Dr. Thomas Sherlock, a man eminent for his talents and learning, was much liked by the Queen. She appointed him to the see of Bangor, and later translated him to Salisbury in succession to his rival Hoadley. For some time Sherlock filled much the same position with the Queen that Gibson, Bishop of London, did with Walpole. He was the Queen’s favourite bishop, and she intended to translate him to London when Archbishop Wake should die, and Gibson, whom Whiston used to call “the heir apparent to Canterbury,” should be advanced to the primacy by Walpole. Between these two eminent prelates, Sherlock and Gibson, there existed a most unchristian spirit of jealousy, and Gibson besought Walpole not to allow Sherlock to succeed him in the bishopric of London. Alas! for the mutability of temporal things: when at last Wake died, it was not Gibson, but a comparatively unknown bishop, Potter of Oxford, who succeeded him in the primacy. Before that time arrived Gibson fell out of favour with Walpole, and Sherlock with the Queen, for the part they played in securing the rejection of the Quakers’ Relief Bill. Walpole had yielded to the clamour of the Church party so far as to refuse to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, but by way of compensation to the dissenters he wished to carry a bill for the relief of Quakers. It was a point of conscience with the Quakers to refuse to pay tithes unless compelled to do so by legal force. This force was always applied, and they paid. All they asked for now was that the legal proceedings against them should be made less costly. Walpole was willing to give them this relief and the Queen supported him, but the bishops, headed by Gibson and seconded by Sherlock, elated by their recent victory over the Nonconformists, rose against it to a man, and though the Bill was carried in the Commons it was rejected by the Lords. The King was highly indignant and denounced the whole bench of bishops as “a parcel of black, canting, hypocritical rascals”. Walpole’s resentment was especially levelled against Gibson, and the Queen’s against Sherlock. The Queen sent for the latter bishop and trounced him in terms which recall those which Queen Elizabeth was said to address to her recalcitrant prelates: “How is it possible,” said Caroline to Sherlock, “you could be so blind and so silly as to be running a race of popularity with the Bishop of London among the clergy, and hope you would rise upon the Bishop of London’s ruins (whom you hate and wish ruined) when you were going hand in hand with him in these very paths which you hoped would ruin him?... Are you not ashamed not to have seen this, and to have been at once in this whole matter, the Bishop of London’s assistant and enemy—tool and dupe?” She told the crestfallen prelate that in the present temper of the King and Prime Minister he could hope for neither London nor Canterbury, and advised him to go to his diocese and try to live it down. As their dioceses were the last places where Queen Caroline’s bishops were generally to be found, this was equivalent to a sentence of banishment. Many years later Sherlock succeeded Gibson as Bishop of London.
The Queen’s chief adviser in Church matters was her favourite, Mrs. Clayton. Mrs. Clayton had no pretence to learning, and was ignorant of the rudiments of theology—though, like many women of her type, she loved to pose as an authority on theological questions. She had imbibed the Arian principles then fashionable at court, and could repeat parrot-wise the shibboleth of her party. As she held much the same views as the Queen (though without her saving graces of learning and common sense), they often settled between them who should succeed to the vacant deaneries and bishoprics. Walpole came often in conflict with Mrs. Clayton over Church appointments, for she was always urging the Queen to prefer extreme men of heterodox views who gave much trouble to the Government by their indiscreet utterances. At last, after several experiences of the vagaries of these bellicose divines, Walpole remonstrated so strongly that Mrs. Clayton’s recommendations were chiefly confined to the Irish Church. Here for years she appointed practically whom she would. The influence of the Queen’s woman of the bedchamber was well known to aspiring divines, and she was overwhelmed with letters from parsons and prelates pining for preferment. Many of these letters (preserved in the Sundon correspondence) are couched in the most cringing tone, and are full of the grossest flattery. The deans and bishops in esse or in posse generally followed up their letters by making her little presents; for instance, we find the Bishop of Cork sending her a dozen bottles of “green usquebaugh, sealed with the figure of St. Patrick on black wax,” and another prelate a suit of fine Irish linen.
