Bishop Trelawny
This article by the Rev Michael Smith was first published in the 1984 Annual Bulletin of La Société Jersiaise
|
Compared with other English dioceses, the records at Winchester for the period 1680-1880 are disappointing. So little material has survived. Only one area of church life may be studied in any detail, and that remote from the mainstream of ecclesiastical affairs. By pure chance a great deal of correspondence addressed to Bishop Sir Jonathan Trelawny has been preserved. On the Bishop's death these packages of letters were not collected up by his son, the Reverend Hele Trelawny, and taken down to Trelawne House in Cornwall with the rest of his father's papers. Had they been conveyed thither they would have suffered the same fate as the overwhelming bulk of the Trelawne manuscripts, and would have been lost forever. As it is the Trelawny Papers now deposited in the Hampshire Record Office give the historian a rare glimpse of church life in the Channel Islands, an aspect of the history of that part of the British Isles which seldom receives serious attention.
Bishop's role
The Trelawny Papers show that the bishop played a significant role in the life of the Church in that part of his diocese. That his influence was indirect was largely the consequence of geography, for no bishop before Sumner visited the Channel Islands in person. This indirect influence was of a piece with Trelawny's whole career. He entered the limelight of public acclaim for a few months only, when he was one of the Seven Bishops imprisoned in the Tower by James II.
Born in 1650, the second surviving son of a Cornish baronet impoverished in the Stuart cause, Jonathan did not expect to become head of the family. His decision to become a clergyman may not have pleased his father, whose other sons were encouraged to seek careers in the army and navy. Jonathan was already ordained and chaplain to Lord Conway when the deaths of his elder brother and of his father in quick succession brought him the baronetcy in 1681. Until his sudden death in July 1721, Sir Jonathan Trelawny had to work out an uneasy compromise between his calling as a priest and his duty as head of an ancient Cornish family. He preferred to work behind the scenes and never sought to be a national leader.
Although he was successively Bishop of Bristol, Exeter and Winchester, he never appeared in the forefront of debate; he wrote no book; he published no sermons. At the time of his translation to Winchester in 1707 he was, next to his ally Lord Godolphin, the dominant force in Cornish parliamentary elections, but the extent of that influence was known to few outside the county. On the other hand, all men recognised in Bishop Trelawny a formidable champion of the rights of the Church of England. The legal battles he fought and won, notably the Exeter College Case, have had a lasting influence on the Church.
One of the many ecclesiastical anomalies created by the withdrawal of the lands of the English crown from papal jurisdiction was the status of the Channel Islands. Throughout the Middle Ages they had been part of the diocese of Coutances. Elizabeth I sought to smooth out the problem in 1568 by transferring them to the diocese of Winchester, but their geographical remoteness rendered the change a purely cosmetic one. The religious wars in France led to what amounted to an invasion of the Channel Islands by Huguenot ministers fleeing from persecution.
Presbyterian government
Now that preaching was encouraged and worship was to be in a tongue 'understanded of the people' the islands looked to the continent for French-speaking clergy and in a very short time, aided and abetted by the governors of the islands, these Huguenot ministers dominated church life. In 1576 they set up a presbyterian synod at St Peter Port, Guernsey, for the whole of the islands. Eventually the islanders themselves, led by the men of Jersey, reacted against the tyranny of presbyterian government. Archbishop Abbot and Bishop Andrews of Winchester effected a moderate and sensible settlement of the schism. The autonomy and local customs of the islands were respected. The clergy of Jersey who, with Jersey's 12 parishes to Guernsey's ten formed a majority, were given the task of drafting a set of canons for their island modelled on the canons of the Church of England of 1604. Their draft, with some small amendments, received the royal assent on 30 June 1623.
The Church of England has paid little attention to this early successful example of church reunion within its own borders. Three outward observances, the wearing of the surplice, the use of the sign of the cross at Baptism and the reception of the Holy Communion kneeling, around which had crystallized so much opposition and defiance of authority in England, were not insisted on for an interim period of unspecified length. The existing parish clergy were left undisturbed, but for the future all officiating rectors were to receive episcopal ordination.
Church courts
The ecclesiastical court of the Dean of Jersey was restored and exercised a jurisdiction similar to that enjoyed by any archidiaconal court in England, indeed greater, because matrimonial cases usually reserved for consistory courts were also to be tried before the dean. In deference to presbyterian synodical practice the dean was never to act as sole judge. All rectors might sit with him and a minimum of two was needed to validate the sentences and, unlike the inferior courts, appeals went no further than the Bishop of Winchester in person.
