Bishop Clayton’s view of the rules that should govern ecclesiastical preferment are worth quoting. The particular candidate he was recommending was a son of the Earl of Abercorn, who had taken holy orders. “What occurs to me at present,” he writes to Mrs. Clayton, “is the consideration of ecclesiastical preferments in a political view. It has not been customary for persons either of birth or fortune, to breed up their children to the Church, by which means, when preferment in the Church is given by their Majesties, there is seldom any one obliged but the very person to whom it is given, having no relatives either in the House of Lords or Commons that are gratified or are kept in dependence thereby. The only way to remedy which is by giving extraordinary encouragements to persons of birth and interest whenever they seek for ecclesiastical preferment, which will encourage others of the same quality to come into the Church, and may thereby render ecclesiastical preferments of the same use to their Majesties as civil employments.”[100] Of the higher interests of the Church or of religion, it will be noted, this servile prelate makes no mention; but the fear of the world and the bedchamber woman was always before his eyes. Mrs. Clayton had a large number of poor and obscure relatives, many of whom benefited at the expense of the Church. One of her nieces, Dorothy Dyves, whom she had made a maid of honour to the Princess Royal, fell in love with the Princess’s young chaplain, the Reverend Charles Chevenix, who was not unmindful of the avenues to preferment thus opened to him. Mrs. Clayton at first refused her consent: she did not consider a poor chaplain good enough for her niece, but Chevenix made the following appeal to her:-- “My salary as chaplain to her Royal Highness will, I hope, be thought a reasonable earnest of some future preferment, and, could I ever be happy enough to obtain your protection, I might flatter myself that I should one day owe to your goodness what I can never expect from my own merit--such a competency of fortune as may make Miss Dyves’s choice a little less unequal. My birth, I may venture to add, is that of a gentleman. My father long served, and at last was killed, in a post where he was very well known--a post that is oftener an annual subsistence than a large provision for a family, and that small provision was unfortunately lost in the year ’20. One of my brothers is now in the army, a profession not thought below people of the first rank; another, indeed, keeps a shop, but I hope that circumstance rather deserves compassion than contempt.”[101]