WATSON, Thomas (1637-1717)

Family and social networks

Famously damned by Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury as ‘one of the worst men, in all respects, that I ever knew in holy orders: passionate, covetous, and false in the blackest instances; without any one virtue or good quality, to balance his many bad ones’, Thomas Watson’s parliamentary career was less important for what he did in the House of Lords than for the means that were taken to remove him from it. Burnet, ii. 226–7. His controversial expulsion after a long and bitterly fought series of legal actions raised fundamental and disturbing questions about the right to control membership of the House.

The combination of a common surname and deliberate attempts by his contemporaries to vilify his reputation makes it particularly difficult to ascertain accurate information about Watson’s early life or the social and economic background of his family. Since in later years he had to borrow the arms of the Watsons of East Hage, it is clear that his was not an armorial family. Add. 5841, f. 9. Alumni Cantabrigienses describes Watson as the son of a seaman and his nephew, John Medley, as the son of a leatherseller, but his kinsman and pupil, William Saltmarsh, is listed as the son of a gentleman. Taken collectively, and interpreted in the context of Hull, one of the most significant trading centres of the day, these entries are suggestive of a social origin poised somewhere between the world of the prosperous tradesman and the lower gentry. Watson’s education at Hull grammar school is indicative of mercantile connections, since the right of presentation to the school was vested in the corporation. VCH, Yorks. (E. Riding), i. 164–5. The gratitude that he expressed in later life for his early education suggests relatively humble origins, as does the inability of his sister Susannah Medley to sign her own name. Hull Hist. Cent. BRL 976; LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1, deposition of Susannah Medley. Significantly, at his trial for simony he was unable to present testimonials to his character from any influential or aristocratic figure. Details of Watson’s personal life in adulthood are also obscure. There is a single stray reference to a son who was still living in 1698, but there is no indication of either a wife or a family in the extensive documentation generated by Watson’s legal cases until his final petition to the House of Lords on 28 Jan. 1705, which was brought in the name of Thomas and Johanna Watson. HMC Hastings, ii. 309.

Hull and its corporation were notorious for their puritan and parliamentarian sympathies during the civil wars. Watson’s teacher at the grammar school was the influential preacher John Shaw, one of the leaders of the northern clergy whose ministry placed considerable emphasis on the importance of piety and strict church discipline. Watson’s association with Shaw meant that even as a youth he was more familiar than most with the potentially devastating effect on a clergyman’s career of becoming associated with the wrong political faction at the wrong time. At the Restoration Shaw was appointed a chaplain to Charles II, probably through the influence of the Presbyterian sympathizers Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, and George Monck, the future duke of Albemarle, but he soon attracted the hostility of Gilbert Sheldon, bishop of London (later archbishop of Canterbury), who feared that Shaw was ‘no great friend to episcopacy and common prayer’ and who engineered his dismissal from his lectureship. Yorks Diaries and Autobiographies in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Surtees Soc. v), 124–5, 142, 153.

Although there is little information about Watson’s experiences at St John’s, Cambridge, he must have had a variety of opportunities to make influential contacts. Peter Gunning, and Francis Turner, both future bishops of Ely, were successively masters of the college. Among the students attending St John’s during Watson’s time were representatives of a number of aristocratic families, including James Cecil* , the future 3rd earl of Salisbury, and John Cecil, the future 5th earl of Exeter. Another contemporary was William Gulston, an undistinguished but politically compliant clergyman who became bishop of Bristol in 1673. Like Gulston, Watson lacked academic distinction but he does seem to have developed a reputation as a teacher and to have been successful in attracting students to his college: William Cole described him as ‘an eminent pupil-monger’, a term that was not intended in a derogatory sense. There is no evidence either to confirm or refute the allegation that Watson kept a shop or sold candles while at St John’s but it is possible that he benefited from the entirely acceptable contemporary practice of taking poundage on goods supplied to his pupils. He was ordained deacon and priest on 22 Dec. 1667 by Benjamin Laney, bishop of Ely.

Despite his new contacts, Watson’s subsequent career seems to have been strongly influenced by alliances associated with his Yorkshire origins. In 1672 he was appointed to the rectory of Burrough Green in Cambridgeshire. Worth some £128 a year, this was one of the most valuable rectories in the country. The advowson was owned by the master of the mint, Henry Slingsby of Kippax in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Another branch of the Slingsby family was based further north at Scriven near Knaresborough. Sir Henry Slingsby^‡ of Scriven, although initially sympathetic to Parliament, had been executed as a royalist conspirator in 1658, but his property had been protected by his cousin, the republican sympathizer and sheriff of London, Slingsby Bethell^‡. Sir Henry’s two sons, Sir Thomas Slingsby^‡ and Henry Slingsby^‡, and his grandson, also named Henry Slingsby^‡, all served in Parliament, where they came to be identified closely with the interests of James Stuart, duke of York. Henry Slingsby, younger son of Sir Henry, was a member of James’s household both before and after his accession to the throne and served as lieutenant governor of Portsmouth under James’s close friend George Legge, Baron Dartmouth. Their sister married Sir John Talbot^‡ who also became a supporter of James’s policies. It was perhaps from this branch of the family that Watson recruited the Mr Slingsby who accompanied him to St Davids as his secretary. Watson was also well known to Sir John Reresby^‡, whose younger brother Yarburgh was a student at St John’s; he may even have assisted Yarburgh Reresby to obtain a fellowship there. CSP Dom. 1668–9, p. 213. Watson’s Yorkshire links were still important in the 1690s for even in the midst of his legal problems he took trouble to ensure that a young kinsman of the Whartons of Beverly obtained a good set of chambers at St John’s. Add. 5831, ff. 212–13.

A major influence on Watson’s career was his friendship with Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon. It is difficult to date the start of this alliance. It is possible that it was fostered by Huntingdon’s marriage to the Yorkshire heiress and future member of the household of Princess Anne, Elizabeth Lewis (d. 1689), in 1672. Her home at Ledstone was very close to Kippax. Another possibility is a connection through the duke of Monmouth, who became chancellor of Cambridge University in 1674 and high steward of Hull in 1675. Monmouth had appointed Watson as one of his chaplains as a reward for ‘answering the public Act at my request’. In January 1678, when Monmouth realized that such an appointment was of little benefit to an aspiring clergyman, he went out of his way to recommend Watson as chaplain to William Sancroft, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury. CSP Dom. 1677–8, p. 582; Bodl. Tanner 40, f. 160.

