The rise of the old dissent, exemplified in the life of Oliver Heywood, one of the founders of the Presbyterian congregations in the county of York. 1630-1702

Preface

Mr. heywood was one of those persons whose lives are the connecting links of early Puritanism and modern Dissent. He was born in the reign of King Charles the First ; studied at Cambridge when the University had been newly reformed by the parliamentary commissioners ; was ordained a minister by a Presbyterian classis in the time of the Commonwealth ; became the pastor of a little rural flock ; was separated from them by the operation of the Act of Uniformity ; refused to desist from the exercise of his ministry when he was so removed, and suffered considerable inconvenience in consequence ; became pastor of a congregation of Non- Conforming persons when the Act of Toleration allowed of the formation of such societies ; and having lived in peace for thirteen years under the protection of that Act, died in 1702, having seen several congregations besides his own raised in a great measure by his efforts.

Such is the outline of his life, and it will be found in the following pages to be filled up with a minuteness which will require, I fear, some indulgence on the part of the reader to be excused ; but having such authentic materials, I was unwilling to lose the opportunity of presenting in detail the facts which made up the experience of one of those men who, by the course which they took at a very critical period in the history of the

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Reformed Church of England, were the instruments in the hands of Providence of introducing a new element into English society, and created influences that have had the most important effects on the characters and fortunes of a large portion of the population of England ; and this the rather as I am not acquainted with any work in which the life of one of these persons is so fully described, few of those ministers having left such ample materials for the purpose as were left by Mr. Heywood. I was desirous also of preserving the names of many persons who acted with him in the severe course of self-appointed duty in which he trod, or were more especially wrought upon by his ministry ; and also of presenting to the hand of any one who may hereafter undertake to write of the ecclesiastical history of the diocese of York, materials which he would in vain seek in any other quarter.

The extracts from these remains, illustrative of the general manners and opinions of the time, are not so numerous as to require apology.

Though this work is the life of Mr. Heywood, it will at once be perceived that it must be to a great extent a view of the public part of the lives of numerous ministers who took the same course which he did when the Act of Uniformity prescribed terms of ministerial communion with the Church which they thought unreasonable and unscriptural ; so that while relating only what was done by Mr. Heywood in the parts of the county of York in which he resided, we are in fact relating what was doing in many other parts of the kingdom ; I might rather say, in every diocese and every county of the realm.

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I write in the character neither of the apologist and defender, nor of the impugner and opponent of men on whom it is impossible to look without a considerable degree of respect, but as the historian of the course they took, and aiming in an impartial spirit to give a just view of their determinations in the several critical periods of their lives.

It remains that I describe the materials which have been used in the preparation of this work.

The age of Mr. Heywood was peculiarly the age of diaries. There are many existing of his period ; there are few earlier, and there are few later. They were part of the religious exercise of the devout of those days. One head of the advice given to him by his father when he entered the University was to keep a written record of his private meditations. Mr. Ambrose, a Puritan minister of Lancashire, Mr. Heywood's native county, had earnestly recommended the keeping of diaries as eminently serviceable to those who made it a principal object of their lives to establish themselves in all the thoughts and ways of piety ; and in the book which he entitled Media, he gives a specimen of what, in his opinion, such diaries ought to be in extracts from his own. With such specimens before us we cannot but lament that the carelessness of later times should have suffered such a curious and valuable document to perish, for perished it is to be feared it is. There is a pathos and beauty in some of the passages which he has selected for publication, as when he speaks of his occasional retirements to his hut in " the sweet silent woods of Widdicre," which make one wish for more ; and there is good historical information in what he relates of events iv

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Reformed Church of England, were the instruments in the hands of Providence of introducing a new element into English society, and created influences that have had the most important effects on the characters and fortunes of a large portion of the population of England ; and this the rather as I am not acquainted with any work in which the life of one of these persons is so fully described, few of those ministers having left such ample materials for the purpose as were left by Mr. Heywood. I was desirous also of preserving the names of many persons who acted with him in the severe course of self-appointed duty in which he trod, or were more especially wrought upon by his ministry ; and also of presenting to the hand of any one who may hereafter undertake to write of the ecclesiastical history of the diocese of York, materials which he would in vain seek in any other quarter.

The extracts from these remains, illustrative of the general manners and opinions of the time, are not so numerous as to require apology.

