About 1676, he was sent to Paris with a state grant on the recommendation of Sir Joseph Williamson (who believed in training promising university young men for public life), and later resumed his career at Oxford.
Through his diplomacy with the corporation of Oxford, a plot of land in the High Street was leased to the college for a thousand years without charge and the first stone of a new court was laid by him on Queen Anne's birthday (6 February 1710).