Court spy and bishop, 1679–89

In January 1679, during the elections for the first Exclusion Parliament, Watson intervened in Hull in favour of Lemuel Kingdon^‡, one of Monmouth’s clients. Hull Hist. Cent., BRL 926. In 1679 he was appointed as a justice for both the town and county of Cambridge, and was said to have been active in the August election in promoting the interest of Sir Levinius Bennet^&Dagger and Sir Robert Cotton^&Dagger for the county, allegedly polling himself twice in favour of the court candidates and ‘riding up and down the country about it and using all sorts of arguments to the freeholders’. In a pamphlet (which may be the one he attributed, together with other material, to Thomas Percival, the associate of Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury and the publisher of anti-Catholic material Benjamin Harris, in a letter to William Alington, 3rd Baron Alington [I], later Baron Arlington), he was accused, too, of using his powers as a magistrate to support a fiercely controversial local campaign against nonconformists. Although he was said to have told his critics that he feared Dissenters and papists equally, it was alleged that ‘he prosecutes the one with the penal laws, and the other with great kindness and caresses’ and that he had declared ‘that all the Protestant gentlemen that frequented some clubs in London, upon which the papists had their eye, ought to be hanged’. Stephen Perry, the chief informer against Cambridgeshire Dissenters, was employed at St John’s and was presumably thought to have been acting under Watson’s direction. The Case of Many Protestant Freeholders and Inhabitants of the County and Town of Cambridge (1680), 5, 10; CSP Dom. 1680–1, pp. 489–90. Watson had been sufficiently noticed by October 1679 for the king to recommend him to Peter Gunning, by now bishop of Ely, as a candidate for the next prebendal vacancy. CSP Dom. 1679–80, p. 263.

Political and religious allegiances apart, Watson was well qualified to act as a justice since he was building up a considerable estate in the county: his landholdings there were said, after his death, to be worth some £2,000 a year. He also acquired lands in Yorkshire. Watson’s ability to build up his landholdings may have been one reason why allegations of simony seemed credible to some. He clearly lived frugally: when he first visited St Davids, his secretary was said to have declared that Watson ‘was so base and niggardly on his journey’ that he was ashamed of it. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 2, interrogatory of John Catlyn. As bishop he seems not even to have maintained his own coach, for he referred on one occasion to the need to book a place on a commercial coach service. After the Revolution of 1688 he was identified politically with the Tories but probably remained isolated socially. None of the Tory aristocrats offered him accommodation during his London sojourns and his few surviving letters indicate that, rather than take a house in London, he preferred to live in what were almost certainly rather cheap lodgings. At a time when both lords spiritual and lords temporal were expected to be hospitable and open-handed and to live up to their status, Watson’s frugality was almost certainly easily interpreted as plain meanness by his contemporaries, even though the money that he accumulated was used to make generous endowments to his old college, to found a hospital in Hull, and to improve the prospects of members of his immediate family.

Although the link with Monmouth is suggestive, it is not known whether Watson joined Huntingdon’s flirtation with the ‘country’ opposition group led by Shaftesbury. If he did do so, he had returned to an allegiance to the court by the beginning of October 1681, for by that date he was spying on behalf of the court, reporting to Alington, and Secretary of State Sir Leoline Jenkins^‡ on the activities of those intending ‘factious designs in Parliament time’ in general and of Thomas Percival in particular. CSP Dom. 1680–1, pp. 489–90, 533, 547. It may be significant that Huntingdon reneged on his former allies and went over to the duke of York at about the same time. HMC Ormonde, vi. 208–9. Watson’s accounts of Percival’s conversations formed part of the evidence that was considered by the Privy Council in its investigations into the Rye House Plot two years later. CSP Dom. 1683, p. 188. In the aftermath of the plot, Watson was appointed a justice for Cambridge University, with power to administer oaths to the university’s justices; he was also appointed to the bench of the neighbouring county of Suffolk.

According to Burnet, Watson owed his elevation to a bishopric in the summer of 1687 either to purchase or to the influence of the Catholic Henry Jermyn, Baron Dover, but Burnet is scarcely an impartial witness. By the time of James II’s accession to the throne Watson, like Huntingdon and the Slingsbys, was clearly committed to the court. There is no evidence that he purchased his see and it is unlikely that he did so, for no such allegation was made at his subsequent trial for simony. Dover, as lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire (and shortly to become high steward of Cambridge and of Hull), almost certainly played some role in the appointment but Watson’s friendships with Huntingdon and the Slingsbys were probably equally important. There were very few clergymen prepared to collaborate so readily with the court. According to Roger Morrice, Watson’s willingness to do so had already led him to be touted as a possible warden of All Souls College, Oxford. It also identified him in the popular mind as a crypto-papist, although his earlier concern about a rumour that Richard Sterne, archbishop of York, had ‘faltered’ in declaring against transubstantiation suggests otherwise. HMC 7th Rep. 213a; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 346, 363; Add. 4274, f. 127. Despite speculation to the contrary, Watson seems to have been a committed Anglican, who regarded both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters as threats to the Church, and who believed that the road to religious conformity lay in improving the quality of everyday pastoral care. Add. 4274, f. 128.

From the outset of his episcopacy Watson was an isolated figure. There is unlikely to have been much truth in the allegations of one of his later defenders, who suggested that his fellow bishops (including John Tillotson, and Thomas Tenison, successive archbishops of Canterbury), were jealous of his generosity, especially concerning the money (over £600) that Watson was prepared to lavish on improvements to his palace, cathedral, and chapel, though it would appear that Tenison was certainly suspicious of the size of his fortune. [R. Ferguson], A Large Review of the Summary View of the Articles Exhibited against the Bp of St Davids (1702), 79–80; Bodl. Rawl. B 380, ff. 253–68. Rather Watson’s politics meant that even before the Revolution of 1688 most of his fellow bishops regarded him with deep mistrust regarding him as a government agent, along with Nathaniel Crew, of Durham (later 3rd Baron Crew), and Thomas Cartwright, of Chester. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 330–1; Clarendon Corresp. ii. 171, 200. Henry Hyde, 2nd earl of Clarendon, was also contemptuous, referring to Cartwright and Watson as ‘two scabby sheep’ and ‘very bad men [who], as they have no reputation or interest, so they are despised by those they court’. HMC Buccleuch, ii. 32.

Such suspicions were both created and reinforced by Watson’s attitude to James II’s Declarations of Indulgence. He was active in promoting the first Declaration, issued shortly before his own elevation, writing to William Lloyd, bishop of Norwich, in April 1687 in a vein that suggested that all the bishops in and about London supported it and asking him to secure a supportive address to the king from the clergy of Norfolk and Suffolk. Watson was unequivocal about his own attitude to such an address: ‘I can see no harm or ill consequence in the thing[.] I think it a fair declaration of… confidence in his majesty’s protection, and a better method than fears and jealousies.’ Tanner 29, f. 12. As bishop of St Davids he made no secret of the warmth of his feelings for the king. He instructed the clergy of his diocese to read the second Declaration and attempted to force them to sign an address to the crown. To those who refused he was said to have responded with ‘menacing expressions’ and accusations of disloyalty. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1, deposition of Hugo Powell. He also presented a congratulatory address to the crown that had been wrung with considerable difficulty from the corporation of Hull. In a pamphlet calling on the clergy of St Davids to resist the declaration, Watson was described as one of ‘our temporising bishops, who under hand endeavour the ruin and destruction of the best of Churches, like so many weathercocks turning every way with the fickle and inconstant wind’. Suspicions of his papist sympathies were redoubled by his habit of ordaining and confirming with his hands crossed, and according to Roger Morrice he once drank the pope’s health. TNA, DEL 1/227 pt. 1, pp. 456–63, pt. 2, p. 1126; Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. ii. 363. Not surprisingly, all the relevant parliamentary lists suggested that he would support the repeal of the Test Acts.

