AROUND THE TOWN AND OVER THE POND - 15. SALEM CHAPEL AT FAIRLYNCH MUSEUM

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https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2024/07/around-town-and-over-pond-14-looking.html

AROUND THE TOWN AND OVER THE POND

A walk around Budleigh Salterton to interest transatlantic visitors. Every so often there’s a diversion which may inspire you to visit places like East Budleigh, Exeter, Sidmouth, Colyton or even places in the United States and Canada.    

The walk is set out in parts. Here’s the fifteenth part:

15. SALEM CHAPEL AT FAIRLYNCH MUSEUM 

Summary: How East Budleigh’s Salem Chapel and the USA were founded on the same principles of freedom and diversity thanks to an Otterton man’s friendship with one of the Western world’s greatest philosophers.

Top: Salem Chapel, East Budleigh. Centre: Portrait of John Locke in 1697 by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Lower: The 1823 facsimile of the final version of the 1776 Declaration of Independence

East Budleigh’s Salem Chapel lies on the outskirts of the village, about 500 metres north-east of the parish church of All Saints, and was built in 1719 for religious dissenters from the Church of England. Most people would not suspect a connection between the building and the historic document of 1776 known as the United States Declaration of Independence.

The connection between the two is interesting because it involves the philosopher John Locke, one of the most influential thinkers of the 17^th century and commonly known as ‘the father of liberalism’.  This gives the building considerable historical importance. 

 

Fairlynch Museum has never staged an exhibition about Salem Chapel. However in the  museum’s local history archives there are photographs of the restoration work which began in the 1970s. There are also six folders which contain copies of much valuable material about the Chapel’s development over the centuries, including the names of church members.   

 

1b. Left, the arms of the Duke family of Otterton: Per fesse argent and azure, three chaplets counterchanged. Right, the Duke family crest: a demi-griffin salient argent, holding in its dexter claw a chaplet azure, as incised on the monumental brass of Richard III Duke (1567–1641) in St Michael’s Church, Otterton. Image credit: Wikipedia

You won’t find any mention of John Locke’s name in the material or in guide booklets for the building, yet one of his friends in the 1680s was a member of the most prominent landowning families in the Budleigh area.

Richard VI Duke and his first wife Isabella are noted for their correspondence with Locke, dated at the time of the philosopher’s self-imposed exile in Holland. 

The Duke family owed its fortune to Richard Duke, a lawyer and Member of Parliament who had acquired large grants of former monastic lands in the West Country following the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of King Henry VIII. He used the site of Otterton Priory to create a new home known as Otterton House or the Manor House, built in the form of a quadrangle.  

 

You can still see the Duke arms sculpted in stone on the porch above the door – all that remains of the manor house in Otterton. 

 

The brass coffin plates of Richard III Duke (1567 – 1641) and Richard VII Duke (1688–1740), Lords of the Manor of Otterton. Image credit: LobsterThermidor- Wikimedia

Richard was a traditional first name for the family as you can see from these coffin plates, on view in St Michael’s Church, Otterton.

 

Exeter College, Oxford. Image credit: Simon Q; Wikipedia

It was Richard VI Duke who was the friend of John Locke. Born at Otterton on 2 May 1652, he was the son and heir of Richard V Duke and Frances, née Southcott. According to records in his handwritten journal he was educated at local schools including in Colyton, Powderham, Martock, Exeter and Ottery. 

He was then admitted in May 1669 as a student at Exeter College, Oxford, where Dr John Conant from the neighbouring village of Yettington had been Rector. This was followed a year later by law studies in London, which seem to have lasted only until 17 August 1671 when he left for Paris. He returned to London in May the following year, and on 17 May 1673 married Isabella, the daughter of Sir Walter Yonge, 2^nd Baronet. 

He had evidently found life in France to his taste because the couple set off for an extended honeymoon in September that year, staying in Montpellier until April 1675 when they returned to London. In May 1678 we find them in Bath, where they seem to have stayed until October that year. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Ashburton on 18 September 1679.

 

Great House, South Street, Colyton. Image credit: Wikipedia

His friend and brother-in-law Sir Walter Yonge, the Member of Parliament for Honiton in that year, resided not too far from Otterton at Great House. You can still see this manor house built in the town of Colyton by the Yonge family in the mid-16^th century. 

The front elevation of the Devonshire House of Sir Walter Yonge, as featured in Vitruvius Britannicus, the three-volume book of engravings showing grand houses of the time, published between 1715 and 1725 by the Scottish architect Colen Campbell. Image credit: www.escot-devon.co.uk 

However he evidently decided that a grander home was needed, designed on the lines seen above. Records show that between 1677 and 1679 he was in correspondence with Robert Hooke, the celebrated polymath and architect whom he had engaged to build a house at Mohuns Ottery, near Luppitt, four miles north-east of Honiton. Hooke was an associate of John Locke; both men had studied at Westminster School and Oxford University and were Fellows of the recently founded Royal Society.   

Escot House in the parish of Talaton, Devon, 1794 watercolour by Rev John Swete (1752-1821). Devon Record Office: DRO 564M/F7/7. Image credit: Wikipedia

In the event, on 10 March 1680, Yonge purchased the estate of Escot Park and decided to build his new home there and not at Mohuns Ottery. Recent research has shown that Escot was in fact designed not by Robert Hooke but by the architect William Taylor.  

However the association between Locke and Hooke and their dealings with Yonge and his brother-in-law tell us that Richard VI Duke moved in elevated circles far from Otterton and was more than just another wealthy Devon landowner. 

