[435] The letters in the State Paper Office, from which all these particulars are taken, are abridged in the Calendar for 1663. Any one wishing to investigate the subject should study these letters in connection with Drake's Eboracum and Whitaker's Loidis and Elmete.
[436] Amongst the papers which belonged to the Secretary of State, and which are now preserved in the Record Office, is an informer's notebook belonging to this period. As it is a curiosity, and as it contains allusions to well-known characters, I will give a few extracts in the Appendix.
[437] These are all local traditions.
[438] Aspland's History of the Old Nonconformists in Duckinfield. Like stories are told of Bradley Wood near Newton Abbot, and of Collier's Wood in Gloucestershire. Places of worship erected or publicly used during times of indulgence or connivance, will be noticed in the next Volume.
[439] Life of Owen by Orme.
[440] Nelson's Life of Bull, 253. Other examples of the ejected having married rich wives may be found in Kennet, 910. John Tombes writing to Williamson, mentions a book on the anvil entitled, Theocratia, or a Treatise of the Kingdom of God, to show that no claim of coercive jurisdiction, either inferior or co-ordinate to the King, is warranted by any ecclesiastical rulers, or by any office or power in the kingdom of Christ in its militant state.... The Bishop of Winchester, he goes on to say, has put him in hopes of a brotherhood at the Savoy. Also has had hope from the Lord Keeper of a place at Rochester in Bishop Warner's Hospital.—State Papers, 1668, May 8. Tombes was a Baptist and therefore could not hold a living, but in other respects he seems to have been a Conformist.
[441] Kennet, 905, 906, 908.
[442] Life by Rogers, 130, 140.
[443] Palmer's Nonconformist Memorial, i. 352.
[444] Life and Times, iii. 142.