Contemporary reactions
Edwin's actions roused the High Church party, brought out the pamphleteers, and caused a longer literary controversy.
A young clergyman named Edward Oliver, preaching before Edwin in St. Paul's Cathedral towards the close of his mayoralty (22 October 1698), declaimed against the nonconformist mode of worship. The sermon soon appeared in print and was answered by a pamphlet, of which two editions were published, entitled 'A Rowland for an Oliver, or a Sharp Rebuke for a Saucy Levite.... By a Lover of Unity.' Edwin had also to face the ridicule of the stage and the lampoons of the wits of the day. Two brochures were preserved in the Guildhall Library: 'A Dialogue betwixt Jack and Will concerning the Lord Mayor's going to Meeting-houses, with the Sword carried before him,' London, 1697, and 'The Puritanical Justice, or the Beggars turn'd Thieves,' London, 1698.
William Penkethman, in his comedy of Love without Interest, 1699, made the following allusion: 'If you'll compound for a catch, I'll sing you one of my Lord Mayor's going to Pin-makers Hall to hear a sniveling non-conseparatist divine divide and subdivide into the two and thirty points of the compass.' Jonathan Swift, in his Tale of a Tub, by way of satirising the toleration of dissenters, states that Jack's tatters are coming into fashion both in court and city, and describes Edwin under the name of Jack getting upon a great horse and eating custard. A satiric print illustrating the text is given in the fifth edition of the Tale of a Tub; the scene is Ludgate Hill, showing the gate, with St. Paul's Cathedral in the background. Daniel Defoe wrote a pamphlet bearing the title 'An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment; with a Preface to the Lord Mayor, occasioned by his carrying the Sword to a Conventicle,' London, 1697.
In the longer run, William Nicholls attacked nonconformism in his Apparatus for the Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanae, and was answered by James Peirce (Vindication of the Dissenters, pt. i. p. 276) and by Edmund Calamy (Abridgment, i. 561).
