Broad Street Chapel, Reading (Paperback)

'Packed tight with well researched information.' Civic Society newsletter Winter 1996

Excerpted from Broad Street Chapel, Reading by Geoff Sawers. Copyright © 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
NO CROSS, NO CROWN Less than a year after the seige the Parliamentarians moved off and the King repossessed the town. The war, and the demands of the King in particular, dealt Reading's cloth trade a blow from which it never recovered. Laud was no more popular than the King: in 1633 a Reading peasant named Lodowick Bowyer, for putting about the rumour that Laud was a secret Catholic, was not only fined, branded and imprisoned, but also had his ears nailed to the pillory in the market place. Such brutalities were not infrequent. Now, with its main industry gone, and disasterous harvests throughout the 1640s, these were desperate times for the town.

The King lost the war, and eventually his head. Under the new regime the heirarchical structure of bishops was axed and Laud's rigid censorship of the press soon dissolved. There was a brief period of toleration; freed of strict orthodoxy a wealth of religious factions flowered, though the most radical were soon suppressed. The Reading Baptists had been meeting in secret from about 1640 in a boat house by the Holy Brook, with a plank to be let down over it in case they were discovered. John Bunyan preached to them in 1688; it was on the cold wet ride back to London that he caught the chill from which he died. The Quakers were among the most persecuted of groups, largely because they declined to be secretive. From 1664 - 72 virtually all of them were in prison. Joseph Coale published a number of tracts written in Reading Gaol (Wilde was not the first!), the former friary, now restored as Greyfriars Church. The Quakers suffered endless harassment from Wm. Armourer. Having arresred all adult Quakers in Reading at one point he returned and 'found that the meeting... was being maintained by the children and young maidens... he ordered them to be pulled out, striking one with his staff.' Dowsings followed. When Charles11 issued his 'Pardon for Friends' in 1672 the 75 Quakers released from prison in Reading were more than a seventh of the whole list!