woman, and the father of another—was at one time an Independent minister at Stowmarket.
But to return to Dr. Young. He, like Mr. Newcomen, had become an East Anglian, and Smectymnuus may therefore more or less be said to have an East Anglian original. As the living of Stowmarket was at that time worth £300 a year, and as £300 a year then was quite equal to £600 a year now, Dr. Young must have been in comfortable circumstances while at Stowmarket. A likeness of him is hung up, or was preserved, in Stowmarket Vicarage. ‘It,’ wrote an old observer, ‘possesses the solemn, faded yellowness of a man much given to austere meditation, yet there is sufficient energy in the eye and mouth to show, as he is preaching in Geneva gown and bands, that he is a man who could write and think, and speak with great vigour.’ One of Milton’s biographers terms him, contemptuously, a Puritan who cut his hair short. The Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth writes that it is an error to suppose that Young remained long as chaplain to merchants abroad. ‘He must have remained generally in constant residence, because we possess his signature to the vestry accounts, in a curious quarto book, which contains the annual accounts of Stow upland Parish for eighty-four years. At the parish meetings,
and at the audit of each year’s accounts Vicar Young presided, with some exceptions, from the year 1629 to 1655, and his autograph is attached to each page.’ As an author, Dr. Young had distinguished himself before he appeared as one of the Smectymnians. In 1639, while the Stuarts and the Bishops were doing all they could to break down the sanctity of the Sabbath, and to make it a day of vulgar revelry and rustic sport, Dr. Young published a thin quarto in Latin, entitled ‘Dies Dominica,’ containing a history of the institution of the Sabbath, and its vindication from all common and profane uses. There is no place of publication named, the signature is feigned, ‘Theophilus Philo Kunaces Loncardiensis,’ and in the copy reserved at Stowmarket is added, in characters by no means unlike that of the handwriting of the Vicar himself, ‘Dr. Thos. Young, of Jesus.’ The tractate is described as a very elaborate and learned compilation from the Fathers upon the sanctity of the Sabbath. A spirit of laborious and determined energy pervades it, nor is it unworthy the abilities and erudition of the author. The work was written at Stowmarket, and may have been published in Ipswich. Its paper and type are coarse; the name of the author was concealed, because at that time
a man who reverenced the Sabbath had a good chance of being brought before the Star Chamber, and of being roughly treated by Archbishop Laud, as an enemy to Church and State. About ten years before, Dr. Young had heard how, for writing his plea against Prelacy, Dr. Alexander Leighton had been cast into Newgate, dragged before the Star Chamber, where he was sentenced to have his ears cut off, to have his nose slit, to be branded in the face, to stand in the pillory, to be whipped at the post, to pay a fine of £10,000, and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. Dr. Young might well shrink from exposing himself to similar torture. But Dr. Young had other warnings, and much nearer home.
Dr. Young, like most of the men of that time, persecuted witches. These latter were supposed to have existed in great numbers, and a roving commission for their discovery was given to one Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, in Essex, to find them out in the eastern counties and execute the law upon them. It was a brutal business, and Hopkins followed it for three or four years. He proceeded from town to town and opened his courts. Stowmarket was one of the places he visited. The Puritans are said to have hung sixty
witches in Suffolk, but the Puritans were not alone responsible. It is a fact that, up to fifty years ago two supposed witches lived in Stowmarket.
Dr. Young escaped the Star Chamber, but, like most good men who would be free at that time he had to fly his native land for awhile. Milton refers to this exile in his Latin elegy:
‘Meantime alone
Thou dwellest, and helpless on a soil unknown,
Poor, and receiving from a foreign hand
The aid denied thee in thy native land.’
It seems from this that the living at Stowmarket was under sequestration. A little while after Young is back in Stowmarket, and Milton thus describes his daily life—a personal experience of the poet’s, not a flight of fancy:
‘Now, entering, thou shalt haply seated see
Besides his spouse, his infants on his knee;
Or, turning page by page with studious look
Some bulky paper or God’s holy Book.’