Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.Phillimore, Lucy
History
Sir Christopher Wren: His Family and His Times: With Original Letters and a Discourse on Architecture Hitherto Unpublished. 1585-1723.
Phillimore, Lucy
Great Britain -- History -- Stuarts, 1603-1714 -- Biography; Wren family; Wren, Christopher, Sir, 1632-1723
[_ARCHBISHOP LAUD MURDERED._]
On January 10, on Tower Hill, the unjust sentence was fulfilled. Few
things are more touching than the account given by his chaplain and
biographer, Heylin, of the way in which the Archbishop met that cruel
fate. It is some comfort to remember that, though the Church Services
were then forbidden, yet his enemies did not interfere, but suffered the
Burial Service to be read in All Hallows, Barking, where he was first
interred. After the Restoration, the coffin was removed to S. John's
College, Oxford, and buried under the altar in the chapel. He left
Bishop Wren and Dr. Duppa, Bishop of Salisbury, executors of his will.
It contained a great number of bequests for charitable foundations,
especially for his native town of Reading; but as his whole estate had
been taken from him, these were unfulfilled. His murder was an immense
triumph to all the Sectarians in England and Scotland, who probably
considered it as a death-blow to the Church.
The Bishop of Ely in his cell must have listened in grief and horror to
the tolling of the Tower bell which proclaimed the bloody death of the
friend with whom he had laboured for many years, latterly his patient
fellow-prisoner. The entry in the diary is brief: 'Parce, O Deus
Requisitor sanguinis.' The same fate seemed very near to himself, and he
was ready to follow the Archbishop; but he had eighteen years of close
imprisonment to endure, and a different work to do.
Early in 1644, George Monk, then a colonel in the King's service, was
taken prisoner by Fairfax in his attack upon the army besieging
Nantwich, in Cheshire. He was imprisoned first at Hull, and then, as he
was thought too important to be exchanged except for some considerable
prisoner, he was sent to the Tower, and there remained two years. The
Tower charges were high, and a long confinement in its walls was a
strain upon the resources of a prisoner, which reduced those, whose
fortune, like that of Monk, was scanty, to extreme poverty. The King,
who knew Monk's condition, contrived to send him a hundred guineas, and
upon this he existed for some time, and resisted the offers of Cromwell,
then rapidly rising in power and authority.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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