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To have allowed them to meet openly in their conventicles would have been to make over the whole of England to them as a seed-bed in which to plant sedition. It was pardonable, it was even necessary, for Charles II. and his advisers, to fall back upon Elizabeth's principles, at least as long as the ashes were still glowing. Indulgence had to be postponed till cooler times.
The magistrates, referring to another Act of Parliament, cautioned Bunyan against finding fault with the Prayer-book, or he would bring himself into further trouble. However this might be, they told him kindly, as Mr. Wingate had done, that it would be better for him if he would keep to his proper work. The law had prohibited conventicles.
"The very man," exclaimed Bothwell, "and the very horse! he was in this room not a quarter of an hour since." The leader of this party was David Hackston, of Rathillet, a gentleman of ancient birth and good estate. He had been profligate in his younger days, but having been led from curiosity to attend the conventicles of the nonconforming clergy, he adopted their principles in the fullest extent.
"By Jupiter!" exclaimed the marquis, with a pause of amusement. "Well," he went on, "I suppose I must take you on your own terms. They've been asking me to put a stop to these conventicles." "Wha has, my lord?" "That's my business." "Lat it be nae ither body's, my lord." "That's my intention. I told him I would go and myself." "Jist like yer lordship!" "What do you mean by that?"
Acts were passed to ratify all the late judgments, however illegal or iniquitous, to indemnify the privy council, judges, and all officers of the crown, civil or military, for all the violences they had committed; to authorise the privy council to impose the test upon all ranks of people under such penalties as that board might think fit to impose; to extend the punishment of death which had formerly attached upon the preachers at field conventicles only, to all their auditors, and likewise to the preachers at house conventicles; to subject to the penalties of treason all persons who should give or take the covenant, or write in defence thereof, or in any other way own it to be obligatory; and lastly, in a strain of tyranny, for which there was, it is believed, no precedent, and which certainly has never been surpassed, to enact that all such persons as being cited in cases of high treason, field or house conventicles, or church irregularities, should refuse to give testimony, should be liable to the punishment due by law to the criminals against whom they refused to be witnesses.
We may receive an impression of the greatness of these occasions, from memorials yet to be seen on some of the sacred places where the Communions were held. Certain stones near the town of Irongrey remain as witnesses of these inspiring solemnities. The stones were evidently on the ground, as witnesses of the wonderful doings of God and His people, in the days of the Conventicles.
The commonalty, almost every where in the south, particularly in the western counties frequented conventicles without reserve; and the gentry though they themselves commonly abstained from these illegal places of worship, connived at this irregularity in their inferiors.
At that very instant such of his own subjects as had seceded from the Established Church to hold conventicles in barns and breweries and backshops in London were hunted by him with bishops' pursuivants and other beagles like vilest criminals, thrown into prison to rot, or suffered to escape from their Fatherland into the trans-Atlantic wilderness, there to battle with wild beasts and savages, and to die without knowing themselves the fathers of a more powerful United States than the Dutch Republic, where they were fain to seek in passing a temporary shelter.
'Twas long she did maintain the Royal Cause, Argu'd, disputed, rail'd with great Applause; Writ Madrigals and Doggerel on the Times, And charg'd you all with your Fore-fathers Crimes; Nay, confidently swore no Plot was true, But that so slily carried on by you: Raised horrid Scandals on you, hellish Stories, In Conventicles how you eat young Tories; As Jew did heretofore eat Christian Suckling; And brought an Odium on your pious Gutling: When this is all Malice it self can say, You for the good Old Cause devoutly eat and pray.
Up betimes, and to Sir W. Coventry's by water, but lost my labour, so through the Park to White Hall, and thence to my Lord Crew's to advise again with him about my Lord Sandwich, and so to the office, where till noon, and then I by coach to Westminster Hall, and there do understand that the business of religion, and the Act against Conventicles, have so taken them up all this morning, and do still, that my Lord Sandwich's business is not like to come on to-day, which I am heartily glad of.
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