LAMPLUGH, Thomas (1615-91)

LAMPLUGH, Thomas (1615–91)

cons. 12 Nov. 1676 bp. of EXETER; transl. 8 Dec. 1688 abp. of YORK

First sat 16 Feb. 1677; last sat 20 Aug. 1689

bap. 1615, s. of Christopher Lamplugh of Little Riston, Yorks. and Anne (1595–1661), da. of Thomas Roper of Octon, Yorks. (E. Riding). educ. St Bees g.s.; Queen’s, Oxf. matric. 1634, BA 1639, fell. 1642, MA 1642, BD 1657, DD 1660; incorp. Camb. 1668. m. (1) lic. 9 Nov. 1663, Katherine (1633–71), da. of Dr Edward Davenant, clergyman, of Gillingham, Dorset; 1s. 1da. (3 ch. d.v.p.); (2) Mary (surname unknown), ?2s. d. 5 May 1691; will 2 May 1691, pr. 1 Dec. 1707.1

Chap. to Charles II 1664–76.

Minister, Holy Rood, Southampton bef. 1648; lecturer, St Martin Carfax, Oxf. 1648–57; rect. Charlton-on-Otmoor, Oxon. 1658–85, Binfield, Berks. 1659,2 St Antholin, London 1664–71; adn. Oxf. 1663–4, London 1664-76; canon, Worcester 1669–76; vic. St Martin-in-the-Fields 1670–6; dean, Rochester 1673–88; mbr. ecclesiastical commn. 1689.3

Principal, St Alban Hall 1664–73.

Also associated with: Thwing and Octon, Yorks.; Cockermouth, Cumb.

Likenesses: oil on canvas, after G. Kneller, 1689, Queen’s, Oxf.; oil on canvas, Bishop’s Palace, Exeter; standing effigy, York Cathedral, G. Gibbons, 1691.

Tracing Thomas Lamplugh’s family background is complicated by several amendments to parish and college registers, but it seems certain that he was descended from the Yorkshire branch of the ‘ancient’ armigerous Lamplugh family originally from Cumberland.4 Lamplugh managed to survive changes of regime over a period of some 50 years. He was ordained by Robert Skinner, then bishop of Oxford, in 1645 and assisted him (on at least 300 occasions) in the ordination of other Church loyalists, yet he survived the parliamentary visitation of Oxford university in 1648 by taking the Covenant and probably also through the influence of his uncle and patron, the lawyer Thomas Lamplugh, who was a parliamentary commissioner. In 1660 (according to Anthony Wood) Lamplugh used ‘flatteries and rewards [and] shuffled himself into considerable spiritualities’ but had been ‘A great cringer … to Presbyterians and independents’ when it was expedient’.5 Yet Lamplugh had appeared on the ecclesiastical planning lists of Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, in 1659, suggesting that Wood’s observations owed more to spleen than to accuracy.6

Lamplugh was not prominent at the Restoration and he did not take part in the Savoy Conference. Nevertheless his career prospects were looking auspicious. His fellow Cumbrian and Queen’s College man Joseph Williamson‡ had become under-secretary of state and in 1663 he married into a clerical dynasty, the Davenant family (his new father-in-law was nephew to a recent bishop of Salisbury). An appointment as archdeacon of Christ Church, Oxford, sparked a legal challenge by his rival Thomas Barlow, future bishop of Lincoln. Lamplugh lost that fight but he soon received other preferments and moved steadily upwards in the clerical hierarchy. During this period he also came into contact with Henry Bennet, later Baron Arlington, whom he assisted in October 1669 in a controversial case at University College, Oxford.7 As vicar of the fashionable church of St Martin-in-the-Fields he ministered to leading members of the nobility and the political elite. He was in regular correspondence with Williamson and as canon of Worcester he sent him information about the state of the diocese following the passage of the second Conventicle Act. Lamplugh praised the mayor of Worcester for his courage ‘in suppressing conventicles and seditious meetings’ and for his political acumen in dealing with those who tried to exploit legal loopholes to evade the Act.8

The last years of the Cavalier Parliament, 1676–88

A preacher who spoke ‘very practically’ (and was thus to the king’s taste), Lamplugh was well placed for elevation.9 After months of speculation about the vacant see of Exeter and the belief that he might be appointed to the deanery (which was apparently more lucrative than the bishopric itself), the royal directive was sent on 8 Aug. 1676 to the chapter of Exeter cathedral for Lamplugh’s election as bishop.10 His writ of summons was issued on 10 Feb. 1677 and he took his seat in the Lords on 16 Feb., the second day of the new parliamentary session.11 His parliamentary career, lasting some 12 years, was marked by very high levels of attendance and involvement in the procedural business of the House. He attended every session of Parliament in the reigns of Charles II and James II, all but one for more than 80 per cent of all sittings.

