THE REFORMATION AND THE GREAT AWAKENING
On one of the walls of the Parish Church of Macclesfield is a small
brass plate, a few inches square. It is called a 'Pardon brass', and
represents the Pope bowing before Christ, while Roger Legh and his six
sons are in the act of prayer. Beneath the figures is the inscription:
'The pardon for saying of five paternosters, five aves and a creed, is
twenty-six thousand years and twenty-six days of pardon.' We are not
told how much money Roger Legh paid the Pope for obtaining pardon for
his misdeeds, but it was a good round sum, I imagine.
During the Middle Ages the doctrine grew up that sins committed by one
man might be atoned for by the prayers or penance performed by others,
together with a sum of money, which varied according to the crime. The
price of pardon for robbery was twelve shillings, for murder only seven
shillings and sixpence, and for perjury nine shillings. By the sixteenth
century people began to have an uneasy feeling that the sale of
'indulgences', as these pardons were called, was wrong, and preachers
rose up everywhere to denounce the system.
This was only one of many evils which was bringing the Church into ill
repute. Reformers, like Martin Luther, showed that the Church believed
many things which did not agree with the teaching of the Bible.
Moreover, churchmen filled all the principal offices of state, and used
their position as a means of amassing great wealth, a portion of which
passed into the hands of the Pope, who was the recognized head of the
Church and whom the clergy were bound to obey. As the clergy would not
reform the Church themselves, the king and his lay ministers decided to
do it for them by Act of Parliament. King Henry the Eighth declared
himself head of the English Church, which, from this time, became
separated from the Church of Rome.
The king then turned his attention to the monasteries, which had grown
wealthy at the expense of the people. The monks themselves had grown
lazy and careless of their duties, and many of them were living evil
lives. The king decided to turn out the monks and do away with the
monasteries altogether.
In the year 1536 the king's officers appeared in Cheshire. The first to
suffer was the Abbot of Norton Priory, who resisted stoutly and summoned
all his tenants to his assistance. The king's men were compelled to take
refuge in a tower, but managed to send a message to Sir Piers Dutton,
Sheriff of Chester, by whose aid the abbot was captured and conveyed to
Halton Castle. The priory was sold, and the revenues, plate, and jewels
confiscated to the king.
Vale Royal fared no better. In this case, at any rate, the monks
deserved their fate. They had long been the terror of the neighbourhood,
and were the friends of the robbers and cut-throats of Delamere Forest.
Abbot and monks were expelled from the abbey, which was handed over to
Sir Thomas Holcroft. The Holcroft crest was a raven, and superstitious
people saw in the fall of Vale Royal the fulfilment of a prophecy of a
Cheshire 'wise man' named Nixon, who said that the abbey would one day
be destroyed and become a raven's nest.
The Cistercian Abbeys of Combermere and Darnhall, and the Priories at
Mobberley and Birkenhead, were treated in similar fashion, and their
wealth and estates divided between the neighbouring gentry and the king.
The Abbot of S. Werburgh was the most powerful man in Cheshire, but he
could not save his abbey from the greedy hands of the king's officials.
The wealth of this abbey was reckoned at more than a thousand pounds, a
large sum in those days, equal to a sum at least ten times as great at
the present time. The abbots lived in their fortified manor-houses at
Saighton and Ince, where they kept great state, and supported large
numbers of retainers and dependants. They held a court at Chester, and
frequent quarrels arose between them and the Mayor of Chester as to the
extent of their powers and jurisdiction.
The people of Chester were probably not sorry to see the abbot stripped
of his power. He did not, like the Abbot of Norton, show violence to the
royal officers, but fell in quietly with their wishes. For this he
received his reward, and returned to Chester within two years, no longer
as abbot, but as dean of a new cathedral.
Many of the bishoprics of England covered such a vast extent of country
that Henry decided to spend a portion of the wealth which he had taken
from the monasteries, in creating six new bishoprics. Chester was one of
them, and the Abbey of S. Werburgh became the cathedral church of the
new bishopric, a portion of the new buildings being set apart as a
palace for the newly made Bishops of Chester. The first bishop was John
Bird, a Carmelite friar.
