In this Land we can live, Our Zeal, or its pretentions. 90 To New JERSEY, with speed, Come all Friends that need Wealth, or large Possessions; And be Slaves to our Professions. What they have is our own, The Canaanites did spoyle,1 London, Printed for F. G[rove]. 1675. With Allowance. 96 102 [In White-letter. No woodcut. The one we use on p. 729 is borrowed from Roxb. Coll., i. 94, representing the Duchess of Suffolk fleeing from religious persecution, in Queen Mary's days.] 1 Quite the contrary to such spoliation was shown: William Penn's treaty with the Indians being equitable and peaceful. This was in Oct. 1682, soon after he landed. The unrecalled calumnies on him in Macaulay's History injure the writer far more than the good Quaker, whose character has been vindicated elsewhere. News from Chelmsford. "Dear Madam, be sure he's a fine-spoken man: Do but hear on the Clergy how glib his tongue ran!" Swift: The Grand Question Debated. 1729. LORD MACAULAY'S description of the character and position of the clergy during the reign of the last Stuarts has been shown to be distorted in outline and overcoloured. Some bitter antagonism to parsondom must have been inherited from Zachary, yet without any balancing favour towards Quakerism. From a few caricatures or ribald ballads (such, for instance, as the one here given) it is scarcely fair to libel a whole class. There are, ever and anon, individual cases of clerical misdemeanor (few in proportion to the large number of the ordained priesthood), of which cases the utmost is greedily and maliciously made by An answer was well given in the Quarterly Review, No. 283 (July, 1876), to Lord Macaulay's misrepresentation of the position, attainments, and morality of the English clergy during the reign of Charles the Second. But additional to that confutation, to us it appears that the historian's description of them and their families, although exaggerated so far as to become untruthful, applies with much more precision to a few generations later. When Macaulay writes "The wife [of the clergyman] had ordinarily been in the patron's service; and it was well if she were not suspected of standing too high in the patron's favour;" he was wrongly biassed by remembering the gibes of Dean Swift on his contemporaries, some written half a century after the death of Charles. Thus, in his Directions to Servants, after ironically telling the waitingmaid how to make profitable concessions to her master, although you are not half so handsome as his own lady;" and how she is "never to allow him the last favour under a hundred guineas, or a settlement of twenty pounds a year for life;" he continues: "In such a family, if you are handsome, you will have the choice of three lovers, the chaplain, the steward, and my lord's gentleman. I would first advise you to choose the steward; but if you happen to be young [query, going] with child by my lord, you must take up with the chaplain." Also, in his Mrs. Frances Harris's Petition, 1700, he makes her, after losing her purse of money, say to him (then chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley and Galway, while she was housekeeper), "Parson," said I, "can you cast a nativity when a body's plunder'd ?" (Now you must know, he hates to be called parson, like the devil!) Truly," says he, "Mrs. Nab, it might become you to be more civil; If your money be gone, as a learned divine says, d'ye see, You are no text for my handling; so take that from me: I was never taken for a Conjuror before, I'd have you to know." "Lord!" said I, "don't be angry, I am sure I never thought you so; I never took one in your coat for a Conjuror in all my life." The clergyman's wife in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, does not give one a high opinion of the class. political Dissenters, and by their allies in destruction, the avowed sceptics or Freethinkers. When Dr. Dodd was executed for forgery, in 1777, there was an outcry raised against all "the cloth." The Church of England is always assailed en masse for every error of each individual son, in his unworthiness. When scandals arise, in the various sects that are so ready to decry, she does not imitate the unworthy example, and calumniate the collective body of that persuasion for the fault of any solitary preacher, elder, or class-leader. Let them rave against her who will she has wrought good work among the poor, controlling their oppressors. Her chief fault is intestinal disunion. The extravagances of Ritualism are not counteracted by the ravings of Low Church, or the soul-deadening rationalism of the latitudinarian "Broad." The Bishops seem powerless, except to inflict injury on the clergy; who work on, without losing heart or hope.' Dryden has given a masterly description of the result to be expected, should factious Nonconformity ever succeed in overthrowing the Church of England : Without a vision poets can foreshow What all but fools by common sense may know: The swelling poison of the several sects, Which, wanting vent, the nation's health infects, Shall burst its bag; and fighting out their way The various venoms on each other prey. &c.-The Medal, 1682. 