suggested Ken's restoration. Her Majesty was pleased at the idea, and ordered Hooper to make the offer. Ken thanked her Majesty, but was unwilling to return again to the business of the world.[1] In a letter to Lloyd of April 1st, 1704, he says, "I perceive by youre two last that your Lordship is very shy of owning your approbation of my action." He alludes to his resignation, of which Lloyd did not approve. He says that he foresaw the censures that were bestowed upon him: and he assures Lloyd, "I never did any thing in my life more to my satisfaction than my seceding."[2]
For a few years after the death of King William
- ↑ Bowles's Ken, ii. 249—253, 256.
- ↑ Ibid. 263. D'Oyley's Sancroft, i. 448. Ken thus gave utterance to his feelings in verse:
But that which most of all my eye-lids drain'd,
My lambs, my sheep, were by their wanderings baned:
They broke from Catholic, and hallow'd bounds,
And for the wholsome chose th' impoison'd grounds,
Contracting latitudinarian taint,
In faith, in morals, suffering no restraint.In allusion to the answer to his prayers, he says:
But I adore benignity Divine,
Who did to hear my worthless cares incline,
And while I mourn'd for the tremendous stroke,
Which freed my flock from uncanonic yoke,
Heaven, my Lord, supereffluently kind,
In you sent a successor to my mind.Elsewhere he alludes to the same subject:
Forc'd from my flock I daily saw, with tears,
A stranger's ravage two sabbatic years:
But I forbear to tell the dreadful stroke,
Which freed my sheep from their Erastian yoke.By the two sabbatic years, Ken alludes to the period, fourteen years, of Kidder's occupancy of the see. Biog. Brit. Art. Ken.
