HIGH PAVEMENT CHAPEL, NOTTINGHAM

CHARLES I raised his standard in Nottingham on 22 AUGUST 1642: the Civil War had begun. Moving to Shrewsbury for strategic purposes the king left the town, and Colonel Thomas Hutchinson came out of hiding, assumed control of the castle and held Nottingham for the Parliamentarians. In 1643 St. Nicholas's parish church was destroyed and until rebuilt in 1682 the parish was united with that of St. Peter's. The two clergymen then in the town, Nicholas Folkingham, vicar of St, Mary's, and Richard Whitchurch, rector of St. Peter's, were sympathetic to the new regime. On the death of Whitchurch John Barret, B.A., who had received ordination from the Wirksworth, classis in 1645, succeeded as rector of St. Peter's. Folkingham's death in 1649 created a vacancy at St. Mary's which was only temporarily filled by the appointment of Jonathan Boole, who became rector of Lambley. In 1651 John Whitlock, M.A., and William Reynolds. M.A ., accepted appointment as vicar and lecturer respectively on condition that the parishioners adopted the full presbyterian discipline. Their adherence to the new ecclesiastical order did not rest at this point and by 1656 they were successful in persuading many of their colleagues and a sufficient number of prominent laymen to erect the Nottingham classis, the minute book being now one of the valuable possessions of High Pavement Chapel.

Before black Bartholomew's Day the Nottingham ministers were already dispossessed. John Barret established himself at Sandiacre, and for a while Whitlock and Reynolds lived at Colwick Hall by permission of Sir John Musters, until eventually they came, after a period in Shirebrook, to take up residence in Mansfield and to participate in the religious fellowship which wonderfully had made that town its centre. Secretly the Nottingham ministers travelled -often by night- to comfort and succour their loyal followers in the town, where the strength of nonconformity was indicated by the size of the two major conventicles disclosed in the Episcopal Returns of 1669, where the Congregationals numbered 200 and the Presby­terians had two meetings of 400 or 500.

The Baptists and Quakers also had their meetings. Thinking events were taking a turn in their favour Whitlock and Reynolds returned to Nottingham in 1687, before toleration was thought of. Their faith was vindicated, and in 1690 land was purchased for the erection of the first High Pavement chapel. John Hawkins was then mayor and was a signatory to the first trust deed.

The Chapel was well-supported and gathered strength. During the eighteenth century so common was it for the mayor to be a member of High Pavement that the minister's vestry was named the 'mayor's parlour'. And in the same century the majority of town councillors and aldermen lay with members of the congregation,

whilst for a period of one hundred and fifty years the town clerks likewise were drawn from High Pavement.

The three ejected ministers who founded the congregation were joined in 1689 by John Whitlock junior. Their labours were over a wide area, as the baptismal registers (which are unbroken from 1690) record. Death claimed Reynolds in 1698, Whitlock in 1708 and Barret in 1713, leaving John Whitlock junior as sole minister, until he was to have the assistance of John Hardy who came in 1714. Hardy was the son of an Anglican clergyman but, on disagreement with his father, he was helped and educated by Dissenters in Liverpool and Edmund Calamy. In Nottingham, Hardy conducted a school which attained a high standard. When John Whitlock died in 1722, Hardy had as colleague Obadiah Hughes, college friend of Philip Doddridge, who himself on two occasions was invited to offer himself as a candidate at High Pavement at the same time as he received pressing invitations to settle at Castlegate Congregational Church, all of which he declined, though admitting an attraction for the Presbyterian congregation because of its more liberal theology. In the late twenties there was a tendency particularly amongst younger nonconformist ministers to conform and Hardy was caught up in this, entering the Church of England in 1727, to become rector of Melton Mowbray. Hardy's defection was a shock to his intimate friends.

Hughes was sole pastor until, in 1729, the grandson of John Whitlock senior, Nathaniel, was appointed as co-pastor. The last entry in the baptismal register by Hughes was in 1735, after which date strangely no information has come to light. It is curious that one so well-known should have disappeared from all record. But to Hughes' name there attaches particular interest in another connection. In 1737 Samuel Eaton, D.D., was appointed to fill the vacancy and serve with Nathaniel Whitlock; whilst at the neighbouring Castlegate Church there had come as assistant to Richard Bateson a Scots Presbyterian in the person of James Sloss, M.A., whose rigid Calvinism soon precipitated a controversy of more than local importance. Joseph Rawson, a communicant at Castlegate, was suspected of heterodox views on the person of Christ and this led to Castlegate's excommunicating him. His attachment to High Pavement involved Eaton and many others in debate and pamphlet argument. After the controversy had continued for three years the church meeting at Castlegate resolved, 28 December, 1739, that it would not receive into fellowship any member of High Pavement congregation 'without giving their experience' unless they had been members before the termination of Hughes's ministry in 1735. The demarcation is significant in determining at what point orthodox nonconformists in the town regarded High Pavement as being definitely in a liberal position.

