page_title: Thomas Paget (Puritan minister)
section_title: Conflict and flight
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Paget (Puritan minister) / Manchester / Conflict and flight
caption_attribution_description: English: Title page from the 1683 edition of the Elizabethan Sermons or Homilies.
context_page_description: Thomas Paget was an English Puritan clergyman, controversialist and theologian, committed to a Presbyterian church order. As a minister in Manchester, he was an early opponent of Laudian ceremonies in the Church of England. He served the English Reformed Church, Amsterdam, and later at Shrewsbury was a strong supporter of the regicide and of the republican Commonwealth of England. He spent his final year as rector of Stockport.
context_section_description: Serious conflict between Lancashire Puritans and the ecclesiastical authorities broke out in 1617, bringing into the open a number of disputes that had already simmered for some time. The issues came to a head after James I visited Hoghton Tower on 17 August 1617 during a royal progress through Lancashire. There he was presented with a petition prepared by local religious conservatives, requesting relaxation of the laws governing Sunday observance, asking they be allowed to pursue "lawful recreations and honest exercises" after the service: the Tudor dynasty had progressively restricted such pursuits. The king responded positively and ordered Thomas Morton, the Bishop of Chester, who was the preacher on the occasion, to prepare the Declaration of Sports, which was later applied to the whole country but was read out initially only in Lancashire. The document specifically excluded those who did not attend the Sunday service, meaning recusant Catholics, and those who attended churches outside their own parish, applying to Puritans, who frequently went to hear preaching in another parish after the service in their own. Paget seems to have been closely associated in the minds of contemporaries with resistance to the so-called Book of Sports, as a tale of miraculous conversion was told of him in that connection. The grandmother of Oliver Heywood, the nonconformist minister, had a husband who was considered "carnal" because he went shooting on Sunday afternoons. She went for advice and prayer to the Puritan minister of Ainsworth, to no avail. However, the man visited Bury for the fair. Finding the church open for lectures, he went in and heard Paget speak. He was converted and set himself on a new course.
  Paget was among a number of the resisting Lancashire ministers cited before Bishop Morton for nonconformity. Morton started Court of High Commission proceedings against them. A group of Lancashire justices of the peace petitioned Morton on the ministers' behalf.
  We have observed (soe farre as we are able to judge, in these our ministers, Integrity of life and conversation, orthodoxall soundnes of doctrine in their teaching, diligence and painfulness in their places; sobriety and peaceablenes in their dispositions free from factiousness. In regard whereof, and also the great good and profit which our Congregations where they remaine have abundantly received from their ministery, we are emboldened eftsoones to intreat &c.
  Morton received the letter at Stockport rectory, to which Tobias Matthew, the Archbishop of York had appointed him alongside the bishopric. He observed in response: "They whom the letter concerneth are the worse to be liked for the good testimony the Gentlemen give of them." It seems from Paget's account that this took place in the presence of himself and other ministers who had been summoned before Morton. In old age, when he had himself become Rector of Stockport, Paget was visited by Henry Newcome and Richard Heyricke, the warden of St Mary's, Manchester and recalled
  That Bishop Moreton, in that very room, (for he was, when Bishop of Chester, parson of Stockport,) did say to him and some others, about non-conformity, that they despised the Common Prayer; but it had converted more than all their preaching could do or ever would do, or to that purpose. Which expression we much wondered at, from so learned a man, and so great a divine as he was.
  Before the court, Paget and his fellow ministers were challenged by Morton to produce arguments against signing with the cross in baptism, a practice condemned by Puritans. Initially they refused, on the grounds that the demand was essentially for self-incrimination. Morton reassured them on this point and Paget spoke eloquently on behalf of the rest, to the surprise of Morton, who confessed he had not expected a learned response and reserved his own arguments for later. He ordered each of the accused ministers to commit three distinct arguments on the subject to paper and to present them to him within a month. Paget attended Morton three times at Chester over a two-wee
caption: Title page of the 1683 reprinted edition of the Elizabethan Book of Homilies, another touchstone of conformity in the 17th century.
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