Introduction

The upheavals of the Civil Wars and interregnum were cataclysmic for lay people whose lives and fortunes were laid on the line for either the king or parliament. Many otherwise obscure clergy also found their lives, Church and ministry turned upside down, as did the bishops whose offices were abolished. Although a number of scholarly works have done much to illuminate the lives of the non-elite and non-radical laity from 1642 to 1660, there is still much to discover about the response of the moderate and episcopalian clergy to the changes they faced.¹ And face them they did: the Civil Wars had profound consequences for Church organization, doctrine, liturgy and the exercise of a pastoral ministry. While the numbers and patterns of sequestered clergy are still under discussion, the activities of a large body of educated and locally influential episcopalian clergymen who were fundamentally opposed to the post-1646 regimes have been largely overlooked.² These activities were a real concern for the regimes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and efforts to control or limit the influence of oppositional clergy were fruitless.

The sufferings of the episcopalian clergy have been variously represented in existing historiography. Some have underplayed the physical deprivations of ejected clergy. Others have highlighted the violence and poverty that ordinary clerics (and their families) faced if they did not conform.³ The picture is clearly varied. On the other hand, the spiritual deprivations of ejected or even reluctantly conformist clergy have been greatly neglected. Despite contemporary descriptions of fears concerning loss of vocation, the state of their parishioners’ souls and the potential for a wrathful divine response to religious changes, this aspect has gone comparatively unnoticed. The almost entirely secular modern Western world finds spiritual deprivation more alien than other forms of suffering, and the interdisciplinary nature of such research more challenging. To ignore it entirely, however, neglects a key aspect of episcopalian clerical determination to resist the religious mores of the 1650s. This chapter will explore spiritual suffering and resistance, examining in particular the experience of clergy in Wales. Studies of royalism, though they in no way rival the amount of research on radicalism and parliamentarianism, have now uncovered significant aspects of the political ideas and experience of the king’s supporters from 1642.⁴ Research on royalist and episcopalian clergy is less well developed but engages with key themes such as sequestration, identity, conformity and exile.⁵ Wales has often taken a back seat in such studies. The work of Philip Jenkins in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated what could be done with the fertile records of royalism and episcopalianism in South Wales.⁶ Lloyd Bowen has uncovered fascinating insights into religion immediately prior to 1642, as well as the role of the clergy in royalist print and sedition.⁷ Yet as both Jenkins and Bowen have commented, Wales was home to an intricately connected and deep-rooted royalist and episcopalian community in the mid seventeenth century. It was a refuge for exiled English clergy, and saw a remarkable flourishing of anti-regime and anti-puritan writings. This makes Wales an important regional case study for the examination of opposition in the 1640s and 1650s. Clearly there were parliamentarian supporters, radical sects and a huge amount of conformity with interregnum regimes. But behind this the oppositional milieu is extremely easy to find in diaries, notebooks, sermons, manuscript ballads and printed pamphlets; in English and Welsh; in North and South Wales. Welsh episcopalian clergy comforted themselves and each other, opposed ‘innovations’ in Church and state, maintained the moral and practices of the Church of England, and encouraged opposition. They did this in oral and written forms. Their words form the basis of this chapter.

Recent scholarship has discussed seditious, oppositional or controversial words during the 1640s and 1650s. Lay and ecclesiastical writers worried about the changing meanings of words and their shifting nature. They saw linguistic instability as a way to explain a deeply unstable political and religious climate, while using rhetorical devices to express binary oppositions and encode their enemy as unnatural or monstrous.⁸ References to instability, fear and the consequences of improper or unusual sexual or political behaviour litter the works and reported words of many different groups in the interregnum.⁹ The lay religious writer and erstwhile parliamentarian John Lewis of Llanbadarn Fawr, for example, wrote in 1658 of how the spirit of discord ‘chiefly lurks in meer words’.¹⁰ He suggested that preachers prescribe for the common people ‘sober Rules for reading the Scriptures’ as otherwise they tended to ‘prefer their own fancy before the soundest Interpretations, hence, and the like, the strange opinions, and crased extravagancies of many in these times (as those we call Quakers, and others deluded, but happly well-meaning souls)’.¹¹

Welsh clergymen contributed to these discussions publicly, in sermons, pamphlets and comments in parish registers, and more privately in their own notebooks, written accounts and testaments. These texts had a variety of purposes.¹² Some appear to have been written to vent private frustration or to note strange events, others to engage in contemporary politico-religious controversies. The latter argued against both Roman Catholics and sectaries, and aimed to sustain the morale and loyalty of royalists and episcopalians. Disaffected clergymen, whether conformist or ejected episcopalians, certainly remained a distinct source of worry for the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes. Bowen labelled them ‘important disseminators of anti-Republican speech’, and pointed to the bills of June 1649 and March 1650 intended to further control ministers’ seditious speech as evidence of the regimes’ concerns.¹³ There is not room in this chapter to cover in depth all elements of episcopalian writings, so the discussion here will focus on four principal themes: a wicked and unnatural political and religious situation; a distinct sense of divine providence operating in a fallen world; a community of righteous sufferers; and the need to defend the Church, its doctrines and its validity.

