Page:The History of the Church & Manor of Wigan part 1.djvu/183

suppose, your honour shall gather convenient occasion to make your honourable good liking of their effectual procedings this last assizes in the cause of religion to appear unto them. Wherby, no doubt, they shall receive no small encouragement to continue the same hereafter, to the great comfort of the true professors and faithful preachers. For the which I shall not cease to be thankful to the Lord, with all my brethren of the ministry, by which we shall enjoy a most sound means of thankfulness to your honour.

Concerning my procedings with the commission ecclesiastical I have, according to your honour's direction, wholly possest Mr. Soliciter therewith. And he further required of me and Mr. Goodman a full advertisement of our manifold enormities, which by mutual conference with all my brethren I have readily furnished; and against the next week to attend the bishop and Mr. Solicitor by their appointment. I fear nothing therein but my lord of Derby his discontinuance, lest it breed some inconvenient delays. But your honour's continual presence and ready mind shall work us, I trust in the Lord, a more speedy dispatch.

Thus commending my humble duty to your honour, and your soul and spirit and body to the most comfortable presence of Christ's Spirit in you now and for ever, I humbly take my leave. From Wigan, the 7th day of September, 1587.

Your honour's most bounden in the Lord,

Edward Fleetwoodde, pastor of Wigan."

The new commission of justices of the peace, to which this letter refers, was in addition to a commission ecclesiastical likewise sent down, to be put in execution,^[1] in which Fleetwood seems to have also had a hand. Canon Raines, who quotes from the Cotton MSS.,^[2] says that on the 5th of September (two days earlier than the previous letter) Fleetwood addressed a letter to Lord Burghley "touching the state of Lancashire," in which he complains of the recusants; and, quoting from Baines,^[3] he adds, Fleetwood proposed that a new ecclesiastical commission should be issued, and that many of the lesser clergy and gentry from the

1. Strype's Annals, vol. v. p. 702.
2. Stanley Papers, part 2 (Chetham Tract xxxi.) p. 168; Cotton MSS. "Titus" 2.
3. Baines' Lancashire, vol. ii. p. 264.