During his first parliamentary session, Lamplugh attended 78 per cent of sittings and was named to 67 select committees, as well as to the sessional committees. Shortly after taking his seat, James Stuart, duke of York, crossed the House to wish Lamplugh ‘joy of his bishopric’ and asked who was to succeed him as vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields; Lamplugh, who had never before spoken to York, was apparently nonplussed at the exchange.12 He received the proxy of Edward Rainbowe, bishop of Carlisle (signed on 1 Feb. and cancelled on 11 Apr. 1677). On 22 Feb. he also received the proxy of Thomas Wood, bishop of Lichfield; the proxy was vacated on 11 Apr. 1677 when Wood attended. The proxies held by Lamplugh were almost certainly employed in the passage of the Act for the more effectual conviction and prosecution of popish recusants and the Act for further securing the Protestant Religion, which passed the House on 7 Mar. and 15 Mar. 1677 respectively, both fully supported by the episcopal bench.

Over the summer and early autumn months Lamplugh conducted his primary visitation.13 Back in the House by 15 Jan. 1678, he continued to attend until 18 June, four weeks before the prorogation of 15 July. Such was the contentious nature of this session (not least the debates about the legality of the long prorogation between 1675 and 1677) that no fewer than 43 sections of the Journal were later expunged from the official record by order of the House on 13 Nov. 1680 (during the second Exclusion Parliament). The grounds for this action (in which Lamplugh was involved as a member of the Journal committee) were that the original minutes recorded ‘unparliamentary’ proceedings and should not be available in the future as examples of parliamentary precedent.

Once again, over the summer months of 1678 Lamplugh visited his diocese (monitoring clerical appointments and seeking the assistance of William Sancroft, of Canterbury, to block those of which he did not approve).14 He attended 82 per cent of sittings and was named to three select committees. The Popish Plot continued to dominate political and ecclesiastical life. On 5 Nov. 1678 he and John Tillotson, later archbishop of Canterbury, preached before the Lords and Commons respectively on the same text (Luke ix. 55–56), an orchestrated attempt to channel anti-Catholic animosity into a force for moral reform. Lamplugh told the Lords that there was ‘imminent danger’ to both the king and the kingdom and that the reformation of only ‘a few’ sinners might avert catastrophe by placating an angry God and preserving ‘public peace and safety’.15 The parallel sermons became a talking (and selling) point: when Lamplugh’s sermon came out in print by the end of the month, the first print run of 4,000 was said to have sold out in a day and by the first week in December it had gone to a third impression.16

Further parliamentary defences against Catholicism were afoot and on 15 Nov. 1678, in divisions on the Test bill, Lamplugh voted in a committee of the whole House to augment the existing oaths of allegiance and supremacy with a new test on transubstantiation.17 During the session he held the proxies of Edward Rainbowe and Herbert Croft, of Hereford, and almost certainly used these to favour the passage of the Test on 20 November. On 29 Nov. he supported the Commons’ address to the king to remove the queen and her entourage from the court.

The following week, on 3 Dec. 1678, the House was informed of the arrest of two men in Worcester for asserting that Lamplugh, Henry Compton, of London, John Fell, of Oxford, and two others were the only Protestant bishops in England. One individual was already in custody but was bailed on condition of appearing before the House. When he failed to appear he was re-arrested and spent a week in Newgate before being released on 21 December. Lamplugh was added to the committee for the Journal on 4 Dec. and his signature on eight entries between 9 Nov. and 7 Jan. 1679 shows that he was an active member of the committee. Some of those entries (11 Nov. and 12 and 28 Dec. 1678) involved amendments to the minutes. Given the sensitivity of the official record of testimonies relating to the Popish Plot, there seems to have been a meticulous approach to the official record at this time: the amendments of 12 Dec. corrected the narrative of William Bedloe’s testimony. On 26 Dec. 1678, on an issue that divided the bishops, Lamplugh voted against the Lords’ amendment which would divert the payment of supply from the Chamber of London into the exchequer but did not sign the subsequent protest. The following day he voted against the committal of Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby. He attended the House on 30 Dec. 1678, when Parliament was prorogued.

