CHAPTER XXVII
THE FALL OF THE STUARTS
When Charles was restored to the throne the bishops also came back to their bishoprics. The records of the churches of Chester tell of the payments made to the ringers for the ringing of the bells when the citizens joyously welcomed Bishop Walton to the city. A large number of citizens and mounted soldiers went as far as Nantwich to meet him and escorted him to the city gates of Chester, where the mayor and corporation as well as the clergy and gentry of Cheshire received him. Once more a Christmas was kept in the old time way, and the churches were decked with holly and evergreens for one of the greatest festivals of the Church. And truly the bare walls, stripped of everything that was beautiful, needed some adornment after the ravages and desecrations of the Civil War.
But Charles was a foolish king, and spent most of his days in idle and frivolous pleasures. The people were disappointed with him, for he had plenty of brains. One of his favourite hobbies was the study of science. John Wilkins, another Bishop of Chester, was one of a little band of clever men who helped the king to found the Royal Society for the spread of knowledge and the study of science. To be a Fellow of the Royal Society is to this day one of the highest honours that men of science can obtain.
The favourite study of John Wilkins was astronomy, and he wrote a book called the Discovery of a New World, to prove that there may be another habitable world in the moon. Another book of his was called Mercury; or the secret and swift Messenger, shewing how a man may privately and with speed tell his thoughts to friends at any distance. Thus, had he lived in a later age, he might perhaps have been the inventor of the telegraph and telephone.
Charles secretly favoured the old Catholic religion, and on his death-bed was received into the Catholic Church. During his reign another Act of Uniformity was passed, much more severe than the former one. Sixty ministers of Cheshire churches, who refused to obey the Act, were turned out of their livings. Among them was Adam Martindale, a noted Puritan, who was driven from his church at Rostherne. Adam Martindale wrote the story of his life, with all his trials and misfortunes, in a book which you may read in many of your public libraries.
The Nonconformists were prevented by another Act from holding prayer meetings within five miles of the town or village where they had held a living. The gaol at Chester was soon filled with those who were ready to suffer for the crime of preaching the Gospel in their homes and to their friends. Sir Geoffrey Shakerley, who had been made Governor of Chester Castle for his services in the Civil War, sought them out and persecuted them with great cruelty.
Still there were many who continued to worship in their own way. For a long time they held their services secretly in private houses, but, in 1690, the Toleration Act allowed them to build chapels. These they erected chiefly on the outskirts of towns or in remote villages. During the later years of the seventeenth century these chapels increased greatly in number. The Unitarian chapel at Knutsford and the tiny brick chapel at Dean Row, between the Bollin and the Dean, are among the earliest of such places of worship in Cheshire.
Matthew Henry, a learned commentator of the New Testament, whose father had been turned out of his church at Worthenbury, preached in the chapel in Trinity Street, Chester. You may still see the seventeenth-century pulpit from which he addressed his congregation. During the Civil War the pulpit had become the most important feature of the churches. The Puritans were in the habit of preaching long political sermons which they timed with an hour-glass fixed on the wall near the pulpit. At Shotwick is a pulpit of the kind called a 'three-decker', with a square box-pew beneath it for the parish clerk.
As soon as people were permitted to choose their own form of worship several other religious bodies came into being, each with its own peculiar teaching and belief, often differing but slightly from each other, all bent on practising their religion precisely in their own particular way. Many earnest soldiers in the Parliamentary army of Sir George Booth, when encamped in the neighbourhood of Knutsford and Alderley, had held their services in the barn of a farmhouse at Warford. Their children in after days built the tiny Baptist chapel which still remains in the village.