I.Z.P.
Clergy sold for Slaves (Vol. ii., p. 51.),—MR. SANSOM will find in the Cromwellian Diary of Thomas Burton, iv. 255. 273. 301-305., ample material for an answer to his question respecting the sale of any of the loyal party for slaves during the rebellion.
There is no evidence of any clergymen having been sold as slaves to Algiers or Barbadoes. Drs. Beale, Martin, and Sterne, heads of colleges, were threatened with this outrage (see Querela Cantabrigiensis appended to the Mercurius Rusticus p. 184). In the life of Dr. John Barwick, one of the authors of the Querela (in the Eng. transl. p. 42.), the story is thus told:
"The rebels at that time threatened some of their greatest men and most learned heads (such as Dr William Beale, Dr. Edward Martin, and Dr. Richard Sterne) transportation into the isles of America, or even to the barbarian Turks: for these great men, and several other very eminent divines, were kept close prisoners in a ship on the Thames, under the hatches, almost killed with stench, hunger, and watching; and treated by the senseless mariners with more insolence than if they had been the vilest slaves, or had been confined there for some infamous robbery or murder. Nay, one Rigby, a scoundrel of the very dregs of the parliament rebels, did at that time expose these venerable persons to sale, and would actually have sold them for slaves, if any one would have bought them."
In a note, it is added that Rigby moved twice in the Long Parliament,
"That those lords and gentlemen who were prisoners, should be sold as slaves to Argiere, or sent to the new plantations in the West Indies, because he had contracted with two merchants for that purpose."
Col. Rigby, so justly denounced by Barwick, sat in the Long Parliament for the borough of Wigan, and in the Parliarment of 1658-9 represented Lancashire. He was a native of Preston, was bred to the law, and held a colonel's rank in the parliamentary army. He was one of the committee of sequestrators for Lancashire, served at the siege of Latham House, and in 1649 was created Baron of the Exchequer, but was superseded by Cromwell.
Calamy, the historian and chaplain of the Nonconformists, treated Walker's statement quoted by MR. SANSOM as a fiction, and advised him to expunge the passage. See his Church and Dissenters compared as to Persecution, 1719, pp. 40, 41.
A.B.R.
North Side of Churchyards (Vol. ii., pp. 55. 189).—One of your writers has recently endeavoured to explain the popular dislike to burial on the north side of the church, by reference to the place of the churchyard cross, the sunniness, and the greater resort of the people to the south. These are not only meagre reasons, but they are incorrect.