Civil War context, 1641–7

Episcopalianism has been described as the ‘ideological cement’ of royalism, and if for some royalists that was the case, the clergy were the skilled craftsmen who employed it.¹⁴ From the beginning of the Long parliament and the first trumpets of ‘paper war’ between king and parliament, the episcopalian clergy acted as intermediaries between the king and his people. Clergymen were at the heart of the intensive circulation and promotion of conservative pro-episcopacy petitions in 1641 in what Ronald Hutton termed ‘the most efficient mass-media system of the age’.¹⁵ John Walter has described the way that such petitions were ‘published’ from the pulpit as well as the quarter sessions and assizes in England, while David Zaret has discussed the support of petitions with sermons and hectoring by clergy of all stripes.¹⁶ The correspondence of Dr David Lloyd, warden of Ruthin, and the North-East Welsh royalist commander Sir Thomas Salusbury demonstrates the organizational involvement of the clergy. Lloyd wrote that he had sent Salusbury:

It is not unreasonable to speculate that Lloyd had ‘published’ the petition in the parish churches mentioned, confirming that practice in Wales operated similarly to that in England. Clergymen read the King’s Declaration of June 1642 in their parish churches, and aided in the circulation of official royalist print in what Lloyd Bowen has called a ‘ready-made state information system’.¹⁸ Parish churches were also the venue for the administration of the royalist ‘Protestation and Oath’, initially administered in July and August 1642, probably as a rival to the parliamentarian ‘Protestation’ of 1641 and 1642.¹⁹ The royalist oath, locally tailored to include the names of prominent parliamentarians, was especially effective in north-east Wales, and prevented Sir Thomas Myddelton from raising a parliamentarian regiment (even from his own tenants) within Wales itself.²⁰ One anonymous field report stated that ‘I knowe none, nether have hard of any that have nott taken a solemne vowe and oath against all that shall stand up for the parliament’, describing the ‘common sort’ as instinctively royalist and episcopalian ‘as for there Religion; they cry God and [the] king; and will nott heere of any other way of salvation’.²¹ Myddelton’s declaration against the oath described a ‘Councell of War’ held at Shrewsbury, in which it was agreed that Commissioners of Array would distribute the royalist protestation to be printed and ‘to be by them sent to the clergy, and by them taken, and by them to be tendered to all Parishioners of the age of sixteen yeares and upwards, and to take the names of all who shall take the same, and of them who refuse, to be severally and distinctly returned’ to the local authorities.²²

If this is an accurate recounting of the procedure of the royalist oath, the parish clergy played a vital role in preventing the parliamentarian cause from gaining a foothold in North Wales. They were, as Lloyd Bowen has observed, ‘voices of religious and social order’ at a time when the social and political order was threatened.²³ They were trusted intermediaries who formed, for the illiterate, a bridge between the printed word of the king and his people. From 1641 a system, perhaps initially informally established, spreading the king’s proclamations via parish churches and their clergy, became a vital aspect of the royalists’ communications. Subsequent warrants, proclamations and orders were distributed via local officers but also the clergy.²⁴ This included one commanding the inhabitants of parishes in Flintshire to arm themselves and muster against ‘rebellious Assemblies and other open acts of hostility’ near Chester, which commanded ‘everie Minister in each parish Church to publishe the whole cause aforesaid and Contents of this our warrant in the vulgar languadge giveing their best exhortations to their parishioners of their forward obedience hereunto’.²⁵ Sir Thomas Myddelton’s officers, petitioning parliament for his exemption from the Self-Denying Ordinance of 1645, argued that the people of North Wales were ‘seduced by the universal dissension of the ministers, there being not (that we can learn) in all the six counties two beneficed ministers that have shewed any affection to the present church reformation or readiness to enter into the National Covenant’.²⁶ As bilingual intermediaries between the king and the monoglot Welsh people, resident in their parishes and familiar with their region, the clergy were ideally placed to exhort their parishioners to support the royalist cause.²⁷

