JOHN WESLEY
In leaving Newport Pagnell, we may depart in imaginary company with John Wesley, who was riding horseback this way to Northampton on May 21st, 1742, when he overtook one who eventually proved to be a Calvinist, “a serious man with whom I immediately fell into conversation. He presently gave me to know what his opinions were, therefore I said nothing to contradict them. He was quite uneasy to know ‘whether I held the doctrines of the decrees as he did’; but I told him over and over ‘We had better keep to practical things, lest we should be angry with one another.’ And so we did for two miles, till he caught me unawares and dragged me into the dispute before I knew where I was. He then grew warmer and warmer; told me I was rotten at heart, and supposed I was one of John Wesley’s followers. I told him ‘No, I am John Wesley himself.’ Upon which he would gladly have run away outright. But being the better mounted of the two, I kept close to his side and endeavoured to show him his heart till we came into the street of Northampton.”
Let us hope that Calvinist was duly convinced of error.
To the north, on our road to Northampton, Newport has grown not at all: for reasons sufficient to the observation of all who pass this way: the river Ouse and its adjacent wet meadows, over which the road is taken on a bridge and a causeway, forbidding, even if the parish boundary did not.
Here is Lathbury, whose church and few houses are to be sought off the road by turning to the left at a point where a formal red brick mansion, formerly “Lathbury Inn,” stands. There was some little trouble here in 1745, when Mrs. Symes, of Lathbury Park, an ardent Jacobite, refused the Duke of Cumberland and his army a passage through her estate: with the result (as she did not possess an army of her own) that they passed through, riotously and destructively, instead of decently and in good order.
The little church of Lathbury is a singularly beautiful village church, with oddly diminishing tower walls. The interior, Norman and Early English, still preserves abundant traces of frescoes of Renaissance character, with texts and the beautiful Lord’s Prayer. A small brass, dated 1661, to one Davies, son of a former rector, is placed here, according to the inscription, so that other “Cambria-Brittaines,” passing, should see it. “Cambria-Brittaine” appears to be seventeenth-century pedant’s language for “Welshman.”
LATHBURY CHURCH.
A GUNPOWDER PLOTTER