Though this work is the life of Mr. Heywood, it will at once be perceived that it must be to a great extent a view of the public part of the lives of numerous ministers who took the same course which he did when the Act of Uniformity prescribed terms of ministerial communion with the Church which they thought unreasonable and unscriptural ; so that while relating only what was done by Mr. Heywood in the parts of the county of York in which he resided, we are in fact relating what was doing in many other parts of the kingdom ; I might rather say, in every diocese and every county of the realm.

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I write in the character neither of the apologist and defender, nor of the impugner and opponent of men on whom it is impossible to look without a considerable degree of respect, but as the historian of the course they took, and aiming in an impartial spirit to give a just view of their determinations in the several critical periods of their lives.

It remains that I describe the materials which have been used in the preparation of this work.

The age of Mr. Heywood was peculiarly the age of diaries. There are many existing of his period ; there are few earlier, and there are few later. They were part of the religious exercise of the devout of those days. One head of the advice given to him by his father when he entered the University was to keep a written record of his private meditations. Mr. Ambrose, a Puritan minister of Lancashire, Mr. Heywood's native county, had earnestly recommended the keeping of diaries as eminently serviceable to those who made it a principal object of their lives to establish themselves in all the thoughts and ways of piety ; and in the book which he entitled Media, he gives a specimen of what, in his opinion, such diaries ought to be in extracts from his own. With such specimens before us we cannot but lament that the carelessness of later times should have suffered such a curious and valuable document to perish, for perished it is to be feared it is. There is a pathos and beauty in some of the passages which he has selected for publication, as when he speaks of his occasional retirements to his hut in " the sweet silent woods of Widdicre," which make one wish for more ; and there is good historical information in what he relates of events vi

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in the civil wars, or of occurrences in families, his contemporaries, of which one of the most remarkable is the account which he gives of the extinction of the ancient house of the Calveleys of Cheshire, which would supply a great defect in the published history of that remarkable family .

Mr. Heywood appears to have entered fully into the spirit of Mr. Ambrose's suggestion. For thirty-six years of his life he kept a daily account of what he did ; he wrote also, on many occasions, the reflections which arose in his mind on the more important events of his life ; and he shows that he was attentive to what passed around him, and that he sought to tarn singular and striking events in the lives of others to his own spiritual benefit.

He wrote in very diminutive volumes, in lines exceedingly close, and in penmanship small, but not indistinct.

Many of these volumes are preserved. The Diary commences with the 24th of March, 1666 ; a memorable day, being that on which he was driven from his home by the operation of one of the severe laws by which it was vainly hoped that the spirits of the Non-Conformists might be subdued. He continued it with a fortitude which was greater than the care with which it has been preserved. The parts of the Diary which have been recovered, after diligent inquiry in the quarters in which the volumes might be supposed to have remained, are of the following periods : —

March 24, 1666, to November 7, 1673.

March 1, 1695, to April 29, 1702, five days before his decease.

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For the period of his life before 1666 we have what is more valuable than a Diary ; an account of his earlyyears, written in 1661, entitled by himself, ' A Relation of the more considerable Passages of my Life from my Infancy hitherto ; ■ and this is followed by Notes of the more remarkable events, written at intervals, between 1661 and 1666.

It is on these that I have relied principally for the facts of his life ; but, beside these, there are other books of which some account must be given.

(1.) A book in which he has entered ' Solemn Covenants' — ' Temptations' — ' Experiences' — ' Returns of Prayer' — ' Remarkable Providences.' — (2.) Another book of ' Solemn Covenants,' which also contains Reviews, year by year, of many of the later years of his life. (3.) Twenty 1 Meditations upon the doleful Bartholomew Day Act, and the effects thereof in silencing so many thousand Ministers in these three Nations.' Belonging to this class is another book, which I have not had the good fortune to see, and know only by the extracts which are made from it by the Rev. Richard Slate, in the Life of Mr. Heywood, which he prepared several years ago and prefixed to the uniform edition of his published writings. This is a volume of ' Soliloquies,' and has reference to various occurrences of his life, and the state of his mind in reference to them, between May 1653 and June 1682.

Next to these in importance are to be placed several biographical accounts of different members of his own family, where we find, occasionally, notices of himself. The persons of whose lives he has left accounts, thrown into the form of regular treatises, are (1.) his father, Mr. Richard Heywood ; (2.) his mother, Mrs. Alice Hey-

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wood ; (3.) his brother, Mr. Nathaniel Hey wood ; (4.) his first wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Angier ; (5.) his father-in-law, Mr. John Angier ; (6.) his mother-in-law, Mrs. Ellen Angier. Of these, the lives of Mr. Angier and of Mr. Nathaniel Heywood, both eminent Puritan and Non-Conforming ministers, were printed during his life.

