Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/27



Rh he did not scruple to partake of them as food. Some of his special dishes are recorded in Stukeley's diary, "bp Rundle is famous for candyed carrot, pea-capons, peeper pye, i.e., young new-hatched turkeys put into a pye, taken out by spoonfuls, 6 veal burrs stuffed with the ropes of 50 woodcocks. He calls a sirloin of beef clumsy plenty. Young hares fed with brocoli. By this means he treated himself into £4000 p. ann." No wonder that if he often partook of these dishes he found himself a valetudinarian before he was 45 years old, and that in the winter of 1733-4 he was dangerously ill!

A torrent of passionate controversy burst over Rundle in December, 1733 and continued to flow all the next year. The see of Gloucester had become vacant and Talbot, the lord chancellor, urged the promotion of his friend. "Codex" Gibson, the bishop of London who for many years of Walpole's administration ruled over matters ecclesiastical, protested against the appointment, urging that Rundle was a deist. His enemies gave out that his "warm fancy and brilliant conversation" had led him into serious indiscretions of speech. "I am an open talkative man" he allowed, but he coupled with it a warm denial that he had expressed at any time a disbelief in the christian religion.

The most serious of the accusations against him came from Richard Venn a man of high character beneficed in the diocese of London, whose sense of duty led him, though a Devonian like Rundle, to interpose in the fray. He stated that on one occasion when in company with Rundle and Robert Cannon, a dean who spoke in a jocular way on serious matters, the former had said, that were he a "justice of the peace when Abraham purposed to offer up his son Isaac he should have thought it his duty to have laid Abraham by the heels, as a knave or a madman," and he threatened to oppose Rundle at his confirmation in Bow