From the Bin: Towers of Trebizond

I just stumbled on this in an old file folder. Doesn't bear a citiation but I am pretty sure it is from Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (link), one of the most satisfyingly plotted novels ever. Or so I remember: at this point I can't recall much except the aftertaste, but what an aftertaste. Anyway:

We belong to an old Anglican family, which suffered under the penal laws of Henry VIII, Mary I, and Oliver Henry VIII we did indeed acquire and domesticate a dissolved abbey in Sussex, but were burned, some of us, for refusing to accept the Six Points; under Mary we were again burned, naturally, for heresy; under Elizabeth we dug ourselves firmly into Anglican life, compelling our Puritan tenants to dance round maypoles and revel at Christmas, and informing the magistrates that Jesuit priests had concealed themselves in the chimney-pieces of our Popish neighbors. 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 under Dr. Beale and in Christ’s under Dr. Cosin (for Cambridge was our university). During the suppression, we privately kept ousted vicars as chaplains and attended secret Anglican services, at which we were interrupted each Christmas Day by the military, who, speaking very spitefullyof Our Lord’s Nativity, dragged us before the Major-Generals. After the Glorious Revolution, we got back our impoverished estates, and, until the Glorious Revolution, there followed palmier days, when we persecuted Papists, conventiclers and Quakers with great impartiality, and, as clerical status rose, began placing our younger sons in fast livings, of which, in 1690, they were deprived as Non-Jurors, and for the next half century or so carried on an independent ecclesiastical existence, very devout, high-flying, schismatic, and eccentrically ordained, directing the devotions and hearing the confessions of pious ladies and gentlemen, and advising them as to the furnishing of the private oratories, conducting services with ritualistic ceremony and schismatic prayer-books, absorbing the teachings of William Law on the sacramental devotional life, and forming part of the stream of High Church piety that has flowed through the centuries down the broad Anglican river, quietly preparing the way for the vociferous Tractarians. These clergymen ancestors of ours were watched with dubious impatience by their relations in the manor houses, who soon discreetly came to terms with the detestable Hanoverians, and did not waste their fortunes and lives chasing after royal pretenders who were not, after all, Anglican.

Fn: For more on the Anglicanism of the novel, go here.

Fn: I think there may be a copying error supra. I have two "Glorious Revolutions" in a row. Looks to me like the first one should be "Restoration." But I don't have the original at hand so I can't check.