Williams, Archbishop of York, ‘hasty hot Welsh Williams,’—whom we once saw, seven years ago, as Bishop of Lincoln, getting jostled in Palaceyard, protesting thereupon, and straightway getting lodged in the Tower,[1]—is to concern us again for one moment. A man once very radiant to men, as obscure as he has now grown: a most high-riding far-shining, Solar Luminary in that epoch; obscure to no man in England for thirty years last past! A man of restless mercurial vivacity, of endless superficial dexterity and ingenuity, of next to no real wisdom;—very fit to have swift promotions and sudden eclipses in a Stuart Court; not worthy of much memory otherwise. Of his rapid rises, culminations, miraculous faculties and destinies, to us all useless, indifferent and extinct, let there be silence here,—reference to Bishop Hacket and the Futile Ingenuities.[2]
Archbishop Williams,—for he got delivered from the Tower at that time, and recovered favour, and was ‘enthroned Archbishop at York’ while his Majesty was raising his War-standard there,—found, after a while, that there was little good to be got of his Archbishophood; that his best weapon would be, not the crosier, but the linstock and cannon-rammer, at present: he went to his Welsh estate of Aberconway, and ‘procuring a Commission from his Majesty,’ fortified Conway Castle ‘at his own expense,’ and invited the neighbouring gentry to lodge their plate and valuables there, as in a place of security. Good;—for the space of a year or two. But now, some time ago in the death-throes of the late War, while North Wales was bestirring itself as in last-agony for his Majesty’s behoof,—there came a certain Colonel Sir John Owen, of whom we shall hear again: he, this Owen, came before Castle Conway with large tumultuary force;
