He happened to They return from Grantham Market to Staunton. come in when the servants were at supper in the hall. desired him to sit down with them, which he did. When supper was ended, they desired him also to return thanks: which he did in these words. The Lord be blessed for all His gifts, Methinks a number of such worthies as these,' adds the pious Calamy,' would not much have recommended any cause in Christendom.' Mr. Ven of Otterton in Devonshire, commended by Dr. Walker as a worthy man, had a keen appetite for good liquor, and sometimes drank more than prudence allowed. But though he was now and then fined by a magistrate or reproved by his graver brethren for inebriety, he retained the respect of his political allies by the fervour with which he denounced Puritans and Parliamentarians. When Mr. Duke,' says Dr. Calamy, attended to receive the sacrament, though he was his patron, yet without any warning or exception before, Mr. Ven told him at the table, he could not administer the sacrament to a rebel; and yet his house was a garrison for the king, and he was a very pious and peaceable gentleman, that meddled little with the affairs of those times.' 6 6 Amongst wits whose humour found expression in comical exaggerations and grotesque lies, Mr. Charles Churchill, the ejected pastor of Feniton, had neither superior nor equal throughout Devonshire. He was a man,' says Calamy, of a lying tongue, that was continually talking of jocular lies, to ridicule religion and religious men. Insomuch that his own wife would say, you must not believe my husband: for he uses to tell his lies to make noblemen laugh. He was much addicted to prophane jeerings and mocking at holy things. Once when he was riding along by a Puritan's door, and found he was at family prayer, he said he prayed so heartily that he was in bodily fear his horse would have fallen down on his knees. And he was so much given to drunkenness that he had debauched the greatest part of the gentlemen and farmers in the parish, who had the greatest deliverance in the world when he was turned out, and succeeded by so excellent a person, and so good and exemplary a Christian as Mr. Hieron.' 6 Another of the eccentric persons whom Dr. Walker includes amongst his sufferers under the Puritan persecution was Lovis, the miserable vicar of Brandest on in Suffolk, who was tried for necromancy, and executed at Bury as a wizard. He had been vicar of this living fifty years,' says Dr. Walker, and was executed with about sixty more, for being a wizard, at Bury in this county. But a neighbour Justice of the Peace, and a Doctor of Divinity, who both knew him very well, altogether acquit him of that crime, as far as they could judge; and did verily believe the truth of it is, he was a contentious man, and made his parishioners very uneasy, and they were glad to take the opportunity of those wicked times and get him hanged, rather than not get rid of him; so that matter hath been represented to me. If this be the true state of the case, and the party were glad of any occasion, not only to sequester but also to hang up the clergy of the Establishment, there cannot be any question made, but that Mr. Lovis doth most justly claim a place in the list: but if any who live nearer to the place or have any other opportunities of searching to the bottom of this story than I have, can discover the contrary, I shall most gladly discard him, and readily joyn in acknowledging the justice of his sentence.' From the terms in which he conditionally acquits this luckless vicar of necromantic guilt, it is clear that the sapient author of the Sufferings of the Clergy,' writing in the last year of Queen Anne, had not relinquished belief in witchcraft and the black art. In judging the men and actions of a time when aged clergymen and senile ladies could be solemnly tried and brutally murdered by process of law for unholy dealings with Satan, it is impossible to make too much allowance for the ignorance of the period and for the immorality that usually attends gross superstition and mental blindness. Of the wide difference between the England of to-day and the England of the seventeenth century the reader must not be unmindful, when considering the faults and virtues, the merited punishments and the undeserved sufferings of the so-called 'scandalous clergy,' who for a while filled the prisons of London to overflowing, and of whose companions in misery Clarendon wrote, Not only all the prisons about London were quickly filled with persons of honour and great reputation for sobriety and integrity to their counties, but new prisons were made for their reception, and of which was a new and barbarous invention; very many persons of very good quality, both of the clergy and laity were committed to prison on board the ships of the river Thames, where they were kept