In 1657, loyalist Church of England clergyman Thomas Aylesbury, born and educated in Warwickshire but serving in Wiltshire, published A Treatise of the Confession of Sinne.¹ Although the treatise had been completed by 1639, Aylesbury added an epilogue nineteen years later recalling the soldiers in 1645 who had violently disturbed his church service, slashed the Book of Common Prayer in pieces with their swords and deprived him of his livings.² He reflected on his experience of ‘godly rule’ as a time when the clergy were ‘disesteemed’ and when

With this powerful simile, Aylesbury expressed what the political and religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s meant to him. The ‘crack’d mirror’, smashed like stained glass by puritan zealots, described the state of reformed Protestantism, ‘splintered into a plethora of rival groups, frequently locked in acrimonious competition’.⁴

This chapter examines how puritan and loyalist Warwickshire clergy around 1662 experienced, responded to and remembered the effects of ‘godly rule’ in the 1640s and 1650s and how they reacted to its overturning in the 1660s. Fiona McCall has explored the struggle of loyalist clergy and their families to suppress painful memories of harassment and ejection under ‘godly rule’, while David Appleby has examined the ‘Farewell’ sermons of ‘godly’ ministers removed in August 1662, noting their ‘sense of injured innocence’ and the emotional dislocation seen, for instance, in Richard Alleine’s stunned comment: ‘This Morning I had a Flock, and you had a Pastour: but now behold a Pastour without a Flock, a Flock without a Shepheard.’⁵ These reactions illustrate the first stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known ‘five stages of grief’ (denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance), which she sees as an ‘intense emotional response to the pain of a loss … the reflection of a connection that has been broken’. While she focused on grief after bereavement, others extended her five stages to the ‘invisible grief’ of loss suffered in often-overlooked circumstances: retirement, redundancy, physical or mental disability, marginalization and oppression, exactly the sort of grief experienced by the displaced clergy under ‘godly rule’ and in the early 1660s. It was grief resulting from loss of role, status and position in the community, financial security, home and often precious possessions.⁶

Here we explore examples of the Warwickshire clergy who exhibited not denial but Kübler-Ross’s second stage of grief, when denial turns to anger as part of the process of remembering, recollecting and reorganizing, culminating in healing and acceptance.⁷ Their memories, sometimes distorted by the ‘cracked mirror’ of religio-political belief, add much to our understanding of the influence of the 1640s and 1650s on both the loyalist and ‘puritan’ clergy during the ‘regime change’ of the early 1660s.

Warwickshire’s 192 parishes, thirty-one curacies and fifteen chapelries saw continuous military activity in the Civil Wars and were largely under parliamentarian control thereafter.⁸ It was a religiously diverse county. Eighteen of its 288 gentry families, mainly in the south and west, had Catholic heads, but it also had a strong puritan heritage. From the 1630s, inspirational puritan ministers preached and lectured weekly in the largest towns, Coventry, Warwick, Birmingham and Stratford, but puritanism, and later separatism, were also found in smaller towns and rural parishes, particularly in the north and east of the county: Richard Vines at Nuneaton, James Nalton at Rugby and Anthony Burgess at Sutton Coldfield all attracted large audiences.⁹

The clergy, as parish leaders, played a vital role after 1642 in interpreting events, inevitably revealing their own religious, political and cultural beliefs, sometimes with dangerous consequences. Scholarly consideration of the clergy between 1640 and the Restoration has focused on loyalist and puritan ejectees, concluding that ‘the majority of parish clergy were not disturbed’, but this is as untrue of Warwickshire as Pruett found it to be of Leicestershire.¹⁰ By late 1662, five-sixths of Warwickshire’s parishes and curacies had changed hands (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2) and the clergymen occupying the livings included a mixed group: ejected loyalists who had returned in 1660, intruded ‘godly’ ministers who had conformed, new loyalists who had replaced departed puritans and those who had remained throughout.

Flight and ejection, 1642–57

Ejected loyalists were not the only clergy to leave their parishes in the 1640s and 1650s. In Warwickshire, fourteen parishes were abandoned in the early war years by puritans and loyalists: the ‘godly’ Francis Roberts of Birmingham fled for his life to London, and was soon joined there by Samuel Clarke of Alcester and Anthony Burgess of Sutton Coldfield, while Simon Moore of Frankton fled to Coventry. Royalists Henry Twitchet of Stratford and Robert Kenrick of Burton Dassett and puritans James Nalton and Benjamin Lovell of Preston Bagot joined their armies. Thirty Warwickshire ministers were formally ejected from parishes scattered across the county, with some clustering around the parliamentarian garrisons of Coventry and Kenilworth where more intense scrutiny was likely.¹¹

Where a cause was specified, loyalist Warwickshire ejections were usually for ‘scandal in life and doctrine’, but ‘doctrine’ covered a variety of offences, some from years before. Thomas Lever, minister of Leamington Hastings from 1619 and Stockton from 1628, was charged in 1636 with assaulting a parishioner in church, one of several similar assaults by ministers at that time, possibly over clerical pluralism and ‘Laudian’ ceremonies inan area of growing religious radicalism in east Warwickshire.¹² In 1640, Lever ‘obstinately refused’ to sign the ‘Protestation Oath’ and, following further brawls with parishioners in Napton church, by 1645 his living was sequestered for his ‘malignancy against the Parliament’.¹³ His removal was probably due to non-puritan beliefs, pluralism and persistent anti-parliamentarian allegiance but Leamington Hastings was a rich living for Warwickshire, worth £150 to £300, and McCall has suggested that while religio-political allegiance was relevant, reformers might target higher-value livings where puritan clergy would have greatest influence.¹⁴

Moral offences, termed ‘scandal in life’, also led to sequestration. George Wilcockson was removed from Wolvey for drunkenness, and John Williams of Halford for drunkenness, swearing, neglect of his cure and promoting Sabbath sports.¹⁵ In 1655 Robert Beake, puritan mayor of Coventry, ordered ‘the outing of [Michael] Walford, minister of Wishaw, for scandal in life’, probably for drunkenness or swearing since Beake zealously punished both.¹⁶ As Bernard Capp has suggested, such moral ‘crimes’ were characteristic of defiant ‘Cavalier’ culture, provoking fierce punishment by godly parliamentarians, although exaggerated accusations of drunkenness were easily made by zealous puritans condemning moderate social drinking in the alehouse by loyalist clergy.¹⁷ Thus, there was a political element to removal for moral offences, just as there was for royalism or the seldom-mentioned rejection of puritan doctrine.

