And now for something a little different. A while back—a year? has it been that long!?—I posted my last academic article, which was published just a few weeks before I was doxxed. I’m hoping it won’t be my final academic article. In fact, I’ve been going over some of my old work, and my DPhil thesis, and thinking about publishing some more essays about medieval and early-modern England. Perhaps I’m just feeling nostalgic for serious historical scholarship, I’m not sure. Anyway, I felt like posting another academic article from my time at Oxford. This is one I greatly enjoyed writing. In my journeys through various archives, I discovered another series of printed sermons that suggested the argument of a very famous book, David Underdown’s Fire from Heaven, was seriously overstated. Underdown argued that the Dorset county town of Dorchester was transformed into the most Puritan town in England after a great fire in 1613, which the local preacher, John White (one of the founders of Massachusetts), argued was a judgment from God on the sins of the townsfolk. With the evidence I found, it became clear that there was already a vigorous attempt to reform the character of the town decades before the Great Fire. Underdown had totally missed this. That’s a rather long introduction, I know.
How quickly Protestantism took root in Dorchester we can only guess. In the sixteenth century the town had no great reputation as a centre of reformation; it was Poole that was said to have contained ‘the first in that part of England were called Protestants’ (Underdown 1993, 17).[i]
Central to the story of David Underdown’s book, Fire from Heaven, is his claim that between the accession of Elizabeth I, in 1558, and the Great Fire of 1613, which destroyed most of the town, Dorchester was essentially an unregenerate place. Home to just a few zealous Protestants, it was otherwise part of a broader Dorset scene ‘much infected with recusancy’ and ‘popery’ – a culture ‘festive’ but not fervid for the Word of God. And so the town’s sudden transformation into ‘the most Puritan town in England’ was all the more sudden and all the more transformative: a revelation conducted through the preacher John White, and received and implemented with popular enthusiasm and support.[ii]
By 1600, claims Underdown, ‘few, if any, of the governors of late Elizabethan Dorchester seem to have had any vision of an alternative to the way their community, and its problems, was run’ (Underdown 1993, 23). One of these governors was George Trenchard. He was variously a justice of the peace and then sheriff of Dorset, and MP for Bridport, Dorchester and, finally, the county. The Trenchards hailed from Wolveton House, to the north of Dorchester, and had been among the central cast of local politics for some time. George’s grandfather had been one of the commissioners for church goods, local officials appointed during the reign of Edward VI to survey goods and plate in advance of its confiscation and sale. His father, Thomas, who was high steward of Dorchester, had married into the notable Horsey family of Clifton Maybank, the serene manor house where the poet Thomas Wyatt had died. Despite noting that George appears to have been an enthusiast for reform – or at the very least, a keen-nosed hound of Dorset’s remaining Catholics – Underdown still means him to be included among his fellow governors, who lacked a godlier vision of their community. Pursuing Catholic recusants county-wide, Trenchard also raised concerns about the lax conditions that allowed ‘papists [to] live at ease’ in the common jails. His highest-profile targets were missionary priests, owing to their role as direct agents of the pope and fomenters of sedition, especially after a series of plots that had elicited savage penalties in response. His most famous discovery would come at Easter 1594, when he rooted ‘blessed’ John Cornelius out of Chideock Castle, a notorious den of popery. Cornelius was then taken to Wolveton for confinement and examination before his execution, which was of course widely publicised. Other of Trenchard’s deeds, especially his role organising and coordinating local defence during the Armada crisis, received somewhat less publicity; although they surely watered the reformed faith far more than did the blood of a single aged priest (Lloyd 1967, 94, 118-21).
These facts about Trenchard are well known. But other, potentially more revealing, facts about him have managed to go unnoticed, even by Professor Underdown. Significant enough, certainly, to complicate his portrayal of Trenchard, these unnoticed facts must also complicate his wider narrative about the town; in 1600, Dorchester was perhaps not quite so unregenerate, nor its governors quite so lacking in moral vision, as he has claimed.[iii] The main evidence consists of a series of sermons preached in Dorchester in 1585 by the minister William Chubb, a returning native of the town. Both concern aspects of God’s temple: the first, its building; the second, ‘what the temple is’. It is uncertain whether Trenchard commissioned the sermons, but when they were printed the next year, and again the year after, each edition was dedicated to him in the same fulsome terms (Chub 1585a). The praise lavished on him, and other evidence, including Chubb’s other published works and a few surviving biographical fragments, reveal that Trenchard was perhaps as keen a patron of sermons as any of Dorchester’s later godly governors. More substantially, it would appear that as early as the 1580s an alliance between magistracy and ministry – between the secular and the ecclesiastical arms of government – was in embryonic form in the town, and with important links beyond it. Trenchard’s place within this embryo alliance is confirmed by another dedication, also unremarked until now (Mayo, 1591). Whether or not any of this falsifies the central premise of Fire from Heaven, it does indicate, at the very least, that long before a chandler’s tallow ‘blazed up’ and out of control one August afternoon, that later godly fire was already being kindled.
