Archbishop of Canterbury - KU ScholarWorks - The University of ...

Church evangelicals. Nevertheless, in his careful and reserved statements
he provided vindication against things spread abroad to his
discredit. More than that, there is here another window onto the
eighteenth century. Behind the multitude of particulars there lies a
wealth of human variety, in what turn out, on investigation, to be
interesting experiences of unnoticed men. On a larger scale, Seeker's
account exemplifies some important ways in which a lay dominated
church worked in a largely aristocratic society.
The autobiography is an almost unique document. Apart from
Wake's, 27 there has been no other from an Archbishop of Canterbury.
Seeker's account carries the reader over extraordinarily varied grounds:
to dissenters' academies, as seen through the critical eyes of a clever
youth; medical studies in London, Paris, Leyden; the havering between
Tory and Whig friends at Oxford; the scholars whom he delighted to
encourage; the bluestockings, for whom he seems to have had a certain
weakness; fashionable physicians at Bath and in the West End, and
promoters of new cures; members of both Houses of Parliament,
politely encroaching on the patronage of client bishops; the parish
officers, and some difficult parishioners, in Westminster. During the first
half of the century he had enjoyed the lively company of old friends, his
brother-in-law Bishop Benson, and the Bishops Berkeley and Butler,
and had borne gently with an ailing wife. These friends, and his wife, all
died within a short period of time. 28 In the last fifteen years of his life,
the widowed Leviathan was more with the prudent but duller company
of those other elder statesmen, Hardwicke and Newcastle, with whom
he did not always see eye to eye. Towards the end, he shrank from the
discomfort and heat of the House of Lords, where once he had been one
of the most effective episcopal speakers.
Acquainted as a boy with reverend seniors who in 1662 had been
ejected ministers, and bearing tales of the dangers to dissenters, even in
Nottingham, during the Monmouth rebellion, he lived long enough to
see the beginnings of troubles in North America, but not long enough to
see established there a republic, and bishops provided there, whether
consecrated in an upstairs room at Aberdeen or in the decorous beauty
of Lambeth Palace Chapel. In his own country, the old regime, of which
he was an ornament, seemed secure enough. The variety of experience
he brought to the Primacy of All England must have been unique.
Whatever some latitudinarians of a Cambridge style might say, there
were others in that place who shared his pastoral ideals, and could quote
2 7 Norman Sykes, William Wake, (Cambridge, 1957), II, p. 274: the unpublished
manuscript autobiography deals with Wake's life only to 1705.
2 8 Mrs. Seeker, "Kitty," died in March 1748, Benson and Butler in 1752, and
Berkeley in 1753.
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