“And shall Trelawny die?
And shall Trelawny die?
There’s twenty thousand Cornish lads
Will know the reason why.”
He retained a secret attachment to James II. after the Revolution. That monarch had, in the midst of his troubles, promised to translate him from Bristol to Exeter; but the turn of events in favour of William, so it is insinuated, drew the Bishop into a betrayal of his old master; at any rate, in some way, from William he obtained his improved preferment; but afterwards he showed himself anxious to deny that the Bishops had invited the Prince over, though, as he said, “we found ourselves obliged to accept of the deliverance.”[344] Trelawny never showed any sympathy with the party led by Tillotson, Burnet, and Tenison; and, in the Correspondence of Atterbury, he appears as the chief of those to whom, as diocesan and friend, the lively and interesting letters of the Archdeacon of Totness are addressed. The Archdeacon constantly kept the Bishop informed of what was going on in the Jerusalem Chamber and in Henry the VII.’s Chapel; and it is plain, from the way in which he wrote, how much influence he had acquired over his patron’s mind. The intimate, cordial, and approving friend of Atterbury could not but be opposed to the proceedings of Tenison and Burnet. Sprat was not a man of much principle; he had joined with Dryden and Waller in poetic praise of Oliver Cromwell, he had sat on James’ High Commission, he had read the Declaration of Indulgence in servile submissiveness, but with faltering lips; he had voted for the Regency, and then taken the new oaths, and assisted at the Coronation; and though he had cleared himself from the charge of treason, there is reason to believe that he was Jacobite at heart. He hated Nonconformists, and went in for High Church measures; and as no love was lost between the Bishops of Rochester and Salisbury, the latter said of the former, he had “been deeply engaged in the former reigns, and he stuck firm to the party to which, by reason of the liberties of his life, he brought no sort of honour.”[345]
1701.
CONVOCATION.
In the spring of 1701, when the great ecclesiastical tournament was going on within the Abbey walls, a new ecclesiastical knight entered the lists outside, in the field of literature. He not only broke a lance, but engaged in a hand-to-hand encounter with the famous antagonist who had distinguished himself equally in book-writing and in debate; White Kennet came forward to answer Francis Atterbury. White Kennet—a curious-looking person, whose forehead, to the day of his death, bore witness to an accident which happened in his youth, for he wore a large patch of black velvet over a ghastly scar—was a man of great archeological research, an eminent Saxon scholar, and a friend of Mr. Tanner and of Dr. Hicks. He had published, in 1695, his well known Parochial Antiquities, and now he sent forth his Ecclesiastical Synods and Parliamentary Convocations historically stated and vindicated from the Misrepresentations of Mr. Atterbury. The title intimates that the object was not to test the Convocation question by applying to it texts of Scripture, or the opinions of the Fathers, or principles of reason, or the results of experience; but to examine it closely in its connection with English history and English law. After the fashion of the day, especially as it appears in the polemical department, whilst using occasionally courteous expressions, he deals very unpleasant blows, depreciating his opponent’s learning, exposing his mistakes, pointing out where he had confounded facts and fallen into sophistry, not omitting to throw the shield of his erudition over Dr. Wake, who had been roughly handled by his excited adversaries. Kennet’s main positions were—that Parliamentary Convocations are not in essence and nature the same things as ecclesiastical synods; that not spiritual affairs, but the taxing of the Clergy, gave the first occasion of their being called together in connection with Parliament—their first appearance in that association being in the year 1282, in the eleventh year of Edward I., the first proctors of the rural priesthood being soon brought into parliamentary attendance. Repeatedly he asserts that Parliamentary Convocations, although ecclesiastical in their constituent parts, are not ecclesiastical in their objects and purposes, and he repeatedly charges Atterbury with confusing civil councils with sacred synods.[346]
1701.
It was a pet idea with Atterbury, that Bishops should avail themselves of the præmunientes clause. Kennet undertook to show that he was mistaken as to the time of its origin; that he incorrectly maintained the constancy of its practical application; that he was deceived in his notice of its nature and effect, and that the modern had not, any more than the ancient Clergy, reason to be fond of it. The provincial summons to Convocation, issued by an Archbishop, he maintained to be a sufficient authority without diocesan writs. “From the three or four first years of Queen Elizabeth,” he says, “when the Protestant Clergy might be trusted for obedient subjects, there is not one proof that ever any Bishop made a return of the præmunientes to the Crown, or that ever the Crown challenged such a return from any Bishop.”[347]