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ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF ESSEX UNDER THE LONG PARLIAMENT AND COMMONWEALTH By Harold Smith
Antiquaries and genealogists and students of the history of English Nonconformity will all find a good deal of useful mate- rial in Dr. Harold Smith's painstaking Ecclesiastical History of Essex under the Long- Parliament -and Commonwealth. (Cul- chester : Benham, 15s.). The whole subject is, of course, treated broadly in Dr. W. A. Shaw's well-known book, but Dr. Smith's detailed work on this one county—important for its size, wealth and nearness to London—helps the reader to understand what really happened when the Ptesbyterians first, and then the Independents, took control of Church affairs in the intmegnum. The expulsion of hundreds of Nonconforming .incumbents under the Act of Uniformity in 1662 was, to a large extent, the natural if lamentable conse- quence of the very numerous removals of Royalist and _High Church clergy in the preceding fifteen or twenty years. Tolera- tion was not practised in those days by Anglican or Presby- terian; the Independent minority alone showed some sense of its value. Dr. Smith's book confirms the belief that the Presbyterian system which the majority of the Long Parliament wanted to set up, in agreement with the Scots, was as abortive in Essex as almost everywhere else. A scheme was worked out in 1645-6 on paper, but only one minister is known to have been ordained by a Presbyterian " classis," and in 1648 the ' triumph of the Independents with Cromwell and the Army put an end to such plans.
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