There can be no question of the purity of Clayton’s motives, but his openly avowed adherence to the cause of the Pretender involved him in serious troubles. To say nothing of his ministerial suspension, he was, for years afterwards, the target of his townsmen’s malice. Some hated him, but others loved him; and the two united turned his life into a turmoil. Hence the following, taken from a work entitled, “Jacobite and Non-Juring Principles freely examined,” and published, in Manchester, against Dr. Deacon, by J. Owen, in 1748. Speaking of Clayton, Owen asks:— “If you are the loyal people you represent yourselves to be, whence happens it that there has been such a flush of joy, discovered by your friends, for a _little, seditious priest_, by virtue of the Act of Indemnity, escaping that justice which was upon the _wing_ to pursue him? Whence was it that the bells rang on the occasion for days together? Was it not by way of grateful _Te Deum_, for the great and undeserved deliverance? Whence was it that this,—shall I call him _Reverend_ Teacher of _Babes_,—has such numbers of his young _fry_, as I am informed he has, clad in the livery of rebellion? Is it not to convince the world that there is no heresy in Scotch plaid, when wore only as a badge of Romish superstition? It must be so, unless you can believe,—and believe it who can!—that plaid, politics, and popery are this gentleman’s aversion.” Clayton’s school has just been mentioned,—a school, perhaps, commenced in consequence of his clerical suspension.[48] His residence was in Greengate, Salford, and the present well-known Methodist Chapel, in Gravel Lane, stands on what was once his garden. Here he ably conducted his classical academy, not a few of his pupils becoming graduates at the Oxford University. Here he kept a favourite monkey which came to a cruel and untimely end; for his pupils, either in wanton mischief or temporary spite, seized poor Pug, and fastened him to a stake in the vicinity of a hive of bees; and then so exasperated the apiarian insects, that the excited and miserable monkey was literally stung to death. At Kersall Cell, the seat of the Byrom family at Manchester, there is a large original oil-painting representing the interior of Clayton’s School in Salford, and a full-length portrait of Clayton himself, dressed in a blue velvet gown, and surrounded by his scholars.