Patrick Comerford
I was talking in Saint Editha’s Collegiate Church, Tamworth, on Tuesday about the memorial erected in the Comberford Chapel 300 years ago, in 1725, by Joseph Comerford, soi-disant Marquis d’Anglure and Baron of Danganmore, and referred to the openly Jacobite sympathies embedded in its Latin text.
Joseph Comerford seems to have suffered little for his Jacobite views, continuing to live in Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne and the Treaty of Limerick, before purchasing a chateau in Champagne and with it French titles of questionable provenance and authenticity.
The Jacobite sympathies expressed in the memorial may have gone unnoticed at the time because of the Latin wording. Nevertheless, they were bold and risky assertions when we realise that the monument was placed in the Comberford Chapel less than a decade after the public execution for treason of a very prominent Jacobite rebel priest, the Revd William Paul, who had spent some years in Tamworth as a teacher in the Free Grammar School.
The Revd William Paul (1678-1716) was the Vicar of Orton when he became a nonjuror and a Jacobite sympathiser, and he was executed for treason after taking part in the Jacobite rebellion and the Battle of Preston in 1715.
William Paul was born in 1678, the eldest son of John Paul, a grazier who has also been described as the owner of a small estate at Little Ashby or Ashby Parva, near Lutterworth, Leicestershire, and about 25 miles south-east of Tamworth.
Paul’s early education was at a school nearby kept by Thomas Sargreave, the Rector of Leire, Leicestershire. Then, from 1696 to 1698, he was at school in Rugby. From Rugby, he went to Saint John’s College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1698 and was admitted a sizar at the age of 18 on 25 May 1698.
In the Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay describes the atmosphere in Saint John’s College in the late 17th century: ‘Under Charles I we looked with disapprobation on the damned crop-eared Puritans whom Archbishop Laud so rightly stood in the pillory, and, until the great Interregnum, approved of the Laudian embellishments of churches and services, the altar crosses, candles and pictures, the improvements in the chapel of St. John’s Cambridge.’
Paul graduated in Cambridge with the degree BA in 1702 and was ordained deacon by James Gardiner, Bishop of Lincoln, on 20 September 1702. He proceeded MA in 1705 and was ordained priest by Richard Cumberland, Bishop Peterborough, on 23 September 1705.
Shortly after leaving Cambridge, he became a curate at Carlton Curlieu, near Harborough, Leicestershire, and at the same time was chaplain to Sir Geoffrey Palmer (1655-1732) of East Carlton Hall, Northamptonshire.
From there, William Paul went to Tamworth, where he was appointed the ‘usher’ at what was known formally as the Free Grammar School of Elizabeth, Queen of England. Thomas Guy, who was MP for Tamworth at the time, had paid for the refurbishment of Tamworth’s Free Grammar School, then on Lower Gungate, in 1677, and Guy’s Almshouses were built in 1678 opposite the Grammar School.
The usher in a grammar school such as this was usually the second master (subpedagogus sive hipodidasculus), normally a young graduate of Oxford or Cambridge who was well read in Latin and Greek, and he was in charge of the lower form where grammar was the chief subject.
From Tamworth, William Paul moved to Nuneaton, Warwickshire, where he was a curate until he was appointed Vicar of Orton-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire. He was instituted as vicar on 5 May 1709, after taking the oaths to Queen Anne and abjuring the Pretender.
Half a century earlier, during the English Civil War, the Vicar of Orton, the Revd Roger Porter, harboured royalist sympathies, and was ejected and imprisoned, while Parliamentarian soldiers stole his horses.
When the Jacobite rebellion broke out in 1715, the Revd William Paul was still the Rector of Orton. He set out with some other men from the surrounding area s to join the Jacobite forces in Lancashire. On the way north, he was seized by a Major Bradshaw, but he was set at liberty by a Colonel Noel, a justice of the peace.
On his release, Paul managed to join the rebels at Lancaster, and at Preston he persuaded the Jacobite chaplain Robert Patten to permit him to read the prayers. Patten later said he gave this permission unwillingly because Paul was in lay dress, but Paul read prayers three times for the Pretender as King.
Paul left Preston just before it was attacked, and although he was arrested by General Wills, he was discharged. After the rebels were defeated at the Battle of Preston, he returned south to Leicestershire, and from there he went to London, where he as seen wearing coloured clothes, laced hat, full-bottomed wig, and a sword by his side. While he was in Saint James’s Park he accidentally came face-to-face by Thomas Bird, a justice of the peace in Leicestershire. Bird recognised Paul in the park and arrested him on 12 December 1715.
He was first detained in the Duke of Devonshire’s house and was then moved to the house of Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend. There he was questioned, taken to another house where he was held for 14 days, and then moved to Newgate Prison.
When he was brought to trial in Westminster on 31 May 1716, he pleaded not guilty. But when he was brought before the court again on 15 June, he withdrew that plea, and instead entered a pleas of guilty.
When the death sentence was passed, Paul expressed penitence, and wrote letters to King George I, the Lord Chief Justice, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, seeking clemency. He now said he detested and abhorred the rebellion from the bottom of his soul. But when his pleading had no effect and he realised his execution was imminent, he changed his attitude once again.
As he was being taken to the scaffold, Paul was dressed in the robes of an Anglican priest. He declared that he was a true son of the Church, but that he regarded the Church of England at that stage had become schismatic, and that he died in the real nonjuring church, free from rebellion and schism.
Paul also asked forgiveness from everyone he had scandalised by pleading guilty, and of his God and King – the Stuart pretender – for having violated his loyalty ‘by taking most abominable oaths in defence of usurpation’ against his ‘lawful sovereign King James III’. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 13 July 1716.
John Hall of Otterburn (1672-1716), a justice of the peace for Northumberland, was executed on the gallows alongside Paul. Hall had been taken prisoner at Preston and saw himself as a noble figure sacrificed for his rightful king. After their execution, Paul and Hall were portrayed by Jacobite as martyrs.
Paul’s dying speech on the scaffold was once said to have been written by the Nonjuror the Revd Laurence Howell (1664-1720), who later died in Newgate. But by his own admission, the Revd Thomas Deacon (1697-1753) had written the speech. Deacon was still only 20, and had already been ordained deacon and priest in quick succession earlier that year by his stepfather, the Nonjuring Bishop Jeremy Collier (deacon 1 March 1716; priest 19 March 1716).
Thomas Deacon was in trouble after the executions of Paul and Hall, accused of absolving both men on the gallows, and for declaring ‘the act for which they dyed was meritorious.’
He absolutely denied the charge, but 30 years later three of his 12 children, and several members of his congregation, were members of the Jacobite Manchester Regiment in the Jacobite rising of 1745. The oldest child, Thomas Theodorus Deacon, was executed at Kennington in London in 1746. His brother Robert Renatus died in prison and Charles Clement, a schoolchild during the Rising, was eventually exiled to Jamaica where he died in 1749.
The other nonjuring bishops refused to join with the Scottish Episcopalian bishop Archibald Campbell when he decided alone to consecrate Deacon and Robert Laurence as bishops of what became the Orthodox British Church in 1733. Deacon died on 16 February 1753, bring to an end the last tangible link with William Paul, the rebel Jacobite priest and colourful teacher who once lived in Tamworth.