Eaton was a Cheshire man and received ordination at Knutsford in 1729. He had been at Allostock from 1728, residing at Congleton where he conducted a school. On his coming to Nottingham he married into the family of Alderman Alexander Burden, whose gift of a silver communion cup is part of the Chapel's precious plate.

Nathaniel Whitlock, never a strong man, died in 1749. Edward Williams, having a private income and in no need of a regular stipend, settled in Nottingham, in 1750, where he took occasional supplies at High Pavement and, later, was a regular preacher at Ilkeston, an association which continued almost to the end of his life. He died in 1787. In 1754 Joseph Evans was invited to assist Eaton and he remained until 1758, when he moved to Upper Chapel, Sheffield, where he remained until his death in 1803. The congrega­tion then appointed Isaac Smithson in succession to Evans. It was unfortunate that the younger minister was soon in opposition, which resulted in Eaton withdrawing with his personal supporters to open a chapel in Halifax Place. Until the breach was healed in 1775 the two congregations made their separate appointments. Dr. Eaton died in 1769 and was succeeded by Peter Emans who stayed until 1774, the year of his appointment at Coventry, in which place his ministry was only interrupted by his death which came in 1810.

At High Pavement itself John Milne was appointed to assist Smithson, who died in the same year as Samuel Eaton. In Smithson's place Thomas Bruckshaw was appointed but in 1772 both ministers died. In the interregnum prior to the settlement of John Simpson, Edward Williams conducted services. Simpson was here two years when George Walker, F.R.S., joined him in 1774, and with his coming brought new distinction to the pulpit. Walker was both erudite and a fine preacher. In the field of mathematics he revealed first class ability. And in the realm of politics the then duke of Portland compared him with Cicero. A man of energy and practical mind, Walker was quickly recognised as pre­eminent in the whole area and commanded great respect. Through him the two congregations were re-united in 1775 and without doubt he played no little part in creating the High Pavement schools (now the High Pavement Grammar School at Bestwood) in 1788. One of his last acts before accepting the invitation to the New College in Manchester in 1798 was to instigate the meeting of ministers which, beginning as the Annual Meeting of Presbyterian Ministers, grew later into the North Midland Presbyterian and Unitarian Association. Walker's collection of psalms and hymns continued in use in the congregation from 1788 to 1838.

As assistants to Walker were Nathaniel Philipps, D.D., 1778-85, who later exercised a long ministry at Upper Chapel, Sheffield, from 1805 to 1842. Following Philipps was Nicholas Clayton, LL.D., to whom reference will be found in the story of Boston congregation. Clayton resigned in 1794 to be succeeded by William Walters, who died twelve years later in 1806. The congregation decided at the time of Walker's resignation that it was desirable to continue the tradition of two ministers. In 1799 Robert Kell, who had been educated under Thomas Belsham, settled but soon moved, in 1801, to the Old Meeting (rebuilt in 1885 but destroyed by enemy action in 1940) Birmingham. With the appointment of James Tayler in Kell's place the modern phase of congregational life really commenced, for it was Tayler who declared his Unitarian beliefs and carried his people with him. It was also a time of expansion. The original chapel was either considerably altered or rebuilt in 1805, when new schoolrooms were added which gave the society an opportunity to conduct its own Sunday School. The day-schools also moved into the new premises, having previously occupied unsuitable premises in St. Mary's Gate.

With Walters' death in 1806 a new appointment of an assistant minister had to be sought and John Grundy then settled. Grundy accepted the Cross Street pulpit in 1811, where his doctrinal addresses preached in Nottingham (and published in Manchester) aroused considerable interest. It was on the occasion of the farewell supper provided in Grundy's honour, when he was about to leave for Liverpool in 1824, that George Harris uttered the fateful sentences which were to spark off the law-suit concerning the Lady Hewley Charity.

Following Grundy there were several assistant ministers William Pitt Scargill, Richard Fry (later of Kidderminster), Joseph Hutton, LL.D., who after ministries at Walthamstow, Leeds, and Carter Lane chapel, London, settled at Friar Gate, Derby.

Henry Turner, the son of the renowned William Turner, minister of Hanover Square Chapel, Newcastle upon Tyne, succeeded Hutton in 1817. It was probably the fact that Mrs. Turner was a cousin to James Martineau, then a young engineer, which occasioned his presence amongst the mourners when Henry Turner was struck down suddenly in 1822. This was the moment of change in Martineau's spiritual development and he went away from a graveside only aware that his true vocation would have to be the ministry. Mrs. Turner outlived her husband by seventy-two years, dying in 1894; and in the Memorial Hall at High Pavement are two portraits, one of the young wife, the other as the silver-haired distinguished lady she grew to be.