Exclusion, 1679–81

On 24 Jan. 1679 Parliament was dissolved and, in the elections that followed, Lamplugh may have encouraged Williamson to stand for Oxford University.18 It is highly unlikely that he had any role in the election of his first cousin Richard Lamplugh‡, who became the exclusionist member for Cumberland, and equally unlikely that he was happy with the electorate’s choice in his cathedral city of Exeter, where the nonconformist interest prevailed with the return of William Glyde‡ and Malachi Pyne‡.19

Lamplugh attended the House on 6 Mar. 1679 for the start of the new Parliament and attended five sittings in the week before the prorogation. He was named only to the three sessional committees. Back in the House on 15 Mar. 1679 when Parliament re-assembled, he attended 97 per cent of sittings, being named to all three standing committees and to 12 select committees, including legislation that would impose the Test oaths on members of Convocation. He was again an active member of the Journal committee, examining the Journal on three occasions. On 14 Apr. 1679 he was one of the six bishops who defied the king and left the chamber rather than vote in a matter of blood on the attainder of Danby. He voted against the appointment, on 10 May, of a joint committee of both houses to consider the method of proceeding against the impeached lords and subsequently attended the House for prorogations on 27 May (and for two further prorogations on 17 Oct. 1679 and 26 Jan. 1680). By June 1679 he was back in Exeter, whence he wrote to Sancroft suggesting the necessity of some public vindication of the bishops from allegations emanating from returning Members of the Commons ‘that the Bishops were the cause of the late prorogation of this Parliament’. He also advised Sancroft to publish the text of his attempt to convert James, duke of York, ‘to let the world know what persuasive means have been used to reduce that most unfortunate Prince to his mother the Church of England’.20 During the course of the year Lamplugh published a pastoral letter to his clergy instructing them to catechize their parishioners and further the cause of Protestantism.21

Parliament was dissolved on 12 July 1679. The sitting members were returned in Exeter without a contest and there is no evidence of Lamplugh’s involvement in any other campaigns at this election. Rather, he concentrated on ensuring that the elections to Convocation passed off ‘without tumult’.22 That there was ill feeling within the chapter is revealed in a letter written in February 1680 by Lamplugh’s predecessor at Exeter, Anthony Sparrow, now bishop of Norwich. Lamplugh stood accused of ‘requiring several things of them contrary, as they think to their oath’, resulting in an appeal to Sancroft.23 In April Lamplugh reported back to the archbishop on his visitation of Devon and Cornwall, claiming to have persuaded the local gentry against the sale of benefices (probably by bonds of resignation) so that ‘those ecclesiastical markets are put down, and now they will bestow their benefices not as merchants but as patrons’. He had also successfully (or so he claimed) pressed the magistracy of Exeter to enforce the penal laws against conventicles so that nonconformists could have no hope to expect sympathy ‘from above’.24 Despite the earlier indications of a dispute with his chapter, Lamplugh boasted at the end of May 1680 that the ‘affairs of the church and of our city … are in a good posture’, with the deputy lieutenants all ‘very well affected and very resolute to preserve the peace’; as for conventicles, he insisted that the evidence from Exeter suggested that all would conform ‘if it were in earnest desired’.25

On 16 June 1680, Lamplugh informed Sancroft that if the court were ready to summon a new Parliament, ‘we are in a condition to send you good members’ in both Devon and Cornwall.26 On 7 Sept. 1680, Secretary Sir Leoline Jenkins‡ wrote to Lamplugh hoping that the bishop had conveyed the king’s thanks to the ‘loyal citizens’ of Exeter ‘most justly due to them for the regard they showed to his majesty’s honour when the [James Scott,] duke of Monmouth was among them’. That Lamplugh’s diocese was still regarded as a hotbed of partisan sentiment was evident four days later when Jenkins was forced to qualify his earlier message to Lamplugh from the king: the king was displeased that some had ‘made bold’ with the royal name, ‘as if he had approved of the proceedings of some gentlemen in your parts, who visited, treated and complimented the duke of Monmouth … [whereas] … he very well approved of those who did neither visit, treat or compliment the duke’.27

