Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/31

 of England during the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. and art. ).

Shortly after his return (8 Aug. 1713) Robinson was nominated to the see of London, in succession to Compton, and his election was confirmed on 13 March 1714. He gave a strong support to the schism bill; but upon the estrangement of Harley, now earl of Oxford, and Bolingbroke, he adhered to the former, and evinced his loyalty to the protestant succession by voting against the court on 13 April 1714; he met his reward when, in September 1714, he was put upon the privy council of George I. He nevertheless opposed some phrases in the king's speech as injurious to the memory of Queen Anne, at whose deathbed he was a conspicuous figure (, Queens of England). In December 1714 he offered, in his capacity as dean of the Chapel Royal, to wait upon the princess (afterwards Queen Caroline), in order to satisfy any doubts or scruples she might entertain in regard to the Anglican mode in religion (Diary of Lady Cowper, p. 41); the princess was much piqued by this officiousness. In the following year, when Strafford was impeached for his share in the treaty of Utrecht, it was said in the house that it appeared as if Robinson ‘were to have benefit of clergy.’ The bishop ambiguously explained to the upper house that he had been kept greatly in the dark as to the precise course of the negotiations. He had the fortitude to protest against the abuse of the whig majority by opposing Harley's impeachment and the septennial act of 1716. His last appearance in the House of Lords was as a supporter of the justly contemned ‘Bill for the suppression of blasphemy and profaneness’ (2 May 1721).

Robinson, who is commended by Charles Wheatley for having made ‘a just and elegant translation of the English liturgy into German,’ assisted Archbishop Sharp in his efforts to restore episcopacy in Prussia, and, on account of his strenuous opposition to Whiston and Clarke, Waterland spoke warmly of his ‘truly primitive zeal against the adversaries of our common faith;’ but, though good-humoured, charitable, and conscientious in the discharge of episcopal duties, Robinson was not conspicuously successful either as a bishop or theological controversialist. In 1719 he issued an admonitory letter to his clergy on the innovations upon the doxology introduced by Clarke and Whiston. The latter rejoined in a scathing ‘Letter of Thanks.’ An ally of Robinson's made an unconvincing reply, which Whiston in another letter subjected to further ridicule. Other whigs and dissenters commented no less forcibly upon the bishop's shortcomings. Calamy observes that his displays of ‘ignorance and hebetude and incompetency’ as bishop of London disgusted his friends, who ‘wished him anywhere out of sight’ (, Own Life, 1829, ii. 270–1). But Robinson was eminently liberal in his benefactions. He built and endowed a free school and rebuilt the church and parsonage at his native place of Cleasby, where he more than once visited his father's cottage. To Oriel College he gave, in 1719, the sum of 750l. for the erection of a block of buildings in the college garden, now the back quadrangle, on which there is an inscription recording the gift and ascribing it to the suggestion of the bishop's first wife, Mary; at the same time he devoted 2,500l. to the support of three exhibitioners at Oriel; he presented an advowson to Balliol College, of which society he was visitor; he also greatly improved the property of the see at Fulham.

Robinson died at Hampstead on 11 April 1723 (Hist. Reg. Chron. Diary, p. 18), and was privately buried in the churchyard at Fulham on 19 April (the long Latin epitaph is printed in Environs and in  Fulham; cf., Fasti Eccl. Angl. ii. 304–5). He married, first, Mary, daughter of William Langton, a nephew of Abraham Langton of The How, Lancashire; and, secondly, Emma, widow of Thomas, son of Sir Francis Cornwallis of Abermarlais, Wales, and daughter of Sir Job Charlton, bart.; she was buried at Fulham on 26 Jan. 1748. The bishop, who left no children, bequeathed his manor of Hewick-upon Bridge, near Ripon, to a son of his brother Christopher in Virginia.

Besides his ‘Account of Sweden,’ Robinson only published two sermons and a few admonitions and charges to the clergy of his diocese. In 1741 Richard Rawlinson ‘rescued from the grocers and chandlers’ a parcel of Robinson's letters and papers relating to the treaty, which had been in the possession of the bishop's private secretary, Anthony Gibbon (Letter of 24 June, Ballard MS. ii. 59). Portions of his diplomatic correspondence are preserved among the Strafford papers at the British Museum (Addit. MSS. 22205–7). In person the bishop was described by Mackay as ‘a little brown man of grave and venerable appearance, in deportment, and everything else, a Swede, of good sense, and very careful in his business.’

An anonymous portrait, painted while he was in Sweden, is preserved at Fulham Palace (Cat. of Nat. Portraits at South Kensington, 1867, No. 170). It has been engraved by Vertue, Picart, Vandergucht, and others, and for the ‘Oxford Almanac’ of 1742. A