This was a most unusual provision and custom rapidly established that appeals could be processed only in the summer months when sailing was easier. Worship was to be conducted in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer, which had been translated into French as early as 1549. Confirmation was never administered because no Bishop of Winchester ever went to the islands. To compensate for this neglect the instruction of children was given greater emphasis and the public examination of children, at an age slightly older than that customary in England, was an event which took place before the whole congregation, the successful completion of which was treated as sufficient ratification of the promises of baptism to admit regularly to the Holy Communion.
Low earnings
Archbishop Laud recognised that until recruits for the ministry were educated in England, the reunion would never become an organic one. He persuaded Charles I to endow fellowships in several Oxford Colleges for the sons of islanders. His intention was to encourage academically suitable young men to study at Oxford then return to take up vacancies in the parishes. Unfortunately, no attention was given to the payment of the clergy. The tithe on corn was part of the salary of the governors of Jersey and Guernsey. Fees for burials and weddings were virtually unknown so the clergy for the most part looked to the tithes on apples, which provided the principal home-brewed drink.
The islanders favoured spur pruning of the trees, but after a time this method caused apple trees to produce every other year. In any case, not every parish planted alike. It was, therefore, an uncertain source of income. Unlike their mainland counterparts, the rectors were not responsible for the maintenance of their rectories; the fabric of the house was a charge on the parish, as was the whole fabric of the church. All the same, no parish was worth as much as fifty pounds a year and the provisions of Queen Anne's Bounty never extended to the islands.
It is small cause for wonder to discover that parents were reluctant to allow their sons to pursue a clerical career and that those young men who did take up a fellowship at Oxford preferred to look for livings in England. The result was that the transition from presbyterianism to anglicanism took very much longer than the authors of the scheme of reunion had intended. The islanders still found most of their clergy from among poor French or Swiss calvinist ministers who knew nothing about the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England and saw no reason to learn. If they gave no lead in the matter then the Church would remain anglican in name only. If poverty inhibited the emergence of a younger generation of native clergy trained at what was then one of the two principal seminaries for the clergy of the Church of England, then the only hope of implementing the reunion would lie with the dean and his church court.
In a farming community with, inevitably, a high level of inter-marriage and a form of land tenure based on gavelkind, the people of Jersey were clannish and litigious. The States, under the presidency of the Bailiff, was composed of 12 Jurats, the 12 Rectors (if they were natives or naturalized) and the 12 elected Constables of the parishes. Seven of each order made up a quorum. The Jurats wished to run the island to their own advantage, supported by the Constables to whom they were related more often than not.
The ecclesiastical court was a thorn in the flesh, a rival jurisdiction which denied to the Jurats and their families any privileged status. Clashes between the Jurats and the clergy were frequent; provocation was offered on both sides. Due observance of the Lord's Day was a particularly touchy subject. In 1698, when the minister of St Peter's announced that he would celebrate the Holy Communion on Christmas Day, which fell on a Sunday, one of the Churchwardens, later a Jurat, opposed him saying that 'it was not a fit day and only a time of recreation'. The churchwarden was supported by the parish Constable who threatened to provide no wine. When the dean cited them both into his court the following February they had him imprisoned on the orders of the civil court.
Sunday observance
A territory as strategically vulnerable as Jersey had to look vigorously to its own defence so that the island militia were in a higher state of military preparedness than their mainland counterparts. It was only prudent during the wars with France to undertake weekly training, even to devote a part of Sunday to military pursuits. It was a needless provocation, however, to muster in the churchyard during the time of divine service and drown out the minister's voice with the noise of drum calls.
On the other hand a young minister, Thomas Cartault, of Trinity, angered by his failure to get the Lord's Day properly observed, wrote a number of anonymous letters attacking the Jurats and threw a bundle of letters into the garden of one of them. At the end of the day his only punishment was a fine, but the way the Jurats threatened him with torture and hanging, keeping guards and the hangman on duty outside his prison cell up to the last minute before his release, indicates the level of their exasperation with what they considered to be a covert attempt to subvert their authority. In turn, the Dean refused to prosecute Cartault for defamation when requested to do so by the civil court.
