William Morton's Barren Fruit: a Caroline Lecturer's Career and Contacts

The clergy of the Church of England, like every other profession, had its marginal members - its low achievers - eclipsed by the better studied elite who published sermons, ascended the hierarchy, or participated in high-profile scandals or controversies. This paper attends to one so invisible that Alumni Cantabrigienses mixed him up with someone else. Though the son of an archdeacon, and ordained MA of Sidney Sussex, William Morton (c. 1602-1646) secured no benefice, published nothing, and featured in no ecclesiastical court case. Yet his papers - 39 items buried in SP 16/ 540 - reveal the hopes, fears, and setbacks of a godly cleric over a dozen years. Morton’s correspondence addresses his personal and pastoral anxieties, professional aspirations, and hopes for marriage, as he gained part-time employment as a lecturer at Leicester and Newcastle. Obscure to the end, he served briefly in the 1640s as an army chaplain, and was an absentee member of the Westminster Assembly. One of the forgotten minor clergy of early modern England – perhaps an ‘alienated intellectual’ - he struggled to discern God's purpose in (his phrase) 'desperately evil times'.