Robert Jones of Long Compton’s ejection for drunkenness masked a more significant reason for his removal: he served the parish of wealthy Catholic landowner Sir William Sheldon.¹⁸ Six more ejectees ministered in parishes where influential Catholics or notorious royalists lived. Edward Mansell, incumbent of Stoneleigh and chaplain to Lord Leigh, who hosted the king when Coventry’s gates were shut against him in 1642, was inevitably ousted when Leigh’s estates were sequestered.¹⁹ John Doughtie, pluralist minister of Lapworth, was removed in 1646 after parishioners accused him of consorting with papists, among other anti-puritan offences, despite his earlier sympathy for Calvinism.²⁰ A successful parish minister had to cultivate relationships with patrons, landowners and ‘chief inhabitants’ whatever their religio-political beliefs, and this might harm them as parliamentarian control increased in the 1640s.

In some cases, the primary cause of sequestration was personal animosity towards the clergyman, often masked by spurious allegations. George Teonge, ejected from Kimcote in Leicestershire, returned to his Wolverton rectory in Warwickshire, acquired in 1619.²¹ He was one of thirty-eight Leicestershire clergymen questioned in 1646 by the puritan county committee on accusations of ‘delinquency and scandall’. McCall has discussed Teonge’s detailed answers to sixteen accusations of ‘Laudian’ practices and royalist support initiated through the enmity of his main accuser, but Teonge was further undermined by several court cases for loan repayments, which created hostility with local puritan gentry.²² Teonge’s responses reveal the frustration of the many accused clergy who complied with Laudian directives for worship but were later forced to adopt contradictory parliamentary ones and were outmanoeuvred by hostile parishioners manipulating critical timescales.

Daniel Whitby, ejected from an Essex parish and serving in Warwickshire from 1650, published an account of his frustrated efforts to answer accusations during an interrogation following his sermon defending the Church of England liturgy.²³ The mind-games used in such interrogations were part of the sequestration process. Ejections themselves were sometimes violent and involved threat, fear and humiliation. Thomas Baker of Baxterley was absent when his wife was evicted at pistol-point and, together with the children and household goods, thrown out by local parliamentary captain and magistrate Waldive Willington, after Baker had refused for some months to leave the parsonage.²⁴ As McCall suggested, ejected ministers, as former authority figures in the parish, felt this loss of dignity, status and identity deeply. Some, like the eighty-year-old royalist Francis Holyoake, rector of Southam, met this loss with anger rather than denial, hindering sequestrators for months. So did Roger Jones of Long Compton and George Wilcockson of Wolvey until threatened with custody and loss of ‘fifths’, respectively.²⁵ This was very different from the ejections of puritan ministers on a specific date in 1662, which were tragic but predictable, and seldom life-threatening.

Contemporary clerical narratives often reveal the anger and bitterness of loss through ejection. At Exhall, John Riland recorded how soldiers ‘with Swords … brake in upon me, threw me out of my Living’ and took books and precious papers from his Oxford lodgings; George Teonge lost sermons and ‘writings’ and Baker’s wife had her first husband’s valuable library seized at pistol-point. Daniel Whitby remembered the abuse: ‘I have lived these three yeares in the ayre of Reproaches; a Popish Priest, Malignant, false-Doctrine-Preacher.’²⁶ John Allington, post-Restoration vicar of Leamington Hastings, after sequestration from a Rutland living in 1646 published an open letter justifying his loyalist beliefs to the ‘godly’ minister, Stephen Marshall, who remained, as Allington bitterly remarked, ‘a light in that very House in which I stand eclips’d’.²⁷ Such vivid memories of ejection reflect the anger, pain and the need to repeat and re-evaluate remembered events typical of the early stages of grief following a painful loss.

A network of Warwickshire gentry sheltered ejected clergymen, probably in return for spiritual guidance rooted in the Church of England liturgy, just as a Rutland gentleman supported John Allington’s Anglican services in the 1650s.²⁸ Thomas Whelpdale ‘retired’ to live with his Warwickshire relative, Sir Thomas Burdett of Bulkington. Despite Burdett’s co-operation with the godly regime as a Warwickshire JP, he appointed Whelpdale to serve Newton Regis where he was plundered and ejected for loyalty to king and Church.²⁹ Burdett’s son, Sir Francis, while Derbyshire sheriff, sheltered both Whelpdale and Thomas Baker of Baxterley, the latter also supported by royalists George Chetwynd of Grendon Hall and Mr Corbin of Polesworth.

The royalist Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle probably maintained prayer-book services, although their manor house was a parliamentary garrison until 1645. By 1648 their loyalist parson, Valentine Jackson, had moved south to Leamington Priors and was charged with using the Book of Common Prayer.³⁰ Bishop William Juxon ‘retired’ to Little Compton on the Warwickshire/Gloucestershire border but celebrated Anglican services around conservative south Warwickshire unmolested.³¹ This undercover gentry network allowed loyalist clergy to maintain Church of England worship under ‘godly rule’, just as Catholic gentry had supported priests in the early seventeenth century.

