T H E OX F O R D H I S T O RY O F P R O T E STA N T

D I S SE N T I N G T R A D I T IO N S ,
VO LUM E I
 T H E OX F O R D H I ST O RY O F
P R O T E S TA N T D I S SE N T I N G T R A D I T IO N S

General Editors:
Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I
The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–c.1689
Edited by John Coffey
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume II
The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1689–c.1828
Edited by Andrew C. Thompson
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III
The Nineteenth Century
Edited by Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume IV
The Twentieth Century: Traditions in a Global Context
Edited by Jehu J. Hanciles
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V
The Twentieth Century: Themes and Variations in a Global Context
Edited by Mark P. Hutchinson
The Oxford History of
Protestant Dissenting
Traditions
Volume I
The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–c.1689

Edited by
J O H N C O F F EY

1
 1
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 Acknowledgements

A substantial work like this is a collaborative project, the product of many

hands. The series was conceived in the minds of Tim Larsen and Mark Noll,
and I am grateful to them for inviting me to edit Volume I. It exemplifies the
biblical maxim that the first shall be last, but with its publication, the series is
now complete. Throughout the long wait, Tim and Mark have provided con-
stant support and expert guidance. Over the past few years, the twenty-three
contributors have displayed a range of qualities, including professionalism,
patience, enthusiasm, and collegiality. I owe special thanks to those who
delivered first and waited longest, and to those who stepped in during the later
stages of the project. At OUP, Tom Perridge and Karen Raith have always been
on hand to offer prompt and wise advice. Our copy-editor Camille Bramall
read the manuscript with great care and attention, and we are also indebted to
the team at SPi Global led by Bharath Krishnamoorthy. I have been editing this
volume while working with N.H. Keeble, Tom Charlton, and Tim Cooper on
the most prolific of all dissenting divines, Richard Baxter. Our major OUP
­edition of Baxter’s memoir, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, has come to completion at
the same time as the Oxford History, and I have benefited enormously from
discussions with Neil, Tom, and Tim. My Leicester research students have also
been valued conversation partners on the history of Dissent. Finally, I am
thankful to (and for) my family, especially Cate, who teaches some of this
­history herself, and knows the things that matter.
John Coffey
Leicester
January 2020
 Contents

List of Contributors ix
Series Introduction by Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll xv

Introduction1
John Coffey

PA RT I . T R A D I T IO N S W I T H I N E N G L A N D
1. Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 41
Polly Ha
2. Presbyterians in the English Revolution 55
Elliot Vernon
3. Presbyterians in the Restoration 73
George Southcombe
4. Congregationalists 88
Tim Cooper
5. Separatists and Baptists 113
Michael A.G. Haykin
6. Early Quakerism and its Origins 139
Ariel Hessayon

PA RT I I . T R A D I T IO N S O U T SI D E E N G L A N D
7. The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in
Dutch Exile, c.1575–1688163
Cory Cotter
8. Scotland 182
R. Scott Spurlock
9. Ireland 204
Crawford Gribben
10. Wales, 1587–1689 224
Lloyd Bowen
viii Contents

11. Dissent in New England 244

Francis J. Bremer
12. Colonial Quakerism 267
Andrew R. Murphy and Adrian Chastain Weimer

PA RT I I I . D I S SE N T A N D T H E WO R L D
13. Dissent in the Parishes 293
W.J. Sheils
14. Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 313
Jacqueline Rose
15. Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 334
Bernard Capp
16. The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity: From Martin
Marprelate to Reliquiæ Baxterianæ  353
N.H. Keeble

PA RT I V. C O N G R E G AT IO N S A N D L I V I N G
17. The Bible and Theology 375
John Coffey
18. Worship and Sacraments 409
Susan Hardman Moore
19. Sermons and Preaching 435
David J. Appleby
20. Women and Gender 454
Rachel Adcock
21. Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 472
Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

Index 495
 List of Contributors

Rachel Adcock is a Lecturer in English at Keele University. Her publications

include Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–80 (2015),
Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing
(2014), and several articles on women and dissenting culture, particularly
women’s textual participation in dissenting networks. She is currently editing
The City Heiress and The Roundheads for The Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Aphra Behn, and researching a new project on dissent, ritual, and memory.
David J. Appleby is a Lecturer in Early Modern British History at the
University of Nottingham. He is author of Black Bartholomew’s Day:
Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity (2007), and has written
widely on preaching, audiences, and Nonconformity. David is a member of
the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Civil War Petitions
project, and (with Andrew Hopper) has recently co-edited Battle-Scarred:
Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (2018).
He is an adviser to the National Civil War Centre, and is currently writing a
history of the Civil Wars for I.B. Tauris’ Short Histories series.
Lloyd Bowen is Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. He has
published widely on politics, religion, and society in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Wales, including The Politics of the Principality: Wales,
c.1603–42 (Cardiff, 2007). He also works on the culture of British royalism
during the civil wars and is a Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project,
‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory During and After the English Civil Wars,
1642–1710’.
Francis J. Bremer is Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University
of Pennsylvania and Editor of the Winthrop Papers for the Massachusetts
Historical Society. He has published sixteen books on puritanism in the
Atlantic World, including John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father
(2003); Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds
(2012); and First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in the Atlantic
World (2012). His most recent work is Lay Empowerment and the Development
of Puritanism (2015). In 2020 Oxford University Press will publish ‘. . . One
Small Candle’: The Story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English
New England.
Bernard Capp is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick,
and an FBA. His publications include England’s Culture Wars. Puritan
Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (2012), The Ties
x List of Contributors

that Bind. Siblings, Family and Society in Early Modern England (2018), and ‘The
Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum
England’, English Historical Review, 129 (2013).
John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of
Leicester. He is the author of monographs on the Scottish Covenanter Samuel
Rutherford and the English Independent John Goodwin, as well as
Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (2000), and
Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther
King Jr. (2014). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008),
and with N.H. Keeble, Tom Charlton, and Tim Cooper has edited Richard
Baxter’s Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, 5 vols (Oxford, 2020).
Tim Cooper is Associate Professor of Church History at the University of
Otago, New Zealand. He has published widely on the Puritans, especially
Richard Baxter and John Owen. He is the author of Fear and Polemic in
Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (2001) and
John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (2011), and he
is one of the editors of the forthcoming critical edition of Richard Baxter’s
Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (Oxford, 2020).
Cory Cotter is currently an independent researcher. His doctoral dissertation
(University of Virginia) focused on ‘Anglo-Dutch Dissent: British Dissenters
in the Netherlands, 1662–1688’ (2011). His publications include ‘Going Dutch:
Beyond Black Bartholomew’s Day’ in N.H. Keeble, ed., Settling the Peace of the
Church (2014). Expanding the scope of his scholarship, he is now writing a
history of English exiles in the early modern Atlantic world.
Michael Davies is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool.
Among his publications is Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the
Works of John Bunyan (2002). He has co-edited with W.R. Owens The Oxford
Handbook of John Bunyan (2018) and, with Anne Dunan-Page and Joel
Halcomb, Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in
Seventeenth-Century England (2019). For Oxford University Press he is
currently preparing a critical edition of The Bunyan Church Book, 1656–1710.
Anne Dunan-Page is Professor of Early Modern British Studies at Aix-
Marseille Université, where she directs the Research Centre on the
Anglophone World. Her publications include Grace Overwhelming: John
Bunyan, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (2006),
The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (2010), and L’Expérience puritaine. Vies
et récits de dissidents, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (2017). She is currently co-editing
the correspondence of Sir Thomas Browne for a new edition of his Complete
Works (forthcoming).
 List of Contributors xi

Crawford Gribben is Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen’s

University Belfast. He is the author of John Owen and English Puritanism:
Experiences of Defeat (2016), God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in
Cromwellian Ireland (2007), and several other books on early modern religious
history, and a co-editor of, among other titles, Cultures of Calvinism in Early
Modern Europe (2019) and Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature (2017). He
also co-edits the Palgrave series ‘Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World’
and the Edinburgh University Press series ‘Scottish Religious Cultures’.
Polly Ha is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia.
She is the author of English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (2011); co-editor, with
Patrick Collinson, of The Reception of European Reformation in Britain (2010);
and chief editor of The Puritans on Independence (2017). She has been a
member of research networks on Freedom and the Construction of Europe,
Toleration in the Modern World, and Alternative Religious Settlements in
Britain and Ireland. She recently completed another critical edition of sources
for Oxford University Press and is currently working on conspiracy and
innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Joel Halcomb is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East
Anglia and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting Experience’
project. His research focuses on religious practice and religious politics in
Britain and Ireland during the British civil wars. He was assistant editor for
The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652 (2012). With
Patrick Little and David Smith, he is co-editing Volume 3 of The Writing and
Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (forthcoming). He is also preparing a monograph
on the Congregational movement during the British civil wars.
Susan Hardman Moore is Professor of Early Modern Religion at the
University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Pilgrims: New World
Settlers and the Call of Home (2007), The Diary of Thomas Larkham, 1647–1669
(2011), and Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England (2013).
Michael A.G. Haykin, FRHistS, is Chair and Professor of Church History at
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and
Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies, which is based at
Southern Seminary and Heritage Theological Seminary, Ontario, Canada. His
areas of research and writing are early Christianity and British Dissent in the
long eighteenth century. He is also the General Editor of a complete and
critical edition of the works of Andrew Fuller (De Gruyter, 2016‒).
Ariel Hessayon is a Reader in the Department of History at Goldsmiths,
University of London. He is the author of ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’. The Prophet
TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (2007) and co-editor/editor of
xii List of Contributors

several collections of essays as well as collections of primary sources. He has

also written extensively on a variety of early modern topics: antiscripturism,
antitrinitarianism, book burning, communism, environmentalism, esotericism,
extra-canonical texts, heresy, crypto-Jews, Judaizing, millenarianism, mysticism,
prophecy, and religious radicalism.
N.H. Keeble is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of
Stirling, Scotland. His academic and research interests lie in English cultural
(and especially literary and religious history) of the early modern period,
1500–1725. His publications include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of
Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002) and a
two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991; with
Geoffrey F. Nuttall). He has edited five collections of original essays, texts by
John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson, Andrew Marvell, and John
Milton, and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (forthcoming; with John
Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Thomas Charlton).
Andrew R. Murphy is Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth
University. He has written extensively on the theory and practice of religious
liberty in England and America, from his first book, Conscience and
Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern
England and America (2001), to his most recent: a biography of William Penn
entitled William Penn: A Life (2018). He is the author of Liberty, Conscience,
and Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (2016); and co-editor of
The Worlds of William Penn (2019).
Jacqueline Rose is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St
Andrews and researches and teaches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
religious, political, and intellectual history. She is author of Godly Kingship in
Restoration England (2011) and edited The Politics of Counsel in England and
Scotland, 1286–1707 (Proceedings of the British Academy, 204, 2016).
W.J. Sheils is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of York and a
former President of the Ecclesiastical History Society. His first book was
on Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558–1610 (1979) and he has
subsequently worked across the denominational spectrum, being the recipient
of a festschrift, N. Lewycky and A. Morton eds, Getting Along? Religious
Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (2012).
George Southcombe is Director of the Sarah Lawrence Programme, Wadham
College, Oxford. He is the author of The Culture of Dissent in Restoration
England: ‘The Wonders of the Lord’ (2019), the editor of English Nonconformist
Poetry (2012), and co-author (with Grant Tapsell) of Restoration Politics,
Religion, and Culture: Britain and Ireland, 1660–1714 (2010). He is also the
 List of Contributors xiii

co-editor (with Almut Suerbaum and Benjamin Thompson) of Polemic:

Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse (2015), and
(with Grant Tapsell) of Revolutionary England, c.1630–c.1660: Essays for Clive
Holmes (2017).
R. Scott Spurlock is Professor of Scottish and Early Modern Christianities at
the University of Glasgow. He is author of Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest
and Religion (2007) and co-editor (with Crawford Gribben) of Puritans and
Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World (2015). Currently he is completing
Reformed Polity and Church–State Relations in the Atlantic World, 1609–1690
for Palgrave Macmillan and is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Theology,
Stellenbosch University.
Elliot Vernon is a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn and the author of a number of
articles on the topics of London, the Levellers, and English Presbyterianism
during the English Revolution. Currently completing a monograph entitled
London Presbyterians and the Politics of Religion, c.1636–1663, he is editor
(with Philip Baker) of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the
Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (2013) and (with Hunter Powell)
Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c.1635–66 (2020).
Adrian Chastain Weimer is Associate Professor of History at Providence
College. Her publications include Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in
Early New England (2014) and articles on colonial Puritan devotional and
political culture, on the Quaker Elizabeth Hooton, and on Huguenots in New
England. She has also contributed to the volumes The Worlds of William Penn
(2018) and Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World (2016).
 Series Introduction
Timothy Larsen and Mark A. Noll

There is something distinctive, if not strange, about how Christianity has been
expressed and embodied in English churches and traditions from the Reformation
era onwards. Things developed differently elsewhere in Europe. Some European
countries such as Spain and Italy remained Roman Catholic. The countries or
regions that became Protestant choose between two exportable and replicable
possibilities for a state church—Lutheran or Reformed. Denmark and Sweden,
for example, both became Lutheran, while the Dutch Republic and Scotland
became Reformed. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the right of
­sovereigns to choose a state church for their territories among those three
options: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. A variety of states adopted a
‘multi-confessional’ policy, allowing different faiths to coexist sideby-side. The
most important alternative expression of Protestantism on the continent was
one that rejected state churches in principle: Anabaptists.
England was powerfully influenced by the continental Reformers, but both
the course and outcome of its Reformation were idiosyncratic. The initial break
with Rome was provoked by Henry VIII’s marital problems; the king rejected
the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith and retained the Latin mass,
but swept away monasteries and shrines, promoted the vernacular Scriptures,
and had himself proclaimed Supreme Head of the Church of England. Each of
his three children (by three different wives) was to pull the church in sharply
different directions. The boy king Edward VI, guided by Archbishop Cranmer
and continental theologians like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli, set it
on a firmly Reformed trajectory, notably through Cranmer’s second Prayer
Book (1552) and the Forty-Two Articles (1553). Mary I reunited England with
Rome, instigating both a Catholic reformation and a repression of Protestants
that resulted in almost three hundred executions. Finally, Elizabeth I restored
the Edwardian settlement (with minor revisions), while sternly opposing moves
for further reformation of the kind favoured by some of her bishops who had
spent the 1550s in exile in Reformed cities on the continent. In contrast to many
Reformed churches abroad, the Church of England retained an episcopal hier-
archy, choral worship in cathedrals, and clerical vestments like the surplice.
The ‘half reformed’ character of the Elizabethan church was a source of deep
frustration to earnest Protestants who wanted to complete England’s reformation,
to ‘purify’ the church of ‘popish’ survivals. From the mid-1560s, these reform-
ers were called ‘Puritans’ (though the term was also applied indiscriminately to
xvi Series Introduction

many godly conformists). They represented a spectrum of opinion. Some were

simply ‘nonconformists’, objecting to the enforcement of certain ceremonies,
like the sign of the cross, kneeling at communion, or the wearing of the surplice.
Others looked for ‘root and branch’ reform of the church’s government. (All
Dissenting movements would remain expert at employing biblical images in
their public appeals, as with ‘root and branch,’ taken in this sense from the Old
Testament’s book of Ezekiel, chapter 17.) They wished to create a Reformed,
Presbyterian state church, that is, to make over the Church of England into the
pattern that ultimately prevailed north of the border as the Church of Scotland.
Still others gave up on the established church altogether, establishing illegal
separatist churches. Eventually, England would see a proliferation of home-grown
sects: Congregationalists (or Independents), General Baptists, Particular Baptists,
Quakers (or Friends), Fifth Monarchists, Ranters, Muggletonians, and more.
These reforming movements flourished during the tumultuous midcentury
years of civil war and interregnum, when the towering figure of Oliver Cromwell
presided over a kingless state and acted as protector of the godly. But when the
throne and the established church were ‘restored’ in 1660, reforming move-
ments of all sorts came under tremendous pressure. The term ‘Dissent’ came to
serve as the generic designation for those who did not agree that the established
Church of England should enjoy a monopoly over English religious life. Some
of the sects—such as the Ranters, Muggletonians, and Fifth Monarchists—soon
faded away. Others, especially Independents/Congregationalists, Baptists, and
Quakers survived. Crucially, they were now joined outside the established
church by the Presbyterians, ejected from the livings in 1660–62. Although
Presbyterians continued to attend parish worship and work for comprehension
within the national church, they were (as Richard Baxter noted) forced into a
separating shape, meeting in illegal conventicles. In 1689, Parliament confirmed
the separation between Church and ‘Dissent’ by rejecting a comprehension bill
and passing the so-called Act of Toleration. The denominations of what became
known as ‘Old Dissent’—Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and
Quakers—now enjoyed legally-protected freedom of worship, even as their
members remained second-class citizens, excluded from public office unless
they received Anglican communion.
Over the course of the seventeenth century, all of these Dissenting move-
ments had established a presence in the British colonies of North America.
(They became ‘British’ and not just ‘English’ colonies in 1707, after the Union of
England and Scotland that created ‘Great Britain’.) In the New World began
what has become a continuous history of English Dissent adapting to condi-
tions outside of England. In this instance, Congregationalists in New England
set up a system that looked an awful lot like a church establishment, even as
they continued to dissent from the Anglicanism that in theory prevailed wher-
ever British settlement extended.
 Series Introduction xvii

Complexity in the history of Dissent only expanded in the eighteenth century

with the emergence of Methodism. This reforming movement within the Church
of England became ‘New Dissent’ at the end of the century when it separated
from Anglican organizational jurisdiction. In America, that separation took
place earlier than in England when the American War of Independence ruled
out any kind of official authority from the established church across the sea in
the new nation.
In the great expansion of the British Empire during the late eighteenth and
throughout the nineteenth century, Anglophone Dissent moved out even
­farther and evolved even further. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa, and other imperial outposts in Africa and Asia usually enjoyed the
­service of Anglican missionaries and local supporters. But everywhere that
Empire went so also went Dissenting Protestants. The creation of the Baptist
Missionary Society (1792) and the London Missionary Society (1795) (which was
dominated by Congregationalists) inaugurated a dramatic surge of overseas
missions. Nowhere in the Empire did the Church of England enjoy the same
range of privileges that it retained in the mother country.
Meanwhile, back in England, still more new movements added to the
Protestant panoply linked to Dissent. Liberalizing trends in both Anglican
and Presbyterian theology in the later eighteenth century saw the emergence
of the Unitarians as a separate denomination. Conservative trends produced
the (so-called Plymouth) Brethren who replicated the earlier Dissenting
­pattern by originating as a protest against the nineteenth-century Church of
England—as well as lamenting the divisions in Christianity and longing to
restore the purity of the New Testament church. The Salvation Army (with
roots in the Methodist and Holiness movement) was established in response
to the challenges of urban mission.
Even further complexity appeared during the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries when Pentecostal movements arose, usually with an obvious Methodist
lineage, especially as developed by the Holiness tradition within Methodism,
but also sometimes with a lineage traceable to representatives of ‘Old Dissent’
as well. Historically considered, Pentecostals are grandchildren of Dissent via a
Methodist-Holiness parentage.
Whether ‘New’ or ‘Old’—or descended from ‘New’ or ‘Old’—all of these
traditions have now become global. Some are even dominant in various coun-
tries or regions in their parts of the globe. To take United States history as an
example, in the eighteenth century Congregationalism dominated Massachusetts.
By the early nineteenth century, Methodism was the largest Christian tradition
in America. Today, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States is
the Southern Baptist Convention. Or with Canada as another example, Anglicans
remained stronger than did Episcopalians in the United States, but Methodists
and Presbyterians often took on establishment-like characteristics in regions
xviii Series Introduction

where their numbers equalled or exceeded the Anglicans. In different ways and
through different patterns of descent, these North American traditions trace
their roots to English Dissent. The same is true in parallel fashion and with
different results in many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere,
where Pentecostalism is usually the dominant style of Protestantism.

THE FIVE VOLUMES OF THIS SERIES

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions is governed by

a motif of migration (‘out-of-England’, as it were), but in two senses of the term.
It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters
distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the
Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but
then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England—and also traces
newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from
earlier forms of Dissent. Second, it does the same for the doctrines, church
practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and
characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier English
Dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent
ecclesiastical organizations. Perhaps the most notable occasion when a major
world figure pointed to such an influence came in 1775 when Edmund Burke
addressed the British Parliament in the early days of the American revolt.
While opposing independence for the colonies, Burke yet called for sensitivity
because, he asserted, the colonists were ‘protestants; and of that kind, which is
the most adverse to all submission of mind and opinion’. Then Burke went on
to say that ‘this averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like
absolute government’ was a basic reality of colonial history. Other claims have
been almost as strong in associating Dissenters with the practice of free trade,
the mediating structures of non-state organization, creativity in scientific
research, and more.
This series was commissioned to complement the five-volume Oxford
History of Anglicanism. In the Introduction to that series, the General Editor
Rowan Strong engaged in considerable handwringing about the difficulties of
making coherent, defensible editorial decisions, beginning with the question of
how fitting the term ‘Anglicanism’ was for the series title. If such angst is needed
for Anglicanism, those whose minds crave tidiness should abandon all hope
before entering here. Beginning again with just the title, ‘Dissenting’ is a term
that obviously varies widely in terms of its connotations and applicability,
depending on the particular time, place, and tradition. In some cases, it has
been used as a self-identifier. In many other cases, groups whom historians
might legitimately regard as descendants of Dissent find it irrelevant, incoher-
ent, or just plain wrong. An example mentioned earlier suggests some of the
 Series Introduction xix

complexity. In colonial Massachusetts, ‘Dissenting’ Congregationalists in effect

set up an established church supported by taxes and exercising substantial
control over public life. In that circumstance, ‘Dissent’ obviously meant some-
thing different than it did for their fellow Independents left behind in England.
Nevertheless, Massachusetts Congregationalism is still one of the traditions
out-of-England that we have decided to track wherever it went—even into the
courthouse and the capitol building. Much later and far, far away, Methodism
in the Pacific Island of Fiji would also take on some establishmentarian fea-
tures, which again suggests that ‘Dissent’ points to a history or affinities shared
to a greater or lesser extent, but not to an unchanging essence. Indeed, because
Dissent is defined in relation to Establishment, it is a relative term.
Another particularly anomalous case is Presbyterianism, which has been a
Dissenting tradition in England but a state church in Scotland and elsewhere.
When one examines it in other parts of the world, a sophisticated analysis is
required—for example, in the United States and Canada (where Presbyterianism
was once a force to be reckoned with) and in South Korea (where it still is). In
these countries one encounters a tradition originally fostered by missionaries
and emigrants with both Dissenting and establishmentarian roots. By includ-
ing Presbyterians in these volumes, we communicate an intention to consider
‘Dissent’ broadly construed.
Other terms might have been chosen for the title, such as ‘Nonconformist’ or
‘Free Churches’. Yet they suffer from the same difficulty—that all groups that
might in historical view be linked under any one term will include many who
never used the term for themselves or who do not acknowledge the historical
connection. Yet ‘Dissenting Studies’ is a recognized and flourishing field of
academic studies, focussed on the history of those Protestant movements that
coalesced as Dissenting denominations in the seventeenth century and on the
New Dissent that arose outside the established church in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
Still, the problem of fitting terminology to historical reality remains. The
further in geographical space that one moves from England and the nearer in
time that one comes to the present, the less relevant any of the possible terms
becomes for the individuals and Protestant traditions under consideration.
Protestants in China or India, for example, generally do not think of their faith
as ‘Dissenting’ at all—at least not in any way that directly relates to how that
word functioned for Unitarians in nineteenth-century England. Even in the West,
a strong sense of denominational identity or heritage has been waning due to
increasing individualism and hybridization. Such difficulties are inevitable for
a genealogy where trunks and branches outline a common history of protest
against church establishment, but very little else besides broadly Protestant
convictions.
The five volumes in this series, as well as the individual chapters treating
different regions, periods, and emphases, admittedly brave intellectual anomalies
xx Series Introduction

and historical inconsistencies. One defence is simply to plead that untidiness in

the volumes reflects reality itself rather than editorial confusion. Church and
Dissent, Anglicanism and Nonconformity, were defined by their relationship,
and the wall between them was a porous one; while it can be helpful to think it
terms of tightly defined ecclesiastical blocs, the reality of lived religion often
defied neat lines of demarcation. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Anglicans read Puritan works, while many Dissenters imbibed the works of
great Anglicans. Besides, an editorial plan that put a premium on tidiness would
impoverish readers by leaving out exciting and important events, traditions,
personalities, and organizations that do fall, however remotely or obscurely,
into the broader history of English Protestant Dissent.
Which brings us to the second, more significant justification for this fivev-
olume series. On offer is nothing less than a feast. Not the least of Britain’s
contributions to world history has been its multifaceted impact on religious
life, thought, and practice. In particular, this one corner of Christendom has
proven unusually fertile for the germination of new forms of Christianity.
Those forms have enriched British history, while doing even more to enrich all
of world history in the last four centuries. By concentrating only on the history
of Dissent, these volumes nonetheless illuminate the extraordinary contribu-
tions of some of the greatest preachers, missionaries, theologians, pastors,
organizations, writers, self-sacrificing altruists and (yes, also) some of the most
scandalous, self-defeating, and egotistical episodes in the entire history of
Christianity. Taken in its broadest dimensions, this series opens the story of
large themes and new ways of thinking that have profoundly shaped our
globe—on the relationships between church and state, on the successes and
failures of voluntary organization, on faith and social action, on toleration and
religious and civil freedom, on innovations in worship, hymnody, literature,
the arts, and much else. It is a story of traditions that have significantly influ-
enced Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands,
and even the Middle East (for example, the founding of what is now the
American University of Beirut). Especially the two volumes on the twentieth
century offer treatments of vibrant, growing forms of Christianity in various
parts of the world that often have not yet received the scholarly attention they
deserve. All five volumes present the work of accomplished scholars with
widely recognized expertise in their chosen subjects. In specifically thematic
chapters, authors address issues of great current interest, including gender,
preaching, missions, social action, politics, literary culture, theology, the Bible,
worship, congregational life, ministerial training, new technologies, and much
more. The geographical, chronological, and ecclesiastical reach is broad: from
the Elizabethan era to the dawn of the twentieth-first century, from
Congregationalists to Pentecostals, from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from China
to Chile, from Irvingite apostles in nineteenth-century London to African
apostles in twenty-first-century Nigeria. Just as expansive is the roster of
 Series Introduction xxi

Dissenters or descendants of Dissent: from John Bunyan to Martin Luther

King, Jr, from prisoner-reformer Elizabeth Fry to mega-mega-church pastor
Yonggi Cho, from princes of the pulpit to educational innovators, from poets to
politicians, from liturgical reformers to social reformers. However imprecise
the category of ‘Dissent’ must remain, the volumes in this series are guaranteed
to delight readers by the wealth of their insight into British history in the
­seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by what they reveal about the surprising
reach of Dissent around the world in later periods, and by the extraordinary
range of positive effects and influences flowing from a family of Christian
believers that began with a negative protest.
 Introduction*
John Coffey

Four major Dissenting traditions emerged out of the religious and political crises
of seventeenth-century England: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists,
and Quakers. By 1715, it has been estimated that there were approximately
180,000 English Presbyterians (comprising more than half of all Dissenters),
60,000 Congregationalists, 60,000 Baptists (with two-thirds being Particular
or Calvinistic Baptists, and the other third General or Arminian Baptists), and
some 40,000 Quakers. Gathered in almost 2,000 congregations, they comprised
at least 6 per cent of the English population, though this may underestimate their
strength.1 In Wales, their percentage share of the population was comparable,
if a little lower, while in London, Bristol and other cities, they loomed larger.
Ireland was anomalous, with a Catholic majority and an Anglican state church;
in Ulster, Presbyterian Dissenters were the largest Protestant community, and
in some areas the largest religious group. In Scotland, after 1689, Presbyterians
formed the Established Church, and Episcopalians were the dissenters. More
dramatically still, Protestant Dissent had been exported to England’s New
World settlements: New England, the Middle Colonies, Virginia, the Carolinas,
and the Caribbean. Congregationalists dominated New England, while in New
Jersey and Pennsylvania the most radical of Dissenting denominations, the
Quakers, found themselves in power.
The contrast with a century earlier is stark. During the reign of Elizabeth I
(r. 1558–1603), England had no permanent settlements in America, and little
Protestant dissent from the Established Church. By 1600, the internal Presbyterian
challenge to the episcopal polity of the Church of England appeared to have

* For comments on this Introduction, I am grateful to Neil Keeble, Tim Larsen, Mark Noll, and
Rosemary Moore. At an earlier stage, Joel Halcomb and Bob Owens provided valuable advice.
1 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978),
pp. 269–70. Geoffrey Holmes estimates that by 1715 there were at least 400,000 Dissenters in
England and Wales, comprising around 7 per cent of the population: The Making of a Great Power:
Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722 (London, 1993), pp. 353, 459–61.

John Coffey, Introduction In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0001
2 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

been foiled. Separatists had been brutally suppressed in the 1590s, and while some
breakaway congregations persisted in London, East Anglia, and the Midlands,
they were tiny, scattered, and exceedingly vulnerable. As yet, there were no
Congregational ‘gathered churches’, no English Baptists, and no Quakers. With
the exception of a few thousand Separatists and perhaps 40,000 Catholic
recusants, the English (and Welsh) worshipped in the 9,000 or so parishes of
the national Church. Indeed, compared to the Dutch republic and other
European multiconfessional polities, the religious map of England was remarkably
homogeneous. As in Lutheran Sweden, Church and commonwealth were seen
as coterminous; Richard Hooker could write that there was not ‘any man a
member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England’.2
England’s century of revolution shook that assumption. The institutional unity
of English Protestantism was shattered. In 1600, barely a few thousand
Protestants were gathered in isolated congregations beyond the parish churches;
by 1700, the Dissenters boasted around 2,000 congregations in England and
Wales, many with hundreds of members. Despite determined efforts to force or
negotiate reunification, England had become a religiously fragmented society,
divided between different denominations, and between ‘Church’ and ‘Dissent’.3
This Oxford History examines the emergence of Protestant Dissenting tra­di­
tions in the post-Reformation era, between the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity
in 1559 and the so-called Act of Toleration in 1689 that legalized, within strictly
defined limits, the new reality of denominational pluralism. The volume traces
the process whereby a national Church that had accommodated ‘the hotter
sort of Protestant’, ended up driving most of these ‘Puritans’ into dissent. As
Jacqueline Rose notes in her chapter, ‘Dissent was a legal category–those who
refused to conform to the Acts of Uniformity’.4 For this reason, ‘Dissent’ and
‘Nonconformity’ can be used as practically synonymous terms. Alternatively,
some historians use ‘nonconformity’ to indicate a phenomenon occurring
within established churches, whereas ‘dissent’ formed outside or beyond it. In
Crawford Gribben’s formulation, the national Churches of England, Scotland,
and Ireland ‘prevented dissent by allowing space for nonconformity’.5 In due
course, however, internal nonconformity was transformed into external dissent,
or we might say that ‘dissent’ was transformed into ‘Dissent’, ‘nonconformity’
into ‘Nonconformity’.6

2 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. A.S. McGrade (Cambridge, 1989),
p. 130.
3 See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588–1689 (Harlow, 2000).
4 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Dissent and the State’, Chapter 14 in this volume.
5 Crawford Gribben, ‘Ireland’, Chapter 9 in this volume.
6 Richard Baxter distinguished between ‘the old Non-conformists’ prior to 1640, who had
remained Church of England ministers, and Restoration Nonconformists, who had been ejected
from their ministry because of ‘the new Conformity’ (see Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (1696), pt II, p. 430;
pt III, pp. 130, 137).
 Introduction3

This introductory chapter sets the scene. It begins with a thumbnail sketch of
the emergence of Protestant Dissent in post-Reformation England. It then
introduces the tradition of denominational historiography, before examining
how this ‘vertical’ approach to Dissenting history has been challenged by his­
tor­ians who focus on the ‘horizontal’—the politics of religion in a specific era
or moment. Early modernists have charged traditional denominational his­tor­
ians with writing Whiggish history: teleological, anachronistic, martyrological,
heroic, and partisan. They have proposed instead to write a broader history of
the dissenting tradition. In doing so they have transformed the field, forcing a
fundamental rethink of the relationship between Anglicanism and Puritanism,
Church and Dissent. Increasingly, historians have concluded that Dissent was
not an inevitable by-product of Puritanism, but the unintended outcome of a
protracted struggle to define and control the Church of England. The Dissenters
were the losers in that contest, though they would soon learn to celebrate their
outsider status and embrace it as an essential part of their identity. This volume
stresses the contingency of Dissent, as well as the fluidity of seventeenth-century
denominational identities. At the same time, the contributors recognize that
the Stuart era witnessed the formation of Dissenting denominations, as reli-
gious communities went to great lengths to sharpen the boundaries of group
identity. The chapter ends by reviewing some recent trends in the scholarship,
and by explaining how this volume (like the series as a whole) traces the diffu-
sion and migration of Dissent beyond England, Scotland and Ireland, to the
Netherlands and the British Atlantic world.

THE RISE OF DISSENT

The history of Protestant Dissent can seem bewildering in its complexity, so we

will begin with a brief sketch of its rise. We can identify a pre-history, a starting
point, and a series of turning points. Later Dissenters liked to trace their origins
back to the Lollards, the late medieval movement inspired by the writings of the
Oxford theologian John Wycliffe and devoted to searching the Scriptures.
Historians are still divided over the influence of Lollardy on the early
English Reformation, however much some have sought to construct a genealogy
stretching ‘from Lollards to Levellers’.7 As Peter Marshall observes, ‘no
important English reformer came from the ranks of the Lollards’, and ‘the first
evangelicals tended to come from the heart, not the margins, of the late medieval
religious establishment’.8 Nevertheless, Reformers such as John Foxe (in his
Acts and Monuments of 1563), as well as later Dissenters, saw Wycliffe as a

7 Compare Christopher Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’, in M. Cornforth, ed., Rebels and their
Causes (London, 1978), with Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), ch. 5.
8 Peter Marshall, ‘The Reformation, Lollardy, and Catholicism’, in Kent Cartwright, ed.,
A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford, 2010), pp. 20–1.
4 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

precursor of the Reformation. Lollardy would be used to justify not merely the
break with Rome, but various departures from the Protestant mainstream.9
We can identify a fault line running through the early evangelical Reformation:
an establishment orientation personified by Thomas Cranmer, and a more
radical tendency represented by William Tyndale who repudiated diocesan
episcopacy and envisaged a non-hierarchical church. The tensions between these
two visions of reformation were to resurface in debates between Elizabethan
conformists and their Puritan critics, who itched and agitated for further refor-
mation.10 From the beginning, evangelical Reformers oscillated between the
opposite poles of establishment and dissent. Under Henry VIII, Cranmer
became Archbishop of Canterbury, whereas Tyndale was burned at the stake.
Under Henry’s son, the Protestant King Edward VI (1547–53), erstwhile
­dissenters like John Bale became bishops, as the English reformation shifted
rapidly from its Henrician middle way between Rome and Wittenburg towards
Lutheranism and then towards the Reformed Protestantism associated with
Zurich, Geneva, and Strasbourg. This was reflected in successive versions of
Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, authorized by Acts of Uniformity in 1549
and 1552. Radical Protestants dissented from the new Protestant establishment.
The Freewillers rejected Reformed teaching on predestination, and two anti-
Trinitarians were burned at the stake in 1550 and 1551, setting a Protestant pre-
cedent for the far more famous execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva under
Calvin in 1553. With Edward’s death and the accession of the Catholic Mary I
(1553–8), the tables turned once more, and Archbishop Cranmer was himself
burned at the stake for heresy in 1556. The English Reformation offered a start-
ling case study in sudden role reversal, as outsiders became insiders, and perse-
cutors became victims. The line between establishment and dissent was not
fixed but alarmingly unstable.11
Seventeenth-century commentators and later historians often traced the
divide between conformists and nonconformists, Anglicans and Puritans to
‘the troubles at Frankfurt’ in 1554–5, where Protestant exiles split into rival fac-
tions led by Richard Cox and the Scottish reformer John Knox: the ‘Coxians’
versus the ‘Knoxians’. Yet the Coxians did not give a free hand to the magistrate
to order ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora, i.e. not determined by Scripture), and
both groups had much in common with Elizabethan Puritans.12 What we do
see in the mid-Tudor period is a vigorous contest over the shape of English

9 Susan Royal, ‘John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and the Lollard Legacy in the Long English
Reformation’ (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2014).
10 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590
(Cambridge, 2014), ch. 1.
11 On the mid-Tudor reformations and their Elizabethan aftermath, see Diarmaid MacCulloch,
The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603, second edn (Basingstoke, 2000).
12 Gunther, Reformation Unbound, ch. 5.
 Introduction5

Protestantism. Over the coming decades, neither the contest nor all the
­contenders could be contained within the bounds of the Established Church.
The formal starting point for this volume is the Elizabethan religious settle-
ment, enacted between 1559 and 1563. Building on the Edwardian settlement,
this established the royal supremacy, the Book of Common Prayer, and the
Thirty-Nine Articles as hallmarks of the Reformed national Church. However,
historians have long observed that in matters of religion the Elizabethan settle-
ment ‘settled nothing, or at least left much unsettled’.13 Many now write of
‘Reformations’ rather than ‘the Reformation’, and most agree that reformation
was a protracted process, a ‘long Reformation’.14 It is common to speak of a
‘post-Reformation’ era marked by a contentious struggle for the hearts of the
English people and the soul of the Church of England.15
The English Church suffered from an identity crisis. On the one hand, it was
viewed by European Calvinists and Catholics alike as a ‘Reformed’ Church,
allied with the Calvinist churches of the continent. Its Thirty-Nine Articles were
a recognizably Reformed confession of faith, it had authorized widespread
iconoclasm under Edward VI, its parish worship was plain and centred on
psalm-singing and sermons, and its leading bishops were in correspondence
networks with continental Reformers like Heinrich Bullinger (Zwingli’s
successor in Zurich) and Theodore Beza (Calvin’s successor in Geneva).
However, the English Church was anomalous in having an episcopal hierarchy,
a formal liturgy, traditional clerical vestments, and a choral tradition within
cathedrals. From the 1560s, contemporaries began to identify ‘Puritans’ within
the Church who were discontented with its ceremonies, and increasingly with
its government too. Puritan nonconformist clergy were often in hot water with
the authorities, but they also enjoyed significant patronage from leading
members of the gentry and aristocracy, and were tolerated by Reformed bishops
who shared their Calvinist theology and appreciated their preaching ministry.
There was a Presbyterian movement seeking to restructure the Church, as well
as Separatists who broke away from it altogether, but the sects were miniscule,
and the vast majority of Puritans remained within the religious establishment
under Elizabeth and her Scottish successor James I (r. 1603–25).16
It took a series of major shocks to create English Dissent as a force outside
the Established Church. The rise of Laudianism under Charles I (r. 1625–49)

13 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Religion of Elizabethan England and its Queen’, in Michelle Cilibretto
and Nicholas Mann, eds, Giordano Bruno, 1583–1585 (Florence, 1997), p. 5. For an older example, see
J.W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928), p. 180.
14 See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors
(Oxford, 1993); Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998).
15 John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714
(Abingdon, 2006).
16 See Patrick Collinson’s classic studies, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967),
and The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982). In this
volume, see especially the chapters by Polly Ha and W.J. Sheils.
6 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

was the first watershed, marking the end of accommodation.17 Named after
William Laud, Bishop of London from 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury
from 1633, the Laudians sought to reform the Church according to ideals of
beauty and order derived especially from their reading of the early Church
Fathers. In the process, they began to purge Puritanism from the Church of
England, thus radicalizing the godly, driving some into separatism, and others
into exile, where they established ‘the Congregational way’ in New England
and the Netherlands. The Laudian programme also provoked a political
backlash. The attempt to impose a formal Prayer Book on the Scottish Kirk
gave rise to the Scottish Covenanter movement and the overthrow of bishops
in the Church of Scotland in 1638. When Charles failed in his attempts to crush
the Covenanters by military means, he was forced to end his period of Personal
Rule without parliaments (1629–40), by summoning parliament at Westminster
in 1640.
The English Revolution that ensued was the second major turning point.18
In 1642, civil war broke out between royalists and parliamentarians. The political
and military crisis unleashed an extraordinary wave of Puritan reform and
experimentation, and witnessed the abolition of episcopacy in 1646.19 Aiming
to forge a new religious settlement, the parliamentarians ended up presiding
over the fragmentation of English Protestantism. Parliament had called an
Assembly of Divines at Westminster in 1643 to advise on ecclesiastical reform,
but although it drew up a new Confession of Faith (1646), as well as a Directory
of Public Worship, a Form of Church Government, and a Larger and Shorter
Catechism, the Presbyterian drive for religious uniformity was blocked by the
triumph of the New Model Army and the Independent coalition, dedicated to
the toleration of Separatist, Congregational, and Baptist minorities. The poet
John Milton, an ardent supporter of the Independent cause, wrote that ‘New
Presbyter is but old Priest writ large’.20 In 1649, the political Independents—led
by army commander Oliver Cromwell—executed the king, abolished mon­
archy and the House of Lords, and instituted a republic or ‘free state’. In the
midst of this unprecedented political upheaval, England witnessed the rise of
the new sects: Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, and most significantly, the
Quakers. In Cromwellian England, Diggers and Ranters were suppressed,

17 For an introduction to Laudianism and other religious developments under Charles I, see
Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–42 (Basingstoke, 1993).
18 The best short introduction to the English Revolution is Blair Worden, The English Civil
Wars (London, 2009). For a magisterial history, see Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution,
1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002). In this volume, see especially the chapters by Elliot Vernon, Tim
Cooper, Michael Haykin, Ariel Hessayon, and Bernard Capp.
19 For a brilliantly detailed study of the emergence of religious and political radicalism between
1640 and 1646, see David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford,
2018).
20 John Milton, ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’, in John Milton:
Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London, 1971), pp. 293–6.
 Introduction7

while Baptists and Quakers thrived. By 1660, there were only a few hundred
Muggletonians, but as many as 25,000 Baptists and anywhere between 30,000
and 60,000 Quakers.21 Cromwell himself saw Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
and Baptists as the core elements of his godly coalition.
The third great defining moment occurred after the death of Cromwell in
1658 (he had served as Lord Protector since 1653). Within eighteen months,
the monarchy was restored and Charles I’s son returned as King Charles II
(r. 1660–85). Episcopacy was also re-established, and the Restoration settlement
saw a raft of legislation passed against Puritan Nonconformists, the centrepiece
being the Act of Uniformity (1662). Altogether, around 2,000 Puritan clergy
were removed from their livings in the Established Church between 1660 and
1662, in what was later dubbed ‘the Great Ejection’.22 The majority were
Presbyterians, and while they continued to worship in the parishes, many also
set up conventicles that increasingly functioned like Congregational gathered
churches. The Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670) declared such assemblies illegal,
and Dissenters were subjected to waves of repression: fines, arrests, and impris-
onments. Quakers suffered more than most. Thousands were gaoled, and hun-
dreds died in Restoration prison cells. Nowhere else in seventeenth-century
Protestant Europe were Protestant minorities persecuted on this scale. The
Restoration era turned most Puritans into ‘Dissenters’, an identity strengthened
rather than eroded by their experience of persecution. The royal Declaration
of Indulgence (1672) provided a brief respite, allowing Dissenters to apply
for official licences as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, or
Nonconformists. This served to consolidate denominational identities. It also
reflected the fact that Dissenters had powerful sympathizers at the highest level
of English politics, such as the ‘Puritan Whig’ Denzil Holles, and Anthony
Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, patron of the tolerationist philosopher,
John Locke. During the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81) and again in the reign of the
Catholic King James II (1685–8), Dissenters were brought in from the cold.23
A fourth key moment, the Revolution of 1688–9, confirmed the divergence
of Church and Dissent. A comprehension bill, designed to reincorporate
Presbyterian clergy into the Established Church, failed. Meanwhile, the so-
called Act of Toleration (1689) recognized the legality of registered Trinitarian
Dissent. In contrast to Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration (1689), the Act did
not set out a principled defence of religious liberty, and it was hotly contested

21 For estimates see, J.F. McGregor and Barry Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English
Revolution (Oxford, 1984), pp. 33, 142. See also Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds,
Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006); Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan,
‘Introduction’, in Hessayon and Finnegan, eds, Varieties of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
English Radicalism in Context (Farnham, 2011), pp. 17–18.
22 See Geoffrey Nuttall and Owen Chadwick, eds, From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962
(London, 1962); N.H. Keeble, ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014).
23 See Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2016); Scott Sowerby,
Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2013).
8 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

by Tory High Churchmen, but it stood the test of time.24 Presbyterians,

Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers now enjoyed freedom of worship,
and opened thousands of meeting houses across England and Wales. They
formed what historians would later call ‘Old Dissent’, to be joined by the ‘New
Dissent’ of Methodism in the late eighteenth century.

