This accident was of great use to Harley; for the party formed against him, was ashamed to push a man who was thus assassinated by one that was studying to recommend himself to the court of France, and who was believed to have formed a design against the queen's person. Her health was at this time much shaken. She had three fits of an ague; the last was a severe one; but the progress of the disease was stopped by the bark.

The tories continued still to pursue the memory of king William; they complained of the grants made by him, though these were far short of those that had been made by king Charles the Second; but that they might distinguish between those, whom they intended to favour, and others, against whom they were set, they brought in a bill, empowering some persons to examine all the grants made by him, and to report both the value of them, and the considerations upon which they were made: this was the method that had succeeded with them before, with relation to Ireland; so the bringing in this bill was looked on, as a sure step, for carrying the resumption of all the grants that they had a mind to make void. When it was brought up to the lords, the design appeared to be an unjust malice against the memory of our deliverer, and against those who had served him best; so upon the first reading of the bill, it was rejected.

Their malice turned next against the earl of Godolphin: they found that the supplies given by parliament were not all returned, and the accounts of many millions were not yet passed in the exchequer; so they passed a vote, that the accounts of thirty-five millions yet stood out. This was a vast sum; but to make it up, some accounts in king Charles's time were thrown into the heap; the lord Ranelagh's accounts of the former reign were the greatest part; and it appeared that in no time accounts were so regularly brought up, as in the queen's reign. Mr. Bridges's accounts, of fourteen or fifteen millions, were the great item, of which not above half a million was passed *; but there were accounts of above eleven millions brought in, though not passed in form, through the great caution and exactness of the duke of Newcastle, at whose office they were to pass; and he was very slow, and would allow nothing without hearing counsel on every article. The truth is, the methods of passing accounts were so sure, that they were very slow; and it was not possible for the proper officers to find time and leisure to pass the accounts that were already in their hands. Upon this, though the earl of Godolphin had managed the treasury with an uncorruptness, fidelity, and diligence, that were so unexceptionable, that it was not possible to fix any censure on his administration: yet, because many accounts stood out, they passed some angry votes on that; but since nothing had appeared, in all the examination they had made, that reflected on him, or on any of the whigs, they would not consent to the motion that was made, for printing that report; for by that, it would have appeared who had served well, and who had served ill.

When this session drew near an end, some were concerned to find that a body, chosen so much by the zeal and influence of the clergy, should have done nothing for the good of the church; so it being apparent, that in the suburbs of London, there were about two hun

Burgeon came, Harley asked, the knife having broken in one of the wounds, if he was in immediate danger, as in that case he would settle his affairs, for he did not fear death. This, says lord Dartmouth, was visible in his countenance, which was not in the least altered. After Guiscard was taken into another room, he wanted to speak with the duke of Ormond, who, with lord Dartmouth, went to him. The culprit expressed his sorrow for Mr. Harley, because he was truly a great man, and had much obliged him. He confessed he had intended to murder the duke of Marlborough. Lord Dartmouth evidently doubted his sanity.-Oxford edition of this work.

This gentleman, Mr. John Brydges, was afterwards, by descent, lord Chandos, and created by George the First, earl of Caernarvon and duke of Chandos. He inherited a very small income, but being made paymaster of the forces, he, although expensive in his habits, amassed in little more than ten years a fortune, amounting to nearly 700,000. Again, being "a bubble to every project," and by a profuse expenditure, he was reduced, in a

few years, to indigence. "Yet he had parts of understand-
ing and knowledge, experience of men and business, with
a sedateness of mind, and gravity of deportment, which
more qualified him for a wise man, than what the wisest
men have generally possessed." (Mr. Speaker Onslow in
Oxford edition of this work.) It is a fact, that he spent
200,000l. in the construction of his residence, Canons, at
Stanmore Parva, in Middlesex. Pope foresaw that this
expense was beyond its owner's fortune, and therefore it is
not surprising that his prophetic verses relating to this
mansion were fulfilled. His lines are

"Another age shall see the golden ear
Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre;
Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned,
And laughing Ceres reassume the land."

The duke died in 1744, and within three vears, Canons was sold piece-meal by auction, and pulled down. His property was very far from being in the ruined state mentioned by Mr. Onslow.

dred thousand people more than could possibly worship God in the churches built there, upon a message to them from the queen (to which the rise was given by an address to her from the convocation) they voted that fifty more churches should be built; and laid the charge of it upon that part of the duty on coals, that had been reserved for building of St. Paul's, which was now finished.