Henry did not go as far in his reformation of the English Church as many
people wished. There were many who 'protested' against practices in the
Roman Church which they thought wrong, such as the worship of images or
of the relics of saints, to which the people were encouraged by the
clergy to pray for help. The Protestants, as the extreme reformers were
called, increased in number daily, and in the reign of Edward the Sixth
got the upper hand. They did away with the old Latin services of the
Church, which the greater part of the poorer classes did not understand,
and wrote a Book of Common Prayer in the English tongue. By an Act of
Uniformity, all the clergy were called upon to use this Prayer Book in
their churches.
During Edward's reign, the rich jewelled vestments of the priests, the
church plate and crucifixes, and even the church bells, were swept away
and sold for the benefit of the king. Many of our village crosses were
wantonly destroyed during this period. The beautiful Sandbach crosses
were thrown down and broken in fragments. Most of the pieces were
recovered at a later day, and the crosses set up again, but they will
for ever remain a proof of the careless destruction of works of art by
which the period of the Reformation was marked.
[Illustration: CHESTER CATHEDRAL (before Restoration)]
When Queen Mary came to the throne she restored the old religion of
Rome. A memorial obelisk on Gallows Hill, Boughton, reminds us of the
dark days when Protestants were persecuted with blind and bitter hatred
by their Catholic enemies, and even suffered death for their beliefs. On
Gallows Hill, George Marsh was burnt at the stake for teaching the
doctrines of the reformed faith. He was tried in the Lady Chapel of the
cathedral, and condemned to death. The citizens of Chester, who had
shown themselves sympathetic to the reformers, were filled with horror,
and, led by one of the sheriffs, tried to rescue him, but failed in the
attempt. The bones of the martyr were collected and laid in the
burial-ground of S. Giles. The sheriff was forced to flee to the
continent until better times. He returned in the more tolerant days of
Queen Elizabeth, and became mayor of the city.
A settlement was brought about in Queen Elizabeth's reign, which
satisfied all but the extreme men on either side. She was the more
inclined to the Protestant cause inasmuch as she hated the Catholic King
Philip of Spain, who called her 'the heretic queen', and whose spies
were to be found all over England. When the struggle with Spain was near
at hand, Protestants and Catholics forgot their quarrels in face of a
common danger, and the queen had no more loyal subjects than the great
Catholic families of Cheshire. Rowland Stanley, of Hooton-in-Wirral,
gave a large sum of money for improving the defence of the sea-coast,
for it was thought that Philip might land troops in Wirral.
The Reformation was only part of a great awakening of peoples all over
Western and Central Europe. Scholars studied and brought from Italy
copies of the books of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. The
invention of printing helped the spread of learning, and the Tudor
monarchs encouraged the building of schools and colleges in order that
all classes might have the benefit of a better education. Over the porch
of the King's School, Chester, is a statue of King Henry the Eighth. He
was the founder of the school, which for a long time was carried on in
the ancient refectory of the abbey.
Some of the wealth taken from the abbeys and monasteries was devoted to
the foundation of schools. The Grammar School at Macclesfield was
endowed in the reign of Edward the Sixth. At Bunbury, Thomas Aldersey, a
haberdasher of London, founded a school, the chantry and college of Sir
Hugh Calveley having been dissolved at the same time as the abbeys.
Sir John Deane, son of Laurence Deane, of Davenham, gave some property
which had been in the possession of monks for the building of a free
Grammar School at Northwich, 'forasmuch as God's glory, His honour and
the public weal is advanced and maintained by no means more than by
virtuous education and bringing up of youth under such as be learned and
virtuous school-masters.'
'God's glory' was indeed not the least of the things that Cheshire boys
of the sixteenth century were taught to observe. In the statutes of the
founder of Witton Grammar School it is laid down 'that the scholars
shall thrice a day serve God within the school, rendering Him thanks for
His goodness done to them, craving His special grace that they may
profit in learning to His honour and glory'.
In the reign of Henry the Eighth the voice of the people of Cheshire was
heard for the first time in the Parliament of the English people at
Westminster. Hitherto, the miniature Parliament of the Norman and royal
Earls of Chester had been considered sufficient for them. Henry now
summoned two knights of the county and two burgesses from the city of
Chester to take their place side by side with the chosen representatives
of the other English shires and boroughs in the national assembly.