Given the wrathful printed response to this oath by Myddelton and in parliament, and its success in terms of royalist recruitment, it is perhaps no wonder that ‘delinquent’ clergymen throughout Wales were ejected and sequestered after the end of the First Civil War partly on the basis of their tendering of the oath and other royalist proclamations. Eubule Lewis, rector of Newtown in Montgomeryshire, for example, was charged in 1647 with having published ‘Capells oath, urdgeing the necessity of engaging therein, for the defence of the Kinge and parishioners owne right, and requiring the parishioners presence at the alter to effect the same’.²⁸ Chaplains within royalist garrisons, clerics who fought for the king and those preaching in his favour were similarly ejected and reviled. Walter Harris of Wolves Newton in Monmouthshire was ejected for ‘setting forth a soldier in the late tyrants war against the Parliament’, Thomas Vaughan of Llansantffraid (brother of the poet Henry Vaughan) for being ‘in armes personally against the Parliament’, and Jacob Wood of Crickadarn for ‘assisting the King in the late Warrs, praying for his successe in publick’. Many others were accused of enmity towards parliament, malignancy and assisting the king in more general ways.²⁹ There were certainly sufficient clergymen in the king’s garrisons at the end of the First Civil War to make them a suspect group. Surviving articles of surrender, such as those of Denbigh and Harlech from 1647, demonstrate that there were enough clergymen in garrisons for them to be discussed as a category in their own right. The Denbigh Articles, for example, stipulated that ‘the clergymen now in the garrison who shall not uppon composition or otherwise be restored to the Church livinges, shall have liberty and passes to go to London to obtayne some fittinge allowance, for the livelihoode of themselves and families’.³⁰ Though detailed records of royalist chaplains are extremely sparse, and no attempt has yet been made to reconstruct the chaplaincy in any detail, it is clear from lists of prisoners and petitions for relief that Welsh clergy were among their number.³¹

Despite the ejections of 1646 and early 1647, this kind of assistance apparently persisted through the Second Civil War. An army ‘charge’ of 6 July 1647 accused two Welsh Presbyterian MPs (among other, more politically significant charges) of having spared Welsh episcopalian clergy from their deserved fate:

The episcopalian clergy were at the heart of the rebellion, and at the sides of the royalist gentry and people of the region. Their words, whether spoken or written, persuaded and encouraged royalists of different social and economic groupings. With this context in mind, and the image of the episcopalian clergy as politically subversive enemies to the government, it is no wonder that they were viewed with suspicion throughout the interregnum. They were seen as ‘persuading the people for the King’, and their potential to carry on doing that was clear.³³

Political words

The Welsh clergy did indeed carry on ‘persuading the people’. Rowan Williams has written of Henry Vaughan that he attempted in the 1650s to create a ‘Church of words’ to substitute for the destroyed or subverted Church of England.³⁴ The episcopalian clergy built their own ‘Church of words’ to sustain and embolden the orthodox. From the outbreak of civil war in 1642 there was on all sides, and in most places, a sense of incredulity and bewilderment at the unnatural situation of division, disorder and conflict. William Roberts, bishop of Bangor, expressed the enormity of the events when he wrote to his clergy on 31 August 1642. He asked that the clergy contribute to a financial donation to the king’s cause and argued that in doing so they were contributing to the ‘preservation of the universe’.³⁵ This rhetoric was to become common. A newly monstrous world, called into existence by wickedness, a universe and stable order at risk – this is an impression repeated throughout episcopalian clerical writings from 1647 to 1660. The trope of monstrosity can be seen in a diverse range of contexts. A 1647 manuscript ballad, interleafed within a volume of Chirk parish records, described the social inversion, hypocrisy and treachery of those then in authority across North Wales, a many-headed monster now in control of local government and religious policy.³⁶ Rowland Watkyns’s poem ‘Strange Monsters’ speaks of all parliamentarians as monsters:

An entry by the rector Gabriel Hughes in the parish records of Cerrigydrudion, Denbighshire, described a comet that presaged ‘Great calamities to husbandmen detriment of cattel putrefaction of corn ... Hott feavers and agues severall heresies and new scismes, varieties of lawes, toleration of unlawfull things, religious men not regarded, death of great comanders, new inventions, tempest, coruscations’.³⁸ The compiler of the Cwtta Cyfarwydd noted in 1644 under the heading of ‘Rebellion etc.’ the coincidence of ‘the enemies vizt Sir Thomas Myddleton kt his armie tooke Ruthin and imprisonned such male persons as they tooke hold, and a great raine and fowle weather happened and fell upon Friday and Saturday before’.³⁹ The incumbent of Northop, Flintshire, wrote in the early 1650s that the late times now seemed to him a ‘ridled wonder’, and mused on its cause. He considered whether the world had grown childish, or the devil victorious, before querying whether it was because:

An anonymous ‘Ejected Priest’ was said to have ‘preached publiquely that the spirit in the preachers approved by parliament was a hobgobling spirit, and that the present powers were traytors and rebells that had shed innocent bloud’.⁴¹ All of these clergymen associated the monstrous, unusual or ‘unnatural’ with the events of the times, and especially with the upending of society and the destabilization of the natural order. It was a rhetoric that episcopalians and royalists could exploit successfully, especially when society and religion lacked the settled nature of the pre-1640 years.⁴² The phenomena identified above were signs of wickedness and instability, and, by association, of providential judgement.