Among Mrs. Clayton’s Irish protégés was Dr. Clayton, a kinsman of her husband, for whom she procured, despite the protest of the Primate of Ireland, the bishopric of Clogher. Bishop Clayton made several attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity, and once proposed in the Irish House of Lords to abolish from the prayer-book the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in a speech of which one of his colleagues remarked, “it made his ears tingle”. Dr. Clayton was not much of a scholar, and less of a theologian, and he adapted his views to meet the approval of his patroness. The letters of this spiritual pastor to Queen Caroline’s woman of the bedchamber are models of subserviency. Once Mrs. Clayton rebuked him for a sermon he had preached on the death of Charles the First, which seemed to her to praise the King overmuch. He at once wrote to express his regret, and said he would tone it down by adding “bred up with notions of despotic government under the pernicious influence of his father”. He placed his patronage, like his opinions, at her disposal, and kept her informed of everything that went on in Ireland—acting, in fact, as a sort of spy in the court interest. His complaisance was rewarded by his patroness, who caused him to be successively advanced to the wealthier sees of Killala and Cork. Most effusive was his gratitude: “Mrs. Clayton cannot command what I will not perform,” he writes, and again: “Could you but form to yourself the image of another person endued with the same steadiness of friendship, liveliness of conversation, soundness of judgment, and a desire of making everybody happy that is about her, which all the world can see in you, but yourself, you would then pardon my forwardness in desiring to keep up a correspondence.... If I am free from any vice, I think it is that of ingratitude.”[99]
Bishop Clayton’s view of the rules that should govern ecclesiastical preferment are worth quoting. The particular candidate he was recommending was a son of the Earl of Abercorn, who had taken holy orders. “What occurs to me at present,” he writes to Mrs. Clayton, “is the consideration of ecclesiastical preferments in a political view. It has not been customary for persons either of birth or fortune, to breed up their children to the Church, by which means, when preferment in the Church is given by their Majesties, there is seldom any one obliged but the very person to whom it is given, having no relatives either in the House of Lords or Commons that are gratified or are kept in dependence thereby. The only way to remedy which is by giving extraordinary encouragements to persons of birth and interest whenever they seek for ecclesiastical preferment, which will encourage others of the same quality to come into the Church, and may thereby render ecclesiastical preferments of the same use to their Majesties as civil employments.”[100] Of the higher interests of the Church or of religion, it will be noted, this servile prelate makes no mention; but the fear of the world and the bedchamber woman was always before his eyes.
Mrs. Clayton had a large number of poor and obscure relatives, many of whom benefited at the expense of the Church. One of her nieces, Dorothy Dyves, whom she had made a maid of honour to the Princess Royal, fell in love with the Princess’s young chaplain, the Reverend Charles Chevenix, who was not unmindful of the avenues to preferment thus opened to him. Mrs. Clayton at first refused her consent: she did not consider a poor chaplain good enough for her niece, but Chevenix made the following appeal to her:—
“My salary as chaplain to her Royal Highness will, I hope, be thought a reasonable earnest of some future preferment, and, could I ever be happy enough to obtain your protection, I might flatter myself that I should one day owe to your goodness what I can never expect from my own merit—such a competency of fortune as may make Miss Dyves’s choice a little less unequal. My birth, I may venture to add, is that of a gentleman. My father long served, and at last was killed, in a post where he was very well known—a post that is oftener an annual subsistence than a large provision for a family, and that small provision was unfortunately lost in the year ’20. One of my brothers is now in the army, a profession not thought below people of the first rank; another, indeed, keeps a shop, but I hope that circumstance rather deserves compassion than contempt.”[101]
Mrs. Clayton was touched by the frankness of this appeal, but the shop remained an obstacle for some time. At last she gave her consent. Chevenix married Dorothy Dyves, and then it was only a question of a little time for the chaplain to blossom into a bishop. He was in due course advanced to the see of Killaloe, and afterwards to the richer one of Waterford. Truly Mrs. Clayton was, as her niece describes her, one of the most “worthy and generous of aunts”. No one could be more mindful of family claims. Her patronage was not entirely ecclesiastical, though she made the Church her speciality; she found for her brother-in-law a comfortable post in the civil service; she obtained for her nephews good military and civil appointments, and her nieces were all made maids of honour. Lord Pembroke sent her a valuable present—a marble table—and obtained something for a poor relative. Lord Pomfret gave her a pair of diamond ear-rings, worth £1,400; a very good investment, for he got in return the lucrative appointment of Master of the Horse. Mrs. Clayton, or Lady Sundon as she had then become, was very proud of these diamond ear-rings, and appeared with them at one of the Queen’s drawing-rooms. This roused the ire of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who had once filled a similar position with Queen Anne. “How can that woman,” said Duchess Sarah in a loud voice, so that all around might hear, “how can that woman have the impudence to go about with that bribe in her ear?” “Madam,” replied Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was standing by, “how can people know where there is wine to be sold, unless there is a sign hung out?”
It can well be imagined that a system of ecclesiastical patronage conducted on these lines did not result in advantage to the Church. Walpole appointed bishops for purely political reasons, Mrs. Clayton for monetary and family consideration, the Queen because their views coincided with her own. Yet the Queen, though sometimes misled by her favourites, who traded on her ignorance of the English Church, honestly tried to appoint the best men according to her lights. The learning and ability of her bishops were undeniable; their only drawback was that they did not believe in the doctrines of the Church of which they were appointed the chief pastors. Without entering into theological controversy, it may be safely laid down that those who direct an institution ought to believe in the institution itself. This is precisely what most of Caroline’s bishops did not do; their energies were directed into other channels, and their enthusiasms reserved for other pursuits. Some of her bishops, notably those who were appointed to sees in Ireland and Wales, never went near their dioceses at all, while others treated the cardinal doctrines of Christianity with tacit contempt, if not open unbelief. The indifference of the bishops filtered down through the lower ranks of the clergy, and gradually influenced the whole tone of the established Church; if the bishops would not do their duty they could hardly blame their clergy for failing in theirs. Moreover, the policy of the Whig Government, in packing the Episcopal Bench solely with its own partisans, resulted in the bishops being out of touch with their clergy, for the majority of the parsons, especially in the country districts, were Tory, and clung to their political faith as firmly as to their religious convictions.
BENJAMIN HOADLEY, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.