By the time the Tudors gave way to James Stuart, the Paschall’s habit of ruffling the feathers of the Earl of Essex was not necessarily that frowned upon, as James Ist didn’t much care for the Earl either, but it hardly made them King’s men. James, let us say, had an unconventional court full of pretty boys, and worse, Scotsmen. So, the religiously ambidextrous of Great Baddow’s Gentry would be getting twitchier and twitchier than they had ever been under the uncertainties that Bloody Mary and The Virgin Queen and a Spanish Armada had created, because now they had a Scottish King brought up as a Presbyterian who subscribed to his divine right to do as he damn well pleased.
These were culture wars! In Great Baddow a certain Thomas Hooker briefly set up home and ran a grammar school for some years before 1628. He had lectured in Chelmsford and had taught at Little Baddow. He had also preached in London, but most of his efforts were centred around Chelmsford and the Baddows. He was teaching how even a weak faith is enough for salvation, a teaching that was not exactly the policy of Charles Ist High Anglicanism. He wrote a book on it “The Poor Doubting Christian Drawn to Christ”.
Faith was all and doubt was natural. His main teaching is summed up by the following quote: "The heart of a true Christian is a battleground where faith and doubt are constantly at war, but it is through this struggle that the soul is refined and brought closer to God."

For a zealous protestant he was on the more compassionate side and wrote about the principles of Congregationalism. In short, the local community should choose its own church ministers and not any central authority like the C of E and certainly not the Paschalls who were possibly feeling rather comfortable with Charles. What could possibly go wrong?
When Hooker’s daughter of two months of age died and was buried in Chelmsford, his wife was fined for not receiving communion and refusing to come to church to give thanks to God for her safe delivery after child birth. The Hooker’s saw this as a mere ritual that was little short of popery and given their grief, far from being compassionate. This seems to have set off a series of clashes with the official church that had him banned from teaching and threatened with arrest for blasphemy.

Cuckoos House, Little Baddow
He and another teacher, John Eliot, shared teaching chores, in this house known as Cuckoos House, named after a 14th Century land owner, Walter Cuckkok. Hooker and John Elliot eventually emigrated to Massachusetts where they set about preaching and then led a hundred settlers up the Connecticut River Valley where in 1636 they founded the town of Hartford. He then became one of the founding fathers of Connecticut creating one of the first constitutions. A poem was read out at his funeral with the first verse as follows:
“Paul in the pulpit, Hooker could not reach,
Yet did he Christ in spirit so lively preach,
That living hearers thought he did inherit,
A double portion of Paul’s lively spirit”
Now many would point out that he was doing most of his lecturing in Chelmsford and Little Baddow so Great Baddow cannot really claim him as their own, but for several years Hooker registered Great Baddow as his home. So, for what it is worth, the rather alarming presence of religious fundamentalism in the USA owes something of it to Great Baddow.
Unfortunately for Charles 1st, not everyone of such ilk grabbed a ride on the Mayflower and by 1642 Parliament was recruiting an army to fight the King, and finding a lot of angry protestants very willing to take up arms.
Meanwhile, those not rushing off to New England and staying in Baddow with the Paschalls, liked a bit of football on a Sunday. In fact, James Ist recommended it as a damned fine sport to replace archery, now being replaced by musketry and other gunpowder fuelled interests. After Guy Fawkes, the king was a little nervous about such interests, and thought it far better to kick a ball about than to hone one’s sniping skills. But by 1643, Football was a bit of a political er, football!
In 1643 John White published his book “A Century of Scandalous Malignant Priests” outing a number of football loving vicars who perhaps loved the footballers more than the game. And many an Essex Vicar found themselves sacked by parliament for football, fornication and frequenting Ale-houses. Sandon, Witham and Mersea Island saw a rapid turnover in their Vicars.

So, in 1642 the Pascals, having got over their Papist phase, appointed a straight up Prod as vicar. Christopher Wragg led the good fight for the next twenty years, occasionally it appears to enforce fines on his benefactors for skipping church. He was by all accounts a man of some considerable note, of good abilities and, I quote, “great acceptance!” which basically means that he bent with the wind sufficiently to have lasted twenty years with the Pascalls twitching every time he cursed Popery and probably blamed it for all the witches they were hanging in Chelmsford.
Just when you think Essex a hot bed of puritan zeal, everyone is grumbling about the Roundheads requisitioning their horses. Consequently Parliament’s “Essex Trained Band” mutinied and switched over to King Charle’s Royalists, probably thinking they would at least pay them. They unfortunately ended up besieged in Colchester. Which was not a good move. And their leaders ended up executed.
The gun on the top there is reputedly nick named Humpty Dumpty. It was shot off the top of Colchester’s St Mary’s church and had a great fall and all the king’s horse and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Together Again. I’m told by none other than an ex-mayor of Colchester that the rhyme didn’t apply to the Colchester Siege, despite many claiming otherwise. There is no contemporary evidence of a connection, so maybe it was the Siege of Gloucester. Or the Siege of York. Or none of the above as the Rhyme did not appear until 1797 in Samuel Arnold’s “Juvenile Amusements”. But then he bills it as “traditional” so who knows, but I’ll plump for it being inspired by the siege of Colchester. It’s a better story.

