Thus it will be seen that in the matter of outward conformity to the rites of the established Church the Queen gave no occasion for cavil. She gave large sums to Church charities, such as £500 at a time to the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy; she endowed livings and restored churches, such as Richmond, Greenwich and Kensington, presenting to Greenwich a fine peal of bells, and to Kensington a new steeple. She even feigned an interest in missionary work, and listened patiently to Berkeley when he expounded to her his scheme for establishing a missionary college in Bermuda in connection with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. She did little to forward it, and he somewhat ungratefully declared that his visits to her had been so much waste of time, and called her discussions “useless debates”. Yet, though the Queen did little to convert his heathens, she remembered Berkeley later, and obtained for him the deanery of Down. But, with all her outward conformity, Caroline never understood the peculiar position of the Church of England, nor did she trouble to understand it. Once, soon after she came to England, Dr. Robinson, then Bishop of London, who was opposed to Dr. Samuel Clarke’s views, waited upon her to endeavour to explain the Church’s teaching, but he met with a repulse. Lady Cowper says: “This day the Bishop of London waited on my mistress, and desired Mrs. Howard to go into the Princess and say that he thought it was his duty to wait upon her, as he was Dean of the Chapel, to satisfy her on any doubts and scruples she might have in regard to our religion, and explain anything to her which she did not comprehend. She was a little nettled when Mrs. Howard delivered this message, and said: ‘Send him away civilly; though he is very impertinent to suppose that I, who refused to be Empress for the sake of the Protestant religion, do not understand it fully’.” Caroline’s words show how little she realised, or sympathised with, the position of the Church of England; it was to her a Protestant sect--that and nothing more. The Church of Laud, Juxon, Andrewes, Sancroft and Ken, the _via media_ between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, did not appeal to her; in fact she viewed it with dislike. She made no pretence to impartiality in her patronage, or to holding the balance even between the different parties in the Church; all her bishops were more or less of her way of thinking. She would have made Dr. Samuel Clarke Archbishop of Canterbury when Archbishop Wake died, had it not been for Bishop Gibson’s temperate remonstrance. He told her that though Clarke was “the most learned and honest man in her dominions, yet he had one difficulty--he was not a Christian”. To do Clarke justice, he never desired a bishopric, and he had doubts about the propriety of accepting one. Moreover, he preferred his unique position at the court, where he was, unofficially, the keeper of the Queen’s conscience.