In the beginning of April, the dauphin and the emperor both died of the small-pox; the first on the third, the second on the sixth of the month: time will shew what influence the one or the other will have on public affairs. The electors were all resolved to choose king Charles emperor. A little before the emperor's death, two great affairs were fully settled; the differences between that court and the duke of Savoy were composed, to the duke's satisfaction: the other was of more importance; offers of amnesty and concessions were sent to the malcontents in Hungary, with which they were so well satisfied, that a full peace was likely to follow on it: and, lest the news of the emperor's death should be any stop to that settlement, it was kept up from them, till a body of ten thousand men came in and delivered up their arms, with the fort of Cassaw, and took an oath of obedience to king Charles, which was the first notice they had of Joseph's death.

The effects of this will probably go farther than barely to the quieting of Hungary; for the king of Sweden, the Crim Tartar, and the agents of France had so animated the Turks against the Muscovites, that though the Sultan had no mind to engage in a new war, till the affairs of that empire should be put in a better state, yet he was so apprehensive of the janizaries, that, much against his own inclinations, he was brought to declare war against the czar; but both the czar and he seemed inclined to accept the mediation that was offered by England and by the States; to which very probably the Turks may the more easily be brought, when they see no hope of any advantage to be made, from the distractions in Hungary.

It did not yet appear what would be undertaken on either side in Spain; king Philip had not yet opened the campaign; but it was given out, that great preparations were made for a siege on the other hand, king Charles had great reinforcements sent him; so that his force was reckoned not inferior to king Philip's: nor was it yet known what resolutions he had taken, since he received the news of the emperor's death.

The campaign was now opened on both sides in the Netherlands, though later than was intended: the season continued long so rainy, that all the ways in those parts were impracticable: nothing was yet attempted on either side; both armies lay near one another, and both were so well posted, that no attack was yet made: and this was the present state of affairs abroad, at the end of May. At home Mr. Harley was created earl of Oxford, and then made lord high treasurer, and had now the supreme favour: the session of parliament was not yet at an end. There had been a great project carried on for a trade into the South Sea; and a fund was projected for paying the interest of nine millions, that were in arrear for our marine affairs.

From our temporal concerns, I turn to give an account of those which related to the church: the convocation of the province of Canterbury was opened, the 25th of November, the same day in which the parliament met; and Atterbury was chosen prolocutor. Soon after, the queen sent a licence to the convocation, empowering them to enter upon such consultations as the present state of the church required, and particularly to consider of such matters as she should lay before them: limiting them to a quorum, that the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, or the bishop of Bath and Wells should be present, and agree to their resolutions. With this licence, there was a letter directed to the archbishop, in which the convocation was ordered to lay before the queen an account of the late excessive growth of infidelity and heresy among us; and to consider how to redress abuses in excommunications; how rural deans might be made more effectual; how terriers might be made and preserved more exactly, and how the abuses in licences for marriage might be corrected.

In this whole matter, neither the archbishop nor any of the bishops were so much as consulted with and some things in the licence were new: the archbishop was not named the president of the convocation, as was usual in former licences; and in these, the archbishop's

presence and consent alone was made necessary except in case of sickness, and then the archbishop had named some bishops to preside, as his commissaries: and in that case, the convocation was limited to his commissaries, which still lodged the presidentship and the negative with the archbishop: this was according to the primitive pattern, to limit the clergy of a province to do nothing, without the consent of the metropolitan; but it was a thing new and unheard-of, to limit the convocation to any of their own body, who had no deputation from the archbishop. So a report of this being made, by a committee that was appointed to search the records, it was laid before the queen; and she sent us a message to let us know, that she did not intend that those whom she had named to be of the quorum, should either preside or have a negative upon our deliberations, though the contrary was plainly insinuated in the licence. The archbishop was so ill of the gout, that after our first meetings, he could come no more to us; so was the bishop of London: upon which, the bishop of Bath and Wells, seeing how invidiously he was distinguished from his brethren, in which he had not been consulted, pretended ill health; and we were at a stand till a new licence was sent us, in which the bishops of Winchester, Bristol, and St. David's were added to be of the quorum. The two last were newly consecrated, and had been in no functions in the church before: so the queen not only passed over all the bishops made in king William's reign, but a great many of those named by herself, and set the two last in a distinction above all their brethren. All this was directed by Atterbury, who had the confidence of the chief minister; and because the other bishops had maintained a good correspondence with the former ministry, it was thought fit to put marks of the queen's distrust upon them, that it might appear with whom her royal favour and trust was lodged.

The convocation entered on the consideration of the matters referred to them by the queen ; and a committee was appointed to draw a representation of the present state of the church, and of religion among us; but after some heads were agreed on, Atterbury procured that the drawing of this might be left to him; and he drew up a most virulent declamation, defaming all the administration from the time of the revolution: into this he brought many impious principles and practices, that had been little heard of or known, but were now to be published, if this should be laid before the queen. The lower house agreed to his draught; but the bishops laid it aside, and ordered another representation to be drawn, in more general and more modest terms. It was not settled which of these draughts should be made use of, or whether any representation at all should be made to the queen; for it was known that the design in asking one was only to have an aspersion cast, both on the former ministry and on the former reign. Several provisions were prepared, with relation to the other particulars in the queen's letter; but none of these were agreed to by both houses.