Puritan intruders in the 1640s and 1650s

‘Godly rule’ was intended to promote moral and doctrinal reform, but there is little evidence of a vigorous policy in Warwickshire despite some action against swearing and disorderly Sabbath drinking in the early 1650s. Its effectiveness is hard to assess since reforms were pursued piecemeal by ministers, patrons and army officers and, as Ann Hughes has noted, by individual justices working largely out of sessions, creating problems of implementation.³² Intruded puritan minister Simon Dingley, with parish support, suppressed six of Brinklow’s seven alehouses for causing neglect and quarrels among children and servants but the ‘godly’ intruder at Whitchurch was presented in 1654 for selling ale without a licence. Jarvis Bryan was removed from Aston after trouble with parishioners; puritan pluralist Daniel Eyre’s church service at Bishop’s Tachbrook was disturbed in 1650 and Henry Cooper, vicar of Stoneleigh from 1646, was in continuous dispute with parishioners who supported sequestered royalist Sir Edward Leigh.³³ ‘Godly rule’ was also unlikely to succeed in polarized parishes like Henley-in-Arden, where radical pastors such as shoemaker John Fawkes were prevented from preaching in 1653 by a ‘riotous assembly’ of innkeepers, and where in 1655 the JPs had to suppress maypoles ‘and other heathenish’ customs threatening law and order.³⁴ Other ‘profane and popish’ parishes like Wixford and Coughton attracted ‘godly’ reformers with a ‘missionary zeal’ to convert ungodly souls, provoking resistance from Catholic parishioners, while in 1656 puritan William Perkins established a grammar school at ‘Catholic’ Salford Priors ‘as a counterweight to anti-Puritan forces’.³⁵

Constant changes of minister thwarted attempts to promote moral reform, and encouraged parishioners’ spiritual self-reliance and dependence on more radical preachers. The high turnover of five incumbents at Leamington Hastings between 1643 and 1661 was unusual but not unique.³⁶ In 1646, the manorial lord Sir Thomas Trevor was thanked by the churchwardens for appointing John Lee as a vicar who would uphold the ‘sanctity and dignity of the ministeriall office’ after Thomas Lever’s death but Trevor was politically suspect.³⁷ Impeached in 1641 and sentenced to imprisonment in 1643 for supporting ‘ship money’, he cooperated with the parliamentary regime as principal exchequer judge but retired to his Warwickshire estate following the king’s execution.³⁸ Lee, as Trevor’s protégé, was therefore under the same parliamentary scrutiny and was ejected in 1649 for ‘malignancy’, swearing and drunkenness, cultural markers separating ‘godly’ from loyalist clergy. Lee resisted the intruder, Gilbert Walden, described by Walker as an ‘eminent independent’.³⁹ Walden was therefore forced to petition Oliver Cromwell in 1655 to confirm his position, claiming that Lee constantly challenged his right to be minister. Supported by ‘severall dissaffected Lawyers’, Lee initiated suits at Warwick assizes for arbitration against Walden, but these were ignored by Coventry’s mayor, Robert Beake.⁴⁰

Lee’s challenge brought the legal weakness of the Cromwellian regime into focus. About a sixth of Warwickshire’s parish clergy had been ejected under ‘godly rule’ by the mid-1650s and dozens of puritan ministers had been intruded, like Walden at Leamington Hastings. ‘Usurped’ authority had ousted Lee from a parish to which he had been legally appointed, so how could an intruded puritan minister exert his clerical authority or pursue godly reform when it rested on such shaky legal foundations?

The Warwickshire clergy of 1660–2

The Church of England was largely re-established by late 1662, when four distinct groups of clergy occupied Warwickshire livings: returning loyalists, conforming puritans, new loyalist recruits and those who had remained. Figure 10.2 attempts to locate these individuals in their parishes at the risk of over-simplifying complicated changes occurring over two decades. Some clergy, for example Francis Folliatt of Berkswell and Nicholas Greenhill of Whitnash, died before they could be ejected. ‘Intruders’ could be loyalist as well as puritan: Daniel Whitby, who served at Arrow on ejection from Essex, resigned and returned to Essex in 1661, while William Morris of Kenilworth and Thomas Fawcett of Aston-juxta-Birmingham were ejected from other counties and served briefly in Warwickshire before being ejected again. ‘Returners’ were loyalists who successfully re-established themselves in former parishes but some, like John Doughtie at Lapworth, were refused re-entry. Others, like Francis Holyoake of Southam, died before they could seek readmission. Sometimes rectors remained, such as Francis Bacon at Astley, while the vicar or curate departed.

‘New incumbents’ were usually, but not necessarily, loyalist: Gilbert Walden, the puritan intruder ejected for radical religious practices at Leamington Hastings, conformed at Baginton, home parish of the royalist Sir William Bromley, while William Smith, ‘intruder’ at Baddesley Clinton, moved to Marton in 1660. Conversely, ‘conforming intruders’ were usually, but not always, ‘puritans’: William Stevenage took over the vicarage of Tysoe from his father, John, who served from 1605 till his death in 1654 and had ‘articles’ brought against him in 1646.⁴¹ ‘Remainers’ were a varied group and included the ‘godly’ Thomas Pilkington of Claverdon and the fervent royalist Walwyn Clarke of Oxhill. The kaleidoscope of religious practice in 1662 indicated in Figure 10.1 was therefore even more complex than it appears, though with a general preponderance of conforming puritans in the southern and eastern hundreds of Kineton and Knightlow as opposed to the northern and western hundreds of Barlichway and Hemlingford.

More striking still is the fact that although the implementation of ‘godly rule’ and its overturning over two decades had affected the Restoration clergy in different ways, there were many similarities in their experiences and how they recorded them. Three major issues affected them all: titles to livings, clerical remuneration and, after 1662, religious separatism.

Disputed titles

The architects of the religious settlement from 1660 had to agree whether episcopally instituted clergy who had resigned, fled or been ejected should be allowed to return and replace sometimes well-established and respected intruded ministers and, where no returnee was available, whether un-episcopally ordained intruders should be allowed to stay.⁴² This affected ministers like Samuel Beresford of Aston-juxta-Birmingham, ordained bythe Wirksworth classis, William Swaine of Withybrook, ordained by John Bryan and Obadiah Grew in Coventry during the wars, and many men appointed by the Committee for Plundered Ministers (CPM) or the ‘Triers’.

