The Story of England, page 38
The first phase of the war came to a climax in the late spring of 1645. With the outcome of the conflict still in the balance, Leicester found itself suddenly surrounded by royalist forces and presented by Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, with an abrupt summons to surrender. The townsmen sought desperately to buy time while they threw up earthworks to patch the decrepit medieval walls, but they were soon subject to an intense bombardment by the royalist artillery established on a ruined Roman aqueduct to the south. A breach was quickly opened and rampaging royalist troops poured through, unrestrained by their leaders in retribution for the town’s failure to surrender. Many hundreds died that day inside the town.
Meanwhile out in the countryside to the south a parliamentarian cavalry regiment under the mercenary John Dalbier was quartered at Kibworth. Dalbier’s soldiers, it was said, were ‘the most unruliest of all the Parliamentarian soldiers quartered in Leicestershire’ and their stay must have been an unpleasant experience for the villagers. (In the archaeological dig of 2009, Civil War stone cannonballs were found on Main Street by the old marketplace.) The troops would at the very least have taken water from the village wells, and demanded fodder and grain from their barns; but perhaps a lot more besides. Domestic robbery no doubt was commonplace. A hint of what things were like over that late spring of 1645 for the Colmans, Chapmans and Carters living in the middle of the village around the market cross at the junction of Hog Lane and Main Street is given by a remonstrance received by the parliamentary Committee of Both Kingdoms concerning the behaviour of Dalbier’s unit: ‘for the last two years they have been damnified by free quarter, taking of horses, and other charges not imposed by Parliament … Many of the troopers of Dalbier’s regiment are returned into the county to the intolerable burden of the inhabitants.’
There had been, the committee noted, ‘of late within three days 200 robberies committed in the county by soldiers, which has much disheartened the country in the Parliament’s service’. While billeted in Kibworth, Dalbier’s troops also learned of the vicar William Hunt’s royalist sympathies. At Whitsun (25 May that year), ‘they threatened Mr Hunt they would not leave him worth a groat.’ With Hunt’s reputation as a royalist and High Church to boot, and given the destructive record of parliamentarian forces elsewhere, especially if they were Puritans or religious radicals, it would be surprising if the interior of St Wilfrid’s survived this episode unscathed: what little had survived the Reformation iconoclasts no doubt went now.
But the decisive battle was now at hand. Having captured Leicester on 31 May the royalist army moved south through Kibworth towards Market Harborough, fanning across the countryside to scavenge supplies from the beleaguered villages. In the path of the army on the main Harborough road, Kibworth (as its vicar later noted) was now afflicted by raids and plundering from the other side, as the royalist troops replenished their stores and quartered themselves on the population. Prince Rupert’s cavalry had been based throughout the siege of Leicester at Great Glen, two miles from Kibworth. On 6 June 1645 the Earl of Manchester reported to the House of Lords, ‘that the King marcheth Southward, his Forlorn Hope at Harborough, the main Body following; their Foot Quarters about Kybworth, Noselye, Scevington, and Tilton’. On 4 June, King Charles stayed at Wistow Hall, seat of his ally Sir Richard Halford, and it was around this date that the main royalist foot moved through Kibworth. The king’s cavalry was reckoned at 3,600, his remaining infantry at around 4,000. If this was not, as Clarendon observed, ‘a body sufficient to fight a battle for a crown’, it was no doubt enough to strike fear into the long-suffering villagers, and to drive them indoors praying for deliverance from this ‘unwanted war’.
The main parliamentary army under Fairfax and Cromwell now moved north to intercept the king. On 14 June the decisive battle was fought to the south of Kibworth at Naseby and Charles was comprehensively defeated. This ‘very great victory’ was hailed by the Committee of Both Kingdoms as a mighty providence from God: ‘the King’s army in which he was in person is wholly broken and destroyed.’ As the royalist forces retreated in chaos north towards Leicester – Charles himself pausing at Wistow to change horses and saddles (the conspicuous crimson and gold one he left behind still remains in Wistow Hall) – they were pursued by Cromwell’s cavalry. ‘Our horse,’ the committee reported, ‘had the pursuit of them from four miles on this side Harborough to nine miles beyond, even to the sight of Leicester, whither the King fled. Our army quartered last night at Harborough, and this day are marching both horse and foot towards Leicester.’ It was said that the first eleven of the fourteen miles through Kibworth to Leicester were littered with hundreds of Cavalier dead, scythed down from behind as they fled, pursued by a body of ‘the enemyes horse and loose scowters to Great Glyn’. It had been, as one survivor noted, ‘a dismall Satterday’.
