Collier, JEREMY, nonjuror and purifier of the English stage, was born at Stow cum Quy, in Cambridgeshire, 23d September 1650. His father was a clerical schoolmaster at Ipswich, and here and at Cains College, Cambridge, he was educated, graduating B.A. in 1672. For six years he was rector of Ampton, near Bury St Edmunds, and for some years before the Revolution he was lecturer at Gray's Inn. His reply to Dr Gilbert Burnet's Inquiry into the State of Affairs (1688) cost him some months' imprisonment in Newgate. He next waged warfare on the crown with a succession of incisive pamphlets, carrying his refusal to recog- nise the authority of the government so far as hardly to be persuaded by his friends to let them bail him out of prison when arrested in 1692 on suspicion of being involved in a treasonable plot. In 1696, along with two other clergymen, he outraged public feeling by solemnly pronouncing absolution, without any public confession, on the scaffold at Tyburn upon the heads of Friend and Parkyns just before their execution for a plot to murder the king. For this gross and public offence he was obliged to go into hiding, but though he was formally outlawed, no attempt was made to punish him. In 1697 he published his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which fell like a thunderbolt among the wits. The boldness of the onslaught can only be understood by remembering the greatness of the odds and the might of his antagonists. 'It is inspiring,' says Macaulay, 'to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.' Collier's argument carried the country with it, and brought back the English drama to good morals and good sense. That excessive stage-profligacy which was a mere reaction against the rigidity of Puritanism, and had far outrun the parallel laxity of contemporary social morals, at once disappeared, and the theatre in England again became a mirror in which nature and truth were reflected without distortion. But it was not without a struggle that the wits consented to be worsted. Congreve and Vanbrugh, with many of the smaller fry, answered angrily but weakly, and were crushed anew by the redoubtable nonjuror, who was 'complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation.' 'Contest,' says Dr Johnson, 'was his delight; he was not to be frightened from his purpose or his prey.' The great Dryden stood apart at first, but at length in the preface to his Fables (1700) acknowledged with a noble honesty that he had been justly reproved. 'I shall say the less of Mr Collier,' he says, 'because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.' But Dryden complained, and fairly, that his antagonist had often perverted his meaning, that he was 'too much given to horse-play in his railing, and came to battle like a dictator from the plough.' Spite, however, of all its pedantry and overstatement of the case, and its faults of taste and of relative proportion in charges made with equal indignation, the Short View was a noble protest against evil, and was as effective as it deserved to be.
Collier continued to preach to a congregation of Nonjurors (q.v.), and was consecrated bishop in 1713. A great controversy soon rent the nonjuring community on the lawfulness of returning to certain 'usages' allowed in the communion-office of the first prayer-book of Edward VI., which Collier's party preferred to the revision of 1552. Collier at length pronounced these usages essential, and not unnaturally laid himself open to a charge of holding Romish views. He masqueraded as 'Jeremias, Primus Anglo-Britanniae Episcopus' in some abortive attempts to form a union with the Eastern
Church. His last years were racked by the torments of the stone, from which he found relief in death, April 26, 1726. Of his forty-two books and pamphlets, those on the stage alone are still read. The fifth edition of his famous treatise (1730) contains all the successive pamphlets which fortified the first. His largest works were the Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary (4 vols. folio, 1701-21), and An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain . . . to the end of the Reign of Charles II. (2 vols. folio, 1708-14; new ed. by T. Lathbury, with Life, 9 vols. 1852).