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Paul, which engaged the bishop to treat Bedell with par- 

 ticular respect. At length Sir Thomas Jermyn, a Suffolk 

 gentleman, presented him to the living of Horingsheath 

 in 1615; but he found ditliculties in obtaining institution 

 and induction. Dr. Jegon, bishop of Norwich, requiring fees 

 on the occasion so large, that Bedell considered the demand 

 to partake of simony. He, in consequence, refused to pay 

 any thing beyond the expense of parchment, writing, and 

 wax ; and, declining to take his title to the living upon any 

 other terms, went home, but in a few days the bishop sent 

 for him, and gave him institution without the charge of 

 fees. Here Bedell continued twelve years, and during that 

 time published and dedicated to King Charles I., then 

 Prince of Wales, ' The Copies of certain Letters which have 

 passed between Spain and England in matter of Religion, 

 concerning the general Motives to the Roman Obedience, 

 between Mr. James Waddesworth, a late pensioner of the 

 Holy Inquisition in Sevil, and W, Bedell, a minister of the 

 Gospel of Jesus Christ in Suffolk,' 8vo. Lond. 1624; after- 

 wards reprinted by Bishop Burnet in 1685, at the end of 

 Bishop Bedell's life. 



Various causes appear to have delayed the reward which 

 Bedell's merits deserved. He was a Calvinist, says Burnet, 

 in the matter of decrees and grace, and preferments were 

 generally at that time bestowed upon those who held oppo- 

 site opinions. His firm and faithful friend, Sir Henry 

 Wotton, too, had lost much of his influence at court ; and 

 his other patron, Sir Thomas Jermyn, was suspected of fa- 

 vouring the Puritans, and was therefore out of credit. 

 Bedell's fame, however, had reached Ireland, and, in 1627, 

 he was unanimously elected provost of Trinity College, 

 Dublin ; a charge which he refused to undertake till the 

 king laid his positive commands upon him, which he obeyed, 

 and on August 10th of that year was sworn provost. He 

 held this office about two years, when, partly by the interest 

 of Sir Thomas Jermyn, and partly by the application of 

 Laud, bishop of London, he was advanced to the united sees 

 of Kilmore and Ardagh, and consecrated on the 13th Sept., 

 1629, at Drogheda, in St. Peter's Church, in the fifty-ninth 

 year of his age. During his short residence at Trinity Col- 

 lege, he did much towards the restoration of order in the 

 college, which on his arrival he found in a very unsettled 

 state. He also rerised and improved the college statutes, 

 and introduced prayers in Irish, and a lecture in the chapel of 

 the university. (See Journal of Education, Nos. XI. XII. 

 ' On the University of Dublin.') On going to his diocese, he 

 found it, says Burnet, under so many disorders, that there 

 was scarce a sound part remaining. The revenue was wasted 

 by excessive dilapidations, and all sacred things had been 

 exposed to sale in so sordid a manner that it was grown to 

 a proverb. One of his cathedrals, Ardagh, was fallen down 

 to the ground, and there was scarce enough remaining out 

 of the revenues of both sees to support a bishop who was re- 

 solved not to supply himself by indirect and base methods. 

 He found, too, the oppression of the ecclesiastical courts ex- 

 cessive, and pluralities and non-residence shamefully pre- 

 vailing. All these abuses he determined to rectify ; and 

 having recovered a sufficient portion of the lands of which 

 his sees had been dispossessed, to enable him to subsist, he 

 set an example for the reformation of further abuses by re- 

 signing (in 1630) the bishopric of Ardagh, which he had the 

 satisfaction to see followed in other instances. 



Upon the arrival of the lord-deputy Wentworth, in 1633, 

 Bishop Bedell fell under his displeasure on account of a 

 petition sent up by the county of Cavan, to which the bishop 

 had set his hand, and in which some complaints were made 

 of, and some regulations proposed for, the army. A recon- 

 ciliation, however, took place, and the lord-deputy received 

 him into favour. He then went on cheerfully in doing what 

 ho considered his duty for the benefit of the church, and was 

 very successful. He loved the Christian power of a bishop, 

 without affecting either political authority- or pomp. What- 

 ever he did was so visibly for the good of his flock, that he 

 seldom failed of being well supported by his clergy, and such 

 as opposed him did it with visible reluctance, for he had the 

 ,1 of the good men of all parties. 