Among the overheated and bedraggled royalists fleeing desperately north on the road towards Leicester was the rector of Kibworth, William Hunt. Hauled later before the parliamentary committee for sequestration, on suspicion of having been in the royalist army, Hunt pleaded simple ill-fortune. He had, he said, unwittingly set out on horseback from Kibworth for Leicester at about two or three o’clock on the day of the battle and found himself caught up with the defeated royalists: ‘the king’s forces were then so scattered that they rode up and down the country about Kibworth, so that a man could ride no way, but he must needs ride in their company.’ It was, to say the very least, unfortunate timing.
Hunt’s hearing, however, opened up a major religious split in Kibworth. The charge sheet brought against Hunt was later catalogued by the royalist John Walker, in his compilation of the ‘Sufferings of the clergy of the Church of England who were sequester’d, harass’d, &c in the times of the Great Rebellion’. Having had his property sequestered initially on 17 August 1644 (though he evidently remained in Kibworth after that date), Hunt was fined the substantial sum of £150 in November 1645 for being in Leicester when it was a royal garrison. ‘While at Leicester’, it was alleged, he ‘got protections from Prince Rupert for some parishioners, but left others to be plundered’, implying a loyalist community in Kibworth whose interests he had sought to protect. Hunt was accused of having ridden in arms with Cavaliers and of having been ‘one of those who fled after Naseby’, suggesting – and it would not be surprising – that fearful royalist sympathizers in Kibworth followed in the tail of the fleeing Cavaliers. But he was also, as we have seen, charged with observing ‘ceremonies’; also of refusing to read parliamentary notices and of avoiding taking the Covenant – an oath in support of Parliament. He had, moreover, even ‘employed a scandalous curate’ in Joseph Foster, who had, the constable of Kibworth reported, been several times seen drunk. In the aftermath of a war, the story is a measure of how central religion was seen to be in the conflicts of the time.
The evidence was enough to condemn Hunt. In 1647 the parliamentary Committee for Plundered Ministers – set up to replace ministers loyal to Charles – ordered that Hunt be removed and nominated in his place a Cambridge Puritan vicar for Kibworth, John Yaxley. But Hunt would not go without a struggle. Finally, after an appeal, on 16 July 1647, the Committee for Sequestrations ordered that his eviction proceed. Interestingly they did so, ‘on parishioners’ petition’, suggesting that if there was a royalist contingent in Kibworth, there was also a body in the village hostile to Hunt and his ‘ceremonies’. Hunt remained obstinate and barricaded himself into the ‘fortified parsonage house’, the medieval rectory to the south of St Wilfrid’s. The parliamentarians responded robustly. A party of soldiers was despatched and they ‘broke down part of the house “not without bloodshed” and gave Yaxley possession’.
Hunt continued his fight at law but failed to wrest the living back from Yaxley, though the dispute rumbled on bitterly for several years. In 1654, Yaxley complained that Hunt was still trying to sue him even though, he indignantly protested, he had now been the village vicar ‘quietly’ for seven years. On 27 June that year the Committee for Compounding ordered that the county commissioners should ‘use all lawful means to quiet Yaxley in his possession of the rectory’. Finally, on 9 February 1655 an agreement was reached by which Yaxley kept the living on condition that he returned all of Hunt’s possessions and paid him £120 for the first year and subsequently £80 a year for life. The generosity of these terms – and the passion with which Hunt fought for them – shows how lucrative the Kibworth living was. And if this dispute dragged on longer than most, it is a pointer to the degree of religious turmoil at grass-roots level during these years that roughly two in five of Leicestershire’s parish incumbents in 1642 had been obliged to resign by Puritan committees.
