ITEMS OF HISTORICAL INTEREST.

be decently interred according to the Liturgy of the Church of England, as by law established." In the same vault are interred his daughter, Sarah Langton, and his widow, Dame Mary. The latter deceased 29th March, 1711, aged seventy. At his death he possessed considerable property; one portion, consisting of estates in the island of Jamaica, he bequeathed to his godson, William Hayman, son of his lately deceased brother, Stephen Hayman, baker. To his daughter, Mary, who, in 1698, married Thomas Edwards, he bequeathed property in Bristol and £1,000 in money for her sole use, and the sum of £20 to purchase mourning for herself and husband. His wife, Dame Mary, whom he describes as his "loving and well-beloved wife," he made his executrix, leaving her very wealthy, with the house, furniture and all the jewels possessed by her; also his chariot and horses, and all the plate with the Colston's arms engraved thereon. To his mother-in-law, Mrs. Colston, and to Mrs. Edward Colston, whom he appointed to be one of the overseers of his will, he left £10 each to purchase mourning.

29. Upon the death of Charles, numerous flattering addresses were placed at the feet of his successor. Even the capital was proudly eulogistic, and Bristol followed in the same obsequious strain. The corporation agreed that an "address be presented the king on the death of his brother, Charles II., of blessed memory!" After the usual stereotyped preliminary, it says:

Paid the mayor, expenses to London to present an address to the king, £30.

In striking contrast to the corporation document is the characteristic address of the Society of Friends:

We are told to testify our sorrow for the death of our good friend Charles, and our joy for thou being made our governor. We are told that thou art not of the persuasion of the Church of England, no more than we; therefore we hope thou wilt grant us the same licence which thou allowed thyself. Which so doing we wish thee all manner of happiness.

Laconic, but to the purpose. No notice of their manumitted brethren, whom James had released from incarceration: there was nothing for which to be thankful; the king had merely done a just act, and the Quakers were not hypocrites to simulate a virtue they could not feel.

The old MS. Calendar states:-"King Charles II. dyed February 6th, 1684-5. Mr. Maior was afterwards knighted by King James." Charles died a professed Roman Catholic; extreme unction and the eucharist were administered to him by a Catholic priest. "His reign was a transition state from a practical despotism to a regulated system of freedom, but the violence of the popular party defeated, in a great measure, the good ends which they professed to have in view, and We cannot approach your sacred majesty without expressing brought upon themselves the mortification of seeing the our sorrow at the decease of our late most gracious sovereign, and crown, not only invested with a greatly-increased inyour majestie's most entirely beloved brother, King Charles the fluence, but even viewed with a growing veneration on 2nd, which would have been insupportable had not your majestie's the part of the multitude, who are most easily led astray. eminent virtues and undoubted title to the crown alleviated our griefs, and secured us from all danger, by having one of the same Had not Charles contrived to suspend the contest beblood, endued with admirable sagacity in government, with entire tween the popular and arbitrary principles of the conaffection to the welfare of all your good subjects, and the happy stitution, a civil war must have ensued in his time, or state of your kingdome, succeeded to the throne, which is most the Revolution been anticipated by a period of ten years. plain by your majestie's adventuring your royall blood to defend those heretofore you are now by right to govern, and by those His reign is rendered memorable for the passing of the gracious expressions of your majestie's to your honourable privy Habeas Corpus Act, which put an end to arbitrary imcouncill at the first sitting amongst them, and many other circum-prisonment, and secured the personal freedom of the stances that give us entire confidence of happiness under your subject on the firm basis of law.”1 majestie's government. Nor is this a new opinion taken up by us upon your majestie's ascending the throne, but was our former sentiment, declared by many addresses from us to his late sacred majestie, of blessed memory. We doe therefore, in confirmation of our loyalty, and as further demonstration of affection, duty, and allegiance, assure your majestie, that we will stand by and assist your majestie in the support of your crown and government, in all honour and safety, with our lives and fortunes; and shall duly pray for your majesties long and happy reign.

Given under the corporation seal of this city by the full and free consent, this 17th February, in the first year of your majesties reign.

One can scarcely imagine these sentiments came from the leading men of a city which had petitioned against James' succession. Had the corporation in

Hepworth Dixon thus describes Charles :

A gaunt dark man, with hairless scalp and bleary eyes, sensual mouth, false teeth, false curls, false colour, bald, bewigged and painted, with a sunken cheek, a hideous leer, with a pinched and saturnine face, a man passed the middle age and looking older than his years, fast hobbling to his grave, with gouty leg and broken frame, amid a rout of gamblers, courtezans and pimps, who cheat each other and play false to him; a prince who sells his country for a bribe; a churchman who betrays his faith; a man whom no one calls his friend; a lover whom his lemans dupe and cheat.

From a collection of letters, papers and other docu1 Creasy, 1685.

ITEMS OF HISTORICAL INTEREST.

ж

CHAPTER XIII.

