ABSTRACT

In September 1641 the House of Commons voted, ‘It shall be lawful for the parishioners of any parish . . . to set up a lecture, and to maintain an orthodox minister at their own charge to preach every Lord’s Day where there is no preaching, and to preach one day in every week where there is no weekly lecture.’ This was a double-edged weapon, intended partly to allow parishioners to force lecturers of their own choosing on Laudian or ‘dumb dog’ incumbents; partly to steal the thunder of the unauthorised ‘mechanick preachers’ who were collecting congregations outside the parish churches. Numbers of parishes

took advantage of the order, often after keen struggles, in which the House of Commons intervened to insist that ministers must allow free use of their pulpits to lecturers. ‘Furious promoters of the most dangerous innovations’, Charles I called lecturers; their prayers and sermons ‘stir up and continue the rebellion raised against me’. Lecturers and ministers frequently acted as recruiting agents and propagandists. In August 1643 the House of Commons ordered ‘divers godly ministers’ to go ‘into divers counties . . . to possess the people with the truth and justice of the Parliament’s cause in taking up of defensive arms’. Meanwhile the Commons ejected numbers of ‘scandalous ministers’, many for reasons which made them scandalous in the modern sense, but others because of their political attitude. Ejected clergy were allowed one-fifth of the parochial revenue, at the expense of their successors. As the Parliamentary armies advanced, so the purge advanced with them; until finally, under the Committees for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales and the North Parts, groups of itinerant ministers were set up to carry the Puritan gospel into the hitherto ‘dark corners’ of the land. So the state took over the task which the Feoffees for Impropriations had begun twenty-five years earlier. Church building, neglected for a century and a half, was resumed in the fifties – especially in the north and west – at government expense.