Clarkson, Lawrence (c.1615–1667?

A manual labourer and autodidact turned preacher, polemicist and sectary,

Lawrence Clarkson (c.1615–1667?) was the author of nine different printed works

issued at London between 1646 and 1660. Born by his account at Preston,

Lancashire, he may have been apprenticed and was later described as a tailor. Though

his parents conformed to the Church of England’s teachings, Clarkson claimed to

have dissented by refusing to receive communion kneeling at a railed altar. Instead he

took it sitting, administered by sympathetic preachers in the countryside. His youth,

moreover, was marked by puritanical devotions; long walks to hear godly ministers,

keeping the Sabbath, fasting, private prayer and memorizing the Authorized Version

of the Bible. He took the Protestation oath at Preston in January 1642, but with the

outbreak of Civil War went to London. Much of our knowledge of his life comes

from his well-known spiritual autobiography The Lost sheep found (1660), a

problematic text that should not be taken at face value. Evoking the wanderings of

the children of Israel during their journey from Egypt to the promised land of Canaan

and written after he had become a Muggletonian, it uses the seven churches of

Revelation 2-3 as a type, recounting Clarkson’s progress through seven forms of

church fellowship: Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, Seeker, Ranter

and Muggletonian.

Hunting out the ablest preachers active in London and diligently reading both their

works and that of a minister who had fled to New England, Clarkson discovered his

own ‘small gift of preaching’ (Lost Sheep, p. 10) while serving as a soldier under the

command of Captain Paul Hobson. Following his adult baptism in the moat around

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the Tower of London on 6 November 1644, he began evangelizing and baptizing in

Suffolk and Norfolk. This resulted in allegations of sexual misconduct during his trial

at Bury St. Edmunds and imprisonment. On his release he issued a recantation – no

longer extant – entitled The Pilgrimage of Saints (January 1646) and allegedly turned

Seeker, denying the Scriptures to be the word of God and consequently their authority

as a guide to Christian conduct. Clarkson became more notorious still as ‘Captain of

the Rant’ and disrupted the Digger plantation on the Little Heath in Cobham, Surrey.

Gerrard Winstanley had either heard him preach or read Clarkson’s A Single Eye All

Light, no Darkness, an ‘impious and blasphemous’ book subsidised by an army

officer and one of three ‘Ranter’ writings publicly burned by order of the House of

Commons in 1650 (Lost Sheep, p. 26, CJ, vol. 6, p. 474). Clarkson was apprehended

near Whitechapel, detained in custody and examined by a Parliamentary committee

for suppressing licentious and impious practices. He confessed and was sentenced to

one month’s labour in New Bridewell followed by banishment, though the latter part

of this decree was not executed.

Following his release Clarkson took up astrology, medicine and magic, combining

his newly acquired skills in healing and recovering stolen goods with preaching in

Cambridgeshire, Essex and Norfolk. All the same he may have remained

impoverished, for a Lawrence Claxton received poor relief at London in February

1658. About this time he became acquainted with John Reeve, who had declared

himself one of the ‘two witnesses’ of Revelation 11, and Reeve’s writings. After

Reeve’s death and claiming to be the only true Bishop and faithful messenger of Jesus

Christ, he wrote five treatises in quick succession under the name Claxton. One was

an attack on the Quakers that provoked an intemperate response. He also quarrelled

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with Reeve’s cousin and fellow witness of the Spirit Lodowick Muggleton who,

fearing Claxton’s attempt to usurp control of their tiny sect, excommunicated him on

25 December 1660. Muggleton eventually forgave a humbled Claxton, allowing him

back within the fold on condition that he desist writing. According to Muggleton,

after the Great Fire of London Claxton became involved in an ill-advised financial

scheme that lead to his incarceration for debt at Ludgate prison, where he died about a

year later.

