Dot Wordsworth

Compliance

Mind Your Language on a strange metamorphosis

issue 06 May 2017

Ralph Bathurst was accused shortly after his death in 1704 of being ‘suspected of Hypocrisy and of mean Complyance’. I am not quite sure what particular hypocrisy was meant, but the accuser was Thomas Hearne, a cranky but principled antiquary in the mould of Anthony Wood. Hearne resented not being able to accept appointments such as librarian of the Bodleian because he would not take the oath to King William after he took the throne in 1689. Bathurst had felt able to accept the Deanery of Wells while retaining the presidency of Trinity College, Oxford, so he was obviously a little flexible, even if he was a great man, a co-founder of the Royal Society and, as a qualified physician, a participant in the remarkable resuscitation of Anne Greene, who had been hanged at Oxford for murdering her child.

Anyway, there is no doubt that compliance was regarded as ‘mean’ and to be found in the same neck of the woods as hypocrisy.

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