suggested that those resident in Buckinghamshire should be exchanged with those resident in South Wales ; but the Earl of Bridgewater represented to the House of Lords that the Papists in his county were few and not dangerous, and begged that the Welsh might not be brought in to ' pervert more.' It is needless to say that the scheme was never carried into effect.
During the next reign the vicar of Little Horwood, Thomas Foot- man, was accused of omitting the State prayers from the Liturgy, and also of not keeping the day of thanksgiving publicly appointed for the king's victory over the Duke of Monmouth and his followers. He managed to clear himself from the latter charge on the ground of sick- ness, but it is not unlikely that he as well as others found the thanks- giving very little to his taste.[1]
Towards the close of the seventeenth century the northern part of the county witnessed some strange religious phenomena. The career of John Mason of Water Stratford is of interest as illustrating some possi- bilities in the Church life of this period. He was vicar first of Stanton- bury from 1668 to 1674,[2] and then for twenty years at Water Strat- ford. Educated at Cambridge, where Latitudinarian influences were strong, and much attached to the liturgy of the Church (of which he said that he ' enjoyed much communion with God while reading it ') he yet continued to maintain the most rigidly Calvinistic views. The rector of Tyringham, Henry Maurice, who was his personal friend and wrote an Impartial Account of him, often argued with him on this subject [3] ; but it is evident that the larger and more Catholic views of the great Caroline divines had comparatively little influence amongst the inferior clergy, and neither Mason nor James Wrexham, rector of Haversham, who shared his views, seemed to think themselves out of place in the Church of England. It was Wrexham, 'a melancholy divine and very often disturbed,' who first became occupied with specu- lations on the Second Advent ; the fact that he went completely mad some time before his death in 1684 did not discourage Mason from devoting himself more and more to meditation upon the same subject. For a while, indeed, he was able to write calm and practical letters of spiritual advice, and verses of some merit, and even his sermon of 1691 , called the ' Midnight Cry,' which made somewhat of a sensation at the time,
- ↑ He was also accused of marrying a couple without banns or license at 5 a.m. ; this he was able to disprove, and his parish clerk declared that he had usually said the State prayers, though he owned the thanksgiving had not been made. MS. Records of the Archdeaconry of St. Albans.
- ↑ This involved very little more than a chaplaincy to the family of Wittewronge, in whose house the vicar probably resided {Records of Bucks, vii. 9-12). The epitaph of Mrs. Clare Wittewronge, who died 1669, contains some bold theological statements which sound very like Mason
'The mother with two babes doth silent lie
Within this womb of immortality;
But when the birthday comes the mother then
Shall rise a virgin, and her children men.' (Add. MS. 3839, f. 179d). - ↑ He maintained that there was no difference between Peter and Judas except what the divine decrees and ' irresistible grace ' had made : that it was all the same whether he had kept the command- ments or broken them all, since Christ had observed them : and that he was saved by the ' imputation of the righteousness of Christ ' to him. Maurice, Impartial Account.
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