In September, 1638, he convened a synod, in which he 

 made many excellent canons that are still extant ; but 

 offence was taken at this by some who were in power, and 

 who questioned the legality of the meeting ; and some talk 

 there was, says his biographer, of calling him in question 

 for it either in the star-chamber or high-commission court ; 

 1-ut his archdeacon, Thomas Price, who was afterwards arch- 



bishop of Cashel, gave such an account of the matter as 

 satisfied the state. Archbishop Usher is said to have ad- 

 vised those who moved to have the bishop brought up upon 

 this charge, ' to let him alone, lest he should be thereby pro- 

 voked to say more for himself than any of his accusers could 

 say against him.' 



Amongst other extraordinary things which he did, his bio- 

 graphers have agreed that there was none more worthy of 

 remembrance than his removing his lay-chancellor, and 

 taking upon himself to sit in his own courts, hearing causes, 

 and retrieving thereby the jurisdiction which antiently be- 

 longed to a bishop. The chancellor upon this filed his bill 

 in equity, and obtained a decree in chancery against the 

 bishop, with 100/. costs. But, by this time, the chancellor 

 saw so visibly the difference between the bishop's sitting in 

 that seat and his own, that he never called for his costs, but 

 appointed a surrogate, with orders to obey the bishop in 

 everything, and so his lordship went on his own way. 



' Our bishop,' says the writer of his life in the Bingraphid 

 Britannica, ' was no persecutor of papists, and yet tlie most 

 successful enemy they ever had ; and if the other bishops 

 had followed his example, the Protestant religion must have 

 spread itself through every part of that country. He la- 

 boured to convert the better sort of the popish clergy, and 

 in this he had great success. He procured the Common- 

 Prayer, which had been translated into Irish, and caused it 

 to be read in the cathedral in his own presence every 

 Sunday ; having himself learned that language perfectly, 

 though he did not attempt to speak it. / The New Testa- 

 ment had been also translated from the Greek into Irish, 

 by William Daniel, afterwards archbishop of Tuam, but 

 our prelate first procured the Old Testament to be trans- 

 lated by one King, and because the translator was igno- 

 rant of the original tongues, and did it from the English, 

 the bishop himself revised and compared it with the He- 

 brew and the best translations. He caused, likewise, some 

 of Chrysostom's and Leo's Homilies, in commendation 

 of the scriptures, to be rendered both into English and 

 Irish, that the common people might see that, in the 

 opinion of the antient fathers, they had not only a right 

 to read the scriptures as well as the clergy, but that it 

 was their duty so to do. He met with great opposition in 

 this work, from a persecution against the translator, raised 

 without reason, and carried on with much passion by those 

 from whom he had no cause to expect it. But, however, he 

 got the translation finished, and would have printed it in 

 his own house, and at his own charge, if the troubles in 

 Ireland had not prevented it ; and, as it was, his labours 

 were not useless, for the translation escaped the hands of 

 the rebels, and was afterwards printed at the expense of 

 the celebrated Robert Boyle. 



When the rebellion broke out in October, 1641, the bishop 

 was so popular in his neighbourhood that he did not at first 

 feel the violence of its effects. His was the only English 

 house in the county of Cavan which stood unviolated, not- 

 withstanding that it and its out-buildings, the church and 

 its churchyard, were filled with people who had fled to him 

 for shelter, whom by his preaching and prayers he encou- 

 raged to expect and bear the worst with patience. This 

 went on till about the middle of December following, when 

 the rebels, pursuant to orders they had received from the 

 council of state at Kilkenny, required him to dismiss the 

 people who were with him, which he refused to do, declaring 

 that he would share the same fate with the rest. They 

 signified to him upon this that they had orders to remove 

 him, and subsequently seized him, his two sons, and Mr. 

 Clogy, who had married his step-daughter, and carried 

 them prisoners to the castle of Cloughboughter, surrounded 

 by a deep water, where they put all but the bishop in irons. 

 They did not suffer any of them to carry any thing with 

 them ; and the moment the bishop was gone from his 

 house, Dr. Swiney, the popish titular bishop of Kilmore, 

 whose brother Bishop Bedell had converted, and who him- 

 self wished to be admitted to lodge with Bishop Bedell, took 

 possession of it and all that belonged to it, and on the Sun- 

 day following said mass in the church. After some time 

 the rebels abated of their severity, took the irons oft' the 

 prisoners, and suffered them to be as much at their ease as 

 they could be in so wretched a place, where the ruined state 

 of the castle exposed them to much severity of weather in a 

 rigorous winter. While thus confined, the bishop, his sons, 

 and Mr. Clogy, preached and prayed continually to their 

 small afflicted congregation, and upon Christmas-day the 



