For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this
time, secular affairs were so deeply and intricately interwoven with
ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on the one question without
considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too,
touched them more personally than any other, since every religious change
scored a record of itself presently within the church that was as
familiar to them as their own cottages.
On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the
Maxwell family that lived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of
the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the
tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he had
remained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system
was sore and inflamed within him. To his simple and obstinate soul it was
an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass from the old to a new
faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant
who had professed a desire to try the new religion.
His wife, a stately lady, a few years younger than himself, did what she
could to keep her lord quiet, and to save him from incurring by his
indiscretion any further penalties beyond the enforced journeys before
the Commission, and the fines inflicted on all who refused to attend
their parish church. So the old man devoted himself to his estates and
the further improvement of the house and gardens, and to the inculcation
of sound religious principles into the minds of his two sons who were
living at home with their parents; and strove to hold his tongue, and his
hand, in public.
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