Donne's journey toward ordination as a Church of England priest in 1615 was along the route of worldly ambition. He never wanted Holy Orders. He desired power, prestige, rank, and riches. King James, who had long warned him that secular promotion was not on offer, may have been rebuking his arrogant hunger by thus mortifying him, or he may have seen in Donne the makings of the spectacular preacher he would ultimately become. Coveting a worldly glory fitted to the brilliance of his pyrotechnic skills; conscientiously aware of his unfitness for Holy Orders and perhaps secretly afraid of committing a final trespass against his Roman Catholic roots, Donne held back until well into middle age. He was almost 43 when he finally yielded. With bizarre celerity he shot up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment like a middle-aged infant prodigy, hurtling heavenwards in the pride of office with demonic energy: he was appointed Royal Chaplain almost immediately, and the disgusted University of Cambridge was forced by the King to confer upon him an honorary doctorate; in 1616 he was chosen divinity reader of Lincoln's Inn; in 1621 he was elected Dean of St Paul's, and at the time of his death was being considered for a Bishopric. Ironically, the ‘worm’ or ‘nothing’ who had solicited patronage from the great was now in a position to dispense influence and largesse; his charitable gifts were exemplary. Proud as St Paul in his status as ‘chief of sinners’ and nearly as eloquent, he discharged sermons from the pulpit at Whitehall or St Paul's in displays of oratorical thunder and lightning, ornate and Baroque in style and utterly galvanizing in the performance. Walton described the apocalyptic manner of his delivery, ‘weeping sometimes for his Auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud’ (Bald, 408). Donne saw his ordination as a coronation; from his cloud, the admonitory angel looked down with some satisfaction upon two kings humbled on their knees in God's (and Dr Donne's) presence. His subject was often himself: public self-flayings for present infirmities and past corruptions were conducted in a rhetoric which glorified through extravagant conceits what it also deplored, but could also hit the perfect note of simple admission: ‘ I impute nothing to another, that I confesse not of my selfe …’ (Sermons, iii. 182).