Lamplugh left his diocese to travel to Westminster in October 1680 and arrived at the second Exclusion Parliament one week after the start of the session. He attended 81 per cent of sittings and was named to the Journal committee, of which he was now a very experienced member, and to seven select committees. He examined the Journal on ten occasions during the session. Six years later (on 9 Dec. 1686) he and other members of the committee amended the entry for 29 Nov. 1680 relating to the excuses offered to the House for the absences of Edward Montagu, 2nd Baron Montagu, Robert Bertie, 3rd earl of Lindsey, William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire, and John Frescheville, Baron Frescheville. On 15 Nov. 1680, Lamplugh voted to reject the Exclusion bill on its first reading and on 23 Nov. voted against a joint committee with the Commons to discuss the safety of the three kingdoms. He attended the House when Parliament was prorogued on 10 Jan. 1681 and almost certainly took part in the subsequent parliamentary elections in Exeter. While it seems likely that Lamplugh was involved in the underhand manoeuvres that ousted the sitting members Glyde and Pyne in favour of the court candidates, Sir Thomas Carew‡ and Thomas Walker‡, there is no evidence to confirm that this was so.28

Tory reaction, 1681–5

Lamplugh attended every sitting of the brief Oxford Parliament from 21 to 28 Mar. 1681. He was named only to the three sessional committees and was again involved in examining the Journal. Parliament was dissolved abruptly on 28 Mar., too soon for the Commons to hear the petition into possible misconduct at the Exeter election.29 Returning to his diocese, Lamplugh told Sancroft that throughout his journey to Exeter he had found the people ‘generally well satisfied’ with the dissolution of the previous two Parliaments, and that the royal declaration had enjoyed a good reception and would find even greater approval if he had further copies to distribute in his parishes, ‘which would undeceive some and keep others from being infected by such ill men, as do endeavour to beget in them a bad opinion of the government’. The justices and gentry had shown themselves at the quarter sessions to be in favour of executing the penal laws ‘if they meet with no check from above’.30

Over the next few years Lamplugh was an active supporter of the ‘Tory reaction’, though he sometimes found himself having to weigh national against local pressures. In July 1681, for example, the local magnate Christopher Monck, 2nd duke of Albemarle (whom Lamplugh ‘would not willingly disoblige’), created a dilemma for the bishop when he leant his support to a candidate for a Plymouth benefice who was regarded by Lamplugh as ‘not fit for the place’.31 A stream of correspondence illustrated the campaign against nonconformity, and the ways in which collaboration between the bishop and justices of the peace had raised awareness of the political and social dangers posed by Dissent.32 By October 1683, after the Devonshire justices had ‘exceeded all other presentments whatsoever’, Lamplugh had expressed wholehearted approval and directed their orders to be read in churches across the diocese.33 Following further instructions from Sancroft, Lamplugh maintained that he would now be able, through the justices, ‘to encourage the king’s friends in these parts, by letting them know his majesty’s steadiness and resolution to reform or suppress that pestilent faction which hath so long infested and so often involved this nation in blood and confusion’.34

For all Lamplugh’s positive reports about local successes, the reality was that the division of power between cathedral and corporation always carried the potential for misunderstanding and discord. In January 1684 he again referred to the need to defend cathedral privileges against ‘our unkind and encroaching neighbours of this city’; by August he was dealing with fresh disputes about seating and the setting up of the city sword.35 During the negotiations over a new charter for Exeter that took place in August and September 1684 he pressed for a proviso to preserve the privileges of the Church. He also wanted to be named in the commission of the peace in the new charter in order to ‘to preserve order and conformity in the city’ and to outwit the ‘huffing’ mayor.36 The new charter, with the desired proviso, was issued in October.37

The reign of James II, 1685–8

On 11 Feb. 1685, following James II’s declaration that he would protect the Church of England, Lamplugh was back at Exeter awaiting Sancroft’s instructions on the tenor of any loyal address in response.38 By 7 Mar. 1685 he was being pressed by his diocesan clergy to prepare an address and again sought Sancroft’s advice, since he ‘would not be singular, nor too officious’.39 A week later he insisted that he could not travel to London in time to preach on Palm Sunday because his affairs in Exeter were ‘so entangled’ and he was suffering from ‘age and infirmities’, but he promised that subscriptions to the address would be ready before the end of April.40

Lamplugh remained in his diocese throughout the parliamentary elections and in March 1685 the former Tory mayor James Walker‡ and the recorder Edward Seymour‡ were returned for the city of Exeter.41 The bishop went up to London for the start of the new Parliament on 19 May 1685. He attended the session for 90 per cent of sittings, and was named to five select committees and to all three sessional committees, examining the Journal on eight occasions. There is no other evidence of his activity during the session apart from his attendance until 19 Nov., the day of the ill-tempered debate on Catholic officers in the army, which led to the peremptory prorogation the following day.