Retired headmaster John James Alexander MA, FRHistSoc, JP, settled in Devon and in 1922-23 was Chairman of the Exeter branch of the Historical Association. The Devonshire Association published 46 articles by him between 1909 and 1942, when he died. Image credit: The Devonshire Association

His journal, the subject of an article by local historian J.J. Alexander written for the Devonshire Association in 1918, records regular stays in London. There were also numerous trips to ‘take the waters’ in spa towns such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells, including Spa in present-day Belgium. He was, in J.J.Alexander's view, based on the journal’s entries, ‘a man of scholarship and literary taste, affected, as was the fashion among the learned men of those times, with a mordant humour’. 

Charles Sackville, 6^th Earl of Dorset, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Image credit: Wikipedia

Politically, as inferred by the comments concerning kings made in his journal, he was, in the view of J.J. Alexander, ‘a stout Whig’  who had ‘nothing but contempt for the monarchs who upheld the Divine Right theory. In line with Locke’s thinking on such matters Duke held that popular consent was a vital part of the government process. He quotes approvingly in his journal these lines by Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset:

‘Heaven first resolv’d William should reign & then

Consenting nations gave their loud Amen;

The People’s voice proclaiming God’s decree

Showes now at last that Heaven and Earth agree

There should be one good King, & this is He.’

Socially, his family would have been the equal of any of the other great West Country landowners. On 19^th March 1705 his 25-year-old daughter Elizabeth married Robert Rolle. The following year would see her husband inherit one of the largest estates in Devon, extending from the manor of Stevenstone near Great Torrington in the north of the county to Bicton in the east, where it bordered the Duke family’s manor of Otterton.  

 

Richard VI Duke, like his brother-in-law, was attracted by the idea of building a new mansion house for himself. He got as far as erecting pillars for the gates to hang on, and they are still visible on the road which runs high above the east bank of the River Otter. He planted an avenue of trees to form the drive in Otterton Park, some of which are still standing. 

Perhaps he would have engaged William Taylor or even Robert Locke to create a home on the lines of Escot, with that drive leading to a palatial building quite unlike any of the typically thatched houses for which Otterton is celebrated today. 

Perhaps the numerous family tragedies that he endured were a reason for his abandonment of the project. His first wife, Isabella, died on 12 November 1703, while still in her fifties. The couple’s daughter Frances had died in infancy in 1681. 

His second wife, whom he married on 1 March 1705, was 24-year-old Elizabeth, née Cholwich, whose father John Cholwich was an alderman of Exeter and lived on the city’s outskirts at Farringdon.  Richard and Elizabeth’s daughter Frances, known in the family as Fanny, died at the age of four in 1711. Two years later they lost their second child, a son named Robert, aged only four months.  

In 1716 came the news that Elizabeth Rolle , the married daughter from his first marriage to Isabella, had died aged only 37 on 16 September in London. Ten years later, on 30 March 1726, he was widowed for a second time when his wife Elizabeth died and was buried at Otterton, aged only 45.    

On Richard VI Duke's death without issue in 1733 the lordship of Otterton Manor passed to his cousin, Richard VII Duke, born in 1688. 

The Radcliffe Camera, part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Image credit: Wikipedia

Richard's wife Isabella was clearly a more prolific writer than her husband. The Bodleian Library in Oxford contains four manuscript letters that Richard Duke wrote to Locke in 1686, whereas Isabella wrote over 30 letters to him between 9 July 1686 and 17 August 1691. 

It was at this time, in 1689, that Locke published Two Treatises of Government, a work of political philosophy which challenged notions such as the Divine Right of Kings. 

‘Men being, as has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another without his own Consent,’ he wrote in the second of his Two Treatises of Government. 

He emphasised mankind’s natural right to live in freedom and independence, with governments deriving their power only by popular consent: 

‘It is evident’, he wrote, ‘that Absolute Monarchy, which by some Men is counted the only Government in the World, is indeed inconsistent with Civil Society, and so can be no Form of Civil Government at all.’   

The signed and handwritten United States Declaration of Independence (1776) in the National Archives Building, Washington. Image credit: Wikipedia

Just under a century later one finds the same political ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the document which affirmed the right of 18th century American colonists to reject British rule:  

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' claim the authors. 'That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'

Writing the Declaration of Independence, a 1900 portrait by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin (left), John Adams (centre), and Thomas Jefferson (right) working on the text

It is widely recognized that the Declaration owes much to a number of authors and thinkers, especially John Locke. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, wrote most of its first draft in isolation between June 11, 1776, and June 28, 1776, from the second floor of a three-storey home he was renting at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia.

Official Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1800); portrait of John Locke in 1697 by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Image credit: Wikipedia

Jefferson called Locke one of ‘the three greatest men that have ever lived’, the two others being Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. 

King James II in 1690 by an unknown artist; King George III in 1762 by the Scottish artist Allan Ramsay. Image credit: Wikipedia

Both John Locke and the authors of the 1776 Declaration of Independence challenged the idea of absolute monarchy, demonstrated by the Stuart kings along with Louis XIV in France. Locke was writing during the reigns of the Stuarts – Charles II and his brother James II – while the American colonists wished to break free from what they saw as the tyranny of the British Crown in the reign of George III.

The Execution of Charles I at Whitehall, London, by an unknown artist. Image credit: National Galleries of Scotland

The clash between royalist supporters of the Stuart dynasty who believed in absolute monarchy and the parliamentarians who rejected it came to a head in the English Civil Wars. It ended with the execution of Charles I in 1649.  

Many influential landowners such as members of the Duke and Rolle families – well known names in our corner of East Devon – were strong Puritans and backed Parliament rather than the King during the English Civil Wars.  Richard Duke’s father, born in 1627 and known as Richard V Duke, is said to have fought on the side of Parliament against the Crown.