Two examples illustrate how Warwickshire’s intruded ministers in the early 1660s had to work hard to retain their livings, as memories of ‘godly rule’ were used against them, just as loyalists Christopher Harvey and Walwyn Clarke, as we shall see below, struggled to stay in their parishes in the 1640s and 1650s. Puritan Richard Pyke had been appointed by Cromwell in 1656 to the rich Nuneaton vicarage from which four loyalist ministers tried to unseat him in 1660. Three of them petitioned for the king’s presentation stating Pyke was dead but Thomas Holyoake, who knew Pyke was alive, instead used loaded images of loyalist suffering to further his cause: his father (Francis of Southam) forcefully ejected from the parsonage, his mother ‘barborously beaten and wounded’ so she died, a servant killed and a valuable living lost. Holyoake secured the title but complained that Pyke refused to let him enter. He had ten witnesses swear that Pyke had ‘in the pulpit several times justified the horrid Murther of his late Majestie’ and prayed against Charles II, yet Pyke held on.⁴³ Ability to retain a living depended on local support and whether the minister’s doctrinal ‘brand’ fitted. The ‘godly’ Nuneaton ‘chief inhabitants’ did not want a loyalist parson and supported Pyke, as well as welcoming several displaced Presbyterian ministers into town following the ejections of 1662.

In Tanworth-in-Arden another intruded puritan minister, Ralph Hodges, had been approved by patron and parishioners in 1646 but was summoned before the bishop in 1663 about his ‘sins’, and in 1667 had to make excuses for using the wrong prayer book.⁴⁴ When a parishioner challenged Hodges’ title to the living he claimed his ordination papers had been lost when the bishop’s palace was ‘taken by the enemy’, an explanation that may have been true and must have been accepted since he remained till his death in 1675, though his weakened authority led to numerous tithe disputes.⁴⁵ As Ian Green has argued, it was several years before post-Restoration ecclesiastical officials, unfamiliar with men intruded by the parliamentary regime, knew from ecclesiastical visitations which ministers were true conformists and which puritan-leaning clergy, like Hodges, favoured unorthodox modes of worship and pastoral care.⁴⁶

Clerical remuneration

The second major issue facing the clergy from 1660 was income, following disruption of ecclesiastical systems under ‘godly rule’, and with damaged churches needing repair. Under the parliamentary regime, clerical income sequestered from ‘scandalous and malignant’ clergy and ‘delinquent’ lay impropriators had been used to augment poor stipends, and the end of augmentation in 1660 seriously depleted some clerical incomes. Poor rate and tax assessment was also confused. The parliamentarian regime adopted a ‘pound rent’ system, to the clergy’s disadvantage, but in 1660 this was identified with ‘godly rule’ and the justices returned to ‘yardland’ assessments, provoking many disputes between clergy and parishioners.⁴⁷ Under ‘godly rule’, the clergy had paid taxes and levies like other parishioners, but from 1660 they sought to re-establish their separation, resulting in disputes over their liability for constables’ levies and similar lay taxation.

Enclosure, changes in farming practices and land deals during the period of ‘godly rule’ had also disadvantaged the clergy. In 1661, Alderminster vicar Nathaniel Swanne complained that his predecessor ‘never took any care to defend the Rights’ of the vicarage and had allowed some compositions to be lost.⁴⁸ The Barcheston churchwardens noted ‘There was an enclosure made in the late war, to the great detriment of the church,’ and enclosures at Allesley in 1652 created disturbances.⁴⁹ A Kenilworth vicar described in 1717 how ecclesiastical income for the living had gradually diminished. The pre-Civil War manor had been largely ‘woods, parks and Chace’, but in the 1640s Cromwell’s officers had seized it, felled the woods, enclosed the land and created individual farms for profitable corn-growing, while reduced tithe-acreage left less income for successive clergymen. In 1660, one of the lessees to the impropriate tithes was a ‘Rigid Dissenter from the Church’ in what was by now a strongly non-conformist town. ‘Godly rule’ had thus ensured that tithe income remained low and control had passed to the non-conformist laity.⁵⁰

Tithes and dues were re-established as the main source of clerical income, reviving disputes which had long been a source of friction between clergy and laity. In addition, religiously radicalized parishioners such as Quakers now refused to pay, leaving hard-pressed clergy to finance expensive suits against them in the ecclesiastical courts. Cases were also fought elsewhere. John Cudworth, Kinwarton rector from 1661, initiated a chancery suit on discovering that a yardland of the rectory glebe had been lost on the death of a sequestered Catholic landowner who had taken it from Cudworth’s predecessor in return for a composition.⁵¹

Post-Restoration court cases sometimes revived memories of experiences under ‘godly rule’. In 1666, John Goodwin, rector of Morton Bagot, was accused of simony by two ‘chief inhabitants’ during several disputes over advowson rights and tithes which employed competing memories of the 1650s. Goodwin was accused of acquiring the presentation by paying for the release of the former patron from imprisonment for a debt incurred through supporting the royalist military, and he was remembered as ‘a royalist’ while his opponents were said to have appropriated the advowson and presented a ‘puritan’ to keep Goodwin out.⁵² Hostilities under the ‘godly regime’ could hardly be forgotten when post-Restoration witnesses recalled old allegiances, suitably refashioned to fit the new political order.

Religious separatism

The growth of radical religion under ‘godly rule’ and the religious separatism resulting from enforcement of the Act of Uniformity presented loyalist and puritan clergy of 1662 with their greatest challenge. Flight, ejection and changes of clergy under ‘godly rule’ had left parishes without consistent spiritual leaders. The ensuing vacuum had allowed religious extremism and clerical disrespect to flourish. Samuel Clarke, who fled from Alcester in 1643, was shocked when he returned in 1647 to learn that parishioners had moved to Warwick for safety where

Growing religious extremism affected half of Warwickshire’s ejected returners, especially those in the east and south-east where radical Protestantism had always been strong, while religious diversity and monetary disputes influenced all four groups of post-Restoration Warwickshire clergy. By tracing each of the clergy groups of 1662, puritan and royalist, we can see how they reacted in surprisingly similar ways to the effects of ‘godly rule’ as part of the healing process after a traumatic event.

