A HISTORY OF YORKSHIRE 



vicars-choral run to the alehouse as soon as they have done reading it.'" 

 The liturgy, said Thomas Sharp of Adel, was ' defective in necessaries, 

 redundant in superfluities, dangerous in some things, disputable in many, 

 disorderly in all.' " A fortnight before the Restoration, John Botts preached 

 violently at Darfield, advocating armed resistance to the king." The minister 

 of Horbury declared somewhat later that ' those that have taken the protesta- 

 tion, and, after, come to the Common Prayer of the Church, are perjured 

 persons before God and man.'" Dr. Lake was preferred after the Restoration 

 to the vicarage of Leeds ; the lecturer, Christopher Nesse, occupied his 

 afternoon sermons with confuting what Lake had preached in the morning." 

 Shaw, at Hull, had been blamed for acknowledging Charles II in 1660 : in 



1 66 1 some of his congregation found his 'ministry too sharp for their lives,' 

 and complained to Bishop Sheldon. He was inhibited from preaching in 

 the church, but was allowed to keep his mastership of the Charterhouse. 

 However, his preaching here attracted people from the town churches ; and 

 he eventually had to retire to Rotherham. His active ministry closed with 

 the silencing of Nonconformist preachers on 24 August 1662." Bowles died 

 three days before that date.°^ Shaw, in spite of occasional alarms, died in 

 peace (1664).'° Kirby died under excommunication, and was buried in 

 his own garden.^™ Heywood, excommunicated in Halifax Church in 



1662 and 1680, led a wandering life on the borders of Lancashire and 

 Yorkshire: after the Declaration of Indulgence in 1679 he settled at 

 Northowram. Driven away in 1680, he was imprisoned for 'riotous assembly' 

 in 1685, but returned to Northowram after James II's declaration, and died 

 in 1702.' Cornelius Todd, ejected from Bilton Ainsty, suffered imprison- 

 ment later on at Pontefract. In 1674, preaching at the opening of a 

 meeting-house in Leeds, he reminded the soldiers who came to interrupt him 

 that, even in the time of Nero, St. Paul had been allowed to preach in his 

 own hired house.^ Sir John Jackson of Hickleton sheltered the minister of 

 the place as his chaplain, and his wife as housekeeper ; and Nathaniel Denton 

 of Bolton- on-Dearne, ' a picture of an old puritan,' found a temporary pulpit 

 in Hickleton Church.* Richard Whitehurst, ejected from Laughton-en-le- 

 Morthen, continued to preach in his friends' houses : to avoid capture, he 

 preached in a lobby between two rooms, with a thin curtain between him 

 and his hearers.* Some of the Puritan clergy conformed : Henry Swift of 

 Penistone, after much persuasion, consented to take the Oxford oath, and to 

 read a few prayers.' Robert Todd of St. John's, Leeds, still went to church 

 after his ejection.' But the majority separated from the Church to which 

 they could no longer conscientiously belong. The events of 1662 proved to 

 the nonconforming bodies, as to the Churchmen of twenty years before, the 

 truth of the saying, persecutio est evangelii genius. 



" Calamy, op. cit. iii, 457 ; J. Walker, Sufferings of the Ckrgy, ii, 83, says that Dr. Richard Marsh had 

 been nominated dean hy Charles I at Oxford : he was installed 1 7 Aug. 1 660. 



^ Calamy, op. cit. iii, 421. " Depositions from the Castle of Tork (Surt. Soc.), 83. 



" Ibid. 85 n. ^ Calamy, op. cit. iii, 441. 



'' Torks. Diaries (Surt. Soc), 154 seq. '" Ibid. 157. 



"Ibid. 161. 



"* Calamy, op. cit. iii, 455. See Depositions from the Castle of Tork (Surt. Soc.), 97, for a charge of 

 persistent Nonconformity against Kirby. ' Calamy, op. cit. iii, 428 seq. 



' Ibid, iii, 424, 425. « Ibid. 



' Ibid. 442. 5 Ibid. 443. ' Ibid. 440. 



68 