If Hunt, his curate Foster and their ‘ceremonies’ had been a divisive presence in Kibworth, the same was also true of the new man, John Yaxley. A zealous – indeed militant – Puritan, Yaxley was (even his admirers conceded) not an easy man to live with. Even apologists for Nonconformist preachers after the Restoration hint at his uncompromising approach: ‘He was a sincere, plain-hearted, humble, pious man; a faithful friend, and very communicative. While he was in the church he was very zealous in promoting reformation, both in his own parish and in the whole country.’ Such men though could be ‘exceptionable characters and turbulent spirits’, one admitted, ‘and Justice obliges us to acknowledge that Mr Yaxley appears to have been of this description.’ Riding with the army as a captain in 1648 with his own troop, Yaxley was ‘a great disturber of the peace, by day and night, searching for cavaliers and making great havoc and spoil of people’s goods’. Back home in his Kibworth pulpit he ‘constantly preached and prayed against the Stuarts’. In Kibworth, needless to say, with its rich and often diverse religious life, such an inflexible approach to his parishioners could only stir up trouble.
Yaxley’s Puritan fundamentalism was felt in Kibworth from the start. The fourteenth-century font was cast out from the church as a ‘relic of superstition’ and wound up doing service as a horse trough in the yard of Robert Brown, a local man of presumably similar views who had served as an officer under Yaxley. (Later buried in a field, it was recovered in the 1860s and today is once again used for the village baptisms.) A similar attitude was taken towards other details of ornament or ritual which offended Yaxley’s sensitive nose for papistry. But such was the drift of the time. Elsewhere even the tomb of Walter of Merton was rudely assaulted, as a Latin inscription commemorating its subsequent repair makes clear:
In the year 1662, during the custody of the nobleman Thomas Clayton, the warden and scholars of Merton College in Oxford University, by virtue of their devotion and gratitude towards its founder, restored this tomb, which had been damaged and almost destroyed by the madness of the fanatics (which mad rabble, for a period lasting beyond the recent civil war, directed its rage against this tomb in just the same way as it was accustomed to do on a monstrous scale against the churches themselves, and against the relics of heroes and saints piously established therein).
Up and down the land in these bitter decades it was not only lives but history which was lost: in Kibworth too, where the once numerous memorials in St Wilfrid’s were mistreated.
Yaxley meanwhile eagerly assisted the wider work of the Puritan regime, which with a virtual ‘thought police’ sought to stamp out licentious behaviour or blasphemous opinions (the latter category of course including any perceived disaffection towards the government). In August 1654, Cromwell passed an ordinance, in his newly assumed capacity as Lord Protector, ‘for ejecting Scandalous, Ignorant and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters’. A panel of commissioners was nominated for each county: on that for Leicestershire sat Sir Arthur Hesilrige as well as Cromwell’s fourth son, Henry. This was assisted by a subsidiary panel of eighteen ministers deemed impeccable in their Puritan rigour, one of whom was the Kibworth vicar John Yaxley.
Together they worked for the ‘setlement of a godly and painful Ministery’, sniffing out any such wrong thinking as contravened the 1650 Act against ‘Atheistical Blasphemous and excrable opinions, derogatory to the Honour of God, and destructive to humane Society’ – as well as licentious behaviour: not only adultery, fornication, drunkenness and fighting but also frequent playing at cards or dice, ‘Whitson-Ales, Wakes, Morris-Dances, May-poles, Stage-plays … or such like Licentious practices, by which men are encouraged in a loose and prophane Conversation’. Republican England, then, was not a place for jollity. Liberty did not on any account mean licence. And Kibworth, with Yaxley at the helm, was in the front line of the campaign for a brave and godly new world.
By the late 1650s, Cromwell was dead and his son Richard installed as Lord Protector, as was noted approvingly in the Kibworth parish register. But many in England, even those once enthusiastic, were wearying of the Republic. As support for the regime dwindled, Yaxley led a delegation of thirty-eight Leicestershire ministers to deliver a petition to Parliament. His was the first name affixed and he delivered the preamble, testifying to the desire of all ‘the true Godly of the Land, to strengthen your Hands in the Work of the Lord’, and rueing the late lapse of erstwhile allies: the ministers ‘could not but with shame, and bleeding of heart, bewail that Cloud of darkness, which had lately overspread divers of their old professed friends, who at first deeply engaged with them’. The House thanked Yaxley and his fellows for a petition in which they discerned ‘a Gospel-Spirit of Meekness, Sincerity, and Holiness’. But many of them sensed clearly enough that, for the English Republic, the game was up.