Benjamin Carpenter who was invited to take Turner's place had been minister at Call Lane chapel, Leeds, where he made the acquain­tance of Joseph Hutton, then at Mill Hill chapel, and on whose recommendation his name was put forward at High Pavement. Carpenter settled in Nottingham in 1823 and, on the death of the senior minister succeeded him as sole pastor in 1831. He married Emily, a daughter of James Tayler.

Though not distin­guished for his oratory, Carpenter's other excellences consolidated the congregation, which was drawing to itself a new generation of support. The older eighteenth century families were giving way to newcomers, whose contribution was to be so prominent a feature of the Chapel's active social and spiritual witness in the years ahead. Carpenter's history of Presbyterian origins in Nottingham, based on the original minutes of the Classis, has remained the principal account since it appeared in print in 1859. The health of the minister caused alarm in 1859-60 and a young man from Man­chester New College, William Blazeby, B.A., faithfully served the congregation until the appointment of Peter William Clayden, who came from Rochdale, Lancashire, in the year of Carpenter's death.

With Clayden there was an awareness of the impact science was making and the need for theological adjustment. To him may be credited several aspects which have firmly fixed themselves in the custom of the Chapel. His experimental journals for the North Midland Association contain the germ of the Chronicle, which his successor Richard Acland Armstrong was to introduce in 1872. Clayden also introduced full liturgical worship, and was the sponsor of the minister's class for preparing young people for membership. But Clayden's real gifts lay in journalism and in 1869 he became editor of the Daily News, combining with this post for a time a ministry at Kentish Town.

The young man who followed Clayden in the pulpit at High Pavement was to show himself one of its outstanding ministers, for under him the congregation grew, whilst its influence extended through the town. The lace industry prospered and with the encouragement of men like Charles Paget, M.P. the resolve to replace the old meeting-house became fact, when in 1876 the present neo-gothic chapel was erected. Armstrong was to have perhaps an even more influential ministry at Hope Street, Liverpool, where he removed in 1884. As the interpreter and populariser of James Martineau's thought Armstrong deserves recognition, and indeed, some of his books are theologically most relevant.

As is almost inevitable the shadow of a man so greatly beloved and respected made it difficult for those who succeeded him in spite of their individual ability, which was not undistinguished. First came James Harwood, B.A., then William Edward Addis, M.A., who later was to be appointed tutor at Manchester College, Oxford, and later to end his days in the Anglican church. Only when Joseph Morgan Lloyd Thomas was appointed in 1900 was a man found who by his own force of mind and personality could create a new sphere for himself. Lloyd Thomas was a solicitor before entering the ministry; but his oratory and his discipline in theology soon marked him for recognition, even if his advocacy of a Free Catholic Faith and socialist politics had not done so. The congregation grew to dimensions it had not known since the time of Armstrong. His going to the Old Meeting, Birmingham, in 1912, was a blow, yet in other ways probably saved the High Pavement people from the tensions which Lloyd Thomas's trenchant views would have imposed. The future of High Pavement was bound up with Unitarianism: the Old Meeting, Birmingham, was taken out of the movement in 1928.

Ministerial Succession:

John Whitlock, M.A. 1662-1708.

William Reynolds, M.A. 1662-1698.

John Barret, B.A. 1662-1713.

John Whitlock junior 1689-1723.

John Hardy 1714-1727.

Nathaniel Whitlock 1729-1739.

Obadiah Hughes 1728-1735.

Samuel Eaton, 0.0.1737-1759.

Joseph Evans 1754-1758.

Isaac Smithson 1758-1769.

John Milne 1759-1772.

Thomas Bmckshaw 1769-1772.

John Simpson 1772-1777.

George Walker, F.R.S. 1774-1798.

Nathaniel Philipps, D. D. 1778-1785.

Nicholas Clayton, LL.D. 1785-1795.

William Walters 1794-1806.

Robert Kell 1799-180 I.

James Tayler 1802-1831.

John Grundy 1806-1811.

William Pitt Scargill 1811.

Richard Fry 1812-1813.

Joseph Hutton, LL.D. 1813-1816.

Henry Turner 1817-1822.

Benjamin Carpenter 1822·1860.

William Blazeby, B.A. 1859-1860.

Peter William Clayden 1860-1868.

Richard Acland Armstrong, B.A. 1869-1884.

James Harwood, B.A. 1884-1892.

William Edward Addis, M.A. 1892­1899.

Joseph Morgan Lloyd Thomas 1900­1912.

John Charles Ballantyne, M. A. 1913-1918.

Simon Jones, B.A. 1918-1934.

James Arnold Williams, B.A., B.D. 1934-1946.

Charles Gordon Bolam, B.A., B.D., M.A. 1946-