seventy years, became the main text of Walker's famous folio of 1714 on
"The Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England in the Grand
Rebellion." According to that book, and to Royalist tradition, it was a
ruthless persecution and spoliation of all the best, the most venerable,
and the most learned of the clergy of England. Fuller, however, writing
at the time, and corroborated by Baxter, represents the facts more
fairly. Not a few of the clergy first ejected, he admits, were really men
of scandalous private character, and were turned out expressly on that
account; others, who were turned out for what was called their "false
doctrine," or obstinate adherence to that Arminian theology and
ceremonial of worship which the nation had condemned, might regard
themselves as simply suffering in their turn what Puritan ministers had
suffered abundantly enough under the rule of Laud; and, if gradually the
sequestration extended itself beyond these two categories of "scandalous
ministers" and "ministers of unsound faith," and swept in among
"malignants" generally, or those whose only fault was that they were
prominent adherents to the King, what was that but one of the harsh
natural vengeances of a civil war? At the beginning of the purgation, at
all events, Parliament professed carefulness and even leniency in its
choice of victims. A fifth of the income of every ejected minister was
reserved to his wife and family; and, in order that the public, and even
the Royalists, might judge of the equity with which Parliament had
proceeded in so odious a business, Mr. White, the chairman of the
committees on clerical delinquency, put forth in print (Nov. 19, 1643)
his "First Century of Scandalous Malignant Priests," or statement of the
cases of one hundred of the sequestered clergy, chiefly in London and the
adjacent counties, with the reasons of their ejection. At the time when
Mr. White (thenceforward known as "Century White") put forth this
pamphlet, the number of the ejected must have already considerably
exceeded one hundred, or perhaps even three hundred; and, as the war went