Notes: Wandsworth's Presbytery
A Vicar's Execution, and the “Orders of Wandsworth”

Vicar of Wandsworth, hanged at St Thomas Watering Confirmed, independently corroborated three ways

The Victoria County History records it plainly:

“…in 1539, when John Griffith, the vicar, was with his chaplain and servant and a Franciscan friar hanged at St. Thomas Watering, most probably for denying the royal supremacy.”

This is corroborated independently by two sources with no obvious reason to be copying the VCH: the Catholic Encyclopedia's own list of confessors and martyrs—

“Friar Waire, O.S.F., and John Griffith p. (generally known as Griffith Clarke), Vicar of Wandsworth, for supporting the papal legate, Cardinal Pole, drawn and quartered, (8 July) at St. Thomas Waterings.”

—and a modern account of his companion "Venerable Waire," which gives the same date, location, and method: 8 July 1539, hanged, drawn, and quartered, at "St Thomas Waterings in Camberwell (a brook at the second milestone on the Old Kent Road)," the traditional South London execution site where pilgrims heading for Canterbury said their farewells to the city.

One additional biographical detail — a blog identifying Griffith Clarke as chaplain to Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter (executed December 1538), and separately as Rector of Dolton, Devon — comes from a single non-academic source, which itself hedges the claim ("if…"). Treat that specific link as unconfirmed; the core fact of the Wandsworth execution does not depend on it.

The first Presbyterian church order in England Well sourced, but resting on one lineage

Thirty-three years after Griffith's execution, and now on the opposite side of the argument, a group of Puritan ministers set up what's generally described as the first fully Presbyterian church order in England, at Wandsworth. The Victoria County History records it via two contemporary Elizabethan chroniclers:

“…in 1572 the Puritans ‘erected a Presbytery’ at Wandsworth” [Bancroft] — “this first establishment they endorsed by the name of the Orders of Wandsworth” [Heylyn].

The movement's leading figures at the time were John Field and Thomas Wilcox, who that same year wrote the famous Admonition to the Parliament — for which both were promptly sentenced to a year's imprisonment in the Tower of London. It functioned as a presbytery in the proper sense: ministers and lay "elders" governing the congregation collectively, a direct challenge to the Church of England's episcopal structure at a time when organising one at all was genuinely dangerous. One later member is on record by name: Thomas Barbar, a Cambridge-educated preacher at St Mary-le-Bow, whose Wikipedia entry notes "he belonged to the presbyterian church at Wandsworth, formed as early as 1572" and records him still being examined by the Star Chamber in 1591 for continued Presbyterian activity.

On the sourcing: Bancroft and Heylyn are the standard, correct references historians of Elizabethan Puritanism cite for this event — this isn't a weak citation by the VCH's standards. But it means the claim currently rests on one lineage (near-contemporary Elizabethan chroniclers, relayed via the VCH) rather than something independently checked against a modern academic treatment. Patrick Collinson's The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) is the obvious standard scholarly work to check against, but its text wasn't accessible via search — worth chasing down a copy or excerpt before treating this as fully closed.

The “1573” chapel plaque Plausible inference, not a documented link

The old chapel site on the corner carries a plaque reading “Erected 1573, Enlarged 1685” — see the fuller discussion on the companion Huguenots page, where the same plaque is considered as a possible (and probably mistaken) trace of an early French congregation. The "1573" date lines up almost exactly with this 1572 Presbytery, which makes it very likely the plaque is a real, if blurred, folk-memory of this specific congregation rather than an invented date. London Remembers' own scepticism is about whether a purpose-built chapel existed that early (probably not — early Wandsworth Presbyterians likely met in private houses), not about whether the Presbyterian congregation itself existed. This connection between the plaque and the 1572 Presbytery is an inference made here, joining two separately-sourced facts — no single source states it outright.