136 WATSON. 







Huntingdonshire. At this time he had neither taken his degree of 

 B.D. or D.D., and by his own account, seems to have known little 

 more of theological learning than he did of chemistry seven years 

 before. Yet such was his good fortune, or the reputation that he 

 had established, for carrying an object whenever he took it in hand, 

 that no other candidate appeared for the professorship, while his 

 eloquence and ingenuity supplied the want of deeper erudition, and 

 attracted as numerous audiences to the exercises in the schools at 

 which he presided, as had ever attended his chemical lectures. 



Watson himself, in the anecdotes of his life, gives the following 

 account of this circumstance : " I was not, when Dr. Rutherforth 

 died, either Bachelor or Doctor in Divinity, and without being one 

 of them I could not become a candidate for the Professorship. This 

 puzzled me for a moment, I had only seven days to transact the 

 business in, but by hard travelling, and some adroitness, I accom- 

 plished my purpose, obtained the King's mandate for a Doctor's 

 degree, and was created Doctor on the day previous to that ap- 

 pointed for the examination of the candidates. Thus did I, by hard 

 and incessant labour for seventeen years, attain at the age of thirty- 

 four, the first office for honour in the University ; and, exclusive of 

 the mastership of Trinity College, I have made it the first for profit ; 

 I found the Professorship not worth quite 330Z., and it is now worth 

 1000Z. at least." 



Watson's clerical preferment after this was very rapid. In 1773, 

 through the influence of the Duke of Grafton, he obtained possession 

 of a sinecure rectory in North Wales, which he was enabled to ex- 

 change during the course of the following year for a prebend in the 

 Church of Ely. In 1780 he succeeded Dr. Plumtree as archdeacon 

 of that diocese ; the same year he was presented to the Rectory of 

 Northwold in Norfolk, and in the beginning of the year following, 

 received another much more valuable living, the Rectory of Knap- 

 toft in Leicestershire, from the hands of the Duke of Rutland, who 

 had been his pupil at the University. Lastly, in July, 1782, he was 

 promoted to the bishopric of Llandaff, by the Prime Minister of that 

 period Lord Shelburne, who hoped thereby both to gratify the Duke 

 of Rutland, and also to secure an active partisan. 



Watson, however, proved a very unmanageable bishop, and 

 during the course of his political career was singularly free and 

 independent in his sentiments. One of his first acts was to publish 

 in 1783, ' A Letter to Archbishop Cornwallis on the Church Revenues, 

 recommending an equalization of the Bishoprics.' This he did in 

 spite of all that could be said to make him see that it would em- 

 barrass the Government, and at the same time do nothing to forward 

 his own object. And so he continued to take his own way, and was 

 very soon left to do so, without any party or person seeking either 

 to guide or stop him. 



In 1783 Bishop Watson had married the eldest daughter of Edward 



