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 supposed to indicate an endeavour to hold communications with the exiled king they were apprehended on 8 Nov., and after being examined by the secretary were imprisoned in the Gatehouse. No evidence was found against them, and they were accordingly admitted to bail. Before long, however, Collier felt scruples as to his conduct in giving bail, considering that this was an acknowledgment of the jurisdiction of the court, and consequently of the royal authority ; he therefore appeared before Chief-justice Holt, surrendered in discharge of his bail, and was imprisoned in the king's bench, from which he was released in about a week or ten days on the application of his friends. During this short imprisonment he wrote a defence of his conduct, which he dated from the king's bench, 23 Nov. 1692. The next year he produced a pamphlet of extraordinary bitterness, entitled 'Remarks on the London Gazette,' on the loss of English property on the coast of Spain and the defeat of the king at the battle of Landen (, History of England, iv. 423). For some years nothing further is known of his life.

When, in 1696, Sir John Friend and Sir William Parkyns were condemned to death for their share in the assassination plot, Collier attended them in Newgate, and when they were drawn to Tyburn on 3 April he and two other nonjuring clergymen named Cook and Snatt were allowed to minister to them at the place of execution. Prayers were read, and then the three clergymen, laying their hands on the heads of the dying men, pronounced over them the form of absolution contained in the Service for the Visitation of the Sick. A somewhat similar scene had taken place at the execution of John Ashton [q. v.] in January 1690-1, and it has been supposed, from certain words used by Collier with reference to this occasion, that he was one of the ministers who absolved him. The sentence referred to, however, seems rather to imply that this was not the case, for Collier is there quoting what was done at Ashton's death as a precedent for his own conduct (State Trials, xiii. 420). The ceremony at the execution of Friend and Parkyns caused considerable scandal. Tories as well as whigs blamed the priests, for as no public confession had been made, the absolution seemed to show that they did not consider the attempt to assassinate William as sinful. As Collier was fully determined not to give bail for his appearance, he concealed himself. On Monday, 6 April, his lodgings were entered at midnight and several of his papers were seized ; on the 9th he published a 'Defence of the Absolution;' and on the following day the two archbishops and twelve bishops who were then in London put forth a 'Declaration ' condemning the action of the three clergymen as 'an open affront to the laws both of church and state,' and 'as insolent and unprecedented in the manner and altogether irregular in the thing.' To this Collier replied on the 25th, arguing that the absolution was defensible in manner, the imposition of hands being the general practice of the ancient church, that the exercise of the absolving power was allowed to priests and enjoined in the office of ordination, and that the thing itself and the occasion were equally justified. On 2 July Cook and Snatt were found guilty upon an indictment for absolving traitors, and were shortly afterwards released. Collier refused to deliver himself up and was outlawed, an incapacity under which he remained during the rest of his life. As the pamphlets he put forth on this matter have no printer's name, it is probable that he remained in concealment during the rest of the year. It was not long, however, before he was allowed to return to his ordinary life ; and though he occasionally signed himself J. Smith in after life, he perhaps did so rather to prevent his literary correspondence being traced to himself than from any fear of legal consequences, though with him literary and political matters were so often the same thing that it is impossible to speak with certainty. In the course of 1697 he seems to have published the first volume of his essays, some of which had already appeared both in a separate form and in a smaller collection. The most famous of these, 'Upon the Office of a Chaplain,' which has a special value from the fact that the author had himself held such a position, was intended to excite self-respect in those who were thus employed, and to cause them to be regarded by others in a manner more becoming their profession. Collier maintains that a chaplain was no servant, branching off on his favourite topic, the independence that rightly pertains to the church, and that, whatever expectations of preferment a chaplain might have, they could not justify either imperiousness in the employer or servility in the employed. The essay is of considerable historical value with reference to the light it throws on the condition of a large class of the stipendiary clergy.

Collier's greatest achievement, his attack on the corruptions of the stage, began with the publication of his 'Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage' in March 1697-8. While this pamphlet attacks the English dramatists generally,