XVIII 345 THE COUNTRY SQUIRE AT CHURCH very considerable power for the squire. The position of comparative independence which Laud would have given to the country clergy was never recovered after his fall. Family papers and memoirs all over England show the laity supreme in parish matters. Characteristic examples might be quoted from the Verney Papers or from the Diary of Sir Richard Newdigate. The latter shows the patron of a living asserting his rights with stubborn ingenuity, having the books and surplice removed from the church, locking the doors till his own minister was ready, and concealing lusty servants in the reading-desk and pulpit to dislodge possible intruders. Such proceedings naturally led to the Ecclesiastical Court, where finally the lay interest prevailed. And the papers of private families do no more than confirm the admirable sketch of Addison in the 112th number of the Spectator: "My friend Sir Roger being a good churchman, has beautified the inside of his church with several texts of his own chusing: he has likewise given a handsome pulpit cloth, and railed in the communion table at his own expence. He has often told me, that at his coming to his estate he found (his parishioners) very irregular; and that in order to make them kneel and join in the responses, he gave every one of them a hassock and a Common Prayer Book: and at the same time employed an itinerant singing master, who goes about the country for that purpose, to instruct them rightly in the tunes of the psalms; upon which they now very much value themselves, and indeed out-do most of the country churches that I have ever heard. As Sir Roger is landlord. to the whole congregation, he keeps them in very good order, and will suffer no body to sleep in it besides himself; for if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and looks about him, and if he sees any body else nodding, either wakes them himself, or sends his servant to them. . . . As soon as the sermon is finished, no body presumes to stir till Sir Roger is gone out of the church. The knight walks down from his seat in the chancel between a double row of his tenants, that stand bowing to him, on each side; and every now and then inquires how such an one's wife, or mother, or son, or father do, whom he does not see in church; which is understood as a secret reprimand to the person that is absent." The interest of country squires in their parish churches, pushed though it was on occasion to curious extremes, un restoration. doubtedly gave great support to the movement Church for Church restoration, already referred to above (pp. 200-2), which was so marked a feature of the period. From the beginning of Sheldon's primacy the work of rebuilding and reparation all over England was seriously taken in hand. Bishop Turner's letter to his clergy and other memorials, the report of the commission appointed by Bishop Lake of Chichester, and many other visitation charges, show how much work was done. Turner, for example, "having found very many of the churches very sadly dilapidated, or, at least, mightily out of repair, had now (1686) pleasing accounts from many places of the care already taken to repair them." Among the great church builders was Bishop Seth Ward, who at Exeter procured over £25,000 to be spent on his cathedral church, and at Salisbury was as lavish, with results not always happy. The whole history of church restoration is typified by the work done in London, and by the history of Sir Christopher Wren. The work of The history of the rebuilding of St. Paul's falls entirely within the period under our review. The clearing of the ground began in 1674. In 1675 the first stone Wren in was laid. At the end of 1697 the choir was London. first used for service. It was not till 1710 that the work was finished, based on the magnificent scheme of Wren, which the chapter had considered to be "the most awful and artificial" of all those submitted to their choice. Wren was the nephew of Laud's disciple, the famous Bishop of Ely and Norwich. During his long life (1632-1723) he remained a most sincere, thorough, and devoted churchman. His work was throughout undertaken under a true spiritual as well as artistic inspiration. Like Purcell, he was a man of genius at once original and national, the founder of a school, the characteristic expression of a great age. He applied classical and Italian methods to the special needs of English worship, and on these principles developed a distinct XVIII THE WORK OF CHRISTOPHER WREN 347 style of his own, dignified, open, solemn, and, above all, fit for common and public worship. Wren's hand may be seen all over England. Fifty-three parish churches in London were built from his designs; Salisbury, Chichester, and Westminster had their great minsters repaired by him. But the great and characteristic work of his hand was the magnificent cathedral church of St. Paul, a triumphant vindication of his style as the most complete