A biographer of Robert Rolle, the 17th century Member of Parliament, has written that the whole Rolle clan was seen as deeply and traditionally Puritan, having a hatred of practices such as usury, gaming at cards and dice. 

A marble plaque in St Michael’s Church records the names of two vicars on opposite sides of the religious divide in 17^th century England

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had an impact which was soon felt in communities across England. In Otterton, Puritans like the Duke family had always hoped that the Church of England would undergo further reforms to remove it from what were seen as Romish influences. In 1645, when Parliamentarians gained the upper hand in the First Civil War, they would have approved the ejection of the royalist vicar Richard Venn and the appointment of the Puritan Richard Conant at St Michael’s Church. 

 

The memorial in St Michael’s Church to two 17^th century vicars of Otterton, father and son

And now such hopes were dashed. Richard Venn was rewarded for his loyalty to the king by being restored to his office on the accession of Charles II in 1660. He had suffered ‘14 years of almost constant wandering’, including imprisonment in Exeter Gaol’ according to this memorial in St Michael’s Church.

A copy of the Book of Common Prayer, printed at Cambridge in 1662 by John Field. Image credit: Boston MA Public Library 

The so-called Cavalier Parliament of the Restoration period saw an opportunity to rid the Church of England of dissenting clergy with unacceptable Puritan tendencies. The Act of Uniformity passed by Parliament in 1662 forced church ministers to conform to the new regime. The Act meant that they had to swear an oath which included acceptance of the Book of Common Prayer and obedience to the bishops. 

Almost 2,000 dissenting or non-conformist ministers who refused to use certain vestments and ceremonies prescribed by the Church of England.were removed from their posts. Devon was the English county with the highest number of ejected vicars: 121 in total. The only other county to approach it was Yorkshire with 110. 

Title page of a collection of Farewell Sermons preached by ministers ejected from their parishes in 1662. Image credit: Wikipedia

This collection of Farewell Sermons was a best-seller in a still strongly Protestant and anti-Catholic England. It consisted of sermons preached by ministers ejected from their parishes following the 1662 Act of Uniformity.      

St Swithun’s Church, Woodbury. Image credit: Wikipedia

At St Swithun’s Church in Woodbury, close to East Budleigh and Otterton, the Rev Samuel Fones, ejected as vicar after 16 years of service, was so well loved by parishioners that his congregation was reported to have wept as he climbed to the pulpit to preach his final sermon. However he did not immediately leave Woodbury and apparently gathered round him a small group of sympathisers who met at his house.  

Portrait of Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop by an unknown artist, together with an image of a replica of the Arbella, flagship of the Winthrop Fleet. The replica was built for the 300th anniversary of Salem in 1930 in conjunction with the city’s Pioneer Village. Image credit: Wikipedia

Samuel Fones’ reformist leanings are well known. He had graduated at New Inn Hall, the notoriously Puritan college of Oxford University. He was also a nephew of Governor John Winthrop, the leading figure in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Winthrop Fleet, as it became known, consisting of eleven ships, sailed to New England in 1630. Samuel Fones eventually joined his uncle in America and died at Rhode Island in 1657. 

His time as vicar of St Swithun’s in Woodbury and his family background make yet one more link between the Budleigh area and the United States.  

Portrait of Lady Arabella Johnson. An 1837 engraving by M.J. Danforth. © The Trustees of the British Museum; arms of the Clinton barony.

In the Arbella, flagship of the Winthrop Fleet pictured above, lies a further interesting connection. The ship was originally called Eagle, but her name was changed in honour of Lady Arabella Johnson, a member of Winthrop's company together with her husband Isaac Johnson.

Lady Arabella, née Fiennes-Clinton, was the daughter of Thomas Clinton, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, whose descendant, the 23^rd Baron Clinton is today the largest private landowner in Devon, responsible for Clinton Devon Estates. 

Lady Arabella died in 1630, shortly after arriving in Salem. She has been described as one of Salem’s most enduring ghosts. ‘In the almost 400 years since her death,’ writes historian Jerome Curley, ‘Salemites have often spoke of a young woman dressed in a cape being seen walking along the shores of Collins Cove on foggy nights. They say she looks for her lost husband who was buried apart from her or she pines to find a way home to her English countryside.’   

Wedding of King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza on 21 May 1662. Image credit: Wikipedia

Popular, largely Puritan mistrust of the Crown continued to grow. Two days after the Act of Uniformity received the Royal assent on 19 May came the news that King Charles II had married a Roman Catholic, the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza.    

Loughwood Meeting House . Its origins go back as early as 1653. Image credit: Derek Harper; Wikipedia

During the ten years which followed the passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, further laws were passed to suppress dissent. To prevent ejected ministers from gathering new congregations it became unlawful to hold meetings of over five people aged 16 and over for religious worship other than that of the Church of England.  

Buildings like Loughwood Meeting House, hidden away in the countryside near the village of Dalwood in East Devon, were typical places for illegal religious gatherings. Early members of the congregation were apparently Huguenots who had escaped persecution in France during the rule of the Catholic King Louis XIV and were given refuge and support by dissenters such as Baptists.  

Portrait of Bishop Seth Ward by John Greenhill. Image credit: Wikipedia

The English church authorities were keenly aware of the growth of nonconformism.  In the diocese of Exeter there was particular tension because of the aggressive policy of uniformity pursued by Seth Ward, its bishop from 1663 to 1667.

On 16 January 1664, two years after Parliament’s passing of the Act of Uniformity, Bishop Ward wrote to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining of more than 20 ejected ministers in Exeter alone who had ‘nothing els to doe but to be gnaweing at the root of Governmt and religion, and to that purpose have many secret meetings and conventicles’.  Even worse, he pointed out, sympathetic officials seemed to be conniving at their subversive activities. ‘Those who are the Sage and the Wise amongst our friends, winke at them and thinke it by no means fit to discourage them,’ admitted the Bishop. 

