Near the end of his political career, Liverpool wrote that ‘The world will at least give me credit for my ecclesiastical promotions, whatever they may say or think of me in other respects’. Gash makes a possible exception of Liverpool’s appointment of his cousin, J. B. Jenkinson, as Bishop of St David’s in 1825, but otherwise concurs with this selfassessment, writing that Liverpool was even more insistent than Pitt ‘on high standards of scholarship, impeccable moral respectability and a conscientious performance of pastoral duties’. However, Liverpool had reckoned without the determinedly churlish pen of Disraeli, who claimed in his favourite novel Tancred, published in 1847, that Liverpool ‘sought for the successors of the apostles, for the stewards of the mysteries of Sinai and Calvary, among third-rate hunters after syllables’ and thus appointed ‘mitred nullities’.