Welton was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he successively graduated BA in 1692, MA in 1695 and DD in 1708.
The apostle John, depicted as a mere boy, was considered singularly like Prince James Edward, and Christ himself was identified by some with Henry Sacheverell.
[2][3] Upon the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new Hanoverian king George I in October 1714.
[1] Thereafter, he led a nonjuring congregation in Whitehall before the government raided his chapel in 1717 and requested that those assembled take the oath of abjuring the Pretender.
He went to America in 1724 where he was briefly rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, before a royal writ of January 1726 demanded that he return to England.