Dispute over pew
A number of confrontations between clergy and constables occurred over the years. None were of great significance in themselves, but in an island community they helped to sustain and build up tension, which eventually threw up a serious violation of justice. In 1704 a certain Jean Le Couteur took it into his head to build a box pew for himself and family in his parish church of St John, siting it in such a way as to block access to the pew occupied by Joshua Ahier. Ahier prosecuted Le Couteur in the Dean's court in December. Le Couteur was an under-officer at the civil court and he brought an action in that court against Ahier in January for disturbing him in his seat at church. The court fined Ahier for a breach of the peace and bound him over to desist from interfering with Le Couteur in the future.
Meanwhile the case proceeded in the ecclesiastical court and sentence was given finally on 26 January 1707. Le Couteur did nothing to comply with the Dean's order and was decreed excommunicated on 1 March. The Jurats then went one step too far. Any redress against the spiritual court for exceeding its authority lay with the Privy Council, which could issue a prohibition. The civil court of Jersey proceeded to draw up its own prohibition, which it served on all the resident clergy on 6 March, one day before Le Couteur's schedule of excommunicaiton was due to be read out in all the parish churches of Jersey.
The dean refused to recall the schedule, so in May Le Couteur prosecuted the clergy in the civil court. The court fined all the clergy in proportion to their personal involvement in the affair, adding insult to injury by giving some of the money so collected to Le Couteur and denying the clergy leave to appeal from their sentence. The unfortunate Joshua Ahier remained in prison, a punishment so severe that it deterred the people of Jersey from bringing any business before the ecclesiastical court.
The Jurats had acted illegally but successfully. Four factors were in their favour. First they had a good precedent. In 1703 the clergy of Jersey had persuaded Bishop Mews to support them in an appeal to the Privy Council, but it had been dismissed on the grounds that it was not a true legal appeal but a conflict between two separate jurisdictions. Secondly, Bishop Mews was old and ill and could never be persuaded to concern himself again with the Channel Islands. Thirdly, Dean Le Couteur was himself elderly and unwell. Finally, the ranks of the clergy were seriously depleted by non-residence. The non-residence of the three leading rectors had given the Dean cause for concern for some years. Requests for episcopal advice and help went unanswered. At length, urged on by Thomas Le Breton, Rector of St Mary, the dean suspended the non-resident clergy who promptly lodged an appeal with the bishop.
Bishop Trelawny's arrival
It was at this critical juncture that Sir Jonathan Trelawny was translated from Exeter to Winchester. Trelawny's arrival changed the situation. In 1707 he was 57 years old; his health was not good but he was no weakling. One of the few bishops surviving from pre-revolutionary days, his understanding of the nature of episcopacy and the task of a bishop had been moulded by William Sancroft and the writings of the Caroline divines. He came to Winchester with the proven reputation of a moderate but firm disciplinarian and of being a redoubtable champion of the legal rights of the Church. He was the only one on the episcopal bench whom the Whig Junto feared enough to hate.
Within 12 months Trelawny became acquainted with the situation of the clergy in the Channel Islands and had formed his strategy to deal with it. An episcopal visitation would have accomplished nothing. The best way he could serve both Jersey and Guernsey was to select a reliable native clergyman, preferably one related to as many of the leading families as possible, and to pave the way for his appointment as Dean as soon as that office fell vacant. Then he could encourage his Dean to provide the vigorous leadership so urgently required and demonstrate publicly and privately that the Dean had his bishop's full approval and support. As for non-residence, that was an abuse Trelawny had fought from the moment he became Bishop of Exeter. There would be no change in policy now he was at Winchester.
When the news of Trelawny's translation reached Thomas Le Breton he was overjoyed. Le Breton was the only rector in Jersey whom the Jurats really needed to be wary of. He was young, intelligent, well-educated, well connected with leading Jersey families and resident with no ambition to seek a wealthier parish in England. He spoke English fluently, having held a fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. That his former visitor should now be his diocesan filled him with hope. Here was a very different bishop from the supine Peter Mews. Immediately he composed a congratulatory address on behalf of the Dean and clergy - and persuaded Dean Le Couteur to seek Trelawny's protection.
Privy Council petition
Le Breton drew up a petition outlining the clergy's dispute with the civil court and asking for advice and assistance. He forwarded the petition with a covering letter in which he indicated not only what the clergy hoped for from one who had defended Exeter College from Socinianism but also that he would be delighted to consider any offer of preferment the bishop might have in mind.