Left to right: Oates revealing the Popish Plot to King Charles; Edward Coleman being taken to the place of execution; the death of the five Jesuit priests. Image credit: Wikipedia

One result of the persecution of dissenters by the Crown in collusion with the Anglican  Church was the growth of anti-Catholic paranoia in England, typified by the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678. This was a supposed Catholic conspiracy to kill King Charles II fabricated by the unscrupulous opportunist Titus Oates. At least fifteen innocent men were executed. They included Edward Coleman, a Catholic courtier who was hanged, drawn and quartered on a treason charge, having been implicated by Titus Oates in his false accusations. Also falsely accused and executed were five Jesuit priests who were hanged. These playing cards designed by the artist Francis Barlow to depict the ‘horrors’ of the Popish Plot were part of the anti-Catholic propaganda encouraged by the Whig party. 

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In this playing card, also designed by Francis Barlow, the Civil War Parliamentary commander Sir William Waller, a Puritan, is depicted as a Protestant hero burning ‘Popish Books, Images and Reliques’. 

‘

The Solemn Mock Procession of the POPE, Cardinalls, Iesuits, Fryers etc: through ye City of London, November ye 17th. 1679.’

The above broadsheet was published at this time, warning the public of a supposedly imminent event such as the triumphant arrival of the Pope in an England about to return to the Catholic faith.

Left: Portrait of James, Duke of York in the 1660s by John Riley; portrait of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury by John Greenhill. Image credit: Wikipedia

 The anti-Catholic fever of political life reached a high point in 1673 when it became known that King Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York, had converted to Roman Catholicism. The Exclusion Crisis, which ran from 1679 until 1681 was an attempt by what became known as the Country Party – soon to be known as the Whigs – to exclude Roman Catholics from the English throne. They were headed by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1^st Earl of Shaftesbury and patron of John Locke. Their opponents, supporting the monarchy and the Church of England, soon became known as the Tory Party.   

  

 A portrait of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch by Jan Wyck, in the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

Against this feverishly anti-Catholic background the young James Scott, an illegitimate son of Charles II who had been created Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch, decided to rally support for his cause as a successor to the throne. As a Protestant, he chose to make a tour of the western counties of England where he knew that he would gain followers. In Topsham he was escorted by ‘a brave company of stout young men’ whose cry was apparently ‘God bless the Protestant Duke and the devil take the Pope’. 

A West Country welcome for the Duke of Monmouth in 1680: 1. Sir Thomas Thynne, later 1^st Viscount Weymouth, owner of 1. Longleat House, Warminster; 2. Barrington Court, Ilminster; 3. Whitelackington Manor, Ilminster; 4. Brympton House, Yeovil; 5. Forde Abbey, Chard   

Aware of the need for financial support he also called on wealthy landowners, including his friend Sir Thomas Thynne at Longleat in Wiltshire. In Somerset he was welcomed by William Strode at Barrington Court and by George Speke at Whitelackington Manor, both near Ilminster. There were further stays at the home of Sir John Sydenham at Brympton House near Yeovil, and with Edmund Prideaux at Forde Abbey, near Chard.

The Great House, Colyton

By 30 August 1680, Monmouth had moved on to East Devon where he called at Great House in Colyton, home of the Yonge family who were known as likely dissenters. In the mid-1660s, the Bishop of Exeter, Seth Ward had complained in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury that there were at least 14 Justices of the Peace in the diocese ‘who are accounted arrant Presbyterians’: among them was Sir Walter Yonge, the 2^nd Baronet.

Otterton Old Manor House in what is now St Michael’s Close, Otterton

The following day he was made welcome in Otterton by Richard Duke and his wife Isabella. The village's lord of the manor and his brother-in-law had become firm friends, no doubt sharing the same non-conformist views in religion which were traditional in their families.  

'Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations: With a briefe Rehearsall of their false and dangerous Tenents', from the Collection of the British Museum. Image credit: Wikipedia. From top left the images depict Jesuits, a Welsh blasphemer, Arminians, Arians, Adamites (shown naked), Libertin (picture of man preparing to take a pick-axe to the Ten Commandments), Antescripturians, Soul sleepers, Anabaptists, Familists, Seekers, Divorcers (picture of man beating his wife)

The government of Charles II was aware of Monmouth’s ‘royal tour’ of the West Country and would have monitored the movements and contacts of the friends and others on whom he had called. In Oliver Cromwell’s time the authorities had recognised the multiplicity of threats from a range of religious extremists, from Catholic Jesuits to Protestant Anabaptists.  This Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and other Nations, a propaganda broadsheet denouncing English dissenters was published by the authorities in 1647.

17^th century spymasters: Portraits of John Thurloe (1616-1668) by an unknown artist, Sir Samuel Morland (1625-1695) by Sir Peter Lely and Sir Joseph Williamson PRS (1633-1701) by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Image credit: Wikipedia

The Postmaster General John Thurloe, aided by his secretary Samuel Morland had set up an efficient intelligence service to guard against royalist plots. After the Restoration, their value was recognised and they were retained as advisers to deal with threats against the monarchy. Their role was continued by Joseph Williamson during the reigns of both Charles II and James II.

The National Archives contain what is described as a small bound manuscript volume dating from 1663 in Joseph Williamson's handwriting, ‘being an Index of Nonconformist Ministers, Anabaptists, Independents, Congregationalists, Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Fifth Monarchy men, Commonwealth men, Scotch sectaries, ejected Ministers, disaffected persons in Holland, fanatics and other dangerous persons with information as to their meeting places, habitations, character and proceedings’. It was printed in 1911-12 under the title Williamson’s Spy Book.  

