The Hutton report

I’m currently doing some digging on parish politics in St Giles Cripplegate, London, during the 1630s. Irritatingly the vestry minutes for that period do not survive – it always seems to be the way that the particular period of a parish I want to research has no extant records! But the evidence that does survive suggests it was a pretty divided parish during this period. The vicar, Dr William Fuller, was an Anglican who resisted the Long Parliament’s attempt to strip away Laudian innovations:

For at St Giles’s Cripple Gate the Sectaries and the Orthodox got almost to Daggers drawing the one about Executing the Order the House of Commons the other for preserving their Church in ancient condition with the Rails about the Communion Table.

Nalson, Impartial Collection, p. 491.

The ‘sectaries’ of the parish went as far as submitting a petition to Parliament, a copy of which was printed. Fuller was singled out for complaint but so too was his curate, a man called Timothy Hutton:

Certaine Parishioners attended to see the christian buriall of a dead corps, could neither find the said Doctor or his Curate, though having notice before thereof: after that also, another Corps, then a third, all attending in the church yard. And at the last; hearing that Timothy Hutton his Curate was at the Fortune to see a Play, they sent to desire him, to officiate for the three corps: but hee would by no meanes come; then they sent a second, then a third also, certifying how long they had waited: yet would the said Timothy Hutton by no meanes come, untill such time that the play was ended.

The petition and articles exhibited in Parliament against Dr Fuller, Deane of Ely, and vicar of S. Giles Cripple-gate (London, 1641), BL, TT, E.175[1], sig. A3v.

I quite like the sound of Hutton: on another occasion he spent a night in the cells for being drunk and was fined a shilling by the magistrates for swearing.

Less amiable by all accounts was the churchwarden, Thomas Bogh, who was summoned in October 1641 to account for himself before the Commons after the MP John Venn gave an account of Bogh’s violent behaviour. In September 1641 Parliament issued reminders about the need to remove Laudian additions to churches, and in addition imposed lectureships on parishes: the godly faction within the congregation wanted the Puritan John Sedgwick (brother of Obadiah), but Bogh was having none of it.

On 15 October, Sedgwick and a crowd of parishioners assembled outside the locked church doors in the pouring rain, and waited an hour before concluding that they weren’t going to be let in. A few days later, John Chambers, servant to the MP Sir Roger Burgoyne, was assaulted by Bogh as he tried to deliver an order insisting that the church’s altar rails were removed.

Fuller, meanwhile, was summoned by the Commons and only released in November after posting substantial bail. In July 1642 he and Hutton were once more in trouble for reading a declaration by Charles I to the congregation. Further into the civil war, Fuller’s assets were seized and he ended up with the king in Oxford. During the Interregnum he returned to London to his old parish, dying in 1659. His request to be buried in the churchyard of St Giles Cripplegate was denied, though, so his body now lies in Saint Vedast-alias-Foster about half a mile south of his former parish.