DENOMINATIONAL HISTORY

The history of Anglophone Protestant Dissent has attracted a wealth of

­scholarship. Until recent decades, the bulk of that research was produced by
‘insiders’, denominational historians who set out to trace the history of their
own trad­ition. Already in the eighteenth century, they produced some major
works: the Presbyterian Edmund Calamy’s Account (1713) of the ejected minis-
ters, expanded in his Continuation, two vols (1727); The History of the Puritans,
four vols (1732–8) by the Independent Daniel Neal; a History of the English
Baptists, four vols (1738–40), by Thomas Crosby; and Collections of the Sufferings
of the People called Quakers, two vols (1753), by Joseph Besse. These works
were—either in whole or in part—martyrologies. They depicted Dissenters as
victims of episcopal persecution, heroic sufferers whose conscientious resist-
ance had led to the creation of Nonconformity. Anglicans, in turn, produced
their own martyrology, John Walker’s The Sufferings of the Clergy of England
(1714), a riposte to Calamy that reminded Dissenters of the inconvenient truth
that their ancestors had harassed and ejected almost 3,000 episcopal and royal-
ist clergy during ‘the Great Rebellion’ of the 1640s. Such works consolidated
distinct denominational identities, and cemented the wall between Church
and Dissent.25
The golden age of denominational history was presided over by the Victorians
and Edwardians. This was an era of spectacular Dissenting growth, especially
among Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists; the religious census of
1851 found that almost one in five of the English (and half of all churchgoers)
attended a Dissenting chapel. A torrent of histories and biographies poured
from the presses, including studies of local congregations and regional surveys
of early nonconformity. Among the major achievements of this new wave of
denominational scholarship was the production of numerous primary source
editions. Between 1846 and 1854, for example, the Hanserd Knollys Society
published a series of seventeenth-century Baptist texts, including the church

24 See Ralph Steven, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720
(Woodbridge, 2018).
25 See John Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious Divisions and the Politics of Memory in
Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008).
 Introduction9

books of Broadmead, Bristol, and the Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham

congregation. In the early twentieth century, the enthusiasm for denominational
history led to the establishment of organizations and journals devoted to
excavating the past. The period from 1898 to 1915 witnessed the creation of
seven Nonconformist historical societies in England and Ireland, each with its
own periodical. The Wesleyans were first off the mark, and whether in
appreciative emulation or as part of an historiographical arms race, the other
dissenting denominations followed in quick succession: the Transactions of
the Congregational Historical Society launched in 1901, the Journal of the Friends
Historical Society in 1903, the Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society in
1908, the Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society of England in 1914, and
the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society in 1915.26
Nonconformity also boasted its own denominational archives. Presbyterian
records were concentrated in the Dr Williams’s Library, opened in 1730, and
relocated to its present location in Bloomsbury in 1890. After 1982, it in­corp­­
orated the Congregational Library (founded in 1831). It is the preeminent
Nonconformist repository. Baptist historical materials were eventually col-
lected together in the Angus Library, now at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.
Quaker archives were deposited in the Friends Reference Library at Devonshire
House in London where Norman Penney was appointed as the first librarian
in 1900. The collection was moved in 1926 to Friends House on the Euston
Road, and as the Library of the Religious Society of Friends it now contains
80,000 books and pamphlets as well as a major manuscript collection. In
Boston, Massachusetts, the Congregational Library and Archives (along
with the Massachusetts Historical Society) curates the documentary history of
American Congregationalism; in Philadelphia, the Presbyterian Historical
Society does the same for American Presbyterianism; at Swarthmore College,
in Pennsylvania, historians of the Quakers can consult the riches of the Friends
Historical Library. These (and other) denominational libraries and archives
remain indispensable to the historian of Dissent.
The research of denominational historians was brilliantly synthesized by
Michael Watts in 1978, in the first volume of what became a magisterial trilogy
entitled The Dissenters.27 Volume I took the story of English (and Welsh)
Protestant Dissent from the Reformation to the French Revolution. In the first
250 pages, Watts covered the emergence of Dissent from 1532 (when three
Englishmen and a Scotsman were arrested in London for distributing
Anabaptist books) to 1689 (the Act of Toleration). Section I examined ‘The
Genesis of Dissent’ in the century before 1640, Section II dealt with the English

26 Herbert McLachlan, Alexander Gordon, 1841–1931: A Biography (1932), p. 76.

27 Michael Watts, The Dissenters; The Dissenters: Volume II: The Rise of Evangelical
Nonconformity (Oxford, 1995); The Dissenters: Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of
Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015).
10 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Revolution as ‘The Liberation of Dissent’, while Section III surveyed ‘The

Persecution of Dissent’ during the Restoration era. Watts acknowledged his
debts to the tradition of dissenting historiography inaugurated by Edmund
Calamy and Daniel Neal. His preface singled out for thanks three leading
Dissenting historians: the Congregationalists Tudur Jones and Geoffrey Nuttall,
and the Baptist Ernest Payne.
Denominational history retains some vigour, despite the long-term decline
of the traditional Dissenting denominations, at least in the UK. In Canada,
attention to the history of Dissenting traditions declined markedly after the
1925 merger of Congregationalists, Methodists, and a majority of Canadian
Presbyterians into the United Church of Canada.28 In Britain, by contrast,
strong denominational identities survived into the age of ecumenism, and the
Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries
was eventually set up to act as an umbrella group, providing links to different
organizations and institutions.29 Among the fruits of this collaboration is the
four-volume anthology of Protestant Nonconformist Texts, published under
the general editorship of the late Alan Sell.30 In North America, a variety of
Reformed and Baptist seminaries foster research into their respective tra­di­
tions, and there are several Centers for Baptist History and Heritage. Another
is based at Regent’s Park College, Oxford (a Baptist institution and a permanent
private hall of the University of Oxford, as well as the location of the Angus
Library).31 Baptists and Presbyterians, both in Europe and America, continue
to argue about their identity with reference to their sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century forebears: debates about theology and the sacraments are conducted
through historiography.32 By seeking a usable past, denominational historians
run the risk of accentuating the congenial, and reading their own preoccupa-
tions into the present. Yet they continue to undertake groundbreaking research.
In recent years, for example, Larry Kreitzer has embarked on a major project to
document the career of the Baptist merchant-pastor William Kiffen. In William
Kiffen and his World, six vols to date (Oxford, 2010–), Kreitzer has transcribed
and analysed hundreds of unpublished documents, and investigated every
aspect of his life and career in unparalleled detail. We learn, for example, of

28 I owe this observation to Mark Noll. 29 http://www.adhscl.org.uk/.

30 R. Tudur Jones with Arthur Long and Rosemary Moore, eds, Protestant Nonconformist
Texts: Volume I: 1550–1700 (Aldershot, 2007; Eugene, OR, 2015); Alan P.F. Sell with David J. Hall
and Ian Sellers, eds, Protestant Nonconformist Texts: Volume II: The Eighteenth Century (Aldershot,
2006; Eugene, OR, 2015); David Bebbington with Kenneth Dix and Alan Ruston, eds, Protestant
Nonconformist Texts: Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006; Eugene, OR, 2015);
David Thompson with John H.Y. Briggs and John Munsey Turner, eds, Protestant Nonconformist
Texts: Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2007; Eugene, OR, 2015).
31 http://baptiststudiesonline.com/links/centers-for-baptist-studies/.
32 See, for example, Matthew C. Bingham, Chris Caughey, R. Scott Clark, Crawford Gribben,
and D.G. Hart, On Being Reformed: Debates over a Theological Identity (2018); Paul Fiddes, ed., The
Fourth Strand of the Reformation: The Covenant Ecclesiology of Anabaptists, English Separatists
and the Early General Baptists (Oxford, 2018).
 Introduction11

Kiffen’s links to Dissenters in the Dutch republic, of his involvement with

the wool–silk trade to Aleppo in Syria, and of his investment in a slave ship
that sailed to the coast of Guinea in 1664. Kreitzer’s project demonstrates that
Dissenters should not be viewed as a race apart, but as immersed in their place
and time.

RETHINKING CHURCH AND DISSENT

While reports of the death of denominational history have been greatly exagger-
ated, it has come under sustained challenge. As far back as 1967, Christopher
Hill used the forum of The Baptist Quarterly to point out some of its shortcom-
ings.33 In 1975, Patrick Collinson published a major essay—almost a mani­festo—
entitled ‘Towards a Broader History of the Early Dissenting Tradition’.34 Here
Collinson drew out some of the implications of his magisterial book, The
Elizabethan Puritan Movement. He explained that he had been doing a different
kind of history to most denominational historians. Theirs was ‘vertical history’,
preoccupied with tracing the genealogy of their own denomination from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present, and thus written teleologic-
ally, with the end in view. But there was another approach that led ‘towards a
broader history of the Early Dissenting Tradition’. This was ‘horizontal history’,
synchronic rather than diachronic in its focus; it sought to locate Puritans and
Separatists not within the long story of Dissent, but within their host societies—
in this case, Elizabethan and early Stuart England. According to Collinson, these
two approaches produced contrasting pictures of the early Dissenting tradition.
For the vertical, denominational historians, Dissenters were outsiders, perse-
cuted insurgents destined to found Separatist congregations. Daniel Neal’s
History of the Puritans was explicitly designed ‘to account for the Rise and
Progress of that Separation from the National Establishment that subsists to this
Day’.35 To period specialists like Collinson, tightly focused on the history of a
particular era, the early nonconformists looked more like insiders, part of a
dynamic Puritanism that embodied the mainstream of English Protestantism.36

33 Christopher Hill, ‘History and Denominational History’, Baptist Quarterly, 22 (1967), 65–71.
34 Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader History of the Early Dissenting Tradition’, in Robert
Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds, The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson (Athens,
OH, 1975), pp. 3–38, reprinted in Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and
Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 527–62.
35 Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 4 vols (London, 1732), I, sig. A4.
36 Despite his emphasis on horizontal history, it may be no coincidence that Collinson was an
Anglican from a devoutly Dissenting family, and thus well equipped to bridge the divide between
Church and Chapel. See his From Cranmer to Sancroft (London, 2006), pp. 25–6; History of a
History Man: Or, The Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance: The Memoirs of Patrick
Collinson (Woodbridge, 2011); and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Church and Chapel’, Spectator,
21 September 2006, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2006/09/church-and-chapel/.
12 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

In rethinking Puritanism and Dissent, Collinson was also revising the

history of the Church of England. In this he was joined by Nicholas Tyacke
whose pioneering research emphasized the Calvinist or Reformed character of
the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church.37 Tyacke argued that far from being a
via media between Rome and Geneva, the Church of England was firmly
aligned with the continental Reformed churches, and deeply committed to
Calvinist theology. This challenged the dominant historiographical paradigm
shaped by High Churchmen, who saw the genius of Anglicanism in its capacity
to preserve patristic and medieval traditions that had been jettisoned by other
Protestant churches. For Tyacke and Collinson, this Anglican exceptionalism
was an anachronistic construct that obscured the fundamentally Reformed
character of the Edwardian, Elizabethan, and Jacobean Church. Puritanism
was not an alien growth, destined to be rejected by the Anglican body, but a
dynamic expression of mainstream Reformed piety. The real challenge to the
Reformed Church of England came from ‘avant-garde conformists’, who were
eventually known as Laudians.38 It was these high church clergy who invented
Anglicanism as we know it—as a third wing of the magisterial Reformation,
quite distinct from Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism, a religious identity
requiring its own colour on maps of Reformation Europe.
Michael Watts was untroubled by this new historiography. His narrative
depended on what was then a conventional understanding of the Church of
England: ‘a church that was neither Protestant nor Catholic, but something in
between’.39 In due course, however, the revisionism of Collinson and Tyacke
would precipitate a full-scale rewriting of the history of Anglicanism and Dissent.
Historians would come to see Puritanism as embedded within the Established
Church, albeit with ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ tendencies. Dissent was not the
inevitable outcome of Puritanism, but a contingent development.
The impact of the Collinsonian revolution can be seen if we turn to the first
volume of The Oxford History of Anglicanism, edited by Anthony Milton.40 To
read that work is to see how much the ground has shifted under the history of
Dissent. Milton and his contributors give us Anglicanism, but not as Watts
knew it. Here the emphasis is on the struggle for the Church of England, and its
contested identity. The Elizabethan settlement was not definitive, but part of an
ongoing process of reformation. The Church that emerged from the Edwardian
and Elizabethan reforms was ‘very much more in tune with the Calvinist

37 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution’, in Conrad Russell,

ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 119–43; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-
Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987).
38 The term ‘avant-garde conformists’ was coined by Peter Lake in ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John
Buckeridge, and Avant-garde Conformity at the Court of James I’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The
Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113–33.
39 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 15.
40 Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume I: Reformation and Identity,
c. 1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017).
 Introduction13

reformations of the continent than with later “Anglican” ideals’.41 And Puritanism,
the movement for further reformation, was not inherently separatist, but a
movement led by ordained Church of England clergy with strong connections
to the religious, political, and educational establishment. It was (as Peter Lake
provocatively puts it) ‘a form of “Anglicanism” ’.42
We know that in the end, the Puritan reformation would fail, and that
Puritans (or most of them) would become Dissenters, ranged in de­nom­in­
ations outside the Established Church. Yet even in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, most Puritans sought to control the religious establishment, not to break
away from it. Puritan parish ministers like Richard Baxter insisted that the
Church of England was alive and well after having been reformed in the 1640s:
O say they, where is your Church of England now? why! what’s the matter? Is the
Church of England dead? Or is any thing taken down that was essential to the
Church of England! was a Prelacy ruling by a lay-Chancelor over many hundred
Parishes, chosen and Governing without the body of the Clergy, Essential to
the Church of England? I am confident the most of the sober godly Ministers
in England, are for the Apostolical primitive Episcopacy still. Was the Book of
Canons, or the Book of Common Prayer, or the Ceremonies Essential to the
Church of England? Sure they were not; And if so, its living still.43
The leading Congregational theologian, John Owen, was also unwilling to
relinquish a claim to ‘the Church of England’, though he redefined it more
drastically than Baxter. Congregationalists typically rejected the concept of a
‘national Church’, believing that the visible church was found only in voluntary
congregations.44 However, Owen (writing as late as 1680) insisted that all
English Protestants were part of ‘the Church of England’, whether they wor-
shipped in parish churches or gathered churches:
This I say is that Church of England which is the principal Bullwark of the Protestant
Religion and Interest in Europe; namely, a Protestant King, a Protestant Parliament,
Protestant Magistrates, Protestant Ministers, a Protestant confession of faith
established by Law, with the cordial agreement of the Body of the People in all
these things; esteeming the Protestant Religion and its Profession their chief
Interest in this world.45
Neither Owen nor Baxter thought that ‘the Church of England’ was defined by
episcopal hierarchy, the canons, and the Prayer Book. Both believed that the

41 Milton, ‘Introduction’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, p. 3.

42 Peter Lake, ‘ “Puritans” and “Anglicans” in the Post-Reformation Church’, in Milton, ed., The
Oxford History of Anglicanism, p. 379.
43 Richard Baxter, Catholick Unity (London, 1660), p. 342.
44 See Matthew Bingham, ‘On the Idea of a National Church: Reassessing Congregationalism
in Revolutionary England’, Church History, 88 (2019), 27–57.
45 John Owen, Some Considerations about Union among Protestants (London, 1680), p. 8. I am
grateful to Esther Counsell for this reference.
14 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Church of England was flourishing under Puritan rule. This runs counter to a
common assumption that the 1640s saw ‘the legal abolition of the Church of
England’ so that it ‘no longer officially existed’.46 Following Anthony Milton, it
is perhaps better to recognize two ambitious attempts to reform the Church
in the middle decades of the seventeenth century: first, in the 1630s, by the
Laudians, then in the 1640s and 1650s ‘a yet more dramatic reform of the
Church’ by the Puritans.47 Hence, The Oxford History of Anglicanism includes
a chapter on the Westminster Assembly, and another on ‘the Cromwellian
Church’, topics traditionally deemed to be part of the history of Dissent (or in
the case of the Westminster Assembly, Scottish Presbyterianism).48 On this
revisionist view of ‘Anglican’ history, the identity of the Church of England was
not fixed, but hotly contested. Puritans were major contenders, and many epis-
copal clergy were willing to operate within the structures of the Cromwellian
establishment. As Christopher Haigh has shown, episcopal divines in the 1650s
were deeply divided on the question: where is the Church of England? Some
(such James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh) thought that it still subsisted in
the national framework of parishes; others maintained that it survived in the
form of ministers and parishes that remained faithful to bishops and prayer
books; still others (like Henry Hammond) insisted that it was now an under-
ground church of recusants.49
Indeed, during the Cromwellian decade, it was episcopalians of Hammond’s
ilk who were the dissenters. Although they claimed to represent ‘the Church of
England’, their prospects looked bleak. They returned with a vengeance at the
Restoration, and their more exclusive view of Anglican identity won out after
almost two years of negotiations and wrangling, with dire consequences for the
Puritan clergy, most of whom were ejected from their parishes. Other outcomes
were possible, however. The Scottish Episcopalians, who also enjoyed estab-
lished status during the Restoration era, were ousted in 1689, and only granted
toleration after much resistance in 1712. Ever since, they have formed a dis­tinct­
ive ‘Protestant dissenting tradition’, albeit one in communion with the Established
Church south of the border.50 ‘Dissent’ and ‘Establishment’ are relative categories,
an unstable pairing.

46 Rowan Strong, ‘Series Introduction’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, xxii.
47 Milton, ‘Introduction’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, pp. 2, 18–20.
48 Chad van Dixhoorn, ‘The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of the 1640s’, and
Ann Hughes, ‘The Cromwellian Church’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, chs 23
and 24.
49 Christopher Haigh, ‘Where was the Church of England, 1646–1660’, Historical Journal, 62
(2019), 127–47.
50 See Alasdair Raffe, ‘Scotland’, in Jeremy Gregory, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism:
Volume II: Establishment and Empire, 1662–1829 (Oxford, 2017), pp. 150–9; Stewart J. Brown,
‘Protestant Dissent in Scotland’, in The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: Volume
II: The Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2018), pp. 142–5.
 Introduction15

The contributors to this volume reinforce the point. They emphasize the
contingency of religious outcomes and the fluidity of religious identities. Bill
Sheils stresses that the boundary between parochial dissent and the Established
Church was a porous one. Whereas earlier historiography accented the sep­ar­
ate­ness of the Lollards and later Dissent, recent scholarship has depicted a more
nuanced relationship between Dissenters and the parish.51 Susan Hardman
Moore speaks of ‘patterns of evasive conformity’, and notes that for most of the
period, ‘the majority of dissenters stayed within the Church of England’.52
David Appleby’s study of Dissenting sermons reminds us that scholars are now
much more reticent about drawing ‘stark demarcation lines’ between ‘plain
style’ Puritan preaching and Anglican homiletics.53 Polly Ha and Elliot Vernon
are at pains to emphasize that the Presbyterians (at least before 1660) did not
see themselves as Dissenters.54 Tim Cooper observes that while historians
of American Puritanism have ‘generally emphasized the Congregationalists’
tendency towards separation’, ‘scholars of British Puritanism . . . have drawn
out their inclination to belong’.55 Bernard Capp recounts how ‘The Civil Wars
transformed Puritans into the new “establishment”, the dominant strand in a
purged and radically reformed national Church’. And he reminds us that ‘over
three-quarters of the Cromwellian parish clergy conformed, more or less, to
the Anglican settlement’ after 1662—including Puritans like Ralph Josselin.56
As for the ejected Puritan clergy, most eschewed separatism, preferring partial
conformity. In Restoration parliaments, ‘Puritan Whigs’ like Denzil Holles
sought to win back Church and state and enact comprehension, allowing
ejected clergy to return to the parishes.57 ‘Overwhelmingly’, remarks Jacqueline
Rose, ‘Dissenters wanted to capture rather than to reject the state; they became
its opponents by happenstance rather than by default’.58
Even after they had relinquished their ambition to reform the Church of
England, Dissenters were not always marginal figures. In some urban areas,
especially, they maintained a high profile. In 1697 and 1700, a Presbyterian
candidate was chosen as Lord Mayor of London, qualifying by taking the
Anglican sacrament, while remaining a proud member of a Dissenting congrega-
tion.59 Daniel Defoe described such occasional conformists as ‘playing Bo-peep
with God Almighty’, but Defoe’s own success as an author demonstrated the

51 W.J. Sheils, ‘Dissent in the Parishes’, Chapter 13 in this volume.

52 Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Worship and Sacraments’, Chapter 18 in this volume.
53 David J. Appleby, ‘Sermons and Preaching’, Chapter 19 in this volume.
54 Polly Ha, ‘Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Chapter 1 in this volume;
Elliot Vernon, ‘Presbyterians in the English Revolution’, Chapter 2 in this volume.
55 Tim Cooper, ‘Congregationalists’, Chapter 4 in this volume.
56 Bernard Capp, ‘The Empowerment of Dissent’, Chapter 15 in this volume.
57 See Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, ch. 4.
58 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Dissent and the State’, Chapter 14 of this volume.
59 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 265. See also pp. 482–3.
16 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Dissenting contribution to English cultural life.60 As N.H. Keeble observes,

‘nonconformist stationers had become a mainstay of their profession’, with the
London Presbyterian bookseller Thomas Parkhurst being elected Master of the
Stationers Company in 1703.61
The same ambiguities of establishment and dissent are evident beyond
England. In Cromwellian Ireland, as Crawford Gribben demonstrates Baptists
and Congregationalists were ‘negotiating their place in a new establishment’,
while ‘prayer book episcopalians, like Jeremy Taylor, were being pushed into
dissent’. In the later seventeenth century, Presbyterian Dissenters outnumbered
members of the Church of Ireland in some parts of Ulster, while Ireland’s
Protestant minority governed a nation with a Catholic majority.62 In Scotland,
explains Scott Spurlock, ‘Presbyterian and episcopal sympathizers alike
competed for the destiny of the entire national Church, not for differentiation
or separation from it’. ‘The boundaries between [the episcopal] Established
Church and [Presbyterian] nonconformity were permeable’.63 In post-
Restoration Wales, Densil Morgan has found that ‘in terms of both piety and
doctrine, there was a vast amount in common between Anglican and
Dissenter’.64 Puritan Dissenters were a tiny minority in Wales, but Lloyd Bowen
points out that in the nineteenth century Dissent would become demographically
predominant, forming a kind of cultural establishment, so that Welsh
Nonconformist history was often ‘fused with patriotic or proto-nationalist
agendas’.65 In the case of New England, Frank Bremer describes how Puritan
Dissenters created a colonial establishment that generated internal dissent.66
Andrew Murphy and Adrian Weimer introduce us to the two faces of American
Quakerism—in New England, Quakers were persecuted insurgents; in
Pennsylvania they created ‘a non-coercive Quaker establishment’.67
In contrast to Watts then, the essays in this Oxford History do what Collinson
envisaged—they write a ‘broader history of the early dissenting tradition’, mov-
ing it closer to the centre of the action. Watts’ Dissenters ‘asked chiefly to be left
alone to worship God in their own way’;68 our protagonists fight to define
English Protestantism and the nation’s religious settlement, and only become
Dissenters (from the Established Church) when they lose that battle. Of course,

60 See John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 2005), quotation at
p. 41.
61 N.H. Keeble, ‘The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity’, Chapter 16 in this volume.
62 Crawford Gribben, ‘Ireland’, Chapter 9 in this volume.
63 R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Scotland’, Chapter 8 in this volume.
64 D. Densil Morgan, Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales: Volume
I: From Reformation to Revival, 1588–1760 (Cardiff, 2018), p. 231.
65 Lloyd Bowen, ‘Wales, 1587–1689’, Chapter 10 in this volume.
66 Francis J. Bremer, ‘Dissent in New England’, Chapter 11 in this volume.
67 Andrew R. Murphy and Adrian Chastain Weimer, ‘Colonial Quakerism’, Chapter 12 in this
volume.
68 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 2.
 Introduction17

this means that the history of Puritan dissent can no longer be seen as a
self-contained subject, but as part of something larger, ‘one half of a stressful
relationship’ (as Collinson memorably put it).69 It also means that the history of
dissent is now too important to be left to denominational historians; it belongs
to the mainstream. Indeed, when George Southcombe reflects on Mark Goldie’s
claim that much of the Presbyterians’ political programme was realized in 1689,
and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s quip that Richard Baxter was the first of the
Anglicans, he wonders if ‘at points the English have lived with a Church and
state defined by Presbyterians after all’.70
If the divide between Church and Dissent now looks porous, so do the
boundaries between the various dissenting denominations. Whereas de­nom­
in­ation­al historians studied the history of a tradition, recent historians have
often focused on the history of a moment. Colin Davis stressed the anti-formalism
of religious radicals, and their powerful antipathy to ecclesiastical structures
and institutions; Jonathan Scott was struck by the ‘fluidity’ of religious radical-
ism, and conceived of the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchists
not as ‘organised groups’ but as ‘different stages’ in the revolutionary process.71
In less iconoclastic fashion, research on the Westminster Assembly has ques-
tioned the rigid two-party denominational model of Presbyterians versus
Congregationalists, showing that the lines of division were much more com-
plex, shifting and realigning from issue to issue, in kal­eido­scop­ic fashion.72
Thus on the question of the authority vested in the congregation (as opposed to
the elders), militant Scottish Presbyterians like Samuel Rutherford and George
Gillespie were closer to the Congregational ‘dissenting brethren’ than they
were to clericalist English Presbyterians.73 The barrier between Baptists and
Congregationalists also looks more permeable than it once did. The gathered
churches of English Congregationalists displayed remarkable flexibility by
incorporating members with baptistic views, and there were prominent
Baptists—like Henry Jessey and John Tombes—who worked as Triers in the
1650s, examining candidates for the public ministry alongside Presbyterian
and Congregational clergy.74 One scholar proposes that we recategorize

69 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 183.

70 George Southcombe, ‘Presbyterians in the Restoration’, Chapter 3 in this volume.
71 J.C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 3 (1993), 265–88; Jonathan Scott, ‘Radicalism and Restoration:
The Shape of the Stuart Experience’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 453–67, esp. 454–5.
72 The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols, ed. Chad van
Dixhoorn (Oxford, 2012), I, pp. 29–31.
73 Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution,
1638–44 (Manchester, 2015). For a reassertion of the Presbyterian–Congregationalist divide, see
Chad Van Dixhoorn, ‘Presbyterian Ecclesiologies at the Westminster Assembly’, in Elliot Vernon
and Hunter Powell, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the English Atlantic World, c. 1635–66
(Manchester, 2020).
74 Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan
Revolution’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009).
18 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Calvinistic Baptists as ‘baptistic congregationalists’, while another questions

the neat division between General and Particular Baptists.75 The boundaries
around Quakerism were much firmer, but as Ariel Hessayon shows, the Quaker
movement had polygenetic origins and eclectic tastes, ‘harvesting support from
pre-existing communities of Independents, Baptists and Seekers’, drawing on
currents of Behmenism and Familism, and capitalizing on the rise and fall of
Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters.76
After the Restoration, Dissenters shared the experience of persecution,
something that could create a stronger sense of affinity between them. Even
Quakers like Fox and Penn identified themselves as ‘Protestant Dissenters’. As
Cory Cotter demonstrates in his analysis of exiled ministers in the Netherlands,
persecution drove Scottish Presbyterians and English Congregationalists
together, revealing that they ‘shared much more in common than is sometimes
supposed’.77 In England, Richard Baxter lamented that Presbyterian con­ven­
ticles were forced into ‘independent and separating shape’, morphing into
something akin to Congregational gathered churches.78 In any case, Baxter’s
own ‘Presbyterianism’ was a far cry from the jure divino Presbyterianism that
had flourished in the mid-1640s. That was now increasingly outmoded, and
Presbyterian had become the standard term for the most conservative of Puritan
Dissenters, the ones who kept one foot in the conventicle and one foot in the
parish. The denominational allegiances of individual clergy and laity were
also often flexible. Following the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, some
Nonconformist clergy took out licences to minister to different denominations
of Dissenters: Presbyterian and Congregationalist, Congregationalist and
Baptist, or even Presbyterian and Baptist.79 And once lingering hopes of com-
prehension were dashed in 1689, Presbyterians joined the other denominations
as beneficiaries of the Act of Toleration.
Indeed, if we survey the half-century from the 1640s to the 1690s, we can
discern something of a rapprochement, as the four Dissenting denominations
moved away from the extremes and clustered closer to each other. Presbyterians,
who had once anathematized heresies were by the end of the century inclined
to a Baxterian doctrinal latitude. The experience of persecution had also made
them much less enthusiastic about the coercive powers of the godly magistrate;
they were increasingly inclined to embrace religious voluntarism and tol­er­
ation.80 Meanwhile, Quakers had become more respectable, more sober, and

75 Matthew Bingham, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford,
2019); Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–49 (Woodbridge, 2006).
76 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Early Quakerism and its Origins’, Chapter 6 in this volume.
77 Cory Cotter, ‘The Dutch Republic’, Chapter 7 in this volume.
78 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (1696), pt II, p. 43.
79 See G. Lyon Turner, ed., Original Records of Early Nonconformity under Persecution and
Indulgence, 3 vols (London, 1911–14).
80 See the landmark works of John Shute Barrington, The Rights of Protestant Dissenters
(London, 1704); Edmund Calamy, A Defence of Moderate Nonconformity (London, 1704).
 Introduction19

more restrained. As Rachel Adcock observes, the Restoration era saw ‘moves
by Independents, Baptists, and Quakers to curtail women’s more authorita-
tive roles as teachers or prophets’.81 The yawning gulf that had once separated
Presbyterians from the sects had narrowed, though it had not disappeared.
We should not envisage Dissenting denominations as rigid and homoge-
neous blocs.

