A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 
and many other persecutions.’ Another came from an ‘aggrieved 
parishioner’ at Caddington.? A complaint also came from the parish- 
ioners of Wootton and Quinton (Northants) against Jeremy Stephens, 
the prebendary of Biggleswade.’ It does not necessarily follow, because 
these petitions were many and urgent, that they were really the voice of 
the people ; but there can be no doubt, in the light of later events, that 
there had been discontent in the county, and that the influence of Cal- 
vinistic teaching was widespread. 
Dr. Pocklington and Hugh Reeve were arrested and deprived of 
all ecclesiastical preferments early in 1641°; John Gwyn, the vicar of 
Cople,” and Giles Thorne of St. Mary’s, Bedford,’ in 1642. Subsequent 
deprivations were as much political as religious; the charge brought 
against the deprived was as a rule simply ‘malignancy.’ The exact 
number of these is not easy to obtain, as they have to be collected 
from different sources. But the largest number that can be made out 
for Bedfordshire, between 1643 and 1648, reckoning all doubtful 
cases, is twenty-six, and there were certainly over twenty at the lowest 
estimate.” If we add to these the names of those deprived before 
the civil war began, it will be no exaggeration to say that about 
one-fifth of the clergy of this county were ejected either for Royalist 
sympathies or for refusal to conform to the modes of Church service 
and government ordained by Parliament. 
It is only fair to say that not all those who were thus deprived 
were left quite destitute. On petition to the local ‘Committee for 
Plundered Ministers ’* it was possible to secure one-fifth of the profits 
of the sequestered rectory or vicarage for the wives and children of the 
late incumbent ; and this pension was actually secured by Mrs. Thorne, 
and also by the children of the rector of Tillbrook.’ An entry of 25 
February 1644” orders a rector to pay ‘what the Parliament ordered’ 
out of the tithes to a curate from whom the living was sequestered. 
But that many suffered extreme poverty and distress there is little doubt. 
One of the hardest cases was that of Hugh Reeve of Ampthill, who 
1 Hist. MSS. Com. p. 94, 5 Aug. 1641. 2 Ibid. p. §3, 23 Feb. 3 Ibid. iv. 74. 
4 Shaw, Hist. of the Engl. Church under the Commonwealth, ii. 296, 297. 5 Ibid. p. 298. 
8 Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 45. Christopher Slater, vicar of Leighton Buzzard, would probably have 
come under the same condemnation if he had not died this year; his parishioners said he was a ‘ pro- 
moter of superstitious innovations,’ so that they had to pay a lecturer besides to instruct them in the 
way of godliness (ibid. v. 4). 
7 In Add. MSS. 15669-71, a rough minute book of the ‘Committee for Plundered Ministers’ 
names sixteen livings as sequestered ; two other incumbents are summoned to appear, but the result is 
not recorded. Walker in his Sufferings of the Clergy names six other cases. The parish register of 
Toddington records in 1654 the burial of Thomas Claver, rector, ‘but unjustly sequestered.’ Other 
such registers might possibly yield more ; none of the other lists pretend to be complete. The arch- 
deacon, John Hacket, and Jeremy Stephens, prebendary of Biggleswade, are not counted above, because 
they only lost part of their preferment. 
8 There had been a local committee for Bedfordshire ‘for the discovery of malignant ministers’ 
appointed by the Central Committee for Plundered Ministers in 1643 (Shaw, Hist. of the Engi. Church 
under the Commonwealth, ii. 194). 
9 Add. MS. 15670, 4 Apr. 1646 ; although he had ‘inveighed with fearefull curses’ against the 
Parliament and said there were none in it but ‘rogues and rascalls.’ (Add. MS. 15669, 5 July 1645). 
19 Thid. 25 Feb. 1644. 
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