This plan acted admirably for a time, but unfortunately the parson was one day carried away by his eloquence, gesticulated wildly, and dropped the whole box of peas on the head of the unfortunate clerk.  The result was such a strenuous chorus of “Amens,” that the laughter of the congregation could not be restrained, and the peas were abolished and consigned to the limbo of impractical inventions.  Possibly the story may be an invention too.

One of the causes which tended to the unpopularity of the Church was the accession of George IV to the throne of England.  “Church and King” were so closely connected in the mind of the people that the sins of the monarch were visited on the former, and deemed to have brought some discredit on it.  Moreover, the King by his first act placed the loyal members of the Church in some difficulty, and that was the order to expunge the name of the ill-used, if erring, Queen Caroline from the Prayers for the Royal Family in the Book of Common Prayer.

One good clergyman, Dr. Parr, vicar of Hatton, placed an interesting record in his Prayer Book after the required erasure:  “It is my duty as a subject and as an ecclesiastic to read what is prescribed by my Sovereign as head of the Church, but it is not my duty to express my approbation.”  The sympathy of the people was with the injured Queen, and they knew not how much the clergy agreed with them.  During the trial popular excitement ran high.  In a Berkshire village the parish clerk “improved the occasion” by giving out in church “the first, fourth, eleventh, and twelfth verses of the thirty-fifth Psalm” in Tate and Brady’s New Version: 

     “False witnesses with forged complaints
       Against my truth combined,
     And to my charge such things they laid
       As I had ne’er designed.”

These words he sang most lustily.

Cowper mentions a similar application of psalmody to political affairs in his Task: 

     “So in the chapel of old Ely House
     When wandering Charles who meant to be the third,
     Had fled from William, and the news was fresh,
     The simple clerk, but loyal, did announce,
     And eke did rear right merrily, two staves
     Sung to the praise and glory of King George.”

It was not an unusual thing for a parish clerk to select a psalm suited to the occasion when any special excitement gave him an opportunity.  Branston, the satirist, in his Art of Politicks published in 1729, alluded to this misapplication of psalmody occasionally made by parish clerks in the lines: 

     “Not long since parish clerks with saucy airs
     Apply’d King David’s psalms to State affairs.”

In order to avoid this unfortunate habit, a country rector in Devonshire compiled in 1725 “Twenty-six Psalms of Thanksgiving, Praise, Love, and Glory, for the use of a parish church, with the omission of all the imprecatory psalms, lest a parish clerk or any other should be whetting his spleen, or obliging his spite, when he should be entertaining his devotion.”