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that he had been a candidate for the dissenting ministry, and that as such
he had preached to a small village congregation at Bolsover in Derbyshire,
not far from Chesterfield, where he was living. The truth that
he set out to be a physician or surgeon was embroidered with statements
to which the autobiography gives the lie: such as that he was trained to
be a male midwife, and that his Leyden dissertation was de partu difficili,
as if there were something discreditable in an archbishop having
technical knowledge about childbirth. More serious than this, there was
a tale that, as a student, he had been president of an atheists' club. The
charge was made, that as he had risen in the Church, so he had of design
grown cooler towards old dissenting connexions, was unwilling to do
anything for dissenting ministers who conformed, and had adopted
manners as far removed as he could make them from those of his
dissenting days, and had become, especially towards his chaplains,
pompous, distant and proud. 17 Horace Walpole told everybody that at
George Ill's accession, Archbishop Seeker most improperly pushed
himself forward, even in the company of the greatest nobles of the land,
in the hope of getting the management of the young king, establishing
church power, and making himself a great figure in the state. 18
In the spring of 1766 there was published anonymously a remarkable
book with a misleading title, The Confessional. The Archbishop, using, as
it was believed by his enemies, a well organized intelligence network,
such as befitted an inquisitorial enemy of liberty, soon found out that the
author was Francis Blackburne, Archdeacon of Cleveland in Yorkshire.
This long tract, the literary climax of the movement against subscription,
was an elaborate plea for the taking away of all obligatory
subscription to human formularies of faith or religion out of all
Protestant churches. Formularies embodied the spirit of popery, and
represented a betrayal of the reformation. Surveying the whole field of
English church history since the reformation, Blackburne came down
firmly on all disputed questions on the side most objectionable to such as
Seeker: on the Thirty-Nine Articles, on the statute 13 Elizabeth, on
Archbishop Wake who was denounced as having in his negotiation with
the Gallicans betrayed the principles of Protestantism, a charge from
which Seeker instituted serious researches to exculpate him. Seeker's
hope for the establishment of an episcopate in the colonies was presented
by Blackburne as evidence of the nastiest kind of unprotestant eccle-
1 7 For these assertions and some rebuttals, see, inter alia, G.M., XXXVIII (1768),
XL (1770), LIII (1783), LIV (1784), LXVII (1797), LXVIII (1798); John Nichols,
Literary Anecdotes VIII, John Nichols, Literary Illustrations IV; Monthly Repository, XV
(1820), XVI (1821).
1 8 Horace Walpole }s Correspondence with George Montagu, ed. W.S. Lewis and Ralph S.
Brown Jr. (New Haven, 1941), I, p. 325: 24 November 1760.
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