*
About William Chubb, the preacher, far less is known than about George Trenchard. It is in the dedicatory preface of the two printed sermons from Dorchester that Chubb’s birthplace is revealed: ‘the Towne of Dorchester, my native towne’, he writes. Otherwise, there are a scattering of references to William Chubbs in ecclesiastical registers. The appointment, on 17 October 1572, of a William Chubb as rector of Norton-sub-Hamdon, in Somerset, is listed in the register of the bishop of Bath and Wells, as well as his deprivation, some three years later, on 13 May 1575.[iv] On 22 February 1582, a ‘Willimus Chubb’, master of arts, was licensed as a preacher, according to the register of the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal.[v] The reference to the preacher’s qualification, master of arts, leads nowhere: to no record of a William Chubb at either Oxford or Cambridge during the sixteenth century, apart from a William Chubbes who was the first master of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1497 and died in 1505 (Venn and Venn 1922, 336). The register of the bishop of Bath and Wells provides another clue: a record of the death of a William Chubb who was vicar of Frome, also in Somerset, on 9 September 1597.[vi] Were these three William Chubbs one? The vicar of Frome who died in 1597 was undoubtedly the author of the Dorchester sermons: the dedicatory preface to the printed editions closes with the words, ‘Written in Froome Zelwood, the xii. of December. 1585’, and the preface to another of Chubb’s printed works, a more substantial spiritual guide, was also written from there, again in 1585 (Chub 1585b). It is quite possible, indeed probable, that Dorchester’s Chubb was the preacher licensed by Grindal, and there is even some reason to believe he had also been the rector of Norton-sub-Hamdon. The proximity of the two livings is suggestive. Even more so is Norton’s patron: in 1572 it was Adrian Stokes, the second husband of the deceased Lady Frances Brandon, the duchess of Suffolk.[vii] Stokes appears, by all accounts, to have been ‘earnest in religion’, and he served on a number of local commissions to enforce church attendance and discover recusants, and on Parliamentary committees on religion and Church government. If Stokes had sought to install a godly minister, the younger Chubb of Dorchester may have proved too hot in his convictions: the deprivation, three years later, could easily have been for some act of nonconformity.[viii]. Until 1580, Frome Selwood was also in the patronage of another, even more prominent, reformer: Sir John Thynne the elder, the builder of Longleat House. Thynne had been a close ally of Edward Seymour, the earl of Somerset and lord protector between 1547 and 1549, and it was from him that he had purchased the manor and advowson of Frome Selwood.[ix] A pattern?
Pattern or no, if the William Chubb who preached the Dorchester sermons had first been installed at Norton-sub-Hamdon, on the border of his native Dorset, and ejected soon after, the force of his ejection had not been all that great; for he had come to rest barely thirty miles away, and comfortably, it would seem, with the patronage of a powerful family to cushion him. For that soft landing he would later thank Thynne the elder’s son, also John, in another dedicatory preface, discussed below.
It is not entirely clear from the preface to the Dorchester sermons whether Trenchard actually commissioned them or simply provided the impetus or inspiration. The courtly tactfulness and circumlocution, while customary of such a preface, are something of a hindrance in this regard. Because of Trenchard’s desire for ‘the exercising of preaching’ in Dorchester, and on account of his ‘liberality for the furthering, continuing and establishing thereof’, Chubb was
not onely moved with a comfortable minde for my native country, to see the prosecuting of so good a purpose, but was also bent upon the same argument to preach these two Sermons following, which as well in thankfulness for your proceedinges, as in signification of mine unfained goodwyll, I humbly present unto your worship…
So Chubb may have taken some opportunity, if he were visiting Dorchester, to lend his oratorical talents to Trenchard’s campaign for an enhanced preaching ministry; or he may have been invited for that purpose, either by Trenchard or another Dorchester worthy.
