BISHOPS.
1662–1677.
The three Archbishops of York before the Revolution were not men who exerted much influence. Dr. Accepted Frewen was enthroned on the 11th of October, 1660, and afterwards enjoyed, for twelve months, the revenues of the see of Lichfield, during which period it remained without an occupant. Before his Archiepiscopal career, which proved equally brief and uneventful—for he died on the 28th of March, 1664—he acquired the reputation of being a good scholar, and a great orator; but none of his works were ever published, except a Latin oration, and a few verses on the death of Prince Henry.[715] He was succeeded by Dr. Sterne, who, though in other respects not a remarkable person, furnishes, from the accounts given of him, material for a more extended notice than his predecessor has received. Being educated at Cambridge, and made Master of Jesus College, he, for his loyalty, and for conveying the College plate to Charles I. at York, with other Royalists, was imprisoned, and otherwise treated with great cruelty. In a letter, which he wrote at the time, he gives an account of his sufferings, and, as it indicates his temper, as well as expresses the bitter recollections of Puritanism, which he carried with him into his Episcopate, it will be well to give an extract from it:—"This is now the fourteenth month of my imprisonment," he says,—"nineteen weeks in the Tower, thirty weeks in the Lord Peter's House, ten days in the ships, and seven weeks here in Ely House. The very dry fees and rents of these several prisons have amounted to above £100, besides diet and all other charges, which have been various and excessive, as in prisons is usual. For the better enabling me to maintain myself in prison, and my family at home, they have seized upon all my means which they can lay their hands on. At my living near Cambridge, they have not only taken the whole crop, that is in a manner the whole benefit of the living (for the rest is very little), but plundered and sold whatever goods of mine they found there, even to the poultry in the yard, allowing me not so much as to pay for his dinner that served the Cure. They have robbed also the child that is yet unborn, of the clothes it should be wrapped in. But, upon my wife's address to the Committee at Cambridge, they had so much humanity as to make the sequestrators (though with much ado) restore them to her again. They have also forbidden our College tenants (all within their verge) to pay us any rents (for the better upholding of learning and the nurseries thereof). If I have anything else that escapes their fingers, it is in such fingers out of which I cannot get it; and that also I owe to the same goodness of the times. So that if my friends' love had not made my credit better than it deserves to be, and supplied my occasions, I should have kept but an hungry and cold house both here and at home. And all this while I have never been so much as spoken withal, or called either to give or receive an account why I am here. Nor is anything laid to my charge (not so much as the general crime of being a malignant), no, not in the warrant for my commitment. What hath been wanting in human justice, hath been (I praise God) supplied by Divine mercy. Health of body, and patience and cheerfulness of mind, I have not wanted, no, not on shipboard, where we lay (the first night) without anything under, or over us, but the bare decks and the clothes on our backs; and, after we had some of us got beds, were not able (when it rained) to lie dry in them; and, when it was fair weather, were sweltered with heat, and stifled with our own breaths: there being of us in that one small Ipswich coal-ship (so low built, too, that we could not walk, nor stand upright in it) within one or two of threescore; whereof six Knights, and eight Doctors in Divinity, and divers gentlemen of very good worth, that would have been sorry to have seen their servants (nay, their dogs) no better accommodated. Yet, among all that company, I do not remember that I saw one sad or dejected countenance all the while, so strong is God, when we are weakest."[716] Having been domestic chaplain to Archbishop Laud, Sterne attended him to the scaffold, and afterwards lived in obscurity until the Restoration, after which the King made him Bishop of Carlisle, in the year 1660, and in 1664 transferred him to York, where he died in 1683.[717]
BISHOPS.
Burnet represents Sterne as "a sour, ill-tempered man," minding chiefly the enriching of his family; as being suspected of Popery, "because he was more than ordinarily compliant in all things to the Court;" and as very zealous for the Duke of York.[718] Another authority affirms that Sterne was greatly respected, and generally lamented; that all his clergy commemorated his sweet condescensions, his free communications, faithful counsels, exemplary temperance, cheerful hospitality, and bountiful charity.[719] It may seem difficult to reconcile these opposite statements; yet, when it is considered, that the first of these authorities would describe Sterne as he appeared to people whom he disliked, and the second as he appeared to people whom he loved, it only follows that the Archbishop showed himself an exceedingly disagreeable man to such as belonged to the opposite party, and quite as pleasant a man to those who belonged to his own. I may notice, that he wrote a Book on Logic, assisted in Walton's Polyglot Bible, and is one amongst other persons to whom, without satisfactory evidence, has been ascribed the authorship of the Whole Duty of Man.[720]
1662–1677.
Sterne was succeeded in the Northern primacy, by Dr. John Dolben, Bishop of Rochester, who died at Bishopthorpe in 1686, and whose consecration sermon was preached by South—scanty pieces of information to put together; but really there is as little interest in his life, as there is of importance in his administration. His biography, by Le Neve, consists in a notice of his being an Ensign in the Royalist Army at Marston Moor, in an enumeration of his preferments, and of the Episcopal consecrations in which he took part,—and in the mention of one or two sermons, which he preached on public occasions.[721] Burnet describes him as "a man of more spirit than discretion, and an excellent preacher; but of a free conversation, which laid him open to much censure in a vicious Court."[722]
BISHOPS.
None of the Welsh Bishops require notice, except that of St. Asaph. This see, after being held by George Griffith, who died in 1668, was bestowed upon Henry Glemham, who died in 1670, when Dr. Isaac Barrow, a High Anglican Churchman, was translated to it from the Isle of Man. Of that singular and inhospitable place he had been consecrated prelate in 1663, and many works of charity and piety are ascribed to him during his seven years' episcopate. The people had no chimnies, and fixed bushes in the entrance to their huts, which they called making a door; and, amidst all this misery, Barrow strove to introduce temporal comforts together with spiritual blessings. At St. Asaph he pursued the same, benevolent career as in the Isle of Man, improving his cathedral and his palace, and also building almshouses.
Barrow was uncle to the celebrated Divine of the same name, but he does not appear to have possessed any of the ability, or much of the learning of his nephew; and it is a singular instance of contrast between the two, that, whereas the Master of Trinity has obtained an undying renown for Protestantism by his treatise on the Pope's supremacy, the prelate has been brought into an equivocal position by the inscription on his monument in St. Asaph Cathedral, where he was buried in 1680: "Orate pro conservo vestro, ut inveniat misericordiam in die Domini." He was succeeded by William Lloyd, a distinguished man, who can be more advantageously described when we reach the story of the Seven Bishops in 1688.[723]
1662–1677.