Baal's Priests

The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution

Fiona McCall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367601676
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317176497
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The English Civil War was a time of disruption, suffering and persecution for many people, not least the clergy of the established church, who found themselves ejected from their livings in increasing numbers as Parliamentarian forces extended their control across the country. Yet, historians have tended to downplay their suffering, preferring in most cases to concentrate instead upon the persecution suffered by dissenters after the Restoration. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources - most notably the remarkable set of family and parish memories collected by John Walker in the early years of the eighteenth century - this book refocuses attention on the experiences of the sequestered loyalist clergy during the turbulent years of the 1640s and 1650s. The study highlights how the experiences of the clergy can help illuminate events in wider society, whilst at the same time acknowledging the unique situation in which Church of England ministers found themselves. For although the plundering, imprisonment and personal loss of the clergy was probably indicative of the experiences of many ordinary people on middle incomes, the ever present religious dimension to the conflict ensured particular attention was paid to those holding religious office. During the war and interregnum, zealous religious reformers attacked every aspect of established religion, targeting both existing institutions and those who supported them. Clergy were ejected on an unprecedented scale, suffering much violence and persecution and branded as 'malignants' and 'baal's priests'. By re-examining their history, the book offers a balanced assessment of the persecution, challenging many preconceptions about the ejected loyalists, and providing new insights into the experiences and legacies of this influential group.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way1

Unchanging, uneventful, unheroic: the lives of the English clergy down the centuries; or so we have been lead to believe. In the chancel at Dickleburgh in Norfolk, Christopher Barnard’s monument records nothing else than that he had been rector there for 58 years.2 At Bishopstrow in Wiltshire Walter Bisse claimed a similarly uninterrupted, unnoteworthy incumbency of 47 years.3 Yet both these clergy lived through the 1640s and 1650s, experienced a country torn by civil war, and were subsequently ejected from their livings, their lives far more full of incident than their epitaphs suggest. In choosing not to elaborate on their life experiences both were conforming to conventions of reticence about the private lives of the clergy and, more importantly, of public silence about a recent conflicted past.

The urge to consign Civil War experiences to oblivion has remained strong. Historians still instinctively downplay the social effects of the English Civil War. It is still considered a relatively mild conflict, a ‘war without an enemy’ as popular histories repeatedly tell us.4 With most accounts of the wars focused around the need to explain the highly complex military and political contingencies of this period, we gain little sense of how ordinary people engaged with the conflict. Their sufferings seem barely to register in the general historical consciousness, not being perhaps considered the best subject for study when attempting in subsequent centuries to inflate ideals of English decency. For to do is to begin to question this most powerful metanarrative in English history: the vision, appealing to people of many political persuasions, of English society as fundamentally stable, subject only to the gradual upward progress of liberal reform.

It would not have been possible to propagate this metanarrative without revisionist Whig historians like John Toland, Edmund Calamy and Daniel Neal who, from the 1690s onwards, began the process of writing violent religious hatred out of mainstream histories of the Civil War and reinterpreting it as a constitutional struggle, a view that became dominant in the nineteenth century.5 In the twentieth century radical historians, led by Christopher Hill, began to challenge this, seeking to re-formulate the Civil War as a conflict with economic causes, characterised not by moderation, but as a revolution involving violence between social classes. But this classic Marxist model, being a poor fit for the available evidence, did not remain long unchallenged. Since the mid-1970s revisionist historians, led by Conrad Russell and John Morrill, have sought instead to characterise the conflict as a war of religion.

Most historians now accept religion to have a central place amongst the causes of the Civil War. What they still do not quite agree on is its degree of impact on society: whether the conflict was relatively benign, a minor aberration in an English society which was essentially stable over the longue durée, or, on the contrary, a major discontinuity in seventeenth-century English history. David Cressy sees the period 1640–42 as profoundly revolutionary, an overturning of the established structures of society and those associated with them.6 Margaret James detailed the extensive economic disruption of the 1640s and 1650s.7 Ian Roy has queried whether the conflict was perhaps more comparable to the continental wars of religion than has previously been given credence.8 Charles Carlton’s best estimate of the casualty figures suggests that this was, in terms of deaths per head of population, as Ronald Hutton states, the most profound and traumatic example of internal violence in the history of the state.9

