A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



long rule of the Whigs, supported by latitudinarian bishops. This lasted for 

 practically a century, broken only by the brief high-church triumph under 

 Queen Anne. The loss of the non-jurors, who embodied fully the traditions 

 of the great Caroline divines, further weakened the culture and spiritual 

 efficiency of a church which had already suffered heavily by the religious con- 

 troversies of the previous century ; while in the Georgian Age the best minds 

 of the Church of England here, as elsewhere, were turned rather to apologetics 

 against Rationalism than to vigorous parochial or evangelistic work. The 

 suppression of Convocation in 171 8 further checked the corporate energies 

 of the clergy, and it is worth remembering that the learned and industrious 

 antiquary. White Kennctt, who became bishop of Peterborough in that year, 

 refrained from publishing the materials he had collected towards the history 

 of Convocation in order to please the Whig government. Bishop Kennett, 

 though zealous in the management of his diocese after his own fashion, was 

 very severe to any of his clergy suspected of Tory or Jacobite tendencies. In 

 April, 1720, Richard Reynolds, then dean of Peterborough, writes from 

 Northampton to Bishop Kennett : ' I find that the vicarage of Newbottle 

 and Charlton has been void above six months. The benefice is not worth 

 above £t,o per annum, which may make the patron less careful to fill it, but 

 as he is a professed Jacobite, and has formerly given much trouble by causing 

 his domestic non-juring chaplain to read prayers commonly in his own 

 form, so if your lordship is not otherwise engaged, it were to be wished you 

 would take this opportunity to collate thereto an honest man well affected to 

 the government.'^ 



Bishop Kennett died in 1728, and the six successors who ruled the 

 diocese to the end of the century were not men of special mark, and generally 

 contented themselves with discountenancing ' enthusiasm.' There were during 

 this time, of course, wide varieties of clerical type, as well as many different 

 kinds of church laymen in Northamptonshire. The earlier evangelical move- 

 ment had in the county one name once widely known. The Rev, James 

 Hervey ^ (born 1714, died 1758, rector of Weston Favell, and CoUing- 

 tree 1752—58), author of T/ie Meditations among the Tombs, and a friend of 

 Wesley and Doddridge, was a prominent example of that school which 

 adhered to Episcopacy, yet professed Calvinistic theology, and united with it 

 much emotional and evangelical fervour. Such people were congenial 

 neither to the Whig bishops nor to many of the Tory clergy, and 

 found among the dissenters most of such sympathy as they secured. Hervey 

 is of historical consequence as a link in the chain of thought and feeling 

 which maintained the Puritan spirit in the Church of England, and which 

 connects the later evangelical revival with the seventeenth century types of 

 piety. His saintly character compares with that of William Law, the great 

 non-juror, but his books show the style of the period at its worst, and the 

 laboured conceits and attenuated thought in his writings have long secured 

 for them oblivion. Brief mention is also deserved by Thomas Hartley* 

 (1709 (?)— 1784), for many years rector of Winwick, whose mystical 

 temperament was in sharp contrast with that least mystical of ages, and 



' Lansdowne MS. 1,028, fol. 238. SackrilleTufton, a son of the earl of Thanct, was at this time patron 

 of the vicarage and lord of the manor of Newbottle. He presented Thomas Willis, M.A., to the living on 

 10 May, 1720. 



' Diet. Nat. Biog. XXVI, 282. ' Diet. Nat. Biog. XXV, 71. 



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