His birth was mentioned by Jonathan Swift in the Letters to Stella, and his infancy is thus referred to by Richard Bentley in the dedication of his edition of Horace to Lord Oxford, on 8 December 1711: Parvulos duos ex filia nepotes, quorum alter a matre adhuc rubet.

As royal chaplain, he gained the confidence and esteem of George II, whom he attended during the German campaign of 1743, and on 7 July of that year preached the thanksgiving sermon for the victory of Dettingen before the king at Hanau.

He made no attempt to popularise the church among the Welsh-speaking population of the diocese, and publicly expressed his hope "that people would see it their best interest to enlarge their views and notions, and to unite with the rest of their fellow-subjects in language as well as in government."

As a proof of the high esteem in which he was held and of his reputation as a preacher, he was selected while archbishop-designate to preach the sermon at the coronation of George III and Queen Charlotte, on 22 September 1761.

During the life of George II, Drummond, who was a whig and an adherent of the Duke of Newcastle, exercised considerable political power, and was an influential speaker in the House of Lords.

[1][2] In 1753, when a charge was laid before the privy council against James Johnson, Bishop of Gloucester, together with Andrew Stone and William Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, of having drunk the Pretender's health, he defended his old schoolfellows with so much earnestness and eloquence that he secured their acquittal, and the proposed inquiry was negatived in the House of Lords by a large majority, George II remarking that "he was indeed a man to make a friend of."

Except when his duty as a churchman called for it, he ceased his attendance at the House of Lords, and retiring to his own private mansion of Brodsworth Hall in Yorkshire, of which we are told he 'made an elegant retreat,' he devoted himself to the vigorous oversight of his diocese and the education of his children, which he personally superintended.

In his religious views he was strongly opposed to Calvinism, and did not scruple to express freely his dislike of passages in the Articles and Homilies which appeared to favour those tenets.

He fully shared in the suspicion which in that age of formality attached to the term "enthusiasm," which he vehemently denounced, while he was equally ardent in defence of what he styled "the decent services and rational doctrines of the church of England."

Noble manners, an engaging disposition, affable and condescending address, a genial and good-humoured bearing, even if some allowance is made for partiality in description, make up an attractive portrait.

His open-handed, generous character was manifested in the splendid additions he made to the archiepiscopal palace at Bishopthorpe, where he also erected a new gateway, ornamented the chapel at great cost, and rebuilt the parish church in the taste of the day.

It deserves notice that, in an age when the fine arts suffered from prevalent neglect, the archbishop proved himself a liberal patron of English artists.

Six of the archbishop's sermons which had been printed separately at the time of their delivery were collected by his youngest son, the Revd George Hay Drummond, and published in one volume in 1803, together with a short memoir and A Letter on Theological Study.