and Henry Liddon of St Paul's Cathedral travelled to Vienna and Serbia on a fact-finding tour. During a boat ride on the River Sava, then the frontier between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire, the two clergymen claimed to have seen an impaled human corpse. Though their testimony could not be independently confirmed, and was challenged by the local British Consul who suggested that the object in question might have been only a bag of beans, MacColl and Liddon used this sighting as proof of the iniquity of Turkish rule in the Balkans. This fitted in with a theme in their sermons that those in Britain (such as Gladstone's arch-opponent Benjamin Disraeli) who did not actively oppose Turkish rule were themselves guilty of its sins. In his private correspondent with Gladstone after the Bulgarian atrocities, MacColl urged the Liberal leader to denounce the Ottomans and is perhaps partly responsible for the campaigning speeches Gladstone made on the issue in the last months of 1876 and early 1877. After returning to power Gladstone rewarded MacColl with the London living of St George Botolph Lane, in 1871, and with a canonry of Ripon in 1884. The latter posting aroused the active opposition of Queen Victoria who had not forgotten or forgiven MacColl's virulent campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1876-78 after the 'Bulgarian Agitation'. The living at Ripon was practically a sinecure. MacColl maintained a large house at Kirby Overblow, south of Harrogate, and continued to devote himself to political pamphleteering and newspaper correspondence, the result of extensive European travel, a wide acquaintance with the leading personages of the day, strong views on ecclesiastical subjects from a high-church standpoint, and particularly on the politics of the Eastern Question, the uprising in Crete, then still an Ottoman province, the cause of the Armenians and Islam. Later life and death MacColl was on close terms with George I of Greece, and leaders of the Armenian movement. During the Greco-Turkish War of April 1897, he visited Athens to confer with the King, conveying the monarch's private views both to Gladstone and also to the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. In the first years of the twentieth century, he was an opponent of the Muslim spokesmen Syed Ameer Ali and Halil Hâlid. He admonished them, arguing for instance that the Ottoman Sultan was not the Caliph of all Muslims. MacColl died in London on 5 April 1907. In