Most of this week’s newsletter is about the 17th century London woodturner and Puritan chronicler Nehemiah Wallington, about whose life a great deal is known thanks to his comprehensive notebooks. An artisan tradesman living in Eastcheap, London, Wallington still found time to write 50 during his lifetime, and eight have survived.
The Featured Woodcut this week concerns Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely, whose avian surname was the source of much ridicule and derision from Puritans who detested his support of Archbishop William Laud (himself accused of crypto-Catholicism) and so pulled few punches when the political tides turned in their favour in the 1640s.
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Nehemiah Wallington: Woodturner, Puritan, Reader
Nehemiah Wallington is one of those utterly fascinating characters of the early modern period who is widely-known among academics and students of London’s Puritan history, but has been virtually forgotten about in popular culture. This can probably be chalked up to the fact that there is no huge force behind his life or personality which would push it to a popular audience (he was not a public figure even during his own lifetime). But he was just so interesting. He features tangentially in an upcoming article, but I thought I’d give a little more detail about his life here.
Nehemiah Wallington was born in London in 1598. He was his parents’ tenth child and would ultimately take up the same trade as his father: woodturning. He was skilled at his craft, and not unsuccessful, but is remembered today for the 50 notebooks he wrote between 1618 and 1654. He wrote them at first with no readership in mind but decided, in around 1630, that they could help “generations to come”. They are nonetheless remarkably personal and intimate when compared with other pieces of life-writing from the time. He was, moreover, surprisingly ordinary by the genre’s usual standards of authorship.
A godly Puritan, Wallington’s journals contain all the expected hallmarks of protestant piety — his regular sessions of prayer, frequent studying of the Bible, and an intense anxiety for the health of his soul which would surely have been applauded by contemporary preachers, but took a toll on his mental health. Even by the standards of Puritanism, Wallington was unusual. He placed his Bible on the table when he hate — describing it as “the food of my soule” — and was so troubled when he missed a session of prayer that he was unable to sleep, so greatly was his “conscience hagging” him. In one extraordinarily devout period he attended 19 sermons in a single week.
Wallington was also an obsessive reader. He quoted extensively from the protestant best-sellers of his day, such as Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601), and for purchasing two works by controversial Puritans William Prynne and Henry Burton was interrogated before the Star Chamber in 1638. He is compelling evidence, if any were really needed, that religious identity could be shaped by the theological discourse which flooded the popular press during the seventeenth century. But it was to newsbooks which he was truly addicted, once lamenting that “finding so many of these littel pamflets of weekly news about my house, I thought they were so many theeves that had stole away my money”.
The darker and more self-destructive side of Puritanism’s emphasis on relentless self-examination can be seen in his multiple attempts at suicide. His identity as a Puritan, and membership of that religious community, was both cause and deterrent in this regard; his religious anxieties clearly exacerbated whatever mental health issues he had, but when considering suicide in his youth, one thing which persuaded him to reject his temptations was the religious implications it would bring: “For thus they would say: Looke upon these puritans: see Master Wallington sonn hath killed himself, and so I should bring a slander upon our religion.”
Wallington speaks of seven instances in his youth when he was tempted by Satan to take his own life, and at least a few of them would be considered today as suicide attempts — at one point attempting to poison himself with toxic Rat’s bane, and in another moment holding a sword to his chest (though he was ultimately dissuaded by another). At times he describes his mental state as he is writing (“I write with teers”) and is open about his inability to control his emotions (“being so full of lust”). He was tormented, too, with nightmares and “fearefull dreams”. The apex of his misery leads him to state that “if their be any hell upon the Earth this troubled minde and tormented contience is it”.
Wallington seems to have been happier as an adult, though one fears that he may have just neglected to be so open in his writing after resolving to publish it. He died in 1658, only a month before Oliver Cromwell’s death, the country having changed beyond all recognition from that of his youth. His notebooks make for fairly unenjoyable reading, insofar as they swing between very austere Puritanism and quite depressing ruminations on unhappiness and suicide. But it is hard to find a set of documents which so thoroughly humanises a person from the past, and for that reason alone his notebooks are invaluable.
Featured Woodcut
Poor Matthew Wren — an influential churchman in his own day (and, yes, uncle to the architect Christopher) but now probably either forgotten about or remembered as a lackey of William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was beheaded in 1645.
Wren, who was Bishop of Ely, escaped the scaffold, notwithstanding a lengthy imprisonment in the Tower of London between 1642 and 1660, but was the subject of harsh criticism in London’s popular press, which the Puritans giddily used to attack their opponents.
Laud’s most prominent supporters — Wren, John Finch, Richard Drake, and Arthur Duck — were mocked with imagery and wordplay. Their avian names only made this more convenient, of course. In 1640, Mr Duck was quacked at by an angry mob of Londoners, who hurled stones at him as he headed by boat to Lambeth Palace (Laud’s residence).
The woodcut above comes from The Wren’s Nest Defil’d (1641) which was authored anonymously, though assuredly by an anti-Laudian Puritan, and was sold by the bookseller John Thomas. This hit piece was a cold-blooded character assassination in which readers were promised Wren would be “anatomiz’d, [and] his Life and Actions dissected and laid open”. Among his crimes was the persecution of “godly preaching ministers” who Wren, as Bishop of Norwich and then Ely, had suspended from their posts.
Wren is the figure on the left of the image, watching in dismay as his “Wrens Nest is defiled” by a Jesuite (i.e. a Catholic) who “rudely in it peepes”. You can see a wren sat atop the chimney on the right and, though harder to discern, the man on the ladder is holding its nest. Beneath the image are the following lines of incendiary verse:
The Wrens Nest is defil’d, for which he weepes,
Whilst that a Jesuite rudely in it peepes,
That ruin’d house doth Norwich signifie.
Whose Doctrine ruin’d, was by fallacy
Hatcht by the Wren; that vild polluted Nest,
Doth specifie: the Bishops unclean brest.