THE FORMATION OF DISSENTING IDENTITIES

This is not to dismiss the achievements of denominational history, or to read

the last rites over it. While Patrick Collinson himself did not come to praise that
school of scholarship, neither did he come to bury it. Indeed, he expressed
admiration for the distinguished Nonconformist historian Geoffrey Nuttall,
and suggested that if religious history is ‘too important to be left to the theolo­
gians’, it is ‘too important to be left to the secularists either’. ‘Those who write
from within the tradition’, he concluded, ‘with theological awareness and
spiritual sensitivity, have much the better chance of getting it right’.82 In Religious
Studies, scholars refer to ‘the insider/outsider problem’, but it might be better
called an insider/outsider dynamic, because as in the case of Church and
Dissent, the border is a porous one.83 More than a few scholars in secular
universities hail from the religious traditions they study, while denominational
historians (based in religiously affiliated institutions) have often received their
training in university history departments. In this volume, and more generally,
the study of Dissent is a collaborative enterprise.
Moreover, we should not set up a false dichotomy between teleological
denominational history and non-teleological secular history. There is a long
tradition in British and American historiography of secular historians in­corp­
or­at­ing Protestant Dissent into vertical narratives of their own. For North
American scholars such as Perry Miller, there could be ‘no understanding of
America’ ‘without some understanding of Puritanism’.84 For liberal scholars

81 Rachel Adcock, ‘Women and Gender’, Chapter 20 in this volume. Despite such restrictions,
Naomi Pullin argues that ‘the process of institutionalisation enhanced rather than diminished
women’s roles within transatlantic Quakerism’. See Pullin, Female Friends and the Making of
Transaltantic Quakerism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge, 2018), p. 2.
82 Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding’, p. 550.
83 See Russell T. McCutcheon, ed., The Insider–Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion
(London, 1999).
84 Perry Miller and T.J. Johnson, eds, The Puritans: A Sourcebook of their Writings, 2 vols
(New York, 1938), I, pp. 1–4. For recent studies of the moral significance and legacy of Puritan New
England, see James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven,
CT, 1993); David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in
New England (New York, 2011).
20 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

writing in the era of European Fascism, radical Puritans such as Roger Williams,
John Milton, and John Lilburne were liberal beacons, pioneers of Anglo-American
democratic freedoms.85 For historians of the Left, sectarian religion was a vital
source of the British radical tradition. Lilburne, Winstanley, Milton, and Bunyan
have all been enrolled into the pantheon of radical heroes. Antinomianism, the
theological critique of legalism, has been identified as a driver of political dissent
from the Ranters to William Blake.86 Millenarianism too, has been viewed as a
source of oppositional politics. This strain of radical historiography owes some-
thing to the Romantic celebration of radical Dissent during the era of the French
Revolution, as well as to the Victorian Nonconformists who lionized the political
radicalism of their forebears.87 It is no coincidence that two of the greatest
British Marxist historians, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, were ‘exposed
by upbringing, residence and study to the Dissenting ambience of the Yorkshire
West Riding’.88 Like denominational historiography, the Marxist tradition
produced a wealth of valuable ­scholarship. Crucially, it set post-Reformation
Dissenters in their social and political contexts, and documented their contri-
bution to a tradition of English political dissent. Yet like denominational
historiography, it was not infrequently lured onto the rocks of strong teleology
and anachronism. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers—millenarian prophets
of England’s Radical Reformation—were refashioned in the image of the modern
social activist.89 Bunyan’s pilgrim became a man burdened by social oppres-
sion rather than sin and guilt.90 A process of historiographical alchemy could
turn the base metal of Puritan piety into the gold of modern political values.91

85 See, for example, W.K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols
(London, 1932–40); S. Brockunier, The Irrepressible Democrat: Roger Williams (New York, 1940);
A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1938); D.M. Wolffe, Milton in the Puritan
Revolution (New York, 1941); Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. D.M. Wolffe (New
York, 1944); The Leveller Tracts, 1647–53, ed. William Haller and G. Davies (New York, 1944).
86 See A.L. Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution
(London, 1970); E.P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law
(Cambridge, 1993); Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century
Controversies (London, 1996), pt IV; Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many Headed
Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA, 2000); John Donoghue,
Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, IL, 2013).
87 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity
(London, 2001); Daniel White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge, 2006);
Raphael Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914’, in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew,
eds, Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), pp. 201–47.
88 Alasdair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication
of Seventeenth-Century History (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 35.
89 Lotte Mulligan, John K. Graham, and Judith Richards, ‘Winstanley: A Case for the Man as
He Said He Was’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 (1977), 57–75.
90 Notably in Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his
Church (Oxford, 1988).
91 The metaphor is taken from C.H. George, ‘Puritanism as History and Historiography’, Past
and Present, 41 (1968), 102. For further warnings against anachronistic readings, see William
Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (London, 1996).
 Introduction21

As Alastair MacLachlan observed, the secular historians of the early and

­mid-twentieth century liberated Puritanism from ‘the tunnel vision of so much
purely denominational history. But the vertical approach was not so much
abandoned as displaced: the overwhelming concern with the end-products of
the Puritan ethic diverted attention from the study of religion itself.’92
For all their tunnel vision, denominational historians did appreciate the
religious preoccupations of their subjects, including their concern with ecclesi-
astical polity. Indeed, in reacting against the confinement of denominational
history, we may lose its insights. In our postmodern moment, averse to binary
thinking and intrigued by hybridity, we are inclined to underplay the sheer
intransigence of many post-Reformation Protestants. In the sixteenth century,
hundreds were burned at the stake rather than renounce their dogmatic con-
victions. In the seventeenth century, thousands accepted imprisonment, often
for many years, for reasons of conscience. When the contributors to this ­volume
discuss religious identities they often describe them as fluid, porous, permeable,
and unstable. Yet at the same time, they find the old denominational categories
indispensable, and they devote much effort to explaining religious divisions.
What remains striking, after the labours of Collinson and other proponents of
horizontal history, is the extraordinary lengths to which con­tem­por­ar­ies could
go to draw lines, erect walls, and forge separate identities. Although the father
of the ‘Brownists’, Robert Browne, would return to the Established Church,
many Separatists proved irreconcilable (and Browne would end up being
excommunicated and sequestered at the end of his life). Militant Dissenters
denounced the Church of England in apocalyptic language as the Second Beast
or the Whore of Babylon. A favourite text was 2 Corinthians 6:17: ‘Wherefore,
come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not
the unclean thing.’
Despite the efforts of reconcilers and compromisers, the seventeenth century
ended with growing polarization between Church and Dissent, and with a set
of sharply delineated denominational groupings. The Association movement
of the 1650s, so often conflated with Richard Baxter’s ecumenical vision,
included many county associations that were ‘predominantly Presbyterian’, and
‘reinvigorated debates over church polity’.93 All eight comprehension bills of
the later Stuart era failed, leaving Presbyterians estranged from the Established
Church, even if they still practised partial or occasional conformity.94 As for
Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Tim Cooper emphasizes that despite the
‘commonality and overlap’ between them, they did not ‘come to agreement’,
partly because ‘the dynamic of religious group identity’ meant that ‘the finest

92 MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England, p. 36.

93 Joel Halcomb, ‘The Association Movement and the Politics of Church Settlement during the
Interregnum’ in Vernon and Powell, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the English Atlantic World,
c. 1635–66.
94 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, pp. 239–46.
22 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

gradations of sameness and difference became critically important’.95 The ‘Happy

Union’ between Presbyterians and Congregationalists foundered in the 1690s
over issues of antinomianism and itinerancy.96 While Congregationalists were
usually willing to accommodate Baptists, many Baptists did not reciprocate;
they placed believers’ baptism ‘at the heart of their theology of church member-
ship’, restricting membership and communion to ‘disciples baptized’.97 Quakers
experienced their own internal conflicts, especially over the Nayler controversy
of the 1650s, the Perrot ‘hat’ dispute in the 1660s, and the Keithian schism of the
1690s, and they zealously maintained their boundaries. In Ireland, despite a
shared Reformed culture and the threatening presence of a Catholic majority,
Protestants were ‘unable . . . to bury their ecclesiastical differences’, and most
worshipped outside the Church of Ireland.98
Rival ecclesiastical identities were created in various ways. The most emphatic
and hostile form of ‘othering’ involved physical coercion. As Jacqueline Rose
observes, ‘The category of Dissent was created by the activity of persecution’.99
The Edwardian, Elizabethan, and Jacobean state burned heretics at the stake,
and a number of Separatists were hanged in the 1590s. The Presbyterians in the
1640s clamoured for heresy to be made a capital crime, but James Nayler and
others were subjected to lesser though still brutal punishments: branding, flog-
ging, and imprisonment. The Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 would have made
anti-Trinitarian teaching a capital offence; secondary errors carried a sentence
of imprisonment, but had it been enforced, this would have led to the gaoling
of Arminians, mortalists, antinomians, Seekers, and Baptists. The incarcer-
ation of Dissenters after the Restoration led to thousands of premature deaths.
Even those who escaped physical punishments were often penalized with fines
or (in the case of clergy) ejection from their parish livings. Elsewhere in early
modern Europe, large-scale persecution had sometimes proved effective in
reconciling or expelling dissidents—in Spain, many Jews became conversos
(though widely suspected of dissimulation), while in France, thousands of
Huguenots returned to the Catholic Church. In England, however, the perse-
cutions of the early Stuart era made Dissent more militant, and the ‘Great
Persecution’ of the Restoration did little to erode the number of Dissenters. Its
failure made it the last time such a policy would be attempted by the English
state. The experience of suffering reinforced Dissenting identities, and the care-
fully curated memory of persecution would shore up these iden­tities through-
out the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Faced by such repression, some

95 See Tim Cooper, ‘Congregationalists’, Chapter 4 in this volume.

96 See C. Gordon Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H.L. Short, and Roger Thomas, eds, The English
Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London, 1968), pp. 101–25.
97 See Joel Halcomb, ‘Congregational Church Books and Denominational Formation in the
English Revolution’, Bunyan Studies, 20 (2016), 58–61.
98 Gribben, ‘Ireland’, Chapter 9 in this volume.
99 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Dissent and the State’, Chapter 14 in this volume.
 Introduction23

Nonconformists chose to go into exile, putting clear blue water (quite literally)
between themselves and the episcopal Church of England.
There were other means of forming distinct denominational identities. In
the second half of the century, there is clear evidence of institutionalization,
what Max Weber called ‘the routinization of charisma’.100 That is most striking
among the most charismatic of the sects, the Quakers, but it can be seen else-
where, not least in a sharper definition of church offices and in the formation of
denominational networks by itinerant preachers, correspondence, regional
and national gatherings: the Presbyterian classis movement, Congregational
conferences and synods, Baptist regional associations in the 1650s and the
1689 national assembly, Quaker monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings. The
Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 was a key moment in the process of sep­ar­
ation, as Dissenters took out licences for conventicles often under de­nom­in­
ation­al names. Presbyterians moved cautiously towards ordaining their own
clergy and meeting at the same time as the parish churches.101 Denominational
identities were firmed up through recordkeeping. Baptist and Congregational
gathered churches kept manuscript ‘church books’, now freshly catalogued and
examined by scholars involved in the Dissenting Experience Project. As Davies,
Dunan-Page, and Halcomb observe, these ‘represented a clear desire to be a
formal, ordered, and respectable religious institution of equal status to the par-
ish church and to consolidate its identity as such’. Church books record the
condemnation of members who had flirted with ‘rival denominations (such as
the national Church or more radical groups, like the Quakers . . .)’. Questions of
membership and communal cohesion ‘came to assume vital importance’.102
The sacraments of baptism and communion functioned as further identity
markers.103 Presbyterians and the New England Congregationalists insisted on
infant baptism, in line with the magisterial Reformation tradition and the
Reformed churches of Europe. In Massachusetts, the Cambridge Platform of
1648 deferred to the doctrinal formulations of the Westminster Confession,
but also specified where New England Congregationalism differed from the
Confession’s assertion of Presbyterian church order. English Congregationalists
went further, taking the momentous step of admitting members who disagreed
with infant baptism alongside members who had their children baptized. General
and Particular Baptists required believers’ baptism as a condition of member­
ship, meaning that baptism was restricted to persons old enough to be deemed
accountable for their own profession of faith. Quakers had no ceremony of

100 Max Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers, ed. S.N. Eisenstadt
(Chicago, IL, 1968), ch. 6.
101 Frank Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence 1672: A Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent
(London, 1908); Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, pp. 237–8.
102 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, ‘Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience
in the Gathered Congregations’, Chapter 21 in this volume.
103 See Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Worship and Sacraments’, Chapter 18 in this volume.
24 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

baptism at all, on the grounds that this was an empty external form. These
­different policies created sharp boundary lines.
The Lord’s Supper, or criteria of admission to it, also served to harden
divisions. While some Presbyterians were willing to practise occasional com-
munion in the parish churches after the Restoration, Congregationalists and
Baptists were not. Many Baptist churches adopted a policy of ‘closed communion’,
admitting only members who had undergone believer’s baptism; this policy
excluded Congregationalists, but also created an internal division with a
minority of ‘open communion’ Baptists.104 New England Congregationalists
became sharply divided over whether or not to baptize the children of baptized
non-communicants; the principle of independency meant that individual
congregations had the flexibility to decide on their local position, but the
decision by the 1662 Synod to endorse the ‘Halfway Covenant’ (allowing
baptism of the children of baptized non-communicants) was hotly contested.
Presbyterian parish clergy often caused division within their parishes in the
1640s and 1650s by their strict admission policies for communion; after the
Restoration, the ejected Presbyterian clergy were extremely reluctant to
administer communion, because to do so was to set up a separate church.
Presbyterians kept one foot in the parishes through the practice of ‘partial’ or
‘occasional’ conformity (including taking communion), but in due course
their own congregations would administer communion in separate churches.
Quakers were set apart from other Dissenters by dispensing with it altogether.
Theological differences consolidated denominational divisions. During the
English Revolution, Presbyterian heresiographers like Thomas Edwards were
especially active in publicizing and stigmatising the ‘heresies’ of the sects, not­
ably the Baptists. As Haykin shows, the Baptists splintered into factions over a
variety of doctrinal issues: open versus closed communion; baptism by immer-
sion versus baptism by affusion; Calvinism versus Arminianism; traditional
Sabbatarianism versus Saturday Sabbatarianism.105 Even as the godly were
ascendant during the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, they were
expending inordinate amounts of time and effort in ‘pursuing denominational
rivalries’, not least in public disputations that pitted Presbyterian against
Baptist, Congregationalist against Quaker, Calvinist against Arminian. As
Bernard Capp demonstrates, England was becoming a ‘fiercely competitive’
religious marketplace.106 And denominational divisions were crystallized in the
confessions of faith adopted by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.
Even those who refused to subscribe to confessions of faith, like Richard Baxter
or (for different reasons) the Quakers, were engaged in incessant theological
controversy. Under Baxter’s influence, Presbyterians and Congregationalists

104 See Haykin, ‘Separatists and Baptists’, Chapter 5 in this volume.

105 Haykin, ‘Separatists and Baptists’, Chapter 5 in this volume.
106 Bernard Capp, ‘The Empowerment of Dissent’, Chapter 15 in this volume.
 Introduction25

began to drift apart on soteriological doctrines of atonement and justification,

with the Presbyterians often following Baxter’s ‘middle way’, while the
Congregationalists adhered more closely to Reformed orthodoxy. The Quakers
broke decisively with the Reformed tradition, disagreeing with other Dissenters
about a raft of doctrines. As for Diggers, Ranters, and Muggletonians, their
dissent from traditional theology went deeper still.
Dress and speech could also function as identity markers. Satirical prints
emphasized the sartorial gulf that separated one variety of English Protestant
from another: episcopal priests and bishops in clerical vestments, Puritan clergy
in plain black gowns, sectarian lay preachers in jerkins and breeches, and Quakers
wearing hats.107 Literary satires, such as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78),
mocked the scriptural speech styles of Dissenters, their affected use of ‘the
language of Canaan’. The Quaker refusal of ‘hat honour’ was another visible
provocation, a challenge to social hierarchy and deference that left them exposed
to physical attack: ‘O! The blows, punchings, beatings and imprisonments that we
underwent’, recalled George Fox in his journal, ‘for not putting off our hats to
men’. Yet along with plain clothing, plain speech, silence, and the testimony
against oaths, the refusal of hat honour served to consolidate the Quaker move-
ment, functioning as a ‘commitment mechanism’ that severed Quakers from
their former lifestyle and wedded them to a new collective identity.108
In the 1650s, Quakers set themselves apart in numerous other ways. They
denounced ‘hireling priests’ and ‘steeplehouses’, interrupted parish services,
dispensed with an ordained ministry, rejected sacraments, quaked, stripped
naked or half-naked as a prophetic sign, claimed miraculous powers, sent out
women prophets, avoided militia duty, and embarked on extraordinary mis-
sionary journeys to awaken Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims to the
light within. It is true that during the later seventeenth century, Quakers curbed
their more outlandish gestures, writing sober treatises and becoming respect-
able magistrates in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Yet while this process made
them less confrontational and more conventional, it also consolidated their
distinct identity through a centralized leadership, monthly, quarterly, and
yearly meetings, separate men and women’s meetings, books of sufferings, and
the ‘peace testimony’. Quakerism had begun as a sect announcing the immi-
nent apocalypse; by 1700, it was beginning to look more like a settled de­nom­
in­ation.109 Of the four main Dissenting traditions, none differentiated itself
more assiduously than the Society of Friends.

107 See John Miller, ed., Religion in the Popular Prints, 1600–1832 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 74–5,
78–9, 82–3, 90–3, 96–7, 100–1, 134–5. I am grateful to Justin Champion for drawing this point to
my attention.
108 Susan Wareham Watkins, ‘Hat Honour, Self-Identity and Commitment in Early Quakerism’,
Quaker History, 103 (2014), 1–16, esp. 8–10. See also Richard Bauman, Let Your Words be Few:
Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge, 1983).
109 For an important reconsideration of this process, see Pullin, Female Friends.
26 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

It would not be entirely misleading to suggest that the four denominations

operated on a sliding scale from Presbyterian to Quaker, mainstream to mar-
ginal, orthodox to heterodox, elitist to populist. Restoration Presbyterians were
by far the largest grouping, the one with greatest support from ordained clergy
as well as from the gentry and aristocracy, the denomination closest to the
establishment. It is no coincidence that after 1660, Presbyterians sought com-
prehension within the Established Church, while other Dissenters sought tol­
er­ation outside it. In later American Protestantism, Richard Niebuhr would
analyse (and bemoan) ‘the social sources of denominationalism’, arguing that
denominations were arranged on an ascending social scale, from sectarian
‘religions of the disinherited’ like Pentecostalism, through the increasingly
respectable Baptists and Methodists, to elite Presbyterians and Episcopalians,
who together had furnished the nation with most of its presidents.110 Such
grad­ations were already apparent in seventeenth-century England.
Of course, such taxonomies and stereotypes can be an unreliable guide. There
were many humble Presbyterians (such as the London woodturner Nehemiah
Wallington), just as there were wealthy Baptist merchants (like William Kiffen)
and Quaker grandees (notably William Penn, son of an ad­miral). Still, in gen-
eral the Presbyterians were closest to the social, political, and ecclesiastical
establishment, the Baptists and Quakers furthest from it. The sliding scale on
the Dissenting spectrum can be observed in relation to women’s public speech
and prophesying: the Presbyterians had important female patrons, but in gen-
eral, female prophecy was discouraged among Presbyterians, more common
among Congregationalists and Baptists, and positively flourishing among the
Quakers (certainly in the 1650s). Moreover, as Keeble observes, ‘Anonymous and
unlicensed publication was commonest among more radical nonconformists,
particularly the Quakers; their incidence steadily decreases through Baptists,
Independents, and Presbyterians as the distance from sep­ar­at­ist dissent decreases’.
So too with personal testimony and spiritual autobiography: it ‘became more
pronounced the further the nonconformist moved from episcopalianism and
Presbyterianism’.111
Naming was another means of differentiation. Contemporaries worked hard
to ‘brand’ the other—to brand was to stigmatize, not to advertise. The Seekers,
who were defined by the belief that there were no true churches left on earth,
provide an ironic exception, because they seem to have named themselves fol-
lowing the example of Roger Williams.112 But groups who actually organized
churches and meetings were more reluctant to adopt a brand name.
‘Independent’, ‘Anabaptist’, and ‘Quaker’ originated as terms of abuse; those
stigmatized with these labels typically disowned them. Independents usually

110 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York, 1929).
111 N.H. Keeble, ‘The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity’, Chapter 16 in this volume.
112 See Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, pp. 237, 388.
 Introduction27

wished to be known as followers of ‘the Congregational way’ (though the more

radical were proud supporters of ‘Independency’). Labelling, whether hostile
or promotional, functioned as another way of demarcating one movement
from another, and sharpening collective identities.
The Baptists offer a particularly interesting case study. The people we call
Baptists never self-identified as such, and they were commonly called
Anabaptists (i.e. re-baptizers), a name that conjured up the fanaticism of sixteenth-
century German sectaries, particularly the millenarian theocracy of Münster
in 1534–35. Only the Quakers labelled them Baptists, presumably in scorn for
their fixation on an external ritual, but also in preference to Anabaptist, a term
that implied that infant baptism was a true baptism.113 Baptists struggled to
name themselves: ‘those CHURCHES which are commonly (though falsly)
called ANABAPTISTS’; ‘seven Congregations or Churches of Christ in
LONDON, which are commonly (but unjustly) called Anabaptists’; the people
‘(falsely) called Ana-Baptists’.114 Ironically, such rejections of the label served to
publicize it, often in capital letters. So Baptists resorted to cumbersome nomen-
clature, calling themselves: ‘congregations, gathered according to the primitive
pattern’, ‘congregations of Christians (baptized upon Profession of their Faith)’,
‘several churches of Christ’, or (most pithily) ‘the baptized churches’.115 The
labels that stuck, however, were the memorable ones: ‘Anabaptist’ or ‘Baptist’.
As Joel Halcomb has argued, the ‘denominating culture’ of the period testi-
fies to a process of ‘denominational formation’.116 By the Restoration era, con­
tem­por­ar­ies were already using the term ‘Denomination’ to refer to different
religious movements identified by a specific name: ‘the denomination of
Quakers’, or ‘Protestant-Dissenters from the Church of England, of what
Denomination Soever’.117 The emergence of this language both relativized and
cemented ecclesiastical differences. ‘Churches’, ‘Christians’, and ‘Dissenters’
existed under different names, disagreeing about matters of real importance
but also recognizing other churches and other Christians under other names.

113 Richard Farnworth, To You that are Called by the Name of Baptists, or the Baptized Churches
(1654). Other Quaker authors who referred to ‘Baptists’ in book titles published between 1654 and
1660 include John Anderdon, John Crook, Joseph Fuce, Dennis Hollister, Alexander Parker,
James Parnell, John Pitman, William Smith, George Whitehead, Thomas Wight, and Humphrey
Wollrich.
114 W.L. Lumpkin, ed., Baptist Confessions of Faith, revised edn (Valley Forge, 1969), pp. 153, 224.
115 The Humble Representation and Vindication of Many of the Messengers, Elders, and Brethren
Belonging to Several of the Baptized Churches in this Nation (1655); Lumpkin, ed., Baptist
Confessions of Faith, pp. 174, 203, 241; Declaration of Several of the People called Anabaptists in and
About the City of London (1659); William Kiffin et al., The Humble Apology of Some Commonly
called Anabaptists (1660).
116 Halcomb, ‘Congregational Church Books and Denominational Formation’, 51, 68–9.
117 Amongst numerous examples, see Thomas Salthouse, To all the Christian Congregations of
the Peculiar People of God now Reproached and Persecuted by the Name, and under the
Denomination of Quakers (1662); A Letter of Religion to the Protestant-Dissenters from the Church
of England, of What Denomination Soever (1675).
28 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Yet names also served to consolidate identities. When applying for licences in
1672, most Dissenting ministers opted for (or were assigned) a clear-cut denom-
inational label: Presbyterian, Congregational, Anabaptist. The second half of the
seventeenth century witnessed the gradual crystallization of de­nom­in­ations.
The process was quicker for sectarian groups like the Baptists and Quakers than
for the Presbyterians. For them, as Mark Goldie notes, ‘Denominationalisation
was a slow and reluctant process, and its decisive moment was neither 1662 nor
1672, but 1689’.118
The erection of a boundary between Church and Dissent after 1660 was
reflected in the dramatic emergence of the term ‘Dissenters’. In the Westminster
Assembly, the ‘dissenting brethren’ had been marked out from the Presbyterian
majority, but it was the Restoration settlement, or its failure, that gave a new
prominence to ‘Dissenters’, a term that gradually superseded ‘Nonconformity’.119
An online search for the term in book titles turns up over 200 records, every
one of them after 1660.120 We find it used by Anglicans and Nonconformists
alike, by those who demand the suppression of ‘Dissenters’ as well as by tol­er­
ationists. ‘Dissenter’ was a stigma, but also a badge of honour.
The convention in this series is to capitalize denominational and party labels:
Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker, Puritan, Separatist, Dissenter.
That does run against a typographical trend among publishers, as well as a
trend in Tudor and Stuart historiography, where it has become increasingly
common to write of protestants, puritans, presbyterians, baptists, and quakers,
with the lower case serving as a warning light to indicate the problematic nature
of religious labels. Yet even the most zealous downsizer allows some names to
survive the cull (Independents being an obvious example), and historians who
follow the early modern convention of capitalizing party names are usually
fully alert to the pitfalls of labelling.121 In any case, this volume cannot claim
complete consistency. We follow standard practice by using the lower case for
conformists and episcopalians (though not for Scottish and American
Episcopalians), and we refer to nonconformists and dissenters whose noncon-
formity and dissent was largely or partly contained within the Established
Church.
Anyone who employs denominational names must keep their wits about
them, and alert readers to the risk of calcifying religious identities that were
often evolving rather than fixed, and hybrid rather than pure. Peter Marshall
warns that to use a label ‘is implicitly to endorse, sympathetically or otherwise,

118 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, p. 238.

119 See N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987), pp. 41–4.
120 Early English Books Online (EEBO).
121 See for example Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism; and Goldie, Roger Morrice
and the Puritan Whigs, where denominational terms are capitalized. The two volumes differ over
‘puritans’ (Milton) and ‘Puritans’ (Goldie).
 Introduction29

a particular interpretation of Church history’.122 Yet as the chapters in this

­volume indicate, even the most detached historian finds labels indispensable.
Names function as signposts in a confusing ecclesiastical landscape, providing
basic orientation. Some (such as Puritan or Dissenter) are very non-specific,
rather like a road sign to ‘The North’. Others give us much more precise direc-
tion: Particular Baptist, Quaker. Even these names disguise a host of com­plex­
ities, but so does any party label; they should be taken as a starting point, not as
an answer to all our questions. They are no substitute for studies of individual
persons and groups, in all their idiosyncrasy and complexity. The reader of this
volume will encounter protagonists who are difficult to pigeonhole, including
eminent figures such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, and John Milton,
whose religious identities have been the subject of much debate.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF DISSENT

It is precisely the complexity and richness of Dissent that keeps scholars busy.
In the four decades since Michael Watts published The Dissenters (1978), much
historiographical water has passed under the bridge. Above all, the digital revo-
lution has transformed access to printed sources, especially through Early
English Books Online (EEBO). Yet Watts’ monograph still stands as the best
single-author overview of early Dissenting history. Such was its success, and
such is the scale of the subject and the scholarship it has generated, that no one
has attempted to write a comparable synthesis in the meantime.123 Yet the con-
tributors to this volume are able to capitalize on some major advances. Our
understanding of Dissent has been transformed by the work of hundreds of
historians and literary scholars, published in thousands of articles and books.
Recent scholarship has changed our view of Anglicanism and Puritanism,
Church and Dissent, but it has also shed light on ‘dark corners of the land’—
aspects of Dissent whose existence was known to Watts, but that were barely
explored. The history of Protestant Dissent is not what it used to be, but it is
still thriving.
Some key advances in the study of Dissent have come in the form of major
scholarly editions. Polly Ha has recovered and edited the manuscript exchanges
that surrounded the formation of Henry Jacob’s ‘Independent’ church in
1616, texts that illuminate the mutually defining relationship between early

122 Peter Marshall, ‘The Naming of Protestant England’, Past and Present, 214 (2012), 87–128.
123 See, however, Michael Winship, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and
America (New Haven, CT, 2019), which traces the rise and fall of Puritan political hegemony in
England and New England, and the fragmentation of Puritanism into various Dissenting
denominations.
30 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Congregational ecclesiology and its Presbyterian critics.124 Our previously

partial picture of the Westminster Assembly (and hence of Presbyterians and
Congregationalists) has now been filled out by the first complete edition of
its minutes and papers, transcribed and edited by Chad van Dixhoorn.125
A similar impact has been made on our understanding of Restoration Dissent
by The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, edited by a team led by Mark Goldie.126
The correspondence of Richard Baxter has been calendared, and there are
plans for a complete edition; meanwhile, his memoir, the Reliquiæ Baxterianæ
(1696) has been published in a five-volume scholarly edition.127 A major new
edition of the writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell is in preparation
under the general editorship of John Morrill. Historians of New England
have produced critical editions of the correspondence of John Cotton and
Roger Williams.128 The writings of canonical dissenting writers such as
Milton, Bunyan, and Marvell have been freshly edited,129 and there are now
scholarly editions of the writings of more recently celebrated authors such as
Gerard Winstanley and Lucy Hutchinson.130
The Lucy Hutchinson project is emblematic of the uncovering of the lives
and texts of Dissenting women. Watts’ book was dominated by the male leader-
ship of Dissent. Twenty years before, in 1958, a young Keith Thomas had pub-
lished a groundbreaking article on ‘women in the civil war sects’,131 and Watts’
section on the English Revolution bore the title: ‘When Women Preach and
Cobblers Pray’. He wrote briefly about Anne Hutchinson, Katherine Chidley,
Mrs Attaway, and Margaret Fell, though not about Anna Trapnell or Lucy
Hutchinson. The history of Dissent had been a largely male preserve, dom­in­
ated by the researches of male clergy; since the 1980s, it has been transformed
by pioneering work on female piety, female patronage, women prophets, clergy
wives, women’s scribal and printed publications, and the intellectual culture of

124 The Puritans on Independence: The First Examination, Defence and Second Examination, ed.
Polly Ha with Jonathan Moore and Edda Frankot (Oxford, 2018).
125 The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, ed. Van Dixhoorn.
126 The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, gen. ed. Mark Goldie, 7 vols (Woodbridge, 2007–9).
127 Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N.H. Keeble and Geoffrey Nuttall,
2 vols (Oxford, 1991); Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, gen. ed. N.H. Keeble, 5 vols (Oxford, 2020);
Correspondence of Richard Baxter, gen. eds Alison Searle and Johanna Harris, 9 vols (Oxford, in
preparation).
128 The Correspondence of John Cotton, ed. Serjeant Bush Jr (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); The
Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn LaFantasie, 2 vols (Hanover, NH, 1998).
129 The Complete Works of John Milton, gen. eds Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell,
11 vols (Oxford, 2008); Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, eds Annabel Patterson et al., 2 vols (New
Haven, CT, 2003); The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols
(Oxford, 1976–94).
130 The Complete Works of Gerard Winstanley, eds Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David
Loewenstein, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009); The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, gen. ed. David Norbrook,
4 vols (Oxford, 2011–). See also ‘Bibliography of Lucy Hutchinson’, https://earlymodern.web.ox.
ac.uk/bibliography-lucy-hutchinson.
131 Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62.
 Introduction31

Puritan women. Alongside this wealth of monographs and articles, the writings
of seventeenth-century dissenting women have been anthologized and edited.
Much of this new research is summarized by Rachel Adock.132
Watts did not have the benefit of the great wave of literary study of dissent
heralded by Keeble’s book, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, published in
1987. Of course, Bunyanists, Miltonists, and Marvellians had already produced
important books and editions, and students of American literature had redis-
covered the verse of the Puritan poets, Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. But
the past generation has seen a dramatic expansion of literary scholarship on
dissent, epitomized in Keeble’s chapter on ‘Nonconformist Print Culture’. As
Mark Goldie has noted:
Older, denominational historiography instinctively looked to seventeenth-century
‘divines’ for sources of Puritan ‘literature’ and discovered spiritual ‘classics’. . . But
now the Puritan poets and satirists have come into their own: Robert Wild,
Benjamin Keach, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and above all Marvell.133
Here George Southcombe’s three-volume edition of English Nonconformist
Poetry, 1660–1700 is a significant landmark, expanding the canon of dissenting
literature beyond the familiar triumvirate of Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan.134
Another literary scholar, Nigel Smith, has edited a wide range of dissenting
writing, including Ranter pamphlets, the Journal of George Fox, and the poems
of Andrew Marvell.135 Sermons too have come into their own as an object of
serious study, though as Ann Hughes and Mark Goldie have noted, we have
only just begun to exploit the ‘immense surviving volume of sermon notes’.136
A further ‘dark corner’ now richly illuminated is the experience (and role) of
lay Dissenters. We have important studies of how the Puritan gentry sustained
the ejected ministers after the Restoration, and how politicians sympathetic to
Dissent ‘wielded considerable clout in moving the levers of political, cultural,
economic, and social power’.137 Social historians have recreated the everyday
lives of ‘ordinary’ Dissenters in local communities across England and Wales.
Watts did not ignore the Dissenting laity, and he utilized church books as well
as the first wave of doctoral theses on the local and county history of dissent.
Yet here again, he was poorly served compared by today’s standards. Margaret

132 Rachel Adcock, ‘Women and Gender’, Chapter 20 in this volume.

133 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, p. xxxiii.
134 George Southcombe, English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700, 3 vols (London, 2012).
135 A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century, ed. Nigel Smith (London, 1983);
George Fox, Journal, ed. Nigel Smith (London, 1998); The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel
Smith (rev. edn, Harlow, 2007).
136 Ann Hughes, ‘Preachers and Hearers in Revolutionary London: Contextualising
Parliamentary Fast Sermons’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 24 (2014), 57–77; Goldie,
Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, p. xxxv.
137 J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry Besieged, 1650–1700 (London, 1993); Goldie, Roger Morrice
and the Puritan Whigs, p. xxxvi.
32 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Spufford and her students have rediscovered the lost world of rural Dissenters,
while others have reconnected the textual with the social worlds of Quakers
and other Dissenters.138 Much of that scholarship has argued that Dissenters
were surprisingly well integrated into local society. As Bill Sheils concludes in
his chapter on dissent in the parish, ‘Parochial dissent in the years before 1640
was a marginal, but not a socially marginalized, phenomenon, which attracted
some locally important supporters’; after 1660 Dissent became ‘a ubiquitous
feature of the religious landscape’.139
The ‘lived religion’ of Dissenting congregations is also being recovered by
the Dissenting Experience Project, which has already produced a remarkable
‘Inventory of Puritan and Dissenting Records from 1640–1714’: ‘a comprehen-
sive, reliable and detailed list of every church book, register, and account book
from a Presbyterian, Congregational, or Baptist church in England, Wales, and
Ireland which either dates from or copies information relating to the period
1640–1714’. Some of these documents were transcribed, edited, and published
by earlier generations of denominational historians, but only now do we have a
thorough survey. The findings of the project are summarized by the authors
themselves in the final chapter of this volume, on the lay experience.140
The reconstruction of popular religion has gone alongside a renaissance
in the study of Dissenting clergy and their writings. This reflects a wider
retrieval of the tradition of Reformed theology, associated especially with the
work of Richard Muller.141 The godly clergy—Presbyterian, Congregational,
and Baptist—have been the subject of numerous monographs, in which their
thought has been patiently dissected and contextualized. The voluminous writ-
ings of Richard Baxter, John Owen, and John Bunyan continue to attract the
attention of a steady stream of doctoral students and other scholars working in
history, religion, and literary studies.142 The Dissenting Academies Project, led
by Isabel Rivers, is reconstructing the educational regime that Dissenters began
to set up in the Restoration era, including an online database with information
on individual academies, tutors, and students.143

138 Margaret Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters (Cambridge, 1995); Adrian Davies,
The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000); Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early
Quakers (Cambridge, 2005).
139 W.J. Sheils, ‘Dissent in the Parishes’, Chapter 13 in this volume.
140 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, ‘Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience
in the Gathered Churches’, Chapter 21 in this volume; and Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb,
eds, Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century
England (Oxford, 2019).
141 Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003).
142 See Kelly M. Kapic and Mark Jones, eds, The Ashgate Companion to John Owen’s Theology
(Farnham, 2012); Mark Burden, ‘John Owen: Learned Puritan’, https://earlymodern.web.ox.ac.
uk/john-owen-learned-puritan; Michael Davies and W.R. Owens, eds, The Oxford Handbook of
John Bunyan (Oxford, 2018).
143 Isabel Rivers, ed., and Mark Burden, assistant ed., A History of the Dissenting Academies
in the British Isles, 1660–1860 (Cambridge, forthcoming). http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.
co.uk/research/the-dissenting-academies-project/.
 Introduction33

Finally, recent historiography has expanded our geographical horizons. The

structure of this volume, and indeed, of the Oxford series, reflects the impact of
the new British history, Atlantic history, and the history of diaspora and glo-
balization. In Andrew Murphy and Adrian Weimer’s account of ‘colonial
Quakerism’, we see how the Quakers migrated and acclimatized to the very
different conditions of New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake and
the Caribbean. The history of Dissent is now written with ‘the English Atlantic’
in mind, and is increasingly alert to the importance of exile, migration, return,
and international networks sustained through travel and correspondence. Its
historians are also exploring the cross-cultural encounter between dissenting
Protestants, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans. Recent work elucidates
the ways in which New England Congregationalists and Quakers in the
Caribbean were complicit in the construction of ‘Christian slavery’, while also
noting the first glimmerings of an antislavery critique.144 John Eliot’s ‘mission
to the Indians’ has received renewed attention, but so have the native converts
who assisted, modified, and propagated Reformed Christianity.145 We do well
to remember that among seventeenth-century Dissenters there were
Algonquian Congregationalists and African Quakers.

DIFFUSION AND MIGRATION

This fits with the governing motif of the Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting
Traditions, one that differs markedly from the narrative arc of the trilogy by
Michael Watts. Despite its Whiggish accent on the liberation of dissent and the
eventual triumph of liberty of conscience, Watts’ work on The Dissenters had a
poignancy that undercut its triumphalism. The three volumes were structured
around a rise and fall model of the history of English and Welsh Dissent.
Volume I recounted the rise: from the tiny, persecuted Separatists of Tudor
England, to the triumphs of the English Revolution, the sufferings of the
Restoration, and the revival of Dissent in the eighteenth-century evangelical
awakening. Volume II documented the heyday of evangelical nonconformity
from the 1790s to the 1840s, when Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists
surged in spectacular style. Volume III showed how amidst the success of

144 Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New
York, 2016); Katherine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic
World (Philadelphia, PA, 2018); Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the
Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT, 2012).
145 Richard Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA,
1999); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among
the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (Cambridge, 2005); Edward Andrews,
Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA,
2013), ch. 1.
34 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Dissent in the later nineteenth century, there were portents of its imminent
decline. Ironically, Protestant Dissent was eroded by forces the Dissenting
ethos had helped to unleash: individualism, liberalism, the nonconformist
conscience, and the secularization of the state. By the 1970s, the Dissenting
denominations were a shadow of their former selves. Although almost every
town centre in England and Wales boasts impressive chapel buildings, the
Presbyterians and Congregationalists (now joined in the United Reformed
Church) and the Methodists, are in steep decline. In English villages, once
thriving Primitive Methodist chapels have been converted into private homes,
while in English towns, Nonconformist buildings now serve as furniture ware-
houses or as mosques, temples, and gurdwaras. Among younger Christians,
denominational identities have faded with the rise of charismatic and ‘nonde­
nom­in­ation­al’ churches. The history of English Protestant Dissent can be writ-
ten as a declension narrative.
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, however, has a very
different narrative structure—not rise and fall, but diffusion and migration.
In this model, Protestant Dissenting traditions originating in England are on
the move, first to Wales and Ireland, and then to the American colonies and
beyond. (In the case of Presbyterianism, Scotland rather than England was the
point of origin for Presbyterian minorities in Ireland, America, and elsewhere.)
The organization of this first volume in the series reflects that governing motif:
Part I traces the emergence of Dissenting denominational traditions within
England, and Part II explores how traditions of Protestant Dissent developed
elsewhere in the British Atlantic world. Later volumes in the series show how
traditions of Protestant Dissent were transmitted beyond the West, being
reconfigured in Africa, Asia, and South America. There are now more
Presbyterians in South Korea than in Scotland, more Baptists in Brazil than in
Britain, more Methodists in Zambia than in Wales. While denominational
statistics are imprecise, it has been estimated that there are around seventy-five
Reformed or Presbyterian Christians worldwide, at least fifty million Baptists,
and comparable numbers of Methodists.146 Given the Methodist roots of
Pentecostalism, the fastest growing religious movement of the past century,
one can even argue that hundreds of millions of non-Anglican Protestants can
trace their genealogy back to early modern Britain. Moreover, Protestant
Dissent is forever remaking itself, in different contexts. As the cover text for
Volume V puts it: ‘While in Europe dissent was often against the religious state,
dissent in a globalizing world could redefine itself against colonialism or other
secular and religious monopolies.’
This raises difficult questions about what constitutes a tradition, and what
connection there is between twenty-first-century global Protestantism and

146 See Mark Hutchinson, ed., The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: Volume V:
The Twentieth Century—Themes and Variations in a Global Context (Oxford, 2018), pp. 20–1.
 Introduction35

early modern English Dissent. Does global Protestantism run on software

designed in seventeenth-century England? Here we are in danger of leaving
horizontal history far behind, drawing tenuous lines of connection between
past and present, and falling prey to the sins of anachronism and teleology. Yet
the question of legacy is worth addressing, if only briefly.
One way of doing so is by considering textual transmission. Some seventeenth-
century texts have enjoyed an extraordinarily long shelf life among Dissenters.
One thinks of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster
Shorter Catechism, crafted for the national Churches of England and Scotland,
but eventually becoming the symbols of Presbyterian Dissenters—in England,
Wales, Ireland, Scotland, America, Canada, Australia, and South Korea.
Along the way, they have been adapted by Congregationalists and Baptists, and
hotly debated among Presbyterians in a series of subscription controversies
in England, Ireland, Scotland, and North America. In 1789, American
Presbyterians doctored certain clauses in the Confession that seemed to teach
‘persecuting principles’, revising the document in line with the sep­ar­ation of
church and state. Works by individual theologians have also travelled far—
above all, the writings of those two pillars of Restoration Dissent, John Owen
and Richard Baxter. Yet no Dissenting text has been more widely disseminated
than Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a book translated into 200 languages, mostly
non-European.147
But it wasn’t just texts that outlived seventeenth-century authors, it was also
practices. Take, for example, believers’ baptism by immersion. During the
Reformation era, the ‘Anabaptist’ critique of infant baptism was flatly repudi-
ated by Lutherans and Calvinists. In Elizabethan England, almost everyone was
baptized soon after birth into the national Church. Yet something unprece-
dented happened over the course of the seventeenth century. Growing numbers
of Puritan Dissenters began to have grave doubts about infant baptism—John
Milton, John Bunyan, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Lawrence (President of
Cromwell’s Council of State), Henry Dunster (President of Harvard College),
even (for a while) the young Richard Baxter. Baptist congregations flourished.
Oliver Cromwell took it upon himself to defend them from persecution, and
English Congregationalists accommodated members with baptistic beliefs.
Baptists gained a foothold within English Protestantism, establishing their
legitimacy in a way that had eluded their continental cousins, partly by creating
a hybrid form of Protestant identity. This foundational development (facilitated
by the English Revolution), was the prerequisite for the Baptists’ later growth
and missionary expansion, in Britain, America, and overseas. If we want to
explain the curious fact that about half of global Protestant congregations prac-
tise believers’ (rather than infant) baptism, and typically do so by complete

147 See Isabel Hofmeyer’s pioneering work, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of
Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
36 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

immersion (rather than sprinkling or pouring water), we have to consider the

impact of British and American Baptists, who trace their origins to the seven-
teenth century.148
Third, Dissent left an institutional legacy. While Seekers, Diggers, Ranters,
and Fifth Monarchists were short-lived movements, the Muggletonians sur-
vived as a tiny sect for more than three centuries, only dying out in 1979, on the
death of their last remaining member.149 The four major denominational
tra­di­
tions that emerged from the English Revolution—Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—were of far greater consequence,
though they would have a chequered history in England itself. Presbyterians,
who started out the largest, would be one of the smaller denominations by the
mid-nineteenth century. Quakers, who never amounted to much numerically,
had a cultural impact out of all proportion to their size, not least on the anti-
slavery movement.150 Congregationalists and Baptists would grow exponen-
tially with the upsurge of evangelicalism in the long nineteenth century. All
four traditions would flourish in North America: Congregationalists forming
the establishment in New England, Presbyterians and Quakers predominating
in the Middle Colonies, and Baptists eventually overtaking the Methodists to
become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States (albeit one
divided along racial and sectional lines). The ongoing study of Tudor and Stuart
Dissent owes much to the persistence and diffusion of these traditions. Their
longevity continues to spark curiosity about their origins.
Finally, Dissent played an important role in legitimizing religious diversity
and valorizing individual conscience. By their obdurate refusal to conform,
Dissenters contributed to the demise of religious uniformity and the rise of
denominational pluralism. For most, this was an unintended outcome, not the
original plan. The Puritans who became Dissenters had fought hard to seize
control of the ship of state. They sought godly rule, not a religious marketplace
where individual consumers were free to choose their own religion.151 Yet it
was radical Protestant minorities (and their establishment protectors) who devel-
oped some of the seminal intellectual defences of religious freedom, and forged
the slogans that would resonate down through the eighteenth and nineteenth
century: ‘civil and religious liberty’, ‘liberty of conscience is a natural right’.152

148 See John Coffey, ‘From Marginal to Mainstream: How Anabaptists became Baptists’, in
Douglas Weaver, ed., Mirrors and Microscopes: Historical Perceptions of Baptists (Milton Keynes,
2015), pp. 1–24.
149 William Lamont, Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652–1979 (Farnham, 2006).
150 See G.M. Ditchfield, ‘Abolitionism and the Social Conscience’, in Andrew Thompson, ed.,
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: Volume II: The Long Eighteenth Century,
c. 1689–c. 1828 (Oxford, 2018), ch. 14.
151 See the classic work by William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–1660
(London, 1969).
152 See Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell
(Oxford, 2012), chs 3 and 8.
 Introduction37

It was the founder of England’s first Baptist church, Thomas Helwys, who
insisted that each individual should enjoy ‘freedome of religion’ to ‘chuse their
religion themselves’. ‘Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever’, he
wrote, ‘it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure’.153
It was the Levellers and other radical parliamentarians, drawing support from
Baptist and sectarian congregations, who sought a constitutional ban on reli-
gious coercion in an Agreement of the People.154 Although Puritan exiles created
their own system of religious uniformity in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it
was the New England Dissenter Roger Williams who founded Rhode Island on
a principle of separating church and state, and the Quaker William Penn who
wrote religious pluralism into the constitution of Pennsylvania.155 In the
eighteenth century, liberty of private judgement would become a core principle
of Protestant Dissent, articulated by Presbyterians as well as Quakers.156 Claims
about the rights of conscience that had once been the preserve of the sectarian
fringes of English Protestantism, became conventional wisdom, given an
authoritative voice by the heterodox Anglican intellectual, John Locke.157
Here again, we see that the boundary between margin and mainstream,
Dissent and Establishment is a porous one. Protestant Dissenting traditions
have enjoyed disproportionate cultural influence across the Anglophone world,
and were dispersed around the globe by generations of Protestant missionaries
and indigenous evangelists. To make sense of the religiously inflected cultures
of the English-speaking world, and of late modern global Protestantism, we
need to understand the rise and development of post-Reformation Dissent.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Bingham, Matthew, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution
(Oxford, 2019).
Bolam, C. Gordon, Goring, Jeremy, Short, H.L., and Thomas, Roger, eds, The English
Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London, 1968).

