Among Mrs. Clayton’s Irish _protégés_ was Dr. Clayton, a kinsman of her husband, for whom she procured, despite the protest of the Primate of Ireland, the bishopric of Clogher. Bishop Clayton made several attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity, and once proposed in the Irish House of Lords to abolish from the prayer-book the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, in a speech of which one of his colleagues remarked, “it made his ears tingle”. Dr. Clayton was not much of a scholar, and less of a theologian, and he adapted his views to meet the approval of his patroness. The letters of this spiritual pastor to Queen Caroline’s woman of the bedchamber are models of subserviency. Once Mrs. Clayton rebuked him for a sermon he had preached on the death of Charles the First, which seemed to her to praise the King overmuch. He at once wrote to express his regret, and said he would tone it down by adding “bred up with notions of despotic government under the pernicious influence of his father”. He placed his patronage, like his opinions, at her disposal, and kept her informed of everything that went on in Ireland--acting, in fact, as a sort of spy in the court interest. His complaisance was rewarded by his patroness, who caused him to be successively advanced to the wealthier sees of Killala and Cork. Most effusive was his gratitude: “Mrs. Clayton cannot command what I will not perform,” he writes, and again: “Could you but form to yourself the image of another person endued with the same steadiness of friendship, liveliness of conversation, soundness of judgment, and a desire of making everybody happy that is about her, which all the world can see in you, but yourself, you would then pardon my forwardness in desiring to keep up a correspondence.... If I am free from any vice, I think it is that of ingratitude.”[99]