Person:John Gorsuch (1)

See http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk/data/answers/answers-2002/ans-0183-gorsuch.htm for many details on John Gorsuch such as:

After being sequestered from his livelihood he remained in Walkern/Weston area and evidently made such a nuisance of himself, that Simon Smeath, Vicar of Weston, who succeeded Ward at Walkern in 1648, persuaded Manchester to send Fairclough of London with a body of men to seize and eject him. The Reverend Thomas Tipping, Vicar of Ardeley, noted this about 1740, in a copy of Chauncy's Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire:

"Dr. Gorsuch was smothered in a haymow. Fairclough of Weston, acting Rascall under Manchester, set a body of Rebels to seize Gorsuch from Smeath Vicar of Weston. Gorsuch betook to ye haymow and there lost his life. He left a very good name."

The body of John Gorsuch was returned to a site near Cambridge University were he had received his doctorate 12 years before. According to the records of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was buried at Wilberton, Isle of Ely on 24 May 1648.

His wife Anne Lovelace Gorsuch (sister of the cavalier poet Sir Richard Lovelace) was left with 12 children, the oldest not yet twenty. She left with Robert, Richard and Anne and was later followed by Elizabeth, Charles, and Lovelace in tow of Katherine for the Virginia Colony sometime after John's death (1649-51). Her brother Colonel Francis Lovelace (later governor of New York) was already in Virginia.

He returned to England in 1652 bringing word to Charles II of Virginia's surrender to the Parlimentarians. On June 1652 letters of administration of her estate were issued to her eldest son Daniel, who had remained in England, as she had "deceased in parts beyond the seas."

Another comment: It must be remembered that 1648 was in the middle of the English Civil War and the long held practices of the Church of England followed by the Royalists were opposed by the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell. Gorsuch was the priest at Walkern, Hertfordshire, when the argument between him and his parishioners who backed the Parliamentarians took place.