Whoever won the Civil War, if it ever was won, the general dourness of puritan rule meant that it was with some relief when Cromwell died and Charles 2nd took over. You get the sense that Englishmen breathed a sigh of relief even despite Cromwell establishing England as something of a super power. You needed then, as one Baddowvian who emigrated to Essex, Massachusetts, put it, “to only take heed of God, the King, and your own opinion!” He was William Hutchinson and married to Anne Hutchinson, an opinionated preacher who fell foul of local puritans and so moved with her followers to New York in 1643 where her family were killed by an Indian attack. So, what William should have added was that one was still better off keeping one’s opinion to one’s self. Short of Native Americans on the War Path, back in England, keeping schtum was definitely the preferable option especially as Charles 2nd was on a hang drawing and quartering spree revenging the execution of his father.
I am sure the Paschalls cheered because they had had lands confiscated – probably all the lands owned in the Vineyards area. Further to that, Parliamentary forces had requisitioned horses and vittles over the years and left the Paschalls Manor Hall looking very shabby. Charles 2nd’s accession was thus greeted with a great cheer and poor old Christopher Wragg was booted out of the Church of England by the Non-Conformity Act. He considered that he would rather take early retirement than swear he would use the royally approved Common Prayer book. It smacked of popery to him. The French queen smacked of popery as well. The theatres, the newspapers, the return of those pagan traditions like maypoles looked like too much fun and God definitely wanted none of that.
The Paschalls then appointed Charles Adams in his place and Charles Adams rapidly hung The Royal Coat of Arms up in St Mary’s church, where it still hangs today, branding it as high church Anglican despite local puritans whispering that was just another papist plot. Charles Adams managed to stay vicar for 21 years. More than likely because by now, people were losing interest in the church. The era heralded a new and reasonable attitude, or at least a shift of interest from the certainty that the devil is after your immortal soul, to the certainty of the ever-hungry wallet.
Just to hammer home the point: the period of intense religiosity before the Restoration had created a curious moral environment as the goings on at the White Horse Inn suggest. In 1654 there was a murder there right under the nose of Christopher Wragg the puritan vicar!


Money in Civil War-torn England had been rather tight for some years, so when a man books into your Inn with a bag full of six hundred pounds in silver and gold coin, you, the wife, and your two young daughters might be a little tempted to grab some of it.
The story is as follows: Mr Thomas Kidderminster after a life of some ups and downs had spotted that a land deal concerning reclaimed fenlands was about to turn sour and so cashed out in the nick of time. He decided to take a circuitous journey back home to avoid any of the crooks who had tried to dupe him. However, he never made it home and his wife looked for news of his whereabout for ten years.
Eventually she came across a sensational “Weekly News” publication with a story about a body being dug up in the garden of the White Horse Inn, a place she thought her husband must have stayed at.
Mrs Kidderminster immediately went to investigate. She stayed at the White Horse Inn for a terrifying night as she had little trust in Mr Turner, the new Innkeeper, who wanted to keep the whole thing quiet and was not cooperative. She barricaded her door and slept with her maid, but swears that someone was trying to lift the latch in the middle of the night. Mr Turner said people often complained about strange noises in the night. It was just the wind.
Eventually she found someone in Great Baddow who was willing to talk. Ten years before, this person had been hanging out washing in St Mary’s churchyard and chatting with one of the servants from the Inn. She learned that she had been given £20 to keep quiet about blood stains and terrible sounds. And so, one thing leads to another and the story emerges how the previous Innkeeper, Mr Sewel had tried to steal the bag, hit Thomas Kidderminster with something, and his wife and daughter had slit the man’s throat! Then it was a matter of getting rid of the evidence, the blood stains, the clothes, the man’s horse, and his body, all of which seems to have left a trail of potential witnesses, including a servant boy who they whipped to terrify him and then of all things sold him to someone who shipped him off to Barbados.
But the law managed to step in. Mr Sewell, having died of the plague and thus set the sale of the Whitehorse Inn, in motion, consequently could not be prosecuted. Then his wife dies of the plague, leaving the daughters to be prosecuted. Their prosecution brings out the full story but they are let off as the evidence against them is regarded as flimsy. But the man who looked after the horse, a Moses Drayne, seems to have assisted in the disposal of the body, and had taken £60 and the man’s clothes as payment. He had sent the clothes off to be dyed and refitted for him. The dyer remembered all this because he had expressed surprise at how fine the clothes were. Moses was subsequently hanged and Mrs Kidderminster pursued the Son of the Sewells for compensation as he had obviously “inherited” what should have been her money. He denied he was liable for anything as he had nothing to do with the murder.
The Sewells of course had been solid church goers, which is hardly surprising as the church is opposite the White Horse Inn, and all the servants would have also been regulars, on pain of being fined if not because of their personal conviction. There seems to have been something of a conspiracy of silence in the village with a number of people paid to keep that silence. It was a situation ripe for a new beginning where all the nastiness of the past few years when everyone seemed to have gone mad, could be forgotten. And if not forgiven, definitely forgotten!



The times thus changed and theatricality was back in vogue, producing great comedies. The printing presses were getting cranked up, producing such as The London Gazette, a Royalist compilation of royal proclamations, military operations, and market prices. Even though the book of the day was John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”, or maybe because of it, money for Church repairs dried up. Society sort of loosened up. One could now wear any colour you liked, so long as it was black, but black could be very slimming and chic and looked a lot smarter than the weird flouncy foreign clothes worn by the royals at court. We are not quite at the era of the power suit but you can see that it is coming and that it will be those that embrace this new aesthetic who will, literally as it turned out, rule the world. Hurrah!


