He, as we know, had been in other days a friend of such great and noble souls as Hammond and Sanderson, Chillingworth and Falkland. He had ministered to Charles I. in his captivity at Newmarket, and had stood on the scaffold with Capel. At The Hague he became an honorary chaplain to the Queen of Bohemia, who knew merit when she saw it.
From the time when Morley assumed the spiritual directorship of the twelve-year-old daughter of his protector Hyde, he taught her to use regular confession, which she seems to have done unswervingly, and her confidence in him may be gauged from the fact that as soon as her position as Duchess of York was firmly established, she chose him to continue her guide “in those things that concerned her spiritual and everlasting condition.” It has been already noticed that at one time Morley had been suspected of Calvinism, on which account he was disliked by Laud; and the story is told of him, that when asked what Arminians held, he answered with some acerbity that they held but bishoprics and deaneries. But his later close friendship with the saintly Ken seems to establish his orthodoxy, and we find him preaching against Presbyterianism.[[241]] He, for his part, describes his pupil Anne as being “as devout and charitable as ever I knew any of her age and sex.” After her marriage she carefully kept the canonical hours of the “Public Service of God in her Chapel with those of her family.” Besides this, she was a regular and devout communicant. “And always,” says the bishop,[[242]] “the day before she received she made a voluntary confession of what she thought she had offended God in, either by omission or by commission, professing her sorrow for it, and promising amendment of it, and kneeling down she desired and received absolution in the form and words prescribed by our Church. This for her devotion. And as for Charity, she did every time she received the Sacrament, besides five pounds in gold she gave at the altar, she gave me twenty pounds to give to such as I thought had most need of it, and did best deserve it. This was her ordinary and constant way of expressing her charity. But that which she did at other Times and upon extraordinary Occasions I believe was very much more, especially in the Time of the Great Plague. To conclude I remember she told the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Sheldon) and me when we were both together with her that if she did not so much in point of Charity as it was fit for her to do, it should be his fault and mine, and not hers.”[[243]]
[241]. Izaak Walton was also much with him, probably owing to his connection with Ken.
[242]. “Register and Chronicle,” by Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough. (Morley.)
[243]. Burnet was very bitter against Sheldon, who he declared “seemed to have no great sense of religion” (“History of His Own Times”). “He {Sheldon} belonged to the school of Andrewes and Laud, and at one time was almost the sole support of Jeremy Taylor. He, by the way, fearlessly remained at Lambeth throughout the Plague” (Dictionary of National Biography).
It is strange and perplexing to read this obviously honest testimony side by side with the dismal tales of light conduct, of avarice, of gluttony, of reckless gambling, which were freely told; and it is impossible to refrain from, at least, trying to discount some of these scandals, knowing as we do the age and state of society which gave birth to them. It may be objected that the King, whose way of life was so unhappily notorious, steadily communicated, himself, in the Chapel Royal on the great festivals; but from the account just quoted, it seems evident that Duchess Anne’s reception of the Divine Mysteries was no perfunctory act. For the rest, impossible as it is to reconcile apparent contradictions, one can only fall back on the truism of the contradictions of poor human nature itself.
With regard to the change of faith presently to be traced, as late as 1667, at the time therefore of her father’s banishment, Bishop Morley persists in describing Anne as still “a zealous Protestant,” “and zealous to make Protestants,” though this assertion may be coloured by the writer’s prepossessions. Her relations with Morley and also with Sheldon brought her into contact with the mysterious adventurer Ferdinand de Macedo.[[244]] Sir John Bramston, Clarendon’s old friend, had been accused by this person, prompted by Henry Mildmay, Bramston’s political enemy, of having changed his religion. Macedo himself (a Portuguese), who had declared himself a convert from the Roman Church, was recommended to the Duchess as an object of charity. She forthwith allowed him a yearly pension of thirty pounds, and spoke for him to her two advisers, who, in their turn, each made him an allowance of ten pounds, the Bishop of Winchester, moreover, placing him at Christ Church and even advancing a further sum of thirty pounds to buy necessaries. However, the man for whom so much was done was found to be utterly unworthy, for he drank and gambled, and even had a discreditable brawl with a Frenchman whom he threw downstairs. The Dean of Christ Church and Canon Lockey, at the end of their patience, very naturally appealed to Morley to remove him, as a cause of grave scandal. The latter, as well as Sheldon, promptly withdrew the allowance aforesaid, but out of good nature said little or nothing of the matter to the Duchess, who, however, hearing something of it from others, questioned the bishop closely, and being satisfied that her bounty was misapplied, took it away. Macedo, who probably traded on the fact that he was a Portuguese, and thus a fellow-countryman of the Queen, was quite unabashed at being unmasked, and with great effrontery announced that he had been turned out of the university for testifying against Popery and the Prayer Book. The exasperated Morley called him, with apparently only too much reason, “a counterfeit pretended convert” whom “Maimbourg magnifies so much, tho’ he knows he proved himself to be an arrant impostor and profligated wretch.”[[245]]
[244]. “Autobiography of Sir John Bramston.”
[245]. “Register and Chronicle,” by Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough.
A year or two earlier, a letter from Anne to the Bishop of Durham, dated 10th September 1665, expresses her attitude with regard to the Anglican Church at that period.