“Sir,
I cannot satisfy my wife without giving you this trouble of my thanks for your very greate kindnesse to me and my sonn: we gott hither in v. good time on Thursday to waite on ye king before night; who was in a course of physick, but God be praised is v. well & walked yesterday round Hide Parke. My son also desires his humble services to you: And we both of us desire our services & thanks to Mr. Ledgard & Mr. Smith for yr great civilities to us; & whenever I can serve any of you or the College, be most confident to find me
“Yr most affect. friend &
“humble Servant
“Conyers.”
In 1680, March 30, London, Lord Conyers writes to O. Walker about sending his son to the College, “who is growne too bigge for schoole tho’ little I fear in scholarship … he is very towardly & capable to be made a scholar.” He desires [letter of London, April 9, 1682] Mr. Walker to provide a tutor for “his young man.”
Smith’s account of Obadiah Walker’s doings at the College is fitly completed by the following passage from a letter sent by a Romanist priest at Oxford, Father Henry Pelham, to the Provincial of the Jesuits, Father John Clare (Sir John Warner, Bart.), preserved in the Public Record Office in Brussels, and given in Bloxam’s Magdalen College and James II. (p. 227)—
“Oxford, 1690, May 2.—Hon. Sir, You are desirous to know how things are with us in these troublous times, since trade (religion) is so much decayed. I can only say that in the general decline of trade we have had our share. For before this turn we were in a very hopeful way, for we had three public shops (chapels) open in Oxford. One did wholly belong to us, and good custom we had, viz. the University (University College Chapel); but now it is shut up. The Master was taken, and has been ever since in prison, and the rest forced to abscond.”
Thus ended the last attempt to force the Romanist religion upon Oxford. In the following December we find “Obadiah Walker” in the list of prisoners remaining at Faversham under a strong guard until the 30th of December, and then conducted some to the Tower, some to Newgate, and others released. Mr. Obadiah Walker lived for many years afterwards, and added to the literary work he had already accomplished in Oxford a history of the Ejected Clergy. His memory long survived in Oxford, and with the mob was kept alive in a doggrel ballad which bore the refrain, “Old Obadiah sings Ave Maria.”