An incident happened that diverted their thoughts to another matter: Mr. Whiston, the professor of mathematics in Cambridge, a learned man, of a sober and exemplary life, but much set on hunting for paradoxes, fell on the reviving the Arian heresy, though he pretended to differ from Arius, in several particulars; yet upon the main he was partly Apollinarist, partly Arian; for he thought the nous, or word, was all the soul that acted in our Saviour's body. He found his notions favoured by the apostolical constitutions; so he reckoned them a part, and the chief part of the canon of the scriptures. For these tenets he was censured at Cambridge, and expelled the university: upon that, he wrote a vindication of himself and his doctrine, and dedicated it to the convocation, promising a larger work on these subjects. The uncontested way of proceeding in such a case was, that the bishop of the diocese, in which he lived, should cite him into his court, in order to his conviction or censure, from whose sentence an appeal lay to the archbishop, and from him to the crown; or the archbishop might proceed in the first instance in a court of audience: but we saw no clear precedents, of any proceedings in convocation, where the jurisdiction was contested; a reference made by the high commission to the convocation, where the party submitted to do penance, being the only precedent that appeared in history; and even of this we had no record; so that it not being thought a clear warrant for our proceeding, we were at a stand. The act that settled the course of appeals in king Henry the Eighth's time, made no mention of sentences in convocation; and yet, by the act in the first of queen Elizabeth, that defined what should be judged heresy, that judgment was declared to be in the crown; by all this

(which the archbishop laid before the bishops in a letter, that he wrote to them on this occasion) it seemed doubtful whether the convocation could, in the first instance, proceed against a man for heresy; and their proceedings, if they were not warranted by law, might involve them in a præmunire. So the upper house, in an address, prayed the queen to ask the opinions of the judges, and such others as she thought fit, concerning these doubts, that they might know how the law stood in this matter.

Eight of the judges, with the attorney and solicitor-general, gave their opinion, that we had a jurisdiction, and might proceed in such a case; but brought no express law nor precedent to support their opinion: they only observed, that the law-books spoke of the convocation as having jurisdiction, and they did not see that it was ever taken from them: they were also of opinion, that an appeal lay from the sentence of convocation to the crown; but they reserved to themselves a power to change their mind, in case, upon an argument that might be made for a prohibition, they should see cause for it. Four of the judges were positively of a contrary opinion, and maintained it from the statutes made at the reformation. The queen, having received these different opinions, sent them to the archbishop, to be laid before the two houses of convocation; and, without taking any notice of the diversity between them, she wrote that, there being now no doubt to be made of our jurisdiction, she did expect that we should proceed in the matter before us. In this it was visible, that those who advised the queen to write that letter, considered more their own humours than her honour. Yet two great doubts still remained, even supposing we had a jurisdiction; the first was, of whom the court was to be composed; whether only of the bishops, or what share the lower house had in this judiciary authority: the other was, by what delegates, in case of an appeal, our sentence was to be examined: were no bishops to be in the court of delegates? or was the sentence of the archbishop and his twenty-one suffragan bishops, with the clergy of the province, to be judged by the archbishop of York and his three suffragan bishops? These difficulties appearing to be so great, the bishops resolved to begin with that, in which they had, by the queen's licence, an undisputable authority; which was to examine and censure the book, and to see if his doctrine was not contrary to the Scriptures, and the first four general councils, which is the measure set by law to judge heresy. They drew out some propositions from his book, which seemed plainly to be the reviving of Arianism; and censured them as such. These they sent down to the lower house, who, though they excepted to one proposition, yet censured the rest in the same manner. This the archbishop (being then disabled by the gout) sent by one of the bishops to the queen for her assent, who promised to consider of it: but to end the matter at once, at their next meeting in winter, no answer being come from the queen, two bishops were sent to ask it; but she could not tell what was become of the paper which the archbishop had sent her; so a new extract of the censure was again sent to her: but she has not yet thought fit to send any answer to it. So Whiston's affair sleeps, though he has published a large work in four volumes in octavo, justifying his doctrine, and maintaining the canonicalness of the apostolical constitutions, preferring their authority not only to the epistles, but even to the gospels. In this last I do not find he has made any proselytes, though he has set himself much to support that paradox *.