Returners

Loyalist ministers ejected in the 1640s and 1650s experienced the same loss of income, role and status as their puritan fellow ejectees in 1662 but with the additional fear of interrogation, violence, imprisonment or worse at a time of military rule. Eleven of them returned triumphant but as McCall has noted, they were ‘out of touch, out of practice, old-fashioned’.⁵⁴ Bartholomew Dobson of Wellesbourne chose to remain in his second living but he was among ten Warwickshire ministers who petitioned the House of Lords for restitution of the tithes and profits from their sequestered parishes. The petitions are brief and formulaic but while emphasizing consistent loyalty to the restored monarchy, some reveal the anger of loss suppressed for some fifteen years.

Thomas Stringfield of Ashow and Edward Nicholls of Snitterfield simply recorded for how long they had been by the ‘Userped powers most illegally ejected and thrust out’. John Doughtie’s petition is more revealing.⁵⁵ His wife was repeatedly denied payment of her ‘fifths’ by the clerical intruder, the parliamentary captain Benjamin Lovell.⁵⁶ Doughtie’s angry petition demanded that his dues, with arrears, were repaid to him personally rather than to local officials named in the order. It was refused and the intruded minister, William Caudwell, remained, possibly because Doughtie had been removed on accusations of supporting ‘papists’ and denying the authority of scripture. In an area of strong Catholic and non-conformist sympathy, Restoration officials and Merton College patrons may not have been willing to risk Doughtie fomenting religious unrest.

By contrast, Joseph Crowther of Tredington’s petition unusually reflected on how his ejection affected parishioners to their ‘great discomfort … who have not had the benefitt of the Sacraments for ten years last past’. Royalist William Clerke of Brinklow recorded the precise date of his ejection in 1643 for supporting ‘his sacred Majestie’ and for supposedly exchanging intelligence with royalists, ‘to the utter undoing of himselfe, and his whole family’.⁵⁷ The focus on details and angry expressions of injustice in these brief petitions indicates the level of suppressed grief that regime change had finally allowed to surface.

However, the return of these loyalist ministers was not without difficulties. After fifteen years of puritan ministry in Brinklow, William Clerke’s return in 1660 was not universally welcomed. His churchwardens were uncooperative and in 1663 Clerke presented to the church courts the township’s leading non-conformists, who were associated with a larger meeting at Stretton-under-Fosse in Monks Kirby.⁵⁸ There the loyalist returner, William Stapleton, had been sequestered for ‘malignancy’ in 1645, his ‘godly’ replacement quickly departing and leaving an empty pulpit that was eventually occupied in 1651 by the puritan Richard Martin. The spiritual vacuum, as Clarke found at Alcester, allowed religious radicals to emerge. Local Baptists ‘violently [broke] open’ the church doors during Martin’s service while John Onely, a local radical preacher, claimed that infant baptism and Anglican ministers were unlawful and ‘that Himselfe was as much an Apostle as Paul’.⁵⁹ On Richard Martin’s ejection in 1660, William Stapleton was restored to Monks Kirby but Baptist disturbance, church non-attendance and parental refusal of child baptism continued, with Onely’s Long Lawford house becoming the local meeting place. Meanwhile, Richard Martin and two of his fellow clerical ejectees, Richard Loseby from Copston Magna and William Swaine from Withybrook, set up a Presbyterian meeting at Stretton-under-Fosse.⁶⁰

Similar non-conformist conventicles in north-east Warwickshire troubled Thomas Baker of Baxterley and Thomas Johnson, Whelpdale’s replacement at Newton Regis. Johnson’s parishioners, among whom may have been some local sectarians, presented him for being a ‘contentious and litigious person that hath very much molested [them] with continual suits’ and for not repairing the chancel.⁶¹ From the 1650s, Quaker groups emerged following George Fox’s visits to Polesworth relatives: ‘near a 100’ participants were meeting at Baddesley Ensor in 1655.⁶² Baker and Johnson repeatedly presented church non-attenders and private conventicles in the early 1660s, while in 1663 William Wragge, vicar of Polesworth, presented several parishioners, including the two churchwardens, for keeping their hats on in church during prayer time.⁶³

Another unhappy ‘returner’ was John Philpot, appointed rector of Lighthorne in 1643 by the later-sequestered royalist Sir Thomas Pope. Philpot was reportedly taken prisoner in 1644 when the royalist Compton House garrison fell to the parliamentarians. Whether he had taken refuge or was fighting for the king is unclear but surprisingly he claimed to have been ‘very serviceable to parliament’. In the 1650s, Philpot was ousted and a godly minister was admitted by the ‘Triers’ in 1658 but removed when Philpot returned in 1660.⁶⁴

Philpot had been a divisive figure under ‘godly rule’ and his return to Lighthorne resulted in a petition in 1661 to remove him. Twelve parishioners listed crimes that would appeal to the restored ecclesiastical hierarchy: induction ‘by a troope of souldiers’, parliamentary allegiance, war crimes including rape and scandalous living, and harassment of parishioners with continuous suits and ruin, quarrelling, drunkenness and allowing the chancel ‘to lye like a Pidgeon house’.⁶⁵ Philpot retaliated by presenting six parishioners in the church courts between 1662 and 1664 for tithe-refusal.⁶⁶ The churchwarden, a tithe-refuser, and his wife were accused by Philpot of church non-attendance and attending religious meetings elsewhere. In defence they said Philpot was ‘contentious’ and not ‘a fit person to administer the sacrament unto them’. They admitted they had heard preaching by ‘Mr [Richard] Mansall’, a former parliamentary officer and last in a succession of intruded puritan ministers at nearby Burton Dassett, who joined other post-Restoration ejectees to lead a meeting attracting eighty to 100 separatist followers.⁶⁷

Ejections of puritan clergy between 1660 and August 1662 and attempts to suppress reformed Protestant worship through the Act of Uniformity simply created a body of displaced ministers available to serve parishioners who preferred the religious practices of the 1650s. Just as ejected loyalist clergy like Baker and Whelpdale had been sheltered by gentry sympathizers in the 1640s, now ejected non-conformist ministers were supported by the Stanhopes, Newdigates and Nethersoles in north Warwickshire, the Temples in the south-east, and the ‘chief inhabitants’ of Coventry, Birmingham and Nuneaton, creating new problems for loyalist clergy returning to a spiritual world distorted by the ‘crack’d mirror’ of religious orthodoxy.