1 There is almost as much of rival-University sarcasm against Cambridge, as of parson-hating rancour, in this ballad, from an Oxford press. But it is of the same class as the earlier tales of ribaldry, pointed against monks and friars, in "Reformation" days. Truth was not needed as a foundation. So that the narrative were laughable, dirty, and sufficiently libellous, no more was required. Stories to the discredit of Churchmen preserve the traditional attractions. But dainty folks, who gloat over the letters of Eloisa to Abelard (whom her indignant uncle had mutilated similarly to Susan's paramour), either in the Troyes correspondence, or in Alexander Pope's versification, will affect to be scandalized by the plain-speaking of this "Bloody News from Chelmsford." They prefer the veiled impurity of her request: "Give all thou can'st, and let me dream the rest: The Troyes manuscript reads:-" Concupiscentia te mihi potius quam amicitia sociavit, libidinis ardor potius quam amor. Ubi igitur quod desiderabas cessavit, quicquid propter hoc exhibebas pariter evanuit." Pope had documentary evidence of Eloisa's request; although we believe the "Letters" to be as apocryphal as is the tomb of these lovers at Père la Chaise. He had also similar authority for her other acknowledged desire, " make me mistress to the man I love!" It reads: "Dulcius mihi semper exstitit amicæ vocabulum aut si non indigneris, concubinæ vel scorti. Charius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam Augusti imperatrix." We copy our exemplar literatim. [Bagford Collection, III. 60.] Bloody News from Chelmsford : Dr, A Proper New Ballad, CONTAINING A true and perfect Relation of a most barbarous Murder conmitted upon the Body of a Country Curate, who died of a great Wound given him in the bottom of his Belly, by a most Cruel Country-fellow, for being too familiar with his Wife. 1 Vide pp. 390-92, ante. 66 2 An allusion to the ballad-broadside (Bagford Coll., iii. 57), printed in 1647, and reprinted in 1677 by D. Mallet. It is also in the rare Rump" Collection of 1660, at beginning, and in the enlarged 1662 edition, i. 350. It was written by Sir John Birkenhead, and commences with "All Christians and Lay-Elders too." It is reported to have been founded on fact, and certainly there is a broadside ballad on a precisely similar event in Wood's Coll., E. 25, fol. 145; on the Execution of Mary Higgs and her Dog, 18th July, 1677. It is entitled "A Looking Glass for Wanton Women;" to the tune, "In Summer time." It begins "To a sad story now give ear, Of one who lived in this land." Printed for P. Brooksby. Dryden writes in Absalom and Achitophel, Part II., But 'twas hard fate that to the gallows led The Dog that never heard the statute read. 3 There were many scandalous stories currently related of Hugh Peters, the Parliamentary preacher, who was executed for high treason on 16th Oct. 1660. One, in particular (glanced at in the Rump Coll., i. 341, 1662), alluding to this intrigue with a butcher's wife. Collections of facetia entitled Hugh Peters' jeasts are still extant, although scarce, but are neither amusing nor "edifying." In Hudibras, his Heroical Epistle, lines 305, 306, 1678, refer to Burgess and Hugh Peters : Some precious gifted Teachers, Unrev'rently reputed Leachers. This probably refers to the ballad entitled "The Four-Legged Quaker," also attributed to Birkenhead, beginning "All you that have two, or but one ear," in Rats Rimed to Death, 1660, p. 73. Rump, i. 358. 1 Id est, Talgol the Bearwarden's hairy companion, Orsin, so powerfully described as to lift the burlesque of Butler's poem almost into sublimity: The gallant Bruin march'd next him, Or Turk of Mahomet's own kin; And in his nose, like Indian King, (Hudibras. Part 1st, Canto 1, published this same year, 1663.) Paris-Garden (line 10), Bankside, had its baited bears before 1526. 2 Reference is here made to another Civil-War ballad, entitled "News from Colchester" (Horkesley, near Colchester); to the tune of, Tom of Bedlam; beginning" All in the Land of Essex." It is in the Rump, 1660, p. 6; 1662 edit.. i. 354; but was written a few years earlier by Sir John Denham (or by John Cleaveland, among whose works also it is printed: J. C. Revived, p. 64). The market town of Chelmsford, built at the confluence of the rivers Chelmer, Can, and Wid, bears in its name a token of what it was, and was called, in early years, Chelmer's-ford: before the bridges were raised to cross the streams. Another Essex Ballad follows this, in iii. 61. We suppose Bever to be his name (see line 190). He was certainly one of those Independent or Presbyterian ministers, who had been instituted during the Commonwealth anarchy, and who (see line 22), in the previous year, had conformed to the Act of 1662, to avoid being ejected. 5 Chelmsford is the seat of the Archdeaconry, in the diocese of Rochester; and it may be the Archidiaconal residence is here intended. • Another reference to Butler's evidently admired Hudibras, Part 1st, Canto 2: He Trulla lov'd, Trulla more bright Than burnish'd armour of her knight; A bold virago, stout and tall, As Joan of France or English Mall, &c. (See our pp. 309, 310.) |