The lower house would not enter into the consideration of the representation sent down to them by the bishops: so none was agreed on to be presented to the queen; but both were printed, and severe reflections were made, in several tracts, on that which was drawn by the lower house, or rather by Atterbury. The bishops went through all the matters recommended to them by the queen, and drew up a scheme of regulations on them all; but

* The eccentric William Whiston was born in 1667, at his father's rectory, Norton, in Leicestershire. His education was conducted at Tamworth school, and Clare Hall, Cambridge, of which he obtained a fellowship, Dr. Moore, bishop of Norwich, to whom he was chap lain, gave him the living of Lowestoff, which he resigned on succeeding to the professorship of mathematics, vacant by sir Isaac Newton's death. He began to promulgate his religious peculiarities in 1708, and after his depriva tion and expulsion from the university, he formed a

society for restoring primitive Christianity, and finally united with the Baptists. His delusions were many; he rejected some of the canonical books of the bible, but admitted some of the apocryphal ones; terrified many by his predictions of the coming millennium, and destruction of the world, and died unconvinced of his errors in 1752. As a mathematician he deserves much praise: and is to be remembered with respect as one of the earliest of rational geologists. The "Memoirs" of his own life are worth perusing.-Biog. Britannica.

neither were these agreed to by the lower house; for their spirits were so exasperated, that nothing sent by the bishops could be agreeable to them. At last the session of parliament and convocation came to an end.

The last thing settled by the parliament was, the creating a new fund for a trade in the South Sea; there was a great debt upon the navy, occasioned partly by the deficiency of the funds appointed for the service at sea, but chiefly by the necessity of applying such supplies as were given, without appropriating clauses, to the service abroad; where it was impossible to carry it on by credit, without ready money, so it was judged necessary to let the debt of the navy run on upon credit; this had risen up to several millions; and the discount on the navy-bills ran high. All this debt was thrown into one stock; and a fund was formed for paying the interest at six per cent.

The flatterers of the new ministers made great use of this, to magnify them, and to asperse the old ministry; but a full report of that matter was soon after published, by which it appeared, that the public money had been managed with the utmost fidelity and frugality; and it was made evident that when there was not money enough to answer all the expense of the war, it was necessary to apply it to that which pressed most, and where the service could not be carried on by credit: so this debt was contracted by an inevitable necessity; and all reasonable persons were fully satisfied with this account of the matter. The earl of Godolphin's unblemished integrity was such, that no imputation of any sort could be fastened on him; so, to keep up a clamour, they reflected on the expense he had run the nation into, upon the early successes in the year 1706; which were very justly acknowledged, and cleared in the succeeding session, as was formerly told: but that was now revived; and it was said to be an invasion of the great right of the commons in giving supplies, to enter on designs and to engage the nation in an expense, not provided for by parliament. This was aggravated with many tragical expressions, as a subversion of the constitution; so with this, and that of the thirty-five millions, of which the accounts were not yet passed, and some other particulars, they made an inflaming address to the queen, at the end of the sessions. And this was artificially spread through the nation, by which weaker minds were so possessed, that it was not easy to undeceive them, even by the fullest and clearest evidences; the nation seemed still infatuated beyond the power of conviction. With this the session ended, and all considering persons had a very melancholy prospect, when they saw what might be apprehended from the two sessions, that were yet to come of the same parliament.

I now turn to affairs abroad. The business of Spain had been so much pressed from the throne, and so much insisted on all this session, and the commons had given 1,500,000l. for that service (a sum far beyond all that had been granted in any preceding session) so that it was expected matters would have been carried there in another manner than formerly. The duke of Argyle was sent to command the queen's troops there, and he seemed full of heat; but all our hopes failed. The duke of Vendome's army was in so ill a condition, that if Starembergh had been supported, he promised himself great advantages; it does not yet appear what made this to fail; for the parliament has not yet taken this into examination. It is certain the duke of Argyle did nothing; neither he nor his troops were once named, during the whole campaign; he wrote over very heavy complaints, that he was not supported, by the failing of the remittances that he expected: but what ground there was for that does not yet appear; for, though he afterwards came over, he was very silent, and seemed in a good understanding with the ministers. Starembergh drew out his forces; and the two armies lay for some time looking on one another, without coming to any action: Vendome ordered a siege to be laid to two small places, but without success. That of Cardona was persisted in obstinately, till near the end of December, and then Starembergh sent some bodies to raise the siege, who succeeded so well in their attempt, that they killed two thousand of the besiegers, and forced their camp; so that they not only raised the siege, but made themselves masters of the enemy's artillery, ammunition, and baggage; and the duke of Vendome's army was so diminished, that if Starembergh had received the assistance which he expected from England, he would have pierced far into Spain; but we did nothing, after all the zeal we had expressed for retrieving matters on that side.

The emperor's death, as it presently opened to king Charles the succession to the here