expression ever given to the ideal of Anglican worship as the seventeenth century desired to see it carried out. The history of church building at this important period in English architecture is a subject of special interest. It can only here be mentioned that the Act of Parliament passed in 1710 for the building of fifty-two new churches in London was a fit expression of the widespread national interest. Only twelve churches were actually built. The magnificence of the earlier work, as in St. Paul's, St. James's, Piccadilly, and St. Mary-le-Bow, had set a standard of expense which it was impossible to reach during the wars of William III. and Queen Anne. That the spending of so much money led also to scandals, bickerings, and fraud, was perhaps inevitable; but the literature of the subject (for example, Frauds and Abuses at St. Paul's, and Wren's Answer, 1713) is not pleasant reading. The slackness which settled down upon the Church after the death of Queen Anne stayed the work throughout England; and the era of church restoration ended with the life of the last sovereign of the Stewart house. Thus, at every point we are brought up, as we close the period of our review, by the sense that a reaction was approaching, induced both by the long strain of the Puritan triumph and by the struggle of the Church to stem the tide which set in against all religious observances and against moral life. As the period draws to its end the political interests, the sharp political contests, tended to engross public attention more and more, and the disturbance of Church life was deep-seated and fraught with future danger. AUTHORITIES.-Details of the life of the day as it affected the Church may be found in the Diaries of Evelyn and Pepys, in Lady Verney's Memoirs of the Verney Family, in Lady Newdigate-Newdegate's Cavalier and Puritan, as well as in the State Papers (Domestic) and in many biographies, notably the Lives of Sir Matthew Hale, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Queen Mary, written by Bishop Burnet, with Baxter's note and a sermon preached at the funeral of the Earl of Rochester by the Rev. Mr. Parsons (1774); Correspondence of Dean Grenville, vols. xxxvii. and xlvii. of Surtees Society; Tanner MSS., especially vol. xliv.; Rawlinson MSS.; Foxcroft, Supplement to Burnet (1902). Among voluminous works on the condition of the clergy, Eachard, Grounds and Occasions, 1670; the Tatler; Jeremy Collier, View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage, 1698; Chamberlayne, State of Britain, 1694; Nelson, Life of Bull, 1713; these and many more are examined in C. Babington's Criticism of Macaulay's Character of the Clergy, 1849; and in this, as in other matters, Dr. Overton's Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, is a storehouse of information carefully collected, sifted, and arranged. Recent lives of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, by M. Palgrave and C. Fell Smith, already mentioned, contain much of interest. Among other important modern books, which have carefully digested the original authorities, are Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century; Abbey, The English Church and its Bishops, 17001800; Perry, History of the Church of England; Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century. CHAPTER XIX THE CHURCH IN WALES, 1625-1715 istics of the four Welsh Character dioceses. THE four Welsh dioceses, rightly though they are regarded as forming part of the Church as it has been organised for centuries south of the Tweed, and closely though they are linked to the life of the sees adjacent to them, are yet distinguished from the English sees by racial characteristics, geographical position, and national history. In the seventeenth century this distinction was especially marked, and it has therefore seemed best to treat of the history of the Church in Wales, during the period covered by this book, in a chapter by itself. seventeenth During the period of Reformation the Church in Wales had undergone a process practically amounting to disendowment, owing to the confiscation of the property of Difficulties of the monastic houses, upon which the parishes had the Church cause largely to depend for spiritual ministrations. in the early In the diocese of St. David's, for example, the century. (1) Dissent. whole of the tithes enjoyed by the monasteries passed away from the Church, and the loss was one which it was impossible to meet. Yet the Reformers had pushed their work among the Welsh people, and Church and State alike had shown much eagerness for the translation of the Bible and of the revised formularies and offices of the English Church into the Welsh language. In 1620 Dr. Parry, Bishop of St. Asaph, with the assistance of several Welsh scholars, brought out a revised translation of the whole Bible in accordance with the authorised version of 1611. Protestant dissent at first made but small progress in Wales. John Parry did |