153 Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (1612), pp. 46, 69; Helwys,
Objections Answered by Way of a Dialogue (1615), p. 30.
154 See Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution
(Manchester, 2013), ch. 4. On the Levellers’ sectarian and Dissenting milieu, see Gary De Krey,
Following the Levellers, 2 vols (London, 2017–18).
155 See The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State
Relations in the American Founding, eds Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis,
IN, 2009), pp. 42–6, 115–19, 146–55.
156 See John Coffey, ‘Between Reformation and Enlightenment: Presbyterian Clergy, Religious
Liberty and Intellectual Change’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó’hAnnracháin, eds, Insular
Christianity: Alternative Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1550–c.1750 (Manchester),
ch. 13.
157 See Brian Tierney, ‘Religious Rights: An Historical Perspective’, in John Witte, ed., Religious
Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives (The Hague, 1996), pp. 17–45.
38 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Bremer, Francis J., The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to
Edwards, rev. edn (Hanover, NH, 1995).
Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588–1689 (Harlow,
2000).
Collinson, Patrick ‘Towards a Broader History of the Early Dissenting Tradition’, in
Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody, eds, The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for
Leland H. Carlson (Athens, OH, 1975), pp. 3–38, reprinted in Collinson, Godly People:
Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 527–62.
Como, David, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018).
Cooper, Tim, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity
(Farnham, 2011).
Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993).
Davies, Adrian, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000).
Davies, Michael, and Owens, W.R., eds, The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford,
2018).
Goldie, Mark, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2016).
Gunther, Karl, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590
(Cambridge, 2014), ch. 1.
Jones, R. Tudor with Long, Arthur and Moore, Rosemary, eds, Protestant Nonconformist
Texts: Volume I: 1550–1700 (Aldershot, 2007; Eugene, OR, 2015).
Keeble, N.H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Leicester, 1987).
Keeble, N.H., ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014).
McGregor, J.F. and Reay, Barry, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford,
1984).
Milton, Anthony, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume I: Reformation and
Identity, c. 1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017).
Morgan, D. Densil, Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales:
Volume I: From Reformation to Revival, 1588–1760 (Cardiff, 2018).
Murphy, Andrew R., William Penn: A Life (New York, 2018).
Nuttall, Geoffrey and Chadwick, Owen, eds, From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962
(London, 1962).
Sowerby, Scott, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution
(Cambridge, MA, 2013).
Spufford, Margaret, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters (Cambridge, 1995).
Steven, Ralph, Protestant Pluralism: The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720
(Woodbridge, 2018).
Vernon, Elliot and Powell, Hunter, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the English Atlantic
World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester, 2020).
Watts, Michael, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford,
1978).
Winship, Michael, Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America
(New Haven, CT, 2019).
 Part I
Traditions Within England
 1

Presbyterianism in Elizabethan
and Early Stuart England
Polly Ha

English Presbyterians denied their status as dissenters. In their eyes, it was the
officially established Church of England that dissented from mainstream
Protestantism. Devising a middle way between conservatives and reformists,
the Elizabethan Church adopted central Protestant tenets whilst retaining
an episcopal hierarchy and the outward ceremony of traditional religion. This
curious concoction, the Presbyterians argued, departed from Continental
Reformation, the apostolic tradition, and more fundamentally, from the
­principles of church government and worship prescribed by the Bible. Yet,
the Church of England was not only marked by compromise in its external
form. It was also characterized by via media more generally in its religious
policy. For the Act of Uniformity merely required outward conformity. This
leniency initially worked in the favour of zealous Protestants, but it disagreed
with their temper.1
The Queen’s supremacy over the Church of England was also problematic.
Posing a threat to royal supremacy, the Presbyterians denied that church
­government was an indifferent matter left to the civil magistrate to decide.2
They insisted that rules governing the household of God must only be deter-
mined by Scripture, the divinely instituted household guide.3 That model

1 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 29–44. For the
English Presbyterians’ historical method and confessionalism see Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism,
1590–1640 (Palo Alto, CA, 2011), pp. 80–95.
2 Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the
Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985), and Peter Lake, Anglicans
and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London,
1988), ch. 4.
3 As Dudley Fenner put it, ‘The Churche of God is the house of God, and therefore ought to bee
directed in all thinges, according to the order prescribed by the Housholder himselfe.’ A Briefe and
Plaine Declaration (London, 1584), p. ii. See also Walter Travers, A Fvll and Plaine Declaration of
Ecclesiastical Discipline (Middleburg, 1617), pp. 3–9.

Polly Ha, Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions,
Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0002
42 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

c­ onsisted of equality among ministers and the local election of lay elders who
assisted in overseeing the church and administering discipline. Such ecclesias-
tical jurisdiction extended through a hierarchy of ecclesiastical bodies ranging
from the local consistory and the provincial classis to the national synod and
ecu­men­ic­al council. The danger of this ecclesiastical republicanism, alleged
their adversaries, was its threat to the monarchy by application to the state.4
According to the Presbyterians, their aim was simply to complete Protestant
reform in England. Indeed, their task of applying a reformed ecclesiastical
model to the peculiar circumstances of the English Reformation would shape
the nature of Presbyterianism as it emerged publically during the reign of
Elizabeth I. It would drive Presbyterians in early Stuart England as they
­con­tinued to agitate for reform after their formal suppression. It also ensured
that Presbyterianism would exercise a wider influence on religious and political
culture in proportion to its size.

ORIGINS

The impulse to pursue further reform in England has long been associated with
Elizabethan Puritan-Presbyterians. But it was neither Presbyterian nor even
Puritan-specific. There were signs, for instance, of such efforts stretching back
to reformists under Edward VI. According to the Presbyterians, they were
­simply carrying out the Edwardian Reformation to its logical conclusions.
Some invoked Henrician discontents to ground their anti-ceremonial and
­anti-clerical sentiments.5 Notwithstanding the peculiar nature of the Queen’s
religion, the character of the national Church was still up for negotiation.
Fleeing the restoration of Catholic worship under the reign of Mary I, hundreds
of English Protestants had joined the international movement of Protestant
refugees dotted throughout Europe at Reformed centres in Emden, the Rhineland
and the Swiss cities. It was therefore at the height of Marian persecution that
some English Protestants, especially those in Geneva, first cut their teeth on a
full-blooded Presbyterian church order. And it was to Geneva, the Rhineland,
and the Netherlands, that English Presbyterians later returned when placed
under pressure to conform to the episcopal order.6
Sceptical of the Elizabethan Settlement, the more radical of the Reformed
initially chose to remain in exile. Among them was William Whittingham, the
English translator of the Geneva Bible. Others hesitated to accept ecclesiastical

4 Peter Lake, ‘Presbyterianism, the Idea of a National Church and the Argument from Divine
Right’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds, Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth
Century England (London, 1987), p. 197.
5 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 7.
6 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 45–55.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 43

preferment upon their return to England. But those who took up episcopal
appointment were not necessarily predisposed to a conservative order. As
­former exiles with first-hand experience of Reformed Protestant practices,
many of these prominent churchmen shared in the reformist zeal and intended
to sway the church from within. Among the progressive bishops were Edmund
Grindal of London and later of York and Canterbury, who was a disciple of
Martin Bucer, Calvin’s own ecclesiastical mentor. Others on this list include
Robert Horne of Winchester, John Parkhurst of Norwich, James Pilkington of
Durham, and Edwin Sandys of Worcester.7
No surprise when clerics balked at adorning themselves in the ceremonial
dress prescribed in the Prayer Book. Many refused outright to wear the surplice
on the grounds that it was a ‘vestige of popery’ that their consciences ­dis­allowed.
The scale of their defiance is indicated by the Queen’s order to enforce uniformity
in 1565, which led to the suspension of thirty-seven ministers in London alone.
The naturalist and religious controversialist William Turner reportedly trained
his dog to ‘leap up and snatch the square caps from the heads of conforming
clerics’.8 Strong sentiments against the clerical garb were especially expressed
by the laity. As Patrick Collinson put it, ‘the scandal of the “popish rag” was
felt more strongly by the godly than by their ministers’.9 It would of course
be mistaken to identify such initial stirrings and zealous Protestants as
­proto-Presbyterian. Eventually all (but three) of the aged ex­patri­ates came to
terms with the church as established by law. And reformed-minded prelates
would equally find a home in the early Stuart Church.
What the initial rumbles over the rubric anticipated was a younger gen­er­ation
of reformers who would rise to take up the cudgels. These reformists were led
by scholars, bred at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the nursery
­gardens of reform. Uproar in the universities had already ensued over the
­controversial clerical dress in the mid-1560s, with members of St John’s
College, Cambridge, refusing to wear the surplice in chapel. It was allegedly at
Thomas Cartwright’s instigation that all but three members of Trinity College,
Cambridge, appeared at chapel without their surplices in the late 1560s.10
Cartwright and Walter Travers made their first public appearances when
selected to deliver orations before the Queen on her royal visit to Cambridge in
1564. With Cartwright rising as the head, and Travers as the neck, of the
Presbyterian movement, these two intellectual leaders took centre stage in the
theological controversies that stormed throughout the late Tudor period.11
In addition to gaining traction among learned divines, reform quickly drew
strength through a network of powerful lay patrons. That network first became

7 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 61–3.

8 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 73.
9 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 94.
10 A.F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1925), p. 16.
11 Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain (London, 1837), III, p. 26.
44 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

visible during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and it was later vital to
­furthering the Presbyterian cause.12 For a class of the country gentry had been
recruited to the cause of Protestant reform, including Francis Russel, Earl of
Bedford, Sir Francis Knollys, the Queen’s cousin by marriage, Sir Anthony
Cook, and Sir Nicholas Bacon. By sending their sons to the universities, they
were ensuring that a new generation of godly patrons would be steeped in
Reformed principles by their Puritan tutors. Above all, the early reformists and
later Presbyterians, including Cartwright and Travers, shared the patronage of
the two most powerful men in England: Elizabeth’s favourite, the Earl of
Leicester, and her chief adviser, William Cecil, later Lord Burghley.13
Early Elizabethan religious disputes are further instructional by the essential
questions they raised. Questions which the Presbyterians later contested that
would remain unresolved even after their formal suppression. What was the
nature of ecclesiastical authority? What were the respective roles of the clergy
and the laity in the church? Should Scripture or the prince determine ‘indifferent
matters’? Could the liberty of conscience be reconciled with godly order and
uniformity? All these matters were thrown up for discussion, but no sooner
suppressed from public disputation by the crown. Yet, it is also here in these
early debates that we hear the language of eradicating Roman remnants at its
‘root’. This was a language rehearsed by Puritans in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. It was a language which held a prominent future in the
later ‘root and branch’ campaign, which successfully abolished episcopacy
(even if only temporarily) in the mid-seventeenth century. It was a language
that narrowed the gap between moderate reform of abuses and full-scale
reform of the church.14

ELIZABETHAN PRESBY TERIANISM

Presbyterianism is known to have injected precept into the pragmatism of early

nonconformity. To be sure, Presbyterianism proposed to replace the episcopal
order with a systemized theology of the church that was as rigorously prin­cipled
as it was practical. However, there is a risk in overlooking the radical theological
strands of anticlericalism that surfaced before the public emergence of a
reformed alternative in England. William Turner, who played a central role in
the vestiarian controversy, articulated many of the principles that would

12 For the continuity of puritan patronage from Elizabethan to early Stuart England, see
Jacqueline Eales, ‘A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642’, in Christopher
Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke,
1996), pp. 184–209.
13 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 52–5.
14 Ha, English Presbyterianism, pp. 27–36.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 45

become characteristic of the Presbyterians. Elizabethan Presbyterians latched

onto his language of ‘weeding’ out the Romish beast in his ‘animal tracts’
­(ori­gin­al­ly against Stephen Gardiner) to argue for ‘rooting’ out popery in the
later sixteenth century.15 In addition to playing a role in inviting the Polish
Reformer John à Lasco to England, he contended for the local election of
­ministers and equality among ministers in his early anti-episcopal arguments
directed against Gardiner and Bonner. During the vestiarian controversy, he
continued to question the hierarchical nature of episcopacy.16
But of course there is equally the danger of conflating early anticlericalism
with a fully explicated Presbyterian polity that could pose as a viable alternative
to episcopacy. The younger generation of Elizabethan reformers would be
the first to introduce the latter. They consolidated Presbyterianism theologically
and practically whilst exploiting powerful patronage that reached up to the
highest levels of Elizabethan government. For the Presbyterians, the urgent
need for more shepherds to feed starving sheep required more than a practical
solution. It could only be remedied by following the divinely appointed
means of calling and electing godly preachers. The beginnings of English
Presbyterianism are therefore rightly identified with the controversy at
Cambridge sparked by the newly appointed Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity, Thomas Cartwright.
It was at the very centre of the University, at Great St Mary’s Church, that
Cartwright first engaged in a philosophical refutation of monarchy before Her
Majesty and her chief counsellors. And it was here in 1570 that he delivered a
series of lectures on the first two chapters of Acts that would throw into question
the legitimacy of episcopacy. Although the lectures themselves concerned the
nature of the apostolic church, by implication they exposed the Church of
England to criticism. For it could hardly escape notice that the present state
of the church bore little resemblance to the model outlined by Cartwright’s
lectures. These systematic teachings on primitive Presbyterianism marked a
de­cisive shift from scruples over ceremony to more fundamental questions
about the nature of the church. The lectures were all the more troubling because
of their enthusiastic reception by a sizeable population of an impressionable
student body. Hauled before the Vice Chancellor and deprived of his chair,
Cartwright soon fled with Travers to Geneva, the most perfect school of
Christ, and of Presbyterian practice. Welcomed by Theodore Beza, the leader
of Genevan Reformation as successor to John Calvin, Cartwright delivered
lectures in divinity to students at the Geneva Academy.17

15 M.M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, IL, 1939), pp. 59–69, and Patrick Collinson,
‘The Puritan Classical Movement in the Reign of Elizabeth I (PhD dissertation, University of
London, 1957), p. 80, n. 1.
16 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 113.
17 Pearson, Thomas Cartwright, pp. 46–54.
46 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

If the Presbyterian cause were solely championed by an academic coterie, it

might have been more easily diverted with the departure of its two main
intellectual leaders. But its reformed roots in England ran deeper. During the
reign of Edward VI, England became a home to hundreds of Protestants fleeing
persecution on the continent, who established reformed churches in London.
The continued presence of French and Dutch Reformed churches in London
invited the English to imagine a world where they too might worship in a
purified church.18 ‘Is a reformation good for France? And can it be euill for
Englande? Is discipline meete for Scotland? And is it vnprofytable for this
realme?’ asked John Field and Thomas Wilcox. Together they penned the
Admonition to Parliament in 1572, the first printed tract to launch the institu-
tional movement for Presbyterian reform.19 The Admonition was essentially
an appeal to parliament for the reform of clerical abuses and adoption of
Presbyterian government. But it was as polemical and acerbic in its style as it
was political in its purpose, alienating sympathetic bishops by its tone. The
Admonition thus marked the emergence of a new movement for reform and
spawned a prolix theological debate in print over the nature of the church and
the place of Scripture in determining ecclesiastical polity. Having returned to
England, Cartwright took up the cudgels against Whitgift, who was now posi-
tioning himself as the arch-episcopal defender.20
Travers remained in Geneva in 1572, the year that thousands of Protestants
were slaughtered in France during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. He was
soon joined by a number of French Calvinists, including the resistance theorist
François Hotman. It was in this context that Travers busied himself writing
his magnum opus on Presbyterian government, Ecclesiasticae disciplinae et
Anglicanae ecclesiae ab ill aberrationis, plena E Verbo Dei, & dilucida explicatio,
which appeared anonymously in Latin and English editions in 1574.21 This was
precisely the sort of circumstances that raised suspicion that Presbyterianism
was part of an international Calvinist conspiracy to undermine the English
monarchy. But the bulk of Travers’ treatise was to argue for the scriptural and
theoretical foundations for English Presbyterianism, refuting the legitimacy of
episcopal hierarchy and appointments. In arguing for a popularly elected
­ministry Travers evaded addressing royal supremacy directly. Nonetheless, the
implications to Elizabeth and her episcopal defendants were clear. For in
this early work Travers anticipated the arguments that would eventually lead
to Archbishop Grindal’s suspension and spectacular fall a decade later. ‘Is it
not meet that even Kings and the highest Magistrates should be obedient
unto [Scripture]?’ Travers pointed to examples throughout history of princes

18 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 45–55.

19 John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament (Hemel Hempstead, 1572),
sig. Bvii.
20 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, ch. 1.
21 S.J. Knox, Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan Puritanism (London, 1962), ch. 4.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 47

who submitted themselves to the divinely appointed order of government,

including Theodosius.22
But whilst the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre informed Travers’ Presbyterian
treatise, the events that next took place in the Netherlands would leave a mark
on his ministry. Following closely after the French religious civil wars, the
Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule escalated when unpaid and hungry Spanish
troops sacked Antwerp in 1576, resulting in the indiscriminate death of several
thousand Protestants. Travers’ encounters with mass Catholic persecution of
Protestants in France and the Netherlands would have only fed into the para-
noia of Elizabeth’s privy councillors, who sought to protect the Queen from
international Catholic plots. Not to mention the many conspiracies hatched at
home involving the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, a strong claimant to the
English throne. Indeed, Travers secured the patronage of those most committed
to preserving the Queen, including William Cecil.23 He also took up his post
with the English Merchant Adventurers based in Antwerp on the recommen-
dation of the English ambassador William Davison. Here he channelled his
zealous anti-Catholicism by converting Presbyterian principles into practice.
He received Presbyterian ordination in May 1578, which would become a point
of contention on his return to England. He also kept records of the church’s
reformed proceedings in his theological notebook, revealing an ex­pert­ise in
Presbyterian government that extended beyond the theoretical.24 Despite
affinity with Presbyterianism further north, the concern to pursue reformation
in England explains why he and Cartwright declined Andrew Melville’s invitation
to accept professorial chairs at St Andrews University in 1580.25
Ecclesiastical authorities could suppress Presbyterianism so long as it
remained subject to academic censorship. But during the 1580s the godly began
to practise more of what they preached. There was no shortage of ways to
­introduce reformed practices in England, breeding what their adversaries
later called ‘presbytery under the wing of episcopacy’.26 Former exiles intro-
duced voluntary religious exercises modelled on continental reformed prac-
tices called prophesyings. These meetings were devoted to the exposition of
Scripture, prayer, and the singing of metrical psalms. The godly also augmented
their spiritual diets by gadding to additional sermons and catechizing on

22 Walter Travers, Fvll and Plaine Declaration, p. 103. For a discussion of Travers’s view of the
Christian Magistrate, see Ha, English Presbyterianism, ch. 1 and Polly Ha, ‘Why Walter Travers
Read Heinrich Bullinger’s De Conciliis’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 42 (2011), 57–76.
23 cf. Travers’s role as chaplain to the Burghley household in S.J. Knox, Walter Travers, pp. 54–8.
24 For examples, see TCD MS 324, fols 4–5, 33, 39.
25 Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 89–93. For an in-depth
study of the relations between early English and Scottish Presbyterianism, see his ‘The Relations
between the English and Scottish Presbyterian Movements to 1604’ (PhD thesis, University of
London, 1938).
26 Peter Heylyn, Aerius Redivivius, or, The History of the Presbyterians Containing the
Beginnings, Progress and Successes of that Active Sect (Oxford, 1670), p. 260.
48 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Sundays and weekday lectures, sometimes travelling at great length to hear a

favourite preacher. They also took advantage of regular market-town exercises
and occasional preaching fasts. Such activity did not necessarily convert into
Presbyterian practices. But the Puritan lectures posed a great-enough threat for
Elizabeth to insist that they be suppressed and to suspend Archbishop Grindal
when he refused to comply.27 It is tempting to draw a fixed line between Puritan
exercises for edification, schism, and Presbyterianism, but historians have
called greater attention to overlap and movement between them. Not all
Puritan fasts were proto-Presbyterian synods. But some were.28 Such overlap
between Puritan piety and more deliberate Presbyterian activity can be seen in
the example of Archbishop Grindal in his later career. In addition to defending
the Puritan preaching exercises, he advised the English Adventurer Church in
Antwerp, which fell under his jurisdiction.29 Encrypted in Travers’s papers
is Grindal’s continued advice on their Presbyterian church order after the
Archbishop’s suspension.30 We shall never know how familiar Grindal was
with Presbyterian practices in England, but his sympathy for the Presbyterians
helps explain the vigour with which his successor sought to suppress them.
Whitgift’s election as Grindal’s successor in 1583 has been regarded as a
‘de­cisive climacteric in the history of the reformed Church of England’.31 For
even before his election, Whitgift promised to aggressively attack nonconformity
by preparing three articles for the greater enforcement of uniformity. This
included a clause requiring ministers to affirm that episcopacy and the Book of
Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to Scripture. More controver-
sially, he intended to enforce these articles by introducing an ecclesiastical
commission whose inquisitorial procedures would raise stiff opposition by
common lawyers.32 But Presbyterianism had become a more organized force
by the time that Whitgift began his counterattack. As early as 1571 brethren met
together in London, eventually agreeing ‘by little and little . . . [to] draw the
Discipline into practice, though they concealed the names eyther of Presbytery,
Elder or Deacon’.33 Throughout the provinces, ministers sympathetic to
Presbyterianism met in conferences that resembled proto-Presbyterian cells.
Evidence later presented against the Presbyterians found the most advanced
regions of reformed activity to have taken root in East Anglia and the Midlands,

27 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 191–8, 208–21.

28 For example, Travers records a meeting of brothers fasting together in 1581, including John
Field, Thomas Edmunds, Richard Crick, and William Chark, to discuss the theological contro-
versy surrounding Peter Baro’s anti-Calvinist teaching in Cambridge. TCD MS 366, fol. 10v.
29 Patrick Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church
(London, 1979), p. 171.
30 TCD MS 324, fol. 4. 31 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, p. 243.
32 Ethan Shagan, ‘The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in
the 1590s’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 541–65.
33 Richard Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings Published and Practised within the
Iland of Brytaine (London, 1593), p. 115.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 49

with presbyteries operating in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.34 There

were some within this circuit, such as the Dedham conference, which in
practice blurred the line between Presbyterianism and Congregational polity.35
But unlike the radical separatist groups that erected autonomous congregations,
most of these bodies were committed to national reform and a centrally organ-
ized presbytery, sending delegates to their London headquarters organized by
John Field.36
When Whitgift was elevated to Canterbury and began his pursuit of
­nonconformity in earnest, the Presbyterians were prompted to change tactic.
By 1584 they began to direct their efforts to lobbying parliament for a reformed
ecclesiastical order. Coinciding with the international threat of popery and
Catholic plots surrounding Mary Queen of Scots, a flurry of petitions from the
provinces were sent to parliament, followed by a series of bills that appeared on
the floor of the House of Commons, calling for the adoption of a reformed
church order. By February 1587, Anthony Cope presented a ‘bill and book’ that
was explicitly Presbyterian in its ecclesiastical vision. Cope proposed a version
of the Forme of Prayers used by the English exile congregation, which was
essentially an adaptation of the Genevan liturgy.37 Although unsuccessful in
parliament, it pointed to a serious effort by the Presbyterians to take refor-
mation into their own hands. For the Presbyterians were busy devising their
own definitive directory for reformed worship. Edited by Walter Travers in
con­sult­ation with fellow Presbyterian clergy, the Book of Discipline was
an adaptation of the Geneva liturgy, but refined through Travers’ experience
in the Netherlands and tailored to fit the peculiar circumstances of the
English Reformation.38 Whilst the Book of Discipline would consolidate the
Presbyterian movement in the late 1580s, it would also become the centrepiece
of evidence against it.
The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Book of Discipline and
the crown’s formal suppression of the Presbyterian movement were lamented
by its main leaders. With the demise of parliamentary Presbyterianism, the
great matters of religion and state moved into the realm of popular satire and
the press. The Marprelate tracts, which appeared under the pseudonym Martin
Marprelate, intended to fight the Presbyterians’ corner following the defeat of
Cope’s ‘bill and book’. These tracts at once lampooned the character of the
episcopate and marked a turning point in English literary history, even if

34 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 323–9.

35 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 318–19. See also introduction to Patrick
Collinson, John Craig and Brett Usher, eds, Conferences and Combination Lectures in the
Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590 (Woodbridge, 2003).
36 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 317–29.
37 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 279–88.
38 For more on the Book of Discipline, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement,
pp. 291–302, and Knox, Walter Travers, ch. 6. My emphasis on the importance of Travers’ ministry
in Antwerp comes from reading his personal papers dated in the late 1570s in TCD MS 324.
50 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

fore­shadowed in its tone by the Admonition to Parliament. It is hard to exaggerate

the Marprelate effect. For the scathing satire of the libellous tracts introduced a
new genre of writing that would be put to even greater effect against episcopacy
during the English revolution. But they did not win the approval of their pro-
tagonists. Nor did they do much to further the Presbyterian cause. For in their
efforts to hunt down the Martinists, the authorities uncovered the whole
Presbyterian movement, procuring their primary evidence against it after
searching the homes of Presbyterian clergy in the vicinity of the Marprelate
press. They unearthed evidence of synods taking place as early as 1581, with
annual meetings coinciding with University of Cambridge commencement.
Furthermore, they found a copy of the Book of Discipline, with subscriptions
from clergy.39
By 1591 Cartwright and eight other Presbyterian suspects were brought to
trial for their attempt to establish a national Presbyterian church. The engine
used to convict the ministers was the High Commission, which required them
to take the oath ex officio. Cartwright and his cohorts denied the oath’s legality,
refusing to swear an oath to answer articles without known accusers or know­ledge
of the particular charges. Cartwright remained obstinately silent, even after the
case was sent to the Court of the Star Chamber. But others, such as John Johnson
of Northamptonshire, supplied incriminating details of the Presbyterians’
meetings. Cartwright and his collaborators were ultimately incarcerated for
refusing to take oath in 1592. Although they were released the following year,
the Presbyterian movement had effectively lost momentum and historians
have believed that Presbyterianism virtually ceased to exist following their for-
mal suppression. Many of their chief patrons, including the Earl of Leicester
and Sir Francis Walsingham, had passed away. Their cause was also discredited
by the deranged pseudo-messiah William Hacket, who proclaimed himself
to be the very means by which Christ would judge the world and secure
Presbyterianism in England. Although the Presbyterians denied all association
with Hacket’s charismatic vision and prophecy, the association played into the
hands of their adversaries. For anti-Puritan bishops such as Richard Bancroft
and Richard Cosin were preparing their own paper bullets against the
Presbyterians wherein Hacket was the logical outcome of their misguided zeal.
So severe was their literary assassination during this decade that Patrick
Collinson dubbed it the nasty nineties.40

39 Patrick Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013),

p. 78.
40 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 403–48. For one discussion of the Marprelate
tracts and their literary context, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering (Cambridge,
2003), pp. 27–52. Collinson’s later treatment of the anti-Presbyterian campaign led by conformists
can be found in Richard Bancroft, chs 6, 7. For a discussion of the anti-puritan literature of the
1590s, see his ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’,
in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995),
pp. 159–64.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 51

LATE ELIZABETHAN AND EARLY STUART

PRESBY TERIANISM

Given the anti-Puritan assault of the 1590s, the supposed death of Presbyterianism
in late Elizabethan and early Stuart England makes sense. With a few excep-
tions, this death was assumed by the Presbyterians’ relative silence for the
remainder of Elizabeth’s reign.41 It was also reinforced by their disappearance
from the historical record until their sudden reappearance in the front line of
the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. As W.A. Shaw asserted,
‘there are no traces of any inheritance of the ideas or influence of this Elizabethan
Presbyterianism by the English Puritans of the days of James I and Charles I’.42
The only options available to Puritans appeared to be conformity or de facto
Congregational autonomy. Above all, the Puritans redirected their efforts to a
reformation of manners in the provinces by sanctifying individual households.43
But contrary to this narrative, there is evidence that English Presbyterianism
persisted.44 For just as English Presbyterians were part of the wider reformed
tradition of refugees on the continent from their first emergence, there
remained active English Presbyterian congregations in the Netherlands
throughout the seventeenth century.45 Across the Atlantic, Presbyterianism
shaped the character of the Bermuda plantation from its early settlement
through the seventeenth century, and found some outspoken defendants
among the New England colonies. Rather than being isolated individuals and
occasional expressions of Presbyterianism, these reformists maintained active
intelligence of and identification with Presbyterians in England in the early
seventeenth century.46
There is also new evidence of the broader role English Presbyterianism
played in shaping the religious and political culture of the early Stuart period.

41 Not all historians insisted on their complete annihilation. Both Jacqueline Eales and
Nicholas Tyacke argued for continuities between Elizabethan and early Stuart puritanism before
the recovery of Walter Travers’s manuscripts revealed the explicit advocacy of Presbyterian ideas.
See Eales, ‘A Road to Revolution’ and Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Fortunes of English Puritanism,
1603–1640’ in Aspects of English Protestantism (Manchester, 2001), ch. 4.
42 W.A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil War and under the Commonwealth,
1640–1660, 2 vols (London, 1900), I, p. 6.
43 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 464–5. Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early
Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997). Again, Nicholas
Tyacke’s stress on broader continuities across Elizabethan and early Stuart puritanism is an
important exception to the general historiography that has argued for the redirection of puritan-
ism in the early seventeenth century. Tyacke, ‘The Fortunes of English Puritanism, 1603–1640’.
44 Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640.
45 Keith Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the
Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982). For a recent case study on
the Amsterdam English Reformed Church and of its relationship to Presbyterians in England, see
Ha, English Presbyterianism, chs 6–7.
46 Ha, English Presbyterianism, pp. 59–67, 91–6, and Polly Ha, ‘Godly Globalization: Calvinism
in Bermuda’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66 (2015), 543–61.
52 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

A hitherto unexplored archive of Walter Travers’ papers reveals the

Presbyterians’ continued agitation for further reformation and assault upon
episcopal ­hierarchy.47 Included in Travers’ papers is a scribal publication
en­titled ‘The Reformed Government’ that was written at the tail end of
Elizabeth’s reign. Arguing for the abolition of bishops, it offers one of the most
robust responses to the slew of conformist allegations of popular political
sedition that flooded the late sixteenth century. This includes Richard Hooker’s
learned Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, which itself was prompted by his famous
controversy with Travers in the Temple Church in the mid-1580s. Defending
royal supremacy, ‘The Reformed Government’ denies that the replacement of
bishops with elders would detract from the Queen’s supremacy. It does so
by transposing Presbyterianism onto the English model, creating nominal
­bishops appointed by the crown to close the gap between Presbyterianism and
episcopacy.
But ‘The Reformed Government’ goes even further. Indicting the bishops
as evil counsellors, it claims that they are single-handedly responsible for halt-
ing ecclesiastical and moral reform and, by extension, provoking divine
wrath and plunging England into its worst years economically.48 Whilst
addressing itself to magistrates, judges, and ‘all those that be in authority’, ‘The
Reformed Government’ also directs its arguments to ‘all equall and indifferent
persons whosoever’.49 Here was an ecclesiastical version of mixed monarchy
expounded in both theory and practice, complete with elaborate plans for local
implementation.50 Thus, whilst Presbyterians such as Travers remained within
the Church of England (and publically silent), they kept the language of ‘root
and branch’ abolition of episcopacy in currency before it was discredited by
Laudian pol­icies.51 They continued to propose an alternative reformed model
of church government as a viable option. They even helped universalize notions
of popular sovereignty before they entered into wider public debate during the
mid-seventeenth century.
During this half century of apparent silence, the Presbyterians also gave
further definition to the development of Congregational ‘independency’ by
coining the name as a term of abuse. For when the Puritan Henry Jacob erected
his independent congregation in Southwark in 1616, a panel of Presbyterians
challenged Jacob’s ecclesiology, introducing the phrase ‘independency’ to
­condemn his experiment.52 Here Travers and his Presbyterian colleagues

47 For an overview and analysis of these manuscripts, see Ha, English Presbyterianism, and
‘Reformed Government’, eds. Polly Ha, Jonathan D. Moore, and Edda Frankot (Oxford, 2021).
48 Ha et al., ‘Reformed Government’, ‘Preface’. 49 TCD MS 140, fol. 66.
50 See Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, in his Elizabethan
Essays (London, 1994), John Guy, The Second Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last
Decade (Cambridge, 1995), and Alexandra Gadja, ‘Political Culture in the 1590s: The “Second
Reign of Elizabeth” ’, History Compass, 8 (2010).
51 Ha, English Presbyterianism, pp. 27–36. 52 Ha, English Presbyterianism, ch. 3.
 Presbyterianism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England 53

gave extensive argumentation for the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority

beyond the individual congregation. This decidedly challenges those accounts
of Congregationalism which contend that it was a natural extension of
the Elizabethan Presbyterian and the Reformed tradition. For although the
Presbyterians remained relatively silent on the authority of synods and
assemblies in their earlier Elizabethan works, they had always operated on the
assumption of a national Church and maintained a polity based on representative
government. Moreover, when pressed by his adversaries, Jacob himself ­confessed
to pushing reform further than Calvin.53 Indeed, by identifying the ­concept of
‘independence’ in the New Testament, he was universalizing the concept and
extending its potential reach beyond an elite circle of learned men.54
All this is not to propose a static history of dissenting experiences that
directly converted into later denominational parties. For the Presbyterians
continued to adapt their practice and emphasis based on their changing cir-
cumstances from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Nor is it
to suggest that the only two viable dissenting traditions in early modern
England were Presbyterian and Congregational polities. For it was through
rigorous debate between the Presbyterians and their interlocutors that ecclesi-
astical variations emerged over the course of the seventeenth century, including
moderate episcopacy and alternate forms of Congregational polity.55 However,
it was precisely because the Presbyterians continued to consider themselves
at one with their episcopal and Congregational brethren that they sustained
their engagement with them and refused to accept the idea of a dissenting
tradition.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967).
Collinson, Patrick, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention
of Puritanism’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last
Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 150–70.
Collinson, Patrick, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge,
2013).
Collinson, Patrick, Craig, John, and Usher, Brett, eds, Conferences and Combination
Lectures in the Elizabethan Church: Dedham and Bury St Edmunds, 1582–1590
(Woodbridge, 2003).

