Note 56 — CONTROVERSY BETWEEN DRYDEN AND STILLINGFLEET, CONCERNING THE DUCHESS OF YORK’S PAPER.

These were Sheldon and Morley. Sheldon was bishop of London, and was promoted to the see of Canterbury on the death of the venerable Juxon. Burnet describes him as generous and charitable, and extremely dexterous in politics; but adds, that he only spoke of religion as an engine of government, and thus gained with the king the character of a wise and honest clergyman. He was much blamed by the Low Church divines, for the rigour with which he followed up the parliamentary deprivation, by which two thousand divines, as was alleged, were ejected for non-conformity.

Blandford, successively bishop of Oxford and Worcester, was an able and excellent divine, modest and humble, says Burnet, even to a fault. Morley, bishop of Winchester, had recommended him to the duchess to be her spiritual director in his stead, when he himself retired from court in 1667: “And I made choice of him,” says that prelate, “not only because, in regard of his learning, piety, gravity, and modesty, together with the gentleness and sweetness of his address and conversation, he was at least as fit as any I could think of for that employment, but in regard of his former relation of chaplain to her father, to whom he owed his rise in the church.”—Preface to Bishop Morley’s Treatise, p. xiv.