Under Charles I
Featley was also a chaplain in ordinary to Charles I of England, and was appointed Provost of the declining Chelsea College in 1630. A devotional manual entitled Ancilla Pietatis was published in 1626 and proved very popular; a sixth edition appeared in 1639, translations into French and other languages were made, and it was a special favourite with Charles I in his troubles.
Featley and William Laud, Abbot's successor, were never on good terms. The Laudian Peter Heylyn said that Featley was 'a Calvinist always in his heart,' though he defended the Church of England and episcopacy in the 1640s. He refused to turn the communion table in his church at Lambeth 'altar-wise.' He was a witness against Laud in 1634, when the primate was charged with having made superstitious innovations in Lambeth Chapel. Laud, two years later, ordered many passages reflecting on the Roman Catholics in Featley's Clavis Mystica to be obliterated, before allowing the book to be printed. These passages were reproduced by William Prynne, in his Canterburies Doome.
In 1641 Featley was nominated by the House of Lords as one of the subcommittee 'to settle religion,' which met at the Jerusalem Chamber, Westminster, under the presidency of John Williams, then Dean of Westminster. He wrote animadversions on a Catholic tract called 'A Safegard from Shipwracke to a prudent Catholike, to which he gave the title of 'Vertumnus Romanus,' (1642); and began marginal annotations on St. Paul's Epistles, which were printed in the Bible issued by the Westminster Assembly in 1645. As the First English Civil War broke out, he was harassed and in some danger. After the Battle of Brentford, 13 November 1642, some of the Earl of Essex's troops, who were quartered at Acton, set fire to his barns and stables, broke open the church, pulled down the font, smashed the windows and burnt the communion rails in the street. On 10 February 1643, in the middle of a service, five soldiers rushed into Lambeth Church intending to murder Featley, who had been warned, and kept out of the way. Two parishioners were wounded and died.
He was next brought before the Committee for Plundered Ministers, on articles exhibited against him by three of his Lambeth parishioners, whom he styles 'semi-separatists.' On 16 March 1643 he was called into the exchequer chamber to answer the charges. The committee refused to hear his witnesses, and voted him out of his living on 23 March, four only out of seventeen being present. The order was not reported to the Commons until 11 July, when it was negatived. Earlier in the year he had been offered, says his nephew John Featley, the chair of divinity at Leyden, but declined it because of age. He attended the meetings of Westminster Assembly, of which he was nominated a member in June. He spoke on behalf of episcopacy, and denounced the alienation of church property and the toleration of new sects. He also refused to assent to all of the solemn league and covenant. His speeches, together with 'sixteen reasons for episcopal government,' are printed in Sacra Nemesis; the speeches alone, as Orationes Synodicae, in the sixth edition of his Dippers Dipt. In consequence of a message from King Charles, whose chaplain he was, Featley eventually withdrew from the assembly. Soon afterwards he was detected in a correspondence with Archbishop James Ussher, then with the King at Oxford, and he was imprisoned as a spy, in Lord Petre's house in Aldersgate Street. According to his sentence, his rectories and library only were ordered to be sequestered, but he was despoiled; Richard Baxter among others sympathised.
During his imprisonment Featley returned to controversy. At the request of the parliament he wrote a treatise against the Catholics. While writing it, says his nephew, he was allowed three books at a time from his library. In January 1644 he published as the third section of The Gentle Lash his 'Challenge' against the puritan divines of the day, in which he offered to vindicate the articles, discipline, and liturgy of the Church of England. Another controversy was with a fellow-prisoner, the Baptist minister, Henry Denne. Featley had on 17 October 1643 held fierce argument in Southwark with William Kiffin and three other baptists, the substance of which he embodied in his best-known work entitled The Dippers Dipt Denne, hurt by the tone of Featley's diatribe, offered to dispute the ten arguments with him face to face; and then drew up his Antichrist Unmasked, which appeared by 1 April 1645, when Featley was already a dying man; another reply by Samuel Richardson, entitled Some brief Considerations, followed soon afterwards.
Featley was in bad health before his imprisonment, and after eighteen months' confinement he was permitted out on bail to move to Chelsea College for change of air. There he died of asthma and dropsy, 17 April 1645, and on the 21st was buried in the chancel of Lambeth church. The sermon was preached by Dr. William Leo, an old friend.
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