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inhabitants . . . know little how much his thoughts dwelt on Maldon” [2.2]. In
fact his thoughts were on far more general concerns and his charitable
bequests were more widely dispersed than the Town Clerk would admit and
in making him an historical character the Borough Council broke into the
anonymity Dr Plume had intended for himself
His books do betray something of his private beliefs. They and his Will
hint at High Church convictions which perhaps led a vicar of Seale in Kent to
dedicate to him, as a man distinguished for piety, probity and charity, an
anniversary sermon on the execution of King Charles I [37.1 ]; his Will and
his
Life o/Hacket
both end with an exhortation: “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,
O come quickly,” which he must have learned from his patron and whose
particular association with the cult of the Martyr King is made clear in
Hacket’s own writing [3.3(a)]. He may have felt too that in the partnership of
Crown and Mitre, Squire and Parson which his building so oddly represents,
the secular power of the Supreme Head of the Church was inferior to the
spiritual authority,
juro divino,
of the Church’s bishops. The relationship of
the tower to the library, the dominating portrait of “the English Cyprian”,
Archbishop Laud [38] hint at this. Yet the deliberate impartiality of his
Library on the whole precludes anything more than guesswork about his
beliefs and politics.
Such anonymity was his firm intention. Only that which would most make
for God’s glory, the benefit of His church, was, as he said, to be of
importance. He used only the humblest description of himself: “Thomas
Plume of East Greenwich, D.D., Minister, the most undeserving”; he
required the simplest of funerals in the most remote of his parishes
(
Longfield, Kent); in place of the ostentation that marked some church
dignitaries’ obsequies he desired “but small attendance and an ordinary black
coffin”, burial in “a plain brick grave” which was to be unfashionably in the
churchyard, not inside the chancel, and a plain black gravestone which would
record of himself only: “Thomas Plume, Archdeacon of Rochester, the
greatest of Sinners, O that I could say ‘ of Pe n it e n t s ... ’ . He did no t
require his benefactions to bear his name, although four brick houses in Dog
Kennel Row at Deptford were to be
The Archdeacon's Poor Almshouses,
which was still only an impersonal designation. The Plume School,