Providence, God’s judgement against the people of England and Wales for their wickedness and sinfulness, was attributed as the cause of all the people’s woes. Providential causes were ascribed to events big and small by almost all early modern Christian groupings, including those of all sides from 1641 onwards.⁴³ As Alexandra Walsham has argued, it was an ‘ingrained parochial response to chaos and crisis, a practical source of consolation in a hazardous and inhospitable environment, and an idea which exercised practical, emotional, and imaginative influence upon those who subscribed to it’. It had ‘near universal acceptance’ and helped Protestants of all stripes to understand the events of their own lives and that of the nation more broadly.⁴⁴ According to the sermons of episcopalian and royalist clergy, God was judging his people by withdrawing his love and favour, ‘whereby darknesse followeth; and so all miseries and mischiefes, fire and brimstone, storme and tempest, warres, famines, plagues, and all evills’.⁴⁵ While the parliament’s actions of rebellion were sinful, it would not do to blame parliament for all the miseries, as other sins have ‘provoked God to stirre up these Rebels to punish us’.⁴⁶ God had sent ‘the sword and speceallie (as here) by such intestine and civill war into a land noe doubt, the cause thereof, is not for the mantaynance of the laws of the land, but for the mantaynance of the law of the Lord God’. Pride, vanity, luxury and division had stirred up God’s wrath.⁴⁷ The kingdom, through the long peace granted by God from enemies abroad, had become complacent, profane and sinful.

As in Jacobean Paul’s Cross sermons, the ‘Israelite paradigm’ was invoked frequently from 1642 to 1660 by episcopalian clergy, across a spectrum spanning moderate Calvinists to Laudian ultra-royalists. Comparisons between the two nations, who both sinned against God and were punished, were threaded throughout printed and manuscript sermons of the 1640s and 1650s.⁴⁹ Israel’s example, as well as that of other biblical examples like Nineveh and Egypt, was used to demonstrate what had happened, but also what would happen further should the kingdom not change its ways. Such comparisons were a long-established convention in English sermons, yet in a period of armed conflict, governmental instability and severe and burgeoning religious division, they had significantly extra weight.⁵⁰ Only prayers, peace, a healing of divisions and ultimately God’s mercy would bring calm once again. Indeed, division was both a cause and effect of divine wrath. The Welsh petitions of 1642 described how the mere report of attacks on the Church had led to ‘insolence and contempt’ in the minds of the ill-affected, leading to ‘scruples and jealousies’.⁵¹ While the test of faith inherent in these providential punishments was severe and hard to bear, it could be seen positively overall. Providential suffering within Protestantism had long been seen as beneficial, a test of commitment to Christ and a way to purify or refine the Christian community.⁵² Although the tests in the 1640s and 1650s were for some significantly more severe than the daily troubles of earlier times, there was also a sense that this should be a chance for the healing of divisions and the reformation of sinful behaviour. If Protestantism was ‘born in crisis and conflict’, if that was where Protestants found their identity as opposed to the slow slog of everyday life, the interregnum was in many ways a rhetorical and emotional gift.⁵³ It was also a source of division in itself, however, as Geoffrey Browell has persuasively argued. By providing the various factions with divine and biblical support for their claims, providentialism radicalized politics and made reconciliation harder – preaching in favour of peace and unity was all very well, but the different shifting factions generally only envisaged peace and unity on their own terms.⁵⁴ The idea that the righteous would endure suffering nobly, that they would see it as evidence of divine displeasure and a motivator for personal and national reformation, is evident in the rapid creation of an episcopalian community of suffering.

