This proposal will also multiply farmers, when the purchasers will have lands in their own power, to give long and easy leases to industrious husbandmen.
I have allowed some bishoprics of equal income to be of more or less value to the purchaser, according as they are circumstanced. For instance, The lands of the primacy and some other sees, are let so low, that they hardly pay a fifth penny of the real value to the bishop, and there the fines are the greater. On the contrary, the sees of Meath and Clonfert, consisting, as I am told, much of tithes, those tithes are annually let to the tenants without any fines. So the see of Dublin is said to have many fee-farms which pay no fines, and some leases for lives which pay very little, and not so soon nor so duly.
I cannot but be confident, that their Graces my Lords the Archbishops, and my Lords the Bishops will heartily join in this proposal, out of gratitude to his late and present Majesty, the best of Kings, who have bestowed such high and opulent stations, as well as in pity to this country which is now become their own; whereby they will be instrumental towards paying the nation's debts, without impoverishing themselves, enrich an hundred gentlemen, as well as free them from dependence, and thus remove that envy which is apt to fall upon their Graces and Lordships from considerable persons, whose birth and fortunes rather qualify them to be lords of manors, than servile dependants upon Churchmen however dignified or distinguished.
If I do not flatter myself, there could not be any law more popular than this; for the immediate tenants to bishops, being some of them persons of quality, and good estates, and more of them grown up to be gentlemen by the profits of these very leases, under a succession of bishops, think it a disgrace to be subject both to rents and fines, at the pleasure of their landlords. Then the bulk of the tenants, especially the dissenters, who are our loyal Protestant brethren, look upon it both as an unnatural and iniquitous thing that bishops should be owners of land at all; (wherein I beg to differ from them) being a point so contrary to the practice of the Apostles, whose successors they are deemed to be, and who although they were contented that land should be sold, for the common use of the brethren, yet would not buy it themselves, but had it laid at their feet, to be distributed to poor proselytes.