53 For the novelty and radical implications of Jacob’s independency, see Polly Ha, ‘Ecclesiastical
Independence and the Freedom of Consent’, in Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, eds,
Freedom and the Construction of Europe (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 4. For the full text, see Polly Ha,
Jonathan D. Moore, and Edda Frankot, eds, The Puritans on Independence (Oxford, 2017).
54 Ha, The Puritans on Independence, pp. 19–25.
55 Ha, English Presbyterianism, pp. 67–73, 91–6.
54 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Eales, Jacqueline, ‘A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642’, in

Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism,
1560–1700, (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 184–209.
Gunther, Karl, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England,
1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014).
Guy, John, ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity’, in The Reign of
Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 126–49.
Ha, Polly, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Palo Alto, CA, 2011).
Ha, Polly, Moore, Jonathan D., Frankot, Edda, eds, The Puritans on Independence
(Oxford, 2017).
Ha, Polly, Moore, Jonathan D., Frankot, Edda, eds, Reformed Government (Oxford,
2021).
Knox, S.J., Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan Puritanism (London, 1962).
Lake, Peter, ‘Presbyterianism, the Idea of a National Church and the Argument from
Divine Right’, in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling, eds, Protestantism and the National
Church in Sixteenth Century England (London, 1987), pp. 193–224.
Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought
from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988).
Lake, Peter, ‘The Elizabethan Puritan Movement’ in ‘Patrick Collinson and his Historical
Legacy’, History, 100 (2015), 517–34.
Mendle, Michael, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and
the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985).
Pearson, A.F. Scott, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1925).
Pearson, A.F. Scott, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism
(Cambridge, 1928).
Peel, Albert, ed., The Seconde Parte of a Register (Cambridge, 1915).
Shagan, Ethan, ‘The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law
in the 1590s’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 541–65.
Sprunger, Keith, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the
Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982).
Tyacke, Nicholas, ‘The Fortunes of English Puritanism, 1603–1640’, in his Aspects of
English Protestantism (Manchester, 2001), pp. 111–31.
Walsham, Alexandra, ed., ‘Special Issue: Patrick Collinson and His Historiographical
Legacy’, History, 100 (2015), 507–625.
Webster, Tom, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement,
c. 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997).
 2

Presbyterians in the English Revolution

Elliot Vernon

The position of the Presbyterians in the English Revolution (the period 1640–1660)
in a volume on the history of English Dissent is perhaps somewhat anomalous.
The Presbyterians in this period were not, and did not see themselves as,
Dissenters. Indeed, arguably after 1645 they perceived themselves as the repre-
sentative clergy of the Church of England as established by law (or at least by
parliamentary ordinance). Presbyterianism developed, as Edmund Calamy
would put it, as a movement from within the Church of England to ‘reform the
Reformation itself ’. Presbyterians sought to realize the long-term moderate
Puritan ambitions of godly rule, evangelical religion in the parishes, and the
alignment of the Church of England with polity of the post-1638 Church of
Scotland and the continental Reformed churches.1 Yet despite these reformist
and establishmentarian ambitions, by 1662 the English Presbyterians would be
amongst the principal leaders of the newly emerging Dissent against a Church
of England they had defended, and to some degree in the chaos of 1659–60,
helped to restore.

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF MID-

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PRESBY TERIANISM

One of the major problems for historians has been to decide when in the early
1640s Presbyterianism emerged in England. As Tom Webster has put it, in rela-
tion to the period 1641–43: ‘Where, then, are the Presbyterians to be found?’2
A.P. Martinich states that it would be ‘wrong to think that prior to the opening

1 Edmund Calamy, England’s Looking Glasse (London, 1642), p. 46.

2 Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643
(Cambridge, 2003), p. 327.

Elliot Vernon, Presbyterians in the English Revolution In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I.
Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0003
56 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of the Assembly of Divines, the members knew what system of church governance
they were for. They were clear or unified in their thoughts only about what
system they were against.’3 This position can, in part, be traced back to the
memoirs of Richard Baxter. For Baxter, Presbyterianism was ‘but a stranger’
to the English clergy, who were called ‘Presbyterian’ by the ‘vulgar’ but opposed
the office of ‘lay’ elders and hankered after a reformed episcopacy.4 Despite
being an obvious self-projection of his own position, few historians have ques-
tioned Baxter’s account. It is clear that the term ‘Presbyterian’, in the religious
sense, was often applied by contemporaries to those who believed in a national
Church of England teaching Reformed doctrine and purged of the remaining
elements of medieval Catholic worship. As it became clear that the parliaments
of the 1650s would not impose the Presbyterian legislation of the late 1640s, this
position became the de facto position of majority of godly ministers. William
Shaw, in the late nineteenth century, took up the tradition of Baxter to argue
that mid-seventeenth-century calls for Presbyterian church government was an
unwelcome Scottish import whose principles sat ill with the English character.5
By the twentieth century, this argument had reached a level of orthodoxy, so
that citation of an uncritical quotation from Baxter was often enough to
dismiss the existence of English Presbyterianism before the Long Parliament’s
need for Scottish military aid in 1643.6
Nevertheless, recent research has challenged some aspects of this historio-
graphical orthodoxy. It is now clear that in addition to those who sought godly
doctrine and practice, but were willing to accept a prudential approach to
matters of church polity, there were English Puritans who can be described as
Presbyterians in the more restrictive sense. In the 1630s a group of noncon-
formists led by the minister John Ball developed important distinctions that
would form the bedrock of English Presbyterian theory in the mid-seventeenth
century.7 Ball argued that the ordained ministry received the ‘power of the
keys’ to administer churches immediately from Christ. This broke with ‘non-
separating Congregationalist’ thought, which saw the keys as being given
directly to the church as a whole and only used by ministers with the consent of
the ­people. Ball’s circle also argued that many of the churches in the cities of the
New Testament era were collections of congregations governed by a single

3 A.P. Martinich, ‘Presbyterians in Behemoth’, in Tomaž Mastnak, ed., Hobbes’s Behemoth:

Religion and Democracy (Exeter, 2009), p. 118.
4 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), Part II, p. 146.
5 William Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the
Commonwealth (London, 1900), pp. 6–7.
6 See for example, Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the
Westminster Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh 1985), ch. 4.
7 Lesley Ann Rowe, ‘The Worlds of Arthur Hildersham 1563–1632’ (PhD thesis, University of
Warwick, 2009), pp. 154–5, 206–8.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 57

common presbytery.8 Although Ball died in 1640, members of his group, par-
ticularly the Westminster Assembly divines Simeon Ashe and William
Rathband, would be prominent in the early 1640s in advancing arguments for
Presbyterianism. Another nonconformist connected to Ball’s conference was
Thomas Paget of Blackley, who in summer 1641 published his brother John
Paget’s influential posthumous treatise for Presbyterian church government.9
Paget’s treatise would join a number of English works advocating a Presbyterian
reformation of the Church of England published as early as January 1641.10
The most important group in the early 1640s to advance Presbyterian argu-
ments, however, were the ministers writing under the acronym Smectymnuus:
Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen,
and William Spurstowe. This group, who met at Edmund Calamy’s house in
Aldermanbury, London, was acting in coordination with the parliamentarian
junto peers and gentlemen centred around the Earl of Warwick. They had
been integral to the national clerical campaign against the Laudian canons of
1640.11 By early 1641 the Aldermanbury group was working alongside Scottish
Covenanter ministers such as George Gillespie and Alexander Henderson
as well as Congregationalists such as Jeremiah Burroughes. Tom Webster has
recently argued that Smectymnuus were, in the round, not Presbyterians but
rather advocated primitive episcopacy.12 It is clear that the Smectymnuus
group emerged out of a period of reflection concerning the nature of the earli-
est episcopacy. In 1639 Thomas Young had written a Latin treatise defending
the role of a presidential bishop and Cornelius Burges claimed in 1659 that the
Aldermanbury circle had never spoken a word ‘tending to the extirpacion of all
Episcopacy; but only to reduce it to the Primitive’ during meetings with the
parliamentary opposition leaders in 1640–1.13
Despite Burges’ later assertions, Smectymnuus’ March 1641 pamphlet An
Answer to a Booke Entitled An Humble Remonstrance, a critique of Bishop
Joseph Hall’s defence of divine right episcopacy, advocates, as Carol Schneider
puts it, a ‘latitudinarian’ Presbyterianism that could accommodate different

8 The thought of Ball and his circle is analysed in Carol Geary Schneider, ‘Godly Order in
Church Half-Reformed: The Disciplinarian Legacy, 1540–1641’ (PhD thesis, Harvard University,
1986), chs 5 and 6; Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, CA, 2011), pp. 60–2;
Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge,
MA, 2012), p. 291.
9 John Paget, A Defence of Church Government Exercised in Presbyteriall . . . Assemblies
(London, 1641).
10 English Presbyterian tracts in this period include [John Bernard?], A Short View of the
Praelaticall Church of England (n.p. 1641); [Anon], The Beauty of Godly Government in a Church
Reformed (n.p. 1641); Richard Byfield, The Power of the Christ of God (London, 1641), [Anon.],
A Forme of Ecclesiastical Government (London, 1642).
11 John Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007), pp. 79–80.
12 Webster, Godly Clergy, pp. 320–1, 323, 327.
13 Thomas Young, Dies Dominica (1639), pp. 89–92. Published in English as The Lords Day
(London, 1672), pp. 277–80.
58 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

‘godly’ positions on church polity.14 Smectymnuus’ key argument was that the
words ‘presbyter’ and ‘bishop’ were synonymous terms in the New Testament
for the office of the ministers of a single church. The earliest churches, for
example the seven churches of Revelation 2–3, were churches governed by a
collective presbytery rather than a singular bishop.15 Following Jerome and
Theodore Beza, Smectymnuus argued that the office of the single ruling bishop
came into the early church as a response to schism and heresy. The emergence
of the bishop as a distinct governing office was therefore of human and not
divine institution.16 This primitive presidential episcopacy had ultimately
served as ‘a stirrup for Antichrist to get into his saddle’ of riding the Church
into popery.17 Smectymnuus called on parliament to ‘abrogate’ episcopacy and
to apply a model of church government that was based on ‘Scripture, the
Sanctuary of the Lord’.18 The Smectymnuans’ Presbyterianism can be seen by
their reference to the confessions of the continental Reformed churches on
church officers, their defence of the divine institution of the ruling elder, and
their advocacy of consociations of congregations into provincial and national
synods.19 In a second work, published in June 1641, the Smectymnuans devel-
oped their arguments further, asserting that the house congregations of the
larger cities during the New Testament era worshipped under the oversight of
a common city-wide presbytery.20
The existence of such Presbyterian ideas in 1641, however, should not be taken
to signify that Presbyterianism in England was widespread or that it was an
entirely coherent position. Many godly ministers and almost all members of the
Long Parliament looked for a settlement that reformed the bishops in the direc-
tion of an idealized pastoral episcopate. More importantly, speeches in the House
of Commons in 1641 illustrated that the retention of the royal supremacy was a
primary concern of the Long Parliament, particularly in its ‘king-in-parliament’
guise. The reticence to abolish episcopacy outright was also noted by the
Scottish minister Robert Baillie, who in February 1641 wrote that while English
ministers were ‘for the erecting of a kind of Presbyteries, and for bringing down
the Bishops in all things’ they could not reach consensus on the total abolition
of episcopacy.21
Nevertheless, the idea of a fully fledged Presbyterian reformation grew
amongst many clergy as 1641 progressed. In around November 1641 an accord
was agreed at Edmund Calamy’s house in Aldermanbury to maintain godly
unity by not publicly publishing differing opinions on church government.

14 Carol Geary Schneider, ‘Godly Order in Church Half-Reformed’, pp. 462, 465.
15 Smectymnuus, An Answer to a Booke entitled An Humble Remonstrance (London, 1641),
pp. 58–60.
16 Smectymnuus, An Answer, pp. 27–35, 91. 17 Smectymnuus, An Answer, pp. 29–30.
18 Smectymnuus, An Answer, p. 23. 19 Smectymnuus, An Answer, pp. 53–8, 69–75.
20 Smectymnuus, A Vindication of the Answer to the Humble Remonstrance (London, 1641), p. 152.
21 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1841–2), I, p. 303.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 59

The effect of the accord was to largely close down debate on alternative
forms of church government to episcopacy in the public sphere until the
winter of 1643/4. However, this did not stop private proselytizing for
Presbyterianism and, by July 1642, the London ministers could assure the
General Assembly of the Kirk in Edinburgh that ‘the desire of the most godly and
considerable part . . . is, that the Presbyterian government . . . may be established
amongst us’.22

THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY

The cause of English Presbyterianism was further advanced by parliament’s

poor military showing against the royalists in the first years of the Civil War.23
Parliament’s need for military aid from the Scottish Covenanter army in the
latter half of 1643 meant that the parliament could no longer hold off its prom-
ise, made in the Grand Remonstrance of December 1641, for an assembly of
divines to settle matters of ecclesiastical government. The fruit of the parlia-
mentarian and Covenanter alliance was the Solemn League and Covenant,
a pact that promised to bring the churches ‘in the three kingdoms to the nearest
conjunction’. English Presbyterian divines, such as Thomas Case, however,
made it clear that the Covenant did not bind the English to establish a facsimile
of the Scottish system.24 Both English and Scottish Presbyterians stressed the
distinction between those parts of church polity that were essential and set by
Scripture, and those aspects that were circumstantial. These circumstantials’
allowed for local variation according to reason and the rule of ‘just and neces-
sary consequence’.25 This was particularly important in England, as it was
hoped that the Congregationalist’s desires for relative autonomy at the congre-
gational level could be accommodated within the national Church
settlement.26
The Assembly first met in July 1643. Its composition was made of those
English ministers who were already convinced of Presbyterianism, such as the
Smectymnuus circle or old nonconformists such as Simeon Ashe, and a hand-
ful of respected Congregationalists. Some English delegates were more recent
converts to the Presbyterian position. For example, the Wiltshire minister

22 T. Pitcairn, ed., Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1638–1842 (Edinburgh,
1843) pp. 66–7.
23 David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke, 2003), ch. 2.
24 Thomas Case, The Quarrel of the Covenant (London, 1643), pp. 40–4.
25 G. Gillespie, An Assertion of the Government of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1641),
p. 160; London Provincial Assembly, A Vindication of the Presbyteriall-Government and Ministry
(London, 1650), p. 4.
26 This is one of the main topics of Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church
Power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1644 (Manchester, 2015).
60 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Thomas Bayley explained on 30 November 1643 that he had been satisfied with
Elizabethan justifications for episcopacy until 1642, when he began to study the
‘Geneva discipline’.27 It is probable, however, that the largest group in the Assembly
were undecided ‘Puritan’ clergy who were leaning towards a Presbyterian
settlement as a fait accompli in the face of the parliamentarian animus against
the bishops. Only Daniel Featly represented traditional episcopalianism and
he was formally expelled from the Assembly on 23 October 1643 for corres­
ponding with Archbishop Ussher in royalist Oxford.28 Likewise, in September
1643, Cornelius Burges and William Price suffered temporary suspension for
protesting that the Covenant locked out the possibility of a ‘primitive’ or
‘reduced’ episcopacy. From October 1643 the Assembly was dominated by the
arguments of the Presbyterian leadership, the Congregationalist ministers, and
those who would later be termed Erastians.29
It is clear that the many of the English Presbyterian clergy owed a substantial
intellectual debt to the Scottish commissioners who joined the Assembly at the
end of October 1643. The Calvinist two kingdoms theory drawn from the the-
ology of Calvin, Thomas Cartwright, and Andrew Melville had been deployed
in 1641 by the Surrey Presbyterian Richard Byfield. However, it was the works
of Scottish Covenanter theologians such as Samuel Rutherford and George
Gillespie that argued for a two kingdom theory perspective in a systematic
way.30 This political theology held that Christ ruled the secular world as one of
the divine persons of the trinity, but ruled his spiritual kingdom in his human
capacity as the mediator between God and fallen humanity.31 One of the con-
sequences of this position was the clericalist argument that Christ-as-mediator
held direct kingship over the spiritual kingdom, which Presbyterians associated
with the visible church. It followed that the kingly mediator’s earthly ministers,
who for Presbyterians were the Church eldership, ruled the Church by divine
right. The Christian magistrate possessed no ‘internal’ power over the doctrine
and discipline of the Established Church, holding only an ‘external’ ius circa

27 Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (Oxford,
2012), II, pp. 386–7.
28 Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, p. 105. For Featley’s Westminster assembly speeches in
defence of Episcopacy, see [Daniel Featley], Sacra Nemesis: The Levites Scourge (Oxford, 1644),
pp. 12–44.
29 ‘Journal of the Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines’ in The Whole Works of the Rev. John
Lightfoot, ed. J.R. Pitman (London. 1824), XIII, pp. 11–13, 15.
30 Richard Byfield, The Power of the Christ of God (London, 1641). For a comprehensive study
of Calvin’s two kingdom political theology, see Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology
and the Public Engagement of the Church (Cambridge, 2017), esp. ch. 4. For an example of Scottish
deployment of Cartwright, see Samuel Rutherford, A Peaceable and Temperate Plea for Paul’s
Presbyterie in Scotland (London, 1642), pp. 294–5.
31 For the Scottish Covenanter’s use of two kingdoms theory, see W.D.J. McKay, ‘George
Gillespie and the Westminster Assembly: The Defence of Presbyterianism’, Scottish Bulletin of
Evangelical Theology, 13 (1995), 51–71; David McKay, ‘Samuel Rutherford on Civil Government’,
in Samuel Vogan, ed., Samuel Rutherford: An Introduction to his Theology (Edinburgh, 2012)
pp. 261–4.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 61

sacra to require the ministry to perform their duties and to assist the Church by
lending the civil sword to its aid.32
One the key issues that pervaded the Presbyterian debate in the 1640s and
1650s was the question of the proper location of power in the Church. The
Presbyterians were anxious to avoid giving any concession to the separatist
position that power in the Church was reposed collectively in the members of
the congregation. In an early debate in the Westminster Assembly on the power
of the keys, the majority decided, in the face of strong Congregationalist oppos-
ition, that Christ had given the keys of Church power to Peter as representative
of the Apostles and thus to their successors, the presbyters.33 On this line of
argument, the ‘church’ was taken to signify the ‘ecclesiastical senate’ of presby-
ters acting together in a consistorial court to exercise church censures. In line
with much early modern thought on the nature of polity, the Presbyterians
drew on classical and civic notions of a mixed constitution to describe the
government of the Church. The Presbyterian theory of ecclesiastical polity
therefore neatly mirrored the 1640s parliamentarian theory of limited or mixed
monarchy in the civil state.34 In terms of the Church’s constitution, Christ
reigned as king, with the ministers holding the place of the ‘aristocracy’ or
‘senators’, and the people giving their democratic consent to rule by their choice
in the election of their representative elders.35
This view had a number of consequences that were never fully resolved
by the Assembly. The first issue was whether the primary ‘unit’ of the church
was the congregational presbytery or the local classis consisting of the elders of
number of congregations. For example, in February 1644 Herbert Palmer told
the Assembly ‘It may be . . . that, in such towns as London or Cambridge, there
should be no fixed distinct congregations, but only one church’, a position that
Lazarus Seaman would revive in May to the chagrin of the Scottish commis-
sioner George Gillespie.36 A connected debate, one that would rumble on
throughout the 1640s and 50s through the writings of Samuel Hudson and his
opponents, was whether power in the Church ascended upwards from particu-
lar congregations to synods and assemblies, or whether Church power derived
from the universal visible Church to be exercised in particular assemblies by

32 A clear expositions of this theory is found in Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici (third
edn,London, 1654), a work initially published in 1646.
33 Van Dixhoorn, The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, II, pp. 231–333; Powell,
The Crisis of British Protestantism, pp. 63–75.
34 Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm and the
Making of the Answer to the xix Propositions (Alabama, 1985).
35 Daniel Cawdrey, Vindiciae Clavium (London, 1645), sig.A3v, p. 28, George Walker,
A Modell of the Government of the Church under the Gospel by Presbyters (London, 1646),
pp. 3–8.
36 George Gillespie, Notes of the Debates and Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh,
1846), pp. 9 (Palmer), 56 (Seaman).
62 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

church officers.37 The majority in the Assembly ultimately chose the latter
position, seeing Church power as the exclusive preserve of presbyters.
The issue of the proper location of Church power was not the only issue
that English Presbyterians disagreed about amongst themselves. As the com-
ment from Richard Baxter cited above shows, many English divines rejected
the scriptural warrant for the ruling elder. Faced with an internal rebellion
against the office of ruling elder, the Assembly voted it to be ‘prudential’ and
discernible from Scripture rather than fully divinely commanded.38 However,
Baxter’s view can be taken too far; many key English Presbyterians both
inside and outside of the Westminster Assembly did advocate a divine war-
rant for the ruling elder.39 A further concern of English Presbyterians was the
desire to protect the distinction between the ordained ministry and the laity
by denying that any but the ordained ministry could preach.40 In order to
preserve the ministry, the established Presbyterian classes in the late 1640s
and 1650s imposed stringent requirements on those seeking ordination and
Presbyterians would engage in a decade-long controversy with advocates of
lay preaching.41
For many English Presbyterian divines, however, the key instrument of the
Presbyterian system was the elders’ power to have oversight over admission to
the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The Westminster Assembly therefore set
about making the Lord’s Supper an instrument for reformation and a marker of
the godly within the parish system.42 It was hoped that these measures would
undermine the arguments of Separatists against the Church of England and
draw them back into a fully Reformed national Church.43 In terms of theology,
the Westminster divines and others, particularly the controversialist Roger
Drake of St Peter, Westcheap in London, held to the position that the Lord’s
Supper was an ordinance instituted by Christ that acted as a seal or sign of the
covenant of grace. As such the Lord’s Supper confirmed the faith of the converted,

37 Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism, pp. 75–80; Sungho Lee, ‘All Subjects of the
Kingdom of Christ: John Owen’s Conceptions of Christian Unity and Schism’ (PhD thesis, Calvin
Theological Seminary, 2007), pp. 62–4, 133–5.
38 Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, pp. 163–74.
39 See, for example, Smectymnuus, An Answer, pp. 69–75; London Provincial Assembly,
A Vindication of the Presbyterial Government (London, 1651), pp. 34–56; First Classis of the
Province of Lancashire, The Censures of the Church Revived (London, 1659), pp. 81, 101–21.
40 Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, pp. 143–5.
41 For examples, see London Provincial Assembly, Jus Divinum Ministerii Evangelici (London,
1654). See Rosemary O’Day, ‘Immanuel Bourne: A Defence of the Ministerial Order’, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), 101–14.
42 Elliot Vernon ‘A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in
Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester,
2006), pp. 115–36.
43 Chad Van Dixhoorn, ‘Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the “Grand
Debate” ’ in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, eds, Insular Christianity: Alternative
Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570−c.1700 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 131–8.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 63

but did not convert sinners, which was the proper role of the preached Word.
The consequence of this was that the Lord’s Supper was to be kept away from
the scandalous and profane, as well as those too ignorant of basic Christian
doctrine to follow the Apostle Paul’s injunction of self-examination before
coming to the Lord’s Supper.44 This doctrine proved to be controversial and led
to a substantial debate throughout the 1640s and 50s with those, such as William
Prynne or John Humphrey, who believed that participation in the Lord’s Supper
had the power to bring about the conversion of sinners and should be freely
administered.45
The Westminster Assembly’s demands for ecclesiastical autonomy in vetting
admission to the Lord’s Supper conflicted with the dominant anti-clericalist
political current in parliament. This view saw parliament as wielding ecclesi-
astical supremacy and thus made parliament the competent body to determine
the doctrine and discipline of the Church within its national boundaries.46 The
clash flared up in 1644 over the issue of ordination and became overtly con-
flictual in 1645–6 when the Westminster Assembly demanded an autonomous
jurisdiction for the Church over admission to the Lord’s Supper.47 Led by
common lawyers such as John Selden, parliament finally quelled the Assembly’s
clericalism by threatening it with praemunire on 30 April 1646.48 In 1645 the
Scottish commissioners had coined the neologism ‘Erastian’, after the mid-
sixteenth-century Zwinglian Thomas Erastus, to describe the position of the
English parliament and those clergy, such as Thomas Coleman, who criticized
Presbyterian clericalist ambitions in the debate. The struggle over control of
the Church spilt out into the public sphere, where it contributed to the
characterization of post-Civil War parliamentarian factions as ‘Presbyterian’
and ‘Independent’. The result of the struggle, which ran alongside the falling
out of the Westminster ‘war party’ with their Scottish Covenanter allies, was
that parliament’s legislation produced what English and Scottish Presbyterians
considered ‘a lame Erastian presbytery’ lacking the necessary power to effect
reformation.49

44 1 Corinthians 11:28–29 (KJV): ‘But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that
bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh
damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.’
45 See E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental
Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, CT, 1974), pp. 109–26.
46 On this topic, see D. Alan Orr, ‘Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil
War’, History, 87 (2002), 474–90.
47 Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, pp. 492–515.
48 Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism and the History of the Jews’, in
G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, eds, Hobbes and History (London and New York, 2000), pp. 160–88;
Ofir Haivry, John Selden and the Western Political Tradition (Cambridge, 2017), ch. 6; Van
Dixhoorn, The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, IV, pp. 83–97.
49 Baillie, Letters and Journals, II, p. 362.
64 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

TOLERATION

Religious toleration and liberty of conscience have been seen as amongst the
key touchstones of the rise of modernity in the Western world.50 Consequently,
the English Presbyterians’ opposition to toleration, a corollary of their commit-
ment to the post-Reformation Calvinist model of the confessional state and
Church, has won them the disdain of many historians.51 However, like the
majority of European theologians, English Presbyterians have to be understood
within the Augustinian background of Reformation thought, which saw a
degree of religious coercion as necessary to maintain the peace and unity of the
Church and Commonwealth.52
From the early 1640s, Presbyterians perceived that the toleration of heresy
and schism represented a threat similar to that which popery had previously
posed under the Tudors and early Stuarts. The Presbyterian heresiographer
Thomas Edwards complained in 1641 that after the Long Parliament’s van-
quishing of popery, England had ‘fallen from Scylla to Charibdis, from popish
Innovations . . . to damnable Heresie . . . our evils are not removed . . . one disease
and Devil hath left us, and another as bad is come in their room’.53 The answer
to the rise of the sects, which threatened both individual souls and the social
order, was the establishment of a uniform Presbyterian polity operating in
coordination with the godly magistrate.
Many English Presbyterians, however, were eager to find means to accom-
modate those confessionally orthodox Calvinists who could not agree with
them on issues of church government. In particular, the ‘magisterial’ strand
of Congregationalists and those ‘primitive’ episcopalians who believed in a
Presbyterian system under the oversight of a presidential bishop were courted
for accommodation.54 Efforts at accommodation were made through parlia-
ment’s Committee for Accommodation, which met in two sessions in autumn
1644 and winter 1645–6. In the final session, the Presbyterian leadership went
as far as offering a ‘forbearance’ to Congregationalist churches to practise out-
side of the national Church. However, the condition for this offer was that such
churches subscribe to the Westminster confession of faith and directory of

50 The classic study being W.K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England,
4 vols (Gloucester, MA, 1965).
51 See, for example, Richard L. Greaves, ‘The Ordination Controversy and the Spirit of Reform
in Puritan England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), 233; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph
of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 131–6, 187, 191.
52 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000), ch. 2.
53 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), Part 1, sig. A3.
54 For a Presbyterian statement concerning desire for broad accommodation, see London
Provincial Assembly, Jus Divinum Ministerii Evangelici (London, 1654), ‘To The Reader’, sigs.
B2v–B3. For discussions between the London Presbyterian leadership and the godly episcopalian
John Gauden for Presbyterianism with a fixed president, see A Collection of the State Papers of
John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1742), V, pp. 597–601; G. Abernathy Jr, ‘Richard Baxter
and the Cromwellian Church’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 24 (1961), 224–5.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 65

worship. This went too far for the Congregationalist leadership, who wished to
see a broader settlement around basic Trinitarian fundamentals.55
Although English Presbyterians had bemoaned the sects since 1641, the
notorious anti-toleration campaign of 1646–8, exemplified by Thomas Edwards’s
Gangraeana, resulted from this failure to reach accommodation. This campaign
drew on the national Presbyterian network, with many ministers in the counties
supplying information to Edwards. Likewise, in 1648, 902 ministers from
thirteen counties signed a series of printed Testimonies supporting a strictly
Reformed confessional settlement in England.56

PRESBY TERIANISM IN PRACTICE

As a result of these difficulties, the Presbyterian system in England was developed

in a piecemeal fashion through a series of parliamentary ordinances that came
into force between 1645 and 1648. The legislation was generally unsatisfactory
and the initial parliamentary ordinance of 19 August 1645 for the election of
elders came at the height of the struggle between the Westminster Assembly
and parliament over admission to the Lord’s Supper. Consonant with parlia-
ment’s claim to wield the functions of the royal supremacy, the ordinance made
a parliamentary committee, rather than the national synod, the final court of
appeal on excommunication for sins not enumerated in the legislation. Further
insult to the Assembly and other Presbyterians was offered by parliament by
the ordinance of 14 March 1646, which made local committees of laymen the
arbiters of what constituted sins worthy of suspension from the Lord’s Supper.57
The Assembly and the London clergy resisted parliament’s determination to
retain final control of ecclesiastical affairs in England by refusing to establish
Presbyterianism in the parishes until the system was granted full jurisdiction.
Ultimately, compromise was reached in June, with parliament resorting to its
initial scheme of a parliamentary committee acting as a final court of appeal.
As Rosemary Bradley has pointed out, this led to a year of ‘fatal delay’ for the
establishment of the Presbyterian system.58 With the political and religious
crisis of the later 1640s, the projected Presbyterian reformation of the Church
of England was largely rendered a dead letter.

55 Youngkwon Chung, ‘Parliament and the Committee for Accommodation’, Parliamentary

History, 30 (2011), 289–308.
56 A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1988), pp. 553–8; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the
English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), pp. 373–8.
57 For a narrative of this legislation and the struggles surrounding it, see George Yule, Puritans
in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament 1640–1647 (Abingdon, 1981), ch. 7.
58 Rosemary Bradley, ‘ “Jacob and Esau Struggling in the Wombe”: A Study of Presbyterian and
Independent Religious Conflicts 1640–1648’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, 1975), ch. 8.
66 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The Presbyterian church discipline established in England was therefore

incomplete and ramshackle. There are few records of Presbyterians actively
using the power of suspension from communion or excommunication in the
period. Richard Baxter appears to have excluded around five members of his
Kidderminster congregation from communion during his ministry, but even
this small number appears quite exceptional.59 In practice, ministers and paro-
chial presbyteries obtained their desire for control over admission by either
refusing admission to all but the known godly or suspending the celebration of
the Lord’s Supper altogether.60 Few Presbyterian classes were formed and only
London and Lancashire established provincial assemblies. Even where the
functioning classes and provincial assemblies existed, the Presbyterian system
was imperfect in operation. While the London Provincial Assembly assumed
the mantle of leadership for English Presbyterianism after 1647, only eight out
of twelve classes in the metropolitan area were formed in the late 1640s.61
One of these was to collapse in the mid-1650s, although two ‘classes’ made up
solely of clergymen did form in the late 1650s.62 In Lancashire seven out of nine
classical presbyteries met regularly.63 In the rest of England only a few classical
presbyteries were set up. It has been discerned that individual classes more
or less operated in fourteen of the forty English counties.64 The extent of
operations in these classes is unclear. For example, the Wirksworth classis in
Derbyshire operated as a full classical presbytery, but it is probable that many
of the other operating ‘classes’ may have existed solely as a presbytery for ordin­
ation and for local clerical fellowship.65 Ordination was an important function
in maintaining the quality of the ministry, with Presbyterian classes adminis-
tering around 700 ordinations in the period 1646–60.66 In areas where classes

59 Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Part I, pp. 91–2.

60 Derek Hirst, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’, Past and Present, 132 (1991),
38–41.
61 Lambeth Palace MS Sion L40.2/E64 (Minutes of the London Provincial Assembly 1647–1660);
Charles E. Surman, ed., The Register-Booke of the Fourth Classis in the Province of London, 1646–59
(London, 1953).
62 Tai Liu, ‘The Founding of the London Provincial Assembly 1645–47’, Guildhall Studies in
London History, 3 (1978), 119–29; Philip J. Anderson, ‘Sion College and the London Provincial
Assembly, 1647–1660’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 68–90.
63 W.A. Shaw, ed., Material for an Account of the Provincial Synod of the County of Lancaster
(Manchester, 1890); W.A. Shaw, ed., Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis, 3 vols (Manchester,
1890–1); W.A. Shaw, ed., Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, 2 vols (Manchester, 1896 and 1898).
64 Shaw, A History of the English Church, II, pp. 24–5; Charles E. Surman, ‘Classical Presbyteries
in England, 1643–1660’ (MA thesis, University of Manchester, 1949), pp. 35–59.
65 J. Charles Cox, ed., ‘Minute Book of the Wirksworth Classis, 1651–1658’, Journal of the Derbyshire
Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2 (1880), 135–222; Charles Surman, ‘Presbyterianism
under the Commonwealth: The Wirksworth Classis Minutes, 1651–58’, Transactions of the
Congregational History Society, 15 (1945–8), 163–176; and 16 (1949–51), 39–47; Stephen Orchard,
Nonconformity in Derbyshire: A Study of Dissent, 1600–1800 (Eugene, OR, 2009), pp. 27–33.
66 Philip James Anderson, ‘Presbyterianism and the Gathered Churches in Old and New England,
1640–1662’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1979), p. 80. For a contemporary account of ordin-
ation by classis, see M.H. Lee, ed., Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry(London 1882), pp. 34–9.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 67

were not formed individual parishes with functioning elderships still existed.
An example of this is the Shropshire town of Shrewsbury, where resistance to
the election of ruling elders in outlying parishes prevented the critical mass of
parishes necessary for the formation of a classis, but where the town church
of St Chad’s had a functioning eldership led by the minister Thomas Paget.67
Why did Presbyterianism fail so dramatically in practice? English Presbyterians
always saw the Presbyterian settlement as the reformation of the national Church
of England rather than as a denomination amongst other denominations. This
establishmentarian position put them in the potentially contradictory position
where they envisaged parliament declaring and enforcing the Presbyterian
church settlement in law, but legislating that the presbyteries operated by div-
ine right. This meant that the Presbyterian settlement was essentially reliant
on parliamentary will to effect a reformation from above. By the time of the
establishment of the classes and provinces, parliament was unwilling to enforce
the exclusive national Church settlement that the Presbyterians desired, and
the Presbyterian system essentially was left to the whim of local ministers and
supporting laity.
This ‘vacuum at the centre’, as William Lamont has described it, meant that
the Presbyterian system was fragile wherever it encountered local resistance.68
As John Morrill has shown, such resistance was widespread, scuppering the
Presbyterian reformation of the Church of England.69 In addition the impover-
ished state of many of England’s churches also hampered the construction of
the classical system, as many parishes could not afford a permanent minister. In
1648 a petition from the London Provincial Assembly found that forty parishes
within the London area were too impoverished to afford the salary of a minister
without financial augmentation or resorting to the pluralism common in the
Laudian period.70

THE PRESBY TERIANS AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

Probably the fundamental reason for the failure of the English Presbyterianism
was the revolutionary turn of political events that began in late 1648.
Presbyterian ministers and laity actively opposed the army’s revolution, cam-
paigning for a personal treaty with Charles I and condemning the New Model

67 Barbara Coulton, ‘The Fourth Shropshire Presbyterian Classis 1647–1662’, Shropshire History
and Archaeology, 73 (1998), 34–5.
68 William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1603–60 (London, 1969), pp. 136–58.
69 John Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–1649’, in The Nature of the English Revolution:
Essays by John Morrill (London, 1993), pp. 148–75.
70 Elliot Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English
Revolution’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), pp. 99–107.
68 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Army’s putsch of the Long Parliament, the regicide, and the new Republic’s
Engagement. As with previous mobilizations, the campaign against the army’s
military intervention was led by the London ministers but received support
from Presbyterian ministers and laity throughout the country.71 For example,
the Presbyterian ministers of Lancashire and Cheshire met in conference at
Warrington and issued A Plea for Non-Scribers counselling those who had
taken the Covenant to refuse the Engagement as it was ‘in way of Competition’
with the defining oaths of the parliamentarian cause.72
Resistance to the regime led to the defining and fatal confrontation between the
Commonwealth and the English Presbyterians in the form of the events known as
Love’s Plot. With Charles II being crowned as King of the Scots in January 1651
according to the Solemn League and Covenant and with war breaking out between
the two nations, the new Republic had every reason to fear a pro-Covenanter
Presbyterian ‘fifth column’ in England. This fear became a reality when a com-
munication network between London Presbyterians, Scottish Covenanters, and
Presbyterian-royalists in the exiled royal court was uncovered. While the exiled
conspirators asked for money and arms, the evidence suggests that the English
conspirators were rather non-committal about supporting such an insurrection.
Nevertheless, the discovery of Love’s Plot provided the Commonwealth with the
reason to crush Presbyterian pulpit resistance to the regime, executing the minis-
ter Christopher Love and John Gibbons, a layman, and imprisoning a number of
London and Lancashire ministers in the process.73 The Commonwealth’s actions
were largely successful, with vocal anti-Commonwealth ministers such London’s
William Jenkyn and Manchester’s Richard Heyrick taking the Engagement and
remaining relatively quiet for the duration of the Rump Parliament.74
The establishment of the Cromwellian Protectorate and the legal removal of
necessity for subscription to the Engagement brought some relief for English
Presbyterians. Many found themselves employed by the Protectorate in central
or local roles, serving on committees for the scheme of Triers and Ejectors.
In addition they assisted Cromwellian attempts to reconcile the split between
Protestors and Resolutioners in the Church of Scotland.75 Under the direction

71 For Presbyterians and the regicide, see Elliot Vernon, ‘The Quarrel of the Covenant: The
London Presbyterians and the Regicide’, in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of
Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001) pp. 202–24; Sean Kelsey, ‘The Death of Charles I’, The Historical
Journal, 45 (2002), 735–9.
72 For this incident and Presbyterian opposition to the Engagement in Lancashire generally,
see Alex Craven, ‘ “For the Better Uniting of this Nation”: The 1649 Oath of Engagement and the
People of Lancashire’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), 83–101.
73 Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave’, ch. 7.
74 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–53 (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 247–8.
75 Ann Hughes, ‘ “The Public Profession of these Nations”: The National Church in Interregnum
England’, in C. Durston and J. Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2007),
pp. 93–112; Ann Hughes, ‘ “The Remembrance of Sweet Fellowship”: Relationships between English
and Scottish Presbyterians in the 1640s and 1650s’, in R. Armstrong and T. Ó hAnnracháin, eds.,
Insular Christianity (Manchester, 2013), pp. 170–89.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 69

of the Congregationalist leader John Owen, the opening of the Protectorate

saw attempts by leading Presbyterians and Congregationalists to put aside their
former differences and settle a confession of faith in response to the challenges
of Socinianism and Arminianism. This attempt, as Tim Cooper has shown, was
largely scuppered by the opposition of Richard Baxter, whose star as the voice
of moderate Puritanism had been rising since the early to mid-1650s.76
Nevertheless, the mid- to late 1650s saw a rapid decline in the classical pres-
byteries established in the 1640s. The London and Lancashire provinces made
valiant efforts to fix their infrastructure, and to focus their efforts on evangeliz-
ing through a renewed focus on preaching and catechizing. By the later 1650s,
however, the presbyteries began to crumble owing to chronic absenteeism and
a loss of purpose.77 The declining fortunes of the classical presbyteries was matched
by the rise of around fifteen unofficial county clerical associations in England, as
well as at least one in Wales and two in Ireland. These largely clerical associations
were variously composed of Presbyterians, parochial Congregationalists, and
episcopalians, as well as the category of non-partisan ministers that Baxter
called ‘mere Christians’.78

TOWARDS THE RESTORATION

Many of these ecumenical but ultimately quasi-Presbyterian associations spe-

cifically aimed at uniting Calvinists in the face of threat of Quakers and other
exponents of anti-formalist religion. The associations ultimately suffered from
the same divisions that had divided the godly throughout the mid-seventeenth-
century crisis and they failed to establish themselves as regional church bodies
(if that ever was the intention). By the later 1650s Presbyterianism had largely
been discredited in practice in the eyes of the emerging generation of clergy.
Many, like Simon Patrick, the future bishop of Ely, sought ordination both from
a classis and from the remaining bishops still living from the Laudian period.
Suspicion of Presbyterianism was assisted by the growing international accept-
ance of Archbishop Ussher’s scholarship on the early second-century letters of
Ignatius of Antioch, which demonstrated the historicity of at least some kind of
episcopacy in the early second-century Church.79 Henry Hammond’s mid-

76 Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Farnham,
2011), pp. 179–95.
77 Shaw, A History of the English Church, II, pp. 98–126.
78 For the associations, see Shaw, A History of the English Church, II, pp. 152–65. See also Simon
Burton, ‘The Heavenly Pattern of the Church: Trinitarian and Covenantal Themes in Richard
Baxter’s Association Ecclesiology’, Ecclesiology, 10 (2014), 53–75.
79 Hugo de Quehen, ‘Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy’, The Seventeenth
Century, 13 (1998), 69–84; Sarah Mortimer, ‘Kingship and the “Apostolic Church”, 1620–1650’,
Reformation and Renaissance Review, 13 (2011), 225–46.
70 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

1650s use of Ussher’s scholarship to remount the case for diocesan episcopacy
further challenged the intellectual basis of the Westminster Assembly’s model
of divine right Presbyterianism.80 In the late 1650s, few English Presbyterians,
save those in London and Lancashire, would defend the Assembly’s model of
Presbyterianism in print.81 Richard Baxter explicitly abandoned the Westminster
Assembly’s Presbyterian model, particularly the notion that a classis or provin-
cial assembly should govern a number of congregations collectively. Baxter
instead focused on a model of church government that identified the Ignatian
bishop with the English parish minister.82 Baxter therefore retreated from the
Westminster Assembly’s classical Presbyterianism to a pre-Civil War Puritan
model that focused on the work of a single pastor. For the generation of
Presbyterian ministers who began their careers bereft of any effective institu-
tional settlement, such as Thomas Wadsworth or Oliver Heywood, Baxter’s
thinking provided a practical solution for the continuing imperative of godly
reformation.83 Baxter’s paradigm, therefore, would be the dominant model
amongst the religious societies of Restoration Presbyterians.
Mid-seventeenth-century Presbyterianism, like its Elizabethan predecessor,
had always been a movement to reform the Church of England. After the fall of
Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate and the chaotic series of military revolutions
of 1659, England’s Presbyterians warmed to the re-establishment of the Stuart
monarchy. Faced with the choice of advancing a toleration of the sectaries and
Roman Catholics they had always opposed or the re-establishment of episco-
pacy in the Church of England, they chose to accept episcopacy. Following
Baxter’s lead, the leading Presbyterian theorists Edmund Calamy and Simeon
Ashe finally abandoned the Presbyterianism of the past twenty years. They
declared to their Scottish counterparts in August 1660 that the only chance
of retaining any aspect of Presbyterian discipline in the Restoration Church of
England was by conceding to the re-establishment of episcopacy. The English
ministers prayed that the Scots would look at this compromise as a practical
necessity until God ‘be pleased to prepare the hearts of the People for his beau-
tiful work’ rather than a ‘tergiversation from our principles or apostacy from

80 John W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660 (Manchester, 1969), pp. 108–28.
81 One such defence, however, was First Classis of the Province of Lancashire’s The Censures of
the Church Revived (1659).
82 See, for example, Richard Baxter, Five Disputations of Church Government and Worship
(London, 1659), pp. 77–91; J. William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of
the Reformed Pastor (Milton Keynes, 2004), pp. 73–8.
83 For Wadsworth, see Eamon Duffy, ‘The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and
the Multitude’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (Abingdon, 1998),
p. 47; Geoffrey Nuttall and Neil Keeble, eds, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter,
2 vols (Oxford, 1991), I, pp. 172–3, 175–6, 190, 200–2, 213–16. For Hayward, see Samuel S. Thomas,
Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish and Congregation in Oliver Heywood’s
Halifax (Leiden, 2013), pp. 38–41, 44–5.
 Presbyterians in the English Revolution 71

the Covenant’.84 The Presbyterian’s prayers for the people’s change of heart
would never be answered.