From the earliest ejections to the Restoration in 1660, the episcopalian clergy quickly articulated the idea of a community of suffering. This was divided into two parts. First, there was the suffering of the parishes and believers that were left without ministers to attend to their spiritual needs. They were abandoned, left in a spiritual wilderness, to drift into irreligion. In parishes supplied with intruded clergy they were, in the view of those who preceded them, teaching errors which were prejudicial to the salvation of the people. The concern of the ejected clergy, therefore, was not only pique at their replacement but fear for the parishioners that they were forced to leave behind. As William Nicholson pointed out, the itinerants were not ‘ubiquitaries’, and so were as non-resident as their ejected episcopalian predecessors.⁵⁵ Second, there was the suffering of the clergy themselves, both spiritual and physical. For ejected clergymen who did not have access to wealthy patrons to whom they could act as chaplains, the 1650s were hard. Not all were awarded the ‘fifths’ for their financial maintenance, and even those who were struggled to keep large families on a small sum of money. Some were forced to take up other professions and others to beg for charity. Furthermore, all ejected clergymen (and arguably many clerical conformists) were united in spiritual suffering. It is a generally neglected aspect of the ejections that the episcopalian clergy were exiled from the legal execution of their ministry, of the rites of the Church and the Propagation of the Gospel as they had taught it for generations. Physical and financial discomfort was, no doubt, extremely pressing, but spiritual deprivation was also real and a source of suffering. This united the deprived bishops with the most obscure curates, chaplains or rectors.

Fear for their own fates was accompanied in clergy writings by a fear for the spiritual lives and destinies of their congregations. These concerns included both what was being taught, performed and preached by intruded ministers, itinerants or radical sects, and the question of whether anything was being taught or provided at all (if a living was empty due to ejection). This connected to wider anxieties about providential judgement – if the kingdom was not being fed with the right spiritual food, how could it regain its health, or the approval of God? Godfrey Goodman justified his tract against the Socinians by outlining how:

The absence of religious instruction or service of any kind stirred the consciences of those who supported the regime as well as those who opposed it. John Lewis wrote at length of the well-intentioned but ultimately negative impact of the changes since the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales. In his gentle but ultimately damning account of the Propagation, he explained how ‘they put out most of the old ministers, and for ought of them I know, most of them well deserving it, but the defect and complaint is, that their vacant places are not yet sufficiently supplyed’.⁵⁷ Lewis recommended that preaching should not be the only priority of those ministers that remained, that traditional festivals (for example, Christmas celebrations) should be tolerated, and that the common people should not be discouraged from going to church, as to do that was to ‘perswade them to have no account or esteem to such places, but to value them as every other ordinary place’.⁵⁸ Citing his own experiences as a parishioner in Llanbadarn Fawr, with no settled minister and too poor a stipend after impropriations to attract one, he suggested that those episcopalian ministers who could be persuaded to conform ‘should be restored (at least) to some incouragements to exercise their gifts and talents in, and because the harvest is great, and labourers few; and that for want of supply Gods worship and service is in hazard to suffer among us’.⁵⁹ This attitude corresponds with that of another layman, with very different political opinions – the royalist poet, translator and jurist Rowland Vaughan of Caergai, who also spoke of the silencing of ‘sound doctrine and its professors’, and of the loss felt by those who had lost their ministers.⁶⁰ Given that between 1643 and 1654 perhaps no more than five per cent of the English population attended religious assemblies other than at the parish church, they were probably right to worry.⁶¹ John Spurr has argued that the liberty of the 1650s harmed parish-based religion more by allowing absence from church than because of the spread of sectarianism.⁶²

In the words of ejected minister Thomas Powell of Cantref, Breconshire, the congregations of ejected ministers were ‘wandering, like sheep without a shepherd, journeying here and there seeking God’s Word, which is nowhere to be found’.⁶³ His neighbour and fellow ejectee Rowland Watkyns of Llanfrynach wrote of how the ‘false coyn’ of schismatic preaching would lead to an ‘itch of disputation’ and a ‘scab of errour’ that would soon run through the whole flock. He, unlike the various tinkers and tailors, would shut his own shop, but pray ‘Lord let thy tender vine no longer bleed/ Call home thy shepheards which thy lambs must feed’.⁶⁴ The poet Henry Vaughan, in his ‘Prayer in time of persecution and heresy’, wrote that for the laymen, ‘Thy service, and Thy Sabbaths, Thy own sacred Institutions and the pledges of Thy love, are denied unto us: Thy ministers are trodden down, and the basest of people are set up in Thy holy place.’⁶⁵ William Nicholson of Llandeilo Fawr used the landscape of Wales within his metaphorical discussion of the travails of Welsh parishioners, writing that the ‘people are scattered upon these mountains without a Shepherd’. They are, he argued,