 

The title page of the official account of the Rye House Plot, composed by Thomas Sprat, appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1684; the execution of Sir Thomas Armstrong. Image credit: Wikipedia

The Rye House Plot of April 1682 was a conspiracy to assassinate the king and his brother the Duke of York but quickly unravelled thanks to the government’s network of spies. A dozen of those involved were executed, including some notable figures such as Henry Cornish, Sheriff of the City of London and Sir Thomas Armstrong, MP for Stafford who were hanged, drawn and quartered.  Twenty others were either imprisoned or fled into exile; the latter included the Duke of Monmouth, Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke.

Left: The Coronation Procession of James II, published by John Bowles, 1685. Right: King James portrayed in about 1685 in his role as head of the army, wearing a general officer's state coat. The painting is attributed to the Italian painter Benedetto Gennari II. Image credit: National Army Museum; Wikipedia

Three years later, following the death of King Charles II, on 23 April 1685, his brother the Duke of York was crowned as King James II. His accession to the throne was not contested and the coronation was a lavish affair but a couple of what were seen as bad omens were noted. The crown appeared to be about to fall off the King’s head and at the moment of crowning the Royal Standard at the Tower of London was torn by the wind.

Nonetheless, James II’s strong position as monarch was clear. There were standing armies of nearly 20,000 men in his kingdom, most of his opponents had been eliminated or fled into exile and his intelligence service was on full alert. In 1685 Richard VI Duke was arrested and charged what was claimed were ‘dangerous and seditious practices’. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Sir Walter Yonge on 19 May. 

Frontispiece to 'Tunbridge-Wells: or, A day's courtship' (London, 1678) supposedly by Thomas Rawlins, showing twelve figures drinking around a well.  © The Trustees of the British Museum. 

Also arrested at around this time was their friend Edward Clarke of Chipley, near Wellington in Somerset, an MP and later Recorder for Taunton. Described as an intimate of John Locke who claimed that he loved him ‘above all other men’, Clarke was held by the authorities on the suspicion that he ‘held correspondence with traitors’. It is certainly true that Clarke, Yonge and Duke had regularly met in the late 1670s at gatherings in the spa town of Tunbridge Wells, which had become a fashionable watering-place.

The Chalybeate Spring, Tunbridge Wells, as it appears today. Image credit: www.geograph.co.uk   Interestingly, promoters of tourism in Tunbridge Wells are currently promoting the town to visitors from the United States because of its ‘rich connection to the American story’. They quote the case of Locke who supposedly found inspiration for his ideas on liberty ‘while soaking in the healing waters of Royal Tunbridge Wells’.

Locke in a postscript refers to ‘our good Tunbridg company’ and is known to have been there with friends including the trio in the August of 1682. 

The Royal Proclamation of 16 June, 1685. Image credit: National Army Museum

In early June the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis and declared himself King in a vain bid for the Crown. The response of his uncle was to order the public burning of Monmouth’s declaration ‘by the Hands of the Common Hangman’ and issue a royal proclamation offering a reward of £5,000 to whoever would bring in the rebel, alive or dead. 
 

 

 The Battle of Sedgemoor memorial stone. Image credit: www.geograph.org.uk

The Monmouth Rebellion ended when about 400 of his ill-equipped supporters were slaughtered at the Battle of Sedgemoor, near Bridgwater on 6 July with many more killed in the aftermath. It is thought that about 50 regular soldiers on the King’s side lost their lives and about 200 were wounded. Monmouth himself was captured and brutally killed in a botched execution in London. 

George Jeffreys, 1st Baron Jeffreys PC, portrait attributed to William Wolfgang Claret. Image credit: Wikipedia 

The Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys was sent to round up Monmouth’s supporters throughout the south-west and try them in the Bloody Assizes at Taunton Castle and elsewhere. About 1,300 people were found guilty, many being transported abroad, while some were executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered.

The home of George Speke at Whitelackington Manor had been searched after the Rye House Plot two years earlier, but no incriminating evidence of involvement in the plot had been found.  Now, following the failed rebellion, Speke and his family were arrested on charges of treason. His son Charles was hanged, it was said, for the crime of having shaken Monmouth by the hand.

Richard Duke and his brother-in-law Sir Walter Yonge were luckier. Confined by the authorities during the rebellion they were released in November 1685, having spent the autumn at Tunbridge Wells with Edward Clarke. 

Another friend staying with them in the spa town at this time was John Freke, a lawyer who had previously come to the attention of the authorities as early as 1676. A warrant issued on 28 May directed the constable of the Tower of London to hold him ‘for high treason, close prisoner’.  In July 1683 he had been summoned in connection with the Rye House Plot. Two years later, on 19 May 1685, Freke’s name had appeared on an arrest warrant along with Richard Duke’s because of the threat posed by the supporters of the Duke of Monmouth.

View of Utrecht, dated between 1624 and 1685, by Herman Saftleven. Image credit: National Gallery of Denmark

In the summer of 1686, Richard Duke, Sir Walter Yonge and John Freke, together with Isabella Duke and Sir Walter’s widowed sister-in law Elizabeth Yonge, travelled to Holland. A letter dated June from Sir Walter to Edward Clarke mentions the town of Spa where they intended to 'take the waters', but it is also known that they visited John Locke in Utrecht where he was living at that time.    

Title page of the first edition of A Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689. Image credit: Wikipedia 

John Locke is also celebrated for his advocacy of religious freedom and at the time of the visit he was involved in writing one of his celebrated works, entitled A Letter Concerning Toleration. 

