But even Caroline could not but respect Potter for his jealousy with regard to the worthily supplying of church benefices. Just after the Queen had congratulated him on being elected to the highest position in the Church of England, Potter called on a clerical relative, to announce to him the intention of his kinsman to confer on him a valuable living. The archbishop unfortunately found his reverend cousin busily engaged at skittles, and the prelate came upon him just as the apostolic player was aiming at the centre pin, with the remark, ‘Now for a shy at the head of the Church!’ He missed his pin, and also lost his preferment. Neither of their Majesties, however, thought Potter justified in withholding a benefice on such slight grounds of offence. Neither George nor Caroline approved of clergymen of any rank inveighing against amusements. I may cite, as a case in point, the anger with which the King, in his heart, visited Gibson, Bishop of London, for denouncing masquerades, and for getting up an episcopal address to the throne, praying ‘for the entire abolition of such pernicious diversions.’ The son of Sophia Dorothea was especially fond of masquerades, and his indignation was great at hearing them denounced by Gibson. This boldness shut the latter out from all chance of succeeding to Canterbury. Caroline looked with some favour, however, on this zealous and upright prelate; and her minister, Walpole, did nothing to obstruct the exercise of his great ecclesiastical power. ‘Gibson is a pope!’ once exclaimed one of the low church courtiers of Caroline’s coterie. ‘True!’ was Walpole’s reply, ‘and a very good pope too!’ It must be confessed, nevertheless, that the church and religion were equally in a deplorable state just previous to the demise of Caroline. That ingenious and learned Northumbrian, Edward Grey, published anonymously, the year before the Queen’s death, a work upon ‘The Miserable and Distracted State of Religion in England upon the Downfall of the Church Established.’ A work, however, published the same year, and which much more interested the Queen, was Warburton’s famous ‘Alliance between Church and State.’ This book brought again into public notice its author, that William Warburton, the son of a Newark attorney, who himself had been lawyer and usher, had denounced Pope as an incapable poet, and had sunk into temporary oblivion in his Lincolnshire rectory at Brant Broughton. But his ‘Alliance between Church and State’ brought him to the notice of Queen Caroline, to whom his book and his name were introduced by Dr. Hare, the Bishop of Chichester. Caroline liked the book and desired to see the author; but her last fatal illness was upon her before he could be introduced, and Warburton had to write many books and wait many years before he found a patron in Murray (Lord Mansfield) who could help him to preferment.