ELY HOUSE.
Ely House was an ancient possession of the see,[80] the gift of William de Ludd, who in the reign of Edward I. gave the house and endowed it with his manor of Ouldbourne, a name which soon grew into Holbourn. The garden and its strawberries are immortalised by Shakespeare. It was leased to Sir Christopher Hatton by Bishop Cox in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and a struggle between the Hatton family and the Bishops of Ely then began which lasted until 1772.[81] In Wren’s time, the Bishops had recovered some of the buildings, and he had lived here before the rebellion. During that time the house had been used as a prison for ‘malignant priests,’ especially those of the city of London, and he must have found the whole building sorely defaced and injured.
The chapel, dedicated to S. Etheldreda, is a beautiful piece of Gothic architecture; and there, when it had been cleansed and restored to some order, many of the new bishops were consecrated, and Bishop Wren assisted at that preservation of the Apostolical Succession which but two years before had seemed well-nigh hopeless.
Much was done at Ely House. In the May of 1661 the Convocation of Canterbury met in S. Paul’s, its marred, plundered condition not inaptly showing the adversities through which the Church of England had passed. The Convocation had much work before it, the most pressing being to prepare a service for the baptism of those of riper years and for May 29. In order to this a committee of both Houses of Convocation was formed, which met at Ely House, and of which Bishop Wren appears to have been the ruling spirit. Many were still half afraid of their true position and afraid of the Puritan party; eighteen years of confusion and persecution had slackened all discipline, and many things seemed natural to the new generation which neither Bishop Andrewes nor Archbishop Laud would have tolerated for a day. It is implied in Dr. Barwick’s Life that many of those who should have upheld the Church discipline were willing, from a mistaken notion of conciliation and peace, to let it go. Bishop Wren set his face resolutely against this doctrine.
REVISION OF THE PRAYER BOOK.
In November the Convocation met again. Dr. John Barwick had been appointed to the deanery of S. Paul’s, and in spite of very failing health, had resumed the weekly Communions, daily prayers, and musical services of the cathedral, and had succeeded in making the choir, where the Puritans had stabled their horses, once more fit for Divine service. At this session of Convocation the Prayer Book was finally revised, after the Bishops had heard at the Savoy Conference all that the Puritans could urge against it. Bishop Wren had been actively engaged in this work, and suggested a considerable number of alterations and additions, many of which were adopted. A large number of grammatical errors had crept in to the old book: for example, ‘which’ instead of ‘who’ was in almost all the collects and the Apostles’ creed. It still, by some oversight, survives in the Lord’s Prayer.[82] ‘The altering whereof,’ says Bishop Wren, ‘if it may seem strange at first to unskilful ears, yet will it not be a nine days’ wonder, but for ever after a right expression in all our addresses unto God.’
Page after page he corrected with the utmost care, from the very title-page and calendar to the end. July has the characteristic note, ‘Out with Dog-days from amongst the Saints.’—A considerable number of his suggestions are part of the Prayer Book to this day. The final clause of the prayer for the Church Militant beginning ‘We also bless, etc.,’ though not Bishop Wren’s composition, as he intended to have replaced the Commemoration of the Saints and the Thanksgiving as it stood in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., is yet due to his suggestion. The whole series of notes and emendations is very interesting, though they are more than can be given here. Two things plainly appear: that he wished to return as nearly as possible to the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., as the one most closely resembling the offices of the Early Church; that he was very desirous to have the book made as full, as plain, and as clear as the English language could make it. He was anxious that no needless stumbling-blocks should remain in the path either of Churchmen or of Nonconformists, but at the same time he had no intention of bartering any portion of Church truth or discipline for the doubtful advantages of ‘comprehension.’
It is a proof that he was not, with all his high-minded firmness, the persecuting prelate of Puritan pamphleteers, or the sour and severe man which, in early days, Lord Clarendon thought him, that both in Norwich, his former diocese, and in the one he then ruled, most of the clergy renounced the Covenant.[83]
S. Bartholomew’s day, 1662, was the time fixed for those who refused to conform to the Church to resign their livings. It has been easy to represent this as a piece of cruel tyranny, as the turning out of a body of pious men who were labouring in the work which others neglected. In truth, as even Milton says, they were ‘time-servers, covetous, illiterate persecutors, not lovers of the truth, like in most things whereof they had accused their predecessors.’ To this grave indictment must be added that they were, in the strictest sense, intruders, thrust into charges by Cromwell’s authority, while the true priests were imprisoned, fined, forbidden to minister, or even to teach as schoolmasters, and literally left to starve.
‘The majority of these were dead and none had been ordained to fill up the gaps, during all the long years since the Church’s overthrow.... Of the eight thousand intruding Nonconformists, a bare two thousand—1700 would probably be nearer the number—refused conformity.