A

addresses of congratulation and celebrated with bonfires. medal, which seems to have been designed by Sancroft himself, was struck to celebrate the victory. The bishops were the heroes of the whole nation, and Sancroft was looked on everywhere as the champion of the freedom of Englishmen and their Church.

The

action after

In nothing were the calmness and confidence in which they had acted seen more clearly than in their quiet return after the exciting days of imprisonment and trial to the bishops' ordinary work of their spiritual office. During the their next few weeks Sancroft was doubly active. He acquittal. issued instructions to his suffragans "of things to be more fully insisted upon in their addresses to the clergy and people of their respective dioceses," urging caution against "all seducers, and especially popish emissaries," and "a very tender regard towards our brethren the Protestant dissenters." He made some attempts also to suggest comprehension, but without success; and he issued a warning against deceivers, among them naming "four persons, exceeding all the rest in confidence, who assume to themselves the titles of bishops of remote places, where they have no flocks, and under pretence of being the pope's vicars in this realm, address themselves to a party of men styled by them lay-Catholics, who separate themselves indeed from our communion, but yet in right and according to the law of this land and the discipline of the primitive Church belong to our care." The first of these documents is thought to have been drawn up under the influence of Ken: and the others also may very likely have been revised by him. It is certain that their trial drew the bishops very closely together, and that they acted during the next few months with one accord.

In September James received warning of the intended invasion of the Prince of Orange. On September 21st he

Their last advice to James.

issued a declaration of his determination to maintain the Church of England in her powers and privileges. On September 28 he gave an audience to several bishops whom he had summoned. He said nothing but some vague words of favour and confidence. Ken replied that "his Majesty's inclinations towards the

XII

INVASION OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE

231

Church and their duty to him were sufficiently understood before, and would have been equally so if they had not stirred one foot out of their dioceses." This was satisfactory to no one, and on October 3, Sancroft, at the head of the bishops, visited the king. They recommended him to withdraw all his dispensations; to restore the President and Fellows of Magdalen; to fill the vacant bishoprics; to prohibit the "four foreign bishops, who style themselves vicars apostolical," from invading the lawful ecclesiastical jurisdiction; to abolish the ecclesiastical commission; to call a Parliament "for the purpose of securing the uniformity of the Church of England, the liberty of conscience, and the liberties and properties of the subject, and for establishing between himself and all his people a mutual confidence and good understanding"; and lastly, to permit the bishops to offer him "such motives and arguments as might, by God's grace, be effectual to persuade him to return to the communion of the Church of England, into whose most Holy Catholic faith he had been baptized and educated, and to which it was their earnest prayer to God that he might be reunited."

James took part at least of the advice. But when he asked the bishops to declare their abhorrence of the invasion, "they told him," says Bishop Sprat, "they could not do it, for the prince might have a just cause of war, for what they knew." Nor would they "declare a dislike" of the invasion. Sancroft, however, willingly prepared a prayer for the restoration of public tranquillity, and so well, says Burnet, that even those who wished for the prince might well have joined in it. Compton, Bishop of London, had already joined in the invitation which had been sent to William, and yet when James questioned him as to the share of the bishops in the matter, he said, "I am sure my brethren will say that they have taken as little part in it as I have." The other bishops, who did know of his share, of course replied when they were questioned that they had not joined at all. James did his utmost to secure the support of the archbishop; and Evelyn The seriously warned him not to be entrapped into invasion of furthering the designs of the papists. On November William of 5 William of Orange landed at Torbay. Two days earlier, after several interviews with the king, Sancroft had

Orange.

Flight of

Dec. 10,

1688.

At

drawn up a declaration that he had never incited or encouraged the invasion, but he had refused to repudiate the declaration that had been put out in William's name. every step in the great national crisis the archbishop stood forward as a true leader of the Church, loyal to the king, but firm in his attachment to law. On November 17 he went with the facile Lamplugh, whom James had now made Archbishop of York, and with Turner of Ely and Sprat the king, of Rochester, to strongly urge the summoning of a "free Parliament," advice which the king took. On December 10 the queen fled with the baby prince, and on the next day the king followed. Sancroft then joined in signing the order to the fleet to abstain from any hostility towards the Dutch, and on December 11 joined in the meeting at the Guildhall which invited the help of William to secure peace and a parliamentary settlement. At this point he stayed. He would give no further support to the Revolution, feeling the obligation of his oath of allegiance too strongly to assist in any act that might deprive James of the crown. He alone of all the bishops would not wait on William or attend in the House of Lords. No new king, he declared, could be appointed by law, but only "by force of conquest.'