Watson arrived in Wales in the late summer or early autumn of 1687. There he began to uncover two major problems. The first related to the domination of the diocese by the Lucy family. William Lucy, the first bishop appointed to St Davids after the Restoration, had taken full advantage of his position in order to provide employment for every one of his five sons, at least three of whom were still alive in 1687. Among other appointments he had granted the registrarship of the diocese ‘jointly and severally’ to his sons George and Robert Lucy for life, with rights of survivorship to the longer-lived of the two. Although the grant had then been confirmed by the chapter, its validity had been questioned by Bishop Lucy’s successors. Watson took legal advice on the point and this confirmed him in his belief that neither George nor Robert Lucy would be able to sustain their claim in a court of law. Initially he took no action. The division of responsibilities between the two brothers meant that George Lucy was regarded as the principal registrar and, although Watson regarded his claim to office as dubious, he was prepared to compromise since George Lucy (unlike Robert) was ‘a sober and virtuous man’.

The second problem related to levels of pastoral care. Neither of Watson’s immediate predecessors, Lawrence Womock, bishop from 1683 to 1686, and John Lloyd, from 1686 to 1687, had been active diocesans; Watson’s supporters also criticized the regime of William Lucy. Watson was determined to improve the situation: though his first visit to the diocese lasted just four days, two of them were spent confirming the ‘vast multitudes’ whose spiritual welfare had been neglected by previous bishops. [Ferguson], Large Review, 75. He was particularly concerned about the issue of non-resident clergy. The strength of his belief in the need for resident clergy can be traced throughout his career. It would influence the arrangements that he made for serving the cure of Burrough Green after his elevation to the episcopate, and a requirement for residency would appear as a proviso in the various endowments that he made to St John’s College during the 1690s. In St Davids he was shocked to discover that the canons residentiary were rarely resident and that many of those who held benefices in plurality did not make adequate provision for the spiritual health of their parishioners. Accordingly he embarked on a determined campaign against the absentees. His talent for confrontation was further demonstrated by his involvement in a dispute about the payment of the salary of the local schoolmaster, Jeremiah Griffith or Griffiths, and by his speedy commencement of a suit for dilapidations against the executors of his predecessor. Court of Arches ed. J. Houston.

Watson was in Cambridgeshire at the Revolution of 1688 where, despite his attempts at disguise, he was captured by an Orangeist mob and paraded through Cambridge on a ‘paltry horse’ before being imprisoned in the castle. He may well have been captured in Burrough Green itself, where the principal landowner was now the Whig (and member of the Immortal Seven) Edward Russell, later earl of Orford. Universal Intelligencer, 22–26 Dec 1688; Morrice Ent’ring Bk. iv. 430–1; HMC Le Fleming, 230. According to Roger Morrice, by mid-December ‘most of the popular petitioning bishops’, concerned by the events of the Revolution and worried about William’s attitude to episcopacy, were part of a conspiracy to call for James II’s return, but Watson was not numbered among them. Morrice also reported that Watson was so unpopular that his picture was used for target practice by a group of William’s English supporters. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 418–19, 471–2.

Under suspicion, 1689–94

Watson took his seat in the House of Lords on 22 Jan. 1689 and was present for over 60 per cent of the sitting days of that year. The manuscript minutes of the House (but not the Journal) list him as one of the managers of the conference of 4 Feb. on the use of the term ‘regency’ or ‘abdication’. HMC Lords, ii. 14–18. He seems to have voted consistently for a regency and against declaring William and Mary to be king and queen; a rumour reported by Morrice to the contrary was almost certainly mistaken. Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iv. 564. On 28 Jan., when it was his turn to read prayers, he refused a whispered suggestion from George Saville, marquess of Halifax, that prayers for the king be omitted; Halifax informed the House and secured a decision that prayers be suspended for the time being. Clarendon Corresp. ii. 255.

Initially Watson refused the oaths. When the pressure to take them intensified in March, he absented himself from Parliament, explaining that he needed to be in Cambridgeshire to deal with the ‘rabble’ who had seized two wagonloads of his goods. The Lords refused to accept his excuse and he was forced to return to London. HMC Lords, ii. 37–38. Sir John Reresby recorded that on 26 Mar. Watson asked him for advice about taking the new oaths; Reresby replied somewhat contemptuously that this was a matter of conscience in which he would expect a bishop to be giving rather than asking for guidance. Watson took the oaths the next day. Reresby Mems. 569. It was a pragmatic rather than ideological decision. In later years he made no secret of his belief that the ability to keep promises and oaths was subject to changing circumstances: ‘You know we took our oaths to King James, but we could not keep them.’ DEL 1/227 pt. 2, pp. 1041–4. He had considerable sympathy with those who could not adjust their consciences to the new situation and is known to have conducted ordinations on behalf of the non-juring bishop of Ely, Francis Turner, during the period of Turner’s suspension. [Ferguson], Large Review, 436.

In July 1689 Watson voted in favour of adhering to the Lords’ amendments to the bill for reversing Titus Oates’s conviction for perjury and opposed the impeachment of Blair and his fellow conspirators. On 19 Nov. he entered a dissent against the bill to prevent clandestine marriages. At or about this time he was probably active in the elections for Convocation, for there are references early in November 1689 that link the ‘perfidiousness’ of Watson’s enemies and ‘recent heartburnings’ to an election in Brecon. In view of his later alliances, this was almost certainly indicative of support for the campaign of Henry Compton, bishop of London, against John Tillotson and against proposals for major alterations to the liturgy and canons in order to bring the vast majority of Dissenters into the Anglican church. Essays in Modern English Church History ed. G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh, 119–20; Lathbury, Hist. of Convocation, 321–5. Watson was also warned that Robert Lucy and his ally Thomas Sandys (an absentee clergyman who was under monition from Watson) would make an attack on him in Convocation. DEL 1/227 pt. 1, pp. 616–20, 622–4. In a list compiled between October 1689 and February 1690, Thomas Osborne, marquess of Carmarthen and later duke of Leeds, reckoned him as an opponent of the court.

Watson may also have been becoming embroiled in local parliamentary politics. In St Davids, as in other Welsh dioceses, a very high proportion of the advowsons were in the hands of the bishop and it was alleged that before the Revolution Watson had promised to use his powers of patronage to reward those who would show themselves loyal to James II. Tanner 146, f. 115. After the Revolution he may either have used – or have been suspected of using – his patronage to influence parliamentary elections in his diocese, many of which were bitterly contested. If so, it was a problem that probably emerged at or after the 1695 election. A pamphlet published in 1703 states that he had incurred the enmity of Sir Rowland Gwynne^‡, but in the early 1690s he seems to have been able to count on the support of the decidedly Whig lord lieutenant, Charles Gerard, earl of Macclesfield. The Extraordinary Case of the Bp. of St Davids (1703), 21.