Of the less remarkable members of his family he has left a beautiful and affecting memorial ; a sketch of all whom he remembered. The events of the lives and the peculiarities of the characters are but slightly touched upon, but there is sufficient to show at least that the spirit by which the more prominent members of this good and religious family were actuated was communicated to most of the other members of it. This account was prepared at a dark period of his varied life ; and the Introduction is so pathetic and so beautiful, that I have omitted it in the place at which it should have occurred in the narrative of his life that it might appear more prominently in the Preface. It will be observed that they were the thoughts of a Sunday evening, after the labours of the day, for all the Sundays were with him laborious. The season, too, is remarkable, the close of the month of September, when the trees which overshadowed his humble dwelling at Northowram must have been shedding their yellow leaves about him : —

4 i When I was sitting in mine own house, on Lord's day night, Sept. 22, 1678, musing upon mine own death, and thinking on those thousands of blessed souls that have broken the ice and gone before me into that celestial city, many of my godly relations that died in the

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Lord came afresh into my thoughts, and T at last resolved to make a catalogue of them that are within my cognizance or remembrance ; partly to maintain the memory of the just, partly to comfort mine own heart that any, yea so many, of my kindred in the flesh were gracious, are now glorified saints, whom I hope to meet in heaven ; partly to recommend them to the observation and imitation of my sons and their seed, that they may see what a religious stock they are branches of, that they or theirs may never degenerate, but walk in the same steps that their ancestors found peace in, and rest in the end of ; nor shall I go further than well-grounded charity according to the Scriptures will admit of, some of them having been more than ordinarily eminent in their generations, others very hopeful plants of renown, and I more value my parentage for godliness than greatness, religion than riches."

With these may be classed the following volumes, which are all of an historical character : — (1 .) A History of the Chapelry of Coley, in the parish of Halifax, the portion of the diocese of York which had the chief benefit of his labours for more than fifty years, namely, from the beginning to the close of his ministerial life ; (2.) A particular Account of his own Congregation at Northowram, the principal village in the Chapelry of Coley, when he had left the Church and appeared in the character of Dissenting minister ; (3.) An Account of the Ordinations of Ministers by himself and others when they had resolved on doing what in them lay to keep up a succession of ministers Non-Conforming, like themselves ; (4.) An Account of the Meetings, technically denominated Meetings of Ministers, in the West

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Riding of Yorkshire, from their commencement in 1691 to the time of his death; (5.) A very copious Register of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the Families with whom he was acquainted, and in many other Families living in the parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire best known to him, with occasional biographical notices — a volume extremely useful to persons engaged in genealogical inquiries; and lastly, a volume containing two distinct parts, the first entitled ' Experiments with Reflections/ the second, ' Objects and Observations.' In this volume are various incidents relating to himself and others.

For the use of the greater part of these volumes I have been indebted to the late Miss Heywood of Mansfield, a descendant in the fourth degree, and to my early and much-valued friend the Rev. Richard Astley of Shrewsbury, into whose hands a portion of them came on his marriage with another Miss Heywood, a descendant in the fifth degree of him of whom they are so singular a memorial. One volume of the Diary is now in the curious collection of autographs formed by the Rev. Dr. Raffles of Liverpool, to whom I owe the opportunity of perusing it, as well as the account which Mr, Heywood left of his Northowram congregation .

Various other remains of Mr. Heywood have been entrusted to me by the family, which are not so much historical as to require to be noticed in this Preface.

But little of his correspondence remains ; and of that little I printed the greater part several years ago, in the Correspondence of his friend Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary, to whom the letters were addressed. Small portions of his correspondence are still in possession of his descendants, and Mr. Slate has discovered some other

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XI portions of it and printed them in his valuable volume. I have also found something relating to him in Thoresby's collection of ' Letters of Divines,' which is now among the Birch manuscripts in the British Museum. Amongst these manuscripts is also a transcript of many singular stories, similar to others which are entered in various of the volumes, made by Thoresby from a manuscript of Mr. Heywood which is no longer known to exist.

