10
divinity disputations and in the eccentricities of successive
Cambridge Professors of Divinity; a Royalist, with pronounced dislike
to Scots and Irish; a Churchman, very antagonistic to Presbyterianism; a
bachelor, deeply convinced of the burdens incidental to
matrimony..[4.3],
but these are most likely the attitudes of Dr Hacket and two of his
friends, Robert Boreman and Dr Edward Hyde, whose own writings
make up a large proportion of the manuscript collection in the Library.
What Dr Clark pieced together is a young man’s group portrait in words
of three old divines, all three sequestered from their main benefices by
the Commonwealth; a sketch made from their anecdotes and jokes,
table-talk, reminiscences, jotted down by the young attendant Plume.
Most of the stuff refers to the Cambridge of a generation previous to
Plume’s and especially to Hacket’s and Boreman’s college, Trinity; it
often refers to persons dead by Plume’s time. None of it is transferable
to Plume. Although he remained a bachelor he was anxious to record in
his Will that he “had no ill opinion of marriage”. The disparaging tales
about presbyterians were theirs (but Hacket had been inclined to seek
ways of reconciling
Figure 3. An extract from one of Plume’s notebooks, stillin the Library at Maldon.