7
7
stalwart maintainer of the proscribed services, took his family there at
Easter 1659 to receive Holy Communion [9.1 ]. Plume was by 1662
held in high esteem by the new Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Dr
John Hacket, who had been victimised in the 1640s and 1650s for his
adherence to the principles of Divine Right and episcopal church
government and who, in 1662, was hoping to appoint to a prebend (a
type of canonry) at Lichfield Cathedral this “Mr Plume of Greenwich,
who is,” he wrote to a friend [5] “of so great merit.”
The influence of this Dr John Hacket on both the career and the
principles of Thomas Plume becomes apparent as one peruses the books.
It was a pervasive influence lasting throughout Plume’s life, as may
become evident in this brief study, but the circumstances in which they
came to know each other are only indistinctly traceable. There is a blank
period of some ten years between Plume’s graduation as a Bachelor of
Arts in 1649 (aged 19) and his arrival at Greenwich in 1658. As he did
not proceed to the M.A. degree he would have remained in
statu
pupilari
had he continued resident in Cambridge. However, it was
customary for young graduates who sought ordination to spend a period
of study combined with practical experience of pastoral work with a
beneficed minister outside the university, a period of pupillage, a curacy.
Thomas Plume could have gone with his tutor, William More, who
abandoned his fellowship at Christ’s College in 1649 (as did all but
three of the Fellows) and retired to his college living at Kegworth, near
Lutterworth. Perhaps he did but by 1656 Plume was at Nonsuch, the
abandoned palace which Henry VIII had built in Surrey. One of his
commonplace books [2.3] has a note to the effect that one of its sections
was completed at Nonsuch, 20 September 1656.
Dr Hacket had been deprived of his most valuable benefices and
positions during the Civil War but he was allowed to keep the rectory of
Cheam and spent the Interregnum there, in scholarly seclusion. On the
outskirts of his parish was the palace of Nonsuch. Hacket wrote of his
dependence on Thomas Plume’s services in buying books for him and
as his secretary and general agent [5] and in the biography which Plume
wrote of Hacket [3.2]the account of the ageing scholar’s disciplined,
frugal life at Cheam is full of touches that come from the author’s
familiarity