contemporaries, he accepted the story of the Popish Plot in 1678. Coventry several times refused the highest court appointments, and he was not included in Sir W. Temple's new-modelled council in April 1679. 1680s In the exclusion question he favoured at first a policy of limitations, and on his nephew Halifax, who on his retirement became the leader of the moderate party, he enjoined prudence and patience, and greatly regretted the violence of the opposition which eventually excited a reaction and ruined everything. He refused to stand for the new parliament, and retired to his country residence at Minster Lovell near Witney, in Oxfordshire. He died unmarried on 23 June 1686, at Somerhill near Tunbridge Wells, where he had gone to take the waters, and was buried at Penshurst, where a monument was erected to his memory at St John the Baptist, Penshurst. In his will he ordered his funeral to be at small expense, and left £2000 to the French Protestant refugees in England, besides £3000 for the liberation of captives held by the Barbary Pirates in Algiers. He had shortly before his death already paid for the liberation of sixty slaves. He was much beloved and respected in his family circle, his nephew, Henry Savile, alluding to him in affectionate terms as "our dearest uncle and incomparable friend". Assessment Writing Coventry's biography in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Philip Chesney Yorke stated that "though Sir William Coventry never filled that place in the national administration to which his merit and exceptional ability clearly entitled him, his public life together with his correspondence are sufficient to distinguish him from amongst his contemporaries as a statesman of the first rank. Lord Halifax obviously derived from his honoured mentor those principles of government which, by means of his own brilliant intellectual gifts, originality and imaginative insight, gained further force and influence. Halifax owed to him his interest in the navy and his grasp of the necessity of a country of a powerful maritime force. He drew his antagonism to France, his religious tolerance, and wider religious views but firm Protestantism doubtless from the same source. Sir William was the original Trimmer". Writing to his nephew Thomas Thynne, 1st Viscount Weymouth, while denying the authorship of The Character of a Trimmer, he says, "I have not been ashamed to own myself to be a trimmer... one who would sit upright and not