This may seem a caricatured description of the Quakers’ religion, but it must be borne in mind that in 1690 that religion was not the systematised and inoffensive thing that it is in 1865.
Of all the members of the Low-Church party, in the reign of William and Mary, Tillotson stood the highest in general estimation. He was the son of a clothier, and was born at Sowerby Bridge, in Yorkshire, in 1630. His first sermon was preached at the morning exercise in Cripplegate, in 1661. Thirty years afterwards he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Church of St Mary le Bow. The congregation was the most splendid that had been seen in any place of worship since William and Mary’s coronation. The crowds that lined the streets greeted the new primate with loud applauses; but the applauses of his friends could not drown the roar of execration which the Jacobites and High-Church party set up against him. According to them, he was a thief, who had entered not by the door, but had climbed over the fences. He was an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, an Atheist. He had never been christened, for his parents were Anabaptists. He had lost their religion when a boy, and he had never found another. In ribald lampoons he was nicknamed “Undipped John.” The parish register of his baptism was produced in vain. This storm of obloquy, which he had to face for the first time at more than sixty years of age, was too much for him. His spirits declined, his health gave way, and in 1695 he died, and Samuel Wesley, his sincere and warm admirer, wrote and published his elegy.
Tillotson was sincere, frank, and humble; of kind and tender affection, bountiful in his charities, and forgiving of injuries. After his death, there was found a bundle of bitter libels which had been published against him, on which he had written with his own hand, “I forgive the authors of these books, and I pray God that He also may forgive them.” His public principles were philanthropic, tolerant, and liberal. William and Mary reposed an entire confidence in his prudence, moderation, and integrity. In some points he was, perhaps, too compliant, and was led into some inconsistencies; but the times were difficult, and his intentions were always good. While he was in a private station of life, he always laid aside two-tenths of his income for charitable uses; and when he died, his debts could not have been paid if the king had not remitted his first fruits. As a preacher, he was thought, by his contemporaries, to have surpassed all rivals, living or dead. Posterity has reversed this judgment. Yet Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate English classic. His highest flights were indeed far below those of Taylor, of Barrow, and of South; but his oratory was more correct and equable than theirs. No quaint conceits, no pedantic quotations from Talmudists and Scoliasts, no mean images, buffoon stories, or scurrilous invectives, ever marred the effect of his grave and temperate discourses. His style is not brilliant, but it is pure and transparently clear. He is always serious, and always good. His sermons were published in three volumes folio. Addison considered them as a standard of the purity of the English language; and Dryden acknowledged that, if he had any talent for English prose, it was derived from frequent perusal of Tillotson’s writings.
In 1694, on December 28, Queen Mary died, and Samuel Wesley composed and published a poem eulogising her character. Being seized with smallpox, Mary gave orders that every lady of the bed-chamber, every maid of honour, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the smallpox, should instantly leave the house. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, and arranged others, and then calmly awaited her decease. William remained night and day by her bedside; and a few moments before she expired he was removed, almost insensible, from the sick-chamber. The public sorrow at her death was great and general. When the Commons next met they sat for a time in profound silence. The number of sad faces in the street struck every observer. On the Sunday which followed her death, her virtues were celebrated in almost every parish church of the capital, and in almost every great meeting-house of the Nonconformists. The funeral was the saddest and most august that Westminster had ever seen. The two Houses, with their maces, followed the hearse; the Lords, robed in scarlet and ermine; the Commons in long black mantles. No preceding sovereign had ever been attended to the grave by a parliament; for, till then, the parliament had always expired with the sovereign. The whole magistracy of the city swelled the procession. The banners of England and France, Scotland, and Ireland, were carried by great nobles before the corpse. The pall was borne by the chiefs of the illustrious houses of Howard, Seymour, Grey, and Stanley. On the gorgeous coffin of purple and gold were laid the crown and sceptre of the realm. The day was well suited to such a ceremony. The sky was dark and troubled. The nave, choir, and transept of the abbey were in a blaze with[with] innumerable wax-lights. The body was deposited under a sumptuous canopy in the centre of the church, while the primate preached; and throughout the whole ceremony the distant booming of cannon was heard every minute from the batteries of the Tower.[[94]]
As long as Queen Mary lived, William left the management of the affairs of the English Church wholly in her hands, and her chief confidant and counsellor was Archbishop Tillotson.