Remainers

Thirty-seven loyalist and puritan clergy remained in their parishes between 1642 and the early 1660s, all experiencing anger and disappointment: for loyalists, at the suppression of the Church of England, and for puritans at the Restoration, because of their dashed hopes for a reformed Protestant Church. Historians have tended to view ‘remainers’ as untouched by ‘godly rule’; indeed, the puritan Thomas Pilkington of Claverdon was said to have led ‘the uneventful life of the country parson’.⁶⁸ This was impossible since in war-torn Warwickshire ‘remainers’ often suffered as much as loyalist ejectees. ‘Articles’ were brought against them entailing detailed interrogation, while parliamentary officers plundered and targeted them for free quarter. One clerical wife was ‘glad to see the sequestration’ with its award of ‘fifths’, after her husband had been twice imprisoned leaving her with only £10 a year to maintain her family.⁶⁹

Sometimes loyalist clergymen surprisingly retained their livings. Christopher Harvey, vicar of Clifton-on-Dunsmore, and Walwyn Clarke of Oxhill both escaped ejection. In the 1640s, Harvey had published devotional poems, expressed ‘sundry doubts’ about signing the Protestation Oath and written a treatise against rebellion. His loyalist views must have been known, resulting in articles against him, crippling taxation and heavy plundering by parliamentarians during the war.⁷⁰ He responded by publishing new poems defending church festivals and utensils, but remained at Clifton until his death in 1663 through a combination of a ‘godly’ upbringing, royalist and puritan gentry protection and the sheer disinclination of the parliamentary regime to remove what Judith Maltby calls disgruntled but diligent ministers who were ‘not quite dangerous enough’.⁷¹

Walwyn Clarke, rector of Oxhill, an ‘outspoken royalist … harassed by parliamentary soldiers for his frequent insults’, was a more surprising survivor. He had articles brought against him in 1646 and was heavily taxed and plundered, but again remained through powerful local support from the initially neutral Underhills.⁷² Puritan ‘remainers’ were probably largely unmolested, but loyalists often experienced great pressure, surviving through local circumstances particularly where lower-value livings were less attractive to puritan intruders.⁷³

Puritan intruders who conformed

Considerable attention has been paid to the hundreds of clergy nationally who lost their livings through ejection or resignation by August 1662, but far less to the puritan intruders who to some extent conformed, as some of their loyalist counterparts had done with the ‘godly regime’. In Warwickshire, over fifty-five ‘puritans’ supposedly conformed, though sometimes with difficulty.⁷⁴ Richard Pyke at Nuneaton was vulnerable due to his appointment by Cromwell. He was in bitter conflict with royalist schoolmaster William Trevis, who was ejected from his Cambridge fellowship and arrived in Nuneaton, like Pyke, in 1656. In 1662 and 1665, Trevis was accused of drunkenness and brutal treatment of his pupils, causing riots and sit-ins at the school, while townsfolk attacked him and his house with firearms.⁷⁵ Pyke publicly declared his hatred of Trevis, probably for exaggerating Pyke’s parliamentarian past, but Trevis survived because local JPs and the bishop needed some royalist balance in ‘puritan’ Nuneaton to preserve order.

Moderate puritan conformists like Pyke were vilified by victorious royalists for responsibility for civil war and regicide. By contrast, William Caudwell, the intruder at Lapworth, was accused by ‘godly’ parishioners of not being puritan enough. In 1664/5 Caudwell was summoned for ‘correction’ at the church court, accused of adultery by Alexander Lilly and two young Lapworth wives.⁷⁶ One witness, John Price, claimed Caudwell frequented alehouses, held unseemly meetings and caused ‘much discord and Dissenssion’ between marital partners. Another, a tithe-refuser, added that Caudwell frequented cockfights, and hinted at his bribery of witnesses. Nevertheless, some parishioners supported Caudwell as sober, honest and chaste. In 1665 Caudwell accused Price as a drunkard, swearer and blasphemer who had paid the two women to lie in order to discredit him. He described Lilly as ‘an hater of Episcopal government’, who had not received the sacrament for seven years, ‘and is at enmity and hateth the sd Mr Caudwell … because he conformeth to the government of the Church … and [wants] to be revenged of him for that and for his sueing him for his just debts’.⁷⁷ These depositions reveal Caudwell’s guilt at betraying the ‘godly’ cause by conforming and his understanding of how his ‘godly’ parishioners blamed him for co-operating with the restored but unreformed Church.

Puritan ministers intruded into ‘Catholic’ parishes faced different problems. Timothy Kirke had arrived in the parishes of Exhall and Wixford in the late 1650s from Leicestershire where he had been curate to the ‘notable puritan’ Richard Clayton, an associate of James Nalton of Rugby. In late 1660 an attempt was made to oust him, accusing Kirke of fighting for parliament against the king. Local JPs investigated but disproved the allegations, praising Kirke for his ‘godly’ ministry and preaching. By October 1661, Kirke had subscribed to the Articles and promised obedience to the Church of England but rather than accommodating his largely Catholic Wixford parishioners, by the mid-1660s Kirke was accusing them of ‘popish’ behaviour in church, recusancy, not paying church fees and unproven marriages. This culminated in serious accusations and violence against Kirke as his relationship with his parishioners broke down entirely.⁷⁸ He probably remained because he was useful to local officials in suppressing Catholic hopes of religious freedom amid fears they might provoke nationwide disorder. Thus conforming puritans, like returning loyalists, faced many difficulties at the Restoration arising from memories of the 1640s and 1650s. Past allegiances and distortions of the ‘crack’d mirror’ of religion created social and spiritual fragmentation in communities which continued to be deeply divided by successive changes of regime.