He would have been influenced in his views during his exile in Holland, where religious issues were discussed more freely and with less danger than in any other country of 17^th century Europe. He would also have been inspired by events in France where Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes on 18 October 1685, resulting in a flood of Protestant refugees into countries like Holland and later on, England. The persecution of Huguenots in France would certainly have been a topic that he would have discussed with his group of visitors. 

A 17^th century view of Montpellier by the German cartographer, cosmographer, and Hebrew scholar Sebastian Münster (1488-1552). Image credit: Wikipedia   

Richard Duke had spent an extended honeymoon of two years between 1673 and 1675 with his wife Isabella in the town of Montpellier, long seen as a Huguenot stronghold. In fact it’s most likely it was in Montpellier that they would have made the acquaintance of Locke. The philosopher lived there from 1675 to 1677 before moving to Paris for two years. Liberal-minded English visitors to the town had been attracted by the reputation of its university, but long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes they had been dismayed by the diminishing number of Protestant scholars and the increasing intolerance of the French government.      

Back in England, during the year following their visit to Holland, Richard Duke and his friends would have been surprised when a step towards religious freedom as envisaged by Locke was taken. The Declaration of Indulgence for Scotland and England, on 12 February and 4 April 1687 respectively, suspended penal laws enforcing conformity to the Church of Scotland and the Church of England. It allowed people to worship in their homes or chapels as they saw fit. It also ended the requirement of affirming religious oaths before gaining employment in government office.

 

 

 

Huguenot refugees landing at Dover, from the bicentenary commemorative issue of The Graphic, 1885. Image credit: The Huguenot Society

A major result of the Declaration of Indulgence was the influx of Huguenots. It’s been noted that relatively few had arrived in the immediate aftermath of the Revocation, but in 1687 they arrived in large numbers.  

Evidently James II saw the Declaration of Indulgence as a means of encouraging his fellow-Catholics to return from abroad. Both Anglicans and non-conformists saw it as part of his plan to reintroduce Catholicism. When the English Declaration of Indulgence was reissued on 27 April 1688 there was open resistance. 

A portrait of James II’s son, Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, by the French painter Alexis Simon Belle. The Prince was later nicknamed the Old Pretender when he claimed the English, Scottish and Irish crowns

A few days later, on 10 June came the news that the Queen, Mary of Modena, had given birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who might re-establish a Catholic royal dynasty.   

Portrait of Sir Jonathan Trelawny, 3rd Baronet, in 1720 by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery; Wikipedia

Seven bishops, including the Bishop of Bristol, Sir Jonathan Trelawny, soon to become Bishop of Exeter, signed a petition asking to be excused from having the Declaration read in church. They were charged with seditious libel and held in the Tower of London before being put on trial. 

The Trial of the Seven Bishops (1844) by John Rogers Herbert. Image credit: Wikipedia

On 30 June they were acquitted amid scenes of public rejoicing, and on the same day a group of seven Protestant nobles invited  William of Orange to come to England from Holland with an army. He landed at Brixham on 5 November. By the end of the year James had fled to France. In what became known as the Glorious Revolution, his daughter Mary was declared Queen, to rule jointly with her husband William. 

William III Landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688, by Jan Wyck.  © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

The reign of James II had seen a stifling of religious dissent. Its voice had been heard briefly during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, but the swift defeat of the rebels and the brutal repression which followed had a traumatic and lasting effect. Three years later, it has been noted, the landing of William of Orange, even with a well equipped army, was initially greeted with fear. Somerset people did not hasten to join his forces.    

Even in Devon, which had not especially suffered in the Bloody Assizes, there was hesitation. In Exeter, although William found the local population generally sympathetic, few people of note were willing to risk coming out in open support.  He was made to wait for over a week before significant numbers of major gentry joined him there.

 

 

John Tutchin by R. Grave, after an unknown artist; a line engraving, published in 1819.  NPG D4940 © National Portrait Gallery, London. Alongside is some of the material which contributed to a West Country martyrology inspired by the sufferings of victims of the Monmouth Rebellion 

The year after the Glorious Revolution saw West Country dissenters more confident as they reflected on the past troubles. Pity for those who had suffered under the previous regime was mixed with anger at its cruelty. Such feelings were stirred up by the anti-Catholic writings of Puritan journalists like John Tutchin and the London bookseller John Dunton.

Born in Lymington, Hampshire in about 1660, Tutchin had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion and been sentenced to seven years in prison, though he was released after only a year.  Six collections of the dying speeches of those executed in the 1670s for their defence of Protestantism and English liberties were printed in the spring and winter of 1689, Tutchin being largely responsible for gathering the material.   

The title page of Dunton’s biography of Judge Jeffreys, from the 1689 edition.   Image credit: www.ezrabook.com     

 John Dunton, born in Graffham, Huntingdon, in 1659, was equally energetic in his anti-Catholic writing. Probably because he also had been involved in the Monmouth Rebellion he spent eight months in New England in 1686, staying for  time in Salem, Massachusetts. He was responsible for the production of one of the most prominent books published in 1689. This was a biography of former Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys, using the pseudonym of James Dent. ‘The hanging judge’, as he was soon called, became a target of vituperation as intense as any levelled at the Pope. The book’s full title was The Bloody Assizes: Or, A Compleat History of the Life of George Lord Jefferies, from His Birth to this Present Time. Wherein, Among other things, is given a true Account of his unheard of Cruelties, and Barbarous Proceedings, in his whole Western Circuit.  

An explanation of the book’s content followed. It claimed to record ‘The whole Proceedings; Arraignment, Tryals, and Condemnation of all those who suffer’d in the West of England in the Year 1685. With their undaunted Courage at the Barr, their Behaviour in Prison; the Cruel Whippings afterwards, and the remarkable Circumstances that attended their Executions. To which is added Major Holmes's excellent Speech with the Dying Speeches and Prayers of many other Eminent Protestants. None of which were ever before Publish'd. Faithfully Collected by several West-Country Gentlemen, who were both Eye and Ear Witnesses to all the matter of Fact.’