Restoration
From the moment that Charles II landed at Dover on 25 May 1660 and processed to London, there were those in Kibworth who sensed that the game was also finally up for their vexatious minister. Unfortunately for Yaxley, the return of the king gave his local enemies all the security they needed to avenge the violent eviction of William Hunt thirteen years earlier and much else suffered by villagers in the interim. One need scarcely doubt that, if there were Puritans in the village who shared Yaxley’s mindset, there were many others profoundly unhappy with the turn their community’s religious life had taken. (In 1658 even the schoolmaster of Kibworth Grammar School had resigned after only two years in the job, fed up with the minister’s busybodying.)
But Yaxley did not go quietly from Kibworth. As Charles arrived in London, Yaxley delivered an apocalyptic commentary from the village pulpit: ‘Hell is broke loose, the devil and his instruments are coming to persecute the godly.’ From the time of the Restoration, it was alleged, Yaxley preached that ‘the King was a Papist, and went to mass twice a day, and that Popery and Profaneness increased apace’. Finally, at dawn on 17 August 1660, William Beridge, whose family had been popular vicars from the 1570s, and his village friends took the law into their own hands.
For what happened next we have conflicting accounts delivered in petitions to Parliament: that of Yaxley’s sworn witness on the one hand (a man given simply as J.D. who was staying at the Rectory while Yaxley was away); and, on the other, the reply of the local Justice, Sir John Pretyman, who lived near to Kibworth and who was summoned to the scene after the initial drama had taken place. According to J.D., Beridge came to the parsonage at sunrise with two other men, Richard Clark and John Brian, both middling Kibworth farmers. They drew the latch and entered, Beridge armed with a drawn sword and a cocked pistol, Clark with a cocked pistol and a fork. Having turfed the maids out of bed they entered the room where J.D. had been sleeping and threatened to run him through with a sword if he did not rise and leave quietly. They then entered the chamber of Mrs Yaxley, breaking down her bolted door, hauled her from the room in her petticoat and thrust her down the stairs and out of the house.
J.D. testified that Mrs Yaxley then went to her sister’s house in the village to borrow a coat before returning and shouting through the parlour window to be allowed to collect some clothes. Yaxley later seems to have claimed that his wife had been frantic at being unable to collect her granddaughter, who was asleep in a cradle in the house – and that she had shouted through the window: ‘You villains, will you kill my child?’ Both agree, however, that she was then shot at through the window and badly wounded in the face by the gunpowder and broken glass, which left her sightless and – as J.D. delicately put it – ‘more like a monster than a woman’. It was a harsh punishment for her husband’s unpopularity.
Yaxley moved to Smithfield in London, where he continued preaching until he died in 1687. It is interesting to compare his case with that of William Sheffield, another Puritan preacher installed by Parliament. In contrast to Yaxley, Sheffield became so respected by his new parishioners that a successful petition to the court was organized after the Restoration – signed by over a thousand people – requesting that he be allowed to continue in his role. But in 1662 the Act of Uniformity imposed the ritual and liturgy of a new Book of Common Prayer – a measure which led to the resignation of some 2,000 clergymen, including Sheffield, who could not comply with its terms. On his resignation William Sheffield retired to Kibworth Harcourt, where he owned land and where he lived the rest of his life. For eleven years he ‘constantly went in the morning, with his family, to the parish church, and preached in his own home in the afternoon’, becoming a lynchpin of the burgeoning Nonconformist community in Kibworth. In 1672, Sheffield licensed his house behind the Old Crown on Main Street as a place for Presbyterian worship with himself as preacher. The Civil War had seen the uniformity of the Church of England that Henry VIII and Elizabeth had sought fragment into scores of sects. Ecclesiastical discipline had almost entirely broken down, and thanks to war and division a generation had grown up quite unused to regular attendance in the established church. ‘Nonconformity’, as a local phenomenon and as a national movement, was born.