Ejected puritans and ‘new loyalists’, 1660–2

Ann Hughes calculated that thirty-three Warwickshire clergy and three lecturers and schoolmasters lost their places under the Act of Uniformity in 1662.⁷⁹ The removal of Gilbert Walden of Leamington Hastings and John Humphrey of Coughton illustrates how loyalists used the distortions of the ‘crack’d mirror’ to attack puritan intruders. As we have seen, John Lee disputed Walden’s right to the Leamington Hastings vicarage but died in 1659. Walden expected to remain as vicar, but Sir Thomas Trevor’s son, who succeeded on his father’s death in 1656, instead presented Tristram Sugge to the living, while in July 1660 twenty-three Leamington inhabitants petitioned for Walden’s removal. They listed fourteen grievances in a reversal of the religio-political accusations made against loyalist clergymen like Daniel Whitby and George Teonge in the 1640s.⁸⁰

Walden was accused of bringing parliamentary troops to terrorize loyalists into providing free quarter and paying exorbitant taxes, reviving wartime memories even though Walden had not arrived until 1650. He was also accused of persuading some parishioners, ‘moste woemen & servants to become Members of a particular congregacion’, and refusing others communion, child baptism, visiting the sick and burial. Leamington’s petitioners, like Teonge’s Kimcote parishioners in the 1640s, distorted historical time and selected anti-puritan experiences to create a shared ‘social memory’ of their past under ‘godly rule’ representing Gilbert Walden, instead of the ejected Thomas Lever, as the ‘malignant’ minister.⁸¹

John Humphrey arrived in the Throckmortons’ ‘Catholic’ parish of Coughton in 1659 or 1660, claiming to have been ordained by the bishop.⁸² However, in May 1661 he appeared for ‘correction’ before the newly revived church court, accused by the two churchwardens of a curious mix of ‘Laudian’ and ‘puritan’ offences against the restored Church. These included defaming ‘the Liturgie and government’ of the Church, vilifying holy scripture, encouraging work, dancing and sports on the Sabbath, sex and drinking offences and calling his Coughton parishioners ‘a companie of illiterate Ideotts, Atheists and ungodly persons’.⁸³ The allegations against Humphrey, like those against Teonge and Walden, manipulated timeframes during a period of regime change. Humphrey allegedly said, presumably early in 1660, that the Church of England had been ‘torne in peices by heresys and scismes, & was but in a halting and lame condition haveing neither head, nor eyes, neither King, nor Bishops to defend & direct it’, which was true, as he maintained, ‘at that time’. When he was accused a year later, the Church of England was being reinstated and he could legitimately be challenged for defaming it, despite describing himself as an ‘orthodox Divine’. As Ian Green suggests, until the Act of Uniformity was passed in May 1662, there was no clear definition of what orthodoxy actually was.⁸⁴ Humphrey was in the unenviable position of arriving in Coughton when the Church of England was in a state of flux, leaving him unable to establish his authority and vulnerable to attack from several quarters because of uncertainty as the religious settlement unfolded.

As the non-conforming clergy left their parishes in 1662, new loyalists were appointed to replace them but often experienced great difficulty where puritanism had flourished under ‘godly rule’. In 1665, the Kenilworth churchwardens undermined the new minister James Chapman’s authority by employing William Maddocks, the ejected pastor, as a preacher.⁸⁵ At Burton Dassett, the former parish ‘register’ who supported the ejected non-conformist Richard Mansell, refused to relinquish the parish register to the new incumbent until December 1665.⁸⁶ At Alcester, Henry Teonge, son of George of Wolverton and Kimcote, replaced the ejected puritan pastor Samuel Ticknor in 1662, yet Ticknor remained in Alcester as ‘godly’ pastor of a large Presbyterian congregation, many of them affluent tradesmen. Teonge, like his father, had initially been a faithful puritan, but as an intruded loyalist in a town with a strong puritan heritage, comparisons with Ticknor were inevitable and allegations were made of Teonge’s pastoral neglect, ungodly drinking and oath-swearing. One witness had not been to church since Teonge arrived, claiming that ‘if there were a man of a good life and conversation and a laborious man’ as minister [meaning Ticknor] he would attend constantly.⁸⁷ The strength of local puritanism ensured that Ticknor was the suffering minister while Teonge was forced into the role of scandalous ‘Cavalier’, suggesting obvious similarities with loyalist ejections under ‘godly rule’.

The mirrors of memory

The ‘Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’ of August 1660 was intended to ‘bury all Seeds of future Discords and remembrance’ nationally, but for many clergy (and indeed laity) this was neither possible nor desirable. At the local level, it offered a chance for the cathartic release of emotions and the re-evaluation of the memories of ‘godly rule’. By examining the written forms in which loyalist and puritan clergy recorded their painful memories we can see how widely emotions of suffering and loss impinged on post-Restoration politico-religious concerns.

An early opportunity to record painful events was in the ‘Accounts’ demanded for each parish in 1646/7 by the victorious parliamentary regime, anxious to acknowledge losses incurred through its military activity in the First Civil War.⁸⁸ Royalist Francis Holyoake recorded angrily in the Southam account: ‘noe notice taken of the number of soldiers and their horses which have bin quartered with me at severall tymes. And I never received a penny for any quarter … besides divers other things plundered at severall times by souldiers’. Walwyn Clarke, ultra-loyalist rector of Oxhill from 1643, was also heavily penalized, recording over £56 in ‘Contribution’, the quartering of thirty-five Warwick soldiers one night and the fact that he sent his carts and labourers to work on parliamentary fortifications for a regime he fiercely opposed.⁸⁹

The clergy also used parish registers, the repositories of communal memory, to create permanent memorials of personal experiences and emotions under the ‘godly regime’. In the Southam register, Holyoake recorded the burial of a soldier on 23 August 1642 after a ‘Battle fought Betweene the Lord Brooke & the Earle of Northampton’, while the allegiance of the Warmington scribe is evident from his record of ‘Edgehill fight’ between ‘our Sovereigne Lord King Charles and Thearle of Essex’ and the subsequent burial of soldiers in the churchyard and fields.⁹⁰ After the death of the Avon Dassett rector, Francis Staunton, in 1669, his son recorded his father’s sufferings ‘per multas tribulationes et perturbationes’ since his arrival in 1629. They were unspecified, but other records reveal Staunton’s losses through military activity and poor-levy disputes with parishioners in the 1660s.⁹¹

Moderate puritan Thomas Pilkington of Claverdon used his register like a personal notebook, writing Latin epitaphs on deceased parishioners. One man moved to the next village during the war and was ‘infected with heresies’, never attending church services thereafter. Pilkington copied out a 1653 Warwickshire petition to parliament concerning ‘poisonous defamacions’ against faithful ministers. He recorded Charles II’s Restoration after Monck’s success in ‘[breaking] in peices the fanatic Army and powers then ruling … unjustly’, and carefully recorded confirmation of his title to the living in 1664.⁹² Ejected loyalist John Wiseman, minister of Rowington, recorded angrily in the register that he was ‘By usurped Authority these many years wrested wrongfully out of my Living’.⁹³ Thus, registers could be used by the clergy to record facts and events under parliamentary rule and to express inner feelings in a semi-public format as a historical memorial for themselves and their communities.

