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Rev Isaac Allen - Part2
Rev. Isaac Allen of St Mary's Prestwich, supported Lord Strange & the Royalist cause
[with reference to "The harassment of Isaac Allen"]
And with thanks to Peter Corbally of P&WHS for the family trees
On Thursday 3 August 1643, Allen told James Wroe of Heaton, one of the churchwardens of Prestwich, that he could not take the Covenant.
A meeting was called at the church on the 27th June 1645, regarding adoption of the Directory. Reports vary that it was heated and that bad words were exchanged, but also that Allen was well behaved and would be safely chosen by the majority of his parishoners.
Richard Ogden and Esther Wilson repeated their claims against Allen, John Scholes recalled that on 24 September 1642, Allen had sent one John Holland to stop the bells from being ‘rung backwards at Prestwich Church’ when Lord Strange was besieging Manchester.
[Read Part1: Isaac Allen - Appointed Rector of Prestwich 1632]
The parliament of 1640 had gone to work abolishing the existing church structures and remodelled it on Puritanism. Church judges were left powerless, prayer books and surplices were torn up; communion tables were relocated and altar rails were burned. Most Puritans found it easy to support the Parliamentarians when the Civil War of 1642 came around, but Isaac still saw the King as the ultimate authority.
This along with Allen's poor relations with what was referred to as a minority of his parishoners, left him open to attack.
Formal mechanisms for the prosecution of Royalist ministers along with parliament’s military success of the first civil war, gave parishioners the opportunity to seek retribution under the auspices of godly reformation.
Wroe family of PrestwichThe Wroe family was a prolific part of the Prestwich and surrounding townships, with no less than 40 burials recorded at St Mary's during he 18th century
The Covenant that Allen refuse to read, was a support agreement between the Parliamentarians and the Scots, based on the adoption of the Scottish system of church government by England.
A week after his refusal, Mr Roe tried again, along with Peter Seddon, to presuade Isaac to take the Covenant, and read it aloud to the congregation, John Schole bore witness to the attempt.
During the subsequent attempted prosecution, four parishioners, Esther Wilson,Elizabeth Gaskell, and two parliamentarian soldiers: Richard Ogden and John Lort, all accused Allen of having failed to instruct his parishioners, through his sermons, which side to support in the Civil War. Isaac did eventually read the Covenant to the congregation, but advised them that he did not agree to it. A further 92 parishoners were claimed to have followed Isaacs stance.
Further accusations were made that Isaac had sent a man and a musket to Salford to assist James Stanley (Lord Strange) after he fled from Manchester in July 1642, and that he had also funded a horse for use in Lord Strange's seige of the town in September that same year.
Lord StrangeLord Strange went on to become the seventh earl of Derby, one his ancestors,the 1st Earl of Derby had been instrumental in the development of St Marys' with his 3 legs of man crest still present on the East side of the church tower. However Lord Strange lost all his lands when the Parliamentarians won the Civil War
However, Thomas Fletcher testified that he and other neighbours had gone to Allen for advice about the conflict, whereupon he had told them that to fight for parliament was ‘absolutely unlawfull’. Allen went on to say that Manchester should not have opposed the earl of Derby,
and that when Fletcher told him ‘that hee had heard the lawe was above the kinge', he [Allen] answered
'noe, the kinge is the lawe’.
Fletcher also stated that Allen had donated £4 to the Royalist cause.
Allen in reply, testified that his accusers were not regular attendees at his Church, and were ‘simple & ignorant persons’. He hoped that the words of so few would not have weight, as
the Parish of Prestwich is a spaciouse & large parish,
& that there are aboue three hundred families therein"
Allen went on to attack his accusers : Esther Wilson; John Scholes;Thomas Fletcher;
Peter Seddon; James Wroe and John Gaskell. Accusing them of not paying their tithes
since the conflict had begun.
In addition he described Richard Ogden, John Lort, Richard Barlow and Thomas Fletcher as
'men of meane capacitye & condicion . . .
who are websters & some of them can not write their owne names,
& therefore could not so well understande
or know what this Respondente meant in some of his speeches’
Of his experiences in Manchester, Allen said that both him and Lord Strange had been invited to the town in a friendly manner.
