Past Lives: Cromwell's ally whose legacy still holds sway

At whose instigation comes all this frivolity? At that of one of England's purest of Puritans, that's who. A man who is just now turning in his 300-year-old tomb, not necessarily at the thought of people having a good time - for when in 1681 he persuaded the King to give the Swaledale village the right to host fairs, he would have known that a certain amount of joie de vivre would be devolved to the peasantry.

No, Lord Wharton, an intimate of Oliver Cromwell and a man whose own stern conscience earned him a year in prison, rests less than tranquilly because his stern testament has been diluted.

Let fantasy run amok: there he lies, startled when his own alasses and alackadays are echoed by equally heartfelt woe-crying from a more recently occupied grave nearby. He makes inquiries of his noisy neighbour, a 20th-century educationalist dead these 20 years, then replies: "I know not of these 'A-levels' nor of the surpassing achievements which, curiously, ye lament; still less is mine comprehension of the 'dumbing down' that grieves ye.

"But share mine grief that the goodly number of sovereigns I did invest, in perpetuity, for the benefit of piety and Bible scholarship amongst children, lately purchases not the seven psalms I stipulated - amounting to 111 verses to be recited by a pupil without booke - but a scant handfulle of verses."

Lord Wharton, whose Yorkshire seat was at Healaugh, a couple of miles up the dale from Reeth, died in 1696, leaving money in his will (income from land at Healaugh) that he instructed should be used to continue a practice he had personally carried out for the past six years. This was to buy Bibles for poor children of respectable Nonconformist parents throughout Yorkshire and in three other counties where the Whartons lived; across in Westmorland, the family's Wharton Hall is an ancient ruin near Kirkby Stephen, and there were also homes in Cumberland and Buckinghamshire, where our man is buried at Woburn.

In return, the children would undertake to learn Psalms 1, 15, 25, 37, 101, 113. The Lord Wharton Bible Charity still exists. But today the Bible can be awarded to a child who learns by heart only five verses from anywhere in the Good Book.

That, to be fair, is the minimum requirement. The emphasis today is more on understanding a longer passage from the Bible, says the minister of the Swaledale church which has a direct link with Wharton himself. She is the Rev Gillian Bobbett, of Low Row United Reformed church, who also encourages her Sunday school pupils to learn a psalm; usually the child choses the famous 23rd or, especially appropriate in the beautiful Dales, the 121st with its promise to "lift up mine eyes unto the hills".

In another respect, however, things have been tightened up since "The Good Lord Wharton" (his son was a bad Lord W, an heir who reacted against his upbringing by becoming a notorious, lifelong rake) wrote his will.

My reading of it is that the youngsters were to be given their Bibles first, then present themselves a year later to make their recitation; indeed, how else would an impoverished child have sufficient access to a Bible to enable him or her to rehearse for such a feat of memory? The parent who had kept the young nose to the grindstone was then given a shilling.

Not so today. The Bible is not handed over until the deed is done. And that has been the case within living memory, says Miss Bobbett. A friend of mine who still has the Wharton Bible he received 50 years ago in Middlesbrough recalls that his Sunday school teacher forgave lapses during recitation of the psalms.

A Wharton Bible of 1831 presented to one Isaac Cleasby was on show this month at the traditional Healaugh Tea Festival. The last one to be awarded at Reeth Congregational church, says its deacon, Mr John Little, was some ten years ago to Margaret Squires, now at university. Several children at Gunnerside school received theirs last year.

The will provided for the award of 1,050 Bibles a year, allocated according to the size or importance of each place, and costing up to 2s 6d (12p). The Yorkshire list included 100 for York then Leeds 80, Doncaster 20, Richmond 40, and Northallerton, Bedale, Thirsk and Boroughbridge, ten each. The day after the annual presentations, sermons were to be preached "to prove to the people the truth, usefulness, sufficiency and excellency of the Holy Scriptures", with the preacher to be paid 10s (50p) by the charity.

All this, remember, was for Nonconformists only; the great cause in Lord Wharton's life was support for the dissenters who, on issues such as their determination that local congregations should control their own churches, who broke away from the Church of England in the upheaval that followed the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

(By 1790, the Bible charity had somehow fallen into the hands of the Church of England. Indeed, changes that would have been theological anathema to Wharton were made and for many years the Bibles were distributed only via Anglican clergymen. The resulting tension eventually led to the Charity Commissioners holding an inquiry and they ruled in 1898 that there should be two sets of trustees, one to award Bibles to Nonconformists' children, the other to those of Anglicans. That is still the situation today).

One of the sanctions applied against the "Independents" on behalf of the established church was the Five-Mile Act of 1665 which kept Nonconformism that distance from any parish church. So it was for that reason in 1690 Lord Wharton had Smarber chapel built on the fellside above Low Row, which is more than that distance both from the big parish church at Grinton - which, then as now, serves Reeth's Anglicans and, even higher in Swaledale, the church at Muker.

Smarber was to cater for the spiritual welfare of his lead-miners in that part of upper Swaledale, where the chapel adjoined his shooting lodge at Smarber Hall; he also paid for the services of a minister. Smarber chapel survives only as a roofless ruin, having been succeeded by a Congregational chapel built in Low Row in 1809, but a service is held there every year.

In 1972, the Congregationalists at Low Row were among those who merged with the Presbyterians to form the United Reformed Church of England and Wales. Reeth was among the tiny minority of Congregationals who refused to join the union. Wharton willed that the income from land in Westmorland should support Noncomformist ministers in Swaledale and Low Row chapel still benefits.

LORD Wharton was a leading politician of his time who argued fiercely in Parliament against legislation which penalised religious dissenters and restricted the activities of Nonconformists. Earlier, although a reluctant soldier, he had fought on Cromwell's side in the Civil War and his detractors called him "Saw-Pit" Wharton - after his ignominious hiding place as his defeated regiment fled a battlefield.

One of his sons nearly married a daughter of Cromwell, a prospect that appealed so much to the Lord Protector that he offered a dowry double that which was paid to the suitor she eventually accepted.

Lord Wharton had opposed the execution of Charles I and, some 11 years later, accepted the Restoration. He went to jail in 1677-78 rather than agree that it was right for Parliament not to be dissolved after an illegal adjournment.

It could be said that his failed opposition to James, Duke of York, becoming king in 1685 led indirectly to Reeth's jolifications this weekend. When James II acceded to the throne, Wharton went to Holland to support William of Orange in his successful campaign - the Glorious Revolution - to supplant James. His reward in 1689 was membership of the Privy Council, from which advantageous position he quickly got the new King to grant the capital of upper Swaledale charters for four fairs and a market.

The Friday market has been resumed in recent years. The fairs, however, gradually fell by the wayside. Only one has been held in the past century, a 1951 revival of the late-August fair to honour St Bartholomew was a Festival of Britain event. It is in that spirit that Reeth (population 600) is again indulging itself, this time as a special millennium celebration.