I suppose Minster had never a more objectionable incumbent than the notorious Richard Culmer, widely known in his time as “Blue Dick,” who was appointed in 1644, in the place of Meric Casaubon, deprived and ejected by the Puritans. “Blue Dick’s” nickname derived from his affecting a blue gown, instead of the then customary black; and the notoriety he really seems to have enjoyed came from the extreme fanatical Puritanism that possessed him. His greatest exploit--or the one best known--was the breaking of the painted windows of Canterbury Cathedral, which he called “rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones.” It did not, apparently, commend him to the people of Minster, who resented his being thrust upon them and hid the key of the church when he came to read himself in.
Simple souls, and unimaginative! What difficulty did that present to one of his methods? None whatever. He simply smashed a window and crawled through the congenial havoc he had made!
The next move was with his new parishioners, who, after the reading-in, hauled him out, and, calling him “thief and robber,” and reproaching him with having broken into the sheepfold instead of entering by the door, whacked him long and heartily, till their sticks broke and their arms grew tired. One almost suspects they did not like him.
The only servant-girl he could get was one of illegitimate birth; but it is difficult to see how an accident of that sort should render a domestic servant less domestically efficient.
Relations continued strained at Minster, and Culmer did his best to ensure that they should remain so, smashing all the windows of the church, and removing the cross that finished off the spire. With his own hands, by moonlight, he reared the ladders by which the workmen were to ascend for the purpose. His flock assembled, with jibe and jeer, to tell him that he should carry the work to a logical conclusion by demolishing the church itself, seeing that it was built in the form of a cross; but demolition on that heroic scale was beyond him, as the continued existence of the ancient church to this day sufficiently proves.
For sixteen long years Richard Culmer remained at Minster, a purge for local pride and a constant source of offence. Then the Restoration relieved the people of his hateful presence, and effected what nothing else could do. Years before he had been offered a yearly pension, equal to the annual value of the living, if he would only go, and let Minster have a parson more acceptable to the place; but he had refused, preferring rather to be an annoyance and a stumbling-block. One of his eccentricities was to demolish part of the parsonage--an act as rabid as that of Goldsmith’s dog, who, “to gain some private ends, went mad and bit the man.”