It is thought that Allen was acquitted in 1643, but two years later he found himslef in the cross hairs again.
In 1645 the presbyterian Directory for Public Worship was approved for use in churches, in place of the Book of Common Prayer. Allen saw no problem continuing with the Book of Common Prayer, and while the churchwardens of the time John Gaskell and Abraham Walworth set about removing the font at St Mary's June 1645. This was a belated implementation of the 1644 parliamentary order that fonts should be removed and ‘utterly defaced’, but also probably meant to pressure Allen to speed up adoption of the Directory. Allen expressed his conflicting view:
‘that there was nothinge in the booke of Commonprayer but what was agreeable to the word of god’
Walworth, Fletcher & Wilson FamiliesThe Walworth and Wilson familes were intermarried, Esther Wilson’s father, Peter Walworth, was the brother of Nathan Walworth, who had left Prestwich for London, and had ultimately become steward to the earl of Pembroke. Nathan had funded the chapel at Ringley (1625), and Thomas Fletcher winessed Esther's will, so there seems to have been a centre of puritanism in Ringley that sought to oust Allen from the Parish
Allen declared that he would seek an election of the Parishners to confirm his approach, and the churchwardens disagreed with such an approach, saying it would divide the congregation. It seems that the local parliamentarians had already lined up a successor to Allen , in the shape of Toby Furness, a preacher who had replaced a royalist in Northenden, a parlimentarian base.
About 1644-45, rebels attacked Deyne Hall Rectory demolishing about 10-14 bays of the Hall. Allen was evicted and imprisoned at Manchester.
James Wroe, the churchwarden in 1643, claimed that Allen had not read to his congregation a declaration of the Irish rebellion having been given a copy by Wroe in December 1643. Further new evidence was more circumstantial, such as John Lort recalled the seditious words of one of Allen’s servants, James Lewis, who boasted that ‘he would kill all the Roundheads’
Peter Seddon also churchwarden in 1643, was summoned before a commission, with Richard Lomax, Richard Barlow, Hester Wilson, and others, to give evidence against Mr. Allen for his Royalist opinions. Oliver Heywood mentions him as "old Mr. Allen, a solid substantial preacher turned out in the war time for not taking the covenant."
In Allen's defence, Thomas Scholes, for example, said that Allen had loaned him a musket with which to
defend the locality from plunder by the earl of Derby’s royalist forces. Five clergy ministers also signed a statement in his defence.
Toby Furness was already being promoted as his successor in the summer of 1645, even
though it would not be until September 1646 that he succeeded Allen as Rector at Prestwich. Although described as 'a godly and orthodox divine'
Allen's replacement was also to have further complaint from his congregation, a Richard Barlow of Pilkington was witness against Allen in 1645 but in 1647 was still at odds with the Rector. Barlow complained to the Presbyterian Assembly, that he and his mother were forbidden by Toby Furness to come to communion "because they were short in their answers at ye eldership, and there was no objection of scandal against them."
Furness was removed, replaced by John Lake who also resisted Pesbyterianism. Allen had been denied a return to Prestwich in 1650, until he made clear his acceptence of the Covenant, and Lake was replaced by Nathaniel Rathband in 1652.
Isaac, spent some time as Rector in Ripponden, then was restored to Prestwich about 1658, returning ‘to the Great Satisfaction of his Parishioners'.
He died February 1660, and was buried in the family vault under the floor of St Mary's, to be with his wife Anna.
One of Isaac's grand daughters married into the Byrom family of Wool Merchants, and noteable supporters of the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, and one of his grandsons was the poet and landowner John Byrom, who lived at Kersal cell.
A further burial in connection with Isaac is recorded at St Mary the Virgin, Prestwich:
Elizabetha Allen - uxor Isaaci Allen, Rector de Prestwich
Elizabeth Ann was Isaac's second wife, buried 7 Apr 1661.
Thanks to Peter Corbally of P&WHS
