Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 37.djvu/297

 companion of Richard ‘in potationibus et aliis non dicendis’ (Chronique de la Traison, p. xlv;, ed. Ellis, cxciii. 347). These charges do not appear in the ‘Annales Ricardi’ or in Walsingham. But the latter doubtless included him among the ‘certi episcopi’ who were the instruments of Richard's extortion. Like Richard and several of his courtiers, Merke sold his favour to the monastery of St. Albans (Gesta Abbatum, iii. 454), and there is reason to doubt whether he ever visited his diocese (, p. 33). He was one of the executors named in Richard's will, made 16 April 1399, on the eve of his journey to Ireland, whither the bishop accompanied him (, Royal Wills, p. 199; Ann. Ricardi, p. 250; Fœdera, viii. 78–9;, p. 37). Returning with Richard to Wales, on the news of the landing of Henry of Bolingbroke, Merke was one of the few who remained with him to the last. He is said by a French authority to have joined in advising him to go to Bordeaux, to have insisted at Conway that Northumberland should take an oath that Henry had no designs against Richard, and to have remonstrated against the latter's excessive grief at Flint (Chronique de la Traison, pp. 44, 49, 56; cf. in Archæologia, xx. 110, 198, 214). According to the English account he was one of the eight for whose lives Richard stipulated when surrendering to Northumberland at Conway (Ann. Ricardi, p. 250). At Chester on 19 Aug. they were separated, and the bishop may have been kept in custody for a time (Chronique de la Traison, p. 60). Kennett (p. 42) thinks it unlikely that he entered London with Henry, as he would in that case have probably fallen a victim to the popular hatred, like John Slake. Possibly he was committed to the care of the abbot of St. Albans. But he was apparently present in parliament, sitting next to Henry, when Richard's renunciation of the crown was read on 30 Sept., and was summoned on that day to Henry's first parliament, which met on 6 Oct. (Continuatio Eulogii, iii. 383; Archæologia, xx. 388; App. to Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, pp. 766, 768). The bold protest against Henry's treatment of Richard, when all his other friends kept silence, which the contemporary ‘Chronique de la Traison’ (pp. 70–1) puts into the mouth of Bishop Merke, whom Henry is said to have thrown into prison in consequence, could only have been delivered in the October parliament, if at all. This famous speech passed through Hall and Holinshed into Shakespeare (Richard II, act iv. sc. 1). Sir John Hayward, in his ‘History of Henry IV,’ 1599, expanded it into a florid disquisition on the rights of kings, bristling with quotations from sacred and profane authors. He repeated Hall's assertion that Merke died soon after his condemnation for this speech, ‘more by fear than sickness, as one desiring to die by Death's darte, rather than by the Temporal sworde’ (p. 281, ed. 1642). In this shape it became a chief weapon in the armoury of the prerogative writers of the seventeenth century, and at the revolution a battle-field of the supporters and opponents of divine right. It was stripped of its embellishments, and rendered very questionable, by the whig researches of Bishop White Kennett [q. v.], in three ‘Letters to the Bishop of Carlisle concerning one of his predecessors, Bishop Merks’ (1713, 1716, 1717). The authenticity of the speech in its original form rests entirely upon the anti-Lancastrian and confused testimony of the ‘Chronique de la Traison,’ and it is not mentioned in the other French contemporary authority, the metrical chronicle of Creton, who indeed expressly states that on 30 Sept. not a voice was raised for Richard (Archæologia, xx. 99). It cannot be shown that Merke was imprisoned for any speech of his in parliament, and he certainly was not deprived of his bishopric on that account, although an error of Rymer's (Fœdera, viii. 106), antedating a document by a whole year, whose detection by Kennett has strangely escaped later historians, has hitherto lent some colour to the charge. He was, indeed, brought up from custody before parliament on 29 Oct., but it was in company with the lords appellant, and for his alleged share in the proceedings against Gloucester, against which charge he eloquently defended himself (Ann. Hen. IV, p. 314; cf., i. 72). He had been for some time in charge of the abbot of St. Albans, for his protection against the people, and for the same reason, though acquitted, he went back to St. Albans for a time (Ann. Hen. IV, u.s.) As on Sunday, 19 Oct., he had performed his profession of obedience and fidelity to the Archbishop of York as his metropolitan, in the archbishop's chapel at Westminster, Kennett's conjecture that he had been committed to custody on the same day (20 Oct.) as the lords appellant may be correct (, p. 64;, Fasti, ed. Hardy, p. 236, with incorrect date; , i. 72). That he chose this time to perform a long-delayed episcopal duty seems to show that he desired to make an appearance at least of submission to the new government. Bishop Stubbs infers that he had been consecrated at Rome (Registrum Sacrum). Recovering his liberty, Merke is said to have been present at the meeting on 17 Dec. in the rooms of the Abbot of West-