryden, in his fine rifacimento of one of the finest passages in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, represents the Good Parson as choosing to resign his benefice rather than acknowledge the Duke of Lancaster to be King of England. For this representation no warrant can be found in Chaucer's Poem, or any where else. Dryden wished to write something that would gall the clergy who had taken the oaths, and therefore attributed to a Roman Catholic priest of the fourteenth century a superstition which originated among the Anglican priests of the seventeenth century.]
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[ See the defence of the profession which the Right Reverend Father in God John Lake, Lord Bishop of Chichester, made upon his deathbed concerning passive obedience and the new oaths. 1690.]
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[ London Gazette, June 30. 1689; Narcissus Luttrell's Diary. "The eminentest men," says Luttrell.]