Printed and Published at the Dover Express Works. 1916.

TO BE FORMATTED

ANNALS OF DOVER.
SECTION FOUR.
THE HISTORY OF RELIGION.
IX. THE FIRST DISSENTERS' CHAPELS.

When William III. ascended the Throne there were
three bodies of Nonconformists in Dover — the Baptists, who
still worshipped in a part of Captain Tavener's house off
Market Lane ; the Society of Friends, who met in a loft in
Mr. Samuel Walton's carpentry establishment near the bottom
of St. James's Street; and the Presbyterian followers of the
Rev. John Davis, the ejected minister of St. James's Church,
who met in a part of an old malt house in Last Lane.
Prolonged persecution had made these Dissenters timid, and
had so reduced their circumstances that when the day of
comparative religious liberty came they were not prepared
to launch out in chapel building. The private houses that
had sheltered them during the storm had still to serve.

It was Zion Chapel, on the site of the old malt house,
at the junction of Last Lane and Queen Street, that first
came into existence. It looks as though the small congre-
gation of Presbyterians that had gathered round the Rev.
John Davis had occupied the old malt house on suffrance;
and in the year 1703, the year following the death of Mr.
Thomas Papillon, M.P., his son, Philip, who was a
candidate for the representation of Dover, purchased and
leased the old malt house to the Presbyterians, who trans-
formed it, without much structural alteration, into a chapel.
In 1708, when David Papillon succeeded Philip as Member
for Dover, he gave them the chapel and helped to improve it,
but Presbyterians being few in Dover, the congregation
dwindled, and the chapel was closed from 1769 to 1771.
Then some preachers of the Countess of Huntingdon's
Connexion re-opened it, and re-built it, with the exception
of the north wall, in 1782. In 1802 the chapel was handed
over to the Congregationalists, the Rev. W. Mather being
the minister; and in 18 14 the chapel was re-built and
enlarged.

The Baptists were the next body of Nonconformists to
build a chapel. After Captain Tavener's imprisonment in
Dover Castle, he went to London, where he remained until
he could safely return. He then acted as Baptist minister
in Dover, the congregation meeting in his own house, where



THE HISTORY OF RELIGION. 1 95

Messrs. Dickeson's and Co.'s warehouses and counting
houses are, in Market Lane. In 1692, the south-west end
of his house was regularly licensed as a place of religious
worship. Tavener died in 1696, and was buried in the
adjoining ground, which now forms part of St. Martin's
Churchyard, but the congregation still continued to worship
in his house, Richard Cannon (a descendant of Captain
Cannon, who was Deputy Governor of the Castle in the
Commonwealth time, and the second son of John Cannon, of
Cannon Street, sometime Mayor of Dover) succeeding
Tavener as minister. So the meetings were continued in the
private house until 1745, when their first chapel was built
at that part of Market Lane where the central block of the
business premises has since been erected.

The last of the three before mentioned Nonconformist
bodies to build a permanent meeting house was the
Society of Friends. The exact date of its erection is in
doubt, but it was about the year 1797. A meeting of the
Society of Friends was originated in Dover in the year 1655,
and in the early part of 1660, just before the Restoration,
the members purchased a piece of land outside the Town
wall at Eastbrook Gate as a burial place; hence it is
supposed that their first meeting place was thereabouts.
Owing to the persecution which they suffered from the
Presbyterians before the Restoration, and from the Govern-
ment afterwards, for many years they had no certain
abiding place. In the Eighteenth Century their meeting
was held in a loft near the bottom of St. James's
Street, which they vacated about the year 1797, when
their permanent meeting hou.se in Queen Street was
ready. It is curious that the exact date of the building
of the Queen Street Meeting House is left in doubt by
local historians. One records it as 1790; another 1802; and
others 1800. It seems pretty certain, however, that it was
built in the year 1797, or a little earlier. A prominent Dover
Quaker, Richard Low, who di&d on the 20th October, 1797,
made a bequest in his will, as follows: — "Upon trust to
lay out and invest such sum of money in the names of the
said trustees, Richard Baker, George Finch and Thomas
Barton Beck, as will accomplish the purchase of one hundred
pounds capital stock in the funds of 5 per cent, annuities at
the Bank of England, and I direct that the interest and
dividends thereof shall from time to time for ever, as occasion



196 AJMNALS OF DOVER.

may require, be applied to and expended in repairing the
Meeting House belonging to the Society of People called
Quakers in Dover." As it is natural to infer that the
Meeting House was in existence when this bequest for its
repair was made, it may be safely inferred that the Meeting
House was built in 1797, or earlier. At that time the days
of persecution were then lon^! past, and moiit of the members
of the Society called Quakers in Dover were people of good
social position; but this Richard Low was one of Dover's
early passive resisters. He did not like to pay the King's
taxes because they were used fur war purposes, and when
the tax-gatherer called at his boot and shoe shop in Last
Lane, he used to point to the open till, saying, " Take
what thou claimest as the King's dues." So the good
Quaker's conscience and King's demands were satisfied.
The Meeting House in Queen Street was built on a strip of
land between the street and the boundary of St. Martin's
graveyard, a high brick wall screening it from the public
thoroughfare.

Such were the three first meeting houses where the
Dover Nonconformists worshipped.



THE HISTORY OF RELIGION. 1 97