Another, after performing divine service on a fast day appointed by their authority, dined on a pigeon pie, and while he cut it up, uttered a wish that it was the usurper's heart.

But such audacious wickedness was doubtless rare and was rather injurious to the Church than to the government, [465] Those clergymen and members of the Universities who incurred the penalties of the law were about four hundred in number.

Foremost in rank stood the Primate and six of his suffragans, Turner of Ely, Lloyd of Norwich, Frampton of Gloucester, Lake of Chichester, White of Peterborough, and Ken of Bath and Wells.

Thomas of Worcester would have made a seventh: but he died three weeks before the day of suspension.

On his deathbed he adjured his clergy to be true to the cause of hereditary right, and declared that those divines who tried to make out that the oaths might be taken without any departure from the loyal doctrines of the Church of England seemed to him to reason more jesuitically than the Jesuits themselves, [466] Ken, who, both in intellectual and in moral qualities, ranked highest among the nonjuring prelates, hesitated long.