On 8 Apr. 1690 Watson entered a protest against the passage of the act declaring William and Mary to be rightful king and queen and confirming the acts of the Convention. Two days later he entered another protest against the decision of the House to expunge the reasons for the protest of 8 April. In May he was elated by his apparent success in persuading the House (in discussion on the bill for securing the king and the queen) that no member should be barred from his seat for failure to take oaths or subscriptions, but rejoicing soon turned to dismay as he and Huntingdon discovered that they would be left out of the act of pardon passed at the end of the session. Clarendon Corresp. ii. 312–13. Watson attended some 50 per cent of the sitting days in 1690 but his last attendance of the year before heading back to Wales was on 8 September. By 12 Sept. he had reached the Welsh border, whence he wrote to Sancroft asking him to nominate a candidate for the chancellorship of St Davids, made vacant by the recent death of Richard Lucy. Watson emphasized the need for the chancellor to take up permanent residence in the diocese. Tanner 27, f. 207. On 8 Oct. he registered a proxy in favour of Thomas Sprat, bishop of Rochester. Watson remained absent for the rest of the session. For part of the time he was in Carmarthen, perhaps preparing for his visitation the following year. While in Carmarthen in October he witnessed an earthquake, which he interpreted as one of several ‘strange warnings’ from God. HMC Hastings ii, 220. Two months later he received a rather more practical warning from Sancroft, who commended his intention to reform the diocese but emphasized the need to proceed by ‘just and legal methods, and take such sure measures from the beginning as may not fail you in the end’. Tanner 146, f. 131.

In the spring of 1691, a minor argument with William Russell, 5th earl (later duke) of Bedford, the Whig lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire, about Watson’s militia assessment showed signs of escalating out of control; it may have been fuelled by political differences, perhaps harking back to resentments over the executions of the Rye House plotters. Tanner 26, ff. 18, 64, 73, 88. For much of 1691 Watson was preoccupied with his visitation of St Davids, which resulted in a large number of monitions to absentee clergymen. By August the resentment of those monished had led Robert Lucy and Thomas Sandys, assisted by Henry Faulconberg and Jeremiah Griffith, to start a petition against Watson which they wanted to present to the House of Lords. They hoped for support from Macclesfield, whose own political history had been as a long-term opponent of James II and staunch supporter of William III. They were unsuccessful, probably because national politics had not yet become entangled with diocesan ones. Instead of supporting moves against Watson, Macclesfield sent his secretary to reprimand Sandys. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1, deposition of Charles Pryse. In October Watson threatened to discipline Robert Lucy for extortion, as a result of which Lucy declared that ‘something must be done and I am resolved I will not spare anything to prosecute’. Ibid.

Watson returned to the House on 9 Nov. 1691 and was present for just over 70 per cent of the sitting days of the 1691-2 session. He was thus able to give Huntingdon full details of the allegations of Jacobitism that had been made against him in the Commons on 10 Dec. 1691. HMC Hastings, ii. 221–2. On 12 Jan. 1692 he entered a dissent to the resolution to receive the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. It was perhaps significant that Norfolk’s estranged wife was the daughter of Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, one of James II’s longest and closest associates.

Despite Macclesfield’s reprimand of Sandys, plans to petition the House of Lords against Watson continued. The petition was drawn up and taken to London so that it could be signed by gentlemen of the diocese; those gentlemen who were reluctant to do so were persuaded by copious amounts of ‘good claret’. The petition was presented to John Lovelace, 3rd Baron Lovelace, and transmitted to the House on 27 Jan. 1692. Signed by a group of prominent Welsh gentlemen (Sir Rice Rudd^‡ of Aberglaseney, John Lewis^‡ of Coedmor, John Vaughan of Plas Gwynne, William Brigstock of Llechdwnny, P. Powell of Castle Madock, and William Williams of the Battle), it informed the House that Watson was under prosecution in Brecknockshire for taking an excessive fee and prayed leave to prosecute him for various other unspecified crimes. The petition also alleged that Watson considered his exception from the Act of Indemnity ‘a great honour’. Watson denied all the allegations, announced his willingness to defend himself without relying on privilege, and stressed his sense of ‘great misfortune’ at being excepted from the Act. He pointed out that, since he did not know the signatories to the petition, it was unlikely that they knew enough about him to substantiate the charges; he also declared his belief that at least some of the supposed signatures were forged. He added that such a ‘method of getting hands to petitions of that nature is of dangerous consequence, and may blast the reputation of the most innocent, without any warrant or colour of law’. HMC Lords, iv. 49–50. When the House learned that some of the signatories denied any involvement in the petition it instructed them all to appear before the House, but there is no record that they ever did so and the matter dropped. At least one of them, William Brigstock, later apologized to Watson, explaining that he had signed under intense pressure at two o’clock in the morning. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1, deposition of Charles Pryse.

An unsigned, undated, and spiteful account of Watson’s ‘irregularities’ survives among the Tanner manuscripts. The irregularities cited include his support for James II’s Declaration of Indulgence, his attempts to bully the clergy into reading it, and his opposition to the stance of the Seven Bishops before the Revolution. Buried among these irregularities are three of the allegations that would surface again at Watson’s trial: his financial relationship with his nephew, John Medley; the taking of double fees during his visitation; and the ordination of a youth who was under age. The list almost certainly relates to the petition to the Lords, and its presence among the Tanner manuscripts suggests that there was a deliberate attempt to involve the Anglican hierarchy in the attack. Tanner 146, f. 115. Perhaps significantly for Watson’s future, the irregularities complained of now included issues of national as well as local interest. Watson was identified as a Jacobite who had publicly justified the legitimacy of the James II’s son, the prince of Wales, while being in possession of evidence that would prove the fraudulence of the birth; as either an atheist or a Catholic; and as one who ‘keeps company with all the malcontents and papists in the country, who in King James his time called him their bishop’.

Wood reported a rumour that Watson was arrested and sent to the Tower during the invasion scare of May 1692, but this is unlikely to be correct as his name (unlike Huntingdon’s) does not appear on the lists of either proposed or actual commitments to the Tower. Wood, Life and Times, iii. 389–90; TNA, PC 2/74; WO 94/7 and 8. Watson was present in the House of Lords for the non-sessional meeting on 14 June 1692 and returned to the bishop’s palace at Abergwelly in mid-August. He told Huntingdon that he intended to confine himself there ‘to prevent what I may suffer by the jealousies of men’ but it is not clear whether those ‘jealousies’ related to his diocesan problems or his relationship with his fellow bishops and the king’s government. HMC Hastings, ii. 226–7. Perhaps he hoped to establish a better relationship with the government for in the autumn, at Macclesfield’s request, he appointed William Brookes to the curacy of Burrough Green. Brookes, who was Macclesfield’s chaplain, did not receive a salary but instead leased the profits of the rectory, for which he paid £200. Despite later allegations that this was a simoniacal contract, it is clear both that by the standards of the day it was not and that the arrangement was exceptionally favourable to Brookes. W.M. Palmer, A History of the Parish of Borough [sic] Green Cambridgeshire, 171–3.

