This pamphlet is illustrated with a woodcut showing the Cook and Tapster in confabulation, while in the background joints are roasting, and guests are seated in boxes, refreshing themselves with ‘half-cans and Bloomsbury pots.’
The abuses of the Ecclesiastical Courts did not escape the notice of the seventeenth-century pamphleteers. Doctors’ Commons and the Proctors were quizzed in an illustrated pamphlet, wherein ‘Sponge, the Proctor,’ and ‘Hunter, the Parator,’ hold a long conversation, and express their opinion that the only way to make men live in quietness is to beggar them with long suits and large fees. Other evil-doers were shown up in a similar manner. A certain Edward Finch, Vicar of Christ-church, London, gave so much offence to the parishioners by his manner of life that a petition was presented to Parliament on the subject. The petitioners said they were offended by their Vicar’s ‘frequent and unreasonable bowings’ before the altar, and by his ‘scandalous life and conversation.’ They set forth in the petition that they are ‘troubled in their church with singing, organs, and other Instruments of Musicke, not understood by them, whereby they are greatly distracted in the service of God, the same being altogether unprofitable, and no way tending to their spirituall edification.’ The Vicar is charged with drunkenness and incontinence—with exacting unreasonable fees—with being a non-resident; and the evidence in support of the petition shows that on one occasion he went to Hammersmith in a coach with certain loose companions and spent the day in a manner unfit for a clergyman. He is proved to have attempted to administer the Sacrament to a dying woman while he was in a state of drunkenness, and to have been guilty of many other disgraceful acts. The House of Commons passed a vote of censure on this graceless Ritualist; and the petition setting forth his misdeeds was printed and published, illustrated with a woodcut showing the journey to Hammersmith in a coach. Notwithstanding the condemnation of Parliament, the Rev. Edward Finch continued in his evil courses, and conducted his ‘life and conversation’ much the same as before.
| EVIL DOINGS OF THE REV. EDWARD FINCH, 1641. |
From the ‘perambulations’ of a Ritualistic clergyman we come to a nunnery, in a pamphlet published in 1641, entitled, ‘The Arminian Nunnery, or a briefe description and relation of the late erected Monasticall Place, called the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire.’ The writer of this pamphlet gives a minute and by no means ‘brief’ description of the institution, which he evidently believes to be Roman Catholic, or a stepping-stone to it, though the ‘Deacon’ who attended him on his visit assured him to the contrary. He, however, sets down all the tapers and crosses, the bowings and prostrations, as so many proofs of idolatry, and marvels that, in a settled Church government, the Bishops should suffer any such institutions to exist; particularly that Archbishop Laud, professing to be such an ‘Anti-Papist and enemy to superstition and idolatry, should permit this innovation and connive at such canting betwixt the barke and the tree in matter of Religion.’ While censuring the prelates for their criminal slothfulness, the writer gave his countrymen the benefit of his own acuteness and energy, and published his description, illustrated with an engraving representing one of the nuns, with a portion of the nunnery in the background.
| NUNNERY AT LITTLE GIDDING, HUNTINGDONSHIRE, 1641. |
The next illustrated pamphlet we come to is a curious attempt on the part of its author to satirise his literary contemporaries for the falsehoods contained in their writings, and he burlesques their productions by relating many things as lies which, however, he means to be understood as truths. It is called ‘The Liar, or a contradiction to those who in the titles of their Books affirmed them to be true, when they were false; although mine are all true yet I term them lyes. Veritas Veritatis.’
‘There was an Englishman which travelled to the Swedish Army, and began to relate very strange passages which he had seen here in England, thinking that travellers might lye by authority; for said he in the County of Berke, at a place called Abingdon, when the Earle of Strafford lost his head, was such thundering and lightning, and earthquakes, that it is almost incredible. Surely I think it is incredible indeed, for I know ’tis no such matter.
‘He told too that the very same day that my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury was committed to the Tower, there was a child born in the County of Somerset with a Mitre on its head, a marke on his breast like a Crucifix, and many other strange things which were there seene.’ Having invented the travelling Englishman for a mouth-piece and selected the Swedish army for an audience, the writer goes on to relate many other strange things, which, though told as lies, are evidently intended to be taken as truths.
| THE LIAR ON THE RACK, 1641. |
‘They heard him with patience till he had made an end of his lying, and then they asked him whether yea or nay he saw these things he spake of, he presently swore all the oaths of God that he saw these things with his own natural eyes, which he had reported, and he would maintaine it, though he spent his dearest blood in the doeing of it; well, they heard his protestations, and made a full account that they would prove his constancie whether he would be a Martyr yea or nay, in the meane time they horsed him, and this was the manner of it.