CONCLUSION

For English Presbyterians the Long Parliament opened the prospect of a second
reformation of the Church of England, aligning it not only with the Church of
Scotland but also the majority of European Reformed churches. This ambition,
however, would be frustrated by the rapid and revolutionary political and reli-
gious currents of the period. Historians, often embarrassed by the Presbyterians’
Reformation rather than Enlightenment values, have tended to cast the English
Presbyterians as bigoted and wrong-headed men of yesterday. Yet Presbyterians
were active participants in most of the debates that interest historians of the mid-
seventeenth century and were sufficiently influential to remain an active voice
throughout the period. Although Presbyterians failed in their ambition to
reform the Church, they provided a continual voice in favour of a Puritan
settlement in the British revolutions and the bedrock of future nonconformity.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Abernathy, George, ‘Richard Baxter and the Cromwellian Church’, Huntington Library
Quarterly 24 (1961), 215–31.
Anderson, Philip J., ‘Sion College and the London Provincial Assembly, 1647–1660’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 68–90.
Armstrong, Robert and Ó Hannrachain, Tadhg, eds, Insular Christianity: Alternative
Models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570−c.1700 (Manchester, 2013).
Baxter, Richard, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696).
Bolam, C. Gordon, Goring, Jeremy, Short, H.L. and Thomas, Roger, eds, The English
Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London, 1968).
Coldwell, Christopher and Hall, David W., eds, Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, or
The Divine Right of Church Government (Dallas, TX, 1995).
Cooper, Tim, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity
(Farnham, 2011).
Coulton, Barbara, ‘The Fourth Shropshire Presbyterian Classis 1647–1662’, Shropshire
History and Archaeology, 73 (1998), 34–5.
Drysdale, A.H., History of the Presbyterians in England: Their Rise, Decline and Revival
(London, 1889).

84 Robert Wodrow, The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh,
1721–2), I, p. lxiii.
72 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Durston, Christopher and Maltby, Judith, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England

(Manchester, 2006).
Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena, 3 volumes ([1646] Ilkley, 1977).
Ha, Polly, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, CA, 2011).
Hirst, Derek, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’, Past and Present, 132
(1991), 33–66.
Hughes, Ann, Gangraena and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004).
Lamont, William, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (London, 1969).
Liu, Tai, ‘The Founding of the London Provincial Assembly 1645–47’, Guildhall Studies
in London History, 3 (1978), 119–29.
Mackenzie, Kirsteen M., The Solemn League and Covenant and the Cromwellian Union
1643–1663 (London, 2017).
Matthews, A.G., ed., Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1988).
Paul, Robert S., The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster
Assembly and the ‘Grand Debate’ (Edinburgh, 1985).
Powell, Hunter, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan
Revolution, 1638–1644 (Manchester, 2015).
Scott, David, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–49 (Basingstoke,
2003).
Shaw, William, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the
Commonwealth (London, 1900).
Van Dixhoorn Chad, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 5 vols
(Oxford, 2012).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
Webster, Tom, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement,
c.1620–1643 (Cambridge, 2003).
Winship Michael P., Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill
(Cambridge, MA, 2012).
Yule, George, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament,
1640–1647 (Abingdon, 1981).
 3

Presbyterians in the Restoration*

George Southcombe

In the period that saw the Earl of Clarendon’s and Gilbert Burnet’s different
historical endeavours come to fruition, one of the great histories remained
largely unwritten.1 The Presbyterian Roger Morrice planned a history of the
Puritans on a grand scale. His vast manuscript collections—used by other histor-
ians since John Strype and Daniel Neal—point to the seriousness with which
he undertook research, and the deep importance that he attached to the pro-
ject, but he was unable to transform his desires into a complete narrative. He
was constrained throughout by a historiographical schizophrenia that made
it unclear what a history of Puritanism should be. Most Puritans had, before
the Civil Wars, considered themselves the voices of true Reformation—
sometimes heard, sometimes muffled—within the Church of England. But in
the Restoration the most vocal clerical exponents of the Puritan tradition found
themselves ejected from that Church’s ministry. How was it possible to write
the history of a group that conceived of itself as the committed ministry of a
national Church when that national Church had rejected it?2 The crisis in
identity that Morrice found so limiting was one that was more generally felt
amongst the Presbyterians. This was a period in which Presbyterianism was
reluctantly refashioned, and this chapter is concerned with the processes by
which this refashioning was enabled and the stages through which it occurred.

* I would like to thank Dr Grant Tapsell for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
1 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England,
3 vols (Oxford, 1702–4); Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England,
3 vols (London, 1679–1715); Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time, 2 vols
(London, 1724–34).
2 Both the content and the argument of this paragraph are deeply indebted to Mark Goldie,
gen. ed., The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, 7 vols (Woodbridge, 2007–9), I, ch. 7.
(Volume I of The Entring Book comprises a monograph by Mark Goldie, which has also been
published as a standalone volume: Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge,
2016)). A description of Morrice’s remaining manuscript collections—housed at Dr Williams’s
Library—can be found in Goldie, gen. ed., Entring Book, I, appendix 1.

George Southcombe, Presbyterians in the Restoration In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I.
Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0004
74 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

RESTORATION

The crisis of Restoration Presbyterianism was born out of two intertwined

­failures: one political and one religious. Following the brief reign of Richard
Cromwell, and the return of the Rump Parliament, fears of social anarchy drove
forward schemes to return England to some form of constitutional stability.3
The rising led by Sir George Booth in Cheshire in the August of 1659 was the
largest of the Presbyterian-royalist attempts to assert militarily these demands.
It was soon put down, but the published materials issued during it are none-
theless suggestive of the principles motivating those who would play a key
role in the moves leading to Restoration. Booth’s rising aimed not simply, or
even primarily, at a Restoration of the Stuart line. Central to its purposes were
the readmission of members of parliament excluded by Pride’s Purge in 1648,
and a reengagement with the terms for settlement that were at that point
being put to the king.4 As Blair Worden has demonstrated, it was this political
Presbyterianism that drove many who led and organized the campaign for a
free parliament that took on the features of a national movement in late 1659
and 1660. It was this campaign in turn that shaped the thinking of the man who
more than any other determined events: the taciturn General George Monck.5
Political Presbyterianism had considerable strengths at this stage. Unlike the
royal court its proponents were able to disseminate its views with ease in public
forums, and royalists recognized that it was necessary to be parasitic upon a
Presbyterian-led movement if their ends were to be obtained.6 Hopes for a
Presbyterian political future remained when the Convention Parliament of
April 1660 was called. The ‘Presbyterian knot’—veteran parliamentarians like
the Earl of Manchester, Denzil Holles, and Sir Harbottle Grimstone—attempt-
ed to secure control of the Houses in order to push through a settlement that
would have put considerable fetters on kingship.7 Why did they fail? The move-
ment that had been spearheaded by political Presbyterians slipped from their
control. The logic of calls for a free parliament led to one that was inhabited by
those who had no time for what were seen as disloyal attempts to place bonds
upon a lawful king. Presbyterian voices had seemed loudest only in a context

3 The best single account of this turbulent period remains Austin Woolrych, ‘Historical
Introduction’, in D.M. Wolfe et al., eds, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven,
CT, 1952–83), VII (rev. edn), pp. 1–228.
4 John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English
Revolution (Oxford, 1974), ch. 8.
5 Blair Worden, ‘1660: Restoration and Revolution’, in Janet Clare, ed., From Republic to Restoration:
Legacies and Departures (Manchester, 2018), pp. 23–52; Blair Worden, ‘The Campaign for a Free
Parliament, 1659–60’, Parliamentary History, 36 (2017), 159–84; Blair Worden, ‘The Demand for a
Free Parliament, 1659–60’, in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, eds, Revolutionary England,
c. 1630–c. 1660: Essays for Clive Holmes (London, 2017), pp. 176–200.
6 Worden, ‘Campaign’; Worden, ‘1660’.
7 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales
1658–1667 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 105, 117–18.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 75

where others had been suppressed.8 The reality of the situation became clear
and the king was welcomed back on terms that suited the gentry interest but
did little to circumscribe his effective field of action.9
The hopes for a Presbyterian political settlement died quickly; hopes for a
Presbyterian religious settlement were kept alive much longer. In the declar-
ation of Breda (1660) Charles had promised ‘a liberty to tender consciences’
and to ‘be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament as upon mature
deliberation shall be offered to us for the full granting that indulgence’.10 The
words were studiedly vague, and responsibility for their implementation
was left to parliament, but Presbyterians believed that there was the real
­possibility of the Church of England being re-established on a broad basis.
John Milton had warned them that the return of monarchy would mean the
return of episcopacy. Any son of Charles I ‘will most certainly bring back
[episcopacy] with him, if he regard the last and strictest charge of his father, to
­persevere in not the doctrin only, but the government of the church of England;
not to neglect the speedie and effectual suppressing of errors and schisms’.11 But
many Presbyterians were prepared to accept an episcopal system if they could
continue to minister within the national Church. The intellectual underpin-
nings of the system of reduced episcopacy they favoured had been provided
by Archbishop James Ussher in the mid-century, and they sought to proceed
on those grounds.12 In October 1660 the Worcester House Declaration held
out the possibility of a limited episcopal system being set up, and made cer-
tain controversial practices—kneeling to receive communion, for example—
a matter for the conscience of individual ministers. However, this was not
passed into legislation, and the Savoy House Conference of 1661, called to dis-
cuss the religious settlement, ended without constructive agreement in part
because of Richard Baxter’s intransigence on the necessity of fundamental
reform of the liturgy.13
It is therefore possible to trace an apparent series of roads not taken from
1660 to 1662—a set of moments that might, counterfactually, have led to the
formation of an inclusive Church of England. This may, though, be to indulge
in even more wishful thinking than counterfactuals usually require. Certainly

8 Worden, ‘1660’.
9 George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture: Britain
and Ireland, 1660–1714 (Basingstoke, 2010), ch. 1.
10 Andrew Browning, ed., English Historical Documents: Volume VIII: 1660–1714 (London,
1966), p. 58.
11 John Milton, The Readie and Easie Way (second edn), in Complete Prose Works, VII
(rev. edn), p. 457.
12 James Ussher, The Reduction of Episcopacie (London, 1656); Goldie, Entring Book, I,
pp. 232–3; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, and
London, 1991), pp. 31–2.
13 Southcombe and Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture, pp. 24–25. See also
N.H. Keeble, ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014); Geoffrey
F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick, eds, From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962 (London, 1962).
76 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the religious defeat of Presbyterianism had its roots in its early political defeat.
The actions of the ‘Presbyterian knot’ were seen within the context of a long
history of attempts to place limitations on monarchy. The arch-Restoration
polemicist Roger L’Estrange wrote that ‘the Factious and Schismatical Clergy
are but (with reverence) Bawds to a State-faction. A Tumult for Religion, is
within one step of Rebellion’.14 Presbyterians were bound by their history.
They could only emphasize their loyalty convincingly by obscuring their
Presbyterianism or emphasize their Presbyterianism at the expense of appear-
ing disloyal. Presbyterian protestations of loyalty could easily be portrayed in
hostile literature as simply duplicitous. As L’Estrange explained, his writing ‘is
directed to the People, and the Design of it is onely to lay open the Presbyterian
Juggle, that in one Age they be not twice deluded by the same Imposture’.15
L’Estrange was a vehement writer, whose anti-Presbyterianism was to rumble
on throughout the religious and political debates of the late seventeenth cen-
tury, but his attitude clearly aligned with a number of those in the Cavalier
Parliament. It was this parliament that was ultimately responsible for the
restrictive religious settlement.
On 19 May 1662 Charles II gave his assent to the Act of Uniformity. Before
St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) ministers had to declare their agreement
with all in the Prayer Book and episcopal ordination, and deny the lawfulness
of resistance and the Solemn League and Covenant. Only those who had been
episcopally ordained themselves would be recognized. These strictures ensured
that over 2,000 were deprived in England and Wales (some before 1662) out
of a total clerical body of c.9,000. For Richard Baxter the historical parallels
were clear: ‘This fatal Day called to remembrance the French Massacre, when
on the same Day 30000 or 40000 Protestants perished by Religious Roman
Zeal and Charity’.16 The Act of Uniformity was followed by a series of legisla-
tive measures—misleadingly known as the ‘Clarendon code’—intended to
suffocate Dissent.17
It remains difficult to establish with any assuredness the numbers of those
who, despite persecution, formed the Dissenting communities. The best ana­
lysis remains that conducted by M.R. Watts, which took as its starting point
the list assembled by Dr John Evans between 1715 and 1718. What is clear from
these figures is that Presbyterians formed by far the largest group of noncon-
formists—Watts estimates that they constituted 3.3 per cent of the population

14 Roger L’Estrange, Interest Mistaken (London, 1661), sig. A*v.

15 L’Estrange, Interest Mistaken, sig. A*.
16 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (London 1696), Part II, p. 384.
17 On Clarendon’s religious attitudes, see Paul Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions:
Clarendon, Comprehension, and Uniformity’, in Keeble, ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’,
pp. 57–84. For a discussion of the penal code, see Southcombe and Tapsell, Restoration Politics,
Religion and Culture, p. 27.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 77

in comparison to the 1.1 per cent of their nearest rivals, the Independents.18
In fact, this is in all probability an underestimate of their total strength.19
This then was the situation of Restoration Presbyterianism. It had been a
driving force behind the Restoration; it had been involved in discussions con-
cerning the religious settlement in which the prospect of comprehension had
seemed real; and it had obtained nothing. Ministers for whom the notion of a
national Church was axiomatic were thrust outside it, and a number of the laity
continued to identify with them (even if, as many did, they also attended their
parish church). These paradoxes were both deeply damaging to old ways of
thinking and the creative impetus for new formulations that would allow
Presbyterian survival.

D ONS AND DUCKLINGS?

The complexity of the situation faced by the Presbyterians was neatly captured
in a letter an Independent minister wrote to a minister in New England, inter-
cepted by the authorities in 1663:
The Presbyterians are very much hated & reproached by the Episcopal party, far
more than the Congregational, because these are contented to enjoy their Church-
way among themselves, & not allotrioepiskopein [to busybody]; whereas the other,
espousing a National Church interest, will call the highest to an account.20
Following the ejection it might seem that the choice available was stark and
clear: either Presbyterians could continue to hold out for comprehension
within the national Church or they could redefine themselves to exist as a
Dissenting group and to seek toleration. The Secretary of State Sir Joseph
Williamson recognized these two positions amongst them and named the
factions ‘Dons’ and ‘Ducklings’ (signalling those who would take to the waters of
Dissent).21 This binary might, however, oversimplify the situation. Positions
adopted may have been strategic, and to write in terms of hard identities
obscures the overlap in thinking and practice between the leading figures.

18 M.R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978),
p. 509.
19 Mark Goldie works with a total figure for Dissenters of ‘no more than ten per cent of the
population’. See Goldie, Entring Book, I, p. 22.
20 A.G. Matthews, ‘A Censored Letter. William Hooke in England to John Davenport in New
England, 1663’, Congregational Historical Society Transactions, ix (1924–6), 274. Matthews prints
TNA, SP 29/69, fols 6–9 with modernized spelling. The Greek, transliterated by Matthews, is a
verb derived from the Greek of 1 Peter 4:15: ‘busybody in other men’s matters’. See Matthews’s note
(which gives an incorrect Biblical reference). The folio in the original manuscript (fol. 8) from
which the quotation is taken now appears to be missing. I am grateful to Tomasz Gromelski for
his help in seeking to establish its current status.
21 TNA, SP 29/294, fol. 223.
78 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The exigencies of survival necessitated the adoption of practices that could

evolve into a structure independent of the national Church, while, even to those
who espoused most strongly the legitimacy of separation, comprehension could
remain a desirable goal that seemed obtainable at specific political movements.
The Presbyterian modes of survival, necessary in the context of the 1660s but
drawing on practices developed in the 1650s, are identifiable in an intelligence
note probably dating from 1664. The note, while—as is the nature of such
texts—it undoubtedly exaggerates the threat of political violence emanating
from the Presbyterians, contains enough plausible detail to mean that its author
had been the recipient of some genuine information. The Presbyterians were
said to hold regular conventicles in private houses—including the Countess of
Exeter’s—and a number of those who preached at their meetings were named
(including Richard Baxter, William Whitaker, and Matthew Poole). They also
met in specific coffeehouses—those hubs of political discussion in the late
seventeenth century—and they organized collections for those ‘in distresse’
(Edmund Calamy had recently received 500l. for distribution). Those sympa-
thetic to Presbyterians who had risen to be aldermen in City government were
identified.22 All this points to a Presbyterian underground that continued to
function during the early period of persecution, and in which different gener-
ations of Presbyterians participated. Ultimate hopes for comprehension did
not preclude such activities.23
Indeed, there was a long tradition within Puritanism of continuing religious
exercises outside of a formal Church structure—the prophesyings that had
caused such conflict between Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Grindal pro-
vided a key precedent.24 Presbyterian meetings could supplement worship within
the national Church, and throughout the period, outside London, it seems that
there are few references to the celebration of communion within these groups.
Partial conformity—attendance at both a parish church and a nonconformist
meeting—was therefore widespread.25 As the rector of Adderbury in the 1680s
wrote to the Bishop of Oxford about the Banbury Presbyterian meeting: ‘many
of ’em, will stragle one part of the day thither, when they duely attend the public
worship of God on the other . . . they seem to be like the borderers betwixt two
kingdoms one can’t well tell what Prince they are subject to’.26 It is important,
though, to recognize the exasperated tone of this statement, and the intimation

22 TNA, SP 29/109, fol. 72. The note records surnames only, so the specific identifications of
preachers are mine.
23 I am very grateful to Elliot Vernon for discussion of these points. He extends this analysis,
and particularly elaborates on the ways in which London Presbyterians continued practices devel-
oped in the 1650s in his forthcoming book.
24 Goldie, Entring Book, I, p. 231.
25 John D. Ramsbottom, ‘Presbyterians and “Partial Conformity” in the Restoration Church
of England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 249–70. Discussion of communion is on
pp. 259–60.
26 Quoted in Ramsbottom, ‘Presbyterians and “Partial Conformity” ’, 262.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 79

of disloyalty (of course, Elizabeth had assumed the political danger inherent
in prophesyings—and she may even have been right). To Presbyterians their
practices may not have been mutually exclusive with worship in a national
Church, but to their enemies they were necessarily subversive. In a context
where the attitudes of their enemies had been given legislative teeth, even
partial conformity required the establishment of mechanisms and justifica-
tion that could produce a distinct and separate religious identity as an unin-
tended consequence.
The irony is then that the very actions of the persecutory Church forced
Presbyterians into novel ways of thinking. As Michael Winship has made clear
‘The consequence of an unprecedentedly severe form of Anglican aggression
was an unprecedentedly aggressive form of moderate puritanism’.27 Joseph
Alleine, one of those who engaged first in nonconformist ordinations in 1665
or 1666, could write stridently of how post the ejections of 1662 ‘we continue
still but in the same station, and the same work, watching over our Flocks,
and administring according to our Office, with no other difference, but only
that the place is altered’.28 Richard Baxter, despite his cautious phrasing, and his
explicit critique of what he saw as the excesses and errors of Independency,
nonetheless shared in Alleine’s analysis.29
This development in Presbyterian thinking was disseminated through a
wide range of cultural forms, and despite the continuation of a vibrant manu-
script culture, and the attempts by the regime to impose strict censorship,
Presbyterians embraced print as an essential medium for pursuing controversy.30
The intelligence note discussed above also recorded details of two booksellers
‘intrusted’ by Presbyterians (Francis Tyton and Samuel Gellibrand), and noted
‘Doctor Wild is their poett’.31 One commentator has seen this last statement as
a rather desperate scrabbling for useful intelligence by the note’s writer, but
while the information may not have been surprising to its original readers its
significance has been generally overlooked by later historians.32 Robert Wild,
ejected clergyman of Tatenhill, Staffordshire, maintained a substantial pres-
ence in the world of printed poetry until his death in 1679. Some analysis of his
work illuminates much about the process of identity formation discussed in
this chapter.

27 Michael P. Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and

Others Respond to A Friendly Debate’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 705.
28 Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism’, 703–4. Winship quotes Joseph Alleine, A Call to Archippus
(London, 1664), p. 23.
29 Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism’.
30 Southcombe and Tapsell, Restoration Politics, Religion and Culture, pp. 11–13; George
Southcombe, ed., English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700, 3 vols (London, 2012), I, pp. xiii–xiv.
31 TNA, SP 29/109, fol. 72v.
32 David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity
(Manchester, 2007), p. 78.
80 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

In his The Loyal Nonconformist—a poem of 1666 occasioned by the Five

Mile Act and its requirement that ejected ministers take the ‘Oxford Oath’ in
order to come within five miles of corporations returning members to parlia-
ment or any place where they had ministered or preached since the Act of
Oblivion—Wild wrote in pungent terms of what he could in conscience swear.33
He protested his loyalty to the monarch, but drew attention to those he saw as
the true enemies of the state:
The Royal Oak I swear I will defend;
    But for the Ivy which doth hug it so,
I swear that is a Thief, and not a Friend,
    And about Steeples fitter for to grow.34
The favoured symbol of the Restoration monarchy—the oak tree in Boscobel
that had shielded Charles during his flight after Worcester—was here imagined
as strangled by persecutory Anglicans. The hopes for a reduced episcopacy
along Ussher’s model remained (‘the Bishops might / Do better, and be better
than they are’; ‘Where we have one, I wish we might have ten’35) but these
co-existed in the poem with strong anti-prelatical sentiment:
I owe assistance to the King by Oath;
    And if he please to put the Bishops down,
As who knows what may be, I should be loth
    To see Tom Beckets Mitre push the Crown.36
Wild’s poem encoded a hope for comprehension at the same time as developing
an image of the leaders of the Church that made the fulfilment of that hope
seem increasingly unlikely. This darkening of the reputation of central figures
within the Anglican Church is the negative of the creative developments in
Presbyterian thought discussed above.
The actions of Anglicans at the Restoration thus propelled forward think-
ing that would justify nonconformist meetings and created a powerful ‘other’
against which Presbyterian identity could be defined. Both made the ultimate
separation of Presbyterians from the Church possible but they did not of
themselves make it necessary. The developments in Presbyterian thought,

33 The ‘Oxford Oath’ was ‘I, A.B., do swear that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever
to take arms against the king, and that I do abhor that traitorous position of taking arms by his
authority against his person, or against those that are commissionated by him, in pursuance
of such commissions, and that I will not at any time endeavour any alteration of government
either in Church or State.’ For the Act see Browning, English Historical Documents 1660–1714,
pp. 382–4. Further discussion of Wild’s poem may be found in George Southcombe, ‘Dissent and
the Restoration Church of England’, in Grant Tapsell, ed., The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714
(Manchester, 2012), pp. 200–2.
34 Robert Wild, The Loyal Nonconformist, in Southcombe, ed., English Nonconformist Poetry,
p. 223.
35 Wild, Loyal Nonconformist, pp. 224–5. 36 Wild, Loyal Nonconformist, p. 225.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 81

traceable in hindsight, were played out in shifting political contexts. The

­distinction between Dons and Ducklings may break down when practices and
habits of thought shared amongst different generations of Presbyterians are
highlighted, but when political manoeuvres at the centre required Presbyterians
to make a public choice concerning how they represented their relationship
with the national Church clearly different responses might be identified.
The issue was forced in 1672 when on 15 March Charles II produced his
Declaration of Indulgence. Working through the royal prerogative the king
suspended the penal laws against Dissent and allowed nonconformists to
apply for licences to hold conventicles.37 Presbyterian consciences were
pricked by two issues. First, whether accepting this non-parliamentary initia-
tive meant giving legitimacy to the king’s arbitrary tendencies, and secondly
whether accepting toleration meant abandoning the claims of Presbyterians to
be encompassed within the national Church. For some these issues were too
much to bear, and they rejected the opportunity that had opened up. But for
others an acceptance—however grudging—of the Declaration was the best way
of ministering to their flocks. Even some of those who were initially unsettled
by the implications of acceptance took out a licence. Philip Henry, who was
concerned that the Declaration would erode ‘our Parish-order which God hath
own’d’ was one, and in the most celebrated case Richard Baxter overcame his
anxieties sufficiently to be licensed as ‘a Nonconforming Minister’ with excep-
tional rights to preach ‘in any licensed or allowed Place’. In fact the majority of
those licensed under the Declaration were Presbyterians, and in a number of
places a greater degree of congregational organization amongst them can be
dated from this point.38
Some of the processes already traced quickened at this stage. Robert Wild—
who was licensed to preach at his house in Oundle, Northamptonshire—in a
published letter to his friend the City politician John Jekyll wrote of those
who would oppose Presbyterian action under the Declaration:
Doubtless, Sir, upon the opening of this wide Door to us, we shall have many
Adversaries on the right hand and on the left; and many from amongst our selves
will rise up and speak perverse things: I wish we may endure the Sun as well as we
did the Wind. The Patriarchs (we must expect) will be moved with Envy; especially
at this Coat of divers colours (the Indulgence) which our Father hath given us.
However, they are our Elder Brethren, and we must honour and love them, though
they will watch for our halting, and lay (it may be) stumbling blocks in our way.39

37 Browning, ed., English Historical Documents 1660–1714, pp. 387–8.

38 Goldie, Entring Book, I, pp. 236–8; Richard L. Greaves, ‘Philip Henry’, ODNB; N.H. Keeble,
‘Richard Baxter’, ODNB; N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Athens, GA, 1987), pp. 57–9; Frank Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence 1672:
A Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent (London, 1908).
39 Robert Wild, A Letter from Dr Robert Wild to his Friend Mr J.J. (London, 1672), p. 15. The
identification of Mr J.J. as John Jekyll is Elizabeth Clarke’s see her ‘John Jekyll’, ODNB.
82 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Wild recognized the antipathy of some within Presbyterianism to the acceptance

of the terms of the Declaration, but his ire remained fixed on the intolerant
Anglicans—figured here as the jealous brothers of Joseph. The ‘honour’ and ‘love’
due to them was made clear in an accompanying poem. The dire warnings issued
by churchmen about the impact of the Declaration were mercilessly satirized:
But now they tole their Bells, and wring their hands,
Religion (that is to say, their Lands)
The Protestant Religion now will fall;
Bell and the Dragon will devour us all.
The Children of the Church are frighted: oh!
The POPE’s Raw-head-and-bloody-bones cry Boh!
Behind the door a License without stint!
This bitter Cup hath Roman Wormwood in’t.
O tender zealous hearts! O sad Condition!
Idolatry will eat up Superstition.
The Calf at Bethel fears the Calf at Dan;
The Gridiron grumbles at the Frying pan.40
Wild’s anti-prelatical attacks were one part of a savage discourse that took
hold within Presbyterianism against those who maintained the narrow Church
settlement. A unifying theme in Roger Morrice’s Entring Book lies in his con-
tinued attacks on this persecutory interest. The ‘Hierarchists’ are painted as
ungrateful, untrustworthy and cruel:
. . . it is congreous enough to the nature and practice of some kinde of creatures to
hate and implacably seeke the ruin of those that have done them a kindnese that
they are never able to recompence as the Bishop did the Presbyterians – after they
had brought in the King and their Lordshipps notwithstanding all the Solemne
promises and vows . . . made them to the contrary.41
If comprehension were going to come then it was not to be the result of a
friendly dialogue.

RESTORATION CRISES AND THE

FAILURE OF COMPREHENSION

Roger Morrice’s great hopes, despite his analysis of the attitudes of the clerical
hierarchy, however, remained embedded in comprehension. The same was true
of others. The Declaration of Indulgence proved a short-lived measure when

40 Wild, A Letter, pp. 26–7.

41 Goldie, Entring Book, III, p. 237. See also the discussion of this theme in Grant Tapsell,
‘ “Weepe Over the Ejected Practice of Religion”: Roger Morrice and the Restoration Twilight of
Puritan Politics’, Parliamentary History, 28 (2009), 279–81.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 83

parliament in 1673 reminded the king that he did not enjoy a suspending
power in ecclesiastical affairs (a point it had already made in 1663).42 But for
many of those who had taken out licences the brief moment of toleration
did not send them towards simply seeking another. From 1673–5 Baxter and
other Presbyterians engaged in discussions with leading Anglicans concern-
ing schemes for comprehension, and certain amelioratory measures were
introduced into parliament but not passed into legislation.43 The crisis of
1678–81, in which fears of popery in a domestic and European context height-
ened desires for Protestant unity, sparked a further round of discussions. The
international context was a key to the Presbyterian position. In the face of the
threat posed by aggressive forces of counter-Reformation, and particularly
Louis XIV’s France, how could the persecution of Reformed Protestants by a
national Protestant Church be justified? In 1680 bills for both comprehension
and toleration were introduced, although again ultimately neither made it on
to the statute book.44 The coming of an unimpeachably Protestant monarch
in the revolution of 1688–9 significantly raised hopes, and a Toleration Act
was passed in May 1689 but plans for comprehension faltered never to be
convincingly resurrected. In all, eight bills for comprehension can be identi-
fied as being prepared for parliamentary deliberation from 1667–89.45 How is
their failure to be explained?
The Presbyterians’ own analysis of the situation was perceptive. Vincent
Alsop, writing in 1680, made clear what to that point had precluded
reconciliation:
And most men have noted, that within these twenty years Providence offer’d them
three seasons, wherein with great ease, they might have healed our Breaches; the
first, after His Majesties happy Restauration; the second, after the Plague, Fire, and
War; the third, after the Discovery of the late Horrid and Popish Plot: but yet it
pleased not God to give them, with the opportunities, to see the things that
belong’d to our Peace.46

42 John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford, 2000), pp. 35–8.
43 John Spurr, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’, English
Historical Review, 104 (1989), 935–6; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, pp. 67–9.
44 H. Horwitz, ‘Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 15 (1964), 201–17; Gary S. De Krey, ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, in
Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds, Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation
England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–52. For debates over the status and nature of the
foreign reformed Churches in this period, see Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England,
1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 284–313. Morrice’s internationalism, and his understanding
of the existence of a powerful Catholic conspiracy for the extirpation of Protestantism in the
later 1680s is discussed by Stephen Taylor, ‘An English Dissenter and the Crisis of European
Protestantism: Roger Morrice’s Perception of European Politics in the 1680s’, in David Onnekink, ed.,
War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 177–95.
45 Goldie, Entring Book, I, pp. 238–46.
46 Vincent Alsop, The Mischief of Impositions (London, 1680), p. 5.
84 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Alsop’s anger is palpable, but underlying it is a justifiable sense of the inflexibility

of the Anglican position. As John Spurr has demonstrated it is all too easy to
mistake the charitableness of some Anglicans for sentiment that would sup-
port comprehension. Toleration itself was eventually adopted as a tactical
necessity to keep those outside the Church who would be destructive if they were
within it. Comprehension far from sustaining the Church of England would
endanger it. As Benjamin Laney, Bishop of Ely, said it was ‘a dragnet, that will
fetch in all kinds of fish, good or bad, great or small, there will be room enough
for Leviathan’.47
Vincent Alsop’s understanding of the situation also led him to proceed fur-
ther with the lines of thought that could justify separation. He expressed them
in a peculiarly powerful written style that could appeal in the growing public
forum for political debate. When faced with the further test to the Presbyterian
conscience provided by the Catholic James’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1687
Alsop was one of those who accepted it. Indeed, he was central to the produc-
tion of the address of thanks for the Declaration issued from Westminster and
in obtaining signatories to it. The travails of the late seventeenth century had
led him to a position from which he could accept positively the possibility of
separation. The active role he played in the Presbyterian ministry of the 1690s
had its roots in these turbulent years.48

CONCLUSION

The key moment in Presbyterianism’s transition to denominational status was

the revolution of 1688–9 and the Toleration Act passed in its aftermath. On one
level this was the last episode in a series of failures that had begun in 1660.
Presbyterians were required to accept that their dreams of being part of a
national Church were over. It is very easy therefore to depict the late seven-
teenth century as a period in which Presbyterians were consistently undone
by their Anglican enemies: courted only to be jilted at any point when union
seemed possible. Certainly for those living through that painful era the
tenor of the times was resoundingly bleak. For Roger Morrice, a conspiracy of
‘Hierarchists’ and papists posed a relentless threat to the survival of Protestant
England.49 The despair of the defeated should be respected, but it is also
necessary to understand the ways in which responses to defeat shaped the later
survival of the movement and meant that the triumph of Anglicanism in 1662

47 Spurr, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act’, quotation on p. 941.
48 R.A. Beddard, ‘Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Restoration Dissent’, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1973), 161–84.
49 Tapsell, ‘ “Weepe Over the Ejected Practice of Religion” ’, pp. 289–94.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 85

was not, in the long term, the triumph of the Church over Dissent. The
­challenges of the Restoration period had prepared Presbyterianism for the
denominational moment. The process by which this occurred was fundamen-
tally dialogic. In response to a fiercely exclusionary Anglicanism, Presbyterianism
was reshaped.50 This reshaping occurred within a context where the continuation
of the Presbyterian movement was based on the art of the possible. (Nowhere
was it clearer than in responses to the declarations of indulgence that while
Presbyterians sought to make their own history they did not do so in cir-
cumstances of their own choosing.) Ideas that could sustain separation were
strengthened, and while plans for reunion continued they ran alongside an
increasing contempt for key members of the Anglican establishment that could
enhance binary modes of thinking. Teleology must be avoided—hopes for
comprehension remained and the tensions in this early period of identity
formation are apparent—but if the events of the late seventeenth century did
not lead ineluctably to a Presbyterian denomination then they provided the
circumstances in which the emergence of that denomination was made
more likely.
It might be possible to go further in challenging the characterization of this
period as one of failure. This chapter started by detailing the early failures of
Presbyterianism in settling both the Restoration Church and state. Two recent
historiographical interventions have questioned how far these failures were
sustained. Mark Goldie has pointed to the continuation of the Presbyterian
political vision throughout the late seventeenth century and written: ‘That it
was the Presbyterian vision which finally came to pass in 1689 is obscured,
especially by the optical illusion of the term “Whig” and supposing that the
“first Whigs” were something wholly new.’51 A more controversial claim con-
cerns Richard Baxter. Baxter’s political importance, his centrality to negoti-
ations for comprehension, and his theological influence have meant that he has
rightly been at the heart of accounts of Restoration Presbyterianism, and, while
this chapter has deliberately sought not to privilege his account, the Reliquiæ
Baxterianæ remains of the utmost importance for scholars of the period.52
Baxter’s significance within Presbyterianism is undoubted, but his own religious
identity was complex. He famously wrote: ‘You could not (except a Catholick
Christian) have trulier called me, than an Episcopal-Presbyterian-Independent’.53

50 Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O.P. Grell,
Jonathan Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution
and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 331–68; Southcombe, ‘Dissent and the Restoration
Church’; Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism’.
51 Goldie, Entring Book, I, p. 161.
52 See the forthcoming edition of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. N.H. Keeble, John
Coffey, Tom Charlton, and Tim Cooper, 5 vols (Oxford, 2020). Placed alongside Roger Morrice’s
Entring Book this is likely to transform our understanding of the period and the significance of
Presbyterianism within it.
53 Richard Baxter, A Third Defence of the Cause of Peace (London, 1681), Part I, 1, p. 110.
86 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Diarmaid MacCulloch has seen in this, and in Baxter’s Hookerian emphasis

on probabilities, the roots of a modern tradition that goes by a very different
name from Presbyterian. When the Church of England thrust Richard Baxter
aside it removed an exponent of a way of thinking that it now seeks to claim.
‘Richard Baxter’, MacCulloch claims, ‘was the first of the Anglicans’.54 Perhaps
at points the English have lived with a Church and state defined by Presbyterians
after all.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Appleby, David J., Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration
Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007).
Bate, Frank, The Declaration of Indulgence 1672: A Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent
(London, 1908).
Beddard, R.A., ‘Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Restoration Dissent’, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1973), 161–84.
De Krey, Gary S., ‘Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682’, in
Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds, Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-
Reformation England, 1540–1688 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 231–52.
Goldie, Mark, gen. ed., The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691, 7 vols (Woodbridge,
2007–9).
Goldie, Mark, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2016).
Horwitz, H., ‘Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis’, Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 15 (1964), 201–17.
Keeble, N.H., Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982).
Keeble, N.H., ed., ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014).
Matthews, A.G., ed., Calamy Revised (1934; Oxford, 1988).
Nuttall, Geoffrey F. and Chadwick, Owen, eds, From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962
(London, 1962).
Ramsbottom, John D., ‘Presbyterians and “Partial Conformity” in the Restoration
Church of England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 249–70.
Southcombe, George, ‘Dissent and the Restoration Church of England’, in Grant
Tapsell, ed., The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), pp. 195–216.
Southcombe, George, ed., English Nonconformist Poetry, 1660–1700, 3 vols (London,
2012).
Spurr, John, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’,
English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 927–46.
Spurr, John, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT, and
London, 1991).