Watson was back in London for the first day of the 1692-3 session and was present on some 85 per cent of the sitting days. On 2 Jan. 1693 he again opposed the duke of Norfolk’s divorce bill. On the following day, he voted in favour of the place bill and entered a dissent at its failure, prompting a newsletter writer to describe him as ‘a strong Jacobite and perhaps a papist in his soul’. HMC 7th Rep. 213a. He also entered a dissent on 17 Jan. against the failure of Charles Knollys’ claim to the earldom of Banbury. When the land tax bill was debated on 19 Jan. he entered a dissent to the decision not to refer it to the committee for privileges and not to adhere to the Lords’ amendments. On 25 Jan. he voted against the commitment of the bill to prevent dangers from disaffected persons. On 10 Feb. 1693 he reported from the committee considering an estate bill for Thomas Towers (a Cambridgeshire neighbour). In December, during the debates on the bill for triennial parliaments, he voted in favour of the use of the word ‘declare’ against the Tories Carmarthen and Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham, and, to his great surprise, alongside the more Whiggishly inclined John Tillotson, ‘the great man of Lambeth’. HMC Hastings, ii. 232–3.

Meanwhile, the situation in St Davids had deteriorated still further with the death in February 1693 of George Lucy. Robert Lucy now claimed the office of registrar in his own right, but Watson was determined not to accept him. After Watson’s deprivation, some of his supporters accused Lucy of being an adulterer and having himself taken bribes, but in the early 1690s Watson’s objections to Lucy seem to have centred on allegations that Lucy had taken exorbitant fees and that he had been seen ‘disguised with drink’. Extraordinary Case of the Bp. of St Davids, 3; DEL 1/227, pt. 2, pp. 909–10. Even Robert Lucy’s allies agreed that he drank, though not in a way ‘unbecoming a gentleman’ or ‘that was unhandsome or unbecoming a person of his quality’. DEL 1/227, pt. 2, pp. 1049, 1089–90. Claiming that Lucy was not fit to hold office, Watson appointed a new registrar, William Williams of Brecon. Lucy, who also had substantial arrears of rent to pay for various parcels of diocesan lands and who was in dispute with another local gentleman over the ownership of lands, became even more determined to have Watson removed from office. TNA, C 10/512/94. It was probably at his instigation that Jeremiah Griffith brought an indictment against Watson at the Brecon assizes in 1693 for taking excessive fees. The grand jury found that there was a case to answer but Watson was neither tried nor convicted.

Watson’s attendance over the 1693-4 session was again in the order of 85 per cent of sitting days. On 22 Dec. 1693 he alone of the bishops joined in a protest at the decision to allow the duchess of Grafton to withdraw her petition, arguing that the underlying compromise should not prevent a censure on the judges for a failure of justice. He also wrote about Sancroft’s death and funeral in terms that suggest considerable admiration for the deposed archbishop and strong sympathies for the exiled royal family. HMC Hastings, ii. 237. On 2 Feb. 1694 he voted in favour of reversing the verdict in Montagu v Bath, one of the many cases associated with the long-running Albemarle inheritance disputes. In May he was heavily involved in helping Huntingdon over his wayward son who had become entangled with a young and unsuitable woman. Ibid. ii. 241.

Trial and deprivation, 1694–9

In June 1694 Watson discovered that Robert Lucy had taken his complaints to John Tillotson of Canterbury. As a result there was to be a special ‘metropolitical’ visitation. Watson feared little from the visitation (apart from trouble and expense), though it must have been somewhat galling that the official notification of the visitation came from one of Robert Lucy’s servants. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 3, Peirson, 13 Aug. 1694. It resulted in no more than a temporary suspension, and this was not for any irregularity in the governance of the diocese but for contempt of the archbishop’s authority. Watson had granted an institution during the time of the visitation; in his defence he claimed that the documents, although post-dated, had actually been drawn up and sealed before service of the archbishop’s inhibition. Wood, Life and Times, iii. 466; LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 3, Thos. Watson, 16 July 1694.

Watson continued to attend the House of Lords during his suspension but in view of his difficulties it is perhaps not surprising that during the 1694-5 session his attendance fell to just over 60 per cent of sitting days. On 23 Jan. 1695 he entered a dissent against the decision to postpone implementation of the treason trials bill until 1698. His suspension was lifted in February 1695 when he made his submission to Thomas Tenison, Tillotson’s successor at Canterbury. This he decided was a wiser course of action than challenging the new archbishop, but it seems that Tenison insisted on much more pointed submission than Watson originally intended to give. An early draft among the case papers merely states that Watson ‘had no intention or thought of any affront[,] contempt or the least disrespect to his grace the archbishop of Canterbury or his authority and jurisdiction in any thing that I did’. In the final version he not only ‘heartily’ apologized for his contempt but also promised not to offend again and ‘to my power to maintain the just rights and authority of the archbishop and see of Canterbury and to submit thereunto’. HMC Hastings, ii. 243; LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 3, draft submission, n.d.; Thos. Watson, 9 Feb. 1695.

Watson’s enemies were not, however, to be conciliated so easily and, as Watson was soon to discover, they now included Tenison himself. Lucy commenced a prosecution against Watson, as a result of which Watson was summoned to appear before Tenison in August 1695. The prosecution was unusual in that it was quite literally before the archbishop, assisted by six of his fellow bishops, rather than in the court of arches or other recognized ecclesiastical court. The charges included simony, failure to administer the oaths of allegiance at ordination, refusing to ordain an individual unless he entered into a penal bond, irregular conduct of church court hearings, refusing to monish a priest for failing to pray for William and Mary, ordaining a priest under age, extortion, and misappropriating fees, diocesan documents, and charitable funds.

There were sufficient irregularities, both about the mixing of common law and canon law offences and about the procedures adopted, to encourage Watson’s lawyers to apply to the king’s bench for a writ of prohibition. The lord chief justice, Sir John Holt^‡, granted the prohibition in respect of one minor charge but refused it for the others, arguing that ‘the archbishop of Canterbury has without doubt provincial jurisdiction over all his suffragan bishops, which he may exercise in what place of the province it shall please him’, that offences under the common law were punishable in the Church courts if they could be construed as simony under Church law, and that even an offence created by statute and punishable under the common law (such as the failure to administer the oaths) could be deemed part and parcel of the office of a bishop and was therefore cognizable in the church courts. The Bishop of St Davids v. Lucy, in Robert, Lord Raymond, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Courts of Kings Bench and Common Pleas (2nd. edn, 1765), i. 447, 539 (91 E.R. 126, 1197).

The case against Watson had still to be heard when in November 1695 a royal warrant was issued for the appointment of Arnold Bowen as archdeacon of St Davids in place of the current incumbent, Watson’s nephew John Medley. Medley’s appointment to the archdeaconry was one of those that Lucy alleged to be simoniacal. The warrant for the appointment of Bowen (who was probably a client of Sir Hugh Owen^‡) specifically stated that the archdeaconry was vacant by ‘lapse or simoniacal contract’. It is unlikely that it was issued without Tenison’s approval. The right to the archdeaconry was tried at the ensuing Carmarthen assizes; Medley must have won his case for he was still archdeacon at his death in December 1731. CSP Dom. 1694–5, p. 334; LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 3, Peirson, 13 Aug. 1694; interrogatories for Edmund Meyrick; Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731, p. 540.