Yet despite such challenges, as Ian Roy notes, ‘there has not been to date a major revision of the old view’. Historians still instinctively downplay Civil War disorder.10 The statistically-based histories which predominated in the latter twentieth century facilitated this. It was easy to discount Civil War casualties and damage simply by offsetting them against worse examples in other countries and centuries. But for ordinary people who lived through the English Civil Wars, such statistical comparisons were meaningless. They remembered their own experiences and, as Mark Stoyle has noted, the associated trauma stayed with them for the rest of their lives, making the war, according to Katherine Briggs, the most prominent conflict in English folk tradition.11 Some have questioned remembered accounts, arguing that their traumas were imagined, a product of anxiety and terror not actual experience, or else exaggerated in memory. But such arguments merely highlight the need for more extensive and systematic research into personal experiences of the revolution and the effects of the associated religious changes on individuals and on the social life of the parish. As Geoff Mortimer argues so eloquently, history should not just confine itself to structural questions, but should also consider the psychological impact of events on the participants in history, as feeling, acting and suffering individuals. We need to know not just what happened but what it was like to be there.12 Most accounts of the English Civil Wars, even those claiming to be ‘popular’, still draw on a very limited range of familiar gentry sources, and suffer in comparison with recent work on the Thirty Years War, for example Mortimer’s own excellent study of eyewitness accounts, and Krusenstjern’s biographical register of personal writing from the time.13

The lack of balance in existing accounts of the English Civil Wars has other dimensions. As Ronald Hutton has noted, royalists have always been the ‘poor relations’ of Civil War historiography.14 The motives and actions of those who instigated the rapid, radical, religious changes of the early 1640s continue to preoccupy historians; relatively few have tried to understand the arguments of those who opposed them.15 Histories of religion, in particular W.A. Shaw’s standard work on the English Church during this period, are often overwhelmingly based on what James Scott terms the ‘public transcripts’ of the victors, their official documentation, or published justifications of their actions.16 The activities of those in opposition, in contrast, are often ‘hidden transcripts’ to which close attention and careful analysis is required but still, regrettably, all too infrequently given. The lack of attention to royalism is partly a fault of the cause’s own making: royalists rarely wrote memoirs or spiritual diaries, and their obsession with hierarchy permeates down into secondary histories which, as Jason McElligott points out, remain unrewardingly addicted to the study of squabbling elite factions.17 Few, apart from Mark Stoyle and David Underdown, have shown much interest in the wider basis of royalist support, or the personal experiences and mentalities of those below the gentry level.18

The aim of this book is to enable a better understanding of the effect of the Civil Wars on English society, and at the same time both of royalism and of the role of religion in the conflict, via a study of the personal experiences of one significant ‘middling-sort’ group affected by the conflict, the thousands of royalist, Anglican clergy and their families ejected from their livings during and after the conflict. Although most modern historians of the seventeenth century are aware of the Anglican ejections, the subject has not been particularly well-served by secondary histories. It is often treated in a fairly summary fashion as tangential to the main issue, with analysis confined to at best a chapter or a paper. It has never been the subject of a full-length historical study. It is a principal concern of this book to challenge this assessment. Traditionalist clergy formed a significant group amongst those who supported the King’s cause and were amongst the worst affected by his eventual defeat. The scale of clerical ejections was unprecedented, even compared to the Reformation, one of the main events of the Civil War period. The seventeenth century cannot be fully comprehended without considering them. This book aims to do what secondary histories to date have conspicuously failed to do, to engage with the mentalities of those affected. To achieve this, it draws on many primary and secondary sources, but principally provides a major critical study of the substantial collection of loyalist memories contained within the Walker Archive in the Bodleian Library. By careful use of these sources, the book aims to provide a challenge both to conventional approaches to the period and our understanding of the events themselves.

A Short History of the Anglican Ejections

The history of the religion during this period is quite byzantine, so it is useful to begin with a brief outline of the main facts concerning the Anglican ejections. Between 1642 and 1660 the Church of England was profoundly transformed. Episcopacy was totally abolished, the use of the liturgy banned and successive systems of more ‘godly’ religion established. Bishop Joseph Hall vividly describes the violent popular hatred of the early 1640s towards established religion, the ‘rabble of London’ invading Parliament, crying out: ‘no Bishops, no Bishops’.19 A flood of anti-episcopal pamphlets stoked their anger: ‘There is Little Laud in Limbo, and Lambeth Fair, and Rome for a Corner’d Cap, and the Character of a Bishop’ offers a pamphlet seller in Robert Wilde’s The Benefice, written at this time.20 But if the intensity of religious discontent had risen sharply after 1640, its roots were longstanding, the tensions between its ‘puritan’ and ‘Catholic’ wings as old as the English Protestant Church i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Note on Conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Memories of Ejection
• 3 In Quiet Till the Breaking Out of the Civil Wars
• 4 Drawn Swords and Pistols Cocked: The Contingencies of War
• 5 A Long Pilgrimage of Affliction – The Sufferings of the Clergy: Rhetoric and Reality
• 6 A Hard Shift to Live: Responses to Ejection
• 7 The World’s Our Store-house Now: The Restoration of the Loyalist Clergy
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Petitions against Ministers 1640–43
• Bibliography
• Index