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through the county. ‘Volunteer troops of gentlemen
and citizens very richly habited and bravely mounted were led by several
eminent persons.’89 In the previous month a ‘declaration
of the gentry of the county who had adhered to the king, and suffered
imprisonment or sequestration during the late troubles,’ had been
forwarded to Charles, thanking Providence for ‘these beginnings of
deliverance,’ and expressing abhorrence of ‘all Revengeful Thoughts
and Actions against any Party or Persons whatsoever.’90 A
different spirit was shown by ‘the miscreant villain ‘in Kent, who,
getting into a pulpit, affronted God with thanks for the death of the
Duke of Gloucester, adding blasphemous desires for the same upon the
rest of the royal stock.91
The more prominent of the Parliamentarians thought it advisable to
retire to the Continent, and the regicides received punishment. Of the
Kentish royalist gentry, many did not live to see the Restoration.
Captain Richard Lovelace, who died in 1658 in direst poverty in a London
back alley, had parted with his ancestral manor and all realizable
property for the king. Of those who survived, the State papers show that
some recovered their property from the parliamentary adherents into
whose hands it had passed, while others spent years in petitioning the
king for a grant of money or a post to help them out of the distress
into which their loyalty had brought them. Official positions in the
hands of notable supporters of the Commonwealth were taken from them to
be given to the loyal. Informations sent repeatedly to the Council of
meetings of seditious and disaffected persons, or of Quakers (now
growing very numerous in Kent, especially in the Weald) or Dissenters,
seem to have been the result less of malice than of genuine nervousness,
as portending’ a great design or open rebellion.’ In March 1662-3
it was said in evidence 92 that Ludlow’s intention had been to ‘fall
upon Kent and kill man, woman and child of the king’s party.’
William
Kingsley wrote from Canterbury, 20 June I663,93 that ‘the liberty
taken by the fanatics frightens the county.’ He described the daily
attendance at conventicles of large bodies of persons, that at Reculver
last week 500 men met and marched out in warlike manner, at Egerton a
large meeting of 800 foot and 200 horse was held, that the same occurred
constantly in Canterbury, and that some people even of the meaner sort
were well horsed, and most significant of all, that Colonel Kenrick was
stirring privately, also Colonel Scott of Lyminge and Colonel Gibbons.
Such notices make the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act
intelligible.
Of the confusion produced in the county by the declaration of war with
the Dutch in 1665, there is abundance of material to furnish a very
complete picture in the pages of the two great diarists of the day, who
were both immediately concerned with Kentish affairs—Pepys by his
admiralty post, and Evelyn through having been entrusted with the
service of providing for the Dutch prisoners who were to be received
into the gaols of Canterbury, Rochester and Maidstone, and elsewhere in
Kent.94 The State papers tell the same tale. On 3 June
1667,
news was received by Governor Titus, of Deal Castle, that the Dutch with
forty sail were making towards the Gunfleet and that a French
89 Hist. MSS. Com. v, App. 205.
90 B.M. Pamphlets, 669, f. 24, (67).
91 Quoted in a letter of Michaelmas Day,
1660, describing the loyal
reception of the Princess Royal of Orange. Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. v, App. 174.
92 Cal. S.P. Dom. 1663-4, p.
92 Ibid. 1663-4, p. 177.
94 Ibid. 1664-5, p.413. |