 

 

Left: The frontispiece of the first 1563 edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments; the fifth,1705, edition of The Western Martyrology: or, Bloody Assizes, containing the Lives, Trials and Dying-Speeches of all those Eminent Protestants that suffer’d in the West of England, and Elsewhere, from the Year 1678, to this Time, together with the Life and Death of George L. Jeffreys. Image credit: www.wikiwand.com; www.thomsonrarebooks.com

Dunton’s book and Tutchin’s pamphlets and poems did much to create a ‘Western martyrology’, as shown in the title of the above publication. The authors were clearly following in the tradition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs published in the previous century and well established as anti-Catholic propaganda. Copies of that work had been chained beside the Bible in cathedrals and many churches.

These ‘canonisations’ of individuals who had suffered for their Protestant faith were eagerly read by the public, with little regard for historical accuracy. Here, for example, in Dunton’s Life of Jeffreys, is the saintly portrayal of Samuel Potts, a surgeon in Monmouth’s army and one of the four men executed at Honiton, who ‘behaved himself with that extraordinary Christian Courage, that all the Spectators were almost astonished: he being but young about twenty, his Prayers being fervent, his Expressions so pithy, and so becoming a Christian of greater Age, that drew pity and compassion from all present.’

 

Another Honiton man, ‘a rude Fellow’ according to Dunton, called for a bottle of wine to drink with his guard just before his execution. ‘Your Cup seemeth to be sweet to you, and you think mine is bitter, which indeed is so to Flesh and Blood,’ he tells the guard  in last words worthy of the most eloquent preacher, ‘but yet I have that assurance of the fruition of a future Estate, that I doubt not but this bitter Potion will be sweetn'd with the Sugar of the loving kindness of my dearest Saviour, that I shall be translated into such a State, where is fulness of Joy and Pleasure for evermore.’

High Anglican supporters such as Charles Hornby did their best to fight back against the tide of propaganda being published by non-conformist writers: 

The Whigs, he claimed in A Caveat against the Whiggs (1712), with some justification, have ‘furnish'd out a new Martyrology of those Holy Ones who died for rebellion and treason, so they can not only turn religion into rebellion, but sanctifie rebellion into religion, and by a dash of their pen, change a pernicious crew of rebels and traytors into a noble army of Saints and Martyrs.’

No doubt the martyrologies would have been eagerly read by dissenters and boosted their numbers. Yet in East Budleigh, the Church of England may have been holding its own against the tide of non-conformism thanks to the character and religious outlook of its vicar.  

Above: Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, Budleigh Salterton resident and antiquary 

Richard Conant had been one of Devon’s 121 ejected clerics, forced out of the living at St Michael’s Church in Otterton by the 1662 Act of Uniformity. He had finally conformed and been appointed as vicar at All Saints Church. No doubt he would have been a popular figure what with his longstanding family connections in the parish. But he was also a conscientious man who would have been respected by all. During the 16½ years in which Richard Conant held the living he was a ‘hardworking, painstaking and exemplary clergyman,’ notes the historian Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield. ‘That that he had good business habits is shown by his management of the various charities, about which there had been previously much laxity.’

Portrait of Richard Baxter (1615-1691), after the artist Robert White, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Image credit: Wikipedia. The title page of Richard Baxter’s A Saint or A Brute and part of Richard Conant’s Will addressed to his daughter Mary Mercer

More significantly, we also know that however conformed Richard Conant may have been as a vicar, he apparently retained his Puritan leanings till the end of his life.  On his death in 1688, he left in his Will to his daughter Mary Mercer the book A Saint or a Brute by Richard Baxter, a theologian described as one of the most influential leaders of the nonconformists. Born in 1615 in Shropshire, Baxter had been fined and imprisoned on numerous occasions as a dissenter. Like Richard Conant he had lost his place as a vicar in the Great Ejection of 1662. 

The title page of Richard Baxter’s The Life of Faith    

The second book by Richard Baxter mentioned in Richard Conant’s Will was The Life of Faith, or A Treatise of the Holy and Happy Life of Sincere Believers, a massive tome of 970 pages. The work, published in 1670, was in three parts: ‘A sermon preached to King Charles II, based on Hebrews 11:1, with another sermon appended to it, for further clarification’; ‘Instructions The for confirming believers in the Christian faith’; and ‘Directions on how to live by faith, or how to exercise it upon all occasions.’

It's worth noting that this book was left to Richard Conant’s sister Mary, who had sailed to America with her younger sister Jane by about 1639. Mary married Hilliard Veren on 12 April 1641 in Salem, where she and her husband settled.

Who could succeed Richard Conant in 1688 on the death of this venerable clergyman?  His conduct and religious views would have made him acceptable to most parishioners, including even dissenters of which he had been one. The community of All Saints Church was still lamenting the Protestant martyrs who had so recently suffered for their faith in the Bloody Assizes under a Catholic monarch. Could it be persuaded to accept a French Protestant as its vicar? 

St Mark's Church, Bristol, west front. Image credit: NotFromUtrecht  - Wikipedia

Exeter’s Bishop Jonathan Trelawny evidently thought so. During his time as Bishop in Bristol he had encouraged the city’s Huguenots, fleeing from persecution in France to found their own church in what is now known as the Lord Mayor’s Chapel, in College Green.  