Alexander Griffith wrote to Cromwell of how ‘in a short space, the Ancient Clergy were (for the most part) indiscriminately ejected, the Tithes Sequestred, the Parishes left unsupplied, the blessed Ordinance of Christ taken away from the Inhabitants, and they wholy debarred from any spiritual comfort to their pretious soules, by any power or dispensation of gospell-ministry’.⁶⁷ There is no doubt that all of these individuals had, to a greater or lesser extent, a measure of self-interest in the supply of clergymen to the poor parishioners of Wales. It seems unnecessarily cynical, however, to view their concerns for those ‘lambs’ as mere selfishness or rancour. Powell and Nicholson were only two of the ejected clergyman in Wales who wrote catechisms, instructional books or spiritual guides (in English or Welsh) that were intended to substitute as far as possible for the loss of clerical instruction. Many people and parishes in Wales were clearly unprovided for spiritually. The charge of abandonment was in many places, therefore, a fair one. Some ejected Welsh clergy tried to offer their parishioners a level of orthodox religious guidance in print, to provide for their flock in the place of a shepherd.

The sufferings of the Welsh clergy themselves were described in their own contemporary accounts and alluded to in many others. John Gauden described how destructive had been the ‘storms and distresses of times (which wett many others to the skin, but it stripped of the cloathes and flayed of the very skins of many clergymen and all bishops especially)’.⁶⁸ Even James Berry, the Major-General responsible for Wales from autumn 1655 to January 1657, commented on the ‘sad condition’ of the ejected and sequestered clergymen and schoolmasters in 1655, and the extent of charity given by only one gentleman, Sir Thomas Myddelton of Chirk, in the 1640s and 1650s indicates the level of need.⁶⁹ Many suffered financial need. Those without private incomes or unsequestered landholdings were forced to rely on their relatives, or farming their remaining land. Nathan Jones of Merthyr Tydfil described the ‘extortion and cruelty’ of those who forced him to attend a committee in London in 1649, depleting his financial means and leaving him and his family impoverished, not paying him his allowance as awarded, and driving him into debt despite his not being ejected or sequestered at that point.⁷⁰ Edward Evans was installed curate of Llanllwchaiarn in 1645 but was unable to get to his living because of ‘danger of lieff and for feare of the enemies’ in that area.⁷¹ Others suffered physical violence, imprisonment and the seizure of their possessions. David Lloyd of Ruthin, for example, was imprisoned and plundered ‘to his utter impoverishment’, while Thomas Price was imprisoned, then on his release wounded, and lost his ‘whole estate’.⁷² Griffith Williams, preaching as early as 1644, compared the treatment of the orthodox clergy with that of the Christians of the Primitive Church – traduced and described as the causes of wars and sedition. Now, he argued, they were described by their enemies as ‘Papists, and idolatrous, and the causes of all these calamities that are fallen upon this land; and therefore let them be deprived, degraded, and destroyed’.⁷³

Godfrey Goodman, bishop of Gloucester and scion of an old Denbighshire family, left behind many testaments to his experiences from 1642 until his death in 1656. In one account, he described being shot at, attempts to seize him by lawyers, the plunder of his houses, searches of his belongings, theft of moneys intended for charitable purposes, the destruction of his property in Gloucester, his flight to a ‘poor mountaine cottage’, and the loss of his historical and theological writings. He seemed bewildered at the abuse directed at him – for example, ‘Mr Prinne a gentleman I neither knew nor ever offended is more invective and bitter against me’, – had no success in law or in gaining an allowance, and felt his office and person disrespected by his inferiors.⁷⁴ His petitions to parliament were unsuccessful, whether for restitution of his belongings, his tithes or the one parsonage that he held in commendam.⁷⁵ In his final printed work Goodman pled

Goodman himself died having converted to Catholicism and been much criticized for it. John Gauden, among others, defended Goodman’s decision as prompted by the treatment of the Church. Goodman, he said, had been:

Another example is provided by the ejected Christ Church chaplain and royalist poet Thomas Weaver, who described the fate of the Maurices of Llanbedr, a clergyman and his wife who were attacked by parliamentarian soldiers. He was imprisoned, and she wounded:

Such physical violence ran contrary to the ideal in terms of treating opponents. Royalist armies in the First Civil War were asked to treat clergy as non-combatants (although no doubt this was neither always the case, nor always respected).⁷⁹ Such reports were, therefore, meant to shock, and to demonstrate the unnatural, hypocritical and monstrous behaviour of the times. As Fiona McCall has demonstrated in relation to England, it was the violent conduct towards the clergy that was most frequently remembered in accounts of their suffering. The interregnum was a time when violent assaults became ‘ubiquitous’, legitimized by warfare and often propagated by soldiers.⁸⁰ The contrast to previous eras makes its recording unsurprising, and yet does not diminish its impact upon the clergy and their families.

