1694–1702.
Yet Dodwell wrote from Shottesbrook, August 29th, 1700, to Archbishop Tenison, requesting him to use his influence in providing Bishops for the colonies. “The occasion of this present address,” he says, “is not to beg any favour for myself, nor for our dear fathers and brethren whom I follow in this excellent cause; it is for that very body which is headed by you against us, which, we hope, will at length unite with us on the old terms, when worldly concerns are removed. You have an opportunity put into your hands of doing God service in the plantations, and of entitling yourself thereby to greater rewards from God than you can expect from any of your worldly designs.” And in November of the same year I discover him corresponding with the same distinguished person as to healing the Church’s wound. First, he despatched a feeler on the subject, which was civilly received, with a request for further communication, and then he propounded certain terms of recommunion. He thought the Clergy who had taken the oaths might agree with the Nonjurors so far as to maintain, in opposition to all Commonwealth’s-men, the doctrine of passive obedience “to the lawful Prince for the time being,” each party being left to apply the principle in his own way. As to the doctrine of the Church’s independency, he proposed there should be “expressions as full as possible disowning the validity of the Lay Act with regard to conscience, and protesting against what had been done in this matter as unfit to pass into a precedent.” As to prayers for the reigning family, so strongly objected to by Kettlewell, he did not regard them as obliging a separation. He took, he says in obscure language, the right of public offices to belong to governors who might bona fide differ in opinion from their subjects, and, notwithstanding, be included by them in their intercessions. He did not mean that men might own those opinions as true which they believed false, yet they might let them pass as the sense of the community of which they were members. At the beginning Dodwell suggested, if the reconciliation could be effected, that the remaining deprived Bishops should “hold their places, with a third part of the profits, without taking the oaths;” and in the end, “If you will do nothing on your part to qualify you for union with us, our fathers will have performed their part, and you alone must be answerable for the consequences of it.”[466]
Hickes, Suffragan Bishop of Thetford, resided in Ormond Street, exerting an influence very different from that of Ken, Kettlewell, and Nelson; for whilst they kept aloof from political intrigues, he plunged deeply into the eddying whirlpool, and whilst they allowed the laity to attend parish churches, he denounced those who did so. He most absurdly maintained that even when no State prayers occurred in the service, simply to hold fellowship with schismatics—and such he denominated all except Nonjurors—was a flagrant betrayal of Christian principle.[467]
NONJURORS.
On another point he was at variance with Kettlewell. Hickes thought it lawful to wear a military disguise that he might escape detection, and once was introduced, in Kettlewell’s presence, as Captain or Colonel Somebody, for which a patriotic precedent was characteristically alleged, by quoting the case of a certain Bishop of old, who, amidst an Arian persecution, assumed a military title. Nor did Turner object to the practice of absconding under borrowed names. But against everything of this kind the severely truthful Kettlewell set his face like a flint, and would not have swerved a hair’s-breadth from the straightest line of honesty to save his life.[468]
Eccentric individuals might be found amongst those who, by Nonjuring sympathies, were drawn together in a city then, as now, containing social worlds, scarcely by any chance touching each other. Such precisians cut themselves off from general intercourse and form narrow-minded habits, which satisfy their own consciences, but provoke the ridicule of other people.
1694–1702.
Amongst those who in William’s reign often met together and talked over the affairs of the deprived Clergy, occurs the name of Dr. Francis Lee—Rabbi Lee, as he came to be called, because of his Jewish learning. He had been deprived of a fellowship at St. John’s College, Oxford, and after travelling abroad and practising as a physician in Venice for a couple of years, had returned to London in 1694, when he joined a company of Mystics, and married the prophetess of the sect—a wild sort of lady, who imagined that she received revelations from God and from angels, and had been taught by them the finite duration of future punishment. Besides this species of modern Montanism, Lee adopted peculiar opinions on other subjects, and published proposals to Peter the Great, Czar of Muscovy, for the better framing of his extensive government.[469]
NONJURORS.
No layman attained such a position amongst the Nonjurors as Robert Nelson, pupil of the Anglican Dr. George Bull, and friend of Dr. Mapletoft, who had been educated in the family of his great-uncle, Nicholas Farrer, of Gidding. He early imbibed influences favourable to the adoption of High Church views. His friendship with the Latitudinarian Archbishop Tillotson, and with the half-Puritan Bishop Kidder, might hold in check for awhile prior tendencies, but could not prevent their ultimately producing effect. His personal regard for Tillotson lasted till death; he held the Primate in his arms at the moment he expired; yet then all Nelson’s deference to his opinions had ceased, for from the crisis of the Revolution he had been a Nonjuring Jacobite. The conversion to Popery of his wife—an aristocratic widow, the Lady Theophila Lucy, who had become violently enamoured of his handsome person—did not incline him at all towards Rome, though it could not prove inimical to the development of his Catholic tendencies. Of his intense devoutness and religious zeal there can be no doubt, nor of his respectable abilities; and the importance of such an accession to the new sect was heightened by other circumstances. No one can look at his portrait without admiring the taste of Lady Lucy. His fine features, set off to advantage by a good complexion and the adventitious decoration of a magnificent wig, must have given him an imposing presence. That presence was further aided by the taste and expensiveness of his apparel, to which should be added the recollection of his wealth and his aristocratic connections. Thus fitted to make his way in society, he naturally became amongst poor and persecuted people a commanding personage—an oracle with some, a counsellor with all. He associated with Lloyd; corresponded with Frampton; was acquainted with Ken; for Kettlewell he felt a warm attachment; Collier and Spinckes were numbered amongst his friends; and Hickes lived close neighbour to him in Ormond Street, Red Lion Fields.