judgments would be null, and that
by sitting in it he should incur a serious responsibility. He therefore
determined not to comply with the royal mandate. He did not, however,
act on this occasion with that courage and sincerity which he showed
when driven to extremity two years later. He begged to be excused on
the plea of business and ill health. The other members of the board,
he added, were men of too much ability to need his assistance. These
disingenuous apologies ill became the Primate of all England at such a
crisis; nor did they avert the royal displeasure. Sancroft's name was
not indeed struck out of the list of Privy Councillors: but, to the
bitter mortification of the friends of the Church, he was no longer
summoned on Council days. "If," said the King, "he is too sick or too
busy to go to the Commission, it is a kindness to relieve him from
attendance at Council." [99]

The government found no similar difficulty with Nathaniel Crewe, Bishop
of the great and opulent see of Durham, a man nobly born, and raised so
high in his profession that he could scarcely wish to rise higher, but
mean, vain, and cowardly. He had been made Dean of the Chapel Royal when
the Bishop of London was banished from the palace. The honour of being
an Ecclesiastical Commissioner turned Crewe's head. It was to no purpose
that some of his friends represented to him the risk which he ran by
sitting in an illegal tribunal. He was not ashamed to answer that he
could not live out of the royal smile, and exultingly expressed his
hope that his name would appear in history, a hope which has not been
altogether disappointed. [100]

Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, was the third clerical Commissioner.
He was a man to whose talents posterity has scarcely done justice.
Unhappily for his fame, it has been usual to print his verses in
collections of the British poets; and those who judge of him by his
verses must consider him as a servile imitator, who, without one spark
of Cowley's admirable genius, mimicked whatever was least commendable
in Cowley's manner: but those who are acquainted with Sprat's prose
writings will form a very different estimate of his powers. He was
indeed a great master of our language, and possessed at once the
eloquence of the orator, of the controversialist, and of the historian.
His moral character might have passed with little censure had he
belonged to a less sacred profession; for the worst that can be said of
him