A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



the teaching of a private school by any sequestered minister. It is said that 

 Aggas, the rector of Rushbrook, got his living by the fiddle. According to 

 the historian of the ejection, one at least of the dispossessed ministers profited 

 in bodily health from the treatment he received. James Buck, the ex-vicar 

 of Stradbroke, was committed to Ipswich gaol, when a martyr to the gout, 

 and when his physicians did not believe he had more than two years' life in 

 him; but a diet of bread and water for two months effected a cure, the gout 

 never returned and he lived to the age of four-score. 1 



However sorrowful many of these cases must have been, it is better to 

 reserve our chief pity for those episcopally ordained clergy who were content 

 to remain in their cures and teach doctrines diametrically opposed to those 

 they were solemnly pledged to uphold. It was amongst the ejected that a 

 certain semi-secret supply of church ministrations was maintained, in spite 

 of all penalties. Thus Lawrence Bretton, the ejected rector of Hitcham, 

 removed to his birthplace at Hadleigh, where he continued to use privately 

 the daily service of the Church, and to ' administer the Blessed Sacrament on 

 the three great festivals of the year to such loyalists as resorted to him,' 

 and Lionel Playters, when turned out of the rectory of Uggeshall, continued 

 the exercise of his ministry. 2 



Nor was the vehemence of the East Anglian Puritans confined to action 

 against clerical ministrations ; it blazed forth with peculiar virulence against 

 the places of worship. 



The county of Suffolk, so celebrated for the beautiful carving and furni- 

 ture of its churches, had the unenviable fame of giving birth to that unhappy 

 destroyer of so much that was worthy of God's sanctuaries, the uncompro- 

 mising iconoclast, William Dowsing. It was in August, 1 64 1 , that an 

 order was first published by the Commons ' for the taking away all scandalous 

 Pictures out of Churches.' 3 At the instance and under the direction of the 

 Earl of Manchester, General of the Associated Eastern Counties, Dowsing 

 received his appointment as Parliamentary Visitor of the Suffolk Churches 

 dated 19 December, 1643. In this commission, under Manchester's signa- 

 ture, it is stated that many crucifixes, crosses, images of the Trinity and the 

 Virgin Mary, and pictures of saints and superstitious inscriptions still re- 

 mained in many churches and chapels of the Associated Counties, and that 

 William Dowsing, gent., was empowered to remove or deface all such, and 

 to require assistance from mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, headboroughs, 

 and ' all other officers and loveinge subjects.' He also had the power assigned 

 him, which he freely exercised, of appointing deputies to carry out the work. 

 Dowsing and his associates far exceeded even the wide terms of the com- 

 mission, working the most wanton and wicked mischief wherever they went, 

 and clearly making plunder and illegal exactions a regular part of their pro- 

 ceedings. Memorial brasses, many of post-Reformation date, were torn up 

 and sold, and payments actually insisted on from the churchwardens for the 

 destructive work in which they had been engaged. 



There is no reason to doubt that the work of destruction was carried 

 out in all the Associated Counties, which included Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincoln, 



1 See Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy, passim. The accounts of the sufferings entailed by several of'the 

 Suffolk ejections are peculiarly heartrending. 



* Ibid. pt. ii, 209, pp. 177, 335. 3 Ibid. p. 178. 



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