Watson was present in the House on over 83 per cent of the sitting days of the 1695-6 session. On 24 Jan. 1696 he protested against the passage of the bill to prevent false and double returns of Members of the Commons and entered a dissent to the postponement of the implementation of the bill for regulating treason trials. On 27 Feb. national politics again started to tangle with local issues when Watson refused to sign the Association. HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 208. A week later the House received a petition from Lucy, complaining that he was unable to prove his charges because Watson refused to waive his privilege. Although Parliament was sitting, the issue was interpreted as one of privilege of peerage, thus raising the question of whether the lords spiritual were entitled to the same privileges as lords temporal. The committee for privileges considered the matter but referred it back to the House, declaring that ‘the thing being of so high a nature that the committee does not think fit to give any opinion in it, there being difficulty in the case’. Secular members of the House were clearly worried that a decision to restrict privilege for a bishop might have far-reaching implications for their own rights. On 20 March 1696 the House agreed to call for the opinions of the judges but a compromise solution was approved when Watson agreed to waive his privilege on condition that Lucy’s petition be dismissed. Ibid. n.s. ii. 220–1. The compromise seems to have been brokered or at least encouraged by Huntingdon. HMC Hastings, ii. 283. Later that month, on 31 Mar., Watson entered a protest against the resolution to pass the bill to encourage the bringing in of plate to the Mint. In April his signature was conspicuously absent from the repugnance at the decision of the non-juring clergymen Cook and Snatt to grant absolution to the men who were executed for their part in the assassination plot. State Trials, xiii. 413.

Over the summer two further prosecutions were commenced against Watson, this time in the court of arches. Jeremiah Griffith brought a case about his suspension from teaching and Robert Lucy brought another about his suspension from the registrarship. Court of Arches ed. Houston, cases 3966, 5893. In July 1696, one of Huntingdon’s correspondents reported on the first steps in the prosecution before the archbishop. He was confident (as was Watson) that the allegations were no more than ‘malevolent random shot’. HMC Hastings, ii. 271. The depositions and interrogatories in the case, which are extensive, confirm this impression. They show that the questions asked were designed to elicit a wide range of information. Witnesses were asked whether Watson swore, whether he entertained non-jurors and papists, whether he had ever commented unfavourably on the ministry’s foreign policy, and whether he had ever refused to toast William and Mary. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2; DEL 1/227. Such questions were necessary because there was virtually no evidence against Watson. Testimony about the level of fees charged by Watson, for example, failed to prove that they were of a substantially different order from those charged by Robert Lucy or even by Robert Lucy’s father. The mixture of gossip and innuendo that was used to advance Lucy’s case left Watson convinced that Tenison and George Oxenden^‡, the dean of arches, were less interested in presiding over a trial than in blackening his name. HMC Hastings, ii. 272, 274, 279, 281. Evelyn reported that Tenison himself declared that he had little patience with Watson’s attempts to defend himself. Evelyn Diary, v. 256.

The strength of the bias against him made it extremely difficult for Watson to mount an adequate defence. One of the allegations of simony – and the only one on which Watson would be convicted – concerned the appointment of his nephew John Medley as archdeacon of St Davids. Watson had supported Medley’s mother and sisters, had financed Medley’s passage through university, and had even bought him appropriate clothing when he obtained his first living. After Medley’s arrival in St Davids, Watson lent him further sums of money in order to provide his sisters with enhanced dowries. As a result both girls married well. It is clear that Watson’s motive was as much about providing opportunities to improve the social standing of his wider family as about money. Nevertheless he expected to be repaid and it is clear that Medley thought that it was entirely right and proper that he should be repaid.

Both Watson and Medley, who was still trying to vindicate his uncle some 20 years later, were prepared to testify that the accounts and bonds between them were of long standing and did not relate to the sale of any ecclesiastical office. Although there was evidence that Watson received the profits of the various offices that he had granted to his nephew, there was no evidence that he kept them or whether, as a more experienced landowner, he had simply administered the estates on his nephew’s behalf. Medley’s mother confirmed that he transmitted money to her through the bishop. Further elucidation of these points is not available since the court declined to hear Medley’s testimony on the grounds that he was party to the crime, even though nothing had been proved against him and Bowen had not succeeded in ousting him from office. Significantly, almost all those questioned in the course of the case, whether on behalf of the prosecution or of the defence, stated that Medley was a pious and conscientious young man who would not entertain a simoniacal contract. Add. 5841, f. 8; TNA, SP 34/27/5; Bodl. Rawl. B 380, ff. 96–97; Extraordinary Case of the Bp. of St Davids, 30–32; LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1.

Confirmation of the real reasons for Tenison’s involvement in Lucy’s campaign came with an exchange of words in August 1696 about Watson’s choice of a commissioner to interrogate witnesses. When the prosecution objected that the commissioner, Charles Piers, was a Jacobite, even though he had qualified himself by taking the requisite oaths, Tenison made it all too clear that worries about Watson’s Jacobitism were at the root of the case against him. Evidence that Watson had entertained non-jurors during the period of the assassination plot probably confirmed the suspicions of government and archbishop that Watson was deeply involved in plotting against them. LPL, VX 1B 2g/2, box 1, deposition of Charles Pryse. Convinced that the proceedings were being stacked against him and that his letters were being intercepted, Watson lamented that ‘I am denied the assistance all criminals have by law. I doubt not their design is to ruin me, but if I might have equal justice I should not apprehend any danger’. He solved the problem of his letters by having them sent via Sir Edward Williams^‡ and John Tredenham^‡. HMC Hastings, ii. 283; Add. 5831, f. 211.

When the parliamentary session resumed in autumn 1696, Watson was present on some 73 per cent of sitting days. Some thought that his experiences with Tenison over the summer had made him ‘very shy of his old friends’. Given the repeated delays in hearing the case it is entirely possible that this was precisely what Tenison had hoped to achieve. Watson, though, was still confident that he could win the case and declared his belief that his persecutors simply wanted ‘to expose him to the displeasure of the government’. HMC Hastings, ii. 281, 286. He certainly was not scared of attempting to thwart Tenison and the government in the House of Lords, for throughout Dec. 1696 he opposed the attainder of Sir John Fenwick^‡. The case raised fundamental theological questions concerning the right of the bishops to vote in capital cases, and in opposing Fenwick’s conviction, Watson was defying his archbishop’s spiritual as well as secular leadership.

Watson left London early in April 1697, some two weeks before the end of the session. Although he professed some confidence in the eventual outcome of the case, and had been encouraged by repeated delays to believe that ‘they do not find what they expected’, he was still keen for his allies to attend when the hearings resumed after the summer, declaring that ‘I cannot be apprehensive of danger and yet am not secure’. Ibid. ii. 290, 293. By the autumn he began to realize that the delays were over and that the archbishop was determined to push the case to a conclusion. Watson sought Huntingdon’s advice on suitable lawyers and asked him to hurry to London for ‘I never desired your assistance more’. Huntingdon’s assistance was rather more limited than Watson expected. He certainly wrote a supportive letter to the lawyer (and future lord keeper) Sir Nathan Wright, whom Watson hoped to secure for his defence, in which he described the prosecution as ‘full of revenge and malice’, but he absented himself from Parliament for the whole of the 1697–8 session and it seems unlikely that he attended any of the hearings. He was also pressurizing Watson to reconcile himself to the archbishop. It may not be entirely coincidental that Huntingdon’s son George Hastings, the future 8th earl of Huntingdon, was about to join King William’s service. Tenison was also under enormous pressure from the king, who was reported to have asked why the proceedings were taking so long and to have described Watson as ‘the scandal of his coat’. Watson, though, remained obdurate, refusing even to visit the archbishop, let alone seek a reconciliation. The man once thought of as nothing more than a time-server now declared that ‘fear of suffering ought not to make a man forsake his principles’. Ibid. ii. 300, 302–3, 305–6.