In June 1685, while the Monmouth rebellion was in full spate in the west country, James II planned to install his ally, Jonathan Trelawny, as bishop of Exeter, where his local knowledge and networks would be politically useful. In order to facilitate this, Lamplugh was to be translated to Peterborough but he refused to move.42 He seems to have remained in London until the following spring, attending a further prorogation on 10 Feb. 1686, but he had returned to his diocese by 20 Feb. 1686 when he wrote to Sancroft that Devon and neighbouring counties were ‘full of soldiers and full of complaints against them’.43 In July 1686 he visited Salisbury as one of a special commission appointed by Sancroft to resolve a dispute within the cathedral chapter.44

By early 1687, Lamplugh was reporting that his diocese was peaceful ‘and the people are firm to their religion’.45 He almost certainly supported the Exeter corporation when it became the subject of a further regulation that year, if only because the new charter removed the proviso protecting Church interests.46 It was common knowledge that Lamplugh opposed the repeal of the Test Act and the king’s policies in general. By 1688, however, he appeared to be collaborating with the government: in May 1688 he broke ranks from the majority of the bishops and ordered his diocesan clergy to read the second Declaration of Indulgence. The hostile reaction that this provoked may have led Lamplugh to change tack, for later that month he belatedly added his signature to the seven bishops’ petition.47 Yet in mid-August Jonathan Trelawny was still complaining to Sancroft of Lamplugh’s attitude to the Declaration, which he had only recalled when his dean sent word that even if Lamplugh ‘would betray the Church he should not [betray] the cathedral’.48 When James II backtracked in November and restored the charter, Lamplugh once again went along with the flow of events. The west country magnate, John Granville, earl of Bath, instructed

the old loyal civil magistrates of this place … to come in a body to the cathedral church, where was the lord bishop of the diocese, the dean, and cannons of the church, the officers of the militia, many of the deputy lieutenants, and other gentlemen of the county, with myself to meet the restored mayor and aldermen, and thousands of the city expressing their joy all along from the guildhall to the cathedral, to see the sword rescued from a conventicle and carried once more after the ancient manner to the cathedral church …49

Revolution, 1688–9

Delivering a sermon ‘entirely against the prince … with great vehemency and abhorrency’, Lamplugh fled to London. On 9 Nov. 1688 William of Orange entered Exeter with both infantry and cavalry to the ‘acclaim’ of the populace, but was not greeted by the gentry, clergy, or mayor.50 One account maintained that, following Lamplugh’s flight, the clergy refused to attend a sermon in the cathedral by Gilbert Burnet, later bishop of Salisbury, and that even the Dissenters refused to hand over the keys of their meeting house to the prince’s agent.51 At a conference with the Exeter clergy Burnet had to explain,

that this expedition was undertaken upon the request of the Church of England and was designed for their good; that the prince had with him the subscription of the majority of the temporal lords in this nation; and that therefore it was hoped that they would give him a favourable reception at Exeter and promote his interest.52

An eighteenth-century historian of York, Francis Drake, attempted to rehabilitate Lamplugh’s reputation, pointing out that the bishop fled to London only after advising the city to hold firm for the king, ‘but finding the tide run too strong for him … presented himself to the king at Whitehall’ in mid-November 1688, whereupon James II is reported to have told Lamplugh that he was ‘a genuine old Cavalier’ and must have the see of York (which had been vacant for two years) as a reward.53 Lamplugh appears to have been the king’s second choice; he first offered it to Nathaniel Crew, bishop of Durham, who turned it down.54

In the eight weeks between the invasion and the flight of James II into exile, Lamplugh swam with the tide of events. In mid-November he joined with Sancroft, Francis Turner, of Ely, Thomas Sprat, of Rochester, and a number of lords temporal to petition the king for a free Parliament. He attended the meeting of lords at the Guildhall and on 11 Dec. 1688 signed the declaration to William, the orders to secure the Tower, and a request to George Legge, Baron Dartmouth, to issue orders to prevent ‘all acts of hostility’. The following day, with Peter Mews, then bishop of Bath and Wells, Sprat, and Thomas White, of Peterborough, he assembled with temporal peers in the Council Chamber at Whitehall to sign a number of interim orders.55 During Sancroft’s sporadic absences from the Guildhall, Lamplugh deputized for him.56 Yet on 17 Dec. 1688 he went with Turner, White, and Sprat to the king (who had returned temporarily to Whitehall) and came away reassured about royal intentions; he was now perceived as the nominal head ‘of this powerful faction that labours to narrow and enervate the prince’s designs’.57 On 21 Dec., when he attended the Queen’s Presence chamber at St James to hear William’s speech, he was once again the most senior clergyman present. He continued to function as one of the more senior members of the provisional government, and on 22, 24, and 25 Dec. 1688 headed the House of Lords, signing various addresses to the prince of Orange. 58 Meanwhile, in an emotional farewell between the king and a few select bishops, James II claimed that he was being chased out the kingdom by the prince of Orange and was not leaving voluntarily.59