The

Matters had indeed gone beyond his intervention. Strong men held the helm of State, and would carry the bark through the troubled waters. Sancroft knew that he must give up all for conscience' sake. "Well," he said to a friend, "I can live on £50 a year," and he boldly announced to the prince that he did not approve of some things that had been done by him. A large meeting was held at Lambeth to Revolution. discuss the situation; but when the convention on January 22, 1689, voted the throne vacant, Sancroft was not present. On the day of the proclamation of William and Mary, as king and queen, Henry Wharton, the archbishop's chaplain, prayed for them at evensong in Lambeth Palace chapel; his diary tells that Sancroft, "with great heat, told him that he must thenceforward desist from offering prayers for the new king and queen, or else from performing the duties of his chapel, for as long as King James was alive no other persons could be sovereigns of

XII

THE REVOLUTION

233

the country." He was expressing the settled judgment of many of his Episcopal colleagues and many of the clergy, that a crowned and anointed king could not lawfully be deposed by his subjects. It was clear that whatever might be the political result of revolution, England was in danger of a new religious schism.

AUTHORITIES.-State Papers, Domestic; Tanner MSS., including Sancroft's Papers; D'Oyly, Life of Sancroft; Howell, State Trials. The case of Alice Lisle, the only one in the "Bloody Assize" of which we have full details, and the other cases, are fully examined in the Life of Jeffreys, by H. B. Irving (1898). See "Matters of Fact at the Time of the Revolution," by Bishop Sprat, in Gutch, Collectanea Curiosa, vol. ii. Autobiography of Bishop Kidde (in Cassan, Bishops of Bath and Wells). The proceedings

and trial of the seven bishops were published verbatim in 1689. The actual petition, as well as a draft for it, presented by the bishops to the king, and another copy, with additional signatures, and also a full account of the proceedings, all in Sancroft's own hand, are among the Tanner MSS. A number of important documents, chiefly from the Tanner MSS., are printed by Gutch in Collectanea Curiosa, vol. i. (1781). Bishop Cartwright's Diary was published by the Camden Society, 1843. The documents relating to Magdalen College were collected and edited by Dr. J. R. Bloxam (Oxford Historical Society, 1886). Dean Plumptre's Life of Ken is full and valuable (2nd edition, 1890). Historical MSS. Commission, on Earl of Dartmouth's Papers, contains some facts of importance. See also A Compleat Collection of Papers relating to the Great Revolution in England, 1689. Perry and Stoughton, as before. Lathbury, History of the Non-Jurors. An interesting sketch of the chief interests and chief men is to be found in Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, by Canon Overton, 1885.

CHAPTER XIII

THE REVOLUTION SETTLEMENT AND THE NON-JURORS

crown.

It was his attack on the Church which had cost James his It might have seemed as if the Church would be the chief gainer by the Revolution which overthrew him. It was far otherwise. Again Erastianism came to the top of the tide. Parliament formally accepted the unhistorical theory of an original contract between king and people, in opposition to the theory of Divine right originally developed as a counterblast to the papal doctrine in politics. James was declared to have broken the contract; and the throne was conferred, without any pretence of religious sanction, upon the Prince and Princess of Orange.

Sancroft gave a commission to his suffragans, which virtually empowered them to crown the new sovereigns, and Compton, Bishop of London, crowned them on of William April 11, 1689. In the coronation oath, by Act

Coronation

and Mary,

April 11,

of Parliament, an additional safeguard was inserted, 1689. by the use of the words "the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law." James had not regarded his attack on the Church as contrary to his oath: it was clear that the oath must be made stricter; and before long the Act of Settlement made the security of the Church still more certain by the provision that the sovereign must be a member of it. The king and queen took the oath separately, and vowed to preserve to the bishops and clergy all their legal rights.

William's views of the Church of England were well known to some of the English clergy. He had told Burnet that all