54 Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in Kenneth Fincham and
Peter Lake, eds, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 58–9 on
p. 59.
 Presbyterians in the Restoration 87

Taylor, Stephen, ‘An English Dissenter and the Crisis of European Protestantism: Roger
Morrice’s Perception of European Politics in the 1680s’, in David Onnekink, ed., War
and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 177–95.
Watts, M.R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford,
1978).
Winship, Michael P., ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and
Others Respond to A Friendly Debate’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 689–715.
Worden, Blair, ‘The Campaign for a Free Parliament, 1659–60’, Parliamentary History,
36 (2017), 159–84.
Worden, Blair, ‘The Demand for a Free Parliament, 1659–60’, in George Southcombe
and Grant Tapsell, eds, Revolutionary England, c. 1630–c. 1660: Essays for Clive
Holmes (London, 2017), pp. 176–200.
Worden, Blair, ‘1660: Restoration and Revolution’, in Janet Clare, ed., From Republic to
Restoration: Legacies and Departures (Manchester, 2018), pp. 23–52.
 4

Congregationalists*
Tim Cooper

In 1944 the great Congregationalist historian, Geoffrey Nuttall, declared that

‘the early Congregationalist churches arose by way of protest and dissent’.1
That statement remains precisely true. He also proposed that the ‘early
Congregationalists were confessedly Separatists’, though when he published
Visible Saints thirteen years later he was much less clear-cut. Few seventeenth-
century Congregationalists, he said then, were directly influenced by sixteenth-
century Separatists; none of those earlier groups was ‘in any real sense
Congregational’.2 That ambiguity has persisted as subsequent historians have
sought to trace not just the early origins of Congregationalism but also its
continued development and demarcation.3 Yet as even Nuttall warned, the
search for something labelled ‘Congregationalism’ before even 1640 risks
anachronism.4 Much more recently, Michael Winship cautions us against pre-
judging things and his careful language is designed to avoid reading back into
the sixteenth century clear dividing lines that became fixed only decades later.5
With those warnings in mind, this chapter offers a short survey of the emer-
gence and development of Congregationalist convictions, starting with those
first Separatists.6

* I am very grateful to Michael Winship, Hunter Powell, and Elliot Vernon for reading a draft
of this essay and offering such valuable feedback.
1 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘The Early Congregational Conception of the Church’, Transactions of the
Congregational Historical Society, 14 (1944), 197.
2 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 8, 9.
3 For a brief summary, see Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French
Revolution (Oxford, 1978), pp. 94–9.
4 Nuttall, Visible Saints, p. 9. Patrick Collinson makes the same point in Godly People: Essays on
English Protestantism (London, 1983), p. 539.
5 Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge,
MA, 2012), pp. 45–6.
6 In briefly relating this story I will frequently rely on the work of Michael Watts in The
Dissenters. But there are other useful accounts in R.W. Dale, History of English Congregationalism
(London, 1907); Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research
(1550–1641), 2 vols (New York, 1912); R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962

Tim Cooper, Congregationalists In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0005
 Congregationalists89

EARLIEST CONGREGATIONALISM

From the beginning England experienced a reluctant reformation. Henry VIII

had little interest in the theology of the reformers. It suited his purposes
merely to assume supremacy in the Church of England, otherwise leaving its
elaborate episcopal hierarchy, its system of church courts, and its canon law
largely unchanged. Throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century there
was never any genuine prospect of England’s monarchs overturning episco-
pacy, a truth evidenced most clearly in James I’s abiding conviction: ‘No bishop,
no king’. While the pope himself had been dispensed with, it could be said—
and it was said—that much that was papal still remained. Antichrist had not
been entirely banished. Even so, the form of the Church of England—one
national Church structured around provinces, dioceses, and parishes—seemed
here to stay.
That left a great deal of room for frustration and disappointment among
those who envisaged alternatives. As Polly Ha has made clear in Chapter 1, they
looked to the Continent for inspiration, to Emden, the Rhineland, and the
Swiss cities, especially Geneva. But Geneva was a compact city state, and even
then it took John Calvin many years to shape the Church in the mould he
wanted. Translating Geneva’s Church structure into an English context with
its much larger population, its extensive network, and complex geography of
counties was going always going to be difficult, if not impossible, even with-
out the reluctance of England’s monarch. Still, they tried. Led principally by
Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers, these Presbyterians agitated for a
national Church that replaced episcopal hierarchy with a system of local classes
and regional and national synods. This was one response to a disappointed
reformation: subversion from within; a belonging, but one that never ceased
yearning for more.
A second response was to cut the ties completely. As Michael Haykin also
explains in this volume, Separatist congregations appeared in England from
the late 1560s, coming to particular notoriety in the 1580s in such figures as
Robert Browne, Robert Harrison, Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, Francis
Johnson and his brother George, John Robinson, and William Brewster.7 Their
worldview was stripped down, black-and-white, all-or nothing. In particular,
their authority really was Scripture alone, and in the pages of the New Testament
there was nothing like the monstrosity that was the Church of England with its

(London, 1962); Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963);
Nuttall, Visible Saints; B.R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to
the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, 1971); Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate
Churches of London 1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977); and Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of
Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988).
7 See Chapter 7 in this volume.
90 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

bloated prelacy; Henry Barrow hardly knew where to begin describing it.8
As he pointed out, only pure stones were used in the building of the temple: not
a single ‘cōmon or vile thinge was vsed towardes yt’, not ‘anie pinne or hooke
(evē the least thing)’. So there was no ‘middle course’; the tree was either good
or evil.9 The Church of England—improperly constituted from the roots up; a
bedraggled specimen even on the brightest day—could never withstand such
severe scrutiny. For these Separatists, it was merely ‘the eldest daughter of the
Church of Rome’; its bishops were the ‘popes bastardes’ who ‘sit in the seat of
Antichrist’; its priests were ‘the ministers of Sathan of Antichrist, sent of God
in his wrath to deceaue & destroie such as are ordeined to death’. And if that
were the case, ‘then ought al Christs true sheepe to flee & auoide them’.10 The
only option was to leave. They were sinners against God’s Word who chose not
to do so.
It would be a mistake to think of these two groups as clear-cut, self-evident,
and obvious. There were important differences within each group and their
ideas remained inchoate and in development. It would certainly be wrong to
read back modern denominations into these early alliances. We should also
recognize that both groups proceeded from a shared set of assumptions: the
Bible was the ultimate authority that gave a timeless pattern of a true Church;
the first century mirrored that pattern most perfectly; subsequent history fol-
lowed a broad path of declension as Antichrist—the concentration of power in
fewer and fewer hands, ultimately (but not only) those of the pope—came to
dominance; and the present task was to sweep all of that away and return to that
primitive purity of the apostolic Church, or face God’s judgement and disap-
proval. Generally speaking, any distinctions between the two groups were a
difference of degree, not a difference in kind.
Also operating from precisely those convictions, a third conceptual alterna-
tive emerged in the early seventeenth century that would in time come to be
known as Congregationalism. While sharing the same broad principles as
Presbyterians and Separatists, it offered a different answer to the central ques-
tion of ecclesiology: What is a true Church? That question was no idle curios-
ity: bound up within it was a host of sub-questions with significant practical
and political implications. Who should comprise the Church? Who had the
power of ordination, discipline, and excommunication? How did one church
acknowledge another? What was the place of the magistrate? As we shall see,

8 Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church (Dort?, 1591?), p. 46.
9 Barrow, Brief Discoverie, pp. 7–8, 215, 112.
10 Barrow, Brief Discoverie, p. 121; Robert Harrison, ‘A Treatise of the Church and the Kingdome
of Christ’, in Albert Peel and Leland H. Carson, eds, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert
Browne (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), p. 32; Robert Browne, A Trve and Short
Declaration, Both of the Gathering and Ioyning Together of Certaine Persons (Netherlands?, 1583?),
sig. A3r.
 Congregationalists91

those questions would create enduring dissension even among the godly, who
agreed on so much else.
In 1605 William Bradshaw, who had been closely involved in efforts towards
reform in the wake of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference, published English
Pvritanisme: Containeing the Maine Opinions of the Rigidest Sort of Those that
are Called Puritanes. Its foundational claim was
that every Companie, Congregation or Assemblie of men, ordinarily joyneing
together in true worship of God, is a true visible church of Christ, and that the
same title is improperlie attributed to any other Conuocations, Synods Societies,
combinations, or assemblies whatsoeuer.11
Bradshaw’s definition did more than repudiate the present episcopal structure
of the Church of England; it also denied what would become the Presbyterian
view that a true Church could comprise a number of distinct congregations
bound up in one presbytery. If a single congregation met the definition of a
true Church then it was improper to think of the Church of England as one
Church; technically, there could be no national Church, either Presbyterian
or episcopal. There might be a national framework of churches, but even then
‘Christ Jesus hath not subjected any Church or Congregation of his, to any
other superior Ecclesiasticall Iurisdiction’.12 Each church possessed its own
spiritual officers who were elected by the congregation.13 An officer in one
church had no power in another church.14 Every church was equal and alike in
status. There were no national, provincial, or diocesan officers with jurisdiction
over a pastor in his congregation,15 though ‘the Civil Magistrate hath and
ought to haue Supreāe power over all the Churches within his Dominions, in
all causes whatsoever’, and only the magistrate had the power to ‘controule and
correct’ an erring congregation.16 All this did not leave the pastor in complete
control of the congregation: there were checks and balances built into the
system, lest ‘any Minister should be a Sole Ruler and as it were a Pope so much
as in one Parrish’.17 The pastor was to rule jointly with the elders, serving ‘as
Monitors & Overseers of the manners & Conversation of all the Congregation &
of one another’.18 Together they possessed ‘the spirituall keyes of the Church’
(i.e. the power of government and discipline) though excommunication
required ‘the free consent of the whole congregation’.19

11 William Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme: Containeing the Maine Opinions of the Rigidest Sort
of Those that are Called Puritanes (London, 1605), p. 5. The italics are converted to Roman type in
all quotes from English Pvritanisme.
12 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 5. 13 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 6.
14 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 7. 15 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, pp. 9, 13, 15.
16 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 6, 7. 17 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 22.
18 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, p. 22.
19 Bradshaw, English Pvritanisme, pp. 24, 31. For the keys of the kingdom, see Matthew 16:18–19,
18:15–18.
92 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Of course, the Separatists had been saying this all along, but Bradshaw
went to great lengths to show he was not one of them. Where they denied that
the Church of England was a true Church, he did not. Essentially, like the
Presbyterians, he rejected the Donatist view that the Church should, and could,
be a model of perfection. In The Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, published
in 1614, Bradshaw took a more Augustinian line: light is mingled with darkness
even in the best of us, even in the best congregations.20 Within the Church of
England—or, as he also termed it, ‘the Church Assemblies of England’—there
were both sound parishes and poor ones, but there remained enough patches
of goodness with which the conscientious could communicate.21 Once again
Bradshaw offered his high view of the magistrate that served to justify even
something in the nature of prelacy. The magistrate might create higher officers
such as archbishops and bishops, chaplains, proctors, sidemen, clerks, sextons,
and any number of other offices even if Christ himself did not appoint them;
and he might divide the Church within his realm into administrative units
such as provinces and dioceses.22 The point is that the magistrate was the
guiding mind of such forms and structures, not Antichrist; and it was shrewd
strategy for the godly to ‘yeald to some things in appearance Antichristian, that
they might with more libertie fight against Antichrist’.23
None of this denied that the particular congregation was complete within
itself,24 yet this was a remarkable and strained defence of prelacy, one that
struggles to sit comfortably with his earlier disavowal of Presbyterian synods
in English Pvritanisme. Peter Lake helps to account for this. He argues that in
abandoning that national hierarchy within Presbyterianism, Bradshaw was
seeking to remove the challenge to royal supremacy that had always seemed
inherent within it. It made sense, then, for him to emphasize the power of the
magistrate, who had nothing to fear from a collection of individual congrega-
tions.25 His position also demonstrates a determination not to repudiate the
Church of England and the contorted effort involved in avoiding the slide into
outright separatism. This is a point worth making early on: Congregationalism
looked in two opposite directions at the same time—one towards belonging,
one towards separation—which can make the task of disentangling and enun-
ciating its internal dynamics (and establishing its placement alongside other
groups) difficult, elusive, and frustrating.
Bradshaw was not the only one to promote this point of view. His great ally
was William Ames, who in 1610 published a Latin edition of English Pvritanisme
with his own applauding preface. In that year he had left England for Holland,

20 William Bradshaw, The Unreasonablenesse of the Separation (Dort, 1614), sig. C1r–v.
21 Bradshaw, Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, sig. A4v, B1r–B2r, I3v, K2v.
22 Bradshaw, Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, sig. D3v, F1v, O2v–O4r.
23 Bradshaw, Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, sig. G1v, K1r.
24 Bradshaw, Unreasonablenesse of the Separation, sig. G1v.
25 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 268–71.
 Congregationalists93

joining other likeminded figures such as Robert Parker and Henry Jacob in
the Leiden congregation of John Robinson. In the view of Michael Winship,
‘Robinson’s was no ordinary separatist congregation’ since it was prepared
to communicate with other Reformed congregations on the Continent;
Robinson even praised their ‘holy presbyterial government’. As for the Church
of England, while it was a false Church there were thousands of true
Christians within.26 So the Leiden congregation provided a ready home for
Congregationalist convictions, and much of its early development would
take place in the Dutch Republic. Clearly England itself was no safe environ-
ment for those who actively agitated for significant reform; they faced fines,
imprisonment, exile, and even execution. The Dutch territories provided at
least relative freedom without travelling too far from home. As a result,
Separatism and Congregationalism both found a more ready audience within
the eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex.27 With a sizeable Dutch
population, important trade connections, and obvious geographical proximity
(it was easier to reach Middelburg than London)28 parts of these counties
were closely linked to the Netherlands.
Henry Jacob took these convictions one practical step further. He was one of
those Puritan leaders who tried to influence the new King James by means of
the Millenary Petition in 1603, which he helped to frame. Five years earlier
he had published A Defence of the Churches and Ministry of England against
the Separatist Francis Johnson. The awkward and unconvincing nature of that
defence demonstrates again just how vulnerable these early Congregationalists
were to many of the Separatists’ arguments. His Reasons . . . Proving a Necessitie
of Reforming Our Churches in England, published in 1604, denied any national,
provincial, or diocesan Church (along with the authority of diocesan bishops)
and argued that the only valid and scriptural form of a church is a ‘Particular
ordinary constant Congregation of Christians’ with power of government in
itself.29 The genius of his particular insight is indicated in the title of that book,
which speaks to the need to reform ‘Our Churches in England’, not ‘the Church
of England’. Jacob recognized that in repudiating the Church of England as a
true Church the Separatists were buying into the very notion they so disliked.
One could dismiss the Church of England as a whole only if it were a whole
Church. But if a Church consisted of only one congregation, as the Separatists
surely believed, then each one should be judged on its merits. Among the thou-
sands of parish churches throughout England there were some, certainly, that
were hopelessly corrupt. But there would be many that were not, with which
the sincere believer could have some communion. In 1611 Jacob categorically

26 Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 94–5. 27 Nuttall, Visible Saints, pp. 19–23.
28 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 50.
29 Henry Jacob, Reasons Taken Ovt of Gods Word . . . Proving a Necessitie of Reforming Our
Churches in England (Middelburg, 1604), p. 5.
94 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

denied being a Separatist even though he made that declaration from

Middelburg and even while defending the Separatists as not nearly as evil as
they were made out to be. The difference: ‘I acknowledge therefore that in
England are true Visible Churches and Ministers . . . such as I refuse not to
communicate with.’30
Polly Ha locates the novelty of Jacob’s ecclesiology in his definition of free-
dom as independence.31 Working from Scripture itself, rather than from clas-
sical theorists, Jacob argued that the choice to join one particular congregation
over another, the power to form a new congregation, and the power to elect
officers and discipline members all lay directly in the free consent of the ­people.32
This was freedom of choice without external constraint or interference, a
powerful idea with broad, enduring implications that were horrifying to mod-
erate Puritans who gave this new ecclesiology the label of ‘Independency’.33 Ha
has produced a critical edition of the manuscript debates between Jacob and his
Presbyterian protagonists, led by Walter Travers, that reveal these emerging
tensions within Puritan ecclesiology. Those debates began around 1610 and
ended in 1620. They did nothing to deter Jacob, who returned to England in
1616 to became the pastor of a self-covenanting and self-forming congregation
in Southwark, but he did not at the same time repudiate the Church of (that is,
the churches in) England. Thus he offered ‘something new, an irenic congrega-
tionalist third way between the separatists and the Church of England’.34 In
1623 he moved to the colony of Virginia, where he died the following year. He
may have passed away; his ideas most decidedly did not.35

NEW ENGLAND CONGREGATIONALISM

Removing oneself from England to the Netherlands or to New England was by

definition a step of separation, one that might be interpreted as a dissenting act.
In his lively and provocative interpretation, Michael Winship details the earli-
est beginnings of what came to be known as the New England Way. In doing so
he particularly emphasizes its near-Separatist elements. The first settlement of

30 Henry Jacob, A Declaration and Plainer Opening of Certain Points . . . Contained in a

Treatise Intituled, The Divine Beginning (Middelburg, 1612), pp. 5–6. This declaration is dated
4 September 1611 (p. 45). See also, Henry Jacob, An Attestation of Many Learned, Godly, and
Famous Divines . . . Justifying this Doctrine, viz. That the Church Government Ought to Bee
Alwayes with the Peoples Free Consent (Middelburg, 1613), pp. 249–50.
31 Polly Ha, ed., The Puritans on Independence: The First Examination, Defence and Second
Examination (Oxford, 2017), p. 11.
32 Ha, ed., Puritans on Independence, pp. 12–15.
33 Ha, ed., Puritans on Independence, p. 11. 34 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 100.
35 For a statement of his beliefs, see [Henry Jacob], A Confession and Protestation of the Faith of
Certaine Christians (Amsterdam, 1616).
 Congregationalists95

Plymouth was the fruit of a conversation held in 1617 between John Robinson
and his ruling lay elder, William Brewster. Dissatisfied with their circum-
stances in Leiden they developed a plan to move their congregation to the
eastern seaboard of North America. Robinson never made it to New England
and only thirty-five members of the congregation arrived in 1620, led by
Brewster and augmented by friends, relatives, and fellow travellers. The total
body of settlers numbered around a hundred; about half of them died during
the winter but numbers were restored by the arrival of a further ninety immi-
grants in 1623.36
All that time the settlement lacked a minister and, therefore, the sacraments.
John Lyford’s arrival in 1624 was intended to fill that gap but before he took up
his ministry the Plymouth Separatists demanded that he renounce his calling
by the Church of England. This he refused to do, at least on terms that would
satisfy them. The issue, then, was a familiar one: whether or not the Church of
England was a true Church. When the Separatists refused to compromise on
that point, Lyford began to offer the sacraments to a cluster of settlers who did
not share those strict Separatist scruples. This group soon dispersed to other
new settlements.37 But Plymouth’s influence endured, not least in Salem. One
of Winship’s innovations is to argue that Salem drew its model of church gov-
ernment directly from Plymouth, if only because the ministers who arrived to
lead the church at Salem (Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton) did so with-
out any clear form of ecclesiology in their own minds and without the experi-
ence that might have exposed the red flags for what they were. With the
enthusiastic support of Salem’s governor, John Endicott, they chose to follow
Plymouth’s lead. On 20 June 1629 the church at Salem came into being: thirty
people assented to a covenant and a confession of faith, and elected Higginson
and Skelton as their pastors.38 The taking of a covenant borrowed a practice
pioneered by the Separatists.39 It signalled that the congregation comprised
only voluntary and visible saints whose faith was assured, not the mixed bag
that was found in most English parishes; it said everything about their concep-
tion of what the Church should be. The election of officials communicated the
self-governing nature of congregational authority and the dispersal of power in
more than one set of hands.
The near-Separatist colour of the Salem church became more apparent a
year later when John Winthrop arrived as governor of the new colony of

36 Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 112–23; Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New
England Society from Bradford to Edwards, rev. ed. (Hanover, NH, 1995), pp. 32–3.
37 Winship, Godly Republicanism, ch. 5. 38 Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 134–45.
39 For an example of a Separatist covenant, see Albert Peel, The First Congregational Churches:
New Light on Separatist Congregations in London 1567–81 (Cambridge, 1920), p. 23; White, The
English Separatist Tradition, p. 27; and Williston Walker, ed., The Creeds and Platforms of
Congregationalism (New York, 1893), pp. 28–74 (repr. Boston, MA, 1960). See also, Morgan,
Visible Saints, pp. 36–8.
96 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Massachusetts. Skelton declined to offer the sacraments to Winthrop or the

other new arrivals, nor would he baptize the child of the immigrant William
Coddington even though he had been a member of John Cotton’s parish church
back in Boston in England. The reason was that they had been members of
the Church of England, not members of a true Church like Skelton’s. Even
‘Cotton’s parish church did not make the cut’.40 Thus it became standard prac-
tice in Massachusetts not to admit new arrivals to the sacraments,41 and, without
intending to, the Massachusetts Bay Company created ‘something never seen
before: a successful, militant, inflexible congregationalist network of churches’.42
If they fell short of outright Separatism, says Winship, it was only by the most
ghostly of margins.43
Behind all of that was another familiar issue: the fear of Antichrist—‘the
dread of unchecked power’—and the sense that, with the ascension of Charles I,
Antichrist appeared to be winning.44 Laudian persecution in England during
the 1630s brought a rising tide of Puritan emigrants to the shores of New
England. There they found Congregationalist churches that, to borrow from
the work of James F. Cooper, generally ran along four broad principles: the
authority of Scripture with its ‘perfect rule’ should govern all matters of faith
and practice; congregations should comprise only voluntary members and vis-
ible saints, and operate on the basis of free consent; no other human authority
could claim jurisdiction over such a congregation; and the laity should partici-
pate in all processes of election, admission, discipline, and excommunication.45
Cooper argues that these convictions, especially that of lay participation,
remained deeply entrenched for a very long time. Ministers like John Cotton
repeatedly and extensively instructed their people in the responsibilities that
came with lay privilege to such an extent that they became ingrained.46 Even
the Anne Hutchinson affair did not give rise to increased clerical control or trun-
cate lay freedoms.47 Likewise, the formalization of those principles in A Platform
of Church Discipline (1649) had to be ratified by the laity; it arguably bound
ministers more than the laity; and both ‘lay people and ministers referred to it
as the religious “constitution” of Massachusetts, a set of higher laws that con-
tained written guarantees of the rights and liberties of members and church
officers’—even then it was merely a description of Church practice, not a set of

40 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 146. 41 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 153.

42 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 137.
43 Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 174, 177.
44 Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 166–73, 193.
45 James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts
(Oxford, 1999), pp. 12–13. For other descriptions of New England’s Congregationalism in practice,
see Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT,
2007), ch. 2.
46 Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, pp. 3–4, 7–8.
47 Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, ch. 3. The details of this affair are related in
Francis J. Bremer, ‘New England’, Chapter 11 of this volume.
 Congregationalists97

binding rules.48 New England Congregationalism certainly had its dangers:

the risk of tyranny from a lay minority or an individual exercising his right of
veto, though that rarely presented itself in practice; and the lack of mechanisms
to bring an erring congregation back into line, a more frequent (though not
impossible) difficulty. Cooper goes on to explain how the difficulties increased
and these convictions eroded as time went on. But any shift towards clerical
control was ‘gradual, complex, and silent’, ‘less significant than it initially appears’,
and it occurred much later than historians have supposed.49
The development of New England Congregationalism aroused anxiety,
­suspicion, and hostility among those Puritans who had chosen to remain in
England.50 An exchange of letters that began in 1636 illustrates the nature of
those tensions. In the first letter, thirteen English Puritan ministers identified a
cluster of ten ‘new opinions’ apparently practised in New England that looked
unnervingly like Separatism. They included the conviction that it was not
lawful to sit under a set liturgy or receive the sacraments in the context of a set
liturgy; that infants should not be baptized except their parents be members of
‘some particular congregation’; that the power of excommunication resides in
the body of the congregation; and that ministers have no power or ministry
outside of their own congregation. The problem was that these ideas were now
being picked up in England, with many leaving their parish churches. These
English ministers sought reassurance this was not the New England Way, ‘Or
will you plead for Separation’?51
In reply, the New England ministers admitted that they had changed their
minds: what had seemed lawful, indifferent, and, anyway, beyond their ability
to change, they now considered sinful in the New England context where
they had every freedom to construct a form of church government ‘according
to the patterne set before us in the Scripture’. Churches ‘need to grow from
apparent defects to puritie . . . till the Lord have utterly abolished Antichrist’. Yet
they offered soothing words. They had no intention of justifying ‘the ways of
rigid separation’. Where Separatists rejected the Church of England as no true
Church and those who remained within it as no true Christians, they did no
such thing, refusing to ‘separate from your Congregations, as no Churches’.52
Thus they stuck to their guns, demonstrating once more that the New England

48 Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, pp. 81–7; A Platform of Church-Discipline Gathered Out
of the Word of God and Agreed Upon by the Elders and Messengers of the Churches Assembled in the
Synod at Cambridge in N.E. (Cambridge, MA, 1649).
49 Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, p. 111.
50 For an examination of church polity in New England and its impact in England, see
Francis J. Bremer, Shaping New Englands: Puritan Clergymen in Seventeenth-Century England and
New England (New York, 1995), ch. 5.
51 Simeon Ashe and William Rathband, A Letter of Many Ministers in Old England Requesting
the Judgement of Their Reverend Brethren in New England Concerning Nine Positions (1643), first
letter (n.p.).
52 Ashe and Rathband, Letter of Many Ministers, second letter (n.p.).
98 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Way was certainly Congregationalist, closely adjacent with Separatism, and

deeply worrying to those back home in England.53 Those concerns did not
subside: it is telling that this series of correspondence was published in 1643,
in a period of national trauma and unprecedented religious and political
turmoil back home in England.

ENGLAND IN THE 1640S

Those Puritan settlers who had risked a trans-Atlantic crossing during the
1630s did so more under the pressure of Laudian persecution than from an
idealistic desire to create a ‘city on a hill’.54 So when circumstances appeared to
reverse themselves in England a lot of them headed for home. Susan Hardman
Moore estimates that as many as one in four Puritan settlers made the return
journey before 1660.55 On the whole, they accommodated themselves to
English parish ministry rather well. Even in New England every town had to
maintain a church—and only one church—supported by taxes imposed on all
the householders; the law required all inhabitants to attend Sunday services
and mid-week lectures, though communion and baptism were reserved only
for an inner core of members (or their infants) who could offer an account of
their own conversion; and transfer between churches required letters of
admission, even if actual practice struggled to match intention.56 The English
parish model was different again, but not so different that returning New
England ministers could not find a place.57
But New England was not the only source of returning Congregationalists. The
Netherlands had not stopped providing shelter, not least in ‘the Congregationalist
church at Rotterdam, which proved the nursery of so many future leaders’.58
A new wave of exiles arrived during the 1630s that included five men who
would become influential Congregationalist leaders in England during the
1640s: in 1636 William Bridge succeeded John Davenport as minister to the
English church at Rotterdam (after Davenport had set his own course for New
England); Jeremiah Burroughes and Sidrach Simpson soon joined the church
as pastor and teacher, respectively; Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye together

53 For a full discussion of this correspondence and its implications for intra-Puritan
r­ elations, see Michael P. Winship, ‘Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians
and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40’, in Crawford Gribben
and R. Scott Spurlock, eds, Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600–1800
(Houndmills, 2015), pp. 89–111.
54 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, pp. 23–6. 55 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, p. 145.
56 Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, 2012), pp. 179–80;
Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, pp. 98–9.
57 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, ch. 7. 58 Nuttall, Visible Saints, p. 15.
 Congregationalists99

gathered a church at Arnhem in association with the Rotterdam church.59 All

of them had been removed from ministry in England, voluntarily or otherwise,
and all of them returned to England between 1640 and 1642. For reasons we
will soon come to, they became known as the ‘Dissenting Brethren’. There
were other important Congregationalist leaders beyond them and these five
men did not share the same point of view on every issue,60 but they generally
moved as one and they quickly became the most significant collective
Congregationalist voice in England’s affairs during the 1640s.
At the beginning of that decade all those seeking a thorough reform in the
Church of England faced a common enemy—so they closed ranks. These five
men worked constructively with leading Presbyterian figures, above all Edmund
Calamy, Curate of St Mary Aldermanbury, London. Under his leadership
(and literally in his house, late in 1641) Congregationalist and Presbyterian
leaders committed themselves to the ‘Aldermanbury Accord’.61 If Thomas
Edwards is to be believed (he was one of the most vehement critics of the
Congregationalists) both sides agreed not to advertise their differences over
church government in the pulpit, in print, or even in private conversation.62
Even as late as December 1643 they could publish Certaine Considerations to
Dis-swade Men from Further Gathering of Churches. Its main point is self-
evident in the title, but it also offered assurances that the ‘rights of particular
Congregations’ and the sensitivities of tender consciences would be protected
in any eventual religious settlement. That suggests a continued concern to bal-
ance the interests of both Presbyterians and Congregationalists and a shared
determination to check the growth of the sects.63 Chad van Dixhoorn calls it a
‘truce’,64 though on occasion the two parties were not above using New English
or Scottish proxies to defend their views for them.
But by then the Westminster Assembly, first convened in July 1643, had
raised the stakes. For the first time the Puritans had the positive opportunity to
bring about the reformation they desired, and the questions they had avoided

59 Nuttall, Visible Saints, pp. 11–14, Watts, Dissenters, pp. 64–5. For their Dutch experience, see
Berndt Gustafsson, The Five Dissenting Brethren: A Study of the Dutch Background of their
Independentism (Lund, 1955).
60 Nuttall, Visible Saints, pp. 11–12, 17–18.
61 For a useful account of the Accord, see Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion:
Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, MA, 1994),
pp. 131–3.
62 Thomas Edwards, Antapologia: Or, a Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration (London,
1644), pp. 240–41. See also, John Vicars, The Schismatick Sifted (London, 1646), pp. 15–17; and
M[archamont] N[edham], Independencie No Schisme (London, 1646), pp. 6–7. Hunter Powell is
not convinced the accord was quite so specific or limiting (Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British
Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 (Manchester, 2015), p. 29; Hunter
Powell, ‘The Dissenting Brethren and the Power of the Keys, 1640–1644’ (PhD thesis, University
of Cambridge, 2011), p. 19, n.12).
63 Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 100–1.
64 Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly 1643–1652,
5 vols (Oxford, 2012), II, p. 488.
100 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

until now could be put off no longer. Hunter Powell casts the Assembly as a
‘disruptive moment that broke into the effort to unite the Godly’.65 Where a
broad agreement might have sustained goodwill and overlooked differences,
the level of detail demanded of the Assembly drew attention to those differ-
ences with excruciating precision at the same time as it generated increasingly
detailed and complex ecclesiological options over which individuals and alli-
ances might disagree.
The recent publication of all the Assembly’s extant minutes and papers—a
remarkable work of scholarship in itself—has already begun to deepen our
understanding of those debates.66 Hunter Powell has used those Minutes,
together with a careful reading of English, Scottish, and Continental publica-
tions, to offer a striking and important departure from previous scholarship.
His work complicates any simple, reductionist, binary opposition between
‘Presbyterians’ and ‘Congregationalists’. He demonstrates that there were signifi-
cant differences within the Presbyterian majority, so one of the major dynamics
of the Assembly was to engineer events to prevent those intra-Presbyterian
divisions ever being exposed. There were also differences among the Scottish
commissioners—men like Robert Baillie, Samuel Rutherford, and George
Gillespie—who arrived in September 1643 with the right to join in the
Assembly debates but not vote.67 Far from uniformly driving the reluctant
English into rigid Presbyterianism, the likes of Gillespie and Rutherford
shared an affinity with the Congregationalists. ‘Scottish views of church gov-
ernment were far more congregational [in 1640] than they would be three years
later at the Westminster Assembly’, and later still when, under pressure from
home, and making strategic moves to ally themselves with the Presbyterians
(moves that did not help them in the end) they chose not to support the
Congregationalist minority.68
By the autumn of 1644, English military forces seemed to be winning
the war all on their own and the Scottish army was increasingly seen as
redundant—the Scots were losing their political clout.69 The best way to
maximize what leverage they had was to work through the Assembly to achieve
a Presbyterian settlement in England. In late October the Scots ­dramatically
boosted their military and political credibility by taking Newcastle. Immediately
they demanded that parliament require of the Assembly its conclusions on
church government even if they were incomplete.70 The Assembly had little
choice but to send up all that it had voted on, which included what is called the

65 Powell, Crisis of British Protestantism, p. 53.

66 Van Dixhoorn, ed., Minutes and Papers.
67 Van Dixhoorn, ed., Minutes and Papers, I, pp. 23–7, 175.
68 Powell presents this new interpretation in great detail in The Crisis of British Protestantism;
for the quote, see p. 37.
69 Powell, Crisis of British Protestantism, p. 210.
70 Powell, Crisis of British Protestantism, pp. 220–1, 323–3.
 Congregationalists101

‘third proposition’: ‘That divers churches may be under one presbyteriall

government’.71 At that point the Congregationalists lost any hope of accom-
modation. They publicly dissented from the proposition, thus earning their
epithet as the Dissenting Brethren.72
So the Presbyterian settlement offered up by the Assembly was, as Elliot
Vernon explains elsewhere in this volume, ‘incomplete and ramshackle’ and
badly delayed, implemented only in piecemeal fashion in a series of ordinances
from 1645 to 1648.73 In the meantime, other political developments moved
in favour of the Congregationalists. In April 1645 parliament reorganized its
military forces. The New Model Army was much more efficient and focused in
taking the fight to the king. Many of the regiments within the army took on the
nature of gathered congregations; many of the soldiers began to demand reli-
gious toleration for divergent ideas. In political terms this new modelling dis-
placed those whose interests might be seen to support the Presbyterians and
who continued to pursue a negotiated settlement with Charles. If nothing else,
it reduced England’s reliance on Scottish military support, and Charles’ alliance
with the Scots in the Second Civil War in the summer of 1648 embarrassed the
Presbyterians, even if they and some Scottish Presbyterians had not supported
the arrangement.74 On 6 December that year Colonel Thomas Pride purged all
those members of parliament who the day before had voted for continued
negotiations with Charles. In January 1649 a parliamentary court found the
king guilty of treason and executed him, an act that always horrified the
Presbyterians.75 If any one man stood behind the Regicide it was Oliver
Cromwell, soon to become the dominant political figure in England and the
most important political patron of the Congregationalists.
All of this, therefore, brought about the ascendency of the Congregationalists
over the Presbyterians, at the cost of great bitterness between them; but
what about the Separatists? It had been clear throughout the 1640s that the
Congregationalists were only reluctant fellow travellers with the Separatists
and only while the political situation required allies, even uncomfortable ones.
Following Pride’s Purge and the Regicide, that need all but vanished.76 This
freed the Congregationalists to acknowledge their willingness to allow the
magistrate a role in overseeing the framework of England’s religious life, and
their support of toleration only so far as it would encompass the ‘orthodox

71 Powell, Crisis of British Protestantism, p. 181.

72 [Westminster Assembly], The Reasons of the Dissenting Brethren Against the Third Proposition
Concerning Presbyterial Government (London, 1645); [Westminster Assembly], The Reasons
Presented by the Dissenting Brethren . . . Together with the Answer of the Assembly of Divines to those
Reasons of Dissent (London, 1648).
73 See Chapter 2 in this volume. 74 Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 115, 116.
75 Elliot Vernon, ‘The Quarrel of the Covenant: The London Presbyterians and the Regicide’, in
Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 202–24;
Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007 and 2016), pp. 154–7.
76 Watts, Dissenters, p. 126.
102 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

godly’. Many of these themes would play out during the 1650s, but in 1649
the Leveller leader William Walwyn was disgusted. The Congregationalists
had demanded toleration as sharply as any from both bishops and the ‘new
raised . . . Puritan Presbyter’. But now that they had ‘gained abundance of love
and respect from all men: their Congregations multiplied, and . . . gained much
countenance from authority’ they had turned on their former allies, denying
them any toleration in their turn.77 The sense of betrayal was palpable and
irreversible. It is dangerous and misleading to lump all Separatists together,
but, speaking generally, the alliance between the Congregationalists and the
Separatists had ‘dissolved’.78

THE 1650S

The Interregnum brought Congregationalism into a spacious place in which it

could grow, and grow it did, helped along by two related factors. First, the dis-
mantling of the old national structures and hierarchies of the Church of
England together with the failure to construct a viable religious settlement in
their place left individual parishes largely free to go their own way. The result
was ‘de facto congregationalism’.79 As Joel Halcomb puts it, the ‘puritan revolu-
tion was defined by a series of voluntary local and personal reformations’.80
Second, though the Congregationalists remained a small minority they gained
from the patronage of Oliver Cromwell, who would become Lord Protector
from December 1653 until his death in September 1658 and who was in turn
supported by the army, which had become a significant political player in its
own right. The instability of a regime that relied on holding together both civil-
ian and military interests was never far from the surface and it did not last
much beyond Cromwell’s passing, but for a time the Congregationalists flour-
ished under significant political patronage.
In his excellent study of Congregationalism, Halcomb identifies two dis-
tinct phases of growth: 1643–4 and 1650–3. The ‘pinnacle of revolutionary
congregationalism’ came in those early years of the Interregnum: ‘the vast
majority of churches gathered between 1650–3’.81 He also identifies regional
networks that supported this growth. Not surprisingly, much of it took place
in precisely those counties that had long histories of Puritan networks: Essex,

77 [William Walwyn], The Vanitie of the Present Churches (1649), p. 2.

