5 - John Walker and the Memory of the Restoration in Augustan England

Summary

In 1705, Ann Harris was an old woman who possessed an increasingly rare and precious resource: a personal memory of the civil war years. Indeed, it is possible that by the turn of the seventeenth century she was the only person remaining in the parish of Coleorton, Leicestershire, who could recall that tumultuous period. During the 1640s, Harris had been a servant in the household of William Pestell, Coleorton's rector. Six decades later, she claimed to remember very well the abuse her employer had received at the hands of parliamentarian soldiers. Forced by them to ride over sixteen miles to Tamworth on a bareback horse, Pestell had endured several beatings along the way. Additionally, the clergyman's wife was forcibly removed from their home despite being heavily pregnant.

We know about Ann Harris and her purported recollection of the Pestells' mistreatment during the civil war because she was the sole witness cited in a letter that William Hunt, the parish's early eighteenth-century rector posted to another clergyman, John Walker of Exeter. As Hunt and Walker knew, during the ‘grand Rebellion’ all too many Anglican clergy and their families had endured hardship and experienced harm. Soon after the accession of Queen Anne, it had become Walker's special mission to collect memories from people such as Ann Harris, which were to be a crucial source for a major historical work about Anglican clergymen. Those clergy had incomes and homes sequestered by the Long Parliament or under the English Republic.