Trelawny acted swiftly. He recommended the clergy to draw up a petition to the Privy Council and employed his personal contact with the Ministry to have the matter expedited. Le Breton came over to London in July with a copy of the petition. Trelawny arranged for the petition to be checked by an advocate at Doctors Commons, then enlisted the support of Sir Charles Hedges, a former secretary of state, for the day when it came before the council and he had a personal word with the Lord Treasurer, Lord Godolphin, in order to ensure that the petition reached the Queen herself.
Few council meetings were held in the summer months, so the council did not receive the petition until the very end of October, when it was referred to a committee which ordered a copy to be sent to the civil court in Jersey for a reply. The Jurats received this order on 20 January 1709 with some alarm. Lulled into a sense of false security, they had never expected the clergy's petition to be received, and had taken no precautionary measures. In a panic they instructed their agent in London to seek legal advice and draw up a reply. It had been reported to Le Breton the previous autumn that the Jurats were beginning to think in terms of a compromise, but no reply was forthcoming by the end of the winter.
Irritated by the delay and worried both by the expense of staying on in London and by Ahier's continued imprisonment in Jersey, Le Breton sought further advice from his bishop. Trelawny advised a further petition to the council complaining of the delay. Le Breton drew it up and Trelawny saw that it reached the council. It had no direct effect but fortunately the council members themselves were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the standards of justice in the civil court of Jersey. Several decisions of that court were reversed on appeal. Finally, in October 1711, the council granted all the attorney-general "thought fit to pray for in our behalf". The clergy's appeal was admitted and the civil court made a defendant in the appeal. This meant that the Jurats themselves would have to pay the legal costs. Le Breton could tell Trelawny that the bailiff "appears already sick of the cause and by his language seems inclined to contrive some genteel way to drop it".
The Jurats were compelled to recognise that they had overreached their powers. On Hedges' advice, Trelawny had not associated himself with his clergy's petition, leaving him greater freedom to support them behind the scenes. However, Trelawny did contrive to give the Jurats of Jersey and indeed all the Channel Islanders evidence that behind their clergy stood a bishop to be reckoned with. When the bill against occasional conformity was in the committee stage in the Lords, Trelawny had Jersey and Guernsey included in the provisions. The islanders preferred to escape the attentions of the parliament at Westminister. The clause was not popular even among the clergy in Jersey, for when Le Breton proposed sending an address of congratulation to the bishop he could not even get his proposal seconded. The act remained on the statute book for only seven years but it must have brought home to Jurats and Constables alike the inadvisability of pushing the clergy too hard.
Non-resident rectors
In their complaint to the privy council and in their letters to the bishop, the clergy of Jersey liked to present themselves as the blameless victims of the sons of Belial. Most of the decline in their authority, however, was a direct result of their own behaviour. Several were prepared to enjoy the privileges of the established church without the necessity of submitting to its doctrine and discipline. On an island with only 12 rectors, non-residence was a serious weakening of joint resolve. In a long, doleful letter to Trelawny, the Dean explained that St Brelade was notorious for sexual immorality; that the churchwardens did their best to uphold the sanctity of marriage despite the opposition of the Constable but that they had no rector to support them.
For many years past, St Brelade had been served by a Huguenot refugee
- "who though pious and learned dares not meddle with anything that relates to the spiritual interest of the parish for fear of displeasing because, as is conceived, his cure, at most, is but precarious".
This refugee had no freehold. His rector could easily dismiss him in order to please any vociferous faction among the parishioners. Edward d'Auvergne had never spent more than a few months in St Brelade in all the 16 years he had been its rector. It was inevitable that the ablest native clergy were tempted to emigrate. Philippe Falle, Rector of St Saviour, and Philippe de la Place, Rector of St Lawrence, also lived in England. If the best educated rectors emigrated, those remaining lost their most effective spokesmen in the sessions of the States. A serious illness in the winter of 1708 left the Dean incapacitated but not before he had initiated proceedings ex officio in his court against the three non-resident rectors and suspended them. On appeal Trelawny upheld the sentence and, shortly afterwards, persuaded all three to resign their parishes on the island.
