On this day … 24 September 1688

The two diarists, Thomas Bellingham and Lawrence Rawstorne, penned another glimpse into life among the gentry in seventeenth-century Preston:

𝐁𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐡𝐚𝐦 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲
Ye 24th. A fayr day. We bowld. Mr. Rishton gave an account of the quaker. His name is Scansfield. He pretends to be a docter – a dangerous, seditious fellow, and not without some suspicion of being a Jesuit. All his relations are R.C. He sayd there was a plott discovered of ye Bpps [Bishops] Keeping confederacy with Holland for raysing disturbances in England. He pretended to have an interest att Court, and to have an interest in electing Burgesses for this corporation. He and Tompson the Regulator were much together. Att night ye Coll. [Rawstorne] treated us att the anchor, where W. B. [William Bellingham] and Mr. Houghton, and D. Langton were very merry.

𝐑𝐚𝐰𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲
24 at Preston, & went to Walton [Hall] came home by Boat & to Dinner was after at Ancor wth Mr Ben Houghton 2 Mr Bellinghams Mr Johnson & Mr Will Patten.

These entries were written just before the invasion of William of Orange (later William III) and the flight of James II. The event known as the Glorious Revolution.

Mr Rishton was Ralph Rishton, who lived in one of the of houses where Crystal House now stands. He was Preston’s postmaster at this time and suspected of acting for the king in opening the letters of suspected supporters of William. Wise people did not trust secrets to the mail at that date, since letter opening was a common practice among postmasters.

Scansfield was John Scansfield, who really was a Quaker and not a Jesuit. He was a thoroughly disreputable individual who had been suspected of ‘tampering with severall women’ by his fellow Quakers while living in London They were concerned that a certain widow should not ‘be ensnared nor hurt by him’. Accordingly, they put him under ‘admonition and reproof’.

A letter from a Quaker in 1687 refers to ‘his being Imployed for ye King’ and expresses worry about ‘his many wiles & strong temptations, & many may be snared & taken therein’. In October of that year, Quaker officials in London drew up a statement concerning Scanfield: they were especially disturbed by his huge debts which he avoided paying. The debts listed amounted to £471 4s 11d and one item suggested he had defrauded a widow by buying houses from her, selling them for £100 but only paying her £10.

Tompson would have been one of the regulators, many of whom were Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists, appointed by James II to ‘regulate’ corporations such as Preston by purging them of those resistant to the king’s reforms. They ‘made contacts with local informants, interviewed … officeholders and potential officeholders, and gathered relevant local political gossip’.

The king’s reforms had included relaxing all the restrictions that prevented Catholics from worshipping freely and in public. He had also replaced Lancashire’s Anglican deputy lieutenants, who effectively ruled the county at that time, with Catholics.

The Anchor, where Rawstorne treated Bellingham and other friends that night, was the Golden Anchor. They refer to it simply as the Anchor, using various spellings such as Anker, a spelling which brings out the fact that the name refers not to a ship’s anchor but to the old imperial measure of 8.5 gallons and to a barrel of that size. So, a yellow barrel outside an inn would stand for the Golden Anchor.

It must have been one of the most important inns in 17th-century Preston given that Bellingham and Rawstorne supped there on 1 August 1688 in the company of the Duke of Somerset and the mayor and corporation of the town. The 1685 plan and survey of the town records Richard Woods as the innkeeper.

At the Anchor that night were: William Bellingham, Thomas Bellingham’s cousin; Benjamin Hoghton, brother of Sir Charles Hoghton, who was then living at Walton Hall in Walton-le-Dale; Richard ‘Dick’ Langton, then living at Broughton Tower; Alexander Johnson, who was related to Thomas Bellingham and who owned a large estate in Bowland and a house in Preston; and William Patten, a lawyer and brother of Thomas Patten, who owned Patten House on Church Street.

When Rawstorne writes that, after visiting Benjamin Hoghton at Walton Hall, he ‘came by boat’, he would have been walking or riding along the bank of the Ribble to take the old ferry that used to be stationed near the present old Penwortham Bridge.