ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



Protestant succession. He also was a Norwich man, who had gone from 

 Norwich School to Corpus Christi College, where he ultimately became 

 master of the college ; and he had married a sister of the last bishop. 

 Dr. Trimnell. He was removed to the richer see of Ely in less than two years 

 after his consecration. Several bishops in succession after him held the see 

 for only a short period. Bishop Leng, who was consecrated 3 November, 

 1723, and who was chaplain in ordinary to George I, died 26 October, 

 1727, of smallpox caught at the coronation of George II. WilHam Baker, 

 bishop of Bangor, translated in December, 1727, died 4 December, 1732, 

 and no record survives of his ever having resided in his diocese. Dr. Robert 

 Butts, dean of Norwich, who succeeded to the bishopric 20 January, 1733, 

 is said by Cole^ to have been universally hated by the time he was translated 

 to Ely in 1738, though he seems to have shown zeal and earnestness in the 

 management of his diocese. Blomefield writes affectionately of Sir Thomas 

 Gooch, who was bishop from 17 October, 1738, to January, 1747, when he 

 also was translated to Ely. He repaired and beautified the palace, and was in 

 many ways a typical bishop of the eighteenth century ; as kind and charitable 

 as he was witty and vivacious.^ He founded the valuable society for the 

 support of the widows and orphans of the clergy of his diocese. Although a 

 High Churchman,' he was favourable to the plans then under discussion for 

 the comprehension of moderate dissenters.* Earlier in his career he had 

 been rector of St. Etheldred's in the city of Norwich, which he then described 

 in Notitia Parochialis^ as a 'rectory without endowment, worth, communibus 

 annis, to him that ofKciates about 12 fi per annum with contributions,' and as 

 containing about 150 souls. His successor. Bishop Lisle, was promoted from 

 the see of St. Asaph 17 March, 1747-8, and died 3 October, 1749; he was 

 followed by Bishop Haytor, then archdeacon of York, in whom Norwich 

 again had a bishop both honest and zealous, and at the same time liberal and 

 broad-minded in his views. In 175 1, on the re-arrangement of the house- 

 hold of Frederick prince of Wales after his death, he was appointed tutor 

 to the young princes. In 1753 he supported the Jews' Naturalisation Bill, 

 which procured him much odium in his diocese. He published anonymously 

 an account of the persecutions of the Quakers, and an essay on the liberty 

 of the press, works which show him to have been somewhat in advance of 

 his times. Horace Walpole describes him as ' a well bred, sensible man.* 



In 1751 ^ James Wheatley, who had been a Methodist preacher since 

 1742, and exceedingly popular, but who had been suspended and finally 

 expelled from the society upon conviction of a serious offence, came to 

 Norwich, where he was unknown, and began to preach out of doors. Before 

 long a temporary building was erected for him called the Tabernacle, and 

 though for some months the city was disturbed and alarmed by the behaviour 

 of the mobs who collected to disturb his meetings,* he had an immense 

 success, and for a time supplied one of the largest chapels in the city. But 

 in 1754 the judge of the ecclesiastical court of Norwich had to deal with 



' Cole, MSS. xviii, 140, 233. ' Bentham, Ely, ziz. ' Walpole, Memoirs, 148. 



* C. J. Abbey, Engl. Ch. and its Bishops, ii, 68. ' Lambeth Lib. 



° Memoirs, 87. ' Tyerman, Life of Wesley, ii, 122. 



' An account of these disturbances and their instigators is to be found in letters in Gent. Mag. for 

 1752, 19 Feb. and 22 March, and in a True and Particular Narrative (B.M. 10 1, K. 18). 



