extraordinary, that Bishop Laud, in a subsequent letter to the Primate, complains in very strong terms of the Lord Chancellor Loftus holding an archdeaconry of good value, when he was only a deacon. "Surely my Lord, if this be so, there is somewhat in it that I will not express by letter, but were I his superior in ordinary, I know what I would do, and that I have plainly expressed both to his Majesty and the Lords committee."

The Primate was at this time much distressed by the disputes, in which Bishop Bedell was involved by his zealous endeavours to remove all abuses from his diocese. At first the Primate appears to have been very unfavorably impressed by the Bishop's conduct, but gradually these misconceptions were removed, and their ancient friendship restored. It is not improbable that much of the alienation

* See Letter 176, Works, vol. xv. pag. 525.

The case was worse, for Sir Adam Loftus was only a layman. He appears to have got possession of the Archdeaconry of Glendaloch about the year 1594, for in that year he was Proctor to the Economy: his name appears in the regal visitation of 1615. Sir Adam Loftus was nephew to the Archbishop of Dublin; he was a Professor of the Civil Law, and in 1595 constituted Judge of the Marshall Court; in 1598 appointed Master in Chancery; in 1619 made Chancellor of Ireland, and in 1622 created a peer by the title of Viscount Loftus of Ely. Shortly after the date of this letter attempts were made to dispossess him of the archdeaconry. It appears from an ancient visitation book in the Consistorial Registry Office of Dublin, that a trial was held in the Archbishop's Court, and the archdeaconry declared vacant. On the 24th of April, 1638, the Archbishop of Dublin collated Edward Stanhope to the archdeaconry, who was installed on the 1st of May, 1639, and appeared at the visitation of 1640. Loftus, appealed, and the name of Viscount Loftus of Ely appears in the Visitation Books of the three following years. However he contrived to defeat the decision, it is certain he held the archdeaconry till his death, which took place in 1643. These proceedings about the archdeaconry will sufficiently account for the hostility of Lord Strafford to the Chancellor, when a charge was brought against him before the Privy Council. However illegal the sentence appears to us, it was not unusual at that period, and in this case sanctioned by the approbation of the King himself. The invasion of the rights of the Church must have made Strafford ready to listen with eagerness to any charges made against Lord Ely, and no additional incitement was required from the base motives assigned to him by some historians. At this distance of time we can dispassionately view the transaction, and we must look with the utmost indignation upon a Lord Chancellor trampling upon the law of the land,

might have been caused by the misrepresentations of the Primate's chaplain, Dr. Bernard, who was then Dean of Kilmore, and the only clergyman in the diocese who resisted the Bishop's endeavours to remove pluralities. The Dean had applied to the Bishop for the living of Kildromfarten, which Mr. Hilton was ready to resign in his favor, and the Primate had seconded the application; but the Bishop, in his letter to the Primate, makes an apology for not complying with his Grace's request, by saying, "as I easily conceived, that being solicited by your old servant you could do no less than you did ;" and assigns as his reason to the Dean, "that he did not know the place nor the people, but if they were mere Irish, he did not see how Mr. Dean should discharge the duty of a minister to them." Bishop Bedell himself speaks in the strongest language of

to hold a paltry ecclesiastical benefice, and, when deprived of it by the proper authorities, still maintaining possession by unjustifiable appeals.

The records of the Cathedral of St. Patrick afford melancholy proof of the rapacity of Archbishop Loftus and his family, to which allusion was made before, pag. 6. Sir Adam Loftus, son to the Archbishop, obtained a grant from James I., in 1618, of the entire prebend of Tymothan, the townland of Tymothan, containing a castle, five tenements, and four plowlands, with all tithes, great and small. And the Archbishop himself procured the reversion of the archdeaconry for George Cowlie, gent.; and in 1615 we find it recorded that the mensal of the archdeaconry was greatly reduced, by this man having granted the tithes of Rathfarnham to Robert Leicester, a servant of the Archbishop.

