The villages supplied with regular services in the vicinity of Wellingborough are Doddington and Wilby, and occasionally Orlingbury. As this Church is of comparatively recent formation, and as all those that have sustained the pastoral office over it are, we believe, still living, the account we can present is necessarily short.
The present pastor and his flock will rejoice in the tokens of divine favour they have received; and will go forward, we trust, with the cheering hope of continued and yet more abundant supplies of divine blessings, so that peace and prosperity may now be increasingly and permanently experienced in this department of Zion.
CHAPTER X.
MEMORIALS OF THE INDEPENDENT CHURCH AT OUNDLE.
In attempting to trace the principles of Nonconformity to their earliest manifestations in the town of Oundle, after the reformation from Popery, we find two Puritan divines ministering here in the course of the sixteenth century. These were men who could not conform to all the rites and ceremonies of the Church as by law established, and who had to suffer much for their refusal to comply with its requirements.
The first of these was Eusebius Paget, who was born at Cranford, in this county, and educated in Christ's College, Oxford. During his abode at Oxford he broke his right arm, and was lame of it ever after. When he removed from the University he became vicar of Oundle and rector of Langton, but was exceedingly harassed on account of his Nonconformity.
On January 29th, 1573, he was cited by Scambler, Bishop of Peterborough, who first suspended him for three weeks, and then deprived him of his living, worth £100 per annum. Several others were suspended and deprived at the same time, because they could not with a good conscience subscribe to certain promises and engagements proposed to them by the Bishop. And this Dr. Edward Scambler, successively Bishop of Peterborough and Norwich, was the first pastor of a Protestant congregation in London in the reign of Queen Mary; but was compelled, on account of the severity of the persecution, to relinquish the situation. He was a learned man; very zealous against the Papists; and was probably driven into a state of exile. But surely he forgot his former circumstances, when he became a zealous persecutor of his brethren in the days of Elizabeth; not remembering that they were as conscientious in their objections to what they considered to be the remains of Popery in a reformed Church, and in their endeavours to obtain a purer mode of discipline and worship, as he had been in his efforts against what he formerly disapproved. After this Mr. Paget was preferred to the rectory of Kilkhampton, in Cornwall.
When Mr. Paget and his brethren were deprived, they presented a supplication to the Queen and the Parliament for their restoration to their beloved ministry, but to no purpose; they must subscribe, or be buried in silence.