Final parliamentary attendance, 1689

In the general election that preceded the Convention, Lamplugh does not appear to have exercised his recently acquired archiepiscopal privileges in the liberty of Ripon.60 He was at Westminster on 22 Jan. 1689 for the first day of the Convention, taking his seat for the first time as the archbishop of York. He attended the session for 93 per cent of sittings and was named to all three sessional committees and to 20 select committees. It was possibly in acknowledgment of his special expertise that he was added to the committee on simoniacal promotions and to the conference with the Commons on Roman Catholics. On 29 Jan. 1689 he voted for a regency as the best way to preserve Church and state, and on 31 Jan. in a committee of the whole house, voted against the motion to declare William and Mary joint monarchs. He and Sancroft wrote to the Speaker of the Commons, on 2 Feb., in response to the vote of the previous day (to thank the clergy of the Church of England for resisting Catholicism, refusing to read the second Declaration of Indulgence, and resisting the ecclesiastical commission). The two archbishops thanked the Commons for the vote and gave their assurance that ‘so far as our observation can reach, the bishops, and clergy of the Church of England are unmovably fixed to the Protestant religion; and absolutely irreconcilable both to popery and arbitrary power’.61 On 4 Feb. Lamplugh helped to manage the conference on the ‘abdication’ debate and on both 4 and 6 Feb. voted against agreeing with the Commons on the word ‘abdicated’ instead of ‘deserted’. On 6 Feb. 1689 he registered his dissent against the resolution of the House to agree with the Commons that the throne was now vacant.

On 2 Mar. 1689 it was reported to the House that Lamplugh was unwell, but would attend the following Monday to take the oaths to the new king and queen; he was accordingly excused attendance. He took the oaths in the House two days later, only the fourth bishop to do so, and was joined by William Beaw, of Llandaff, William Lloyd, of St Asaph, Sprat, and Mews.62 He acted as an intermediary between Sancroft and the House of Lords, reporting to the acting Speaker George Savile, marquess of Halifax, that his fellow archbishop was indisposed and ‘took no notice at all of the assembly as a Parliament, nor of the speaker’.63 On 8 Mar., having attended the new king and queen, Lamplugh reported back to the House that William was ready to do whatever was necessary for the good of the nation. On the same day, Edward Stillingfleet, of Worcester, a seasoned drafter of parliamentary legislation, informed Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham of the need for a new commission to revise the Church canons and reform the ecclesiastical courts, and that both Lamplugh and Sancroft should act on the commission to maintain its credibility.64 On 14 Mar. Lamplugh was present for the committal of the comprehension bill and was thus named to the committee.

On 11 Apr. 1689 he assisted Compton in the coronation of the new king and queen.65 Later in the month, now fully part of the Orange regime, he helped to compose an emotive (and virulently anti-Catholic) appeal on behalf of Irish Protestants, signing it together with Compton, Mews, Lloyd of St Asaph, and his subsequent detractor Gilbert Burnet.66 On 8 May he managed the conference for the bill ‘for more speedy and effectual convicting and disarming of papists’ and on 31 May voted against a reversal of the two judgments of perjury against Titus Oates. On 2 July 1689 he was one of 21 lords (including Compton and five other bishops) to register his dissent against the resolution to proceed with the impeachment for high treason against Sir Adam Blaire and his accomplices. Despite their apparent disagreements of the previous summer, on 22 July Lamplugh received the proxy of his successor at Exeter, Jonathan Trelawny (vacated at the end of the session). On 30 July 1689, using Trelawny’s proxy, he voted to adhere to the Lords’ amendments in the division on the reversal of judgments against Oates.