2 Nicholas Bernard had been educated at Cambridge, and introduced to the Primate, then Bishop of Meath, in the year 1624. The Primate brought him over to Ireland in 1626, and in the autumn of that year ordained him. His Grace's interest procured for him the deanery of Kilmore in the next year. It seems very extraordinary that Bishop Bedell should, in 1630, speak of him as the Primate's "old servant." The biographers of Bishop Bedell state that Dr. Bernard was so ashamed of his being the only person who resisted the Bishop's wishes about pluralities, that he exchanged his deanery for that of Ardagh; but this is not correct, for he did not make the exchange till 1637. In 1635 the Primate gave him the vicarage of St. Peter's, Drogheda, where he resided, in care of his Grace's library, till after the siege in 1641. Soon after the rebellion he left Ireland, and was appointed Rector of Whitechurch, in Shropshire, and preacher to the Society of Gray's Inn. He then was appointed Chaplain and Almoner to Oliver Cromwell. He seems to have had very accommodating religious opinions, for on the Restoration he .continued to hold his living of Whitechurch, and died soon after.

the hostility of the Dean: "Anda as for mine accuser (whose hatred I have incurred only by not giving way to his covetous desire of heaping living upon living to the evident damage not only of other souls committed to him, but of his own) truly I am glad and do give God thanks, that this malignity which a while masked itself in the pretence of friendship, hath at last discovered itself by public opposition. It hath not, and I hope it shall not be in his power to hurt me at all, he hath rather shamed himself: and although his high heart cannot give his tongue leave to acknowledge his folly, his understanding is not so weak and blind as not to see it."

The immediate cause of bringing the Bishop into opposition with the Primate, was an attempt on the Bishop's part to remove his lay Chancellor, and preside himself

a Letter 168, Works, vol. xv. pag. 537. The Bishop also says to the Primate: "As touching his traducing me in your pulpit at Cavan, I have sent your Grace the testimonies of Mr. Robinson and Mr. Feate." I cannot comprehend why he should call the pulpit in Cavan the Primate's pulpit; Cavan was not in the diocese of Armagh, but of Kilmore. b Bishop Bedell complained of all the ecclesiastical courts. He says, in a letter to the Primate, "he had been wont to except one court, but he had heard that it is said among great personages here that my Lord Primate is a good man, but his court is as corrupt as others." He speaks of his own Chancellor, Mr. Cook, as "the most noted man and most cried out upon;" and Bishop Burnet says of him, "He had bought his place from his predecessor, and so thought he had a right to all the profits that he could raise out of it, and the whole business of the court seemed to be nothing but extortion and oppression. For it is an old observation, that men who buy justice will sell it." The Bishop discovered that the patent under which his Chancellor acted was invalid, as not having the Bishop's seal, and being defective in other particulars (see Letter 160, where, among the defects, he mentions "the false Latin," a circumstance not very unusual), and inhibited Mr. Cook from acting under it. Mr. Cook, the Chancellor, brought the matter into the Primate's court. The Bishop submitted it to the Primate's decision, but not his Chancellor's, or to the Synod of the province. I cannot find that the cause was tried in the Archbishop's court: perhaps the difficulty arose from the objection of Bishop Bedell just mentioned, or from a remark in the answer of the Primate, "In your judging of Mr. Cooks patent to be void, I wish you would not be too forward upon that point. To pronounce in a judicial manner of the validity or invalidity of a patent, is no office of the Ecclesiastical but of the civil magistrate; and for the one to intromit himself into the judicature of that which pertaineth to another, you know draweth near to a Præmunire." At a subsequent period the cause was brought into the Court of Chancery, and the Lord Chan

