A HISTORY OF HERTFORDSHIRE 



from Laud. The case was bound to create much sympathy with the minister, 

 and years afterwards when Chauncey was in America the parishioners of 

 Ware begged him to return ; he was actually on his way when^he accepted 

 the invitation to become the first president of Harvard College." 



That disturbances were frequent at this date there is ample evidence to 

 prove, and the trouble generally centred round the communion rails. What 

 was, perhaps, the first outrage was committed at Much Hadham, where 

 Dr.'Thomas Paske had set up rails and inserted new painted glass in the east 

 window." Three men of Hadham, who ' did not Hke the rails nor the 

 pictures of the window,' promised the blacksmith and two others money ir 

 they would take them down,^' apparently during the rector's absence one 

 day in August 1640.'' The affair was attributed to the soldiery, but there 

 seems no doubt that the actors were local men, as William Lord Sahsbury 

 wrote to Secretary Windebank that the three that ' pulled the window down 

 . might easily have been prevented and apprehended, if the town had 

 not connived at it.' *° His report brought a request from the council to the 

 justices for a note of any riots or profanation of churches ; the return made 

 showed that in five churches in Broadwater Hundred the altar rails had been 

 pulled down by the soldiers." The action seems to have met with general 

 approval, for though their number in no case exceeded five, and they entered 

 either by finding the door open or by fetching the key, no one would identify 

 the rioters.*^ More serious was the outrage at King's Walden, where Puritan 

 feeling seems to have been strong. Here ' on Sunday, during divine service, 

 24 soldiers entered . . . and sat in the chancel till the sermon was ended, 

 and then, before all the congregation, they tore down the rails and defaced 

 the wainscot, inviting themselves to the churchwardens to dinner, exacted 

 money from the minister, brought an excommunicated person into church 

 and forced the minister to read evening prayer in his presence.' *' 



In 1 64 1 orders were issued by both Houses for the removal of the altar 

 rails," and these were generally carried out, though Henry Hancock, the 

 pugnacious vicar of Furneux Pelham, ' walked with his Sword about the 

 Church-yard in the night, saying, "he would rather loose his life, than suffer 

 them to be pul'd up."'" At Tewin when the rails were removed John Mount- 

 fort ' placed formes instead of them,' *' a device probably adopted elsewhere. 



While moral and disciplinary cases were being tried in the Court of 

 High Commission, and smaller offences, such as absence from church, were 

 coming before the justices of the peace,*^ public opinion was becoming more 

 and more definite in hostility to the government of both church and state. 

 The unfortunate association of the bishops with the administration of affairs 

 and their support of the theory of divine right lent point to the academic 

 Presbyterianism of the Puritans of the older school with their yearning after 

 primitive order. In Hertfordshire the divergence of poUcy evident between 



«« Diet. Nat. Biog. 37 cal. S. P. Bom. 1640, p. 580. 



^ Quarter Sess. R. (Herts. Co. Rec), i, 64. 39 Ibid. 68. ^ Cal. S. P. Dom. 1640, p. 580. 



Ibid. 1 640-1, pp. 69-70. At Rickmansworth eight soldiers impressed in the county entered the 

 church and broke down the communion rails after morning service ; in the afternoon they defaced the font 

 cover (Urwick, op. cit. 307). ^ Cal. S. P. Dom. 1640-1, p. 70. « Ibid. 



" Shaw, Hist, of Engl. Church, 1640-60, 1, 106. 



*' White, Tint Century of Scandalous and Malignant Priests, 1 7. *^ Ibid. 45. 



*' cf. Cal. S. P. Dom. 1625-49, P- 5^6. 



