es II. and William. Under the former he not only lost
the rent of his Irish estates,[38] but had his name[39] on the murderous
act of attainder to which James, to his great disgrace, attached his
signature in 1689. Under the latter he was deprived of his preferment in
Oxford, and under a harsher rule might have incurred yet graver
penalties. 'He has set his heart,' said William of him, 'on being a
martyr, and I have set mine on disappointing him.'[40] He died at
Shottisbrooke in 1711.

After Kettlewell's death, no one was so intimate with Robert Nelson as
Dr. George Hickes. They lived near together[41] in Ormond Street, and
for the last eleven years of Nelson's life met almost daily. In forming
any estimate of Hickes's character, the warm-hearted esteem with which
Nelson regarded him[42] should not be lost sight of. Whatever were his
faults, he must have possessed many high qualities to have thus
completely won the heart of so good a man. The feeling was fully
reciprocated; and those who knew with what intensity of blind zeal
Hickes attached himself to the interests of his party, must have been
surprised that this intimacy was not interrupted even by his sore
disappointment at Nelson's defection from the nonjuring communion. In
Hickes there was nothing of the calm and tempered judgment which ruled
in Nelson's mind. From the day that he vacated his deanery, and fixed up
his indignant protest in Worcester Cathedral,[43] he threw his heart and
soul into the nonjuring cause. Unity might be a blessing, and schism a
disaster; but it is doubtful whether he would have made the smallest
concession in order to attain the one, or avoid the other. Even Bishop
Ken said of him that he showed zeal to make the schism incurable.[44] A
good man, and a scholar of rare erudition, he possessed nevertheless the
true temper of a bigot. In middle life he had been brought into close
acquaintance with the fanatic extravagances of Scotch Covenanters, his
aversion to which might seem to have taught him, not the excellence of a
more temperate spirit, but the desirability of rushing toward similar
extremes in an opposite direction. He delighted in controversy in
proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when
he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against
any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and
discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was
'an atheis