This led to a series of new ecclesiastical appointments. One of Peter Mews' last acts had been to approve the moves of the Dean's brother and nephew to the parishes of St Helier and St Martin respectively. Trelawny confirmed this decision and the pair were inducted on 12 October 1708. The move of the Dean's brother, Francis Le Couteur senior, caused a vacancy at Trinity. All the livings were in the gift of the Governor, Lieutenant-General Lumley, an officer on active service who never resided in Jersey. He was not always amenable to clerical or episcopal suggestions. Trelawny recommended a young Savoyard, John Cornelius Pugin, for one of the vacancies, but Lumley was not to be influenced even by the bishop's hint that the Queen expected it. However, the bishop had no objection to the Governor's choice for three of the vacancies. The dean inducted Thomas Cartault to Trinity, John Cartault to St Brelade and Jean-Baptiste Sorsoleil to St Lawrence.
John Nicolle
Lumley presented an Englishman named Lombard to St Saviour who, once he learnt of the difficulties of exercising a ministry in Jersey, resigned his presentation. Both the Dean and Le Breton urged Trelawny to delay an institution to St Saviour until John Nicolle, a young islander studying at Exeter College, should be old enough to be ordained priest. When Trelawny agreed to this proposal the clergy then quarrelled over who should be appointed curate in the meantime. St Helier's parish had been vacant for two and a half years before Francis Le Couteur was inducted. He inherited a young French curate, Jean Rocques, who, much to his annoyance, had built up a party of supporters among the parishioners and intended to stay there.
The Dean looked on Rocques as a trouble-maker and did not want him to be licensed anywhere in Jersey. Once Rocques realised that his days at St Helier were numbered, he persuaded some of the clergy to support his application for the curacy of St Saviour. Rocques had married Le Breton's first cousin so he had to remain neutral. Nevertheless he took care that Trelawny should know that the attitude of all calvinist ministers, including Rocques, to the worship and discipline of the Church of England could be summed up in Calvin's phrase, tollerabiles nugae. Rocques was not licensed and the affair is of passing interest. It does illustrate, however, the type of petty bickering among the rectors which did nothing to strengthen their authority in the presence of a number of French calvinists whose acceptability as clergymen was still taken for granted by the islanders.
Dean Le Couteur's poor health raised the question of his successor. Even before Le Breton began to solicit actively for the Deanery, Trelawny had been making enquiries about him. The rector of Exeter College assured the bishop that Le Breton had been the best islander he had known at the College. After Le Couteur had suffered his stroke, Trelawny let it be known that Le Breton was his choice, yet he was reluctant to interfere so long as there was a chance Le Couteur might recover. The ineffectual rector of Grouville, Jean Lempriere, was already sub-dean. Without strong leadership the bickering among the clergy continued. Trelawny was forced to remind them all that disputes were only to be brought before him by way of appeal.
Le Breton's appointment
In 1712 Trelawny ordered the clergy to submit a written account of the state of the church in Jersey and sent his order through Le Breton. When some clergy, piqued by this obvious indication of episcopal favour, refused to co-operate, Trelawny lost patience and appointed Le Breton episcopal commissary in the following year. The Deanery was a Royal appointment. Trelawny had already solicited hard for Le Breton when Godolphin was lord treasurer. It was fortunate that Le Couteur died when he did because in the months immediately following Anne's death, when George I had not given up hope of including some Tories in his first ministry, the wishes of Trelawny were more likely to be gratified. Ever since December 1712 Trelawny had been numbered among the small group of 'whimsicals' or Hanoverian Tories in parliament. George I accepted Le Breton, who took up the office of Dean in December 1714. One of the reasons for seeing Le Breton promoted was that having numerous relatives and friends in Jersey, Trelawny had reason to believe he would have greater support than another rector.
Guernsey
The surviving correspondence relating to the Church in Guernsey is largely taken up with the problem created by bringing an Englishman into the island. Lawrence Payne, who was rector of St Martin and St Saviour and master of the grammar school, was strongly disliked. Disapproval of his laziness and of his idiosyncratic interpretation of his role as a clergyman was greatly exacerbated by his English origin. Guernsey had few native clergy: even by the end of the 18th century only two parishes were served by islanders. Guernsey had not followed Jersey in the reunion of 1623, so episcopacy had to be reintroduced by royal decree in 1660. A steady supply of continental clergy meant that disputes between them and the Dean of Guernsey were frequent.