Clarkson’s earliest surviving work, Truth Released From Prison, to its Former

Libertie (March 1646) may have derived from a sermon on 1 Kings 18:17. Through

its condemnation of the ancient Israelite King Ahab together with his wicked priests

and courtiers, Clarkson implicitly charged Charles I, the Laudian clergy and the

king’s counsellors with hindering the progress of England’s Reformation and evilly

denying liberty of conscience to God’s saints. Furthermore, drawing on Pauline

notions of divine election and the belief in his calling Clarkson, like several

contemporary pamphleteers, justified unlearned lay preaching by drawing parallels

with the lowly occupations of Christ and his disciples. Hence a carpenter, fishermen

and tent-makers were compared with poor tailors and weavers. Recognizing

Clarkson’s polemical talents one of his hearers paid him £12 for the publication of his

next book, A Generall Charge or, Impeachment of High-Treason (October 1647).

Framed as a legal document, it purported to be an indictment of the enslaved

‘Communality of England’ on fourteen charges of relinquishing their birthright –

popular sovereignty – into the hands of Parliament. The yeomen, farmers, tradesmen

and labourers of the communality, however, were exonerated and responsibility

placed on the nobility and gentry, on vested interests, for the ills that afflicted the

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kingdom: injustice, corruption, failure to pay victorious soldiers their arrears,

religious oppression, heavy taxation, an iniquitous and unreformed legal system, press

censorship and an exploitative clergy maintained by burdensome tithes.

Turning to A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness (c. June 1650), the title was a

conflation of Luke 11:34 and 1 John 1:5, while its contents may have originated in a

sermon on Isaiah 42:16. Here Clarkson maintained that ‘sin hath its conception only

in the imagination’. Indeed, ‘so long as the act was in God’ it was ‘as holy as God’.

Consequently there was no iniquity to behold with ‘purer’ eyes, only that the ‘Devil is

God, Hell is Heaven, Sin Holiness, Damnation Salvation’ (Single Eye, pp. 8, 13–14).

These oxymorons recall Nicholas of Cusa’s English editor’s dictum that knowledge of

God consisted of opposites and contradictions. Significantly, that editor was Giles

Randall, who owned and sold copies of Clarkson’s first book. Though Randall may

have discussed these writings with Clarkson, there is no indication in A Single Eye

that Clarkson had read them. Nor does it appear that he was familiar with the German

mystic Jacob Boehme’s teachings. A more likely source for Clarkson’s doctrines was

the posthumously published sermons of Tobias Crisp, a minister who extolled free

grace, defended libertinism and was considered an Antinomian.

Claxton’s Muggletonian texts – Look about you, For the Devil that you fear is in

you (1659), A Wonder of Wonders (c. 1659 but no longer extant), The Quakers

downfal (1659), A paradisical dialogue betwixt Faith and Reason (1660), and The

Lost sheep found (1660) – were largely concerned with elaborating aspects of the

sect’s principle doctrines: three commissions, two seeds and one corporeal Christ.

Surviving manuscript copies of two of these treatises suggest they were highly

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regarded until, angered by Claxton’s spiritual pride, Muggleton ordered his daughter

burn some of Claxton’s books before his face. Nonetheless, their proselytizing value

was confirmed with the conversion to the faith of Thomas Tomkinson, who would

likewise defend the sect in print. Although Claxton’s published writings fell into

neglect outside Muggletonian circles, copies were recorded in the libraries of

Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach and John Denis, a late eighteenth century London

bookseller. Sir Walter Scott also owned The Lost sheep found, comparing it with

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS:

Davis, J.C. (1986), Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 58–75

Friedman, Jerome (1987), Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: the Ranters and the

English Revolution. Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, pp. 96–121

Hill, Christopher, Reay, Barry and Lamont, William (1983), The World of the

Muggletonians. Temple Smith, London, pp. 162–86

Morton, Arthur (1970), The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English

Revolution. Lawrence & Wishart, London, pp. 115–42