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to intellectual and perhaps spiritual maturity: he was in his twenties, a
time of decisions as he laid the foundations of his career but also a time
of great social, political and religious upheaval, when the world into
which he had been born was (as was said at the time) “turned upside
down” [15.1] or (as another commented) when the nation was “turned
with its heels upwards’ ’[15.2]. Indeed he could hardly have spent his
formative years at a more difficult time.
The man who stepped out of the turmoil of the Civil Wars and the
Commonwealth’s experiments in republican government, who was
presented to Greenwich Vicarage by Oliver Cromwell’s son, ought to
have been an open supporter of the radical wing of the Church of
England, a Puritan, eager to implement the presbyterian reorganisation
of the State Church which the Parliaments and the Scots had attempted
in the 1640s. He had spent his childhood in a borough (Maldon) whose
Corporation had from the 1570s consistently maintained a Calvinist
preaching ministry and in his childhood had sheltered a scholar ejected
from Cambridge for republican sympathies, Isaac Dorislaus, who
became one of the prosecuting counsel at the trial of King Charles 1.
This Thomas Plume graduated from one of the principal “nurseries” of
Anglican puritanism, Christ’s College, as had his father and close
cousins [6]; for him a pulpit ought to have been more important than a
Communion table, a sermon essential, a Book of Common Prayer not.
His father officiated as Senior Elder in one of the presbyteries which
replaced the dioceses, archdeaconries and rural deaneries of England
during the Commonwealth.
Instead, by 1662 Thomas Plume appears as a Royalist and a
committed Anglican. He was a priest by 1659 and the regularity of his
orders were never questioned after the re-establishment of the Church of
England in 1661-1662, so he must have deliberately sought ordination
at some time before 1659, at a time when the surviving bishops could
only function clandestinely. (Another who did as Plume must have done
was the future Archbishop Tenison [5], who was ordained by Bishop
Brian Duppa in 1659). From the beginning of his ministry Plume
celebrated Holy Communion in St Alphege’s Church at Greenwich
according to the Order in the Book of Common Prayer; John Evelyn, a