It remains to be added, that it was in the years 1819, 1820 and 1821 that my attention was particularly directed to the body of curious information which these little volumes contain, and that I made the transcript of the more remarkable portions with the design of using them in such a work as that which is now to appear before the public ; that I have since recurred at different times to the design, but have been drawn away from it by other duties ; and that possibly the design might never have been executed had not the course of events which make up the history of English Protestant Dissent led me to undertake researches into the state of opinion in that body at the time when Mr. Heywood and those who had been ejected with him were giving way to younger and bolder men, who soon changed the whole aspect of the Non-Conforming body, and to much reflection on the results of those inquiries. It has been the fortune of the Presbyterian Dissenters to have witnessed during the last few years the attempt made to wrest out of their hands the places of public worship which they had built for themselves, and the funds which they had established for the support of their ministers ; not by the Church, nor by the State, the ad-

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ministrators of the law designing in this, as in everything, only to do justice and maintain the right ; it is done by persons whose duty and whose interest it was to cherish those whom they would destroy, and whose conduct in this particular has opened to some minds views of Dissent which make it far less amiable than in the early and confiding periods of their lives they were led to consider it. I do not hesitate to profess my own conviction, that in this proceeding, so far from seeing Dissent aiding the progress of theological science, sound knowledge, and political or religious freedom, I see it directly opposed to all these ; thus cutting away the most solid ground on which it is rested. But though called upon to lend my assistance in the defence of the religious community in which I was born against their old enemies the Independents, or rather against the new body of people who call themselves by that name (for the old Independents, though they saw and lamented the departure of the Presbyterians from the Calvinian opinions of their founders, never thought of recalling them by a voice from the Court of Chancery), I should never have accomplished this work if I had not been excited to it by the encouragement of two distinguished members of this family, in whom is remarkably exemplified the saying of ancient wisdom, that the seed of the righteous shall be blessed after them ; nor would it without their encouragement be given to the world, when books of which the chief or only merit is that they add to the stock of original information made easily accessible by being widely dispersed, are the last which those who best understand the public taste will venture to usher to the world.

Contents

FIRST PERIOD OF MR. HEYWOOD's LIFE — FROM HIS BIRTH TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN THE MINISTRY AT COLEY.

1630—1650.

Page

Chapter I

DESCENT OF MR. HEYWOOD. HEYWOODS OF HEYWOOD. BOLTON AN

EARLY SEAT OF RELIGION. LABOURS OF BRADFORD AND MARSH.

FATHERS OF PROTESTANTISM AND PURITANISM IN SOUTH LAN- CASHIRE. EFFORTS MADE IN FURTHERANCE OF PROTESTANTISM.

THE MANCHESTER LECTURE OR EXERCISE. EFFECTS. JOHN AND

THE ELDER OLIVER HEYWOOD. CONVERSION OF THE LATTER.

RISE OF DISAFFECTION TO THE PROTESTANT CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

PURITANISM. POINTS OF OBJECTION; CEREMONIES; FORM;

DOCTRINE. THE HEYWOODS PURITANS. CONFERENCE AT HAMP- TON COURT. DETERMINATION TO PUT DOWN PURITANISM. PER- SECUTION OF THE PURITAN MINISTERS.

THE ancestors of Mr. Hey wood, in whatever line they can be traced, were inhabitants of the parish of Bolton-en-le-Moors in Lancashire. They were small freeholders, cultivating their own lands, and generally engaged in the manufactures for which those parts of the country were then in repute. His father, grandfather, and great grandfather, of all of whom he has left some account, were settled in that part of the parish of Bolton where it approaches the confines of the neighbouring

B parish of Manchester. Little Lever, the village in which his father resided, and where he himself was born, had easy communication with both Manchester and Bolton, as it lay upon the high road between those towns. There also lived his grandfather ; but the remoter ancestor was an inhabitant of the neighbouring dell called the Water-side, which, although now full of mills and cottages, was in those days a secluded and romantic place.

A small table will present more clearly to the mind of the reader the several ancestors of Mr. Heywood than any narrative : —

John Heywood, of Heywood Mill, =p — Seddon, Waterside. Born about 1530. | of Prestolee.

i ; ;J

Oliver Heywood, of Little Lever. =f= Alice Hulton, sister of

Died in 1628, aged about 72. j Adam Hulton, of Brightmet.

Alice Critchlaw, of Long- =p Richard Heywood, = Margaret Brereton, worth, first wife, sister of Little Lever. second wife. Died

of William, Francis, Died 1677, aged 81. in 1697. Hugh, and Ralph.

John, OLIVER, Nathaniel, Josiah. born 1630.

