Sir Jonathan Trelawny (1650–1721)

This 1708 portrait of Sir Jonathan Trelawny depicts the Bishop of Winchester who had been one of the Seven Bishops whose trial by James II in 1688 became a watershed moment in the Glorious Revolution. Trelawny and six other bishops refused to read James's Declaration of Indulgence from their pulpits, were arrested and tried for seditious libel, and were acquitted to the cheers of crowds across England — a verdict that demonstrated royal prerogative had constitutional limits even bishops would resist. The bishops' stand contributed directly to the crisis that brought William III to the throne. Trelawny's portrait by Kneller, painted twenty years after this defining moment, preserves the image of a man whose resistance to royal tyranny had become part of the national historical narrative, celebrated in the Cornish ballad 'And shall Trelawny die?' Kneller, as Principal Painter to successive monarchs, was the natural choice for portraits of prominent ecclesiastical and political figures. The work at Christ Church, Oxford, shows Trelawny in his episcopal robes with the composed authority of a man who had survived one of the most dangerous confrontations in English church history.

The episcopal portrait renders the Bishop-hero with the combination of ecclesiastical dignity and personal forcefulness appropriate to a man who helped change the course of English history.