During the 1697–8 session Watson was present on just over 50 per cent of sitting days, much of his time being taken up elsewhere with his case. On 23 Jan. 1698 he entered a protest at the failure of the bill to regulate parliamentary elections and on 3 Mar. he entered a dissent to the proceedings against Charles Duncombe^‡ and voted in his favour. By now Watson’s friends were warning him that deprivation was a very real possibility. Add. 5831, f. 215. Late in the spring of 1698 Robert Lucy pressed home his advantage by commencing yet another suit against Watson, this time in chancery for the restitution of the office of registrar and for the fees pertaining to it. C 5/134/35. Once again he asked the House of Lords to order Watson to waive his privilege, but on 23 May the House decided that this was unnecessary: Watson was unable to claim privilege since this was a matter in which he acted as trustee rather than as principal. Despite this decision there seem to have been no significant developments in the suit until the spring of 1705. The case was still unresolved at Robert Lucy’s death in 1713, although what progress there was seems to have vindicated Lucy’s claim to office. His widow attempted to revive it as late as 1720. C 5/253/31; C 11/1229/36. Watson’s last attendance of the session was on 23 May 1698. The following day he entered his proxy in favour of Henry Compton; it was vacated by the end of the session on 5 July.

Watson returned to Parliament for the 1698-9 session on 6 Dec. 1698 and was present on some 84 per cent of the sitting days. As inflexible in his opposition to the court as ever, on 8 Feb. 1699 he opposed measures to assist the king in retaining Dutch guards. On 3 Aug. he was found guilty of simony, of taking exorbitant fees, and of ordaining two deacons without tendering the necessary oaths of allegiance. His supporters were later to claim that even the conviction for failing to tender the oaths of allegiance was flawed, since both the men concerned were prepared to testify that they had taken the oaths the day before their ordinations. Extraordinary Case of the Bp. of St Davids. Tenison denied Watson’s accusations of party political bias, exclaiming that ‘God forbid we should try persons instead of causes’. He then went on to dismiss almost all of the evidence presented in Watson’s defence to show that Watson was of strict life and an observer of Church discipline. This, Tenison said, could not be true since Watson’s earlier suspension had been for breaching an inhibition. It was extremely unusual for a court to reject the evidence of a high-ranking individual such as a bishop in favour of the testimony of persons of inferior social status. Vague and nebulous evidence for the prosecution, such as evidence that Medley had seemed melancholy after his preferment to the archdeaconry, was accepted as confirmation of simony. Evidence that Watson had been indicted for taking excessive fees, even though he had not been tried, let alone convicted, was used to support the case against him. Evidence that he had offered to resign the living of Burrough Green was used to prove simoniacal intent, even though he did not own the right of presentation. Bodl. Rawl. B 380, ff. 253–68.

The bishops who sat with Tenison as assessors differed in their verdicts. Thomas Sprat refused to give judgment at all and absented himself from the court. Burnet, ii. 226–7. Henry Compton found Watson guilty of the lesser crimes but, although he agreed that Watson’s financial relationship with Medley was suspicious, he argued that it had not been proved; he therefore found Watson not guilty on the charges of simony. John Hough, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, acquitted Watson of simony over Burrough Green but found him guilty on the other charges. Tenison, together with William Lloyd, of Worcester, and Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, found him guilty on all charges. Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, 334. Ironically, investigation of the charges against Edward Jones, of St Asaph, were already beginning to reveal that Lloyd was himself guilty of simony, prompting Watson to remark that ‘I wish others now were as clear of simony as I.’ Burnet made a long and barbed speech in which he insisted that even evidence that Watson had refused bribes for preferment proved the allegations against him – for why otherwise would such offers have been made? Deprivation, he argued, was the only possible sentence: ‘he who has once broke his faith in so sacred a matter, can never be trusted any more’. Tenison agreed, Watson’s offences were ‘aggravated with a long black order of evil practices’ and ‘where there is a gangrene amputation is necessary’. He also placed Watson under monition not to wear episcopal habit under pain of major excommunication. Bodl. Rawl. B 380, ff. 191, 248–68. The deprivation was promptly reported to the exchequer. TNA, E 135/21/83.

Fighting on, 1699–1717

Watson, who had never believed such a sentence to be possible, promptly appealed to the court of delegates. Simon Patrick, of Ely, John Moore, of Norwich, John Hall, of Bristol, James Gardiner, of Lincoln, John Williams, of Chichester, Sir George Treby^‡, Sir Edward Ward, Sir Thomas Powell^‡, Sir Littleton Powys, and Sir Henry Hatsell, a judge, were named as the delegates. Bodl. Rawl. B 380, f. 211. Realizing that there was a built-in bias against him and that the delegates would confirm the verdict, on 29 Nov. 1699 Watson attempted to resume privilege, claiming that he was in need of the protection of the House against the ‘unforeseen oppressions’ to which his earlier waiver had exposed him. During the ensuing discussion on 4 and 6 Dec. the attorney general intervened to inform the House that allowing Watson his privilege might tend ‘to the diminution of the king’s prerogative in ecclesiastical affairs’. Not surprisingly, when the Lords instituted a full debate on the issue they soon found themselves discussing wider questions about the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury.

Watson’s plight raised anxieties about secular as well as ecclesiastical issues. Watson and his supporters argued that a sentence of deprivation ought only to be pronounced in a synod. Others were uneasily aware that the archbishop was effectively claiming the right to control a significant portion of the membership of the House. The lords temporal could not be removed from the House by the decision of a single individual, even if that individual were the king. The non-juring bishops had been removed by legislation ratified by both Houses. On what authority could the archbishop exercise such a power, which, in the wrong hands could be used to ‘help forward the destruction both of Church and state’. Bishops Compton and Jones spoke in Watson’s favour. Even dissident Whigs such as Charles Mordaunt, 3rd earl of Peterborough, joined in on Watson’s behalf, but when it was put to a vote on 6 Dec. 1699 the House decided that bishops had no privilege against the archbishop’s jurisdiction. Vernon–Shrewsbury Letters, 338, 376–7; LPL, ms 3403, ff. 239–51; Bodl. Rawl. B 380, f. 224.

