4 - Continuing Civil War by Other Means: Loyalist Mockery of the Interregnum Church

Summary

A royalist martyrology is not necessarily the first place you might turn to in search of a laugh. The book known as the Sufferings of the Clergy, published by Devonshire clergyman John Walker in 1714, is consequently better known to historians than to specialists in eighteenth-century satire. What is less known is that the voluminous correspondence on which it was based, along with recording memories of loyalist sufferings during the Civil Wars, also contains a rich seam of ridicule directed against the interregnum church and its clergy. During Queen Anne's reign, what Andrew Marvell had styled ‘jocular divinity’ was at its height. Even Jonathan Swift, in his A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704 – the same year Walker began researching – complained of the ‘so very numerous’ ‘wits of the present age’, before calculating the number at a figure remarkably close to the number of beneficed Church of England clergy. Visual and verbal satire had become the dominant mode of addressing religious anxieties over the perceived threat to the established church from dissent. While the satirical efforts of Swift (and of Daniel Defoe on the other side) have been much studied, non-canonical efforts from contemporary discourse have attracted less attention.

None of the manuscript satire in John Walker's archive was judged fit for publication at the time. Loyalists were extremely sensitive to the widespread characterisation of their own Civil War clergy as ‘scandalous ministers’, a notoriety lasting well into the eighteenth century. This left them reluctant to adopt their adversaries’ ad hominem approach, in print at least. The dean of Norwich, Humphrey Prideaux, discouraged Walker from examining nonconformists’ characters; although ‘much practised’ by ‘the other side’, it was ‘the Devill's office’, ill-befitting a ‘good Christian or a Divine’. Edward Chamberlain, rector of Letton in Herefordshire, advised Walker to say nothing on the ‘intruders’ who had displaced loyalists, out of respect for their more conformist descendants. Thomas Rennell, fellow of Exeter College, appealed to Walker for ‘moderation’, although this would ‘make your book less entertaining’.