Note 25 — LORD RUSSELL

John Tillotson (1630-1694) was the son of a weaver of Sowerby. He entered Clare Hall in 1647, and became a fellow of the same college in 1651. He received an early bias against Puritanism from Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants, and his intercourse with Cudworth and others at Cambridge. He became tutor to the son of Prideaux, Cromwell's Attorney-General in 1656; he was present at the Savoy Conference in 1661, and remained identified with the Puritans till the passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1662; afterwards he became curate of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire and rector of Keddington in Suffolk. In 1664 he was known as a celebrated preacher, and was appointed preacher in Lincoln's Inn. In 1678 and 1680 he preached sermons to the House of Commons and the King respectively, exhorting the former to legislation against Popery, and pointing out to the latter that whilst Catholics should be tolerated, they should not be allowed to proselytise. He attended Russell on the scaffold, and with Burnet was summoned before the Council on a suspicion of having helped to compose Russell's published speech. He acquired great influence after the Revolution; and having exercised the archiepiscopal jurisdiction of the province of Canterbury during Sancroft's suspension, became himself archbishop in 1691.