_Clergy sold for Slaves_ (Vol. ii., p. 51.),--MR. SANSOM will find in
the _Cromwellian Diary of Thomas Burton_, iv. 255. 273. 301-305., ample
material for an answer to his question respecting the sale of any of the
loyal party for slaves during the rebellion.
There is no evidence of any _clergymen_ having been sold as slaves to
Algiers or Barbadoes. Drs. Beale, Martin, and Sterne, heads of colleges,
were threatened with this outrage (see _Querela Cantabrigiensis_
appended to the _Mercurius Rusticus_ p. 184). In the life of Dr. John
Barwick, one of the authors of the _Querela_ (in the Eng. transl. p.
42.), the story is thus told:
"The rebels at that time threatened some of their greatest men
and most learned heads (such as Dr William Beale, Dr. Edward
Martin, and Dr. Richard Sterne) transportation into the isles of
America, or even to the barbarian Turks: for these great men,
and several other very eminent divines, were kept close
prisoners in a ship on the Thames, under the hatches, almost
killed with stench, hunger, and watching; and treated by the
senseless mariners with more insolence than if they had been the
vilest slaves, or had been confined there for some infamous
robbery or murder. Nay, one Rigby, a scoundrel of the very dregs
of the parliament rebels, did at that time expose these venerable
persons to sale, and _would actually have sold them for slaves,
if any one would have bought them_."
In a note, it is added that Rigby moved twice in the Long Parliament,
"That those lords and gentlemen who were prisoners, should be
sold as slaves to Argiere, or sent to the new plantations in the
West Indies, because he had contracted with two merchants for
that purpose."
Col. Rigby, so justly denounced by Barwick, sat in the Long Parliament
for the borough of Wigan, and in the Parliarment of 1658-9 represented
Lancashire. He was a native of Preston, was bred to the law, and held a
colonel's rank in the parliamentary army. He was one of the committee of
sequestrators for Lancashire, served at the siege of Latham House, and
in 1649 was created Baron of the Exchequer, but was superseded by
Cromwell.
Calamy, the historian and chaplain of the Nonconformists, treated
Walker's statement quoted by MR. SANSOM as a fiction, and advised him to
expunge the passage. See his _Church and Dissenters compared as to
Persecution_, 1719, pp. 40, 41.