ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



gence, and the same conscientious scruples led him to follow his metropolitan, 

 Sancroft, in refusing to take the oath to William and Mary. Deprivation 

 followed, and White of Peterborough, with five other bishops, and about 

 400 of the most learned of the beneficed clergy, with a few distinguished 

 laymen, formed the body of non-jurors. Bishop White was one of the most 

 active of them ; he joined in the circular of 1695 asking for help from the 

 charitable for his dispossessed brethren, and was in consequence imprisoned 

 for eight weeks while awaiting examination by the Privy Council, then 

 under Whig influence. He attended Sir John Fenwick on the scaffold in 

 January, 1697, to the scandal of all but the non-jurors, and he joined with 

 the deprived bishops of Norwich and Ely in secretly consecrating suffragan 

 bishops of Thetford and Ipswich in 1694, by which the succession of non- 

 juring bishops was continued in a line which lasted for more than a century. 

 The Northamptonshire clergy who became non-jurors were Bagshaw of 

 Sibbertoft, Arnold of Deene, Coteler of Litchborough, Cuffe of Wicken, 

 Bedford of Wittering, Ives of St. Giles', Northampton, Harvey of Braybrooke, 

 and Hughes, minor canon of Peterborough. So late as the reign of George I 

 the laity who refused the oath of allegiance in Northamptonshire were, 

 though few, of considerable consequence.^ 



The learning and piety of the non-jurors can find no better illustration 

 than the life and work of William Law', the author of the Serious Call to a 

 Holy Life.^ Born at King's Cliffe in 1686,' he was deprived of his Cambridge 

 fellowship on the accession of George I, when the Abjuration Oath was 

 strictly enforced. He retired to his native place, and there lived a life of 

 devotion, alms-giving, and practical works of mercy, making indeed a com- 

 panion idyll to that of Nicholas Ferrar in the previous century. Here Law 

 died in 1761. His is by far the greatest name among the non-juring 

 members of the Church of England in the county during the eighteenth 

 century, and the effect of his writings and life both on the earlier and later 

 Evangelical party, in and out of the church, and subsequently upon Newman 

 and the Oxford movement, make him a landmark in English religious history. 

 His tendency to mysticism alienated many of his contemporaries, and his 

 great logical and literary merit and power have never been duly recognised 

 except in the case of the Serious Call.* 



Apart from William Law, the story of the Church of England in 

 Northamptonshire during the eighteenth century is comparatively unim- 

 portant, the characteristics of the age in which a period of long religious 

 strife was followed by a reaction against all enthusiasm being naturally felt 

 and displayed more widely by the national Church than by the much 

 smaller religious societies outside its pale. The failure of the Comprehension 

 Bill had left the boundaries of the Church where the Act of Uniformity had 

 placed them, while the Toleration Act strengthened dissent in Northampton- 

 shire, as elsewhere, and facilitated the loss to the Church of earnest persons 

 out of harmony with the lower spiritual tone of the age. The victory of 

 Anglicanism in matters of church government and doctrine under Charles II 

 was largely nullified in practice, though not in church organization, by the 



' See Names and Particulars of all England arranged into Counties, printed in 1745 ; B.M. 1,401. 

 ' See edition with preface and notes bv J. H. Overton (1898). 

 » Diet. Nat. Biog. XXXII, 236. 

 < Ibid. XXXII, 238, 239. 



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