Tillotson, JOHN ROBERT

Tillotson, JOHN ROBERT, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born the son of a Puritan clothier, at Sowerby in Yorkshire, in October 1630. He studied at Clare Hall, Cambridge, graduated B.A. in 1650, and became a fellow the year after. The writings of Chillingworth influenced him early, not less the conversation of Cudworth, and others of his school. In 1656 he became tutor in the house of Edmund Prideaux, Attorney-general under the Protector. He is said to have received his orders from Sydserf, Bishop of Galloway, and at any rate he was a preacher by 1661, when we find him ranged among the Presbyterians at the Savoy Conference. He submitted at once to the Act of Uniformity (1662), in December of the same year declined Calamy's church of St Mary Aldermanbury, London; but in 1663 became rector of Keddington in Suffolk, the year after preacher at Lincoln's Inn, where his mild, evangelical, but undoctrinal morality was at first little relished—'Since Mr Tillotson came,' said the Benchers, 'Jesus Christ has not been preached among us.' That same year he married a niece of Oliver Cromwell, and became lecturer at St Lawrence's Church in the Jewry. In 1670 he became a prebendary, in 1672 dean, of Canterbury. Along with Burnet he attended Lord Russell on the scaffold (1683). In 1689 he was appointed Clerk of the Closet to King William and dean of St Paul's, and in April 1691 was raised to the see of Canterbury, vacant by the deposition of the Nonjurator Sancroft. He accepted this elevation with the greatest reluctance, nor could all the insults of the Nonjurors to the end of his life extort either complaint or retaliation from the meek and tolerant primate. He died of palsy, 22d November 1694. His Posthumous Sermons, edited by his chaplain, Dr Ralph Barker, filled 14 volumes (1694), and for them the booksellers gave the unwonted sum of 2500 guineas. A complete edition of his whole works, including 254 sermons, appeared in 3 vols. folio, 1707-12; with a good Life by Dr Thomas Birch, 1752; and an annotated selection of his sermons by G. W. Weldon (1886). The judgment of Tillotson's preaching by his contemporaries is thus summed up by Burnet: 'He was not only the best preacher of the age, but seemed to have brought preaching to perfection; his sermons were so well heard and liked, and so much read, that all the nation proposed him as a pattern, and studied to copy after him.' Dryden used to say that what talent he had for English prose was due to his familiarity with Tillotson, and Locke recommends him as a model of perspicuity and propriety in language.