Similar narratives and emotions surface occasionally in clerical wills. Puritan minister Josiah Slader senior, lecturer at Birmingham from 1623 to 1636, and subsequently minister at Broughton, Oxfordshire, from where he fled in 1642, used his will to record his removal from nine successive parishes from which ‘the Bishops drove me (except the last) which the Cavaliers did’.⁹⁴ The will of John Batty minister of Warmington recalled his wartime experiences in a parish that saw much military activity when ‘god of his mercy reserved me from the violence of souldiers’.⁹⁵ He also complained of a debt owed by ‘Mr Richard Wootton’, described by the CPM as a ‘plundered minister driven from Warmington’, but by Hughes as a parliamentary officer and ‘unsavoury cleric’ denounced by parishioners in 1647.⁹⁶

While wills rarely recorded experiences of war and ‘godly rule’, church court records frequently did so, even years after the event, as we saw in John Goodwin’s dispute at Morton Bagot. In Alderminster, churchwarden Nicholas Milward’s complaints in the Court of Arches in 1666 against the vicar were a curious mixture of Nathaniel Swanne’s alleged ‘Cavalier’ behaviour (drinking, playing sports, pastoral neglect) and puritan disrespect for church utensils and the altar, plus his military activity for parliament as ‘a Captaine against the Kinge under the pretended government’.⁹⁷ Milward emphasized Swanne’s disloyalty in order to discredit him in an example of what Matthew Neufeld suggested were ‘war stories … not so much about re-fighting the Civil Wars as engaging with the political framework constructed by the Restoration regime’.⁹⁸

The secular courts, and particularly Chancery court cases, of the 1650s and 1660s are another rich source of clerical accounts of experiences under ‘godly rule’, since the clergy suffered heavy financial losses but often had the means to litigate. Narratives might be presented in great detail, suggesting the constant retelling that Kübler-Ross has shown is part of healing after trauma.⁹⁹ When George Teonge of Kimcote was threatened with violence in a suit for outlawry in the 1650s, he recorded that he was ‘out of favour of the tymes’, ‘driven away’ by violence for loyalty to the king, ‘plundered of his goods’, and his wife and children ‘thrust out’. It is a detailed narrative full of anger and indignation as he relived his suffering at the time of loss.¹⁰⁰

Numerous published accounts of painful experiences under the parliamentary regime were produced by Warwickshire clergy. Some appeared soon after the event, like John Doughtie’s The King’s Cause of 1644, with its angry complaint about ‘a Warre continued, a cruell bloody Warre … against … a good and peaceful King’. Daniel Whitby’s Vindication and John Allington’s Brief Apologie were passionate defences of their religious positions. Allington’s painful memories of ‘godly rule’ still festered thirty years later when he delivered a Coventry visitation sermon, bitterly critical of those ‘who make an huge scruple of any Recreation upon the Lord’s day, who … made none at all of Rebellion, Schism, Sedition, Heresy’ and who ‘boggle at a Surplice, who made nothing of Plundering, Killing, and Cutting of Throats!’¹⁰¹

Appleby has shown how the sermons of puritan clergy ejected in 1662, as ‘godly rule’ was finally overturned, were published for political ends and often employed military metaphors to recall civil-war memories. However,similar military metaphors had been used to recall puritan clerical suffering in publications since the 1640s.¹⁰² James Nalton of Rugby wrote of faith as ‘a Fort or Castle’, besieged and ‘assaulted with batteries and onsets’, reflecting his parliamentary army service in 1643. Puritan minister Francis Roberts fled battle-torn Birmingham in 1643 and wrote in 1648 of ‘these crazy times’ when ‘Lives, Liberties, Health … are in such extremity of extraordinary uncertainties’, while Samuel Clarke’s 1654 sermon at the Feast for Warwickshire gentlemen recalled the ‘many Widdowes, and Orphans of godly Ministers … whose husbands, and Parents have been ruined, and undone in the late plundering times’, particularly in Warwickshire.¹⁰³

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that Thomas Aylesbury’s ‘mirror of religion’, cracked by civil war and ‘godly rule’, both reflected and distorted the suffering of puritan and loyalist clergy in Warwickshire. Their experiences were surprisingly similar: puritans who attempted to bring ‘godly rule’ to a sinful nation were abused at Wixford, Stoneleigh and Leamington Hastings, while Aylesbury’s ‘multiplied images’ of heresy described the radical groups disturbing ‘godly’ ministers at Monks Kirby and Bishop’s Tachbrook. The legacy of ‘godly rule’ perpetuated this disruption beyond 1662, after hopes of ‘godly reformation’ under a unified national Church were shattered, undermining the ministry of loyalist clergy in parishes like Brinklow and Alcester for decades to come. While some ministers exhibited what McCall has called the ‘conventions of reticence’ in their suffering under ‘godly rule’, this chapter has shown that, by contrast, other clergymen experienced Kübler-Ross’s ‘second stage’ of grief, recalling their loss of role, status and livelihood with emotions of anger, bitterness and a sense of injustice as religion’s mirror, cracked and distorted by twenty years of political upheaval, now reflected ‘multiplied images’ of spiritual orthodoxy in a changed religious world.¹⁰⁴

M. Harris, ‘“A crack’d mirror”: reflections on ‘godly rule’ in Warwickshire in 1662’, in Church and people in interregnum Britain, ed. F. McCall (London, 2021), pp. 245–271. License: CC BY-NC-ND.