The loss of their ministerial calling, or vocation, was another lament of the ejected clergy. The Church historian Thomas Fuller wrote in 1646 of his longing to ‘bee restored to the open exercise of my profession, on termes consisting with my Conscience, (which welcome Minute, I doe heartily wish, and humbly wait for; and will greedily listen to the least whisper sounding thereunto)’.⁸¹ This was not the preserve of prominent English ejected clergy. Welsh clerical petitioners in 1660 frequently referred to the removal from the exercise of their ‘ministeriall duty’.⁸² It is tempting to see this as mere convention, part of the form of petitioning for the Restoration, and yet the loss of their vocation formed an important aspect of their suffering.⁸³ Aside from petitions and personal narratives, episcopalian clergy wrote about their loss most frequently in prefaces to printed works, demonstrating (as Fuller did) their yearning to minister to their congregations once more. William Nicholson, for example, wrote to his parishioners that:

Another common theme was a fear for the Church of England and a desire to defend it against those who claimed it was illegitimate, popish or tyrannical. This defence manifested itself in a variety of ways. From 1642, defence of ‘the publique liturgie therof in the ancient liberties and form of government as they do now stand established by law’ against ‘innovation’ was central to Welsh support for Charles I. Episcopacy was especially mentioned, as ‘that form which came into this island with the first plantation of religion here … near or in the time of the Apostles themselves’. Its antiquity was a sign of God’s approval and protection, and to alter it was to risk disaster.⁸⁵ The subsequent defence of the Church throughout the 1640s and 1650s was to stray very little from these basic foundations – the Church was legally established, was beloved of the people, historically valid and protected by God, and its government was sound. Such matters were, for example, at the heart of the Anglesey Rising of 1648. It was two clergymen, Michael Evans and Robert Morgan, who drafted the declaration of the rising, stating that ‘out of conscience towards God, and loyalty to his anointed … [we] with all humbleness prostrate ourselves, our lives and fortunes, at his majesty’s feet’. Those making the Declaration professed that they would ‘maintain the true Protestant religion by law established, his Majesty’s royal prerogative, the known laws of the land, just privileges of parliament, together with our own and fellow subjects’ legal properties and liberties’. They declared the Commonwealth government in London to be enemies and traitors, and swore to proceed against them. This declaration was read in English and Welsh to all those who had flocked from across North Wales to rise on Anglesey.⁸⁶

Defence of the Church of England’s liturgy and practices also happened in disputations.⁸⁷ Dr George Griffith, future bishop of St Asaph, debated with the millenarian Vavasor Powell both in person and in print. In this debate, Griffith was allegedly supported by ‘carnall cavaliers and outed clergie-men’, ‘thirty or forty of the scum of two or three counties’ and a lawyer (‘one of the long robe’). One of the clergymen was identified as Mr Jones, chaplain to Lord Herbert, and another ‘Mr Kyffin’, probably John Kyffin who had been variously vicar of Llansilin, vicar choral of St Asaph, prebend of Meliden, vicar of Oswestry and rector of Manafon in Montgomeryshire. He was ejected by sequestrators.⁸⁸ During the debate, Griffith defended the validity of the calling of episcopalian clergy. He argued against the Church harbouring popery, instead accusing the radicals of being ‘good agents for the Papists’ as numbers had increased since the Propagation had removed ministers. Griffith defended set forms of prayer, attacked by Powell as used in the place of God-given gifts of prayer, as described in scripture and most convenient for the people.⁸⁹ He also defended episcopal ordination, the singing of psalms as a Protestant practice, and the conduct of his parishioners in demanding traditional services.⁹⁰ During the debate and in the printed dispute that followed, George Griffith was connected ideologically and politically by Powell and his allies with another controversialist and determined foe of Powell – Alexander Griffith of Glasbury.⁹¹ Alexander Griffith was described as George Griffith’s ‘Master-Minter’ in one hostile pamphlet, which outlines a sermon preached by Alexander Griffith at Kinton in Herefordshire on 30 September 1652 and a resulting disputation, in which he argued that there was no separation between saints and sinners until the end of the world. It seems from the summary that both Griffiths argued for mixed congregations, a concept that was anathema to the Fifth Monarchist radicals of Powell’s group.⁹²

