In 1735 a great change took place in Cork society. Hitherto, wrote John Boyle, fifth earl of Cork and Orrery, ‘we trembled at a bumper and loath’d the Glorious Memory. We were as silent and melancholy as captives and we were strangers to mirth’. But now, he went on, ‘we sing catches, read Pastor Fido and talk love.’ The change was due to the death of Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross, and the advent of his successor, Robert Clayton. Browne, according to Harris, was ‘an austere, retired and mortified man’, but Clayton was a man of the world and given to social life. Browne had written treatises against drinking in memory of the dead (his inclusion of the toast to the memory of king William in his condemnation led to his being regarded by some as a Jacobite) and against the drinking of healths: the former was a blasphemous profanation of the Lord’s Supper, and the latter a pagan custom and a cause of intemperance. Under the more relaxed rule of Clayton glasses could be raised unaccompanied by troubled consciences.