Not many miles from Little Lever, to the east, is the township of Heywood, on which was seated a family who derived from it their surname, from the earliest times to which we can usually ascend in genealogical investigations. The original charter still exists, by which Adam de Burgo, the chief lord of the fee in which Heywood was comprehended, gave the lands to one Peter, and is remarkable for the curious specification of the boundaries. It has for witnesses the principal gentry in those parts of Lancashire : — Geffery de Cheteham, Alexander de Pilkington, Thomas de Prestwich, Geffery de Radcliffe, William de Radcliffe, and others, and cannot be referred to a period later than the first fifteen years of the reign of King Edward the First. This Peter is called de Heywood, and from him sprung a numerous family bearing that surname, who continued on the

OLIVER HEY WOOD.

lands of Heywood, till, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, they were induced by the Earls of Derby to remove to the Isle of Man. In that island they filled the highest offices of trust and importance belonging to that singular political community, being Deemsters, Speakers of the House of Keys, and one of them Attorney-General, when they sold their ancient inheritance in Lancashire.

The Heywoods of Maristowe in Devonshire were a younger branch of this family ; and there is some reason to believe that the Heywoods of Little Lever descended from a younger son, though the particular point at which they were connected cannot now be determined. It happens, in this case, as in many others, that a very little inquiry at the proper time, and a very little pains in committing to writing the results of such an inquiry, would save a world of fruitless pains and expense, when once a curiosity arises respecting such trifles as these.

The Heywoods of Heywood had never, in the best of times, either the talent, the influence, or the wealth which it has been the fortune of the descendants of John Heywood of the Waterside to possess ; but they had more of the grace of ancestry. Their pedigree is remarkably authentic, having been deduced in the first instance from the family evidences by Dodsworth, the Charter Antiquary of the seventeenth century*, and subsequently registered by the heralds on their visitation.

Mr. Heywood speaks on this point with equal modesty and piety : — " 'Tis possible we might spring from

* His notes still remain among his manuscripts at the Bodleian, vol. lxxix. f. 59, and vol. cxvii. f. 35. The arms borne by the Heywoods of Heywood wTere three torteaux between two red bendlets on a silver field, and were evidently formed, like those of Byron, on the figure borne by the early lords of Manchester. The old writer of epigrams, John Heywood, in the reign of Elizabeth, thus Latinizes the name — Fceni Sylva ; but this is inadmissible. Heywood is the wood abounding in streams of water, or bounded by them, as Heywood is on one side by the river Roch ; or the wrood inclosed by a paling ; but probably the former, the earliest orthography of the word being Eywood.

B 2 some younger brother of the house of Heywood of Hey wood, an ancient esquire's seat betwixt Rochdale and Bury ; for old Mr. Robert Heywood whom I knew, a pious reverend old gentleman and an excellent poet, was wont to call my father Cousin. But kinship grows out in process of time ; and 'tis not much material what family we are of, so that we be of the household of faith, and have God for our Father, Christ for our elder Brother, and the Spirit of Grace running in our best veins, and acting us for God."

It is said of the parish of Bolton by the writer of the ' Lives of the Ejected and Silenced Ministers in 1662/ that it was " an ancient and famous seat of religion : " and Mr. Heywood speaks of it as having been " long famous for glorious professors of the Gospel, and powerful preachers." In the very dawn of the Reformation, in the reign of King Edward the Sixth, these parts of the county were the principal field of the labours of the two eminent preachers, Bradford and Marsh, who, having distinguished themselves by their zeal in promoting the principles of the Reformation, were put to the cruel death of burning in the succeeding reign. Letters are extant which were written by them to members of their families or to their converts in these parts, full of affectionate entreaty to constancy in the profession which they had made, and breathing, on their own part, the spirit of the most heroic selfdevotion #. These letters show us what their preaching

* See Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable Letters of such true Saints and holy Martyrs of God as in the late bloody persecution here within this realm gave their lives for the Defence of Chrisfs Holy Gospel, 4to, 1564, probably collected and published by Coverdale. It contains several letters of the two Lancashire martyrs, addressed to their relations and friends at Manchester and in the neighbourhood. Bradford's letters are now the more interesting on account of their greater particularity. He mentions Bolton and other towns around Manchester as places at which he had preached ; and he even names particular persons in those parts who had been converted by his preaching, beside his mother, sisters, and brother-in-law, who resided at Manchester, which was his birth-place. The

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must have been ; and there can be no doubt that the effects of their labours would live long after them, that the places in which they had preached would long retain a tincture of the piety first infused by them, and that to them may be traced, as its origin, that devotional spirit which has always prevailed in the parts of the country of which we are speaking.

The friends of the Reformation made use of every means to keep up in these places a spirit of earnest piety. The Reformation in South Lancashire was not, as in many other parts of the kingdom, a quiet acquiescence in whatever form of religion the political authorities of the time enforced upon the people. There was an active opposition on the part of the superior gentry, many of whom remained, as their descendants