The Governor of Guernsey at this time was General Churchill, brother of the Duke of Malborough. Like the Governor of Jersey, he never resided and was on bad terms with Giles Spicer, his Lieut-Governor. Lawrence Payne preferred the more genteel occupation of domestic chaplain and tutor to the sons of the nobility. The former Governor, Lord Hatton, had appointed him to be master at the grammer school. As the salary was small, Hatton presented Payne first to St Martin and secondly to St Saviour. The Dean, Nicholas Le Mesurier, strongly disapproved of this pluralism. His motive for doing so was not without self-interest. Payne had signed a bond to resign the school to Le Mesurier's son in six years if the Governor agreed to appoint him. The Governor's refusal to do so gave Payne an excuse not to honour the bond.
From his own letters it is clear that Payne was a reluctant parish priest and an ineffective schoolmaster. He refused to serve St Saviour because the parishioners were "intolerably rude and insolent and I could get no redress". He blamed his lack of success in educating the youth on their parents who encouraged them to be disobedient "for they are very angry and clamorous if their children are corrected". Payne spent as much time as he could in England. His very unpopularity made him a valuable asset in the eyes of General Churchill who employed him as his attorney-general and receiver-general, knowing full well that he need fear no collusion between Payne and the islanders to defraud him of his revenue.
The Lieut-Governor had to stand by helplessly as Payne visited Guernsey from time to time with the Governor's authority to make leases and to dispense patronage. Payne continued to do this in defiance of an admonition from Trelawny that he should cease such secular work and reside constantly in his parish of St Martin. In April 1715 Spicer implored Trelawny never to let "that fellow Payne" return to Guernsey. The correspondence gives us no indication of Trelawny's response but Payne was residing at St Martin in the winter following Trelawny's death in July 1721.
The Trelawny Papers tell nothing more of church affairs in Guernsey. The bishop's strategy for this island was the same as for Jersey. When Dean Le Mesurier died, Trelawny had already picked his successor and proceeded to secure the crown appointment for John Bonamy. Churchill's successor as Governor, General Hervey, assumed that he could nominate the Dean as well as present all the rectors. The late Dean's son, now master of the school, encouraged him in this belief, expecting himself to be the Governor's choice. Treelawny, however, had already marshalled the precedents to argue that Hervey had no such right and he arranged with Archbishop Wake for George I to appoint Bonamy. As he explained to the archbishop the post brought its holder a mere 20 shillings a year in fees:
- "Yet his power is of consequence to the service of the Church and Bonamy by principle and interest in that Island (as being related to the best families there) most capable of doing it, as, your Grace, by me, shall at all times direct him."
Summary of Jersey Church
Among the Trelawny papers is a summary of the state of the Church in Jersey. It is undated but belongs to the year 1712 when Trelawny was making his inquiries. It describes a Church in which liturgical practice had remained unchanged since its presbyterian period. The people did not even join in the congregational prayers and responses laid down in the Book of Common Prayer. By the end of the 18th century the situation was very different in Jersey and, even though Guernsey lagged far behind, at least the Church there was left in no doubt as to how it ought to behave.
Acting through clergy like Le Breton and Bonamy, Bishop Trelawny can claim a fair measure of the credit for insisting that the Church in the Channel Islands come into line with the rest of the Church of England. In 1712 Le Breton introdeuced the sign of the cross at baptisms in St Mary and reported that he met with no opposition from the congregation. He faced considerable opposition from the calvinist clergy when he was Dean.
Trelawny sent them all letters of admonition ordering them to obey their Dean's instructions and this steady support for the man of his choice was something Le Breton always recalled with gratitude. He boasted to Bishop Trimnell that no judicial sentence of his had ever been reversed and he attributed the fact to the close working relationship he had enjoyed with Trelawny.
If Trelawny had not chosen his Deans wisely and backet then fully, the morale of the clergy might never have risen to the level at which they were prepared to make the necessary changes. The writer who revised Falle's description of the Church in Jersey states that Holy Communion was received kneeling, which is the best indication of the level of acceptance of anglican practice by the end of that century.
Not everything that Trelawny did was beneficial. The inclusion of the Channel Islands in the act against occasional conformity left a legacy of resentment the depth of which can be gauged by the treatment meted out to young Cartault in 1723. Nonetheless Trelawny halted and reversed the policy of drift and indifference followed by his predecessors. In this dealings with the Church in the Chnanel Islands he was true to his own family motto: Sermoni consona facta.
