A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 
Bedfordshire clergy as strictly as Hugh Reeve or Giles Thorne. His 
case is chiefly interesting because the accusation is given in detail; he 
‘adored the altar, having his eye fixed upon a crucifix in the east win- 
dow over it’; he insisted on a woman coming up to the altar rails to be 
churched; and he prayed for the departed.’ 
How the county really fared during the Presbyterian régime it is 
not easy to say ; the witnesses on both sides are so prejudiced that it is 
hard to arrive at truth between them. Thus, Thomas Holden, who was 
appointed temporarily to St. Mary’s in the place of Giles Thorne, was 
asked for by the parishioners as a ‘ godly and painful minister’ ; while 
Thorne from his prison petitioned the Parliament to commit his flock to 
a better man than Holden, who was ‘ ridiculously ignorant’ and incapable 
of discerning truth from error.’ But it is clear that there was a large 
majority ready to conform to the new order ; most of the Puritans among the 
clergy would naturally welcome it, and others would accept it from the 
same necessity which always wins a certain measure of conformity. 
Nominally the whole country became Presbyterian ; but so long as the 
majority of the clergy were men who had been trained in the old ways, 
it is likely that in many places the order of service, the words of the 
extempore prayers, had a strong affinity with the ancient liturgy. There 
is no more striking evidence of the little change of which the less in- 
structed were aware than that which is found in the autobiography of 
John Bunyan. ‘At this time,’ he says, ‘I was so overrun with the 
spirit of superstition,’ that ‘I adored and that with great devotion’ all 
things in the church—‘ High Place, Priest, clerk, vestment and what 
else ’—‘ counting all things holy that were therein contained.’* What 
other frame of mind could Laud himself have wished? Yet this was in 
1649-50, when the ‘high place’ must have been bare enough ; when 
the only vestment Bunyan could have seen for six or seven years was the 
Geneva gown. The popular phrase itself—‘ high place ’—is not with- 
out interest; it seems out of keeping with days when the altar was 
nothing but a table which was moved according to the convenience of 
the minister and congregation. 
Two things at any rate may be placed to the credit of the Presby- 
terians. One was the stand they made against plurality ; even those who 
1 Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy, p. 154. In connection with these prosecutions for ritual it should 
however be noted that they were made by men who objected equally to other points of church custom 
which no churchmen have ever since attacked. The lists of ‘ innovations’ drawn up by the committee 
which sat at the Bishop of Lincoln’s house in 1641 is very instructive. There the ‘turning of the 
table altarwise,’ compelling the communicants to come up to the rails to receive, standing for the 
hymns and glorias, reading the litany in the body of the church, are set side by side with the 
adornment of the altar with crucifix, candlesticks and curtains, bowing to it, turning to the east at the 
creed, using a credence table, etc., and could only be condemned by those who wished not merely to 
reform, but to break altogether with the church and all its traditions. The fact that 2 these things 
could be called ‘innovations’ throws light backwards over the previous half-century, and shows how 
wonderfully successful the Puritans had been in opposing royal and episcopal authority. 
* Hist. MSS. Com. iv. 100. Holden was only a short time at St. Mary’s (Add. MS. 15671, f. 
104). On 19 July 1647 certain parishioners were again appointed to take the tithes, and pay Mrs. 
Thorne’s fifth, until a fit person was appointed. 
8 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Clar. Press ed. p. 301). 
340 