under decks, and no friend suffered to come to them, by which many lost their lives." CHAPTER VI. CHURCH SERVICE UNDER ASSEMBLERS AND TRIERS. To supply the place of Convocation, an institution which had perished for the time, Parliament created the Assembly, consisting of thirty laymen and one hundred and thirty-one clerical persons,* who were invited to meet on July 1st, 1643, at Westminster, in King Henry the Seventh's Chapel, to deliberate on the religious concerns of the country, and to assist the Parliament with counsel on questions of ecclesiastical polity. Amongst the laymen summoned to this council were ten peers of great influence and character, and several commoners of brilliant parts and extraordinary learning. John Selden, the two Vanes, John Glynne, White the Centurist, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Oliver St. John, John Pym, John Maynard, and Matthew Hale, had seats in the Parliament's Convocation, which, from the time of its first meeting in 1643 till its separation in 1652, exercised a beneficial, though inadequate, influence on the religious action of the people. The Assemblers-as the members of this mushroom convocation were called-had a difficult part assigned to them in days when spiritual authorities were held in no high esteem; * Amongst these ecclesiastical persons were several staunch Royalists, some high dignitaries of the Church, and several who became bishops after the Restoration. Archbishop Usher, Bishop Prideaux, Bishop Brownrigge, Drs. Sanderson, Morley, and Hammond, were in the original list of Assemblers, or rather, of divines invited to assemble. Their first list,' says Sir John Birkenhead, was sprinkled with some names of honour (Dr. Sanderson, Dr. Morley, Dr. Hammond, &c.); but these divines were too worthy to mix with such scandalous mi. nisters, and would not assemble without the royal call. Nay, the first list had one archbishop, one bishop, and an half (Bishop Brownrigge was then but elect); but now their assembly, as philosophers think the world, consists of atoms, petty small Levites, whose parts are not discernible.' and the Cavalier satirists were never weary of ridiculing their conduct and exaggerating their dissensions. In Sir John Birkenhead's Assembly-man,' written in the year 1647, the reader may see the way in which these religious councillors were derided by the Episcopalians. That some of them were learned men and personages of the highest distinction, the author of this pungent satire could not deny; but he represents that these Assemblers of superior quality only attended the Assembly for the sake of diverting themselves with the ignorance and bad manners of the Puritan clergy, who affected the dignity of profound legislators, and far exceeded the bishops in arrogance. 'Mr. Selden,' says the pamphleteer, 'visits them, as Persians use to see wild asses fight; when the Commons have tired him with their new law, these brethren refresh him with their mad gospel. They lately were graveled betwixt Jerusalem and Jericho; they knew not the distance betwixt these two places; one cried twenty miles, another ten; it was concluded seven for this reason, "That fish was brought from Jericho to Jerusalem Market." Mr. Selden smiled, and said, "Perhaps the fish was salt fish," and so stopped their mouths." The grossness of the reverend Assembler's appetite; his meanness in feeding himself cheaply at threepenny ordinaries,† when he dined at his own cost, and gorging himself with food at tables where he was a free guest; the grotesque ways in which he clothed himself and dressed his hair; the violence and occasional *That Selden was an effective speaker in the Assembly, and sometimes worried the reverend assemblers with his superior scholarship, we know from Whitelocke, who says that he (Selden) would sometimes say, in a warm discussion on a Biblical question, Perhaps in your little pocket Bible with gilt leaves the translation may be thus: but the Greek and Hebrew signifies thus and thus !' A shilling dinner in Victorian London-such a dinner as clerks and students of narrow means get at cheap dining-rooms-is the modern equivalent of the threepenny dinner of Caroline London. The Assembler's diet,' says Sir John Birkenhead, 'is strangely different; for he dines wretchedly on dry bread at Westminster, four Assemblers for thirteen pence: but this sharpens and whets him for supper, when he feeds gratis with his city landlord, to whom he brings a huge stomach and news: for which crammed capons cram him.' Bread being the chief ingredient of the threepenny dinner, the Assemblers are described as dining on that alone; but the reader must not infer from the satire that they had no meat. Master Poorest and Master Needham, the curates of 'The Curates' Conference' (1641), dine at a threepenny ordinary, and converse about their fare |