Dr. James Drake, the author of “The Memorial of the Church of England,” was a man of liberal education and of considerable attainments, which, unhappily for him, were applied to serve political rancour, instead of being confined to the medical profession, of which he was a member. Dr. Drake was a native of Cambridge, a Master of Arts in that university, and fellow both of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society. Yet he found it more profitable, notwithstanding the patronage of Sir Thomas Millington, to devote his talents to the service of booksellers, who quickly appreciated his powers of invective and ridicule. It was disappointment on not being made one of the commissioners of the sick and wounded, which induced Drake, after successive publications, to publish the “Memorial,” in conjunction with Mr. Poley, the member for Ipswich. In this production, after referring to the death of King William, Drake comments upon the “numerous, corrupt, and licentious party throughout the nation, from which the House of Commons was sometimes not free,” who might “entertain hopes, from the advantage of being at the helm, and the assistance of their rabble, to have put into practice their own schemes, and to have given us a new model of government of their own projection,” and “to have mounted their own beast, the rabble, and driven the sober part of the nation like cattle before them.” That this was no conjecture was proved, the author stated, by the conduct of the party to the Queen, towards whom, “not contented with showing her a constant neglect and slight themselves, they also instructed their whole party to treat her with disrespect and slight. They were busy to traduce her with false and scandalous aspersions; and so far they carried the affront, as to make her at one time almost the common subject of the tittle-tattle of every coffee-house and drawing-room, which they promoted with as much zeal, application, and venom, as if a bill of exclusion had been then on the anvil, and these were the introductory ceremonies.”[493]