27
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stipulation that his professor’s Observatory at Cambridge and his
Library at Maldon were to be accessible to both clergy (or scholars) and
gentlemen. And, mindful of his own education, he gave £20 to
Chelmsford Grammar School to buy books, “for the use thereof in a
Standing Library”; he proposed establishing at Christ’s College “an
annual exhibition of £6 towards the maintenance of one scholar
educated at Maldon”; his trustees in the town were to provide schooling
for six (or ten, if possible) sons of paupers; he gave the town’s grammar
school new premises below his Library Room.
Allied to this tradition of excellence in scholarship was the claim of
the Church of England to an unbroken, continuous life from the time of
the Early Church. Its scholars had been maintaining this since the 1560s,
from John Fox’s
Book of Martyrs
(
see Figure 8) which set the Protestant
martyrdoms of the 16th century in the context of the continuous
persecution of the godly fromSt Stephen to his own time. The Library is
well stocked with treatises written to substantiate this view [36], in
which the Reformation is represented as a renaissance, not as a break
with the past. But as scholarship had suffered by the Civil War, so had
the historic fabric of the Church. Its monuments and its buildings had
been haphazardly desecrated, its rituals and music had been abolished,
its remaining wealth had been plundered. So the Restoration of the
Monarchy in 1660 had to be complemented by the Restoration of the
Church. Hacket and his generation, survivors from the glories of the
past, and the new generation of young clerics like Plume and Tenison,
had to be the rebuilders. That this remained his overriding intention is
stated before his name as the opening words of Plume’s Will, written in
1703:
“
God direct me in the making of my last Will as may most make
for His glory, the benefit of His church and my own soul’s good in
the Day of His great Account”.
In part it was a physical restoration. On arriving at Lichfield in 1661
Bishop Hacket began the immense rebuilding of his cathedral,
devastated by siege warfare in 1644, paying for much of the work from
his own resources. This is carefully and fully described by Plume in his
‘
Life’ of Hacket, down to the solemn service of rededication and the
three-day feast of celebration. Nearly forty years later Plume put as the
first item in his Will a gift