OR1904

‘Mr. Sayer his Instructions’ (endorsed ‘Payne’) Defamatory statement concerning Thomas Whitbie..

c. 1616?

From: 1616 To: 1616

In his sermons on various texts Whitbie has taken the opportunity to abuse his parishoners, claim that St. John the Baptist was better born than Christ because he was the son of a priest, that St. Peter was a ‘malapert and saucie fellow, a meddler with that he had nothing to do,’ and was a nobody compared with St. John ‘for Peter wrote no Gospell’. Whitbie also proclaimed that those who have fairs and markets on holy days were ‘grievous offenders against the Church and King’. The statement alleges that ‘none more forward than himself in the holyday morning’ until ‘he fell a wrangling with his neighbours, for after he would not let bowling on an holyday’, and that Whitbie had he had compared the parishoners to Judas for their verdict on his wife ‘for a famous scold who well deserved it and setting up a cucking stoole for her’, and for not believing ‘the libel he had written against Mr. Payne and redd it openly in the pulpit in the midst of his sermon.’ Whitbie has also maintained that bishops may ex-communicate Kings and ‘when the worthy book called ‘God and the King’ came forth by public authority and commandment to read it in all churches and all schooles to teach their scholars it both in Latin and English, which book we read with all cheerfulness and joye and expected his reading it publicly in church according to the commandment, we found him loth to read it...... it crossed the grain of his former sermon...... that the King should be advanced so high in it, above the reach of all men to chastise him and only lesse than God under whose chastisement the King was, and nobody else’. ?circa 1616

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Payne, William,
Sayer,
Whitbie, Thomas

vicar, CHURCH, PODINGTON, sermons