THE RISE OF DISSENT IN BRISTOL PERSECUTION OF ITS ADHERENTS.

1. Puritanism in the 16th and 17th centuries. Declarations of the Independents and of the Baptists. 2. Results of Puritanism in Bristol. Mrs. Hazard and others become Separatists and form a church. 3. The Quakers: their sufferings. James Naylor whipped and branded. 4. Chronological sequence of the denominations. Ewins becomes a Baptist. 5. The Persecution begins: Ewins and Terrill thrown into prison. Country sites where the Dissenters worshipped. 6. Expedients taken to baffle their persecutors. Baptist Mills, why so called. Ewins dies: Hardcastle succeeds at Broadmead. 7. Charles grants licenses, which he afterwards withdraws. Hellier, a notorious persecutor. Hardcastle and Weeks are apprehended. 8. The Baptists found a close communion church. Andrew Gifford: his romantic work, his sufferings. 9. Thompson is imprisoned: dies in Newgate. Two scarce pamphlets. Where the church met in the Castle. 10. Hardcastle again imprisoned. Conspicuous persecutors. II. Sacrilegious ruffianism. Hardcastle's death. Ford hunted into the Avon and drowned. Knight dies from the effects of his submersion. Fownes dies. 12. Weeks and the Presbyterian Dissenters. Two noble laymen, Edward Terrill and Ichabod Chauncey.

E shall now give a brief sketch of the | in the State, but no one could hold office without thus rise and progress of Nonconformity in Bristol, noting more especially the effect of the measures adopted by Charles II. towards the Separatists. At the close of the 16th century many persons of tender conscience in divers parts of the kingdom were led to embrace the doctrine of justification by faith, in contradistinction to the general teaching and ceremonial worship of the Church of England, which held the theory that every one in the land was a Christian. The world thus brought bodily into the Church had naturally brought the Church down to its level; any man, however vile, might take the sacrament as a sign of fitness for office

asserting his church membership. The Puritans in their attempts to correct this extreme, created another by strongly emphasising the doctrine of conversion, and they went so far as to assert that no man should be a church member who was not clear as to the very date and manner of his second birth. The natural effect of this teaching was, that in their hands the church became a reservoir of the elect and sanctified, instead of becoming a healthy, life-giving stream to the world, an educating institution in which men should from childhood be trained in truth and goodness. Hence the Christ-life became rather an accident than a result, an error which two centuries have failed as yet to rectify. But few of these good men, however, became at that

A.D. 1639.

RESULTS OF PURITANISM IN BRISTOL.

91

time Separatists; still the name Puritan was generally given to them on account of their purity of life and the precision of their doctrinal views. Early in the 17th century, John Robinson, the pastor of the church from which sprang the Puritan fathers, separated from the Anglican communion, and founded the Independent denomination, but he admitted the right of the civil authority to interfere with the constitution of the church, and held it to be a duty for godly magistrates to force men by penalty to attend on divine service. The Baptists, who, in the year after this deliverance of Robinson's published their Confession of Faith (1611),

cry day and night to the Lord to pluck down the lordly prelates of the time, and the superstition thereof." They also met at Anthony Kelly's, grocer, in High street, at Robert Haynes', writing schoolmaster, in Corn street, at Richard Moon's, farrier, in Wine street, and at Goodman Coles', victualler or butcher, at Lawford's gate. Mr. Kelly died in 1631; Mr. Yeamans in 1633, after which from time to time Puritan clergymen, chiefly from South Wales, came occasionally to minister to the bereaved flock. Eventually, Mr. Hazard, "a young preacher who savoured of the Puritanic spirit," came to St. Nicholas on a temporary

Widow Kelly and other women stopping up Frome Gate at the Siege of Bristol in 1643.

show a greater advance in the principles of religious liberty; in it "they deny the rights of the civil magistrate to interfere with religion, or with matters of conscience, or to compel men to this or that form of religion, because Christ is the King and Lawgiver of the church and of conscience."

2. In Bristol from 1604 the Rev. William Yeamans, a Puritan vicar of the church of St. Philip and Jacob, was the central rallying point for the godly, "who sat under his light for nearly twenty years, keeping many fast days in private houses, namely, at one Wm. Listun's house, a glover, near Lawford's gate, and at one Richard Langford's house, a house carpenter in the Castle, and sometimes at other places, where they did

visit, and as a supply preached at Redcliff, but had to leave there because he used too much plainness of speech. This would appear to have been in 1639, at which period the widow Kelly kept on the grocer's shop between the Guilder's inn and the High Cross, "where she would keep open her shop on the time they called Christmas Day, and sit sewing in her shop, as a witness for God in the midst of the city, in the face of the sun, and in the sight of all men . . . when as it were all sorts of people had a reverence of that particular day above all others. . . . She was the first woman in this city of Bristol that practised that truth of the Lord which was then hated and odious, namely, Separation." (This is the same strong-minded lady