40 Westbury under the Plain. 



I 



orthodox University of Oxford that they condemned it in Convo- 

 cation, and ordered it to be publicly burnt in the schools quadrangle. 1 



John Paradise. 



The other vicar, also a Commonwealth man, minister of Westbury, 

 who survives in a printed publication, was a native of the county, of 

 whom it is particularly recorded, as something extraordinary, though 

 not so now-a-days, that he was so dexterous in writing shorthand 

 as to be able to take down, word for word, a whole sermon from the 

 mouth of any preacher. On the Restoration he conformed, and 

 preached as earnestly for the King as he had formerly done for the 

 Commonwealth. His shorthand notes from discourses of the previous 

 complexion could scarcely have been of much use to him. The one 

 discourse by which his memory lives was preached at Westbury on 

 30th January, 1661. It has the odd title of " Hadad-rimmon, } or 

 England's mourning for Regicide, preached at Westbury on a 

 solemn Fast for the Horrid Murder of K. Charles I. of glorious 

 memory The name of Hadad-rimmon occurs only once in the 

 Bible, in the twelfth chapter of Zechariah :— " In that day shall 

 there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadad- 

 rimmon in the valley of Megiddo " : alluding to a place of that 



1 Antony Wood, in his account of Mr. Hunton in " Athense Oxonienses," says 

 that this treatise on monarchy was in great vogue among many persons of 

 Commonwealth and Levelling principles, but that the offence specially taken to 

 it at Oxford arose from its assertion that the sovereignty of England lay in the 

 " Three Estates, the King, Lords, and Commons." That is still the general 

 idea of the " Three Estates," but strictly speaking, it is incorrect. The Crown 

 is not one of the estates of the realm. In the heading of the now disused service 

 for the 5th of November, in the Prayer Book, the case is stated correctly : " A 

 Form of Prayer and Thanksgiving for the happy Deliverance of King James 

 and the three Estates of England." The collects of that service are still more 

 explicit : "The King and the Estates of the Realm, viz., The Nobility, Clergy, 

 and Commons assembled in Parliament." Master Hunton designedly omitted 

 the clergy. The year 1683 was an awkward time to make such an omission, 

 because the Established Clergy having been for many years, in the Commonwealth 

 period, shelved and ejected, had lately recovered their position at the Restoration 

 of Charles II., and for them to be then proclaimed, by one of their own order, as 

 no longer one of the estates of the realm, was intolerable in the ears of Oxford 

 divines, who accordingly showed their sense of the indignity by putting the Vicar 

 of Westbury' s book into the fire. 



