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This and, certainly, Joseph Hall’s sermon, Thomas Plume had read
but it was learned by him also in John Hacket’s study. Indeed, the most
frequently cited version of this boast, accurately placing it “about the
time of King Charles the First’s reign”, that “in the long reign of Queen
Elizabeth and King James the Clergy of the Reformed Church of
England grew the most learned of the world” is from Thomas Plume’s
own pen [3.2(a)]. And his Library is in part a showcase of the published
proof of the claim. All the English scholars whom Joseph Hall had
named in 1624 to illustrate his assertion are represented among Dr
Plume’s books.
From the 1560s to the 1640s England’s two universities had poured
forth an unprecedented number of graduates — indeed, unequalled until
the late 19th century — and Plume’s father can stand for the hundreds of
benefactors who raised the fine new collegiate buildings, patronised the
university presses and maintained the new grammar schools in which
this spate of scholars was prepared. This phenomenon in English
education had been halted by civil war; subsequent allegations that the
violence of the 1640s had originated in the universities, the nurseries of
social change and of the puritanism that “preached your Majesty out of
your kingdom” [64(a)] prevented any recovery. But it was Plume’s
intention in 1704 to help re-establish the Church’s learned ministry. A
minister of religion, it had been said, should be “the eye of the world”
for his congregation, “to disperse the clouds of ignorance and give
light...” [35]. For this the clergy of Colchester and Chelmsford already
had the Harsnett and Knightbridge libraries; the clergy of the Maldon
area should have one, too.
He inherited from his father rather than from Hacket the parallel
English tradition of a puritan insistence on the necessity of a learned
laity, the ideal of a godly commonwealth conjointly ruled by learned
magistrates and learned clergy. This too had flourished from the 1560s
to the 1640s, had led to the foundation of hundreds of schools, the
endowment of many scholarships, an informed, high-thinking lay
readership of men like Alderman Thomas Plume, of T. Knight, Robert
Eyre, Thomas Windesor (encountered above) and Thomas Chese and
Ruben Robinson [30(b) and (c)]who read history, law and experimental
sciences as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. Hence Plume’s