Whatever was Mary’s character and conduct as a daughter and a sister, she was certainly the most devoted and exemplary of royal wives. Though, in accordance with the atrocious practice of sovereigns, her husband kept a mistress in the palace, yet she had the good sense to submit to his commanding intellect. John Wesley says, she “was in her person tall and well-proportioned, with an oval visage, lively eyes, agreeable features, a mild aspect, and an air of dignity. Her apprehension was clear, her memory tenacious, and her judgment solid. She was a zealous Protestant, scrupulously exact in all the duties of devotion, of an even temper, and of a calm and mild conversation.” She was excellently qualified to be the head of the English court. She was English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her face was handsome, her port majestic, her temper sweet and lively, her manners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly cultivated, was quick. Feminine wit sparkled in her conversation; and her letters were so well expressed that they deserved to be well spelt. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds of literature, and did something towards bringing books into fashion among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life, and the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties, were the more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness, and discouraged scandal as much as vice. Her charities were munificent and judicious, and though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London.[[95]]
The reign of William, her husband, extended to the year 1702. During the thirteen years that William wore the crown, the Bank of England was founded; the East India Company was reorganised; and the plantations or settlements of America and the West Indies so steadily increased, that, before his death, they employed not less than five hundred sail of ships. Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely were the chief portrait-painters of the day; Purcell was the chief musician; and Sir Isaac Newton was shedding a glory over his age and country by his sublime scientific discoveries. The higher kinds of literature were at a discount for want of court patronage. Dryden, fallen on what to him were evil days and evil tongues, and forced in his old age to write for bread, with less rest for his wearied head and hand than they had ever had before, now produced some of his most laborious and also some of his happiest works; and Lee, the dramatic poet, discharged from Bedlam, finished two more tragedies; but besides these, there were hardly any poets above the rank of Shadwell, Tate, and Brady. Among other writers belonging to the same period may be mentioned:—Bishop Stillingfleet, who had been known as an author thirty years before William’s accession to the throne; Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough, an exceedingly learned writer, who, at the age of eighty-four, began to study, and mastered the Coptic language, was now in the full zenith of his fame; Bishop Bull was writing his “Judicium Ecclesiæ Catholicæ,” for which he received the thanks of the whole body of the clergy in France; good old Richard Baxter, who had been filling the world with books for half a century, just lived to see the Revolution, and died in 1691; Dr Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was plying his prolific pen, which, during his lifetime, produced one hundred and forty-five distinct publications; Robert South, immortalised by his masculine, if not spiritual sermons, was carrying on a controversy with Sherlock respecting the Trinity; and John Locke was publishing his “Essay Concerning the Human Understanding.”
The population of England, in the reign of King William, was about seven millions. About ten thousand of these were clergymen, with an average income of £60 each per annum. The average wages of labouring people and out-door servants were five shillings and ninepence farthing per week; and the average income of cottagers and paupers fourpence farthing per day.[[96]] Such was the state of things when Samuel Wesley was flourishing among his two hundred peasant parishioners at South Ormsby, on £50 a year and a parsonage,—an income nearly equal to the average income of the ten thousand clergy living at that period.
King William died on the 8th of March 1702. Samuel Wesley’s son John says—“Upon the whole, William III. appears to have been an honest, conscientious man, fearing God, and desirous to please Him. His good qualities were many, his ill ones few; so that we may well rank him among the best of the English princes.”[[97]]
At eighteen William sat among the fathers of the Commonwealth, grave, discreet, and judicious as the oldest among them. At twenty-one he was placed at the head of the administration. At twenty-three he was renowned throughout Europe as a soldier and politician. His personal tastes were those of a warrior rather than of a statesman; but he occupies a far higher place among statesmen than among warriors. From a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of manhood his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack of smallpox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely draw his breath in any but the purest air. Cruel headaches frequently tortured him. Exertion soon fatigued him. Yet, through a life, which was one of long disease, the force of his mind never failed, on any great occasion, to bear up his suffering and languid body.