Dr. Welton's chapel in Goodman's Fields being visited (1717) by Colonel Ellis and other justices of the peace, with proper assistants, about two hundred and fifty persons were found there assembled, of whom but forty would take the oaths. The doctor refusing them also, was ordered to be proceeded against according to law.
This reminds me of another Query. What has become of Dr. Welton's famous Whitechapel altar-piece, which Bishop Compton drove out of his church. Some doubts have been expressed whether that is the identical one in the Saint's Chapel of St. Alban's Abbey. A friend has assured the writer that he had seen it about twenty years ago, at a Roman Catholic meeting-house in an obscure court at Greenwich. It is not there now. The print of it in the library of the Society of Antiquaries is accompanied with these MS. lines by Mr. Mattaire:—
"To say the picture does to him belong,
Kennett does Judas and the painter wrong;
False is the image, the resemblance faint,
Judas, compared to Kennett, was a saint."
One word more. The episcopal seal of the nonjuring bishops was a shepherd with a sheep upon his shoulders. The crozier which had been used by them, was, in 1839, in the possession of John Crossley Esq., of Scaitcliffe, near Todmorden.
J. Yeowell.
Hoxton.