him to meet his father's debts (Correspondence of Clarendon and Rochester, ed. Singer, 1828, i. 146). Nevertheless Bristol was offered him. On 17 Oct. the intimation of the congé d'élire was conveyed to him by Sunderland; on the 26th his university conferred the degree of D.D.; and on 8 Nov. he was consecrated at Lambeth by both archbishops and six bishops. Three days later, he and Ken took their seats in the lords.
To the active loyalty inherited from his ancestors and from his cavalier father, Trelawny united as bishop the passive obedience of his order. He accepted the papistry of the king until it became aggressive. While at Dorchester, on his first visitation, he severely reprimanded a preacher who made insinuations in a sermon against the king's good faith. By 1 June 1686 Trelawny had finished his visitation, and laid before the archbishop the results which pointed to gross neglect by the clergy of their duties (Tanner MSS. xxx. 50).
The appearance of the first declaration of indulgence on 4 April 1687 changed Trelawny's views of the king and converted him into a resolute foe (Tanner MSS. xxix. 42). Upon Sunderland's invitation to him to sign an address in favour of the declaration, and to obtain the signatures of his clergy, Trelawny, first letting it be known that he would not sign himself, called his clergy together and debated with them. They refused to sign to a man. Reporting his action to the archbishop, he asserted: ‘I have given God thanks for this opportunity … of declaring … that I am firmly of the church of England, and not to be forced from her interest by the terrors of displeasure or death itself.’ He did all he could in 1687 for the French protestant refugees at Bristol, settled 20l. upon their two ministers, and drew up a form of subscription for their benefit (Tanner MSS. xxix. 147 or 149, xxx. 191, xxix. 32). When the king attempted to pack a parliament pledged to support his attack upon the church, the Earl of Bath undertook to manage the Cornish elections, but Trelawny successfully opposed him (Tanner MSS. xxviii. 139, in Strickland's Lives).
On 27 April 1688 James issued his second declaration of indulgence, and on 12 May Sancroft summoned his suffragans to consider it. Trelawny arrived at Lambeth with his friend Ken on the evening of the 17th. On the following morning he assisted in drawing up the bishops' petition against the declaration, and in the evening repaired with the rest to Whitehall. When the king mentioned the word ‘rebellion,’ Trelawny fell on his knees and warmly repudiated the suggestion that he and his brethren could be guilty of such an offence. ‘We will do,’ he concluded, ‘our duty to your majesty to the utmost in everything that does not interfere with our duty to God’ (Oliver, Bishops of Exeter, p. 157 n. 2). After the interview Trelawny went down to his diocese, and was served at Bath on 30 May with a warrant from Sunderland, dated 27 May, to appear with the archbishop and five fellow bishops before the council on 8 June at five in the afternoon to answer a charge of seditious libel. Trelawny obeyed the summons, and on the same evening he, Sancroft, and five other bishops were sent to the Tower (8 June). Four lords—Worcester, Devonshire, Scarsdale, and Lumley—were ready to give bail for Trelawny. Released in a week on their own recognisances, the seven bishops came up on 29 June for trial on the charge of seditious libel. A verdict of ‘not guilty’ was returned at ten o'clock of the morning of the next day. The anniversary of 30 June 1688 was ever afterwards a festival with Trelawny. The Cornishmen meanwhile identified themselves with Trelawny in his struggle with the king, and, according to a local tradition reported by Robert Stephen Hawker [q. v.], they raised a song of which the refrain ran:
And shall Trelawny die?
Then twenty thousand Cornishmen will know the reason why.
Hawker's testimony is not quite conclusive. There is some ground for believing that the cry was first raised in 1628, owing to the fears of Cornishmen for the life of Sir John Trelawny, first baronet, at the hands of the House of Commons (cf. Bristol Journal, 25 July 1772). ‘The Song of the Western Men,’ a ballad said to have been suggested by the ancient refrain, was composed by Hawker in 1825, and long passed for an original song dating from 1688. While Bristol was still ablaze with bonfires, in celebration of the bishop's acquittal, the king by quo warranto struck Trelawny's name from the burgess roll of Liskeard (The Epistolary Correspondence &c. of Francis Atterbury, ed. Nichols, 1789–1799; Iago, Bishop Trelawny, 1882).
Burnet states precisely that Trelawny joined Compton in signing the invitation to William (Own Time, Oxford, 1833, iii. 159). Burnet adds that the bishop's brother, Colonel Charles Trelawny, drew him into the plan of invasion (ib. iii. 279). Burnet has been followed by Macaulay and Miss Strickland. But Trelawny steadily denied the allegation (Trelawne MSS. in Hist. MSS. Comm. 1st Rep. p. 52). In a draft letter