Retirement from Westminster

On 20 Aug. 1689 Lamplugh attended the House of Lords for the final time. Thereafter his political behaviour suggests a tactical, but not wholesale, withdrawal from the business of government. On 19 Sept. he received a letter from Nottingham, with his nomination to a commission to review the liturgy and prepare draft proposals of ecclesiastical reform to present to Convocation and thence to Parliament.67 The commission met in the Jerusalem Chamber on 10 Oct. but Lamplugh was not present at its opening and never attended subsequent meetings. On 23 Oct. and 30 Oct. 1689 he registered his proxy in favour of Henry Compton (vacated at the end of the session and possibly used for the Succession bill in November). By the start of the November, news had reached Roger Morrice that, ‘for some time past’, Lamplugh, Mews, and Sprat had ‘openly and publicly refused to act’ with the ecclesiastical commissioners, whose proposals were clearly in favour of admitting to the Church of England a large proportion of Dissenters.68

Lamplugh continued to persuade the non-jurors to take the oaths and thus avoid deprivation. On 6 Jan. 1690, he attended a ‘great meeting of bishops’ at Lambeth with Compton and Burnet and promised to use his influence in Parliament to pass an act to protect the non-juring bishops from deprivation, but make them ineligible for new preferments. The proposals were rejected.69 He continued with his diocesan and metropolitan duties, circulating injunctions to his clergy in preparation for his 1690 primary visitation.70 On 3 Mar. he told Sir William Lowther‡ that he hoped to be excused from the start of the new Parliament since he was about to start his visitation. He had asked Henry Compton to obtain leave of absence; if refused, he would abandon his diocesan duties ‘rather than be wanting to my duty there’.71 At a call of the House on 31 Mar. 1690, he was duly registered as excused.

Lamplugh’s tenure of the province of York was hardly an ecclesiastical triumph; his confirmation service at Retford on 16 May 1690 was ‘confused’ and disorganized and his somewhat biased successor at York, John Sharp, maintained that Lamplugh had been lax during his tenure of the see.72 On 19 Jan. 1691, Nicholas Stratford, bishop of Chester, sought his archbishop’s permission to conduct a metropolitan visitation in his place, fearing that Lamplugh was too old and frail to conduct the visitation himself. Stratford deemed such a visitation to be absolutely necessary because ‘for thirteen years last past … no visitation has been made by any bishop of this diocese; that by reason of this long neglect, many things are scandalously amiss, and very much need correction’.73

On 5 May 1691, Lamplugh died at the bishop’s palace in Bishopsthorpe. His will, written only three days before his death, expressed fears for the unity of the Church of England, now ‘rent by discord’. It provided no details of any landed property and his bequests were relatively modest, leaving his communion plate to his successors at York and less than £500 to various relatives and to the poor of five separate parishes. Some 20 months earlier, in response to a circular requesting a self-assessment for tax purposes, Lamplugh had replied that, having ‘been at great expenses by reason of my translation from Exeter to York and my long attendance in London’, his personal estate amounted to only about £1,000. His son, Thomas (later archdeacon of Richmond), was the sole executor. Lamplugh was buried in York Minster, where his son commissioned a lavish monument by Grinling Gibbons.74

Lamplugh’s ability to survive and build a career despite the vicissitudes of civil war and revolution makes it easy to adopt Wood’s condemnation of him as a ‘cringer’ or to regard him rather more politely as overly flexible. The reality is perhaps a little more complicated. His theology and attitude to nonconformity seems to have been quite consistent but it ran alongside an instinct for self-preservation that made him somewhat unpredictable and prone to panic at moments of stress. It also ran alongside a remarkable streak of luck that is perhaps best epitomized by the consequences of his flight from Exeter. Under other circumstances he could have become the subject of the king’s ire for deserting his post; instead he arrived in London just as the king was casting around for ways of rebuilding clerical support. He owed his promotion to York to the king’s desperation rather than to his own abilities or theological credentials. Being in the right place at the right time was just as important as the ability to ‘cringe’ to those in power.

B.A.

