Persecutio Undecima. The Churches Eleventh Persecution, or, A Briefe of the Puritan Persecution of the Protestant Clergy of the Church of England

1648

de Beer 1648 C

[London]

From the English Reformation on, there was a very real fear of Catholic Spain. The Stuart kings did not help. All of them married Catholics; each suspected of favouring their wives’ religion. Anxieties intensified between Catholics and Protestants. And with the variety of splinter groups under the ‘Protestant’ banner, there were the inevitable ructions. John White (1590-1645), Long Parliament MP for Southwark, was in charge of the committee investigating clergy immorality, replacing scandalous and malignant clergy with Puritan ministers. White’s First Century of Scandalous Malignant Priests (1643) earned him the nickname ‘Century White’. Robert Chestlin, a Royalist author and minister, attacked the purging, and in his Persecutio Undecima listed some of those unfortunates who were ‘sequestered, turned out, plundered, imprisoned, molested, abused,…and killed.’