in his own court. However, various other complaints appear to have been made against him. The Bishop, in his letter to Archbishop Ussher, stated that he had been accused to him of being a Papist, an Arminian, of bowing at the name of Jesus, of pulling down the seat of his predecessor to erect an altar, and of undervaluinge the Primate's preaching. The Primate answers the Bishop with great severity. The following passage is very remarkable: "Most of the slanders wherewith you were so much troubled I never heard till you now mentioned them yourself; only the course which you took with the Papists, was generally cried out against: neither do I remember in all cellor confirmed Mr. Cook's appointment, with £100 costs. The details of these transactions are not given in any of the Lives of Archbishop Ussher, and in the Lives of Bishop Bedell are not arranged correctly. Bishop Burnet, and he is followed by Mr. Mason, places the trial in the Court of Chancery before the discovery that the patent was illegal. Now this is certainly not the case, for the suspension of Mr. Cook and the trial in the Archbishop's court are mentioned in the letters written in the end of the year 1629 and the beginning of 1630. But a disgraceful story, related by the son-in-law of Bishop Bedell, fixes the date of the trial after the appointment of Chancellor Bolton, which took place in 1639. The story is, that when Bishop Bedell asked the Lord Chancellor Bolton "how he came to make so unjust a decree?" he answered, "that all his father had left him was a register's place; so he thought he was bound to support those courts, which he saw would be ruined if the way he took had not been checked." The Bishop appears to have argued his case both on the invalidity of the patent, and on the general question of the powers vested in the bishop.

• The story of this complaint is too happy an illustration of the mode in which such accusations are got up, to be omitted. The story was, that the Bishop compared the Primate's preaching to one Mr. Whiskins, Mr. Creighton and Mr. Baxter's, and preferred them. The Bishop states the facts in these words: "Thus it was: Mr. Dunsterville acquainted me with his purpose to preach of Prov. xx. 6: But a faithful man who can find;' where he said the doctrine he meant to raise was this, that Faith was a rare gift of God. I told him I thought he mistook the meaning of the text, and wished him to choose longer texts, and not bring his discourses to a word or two of Scripture, but rather to declare those of the Holy Ghost. He said, your Grace did so sometimes. I answered, there might be just cause, but I thought you did not so ordinarily. As for those men, Mr. Whiskins, and the rest, I never heard any of them preach to this day. Peradventure their manner is to take longer texts, whereupon the comparison is made up, as if I preferred them before you."

d See Letter 161, Works, vol. xv. pag. 473.

my life, that any thing was done here by any of us, at which the professors of the Gospel did take more offence, or by which the adversaries were more confirmed in their superstitions and idolatry. Whereas I could wish that you had advised with your brethren, before you would adventure to pull down that which they have been so long a building; so I may boldly aver, that they have abused grossly both of us, who reported unto you, that I should give out, that I found myself deceived in you. What you did, I know was done out of a good intention, but I was assured that your project would be so quickly refuted with your present success and event, that there would be no need, that your friends should advise you to desist from building such castles in the air." The Bishop, in his answer, declares that all this is a riddle to him, but it is very evident to what the Primate alluded. The censure was upon the Bishop's attempt at converting the Irish, by translating the Scriptures into the Irish language, and by circulating a short catechism with the Irish and English on opposite pages. The objection affords a melancholy instance of the strength of prejudice. The Primate, who could so convincingly argue upon the impropriety of prayers in an unknown tongue, and upon the necessity of translating the Scriptures into different languages, yet failed to apply his own principles to the case immediately before him, the case of the Irish nation. Blinded by the false notion of upholding English influence by exterminating the Irish language, and taught to reverence the policy which dictated an Act of Parliament in direct opposition to the principles of the Reformation, the Primate censured as a mode of confirming superstition and idolatry, the first judicious attempt that had been made to spread the doctrines of the Reformation through the country. It is not a little singular that the two bishops who, at different periods, exerted themselves most strenuously to spread the knowledge of the Irish language among the clergy were Englishmen, Bishop Bedell and Primate Marsh.

It would appear from the whole correspondence, that nothing gave the Primate so much offence as Bishop Bedell's