Another consistent defender of the Church along the Welsh border was John Cragge of Llantilio Pertholey, Monmouthshire. Although Cragge published a number of sermons and is mentioned in passing in scholarly articles, his involvement in a typically rancorous disputation and pamphlet exchange has gone comparatively unremarked. Following a sermon given by the anti-paedobaptist John Tombes in Abergavenny on 5 September 1653, Henry Vaughan, Anthony Bonner, a neighbouring minister, and Cragge undertook a dispute in St Mary’s Church, followed the next week by a sermon on the same text by Cragge.⁹³ This five-hour dispute focused on the admissibility of infant baptism, but Cragge’s later printed texts also argued about church marriage, the legality and advisability of tithes and the advisability of Church discipline. Cragge was certainly not one to mince his words, describing the consequences of the sin thus: ‘All places have become Aceldamaes, houses of blood, fields of blood, ditches of blood, towns of blood, Churches of blood, in this land, that was once Insula pacis, an Island of peace.’⁹⁴ At the 1656 funeral sermon of James Parry, uncle to Rowland Watkyn and former vicar of Tedstone, Cragge lambasted the state of the Church and the state, describing how ‘God hath not restrained violence against us, so as he did against those of our profession in the daies of old,’ although he acknowledged that the sins of the clergy had played their part.⁹⁵ On infant baptism, Cragge took a similarly firm line. Comparing the events in Germany with Britain’s current state, he rooted them in anabaptism, arguing that magistracy and ministry, going hand in hand, were both discarded by those who rebelled in favour of heresy and faction. Casting the orthodox clergy as the watchmen, and heretics as the ‘starved snake’, he described the effect of heterodoxy in religion:

The rhetorical style of episcopalian disputants is striking but such strident language was far from confined to one side or faction. The defence of the established Church as a guarantor of stability, discipline and peace was a potent one, however, as was the argument that it confused and unsettled the ordinary people. To return to language and words briefly, for Cragge, ‘Libertie in religion is like free conversing without restraint’. An interjector in the Abergavenny dispute, an apothecary, was silenced by a ‘gentleman of authoritie … that it was not fit for a man of his place, and calling, to speak’.⁹⁷ Towards the end of the 1650s, it seemed clear to many that lack of restraint had been disastrous, and that order, peace and unity should have been preserved. Disputations were a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they were fractious and divisive, seemingly further indicative of sinful behaviour and strife. On the other, they were powerful opportunities for episcopalian clergy to prove their worth in learning and wisdom, to silence radicals and to rally their communities.

Conclusion

The clergy were God’s ‘vigilant watch-men’, ‘his souldiers, stewards, angells’.⁹⁸ They guarded their people and, on a wider stage, the state and the Church.⁹⁹ In doing so, whichever ecclesiastical position they represented, they saw themselves as protecting true Christian religion. In a world in which religion and politics were indivisible even as coalitions and positions shifted, this was a potent role. As Tim Cooper has argued, a community labels as deviant those practices or beliefs that seem to attack its most cherished values. Opposition to groups as diverse as the anti-paedobaptists, Socinians and Catholics, therefore, was rooted in inner fears, and the interregnum was a time of ‘collective fear’, ‘moral panic’ and anxiety about moral and doctrinal disorder and excess.¹⁰⁰ Dolly McKinnon has written of how the spring tides by the North Sea were ‘the object of early modern individual and community fear … interpreted as God’s anger’.¹⁰¹ According to McKinnon, community responses to disasters reflected different calibrations of fear, ones that could forge bonds, and consolidate a sense of individual and collective identity and emotional memory in order to generate emotional resilience’.¹⁰² For episcopalians after 1646, the religious and political situation was analogous to a monstrous environmental disaster. The world as they knew it was largely swept away, and there was the potential to lose the liturgy and identity of the Church.

Clergy words, therefore, were central to the continuance of the traditions, practices and identities of the Church of England. The clergy were praised for ‘bottoming’ royalists, and it was acknowledged by the parliamentarian regimes that hostile clergy made life very difficult for the authorities: ‘like priest, like people, and like magistrates, like people’.¹⁰³ In articulating defences of the Church they appealed at different points in the period to those who felt destabilized and lost among the new developments. Descriptions of sufferings were another way to motivate the faithful, with plentiful biblical material on the deprivations of God’s chosen people, the fate of the wicked and the traducers of true religion on hand to vindicate both episcopalian clergy and laity. Sermons (particularly at royalist funerals), disputations and pamphlet wars provided a religious corollary to a royalist social community, using the arts of rhetoric and learning to bolster the self-image and morale of the Church. God’s watchmen guarded their traditions, gave voice to opposition and provided a beacon for individuals and communities who found themselves in unaccustomed opposition in the period 1646 to 1660.

S. W. Clavier, ‘“God’s vigilant watchmen”: the words of episcopalian clergy in Wales, 1646–60’, in Church and people in interregnum Britain, ed. F. McCall (London, 2021), pp. 217–241. License: CC BY-NC-ND.