Support by English bishops for the Huguenot immigrants was particularly vital when they were proposed as ministers of the Church of England. They were foreign, after all, speaking with a strange accent and perhaps difficult to understand for some parishioners! No doubt sympathetic bishops like Trelawny would have pointed out to objectors that the refugees had suffered for their Protestant faith and that many of them would have been more knowledgeable of the Bible than most members of English congregations.

‘The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror’s days and came over with him,’ Locke would write in his 1693 essay For a General Naturalization. ‘For ’tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners.’ 

And thus it was that on 24 May 1689 Daniel Caunieres was named vicar of East Budleigh. It's likely that Trelawny would have had no need to persuade Richard Duke that a Huguenot vicar in East Budleigh would be a good idea. Quite apart from the two years that Duke and his wife had spent in France, their friend John Locke had had much to say on the subject of Huguenot refugees settling in England. Contact with talented and skilled Huguenots, forced to leave their homeland by the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had inspired him with the idea that such foreigners deserved to be naturalised citizens.  He himself had recommended that a Huguenot refugee would be a good choice as tutor for the family of his friend Edward Clarke of Chipley, Somerset, the MP for Taunton.  

Vicars Mead, East Budleigh

Certainly Daniel was confident enough to call on the support of Bishop Trelawny when in the following year, 1690, he complained about his accommodation. Along with his Patron, Richard Duke, and the church wardens, he reported to Bishop Trelawny that the Vicarage House was in a ruinous condition, ‘the greatest part of it standing vpon Posts, and some of it fallen down.’ It was also, he complained, ‘too large for so Poor a Place,’ and requested permission for it to be ‘reduced to a less spacious and more convenient Habitation’. The Bishop agreed, and allowed money to carry out the alterations.

An engraving by an unknown artist of Castle Hill, Filleigh, North Devon, as built by Hugh Fortescue, 1st Earl Clinton. The portrait of Earl Clinton is in the Collection of Countess of Arran, Castle Hill. Image credit: www.castlehilldevon.co.uk     A disastrous fire destroyed the original building in 1934

Daniel was Vicar of East Budleigh for about twelve years, and during this period the Registers record the baptism of nine of his children, and the burial of two. He then moved to the parish of Filleigh in North Devon, becoming personal chaplain to Lord Clinton – an indication of the powerful friends in high places enjoyed by this former Huguenot refugee.

On 31 October 1702 Caunieres was succeeded as vicar by Abraham Searle, who died on 7 April 1719. ‘Nothing is known of him’, comments Dr Brushfield in his history of the Church of All Saints.

The problem of dissenters continued to worry the Church of England. In 1714 the Schism Act was passed by Parliament. It stipulated that anyone who wished to keep, manage or own a public or private school, or act as tutor, must first be granted a licence from a bishop. It also stipulated that such a person must conform to the liturgy of the Church of England and to have taken in the past year the rites of that Church. The Act was never enforced. On 1 August, 1714, the day that it was due to come into force, Queen Anne died. With the succession of King George I of the Hanoverian dynasty and the supremacy of the Whigs over the Tory party the Act was repealed in 1718 by the Religious Worship Act.

This development in British politics is likely to have encouraged local dissenters with the idea of building their own place of worship, separate from All Saints Church in East Budleigh. Significantly, it appears, they also received encouragement from Richard VI Duke and his family, who according to records seem to have supplied local stone for the building of Salem Chapel, completed in 1719.

Was Duke therefore ‘possibly a Dissenter’ as suggested by the writer of his profile in the History of Parliament online? We have no evidence for this in spite of his strong association with non-conformism. From his journal we learn that he saw himself as part of the community of St Michael’s Church in Otterton, where he desired to be buried ‘in my Grt Grd fathers vault, with my children.’  The church still displays his name among those listed for ‘Gifts given for ye Benefit of the Poor of Otterton’, as we can see from the above plaque. 

Far more likely is that he and his wife were still influenced by the ideas of their friend John Locke.  ‘The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light,’ Locke had written in 1689.  

‘No man by nature is bound unto any particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to that society in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is truly acceptable to God,’ reads his Letters Concerning Toleration.   Some people, he continues, ‘may object that no such society can be said to be a true church unless it have in it a bishop or presbyter, with ruling authority derived from the very apostles, and continued down to the present times by an uninterrupted succession. To these I answer: In the first place, let them show me the edict by which Christ has imposed that law upon His Church. And let not any man think me impertinent, if in a thing of this consequence I require that the terms of that edict be very express and positive; for the promise He has made us, that “wheresoever two or three are gathered together” in His name, He will be in the midst of them, seems to imply the contrary.’ 

‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others’. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

Perhaps, during that visit to his home in Utrecht in the summer of 1686, Locke and his friends had even discussed the thorny issue of Catholics and whether they also should be allowed freedom of worship in England. As recently as 2019 a hitherto unknown manuscript by Locke with the title ‘Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others’ was discovered. Now in the Greenfield Library at St. John’s College, Annapolis in Maryland, USA, and dated to 1667-8, the manuscript, in the words of Craig Walmsley, the researcher who discovered it, shows Locke to be much more tolerant in certain respects than was ever previously supposed. 

 

The statue of John Locke FRS (1870) by William Theed II (1804–1891), in the grounds of Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts, London. Image credit: www.artuk.org. Facsimile of the original draft of ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN General Congress Assembled’. Image credit: Wikipedia   

Craig Walmsley follows other historians in pointing out how Locke’s arguments would indelibly inform Western liberal thinking in general and the US Constitution in particular, noting how Thomas Jefferson paraphrased Locke in the 'Declaration of Independence'.

So East Budleigh’s Salem Chapel has nothing to do with the American city in Massachusetts. But, having come into being thanks to the ideas of such a towering figure in Western philosophy, it is clearly rather a special Devon landmark, to be admired and cherished by our visitors from across ‘The Pond’.