Watson again sought a prohibition from the king’s bench, arguing that by canon law the archbishop did not have the power of deprivation. At the same time he sought a writ of mandamus to compel the delegates to accept his evidence. Holt refused the mandamus, stating that such a measure could only be used to enforce a temporal right, and not to force an ecclesiastical court to act according to canon law. He also refused the prohibition, remarking that to question the archbishop’s authority in such a way was ‘to question the very foundations of the government’ and that whether or not the archbishop could deprive a bishop of his own authority was in itself a matter for the decision of the delegates. R. Burn, The Ecclesiastical Law (1824 edn), i. 235. The delegates confirmed the sentence of deprivation on 16 Feb. 1700. Watson challenged it by trying to bring a writ of error in the House of Lords, where he continued to sit until 21 February. He seems still to have been an active member of the House, for earlier that month a pre-division voting list forecast that he would vote against the East India Company bill.

The reaction of the government’s senior law advisers to Watson’s application for a writ of error suggests that this was indeed a controversial ruling. The lord chancellor, John Somers, Baron Somers, granted the writ after consultation with the law officers. CSP Dom. 1699–1700, pp. 385–6. He then took further legal advice from Sir George Treby, even though he himself admitted that such a request might be considered improper if done in open court. HMC 13th Rep VI, 48. Holt made it known that even if the Lords granted the writ of error he would refuse to obey it, but a clash of jurisdictions was avoided when the House decided not to consider the merits of the application but only the manner in which it had been presented. Robert, Lord Raymond, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Courts of Kings Bench and Common Pleas (2nd. edn, 1765), i. 545 (91 E.R. 1264). The application was refused on 2 Mar. 1700. The Journal now referred to Watson as the ‘late bishop of St Davids’. Nevertheless, on 8 Mar. the House was moved to address the crown that the bishopric be left vacant ‘for some convenient time’. No discussion of such a motion is indicated in the Journal but Narcissus Luttrell^&Dagger records that on the following day the House debated the difficulty of removing Watson from his temporalities. Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 621. The removal of the temporalities was not simply about Watson’s claim to the income of the diocese but was also about membership of the House, since a bishop’s entitlement to sit in the House did not rest on his ecclesiastical status alone, but also stemmed from the belief that the possession of temporalities created a barony and that it was the possession of the barony that conferred the right to sit as one of the lords spiritual.

Watson, apparently now determined to embrace martyrdom, refused to obey an order of the archbishop to pay costs. In May 1702 Robert Lucy petitioned the new queen for some recompense for his costs. He claimed to have spent £2,000 in a cause that had been fought ‘only in the interests of the poor clergy… and for the public good’. CSP Dom. 1702–3, pp. 420–1. It was perhaps as a result of this petition that the archbishop issued a further process against Watson, ordering him to pay some £600 in costs. Watson refused and as a result was excommunicated and committed to Newgate. Luttrell, Brief Relation, v. 49, 189. He was still there in November when he learned that Thomas Coke^‡ was taking a sympathetic interest in his case. HMC Cowper, iii. 19. Once again Watson brought an action in the king’s bench, as a result of which he was released, but on a technicality that enabled the judges to ignore wider issues about the powers of the archbishop. At or about this time Watson petitioned the new queen for a commission of review. TNA, SP 34/1/80, stamped f. 137. He was unsuccessful, probably partly because a powerful coalition of the gentry of the counties of Brecon, Radnor, Carmarthen, and Pembroke, including John Laugharne^‡, John Meyrick^‡, Sir Arthur Owen^‡, and Griffith Rice^‡, signed a petition to the Crown in which they lambasted Watson and asked for the appointment of a new bishop who could act both as a spiritual leader and as a focus for loyalty to the crown. John Medley, still loyal to his uncle, headed the list of the clergy of St Davids who counter-petitioned for the return of their diocesan. Their petition emphasized Watson’s devotion to the doctrines of the Church of England and assured the new queen that the prosecution against him ‘was begun without our knowledge and carried on against our consent’ but omitted any mention of his loyalty to the current regime. TNA, SP 34/27/3–5.

A year later the government started proceedings in exchequer to deprive Watson of his temporalities. CSP Dom. 1703-4, p. 456. When Watson lost the case he attempted to bring yet another writ of error, which was lodged in the House of Lords on 14 Dec. 1704. Although the Journal does not record an order to assign errors, Watson’s failure to do so on 22 Dec. enabled the attorney general to suggest that the House invoke its standing orders, which required errors to be assigned within eight days. The House was then able to order the writ of error to be discontinued without considering the case on its merits. It is unclear whether this was usual practice but, given the problems the House was already facing in Ashby v White, it may have wished to avoid reopening another controversial case. Watson tried to have the ruling overturned, arguing that he would have acted on 22 Dec. had he known it was necessary to do so, but his petition was rejected on 22 Jan. 1705. In March 1705 the Crown appointed George Bull, as bishop of St Davids in his stead.

Watson continued to call himself the bishop of St Davids, as did his allies – one of whom was his ‘worthy friend’ and benefactor John Sharp, archbishop of York. Add. 4274, f. 128; Add. 5841, f. 7v. Clerks dealing with the various actions in chancery tactfully referred to him as ‘Thomas Watson, consecrated bishop of St Davids’. TNA, C 5/253/31, further answer of Thomas Watson, 9 Mar. 1704. Watson lived out the rest of his life at his house at Great Wilbraham in Cambridgeshire, convinced that the root of his problems had not been ‘the malice of a few ill men’ in the diocese but ‘the envy of greater persons who were glad of any pretence to assault and ruin’. Although only fragments of his correspondence survive, they suggest that he maintained an active interest in Church affairs. He kept in touch with a number of sympathetic churchmen and continued to believe that the spiritual welfare of the people depended on clergymen who were active in catechizing their congregations and beautifying their churches. Add. 4274, f. 128. He gave generously to his old school and college and towards the end of his life he became involved in planning and building the almshouses in Hull that were to become known as Watson’s Hospital. Hull Hist. Cent. BRL 1219, 1228, 1239a; VCH Cambs. x. 151; VCH Yorks (E. Riding), i. 346. The inscription that he designed for the hospital in 1711 left no doubt of his continuing gratitude to the now dead King James II. Perhaps even he recognized how inflammatory it might be for, using Archbishop Sharp as an intermediary, he gave Queen Anne an opportunity to veto it. Add. 5841, f. 7v. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Watson’s nephew Watson Powell was expelled from St Johns for drinking the Pretender’s health and ‘that his uncle had declared he shall be amply recompensed for his loyalty’. Ibid. f. 10.

Watson died in 1717, still convinced that he had been victimized for his political beliefs. He was buried in the chancel of the parish church at Great Wilbraham; his estates passed to his brother William Watson of Cherry Hinton. Many churchmen agreed that Watson had been victimized and a belief that he had been deprived for opposing his archbishop in the House of Lords and in convocation became one of the underlying factors in the disputes about the role and function of convocation that marred the early years of Anne’s reign. Watson’s treatment at the hands of the archbishop was regularly compared to that of Edward Jones of St Asaph, who was similarly accused of simony in 1697. The evidence against Jones was far more convincing than that against Watson but he was sentenced to no more than a temporary suspension. Unlike Watson, Jones had not crossed his archbishop, and, unlike Watson, his origins were socially acceptable and he had powerful friends who were prepared to speak up on his behalf.