  • 1 TNA, PROB 11/497.
  • 2 VCH Oxon. vi. 80–92.
  • 3 CSP Dom. 1689–90, pp. 262–3.
  • 4 Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. lxi. 120–30; Wotton, Baronetage, iv. 113; W. Hutchinson, Hist. Cumb. ii. 94.
  • 5 Wood, Life and Times, i. 365.
  • 6 CCED; Bodl. Tanner 48, f. 25; Trans. Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc n.s. lxxxvi. 145; Eg. 2542, f. 267.
  • 7 CSP Dom. 1668–9, p. 524.
  • 8 CSP Dom. 1670, p. 259.
  • 9 Evelyn Diary, iv. 28.
  • 10 Verney ms. mic. M636/29, Dr. W. Denton to Sir R. Verney, 3 Aug. 1676.
  • 11 PA, HL/PO/JO/19/1/115.
  • 12 Diary of Dr. Edward Lake, Cam. Misc. i. 17–18.
  • 13 Articles of Visitation and Enquiry … within the Diocese of Exeter (1677).
  • 14 Tanner 39, f. 104.
  • 15 T. Lamplugh, A Sermon Preached before the House of Lords … Nov. 5, 1678 (1678), 42, 46; J. Tillotson, A Sermon Preached Nov. 5, 1678 … before the … House of Commons (1678).
  • 16 Verney ms. mic. M636/32, J. Verney to Sir R. Verney, 21 Nov., 28 Nov., 5 Dec. 1678.
  • 17 Bodl. Carte 81, f. 380.
  • 18 HP Commons 1660–90, iii. 736–7; CSP Dom. 1679–80, p. 65.
  • 19 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 197–200; ii. 707.
  • 20 Tanner 38, f. 45.
  • 21 T. Lamplugh, My Reverend Brethren … Pastoral Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Exeter (1679).
  • 22 Tanner 314, f. 35.
  • 23 Tanner 141, f. 134.
  • 24 Tanner 37, f. 17.
  • 25 Ibid. f. 38.
  • 26 Ibid. f. 47.
  • 27 CSP Dom. 1680–1, pp. 9, 11–12.
  • 28 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 197–200.
  • 29 Ibid. i. 199.
  • 30 Tanner 36, f. 11.
  • 31 Ibid. ff. 62, 72.
  • 32 CSP Dom. 1682, p. 25; Tanner 36, ff. 214, 235; Tanner 35, f. 9; Tanner 129, f. 86.
  • 33 Morrice, Entring Bk, ii. 393.
  • 34 Tanner 34, f. 174.
  • 35 Tanner 141, ff. 114, 117.
  • 36 Ibid. ff. 114, 116.
  • 37 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 199; Tanner 141, ff. 114–15, 126.
  • 38 Tanner 32, f. 218.
  • 39 Ibid. f. 236.
  • 40 Ibid. ff. 218, 236, 243.
  • 41 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 197–200; iii. 651–2.
  • 42 Tanner 31, f. 117.
  • 43 Ibid. f. 267.
  • 44 Tanner 143, f. 159.
  • 45 Tanner 30, f. 187.
  • 46 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 197–200.
  • 47 Tanner 28, f. 109; Spurr, Restoration Church, 95.
  • 48 Tanner 28, f. 158.
  • 49 Add. 41805, f. 118.
  • 50 Morrice, Entring Bk, iv. 336.
  • 51 Dalrymple, Mems, ii. 195–6.
  • 52 NLW, Ottley corresp. 1698.
  • 53 F. Drake, Eboracum (1736), 466.
  • 54 Durham UL (Palace Green), Mickleton and Spearman ms 46, f. 122.
  • 55 Add. 22183, f. 139; Bodl. ms Eng. hist. d. 307, ff. 7–9.
  • 56 Kingdom without a King, 38, 68, 70–71, 74, 79, 80–83, 92, 98, 105, 109, 115.
  • 57 Kingdom without a King, 124, 153, 158; Morrice, Entring Bk, iv. 421; Kingdom without a King, 55.
  • 58 Morrice, Entring Bk, iv. 424, 425.
  • 59 Kingdom without a King, 60.
  • 60 HP Commons 1660–90, i. 484–5.
  • 61 Tanner 28, f. 340; J. Gutch, Collectanea Curiosa, i. 446–7.
  • 62 LJ xiv. 137–8; Timberland, i. 351–2.
  • 63 Morrice, Entring Bk, v. 63.
  • 64 HMC Finch, ii. 194.
  • 65 Morrice, Entring Bk, v. 85.
  • 66 The Deplorable State of the Kingdom of Ireland (1689).
  • 67 CSP Dom. 1687–9, pp. 262–3.
  • 68 Morrice, Entring Bk, v. 220; T. Lathbury, Hist. of Convocation, 325.
  • 69 Morrice, Entring Bk, v. 368.
  • 70 T. Lamplugh, Certain Injunctions Given … by the Most Reverend Father in God, Thomas … Lord Arch-Bishop of York (1690).
  • 71 Add. 4274, f. 263.
  • 72 Sheldon to Secker, 14; A. Tindal Hart, Life of Sharp, 138.
  • 73 Tanner 152, f. 42.
  • 74 F. Drake, Hist. of Church of St Peter, York, 84.