Sermons were often printed after their delivery (Blench 1964; Wabuda 2002). In this case, it is unclear who paid for the printing. Chubb may have had the sermons printed as a gift to Trenchard, to court his favour, if it had not already been won completely, or to cement an existing friendship – or, indeed, to thank him for an invitation to preach. Another of Chubb’s sermons was printed and dedicated as a gift to William Paulet, the third marquess of Winchester, by whose patronage and friendship Chubb also appears to have benefitted.[x] The printing was a
signification of that hartie good will and grateful affection I owe your L. which I would to last so long in memoriall, as my selfe and my poore familie have occasion to use your L. great favour, alreadie assured to our continuall comfort and stay (Chub 1587).
Paulet’s, interestingly, is a name that features only once in Fire from Heaven, and then only by his title and in passing: Dorchester was careful to elect clients of the marquess to Parliament, after the death of the second earl of Bedford, the then-prevailing magnate, in 1585 (Underdown 1993, 8-9).
So it was through both the marquess’s considerable influence and also the continuing patronage of the Thynne family that Chubb was kept in ‘continuall comfort and stay’, and by the time he preached the Dorchester sermons, he already had a good reputation upon which to build. In the same year as the Dorchester sermons were printed, Chubb was author to The true travaile of all faithfull Christians, a spiritual manual for the lay reader, of the same genre as Arthur Dent’s hugely popular Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven (although unlike the Plain Man’s Pathways, The true travaile does not take the form of a dialogue among a small cast of characters, but is divided into a series of prayers and disquisitions on basic questions of the faith).[xi] He dedicates the work to John Thynne, the son of John the elder, now deceased, and hails in the preface the ‘continual favoure I have found at your handes (right worshipfull) especially of late in London, as well by writing as by your personall travel’.
This ‘favoure’, ‘writing’ and ‘travel’ must have consisted of written recommendations or introductions, and it is possible that Chubb actually met Trenchard through his patron. Sir John Thynne the elder, at least, had a connection with the Trenchards, if at a single remove: in 1540 he had bought from Sir John Horsey (of Clifton Maybank) the former Augustinian priory that would become Longleat House.[xii] Equally or more likely, Chubb could have met Trenchard through William Paulet: Trenchard and Paulet were both trustees of Dorchester’s grammar school, and engaged in a number of other charitable ventures together.[xiii] Nevertheless, given that Chubb and Trenchard were both natives of Dorchester – maybe contemporaries, although no evidence of Chubb’s age exists – they could just as easily have met in school, the town square or one of Dorchester’s parish churches as in London or elsewhere. They could even have met at Wolveton itself, where Trenchard was known to invite radical ministers to dine, among an otherwise rather motley crew of dinner guests, including Sir Walter Raleigh – the ‘atheist’ – on one occasion (Lloyd 1967, 254-58).[xiv]
Returning to the preface of the Dorchester sermons, no further details of Trenchard’s ‘liberality for the furthering, continuing and establishing’ of preaching in Dorchester are given, but it seems reasonable to assume that he was, at the very least, paying for visiting preachers like Chubb, even if not Chubb himself in this instance, or instead paying for supplementary preaching from the town’s resident clergy. Visiting preachers were far from unknown in the county in the 1580s, even the 1570s. In 1571, William Kethe, a Marian exile who had recently preached for a time in the Minories, a hothouse of nonconformity in London, was brought to the quarter sessions at Blandford, where he gave an inflammatory sermon against traditional pastimes – church ales and Sunday sports (Kethe 1571).[xv] The corporation of Wimborne Minster began to pay for lectures by visiting preachers in 1576-77, when a preacher visited from nearby Piddle, and it continued to pay for itinerant sermonising until the end of the 1580s, by which time a lectureship – a dedicated preaching position with its own yearly stipend – had been established.[xvi] Apart from Chubb’s two sermons, the earliest printed evidence of visiting preachers at Dorchester comes from 1613, the year of the Great Fire, when William Jones preached a Christmas Day sermon on the subject of ‘the mysterie of Christes Nativitie’ (Jones 1614). Underdown notes that preachers from the surrounding area were visiting Dorchester earlier than this; although he provides neither names nor dates (Underdown 1993, 27).
