Note 683 — Chapter VII
Reading edition
That this was the immediate cause, so far as the head of the church-party was concerned, is unblushingly avowed by the biographer and defender of the then Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘The order published from the king in council, May 4th, 1688, directing the archbishops and bishops to send to the clergy in their respective dioceses the Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, to be publicly read in all the churches of the kingdom, made it impossible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to abstain any longer from engaging in an open and declared opposition to the counsels under which the king was now unhappily acting.’ D'Oyly's Life of Sancroft, p. 151.