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What could be expected when covetous patrons canceled their debts to their servants by bestowing advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, grooms, pages, and lackeys when even in the universities there was cheating at elections for scholarships and fellowships, and gifts were for sale!

The little patrimony that Cardinal de Bouillon had not been able to carry away, was immediately confiscated: the temporality of his benefices had been already seized, and on the 7th of July appeared a declaration from the King, which, depriving the Cardinal of all his advowsons, distributed them to the bishops of the dioceses in which those advowsons were situated.

His colleagues called him an 'enthusiast, and disliked him as a busybody if not a fanatic. They were by birth and adoption themselves members of the ruling class; many of them were the younger sons of squires, and held their livings in virtue of their birth. Advowsons are the last offices to retain a proprietary character.

But Elizabeth seemed to ascend the throne only to bestow gifts upon her favourite. Baronies and earldoms, stars and garters, manors and monopolies, castles and forests, church livings and college chancellorships, advowsons and sinecures, emoluments and dignities, the most copious and the most exalted, were conferred upon him in breathless succession.

Many questions of property, too, were involved in the question the church buildings, lands and pastures belonging to the Counts of Holland and their successors the States having always exercised the right of church patronage 'jus patronatus' a privilege which, as well as inherited or purchased advowsons, had been of late flagrantly interfered with.

Hereby then, and by those already remembered, it is found that the Church of England is no less commodious to the prince's coffers than the state of the laity, if it do not far exceed the same, since their payments are certain, continual, and seldom abated, howsoever they gather up their own duties with grudging, murmuring, suit, and slanderous speeches of the payers, or have their livings otherwise hardly valued unto the uttermost farthing, or shrewdly cancelled by the covetousness of the patrons, of whom some do bestow advowsons of benefices upon their bakers, butlers, cooks, good archers, falconers, and horsekeepers, instead of other recompense, for their long and faithful service, which they employ afterward unto the most advantage.

The sixteenth and twenty-fourth clauses impose the oath of abjuration, and the sacramental test, as a qualification for office, and for voting at elections. The twenty-third clause deprives the Catholics of Limerick and Galway of the protection secured to them by the articles of the treaty of Limerick. The twenty-fifth clause vests in her majesty all advowsons possessed by Papists.

But Elizabeth seemed to ascend the throne only to bestow gifts upon her favourite. Baronies and earldoms, stars and garters, manors and monopolies, castles and forests, church livings and college chancellorships, advowsons and sinecures, emoluments and dignities, the most copious and the most exalted, were conferred upon him in breathless succession.

For five months the committee intrusted with the subject was silent; now, to prevent, as it was thought, the agitation of the question of advowsons, they presented a report respecting the method of ejecting scandalous, and settling godly, ministers; to which they appended their own opinion, that incumbents, rectors, and impropriators had a property in tithes.

According to the division thus ordered, upwards of 43,000 acres were claimed and conceded to the Primate and the Protestant Bishops of Ulster; in Tyrone, Derry, and Armagh, Trinity College got 30,000 acres, with six advowsons in each county.