Essays on natural history, chiefly ornithology / By Charles Waterton ... ; With an autobiography of the author, and a view of Walton Hall.

  • Waterton, Charles, 1782-1865.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on natural history, chiefly ornithology / By Charles Waterton ... ; With an autobiography of the author, and a view of Walton Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    _ damnable idolaters; and we were unceremoniously ousted out of our tenements: our only crime being a conscientious adherence. to the creed of our an-. cestors, professed by England for nine long centuries before the Reformation. So determined were the new religionists that we should grope our way to heaven along the crooked and gloomy path which they had laid out for us, that they made us pay twenty pounds a month, by way of penalty, for refusing to hear a married parson read prayers in the church of Sandal Magna; which venerable edifice had been stripped of its altar, its crucifix, its chalice, its tabernacle, and all its holy ornaments, not for the love of God, but for the private use and benefit of those who had laid their sacrilegious hands upon them. My ancestors acted wisely. I myself (as I have already told the public, in a printed let- ter,) would rather run the risk of going to hell with St. Edward the Confessor, Venerable Bede, and St. Thomas of Canterbury, than make a dash at heaven in company with Harry VIII., Queen Bess, and Dutch William. Oliver Cromwell broke down our drawbridge ; some of his musket balls remaining in one of the old oaken gates, which are in good repair to this day. Not being able to get in, he carried off every thing in the shape of horses and cattle that his men could lay their hands on. Dutch William enacted doubly severe penal laws against us: during the reign of that sordid foreigner, some little Res was at last made in favour of ' dissenters ; but it was particularly specified, that Kees 5 eae