Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/274

 extent. Personally, he was disposed to be friendly to men of all opinions; but he was a strict disciplinarian, and he felt it his duty to use rigorously the powers which the law gave him to bring all men into outward conformity with the church he served, and then to turn mere conformists into real churchmen, or at least the semblance of such. His position gave him a double power; for he was not only bishop of the diocese, but also, quâ bishop, lord-lieutenant of the county, and he had not the slightest scruple, as such, in employing the train-bands to hunt out nonconformists. There was a strong puritan element in his diocese, perhaps owing to its near neighbourhood to Scotland. There were also many old and influential Roman catholics; and these of course drew after them many dependents. ‘Popish recusant’ and nonconforming presbyterian were equally obnoxious to Cosin. Many of his acts in relation especially to the latter were utterly unjustifiable, according to our modern notions; but it is obviously unfair to judge a prelate of the Restoration era by the standard of the nineteenth century. And again, it is only fair to take into account the very real, though no doubt exaggerated, fear of danger both to the altar and the throne which prevailed. But after making full allowance for all this, such sentences as the following naturally shock us: ‘I am sorry to heare that Mr. Davison, vicar of Norton, hath so many obstinate men and women in his parish that will not yet let downe their conventicles. Here at London they are ferretted out of every hole by the train-bands of the city and the troops employed for that purpose by the king and his officers,’ and so forth. In other respects Cosin was not a perfect character. His violent opposition to the election of parliamentary representatives for the county—a point which he succeeded in carrying—seems rather an arbitrary proceeding; nor can we at all approve of his sanctioning the sale of offices in his patronage. Indeed, he had always rather too keen an eye for business, exacting all that he considered his due to the utmost farthing. But if he loved to acquire money, he also loved to spend it on purely unselfish objects. The amount he spent upon the castles at Durham and Auckland, upon the cathedral at Durham, upon the chapel at Auckland (which he brought up externally to the standard of ornate ritual which he loved), upon the library at Durham which still bears his name, upon the foundation of scholarships, both at Caius and Peterhouse, upon general and rather indiscriminate almsgiving, upon help to the sufferers from the plague in London, at Durham, and at Cambridge, upon lavish hospitality, upon the redemption of christian captives at Algiers, upon the building and endowment of hospitals at Durham and Auckland, upon the augmentation of poor livings, and upon innumerable other objects of benevolence, must have been enormous. We can well understand his being called par excellence ‘the munificent bishop of Durham;’ and we could imagine that Archdeacon Basire's statement in his funeral sermon, that he spent 2,000l. every year of his episcopate on works of charity, was below rather than above the mark. When his friends remonstrated with him for spending such vast sums of money upon church building and ornamentation, to the detriment of his children, he replied, ‘The church is my firstborn.’ But his business habits enabled him also to make ample provision for his younger children.

Cosin died in London on 15 Jan. 1671–2, after a long and painful illness, which was probably aggravated by his persistence in attending church, ‘though the weather was never so ill.’ When his friends and physicians remonstrated with him, he replied that ‘when his body was unfitt to serve and honour God, 'twas fitt to go to the dust from whence it came.’ He was buried, according to his own desire expressed in his will, at Bishop Auckland, with a magnificent funeral, as befitted one who may fairly be called a magnificent prelate. The funeral sermon was preached by the archdeacon of Northumberland, [q. v.], who had loyally seconded all his chief's efforts during his lifetime, and continued to carry them out after his death. The sermon is entitled ‘The Dead Man's Real Speech,’ and appended to it is a ‘Brief’ of the great prelate's life.

Though Cosin was a staunch and unflinching churchman of a very marked type, and may, broadly speaking, be grouped with the Laudian school, he differed, both in general tone and in special opinions, from many churchmen of his day. For instance, at the Savoy conference he was, as we have seen, more favourable to the nonconformists than any of the bishops except Reynolds and Gauden, one of whom virtually was, and the other had been, a presbyterian. His attitude towards the foreign protestant churches was certainly different from that of many churchmen in his day. He acted in this matter at Paris in a way which his friend, Bishop Morley, for instance, who on the whole was by no means so advanced a churchman, could neither approve nor imitate. He held the same views to the end of his life, and drew an elaborate parallel between Rome and Geneva, showing that on every point the