Note 33 — Chapter IV

It may be mentioned that at his death, in 1637, Jonn Paget was succeeded by his brother Thomas, "a man of much frowardness," and able to create "much unquietness," as Henry Newcome affirms, who had been minister of Blackley, in Manchester parish, but deprived in 1631 by Dr. Bridgman, Bishop of Chester, when, to escape the fines imposed by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, he fled to Holland and joined his brother, whom he eventually succeeded in the pastorate of the English Church. Brook, in his "Lives of the Puritans," says he "most probably spent the remainder of his days there," but this was not so; in 1646 he returned to England, was appointed to the rectory of St. Chad's, Shrewsbury, and remained there until 1656, when he was presented by the Commonwealth party to the rich rectory of Stockport. Thomas Paget's son, Nathan Paget, who practised as a physician in London, was the intimate friend of John Milton, and cousin to the great epic poet's fourth wife, Elizabeth Minshull, and also of Thomas Minshull, the Manchester apothecary and noted Nonconformist, whose name, as well as that of his residence, Chorlton Hall, in Manchester, is still perpetuated in Minshull and Chorlton streets, where he at that time owned considerable property.