78 Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars 1640–1660 (London, 2009), p. 116.
79 J. William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor
(Bletchley, 2004), p. 141.
80 Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan
Revolution’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009), p. 39.
81 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 22.
 Congregationalists103

Norfolk, and Suffolk; ‘by the Restoration these three counties would be home
to almost 50 churches’.82 The next largest network outside London developed
in Kent, where twenty-five churches had gathered by the Restoration.83
After that came Cheshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, which gathered around
thirteen congregations, the same number as the West Midlands.84 London
and Middlesex added in at least twenty-five churches.85 Similar growth
occurred outside England as well, in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (notably in
Edinburgh, around Aberdeen, and around Glasgow).86 ‘Between them the
Congregationalists and Baptists had perhaps 80,000–100,000 actively covenanted
members, less than 2 per cent of the population.’87 Lack of evidence means we
cannot be certain of the total number of gathered congregations, but, in sum,
‘[a]pproximately 250 churches had been gathered across Britain and Ireland
by the Restoration’.88
These were gathered congregations, to be sure, but all this growth was not
disconnected from existing parish life and structures. To return to Susan
Hardman Moore and those New England ministers who came back home
during the 1640s and 1650s, their ‘presence in parish pulpits . . . underlines the
tenacity of the parish ideal. Let loose on English soil, they still wanted to preach
to the community at large, as well as to gather saints for closer fellowship.’89
A Congregationalist minister could serve the parish and also gather a congre-
gation that would meet at a different time and even include members of other
parishes. Halcomb asserts that most of the newly gathered churches ‘existed
within a parish format’; some even met within the precincts of cathedrals.90 By
the Restoration, four out of five Congregational churches were led by a minister
who also held a state living; the vast majority of those held a parochial living.91
Around 10 per cent of ministers ejected from parish ministry in 1662 were
Congregationalists.92 Thus the altered landscape offered a ‘new freedom to

82 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 39.

83 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 42.
84 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, pp. 44, 48.
85 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 48.
86 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, pp. 50–3. For the full story
of Congregationalism in Wales, see R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in Wales, ed. Robert Pope
(Cardiff, 2004). See also, Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints: Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell,
Morgan Llwyd (Cardiff, 1957).
87 John Morrill, ‘The Puritan Revolution’, in John Coffey and Paul C.H. Lim, eds, The Cambridge
Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), p. 79.
88 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 54.
89 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, p. 139.
90 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, pp. 102, 110.
91 Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 104.
92 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Congregational Commonwealth Incumbents’, Transactions of the
Congregational Historical Society, 14 (1943), 155. See also, A.G. Mathews, ed., Calamy Revised:
Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced,
1660–2 (Oxford, 1934).
104 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

define the relation between the parish population at large and the saints
within it’.93 Congregationalists seized that opportunity with both hands.
In various ways, then, ‘many communities had developed a functional
settlement in their local religious life’ during the 1650s,94 but the search for an
enduring national settlement continued. Here the Dissenting Brethren took
the lead in developing a national framework for England’s churches. They
were joined by a younger man who would, after the Restoration, assume the
leadership of the Congregationalist movement in England: John Owen.95
After reading Cotton’s Keyes of the Kingdom in the mid-1640s he came over to
Congregationalism. While still serving as parish minister at Coggeshall, Essex,
he gathered a congregation within the parish. An astute politician, he smoothly
navigated the mechanisms of patronage to rise to national prominence, preach-
ing to parliament the day after the Regicide and coming under the wing of
Cromwell, with whom he travelled as chaplain during the Irish and Scottish
campaigns from late 1649 to July 1651, continuing thereafter as chaplain to the
Council of State. He became Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and, from 1653 to
1657, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.96 Owen had quickly become ‘the
chief architect of the Cromwellian Church’.97
Therefore, well placed to influence policy, the Dissenting Brethren-plus-
Owen set about to engineer a religious settlement that would be conducive to
Congregationalist principles and practice as well as being acceptable to all the
moderate godly, notwithstanding the post-Regicide tension between them
(which, certainly by 1654, they were seeking to ameliorate). This involved a
search for the ‘fundamentals of the faith’: those orthodox, Trinitarian beliefs
that were necessary to salvation. Any group that adhered to those fundamen-
tals would enjoy toleration on any other matters of doctrine and practice in
which they differed (like church government). Indeed, any Christian who
believed the fundamentals was a member of the one true, invisible Church;
doctrine held that Church in unity, not structure. This helped Owen to defend
the Congregationalists against the ancient accusation of schism: as long as
these fundamentals were shared there could be no schism, no matter how many
distinct congregations they gathered.98

93 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, p. 127.

94 Halcomb, ‘Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 101.
95 Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (New York,
2016), chs 5 and 6.
96 For a summary of Owen’s personality and career, see Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard
Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Farnham, 2011), pp. 102–24. See also, Martyn Cowan,
John Owen and the Civil War Apocalypse: Preaching, Prophecy and Politics (Abingdon, 2017).
97 Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W.J. Sheils, ed., Persecution
and Toleration (Oxford, 1984), p. 204. The point is repeated in Blair Worden, God’s Instruments:
Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), p. 67.
98 John Owen, Of Schisme: The True Nature of It Discovered and Considered (Oxford, 1657),
pp. 134–7, 192–6.
 Congregationalists105

On 10 February 1652 Owen, Goodwin, Nye, and Simpson petitioned

­ arliament. The petition itself is no longer extant, but the fruit emerged later
p
that year in two documents: The Humble Proposals signalled the system of
Triers and Ejectors that would be implemented in 1654; the Proposals for the
Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospell in this Nation offered a list of sixteen
fundamentals, but Cromwell dissolved parliament in April 1653 before it could
authorize them. A further attempt followed late in 1654 when Owen was an
influential member of a small assembly of Presbyterian and Congregationalist
divines to advise parliament on the fundamentals. It compiled a list of funda-
mentals that once again went nowhere: Cromwell dissolved parliament in
January 1655 before it could debate the assembly’s work.99 Subsequent attempts
during the Second Protectorate Parliament also came to nothing, though the
1657 Humble Petition and Advice called for a national confession.100 In fact, that
long-sought-for settlement would never come.
The Association movement offered a different approach to achieving unity,
one that was based not on shared principle but on shared practice. Richard
Baxter, who undertook an effective reformation of the parish of Kidderminster
during the 1650s, pioneered this alternative approach. He established the
Worcestershire Association, whose membership was open to nearby ministers
who would meet once a month for mutual edification and counsel on difficult
cases of discipline.101 Even if they started from different points of principle
they agreed on broad practices, which offered a practicable basis for unity.
But no nearby Congregationalist chose to join the Association, ‘though two or
three honest ones said nothing against us’.102 The Congregationalist minister
at Cockermouth, Thomas Larkham, joined the Association of Ministers in
Cumberland and Westmoreland,103 but he was the exception rather than the
rule. Baxter was no Congregationalist, but in conciliatory moments he bent
over backwards to point out the broad commonality between the Presbyterians
and Congregationalists. In 1658 he assessed ten fundamental issues under
debate: he thought the two parties could find a practical agreement on nine out
of ten. Only on the tenth, the practice of gathering a new congregation in an
existing parish, could Baxter give no ground. He thought such exclusivity on
the part of the Congregationalists nourished spiritual pride and blunted the

99 For an assessment of this assembly, see Cooper, Formation of Nonconformity, ch. 6.

100 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the English Revolution
1625–1660, third edn (Oxford, 1906), 454; Worden, God’s Instruments, p. 85.
101 [Richard Baxter], Christian Concord: or the Agreement of the Associated Pastors and Churches
of Worcestershire (1653). See also Black, Reformation Pastors, esp. ch. 6; and Geoffrey F. Nuttall,
‘The Worcestershire Association: Its Membership’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1 (1950),
197–206. On p. 203, Nuttall notes that four members were licensed as Congregationalists after the
1672 Declaration of Indulgence.
102 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or, Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most
Memorable Passages of his Life and Times, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696), Part I, p. 97, §140.
103 Hardman Moore, Pilgrims, p. 132.
106 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

evangelistic edge of the national Church; it removed the best of the flock,
selfishly leaving the straggling remnant to their own devices.104 His assessment
illustrates once again that tension in Congregationalism between separation
and belonging. At the same time as they were proximate to the Presbyterians on
so many issues, they were worlds apart.
The Savoy Conference might be seen in part as one last attempt by leading
Congregationalists to bring about a national unity. On 12 October 1658 some
200 messengers from 120 congregations throughout England and possibly
Wales met at the Savoy palace in London.105 They met in two groups. The larger
group produced advice to Congregationalist minsters about discipline and
organization. The smaller group worked up a confession of faith. This com-
prised a general confession in thirty-two chapters; a declaration of thirty chap-
ters concerning Congregationalist church polity; and a long preface. Published
late in 1658 as A Declaration of the Faith and Order Owned and Practised in
the Congregational Churches in England, it supplied an enduring charter for
Congregationalist faith and practice over subsequent centuries.106 But it may
have been intended to do more than that. By 1658 political fortunes were
shifting once again. The new Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell, lacked his
father’s army experience (and support) and tended to favour the Presbyterians.
Owen’s removal as Vice-Chancellor in October 1657 was just one indication of
the declining political fortunes of the Congregationalists. A year later they
feared the Presbyterians might seek to impose the Westminster Confession as
England’s doctrinal standard, perhaps in response to the Humble Petition
and Advice. They would have no trouble accepting most of the Westminster
Confession, but not all of it, and perhaps their own confession was offered as a
suitable substitute to the Westminster Confession: it was very similar in content
and exactly the same length (thirty-two chapters). Given that the key personnel
involved in the Savoy had been a part of every attempted settlement since the
Humble Proposals, and given the role of Henry Scobell, Clerk to the Council
of State, in organizing the Savoy Conference, it is at least plausible that the
Savoy was of broader interest to the regime, not just of narrow interest to
the Congregationalists.107
But by 1659 their moment was over. Leading army officers, almost certainly
in collusion with John Owen, brought about the end of the Protectorate in an

104 Baxter published this in 1691 as Church Concord: Containing a Disswasive from the
Unnecessary Division and Separation, and the Real Concord of the Moderate Independents with the
Presbyterians, Instanced in Ten Seeming Differences. See esp. pp. 42ff. See also, Michael Winship,
‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly
Debate’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 705.
105 Halcomb, ‘Congregational Religious Practice’, p. 45.
106 For a modern edition and introduction, see A.G. Matthews, ed., The Savoy Declaration of
Faith and Order 1658 (London, 1959).
107 For a fuller discussion of all this and the historiography, see Cooper, Formation of
Nonconformity, ch. 8.
 Congregationalists107

effective coup d’état.108 In the months of chaos that followed the resignation of
Richard Cromwell in late May, momentum ran away from the Congregationalists
and their political and military allies.109 In the following year, of course, King
Charles II was restored. The Presbyterians rightly claimed much of the credit
for bringing him back—the spring of 1660 was ‘the apogee of Presbyterian
power’110—and they, not the Congregationalists, were invited to negotiate the
terms of a restored Church of England. Yet even they lost out: those terms
would be harsh indeed, for both parties.

THE RESTORATION PERIOD

The religious settlement that followed the Restoration ended any opportunity
for Presbyterians and Congregationalists to reshape the national Church. In
various negotiations the restored bishops ‘crushed hopes for a moderate reli-
gious settlement’.111 Parliament enacted legislation that removed from minis-
try, municipal corporations, schools, and universities anyone who could not
subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer. No group of five or more could meet
together for a religious service; no ejected minister could reside within five
miles of his former living. In the end, ‘not a corner was left in which a noncon-
formist could hide’.112
This is, technically speaking, the birth of Dissent, but we might note two
things. First, most of those now labelled ‘Dissenters’ did not see themselves as
Dissenters; they argued that the latest iteration of the Church of England,
shaped according to the wishes of a particular and narrow group of bishops,
was itself in dissent from its own traditions. Both Mark Goldie and Michael
Winship have recently argued that the Restoration settlement was, in Winship’s
words, merely ‘a fragile statutory coup’ built upon ‘present legal arrangements’.113
Second, 1662 was not the birth of denominations. Goldie rightly reminds us
that there was enormous continuity in the preferences and personnel of those
we call Puritans (before 1660) and Dissenters (after 1660). Presbyterians still
yearned for a comprehensive Church in which the terms of inclusion were
moderated to such a degree that they could find a welcome place within it. We
know now that never happened, but that was not a foregone conclusion at

108 See Cooper, Formation of Nonconformity, pp. 243–57.

109 Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 41–5.
110 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, pp. 157, 158–9.
111 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, p. 234.
112 Jones, Congregationalism in England, p. 59. For a description of each piece of legislation, see
pp. 57–9, 66–8, and also Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-
Century England (Leicester, 1987), ch. 1.
113 Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism’, pp. 709, 710.
108 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the time: between 1667 and 1689 eight bills for Comprehension appeared before
parliament. But over that time there was a growing trend especially among
younger Presbyterians to accept their place outside the national Church and
to prefer a policy of toleration to comprehension, since toleration implicitly
affirmed their new (if unwanted) stance as reluctant Separatists.114 Of course,
Congregationalists from the beginning were content with toleration. They do
not feature prominently in Goldie’s analysis,115 but its effect is to posit a greater
distance between Presbyterians and Congregationalists for much of the
Restoration period than between Presbyterians and those we may now call
Anglicans. The agenda for Comprehension became entangled in the agenda
for Toleration: they continually worked against each other to the advantage
of a common opponent. Despite their shared experience of persecution,
therefore, and their enduring commonality of conviction, the gap between the
Congregationalists and the Presbyterians never looked like closing.
Persecution was no uniform phenomenon during the Restoration period. It
ebbed and flowed in accord with national political developments, becoming
notably worse in three periods, 1662–6, 1670–2, and the 1680s.116 The Declaration
of Indulgence in 1672 called a temporary halt to persecution, one that gave vital
breathing space for Congregationalists to take stock and rebuild. The licensing
of Congregationalist ministers and premises showed that its main strength ‘lay
in London and East Anglia with strong outposts in Devon and Yorkshire’.117
And the implementation of persecution adjusted to local conditions, not
least the posture of local magistrates. One of the most striking examples is
Yarmouth in Norfolk, where in 1667 the Congregationalists were able to call
their former minister and one of the Dissenting Brethren, William Bridge, to
serve among them. Thus Congregationalism in Norfolk and Suffolk remained
relatively strong; Coventry, Newcastle, and Bridgwater provide similar examples
of resilience.118 Other places were not so lucky. The removal of their ministers
left numerous congregations weakened and exposed; some vanished altogether.119
Congregationalists evaded the authorities by meeting in the woods; in cleverly
concealed structures; during the night; even on a rock at low tide ‘in Kingsbridge
estuary, a point that was believed to be a kind of no-man’s-land outside the
jurisdiction of the three neighbouring and equidistant parishes’.120 The con-
stant threat of spies, informers, raids, fines, and imprisonments took a steady
toll over a very long time. Just before his death in 1683, Owen felt that he was

114 Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, p. 239.

115 They are notably absent in the discussion on pp. 226–8.
116 Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 74, 97. For another more detailed account of
persecution, see Watts, The Dissenters, section III.
117 Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 92–3.
118 Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 73, 75.
119 Jones, Congregationalism in England, p. 73.
120 Jones, Congregationalism in England, p. 79. See also, Keeble, Literary Culture of
Nonconformity, pp. 72–8.
 Congregationalists109

‘leaving the ship of the church in a storm’.121 He and other Congregationalists

had been implicated in the Rye House plot to assassinate King Charles II and
his brother James, the Duke of York. That inflamed once more the paranoia of
the authorities and intensified the persecution they brought to bear.122
In 1688 King James II fled London, fearing his head might go the same
way as his father’s; William and Mary ascended the throne. A year later par-
liament passed the Toleration Act—not, to the great disappointment of many
Presbyterians, the Bill for Comprehension. Congregationalists welcomed the
Toleration Act warmly enough even if it granted only exemption from the
penal code (not its dismantling) and still left them as second-class citizens in
their own country. Still, this was preferable to any attempt to comprehend
them within the Church of England. They finally owned the separatism that
was always latent in the near-Separatism of their forebears.
Even so, that did not stop the Presbyterians and Congregationalists from
trying to forge a ‘happy union’. In 1690 they formed a common fund to provide
education and financial support to their ministers. They also began a series of
joint lectures at Pinners’ Hall, London. In 1691 they signed and published the
Heads of Agreement Assented to by the United Ministers In and About London,
Formerly Called Presbyterian and Congregational. But the linguistic leap sig-
nalled in that title was too big a jump to hope for; longstanding differences did
not disappear quite as easily as that. The two groups began a decade-long debate
over soteriology: Presbyterians accused Congregationalists of Antinomianism,
while they accused the Presbyterians of Arminianism. This debate, along with
the innovative, effective, and (to Presbyterians) entirely unwelcome itinerant
methods of the Congregationalist minister of Rothwell, Northamptonshire,
Richard Davis, served to wreck the Union. In 1694 the two groups began to
hold their own respective lectures at different venues at competing times. In
1695 the Congregationalists established a separate fund to support their own
ministers. All of this ‘broke up the Happy Union and created a rift between
Presbyterians and Congregationalists which was never closed’.123

CONCLUSION

There has been a notable trend within recent scholarship to move away
from treating dichotomies (such as Congregationalist/Presbyterian or
Congregationalist/Separatist) as straightforward, clear-cut, self-evident binaries

121 Peter Toon, ed., The Correspondence of John Owen (1616–1683) (Cambridge, 1970), p. 174.
122 Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 98–100.
123 For these developments in the 1690s, see Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 109–19,
and for that final quote, see p. 118.
110 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

and to consider what these groups had in common as much as what held
them apart. To offer just one example, Ann Hughes lays aside the main pat-
terns of previous scholarship that were ‘based on boxes, linear developments,
or factions’ and that reflected both ‘a drive to fit people into hard and fast
categories’ and the ‘search for a clearly defined turning point, the time when
once and for all religious and political divisions emerged, party alignments
were fixed, or adversary politics sprang into life’. Instead, fathoming out
these complex developments ‘requires a more sophisticated understanding of
political identities, both individual and collective, as more fragmentary,
contradictory, and contingent than dominant modes of analysis imply’.124 This is
a welcome recognition of the overlapping, fluid complexity within early mod-
ern discourse and identity. It has been necessary in a brief survey such as this to
employ easy short-hands—‘Presbyterian’, ‘Congregationalist’, ‘Separatist’—but
they mask a great deal of underlying complexity and divergence even within
those labels.
A second and more enduring pattern within the scholarship is the different
point of view adopted by scholars of American Puritanism, who have generally
emphasized the Congregationalists’ tendency towards separation, and scholars
of British Puritanism, who have drawn out their inclination to belong.125 The
recent scholarship of Michael Winship and Hunter Powell might be seen to
continue precisely that pattern. Once again, in a brief essay such as this it is
impossible to arbitrate between these different points of view, much less settle
the matter (if that were even possible). I hope it will not seem too faint-hearted
or banal to suggest that there is truth in both perspectives. We have seen within
Congregationalism the tendency to look in both directions, sharing so much in
common with both Presbyterians and Separatists whilst also seeking to stand
apart on principled points of conviction. But I agree with Powell that those
Congregationalist leaders of the early 1640s genuinely desired a way of accom-
modation even if in the end that proved impossible, for reasons that were not
entirely their fault.
Forty years later John Owen measured the distance between Presbyterians
and Congregationalists: ‘their Practice, so far as I can observe, is one and the
same, and therefore their Principles must be also, though they choose several
ways of expressing them’.126 We should not take that statement at face value,
but it does raise an awkward question: if there was so much commonality and
overlap between these two groups, why did they not come to agreement? What
is it that accounts for the fragmentation of the Puritans—a fragmentation that
was there, if not always publically visible, from the very beginning?

124 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), p. 330.
125 I am grateful to Susan Hardman Moore for pointing out this pattern.
126 John Owen, A Brief Vindication of the Nonconformists From the Charge of Schisme (1680),
p. 20.
 Congregationalists111

This is one more question that is far too large to answer here, but surely
any answer will comprise a number of layers or elements.127 First, there is the
dynamic of religious group identity in which the finest gradations of sameness
and difference become critically important as similar groups compete for what
might be called ‘market share’. It is their very commonality, then, that invested
minor differences with major aggravation, a dynamic hardly unknown among
other groups at other times. Second, we are dealing with people who were
nothing if not conscientious—they were not called Puritans for nothing, with
all the connotations that word can bring. God had prescribed a right way, and
only one right way, with serious consequences for error. Ecclesiology may not
matter much to us but it mattered a great deal to them. God’s judgement hung
poised over England should the Reformation go awry, as it seemed to do time
after time. Getting it right, and getting it precisely right, lent urgency to the
issues under debate. Third, there were a cluster of human and social tendencies.
Personality came into play, not least serious relational dysfunction between the
leaders of various groups, especially between Richard Baxter and John Owen.
It is all too easy for what I have elsewhere called ‘fatal memory’ to do its work:128
a long remembrance of accumulating slights and offences that provides a filter
of hurt through which one group now perceives the actions of the other,
making trust and mutual understanding all the more unattainable. And there
were the political and social pressures brought to bear upon those groups.
True, those forces (like persecution) could have bound them together more
tightly, but they tended to have a separating effect. This is apparent in the
Restoration period when in matters of national political concern the Presbyterians
and Congregationalists could not be seen to be working together,129 or when
the agenda for Toleration frustrated the agenda for Comprehension, and vice
versa. We might bear in mind, too, that there were moments of agreement
between the two groups but they were frustrated by the need to get any reli-
gious settlement approved by parliament—the transitory nature of those
parliaments (during the 1650s, when settlement lay within reach) proved most
unhelpful.
For all these reasons and more, the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists
never attained a happy union, despite the best hopes of many to achieve it. As
it happened, permanent denominational divisions marked the Church in
England as it emerged from the seventeenth century. And those divides, of
course, are with us still.

127 For a fuller discussion, see Cooper, Formation of Nonconformity, pp. 301–7.
128 Cooper, Formation of Nonconformity, ch. 9.
129 For an example, see Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Part III, p. 62, §141; III, p. 64, §143.
112 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Brachlow, Stephen, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology
1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988).
Bremer, Francis J., Shaping New Englands: Puritan Clergymen in Seventeenth-Century
England and New England (New York, 1995).
Cooper, James F., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial
Massachusetts (Oxford, 1999).
Cooper, Tim, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity
(Farnham, 2011).
Goldie, Mark, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007 and 2016).
Gribben, Crawford, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (New
York, 2016).
Ha, Polly, ed., The Puritans on Independence: The First Examination, Defence and Second
Examination (Oxford, 2017).
Hardman Moore, Susan, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New
Haven, CT, 2007).
Jones, R. Tudur, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London, 1962).
Jones, R. Tudur, Congregationalism in Wales, ed. Robert Pope (Cardiff, 2004).
Lake, Peter, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982).
Matthews, A.G., ed., The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order 1658 (London, 1959).
Morgan, Edmund S., Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963).
Nuttall, Geoffrey F., Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957).
Powell, Hunter, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan
Revolution, 1638–44 (Manchester, 2015).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
Winship, Michael, ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and
Others Respond to A Friendly Debate’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 689–715.
Winship, Michael, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill
(Cambridge, MA, 2012).
Winship, Michael P., ‘Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and
Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40’, in Crawford
Gribben and R. Scott Spurlock, eds, Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic
World, 1600–1800 (Houndmills, 2015), pp. 89–111.
Worden, Blair, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell
(Oxford, 2012).
 5

Separatists and Baptists*

Michael A.G. Haykin

‘Origins are elusive things’, the English Baptist historian Ernest A. Payne once
remarked with regard to the beginnings of English Dissent. As he went on to
elaborate, it is not clear where those beginnings of the Dissenting tradition in
England are to be placed—with the early Tudor Reformer John Hooper and his
dispute about vestments, with Richard Fitz, who was arrested for leading
unauthorized worship in Plumbers’ Hall in London in June of 1567, or with
Robert Browne and his transformation of St Helen’s in Norwich into a Separatist
congregation in 1581?1 What is patent, though, is that the bulk of English
Separatism had its main source in Elizabethan Calvinistic Puritanism.2 After
Elizabeth I ascended the throne in the late autumn of 1558 Protestants were
delighted that England was now firmly within the orbit of the Reformation.
When Katherine Bertie, née Willoughby, the Duchess of Suffolk, for example,
heard the news of Elizabeth’s accession she wrote at once to her from exile in

* I am grateful to Dr Adam Winters, the Archivist of the James P. Boyce Centennial Library at
the Southern Baptist Seminary, for help in obtaining sources for this chapter.
1 Ernest A. Payne, The Free Church Tradition in the Life of England (London, 1944), p. 22.
On Fitz and his congregation, see Albert Peel, The First Congregational Churches: New Light on
Separatist Congregations in London 1567–81 (Cambridge, 1920); Michael R. Watts, The
Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), 19–20, 23–4; Timothy
George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, GA, 1982), 27–31. See also
the helpful overview of R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London,
1962), 13–14.
More recently, Michael R. Watts has argued for the roots of Separatism within late medieval
Lollardy. See The Dissenters, pp. 7–14. For partial corroboration of Watts’ argument in this
regard, see especially Nesta Evans, ‘The Descent of Dissenters in the Chiltern Hundreds’,
in Margaret Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995),
pp. 288–308.
2 Watts, Dissenters, p. 14; J.F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, in McGregor and
B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984), p. 26; Stephen Brachlow,
‘Puritan Theology and General Baptist Origins’, The Baptist Quarterly, 31 (1985–1986), 179–94;
Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 4–7.

Michael A.G. Haykin, Separatists and Baptists In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I.
Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0006
114 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

what is now Lithuania and told her, ‘if the Israelites might joy in their Deborah,
how much we English in our Elizabeth’.3
The question that arose, though, was to what extent would the Elizabethan
Church be reformed, especially given Elizabeth’s innate conservatism, well
summed up by her motto semper eadem, ‘always the same’.4 A few months
after the above-cited letter, for instance, Katherine Bertie was concerned that
things were not moving fast enough in terms of reform, an attitude typical of
many of the returning Marian exiles.5 As she impatiently told Elizabeth’s main
confidante and chief adviser, William Cecil: ‘To build surely is first to lay the
sure cornered stone, today and not tomorrow; there is no exception by man’s
law that may serve against God’s. . . Christ . . . hath left his Gospel behind him a
rule sufficient and only to be followed.’6 Within a handful of years the mindset
typified by these words had crystallized into a distinct ecclesial position, name-
ly, Puritanism. Initially defined in response to Elizabeth’s ecclesial ‘settledness’,
the Puritans began to labour and lobby for reform within the Elizabethan
Church after the model of the Reformed churches in Protestant Switzerland,
especially that in Geneva. By the 1580s, though, a number of the more radical
Puritans, despairing of reformation within the Church of England, organized
their own congregations independent of episcopal control. As English Baptist
historian B.R. White has noted:
For many it was but a short step from impatient Puritanism within the established
Church to convinced Separatism outside it. So close in many ways were the ideals
of the two groups that for many the step from Puritanism into Separatism was
often but the step between yearning and fulfilment.7

3 Katherine Bertie to Elizabeth I, January 25, 1559 in Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a
Loyal House (London, 1845), I, pp. 34–5.
4 Peter Marshall, ‘Settlement Patterns: The Church of England, 1533–1603’, in Anthony Milton,
ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662 (Oxford,
2017), p. 53.
5 B.R. White, The English Separatist Tradition from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers
(London, 1971), pp. 20–1. This work is still an excellent guide to mapping the development of the
Separatists.
6 Katherine Bertie, Letter to William Cecil, March 4, 1559 in ‘Elizabeth: March 1559, 1–10’,
Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Volume 1, 1558–1559, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London,
1863), pp. 152–70 (British History Online www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/foreign/vol1/
pp.152–170). The spelling and capitalization have been modernized for this and other quotations
in this chapter. For a study of the Duchess of Suffolk, see Melissa Franklin Harkrider, Women,
Reform and Community in Early Modern England. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and
Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580 (Woodbridge, 2008). It is noteworthy that one of the
Duchess’ protégés, John Browne, was involved in the Separatist movement in the late 1560s
and 1570s. See Peel, First Congregational Churches, pp. 24–30; White, English Separatist Tradition,
pp. 28–9; George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition, pp. 25–6; Harkrider, Women,
Reform and Community, pp. 117–18.
7 White, English Separatist Tradition, p. 84.
 Separatists and Baptists 115

‘WITHOUT TARYING FOR ANIE’:

THE ELIZABETHAN SEPARATISTS

If there is a clarion-call of the Separatist movement it would be A Treatise of

Reformation without Tarying for Anie (1582) by Robert Browne, or ‘Troublechurch’
Browne, as one of his opponents nicknamed him.8 During his undergraduate
years at Cambridge University, Browne had become a thoroughgoing Puritan,
and after graduation sought mentoring by Richard Greenham, a pioneer of
Puritan pastoral care, who was ministering in Dry Drayton, just north of
Cambridge.9 Over the course of two years, from 1578 to 1579, Browne lived with
Greenham, likening his home to the Old Testament school of the prophets
mentioned in 1 Samuel 18. But Greenham informed Browne that ‘without leave
& special word from the bishop, he was to suffer none to teach openly in his
parish’. Although Greenham did not adhere to this ruling and allowed Browne to
teach in the parish, Browne became convinced that ‘the bishops’ feet were too
much set in every place, & that spiritual infection too much spread even to the
best reformed places’.10 In part, this experience led Browne to the conviction
that each local congregation had the right, indeed the responsibility, to elect its
own elders.
At the beginning of the next decade Browne moved to Norwich, fertile
ground for radical Puritanism. Here he ministered with a Cambridge friend
Robert Harrison, who was the Master of St. Giles’ Hospital in Norwich from
1580 to 1582.11 By 1581 Browne and Harrison shared the opinion that the estab-
lishment of congregations apart from the Established Church and its parish
churches was a necessity for, as Browne wrote that year, ‘God will receive none
to communion & covenant with him, which as yet are at one with the wicked’.12
The two men transformed the hospital chapel, St Helen’s, into a Separatist con-
gregation of sorts. Matters of doctrine and practice were decided by Browne
and Harrison in consultation with the church members though the church was
still technically a parish church. Not surprisingly, state authorities sought to

8 White, English Separatist Tradition, p. 44. On Robert Browne, see White, English Separatist
Tradition, pp. 44–66; Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 27–34; George, John Robinson and the English
Separatist Tradition, pp. 35–44; Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a
City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA, London, 2012), pp. 46–51.
9
Robert Browne, A True and Short Declaration, Both of the Gathering and Ioyning Together
of Certaine Persons: and also of the Lamentable Breach and Division which fell amongst them
([1583]), sig. A1v. For publication details of this tract, see Leland H. Carlson and Albert Peel, eds,
The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne (London, New York, 1953), p. 396. On
Greenham, see John H. Primus, Richard Greenham: Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor (Macon,
GA, 1998).
10 Browne, True and Short Declaration, sig. A1v.
11 On Harrison, see Carlson and Peel, eds, Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne,
pp. 1–3; Jones, Congregationalism in England, pp. 15–16.
12 Browne, True and Short Declaration, sig. B2v.
116 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

shut them down, and Browne, Harrison, and their Norwich congregation left
England in 1582 for the freedom of the Netherlands.
What attracted the Separatists to the Netherlands was its geographical prox-
imity to England, its policy of religious toleration, its phenomenal commercial
prosperity—the early seventeenth century witnessed such a flowering of
Dutch literary, scientific, and artistic achievement that this period has often
been called ‘the golden age of the Netherlands’—and the Reformed nature of
its churches. It was there that Browne published his Treatise of Reformation. In
this tract and subsequent writings, Browne set forth views that, over the course
of the next century, would become common property of all the theological
children of the English Separatists, including the Baptists.
Over against what passed for standard English ecclesial wisdom, Browne
had to demonstrate both his obedience to secular authorities as well as his
rejection of their right to intervene in the life of a local church, a given for many
since the fourth-century Constantinian revolution. Browne willingly conceded
the right of civil authorities to rule and to govern.13 However, he drew a distinct
line between their powers in society at large and their power with regard to
local churches. As citizens of the state the individual members of these churches
were to be subject to civil authorities, but, he emphasized, these authorities had
no right ‘to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submis-
sion to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties’.14 Browne conceived of
the local church as a company of Christians who had covenanted together to
live under the rule of Christ, whose will was made known through his Word
and his Spirit.15 Therefore, pastors and elders of the church, though they ultimately
received their authority and office from God, were to be appointed to their
office by ‘due consent and agreement of the church’.16 For Browne, the king-
dom of God cannot be brought about by the decrees of state authorities for
ultimately Christianity is ‘a matter of private conscience rather than public
order’ and ‘the church is a fellowship of believers rather than an army’ of
conscripts.17
When Browne returned to the British archipelago in 1584 he ended up
recanting his views after suffering imprisonment for them, but his mantle
and that of Harrison, who appears to have died in Middleburg in 1585, fell to
three men—John Greenwood, Henry Barrow, and a Welshman, John Penry.
All three of these men would be hanged in 1593 for what the state regarded as

13 Robert Browne, A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie, and of the Wickednesse
of those Preachers which will not Reforme till the Magistrate Commaunde or Compell Them (1582),
sig. A2r–v.
14 Browne, Treatise of Reformation, sig. B3v–B4r.
15 Robert Browne, A Booke which Sheweth the Life and Manners of All True Christians (1582),
sigs A1v–A2r and C2v–C3r.
16 Browne, The Life and Manners of All True Christians, sig. K1r.
17 Watts, Dissenters, p. 34.
 Separatists and Baptists 117

seditious writings advocating secession from the Established Church. Before

their respective deaths, though, their preaching and writings had led a number
in London to adopt Separatist principles. Barrow, ‘a spokesman of great fire
and genius’,18 was vitriolic in his denunciation of the state Church. English par-
ish churches were totally unfit for worship, for they received the ungodly as
members in good standing. Barrow was convinced that it was improper to even
use the buildings that had once witnessed the idolatry of the medieval church:
‘the idolatrous shape so cleaveth to every stone, as it by no means can be
severed from them whiles there is a stone left standing upon a stone’. Such
church buildings needed to be ‘utterly razed & destroyed’.19 Alongside such
ferocious invective there was also profound courage in the face of state terror:
prior to his death Penry emphasized to the state authorities that ‘imprison-
ments, indictments, arraignments, yea, death itself, are no weapons to convince
the conscience grounded upon the Word of the Lord’.20
In April 1593 a law was passed that required everyone over the age of sixteen
to attend their local parish church. Failure to do so for an entire month meant
imprisonment. If, after three months following the individual’s release from
prison, he or she still refused to conform, the person was to be given a choice
of exile or death. The Elizabethan Church and state was hoping to rid itself
of the Separatist problem by sending those who were recalcitrant into exile.
Understandably, when faced with a choice of death or exile, most Separatists
chose the latter. About forty of them ended up in Amsterdam, where they were
later joined by their pastor, a former Puritan named Francis Johnson. It is note-
worthy that Francis Johnson had been arrested at the same time as Greenwood
and Barrow. Though they were executed, he was kept in prison till 1597, when
he was released on the condition that he go into exile to Canada. Needless to
say, Johnson did not end up in Canada, but in Amsterdam, where his Separatist
congregation was residing.
Though the Separatists now had freedom to worship, their troubles were
not at an end. First, Francis’ brother George Johnson caused problems for the
congregation. George gave voice to a veritable litany of complaints about his
sister-in-law: her expensive clothing that exposed her breasts to an immodest
degree, her use of whalebones in her petticoats so that, according to George,
she was hindered in bearing children, and the fact that she stayed in bed till nine
o’clock on Sunday mornings, among other things.21 To such criticisms, George

18 Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation
to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto, ON, 1978), p. 73.
19 Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church (1590), pp. 138–9. On Barrow, see espe-
cially Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 51–60.
20 Cited William Pierce, John Penry: His Life and Writings (London, 1923), p. 402.
21 Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641)
(Cambridge, 1912), I, 160–1. See also Martha L. Finch, ‘ “Fashions of Worldly Dames”: Separatist
Discourses of Dress in Early Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony’, Church
History, 74 (2005), 494–533.
118 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

added one considerably more substantial: his brother was power-hungry, and
he was the centre of power, not the congregation.22 The congregation, though,
sided with Francis Johnson and his wife, and George Johnson, when he
refused to withdraw his charges, was excommunicated around 1599/1600.
But the troubles of this congregation were not over. In 1608 John Smyth, a
Puritan acquaintance of Francis Johnson, arrived in Amsterdam along with
his Separatist congregation. Initially, there was a considerable amount of
unanimity between the two congregations—they were both Separatist in the-
ology and both composed of expatriate English men and women—but within
a year significant differences between the two groups appeared, differences
that eventually led the Smyth congregation to becoming the first English-
speaking Baptists.

‘LIKE MEN SET UPON THE ICE’: JOHN SMY TH

AND THE GENERAL BAPTISTS

John Smyth’s exact origins are unknown, though he may well have grown up at
Sturton-le-Steeple in Nottinghamshire.23 Our first definite sight of Smyth is
when he was at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained a BA in 1590
and an MA three years later. During this period Cambridge University was a
nursery of Puritanism, and among Smyth’s tutors was Francis Johnson. It is not
surprising, therefore, to find Smyth in trouble for his Puritan views a few years
after his departure from Cambridge. He had been ordained as a minister in
the Church of England in 1594, but within three years he was voicing strong
disagreement with certain aspects of that Church’s liturgy. Appointed lecturer
in the town of Lincoln by its Puritan-leaning town council in 1600, he stayed till
1602. Some sermons that he gave at this time—later published as The Bright
Morning Starre (1603) and A Paterne of True Prayer (1605)—reveal a man who
was Puritan in theology, but a loyal member of the Church of England.24

22 White, English Separatist Tradition, p. 102. See also Michael E. Moody, ‘A Critical Edition of
George Johnson’s A Discourse of Some Troubles and Excommunications in the Banished English
Church at Amsterdam, 1603’ (PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1979).
23 B.R. White, ‘Smyth, John’ in Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller, eds, Biographical Dictionary
of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols (Brighton, 1982–4), III, p. 186; James Robert
Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence, and the Elect Nation
(Waterloo, ON, Scottdale, PA, 1991), p. 32. For Smyth’s theological journey, see White, English
Separatist Tradition, pp. 116–41; Stephen M. Johnson, ‘The Soteriology of the English General
Baptists to 1630: A Study in Theological Kinship and Dependence’ (PhD thesis, Westminster
Theological Seminary, 1988), pp. 198–250; Jason K. Lee, The Theology of John Smyth: Puritan,
Separatist, Baptist, Mennonite (Macon, GA, 2003); Wright, Early English Baptists, pp. 13–44.
24 White, English Separatist Tradition, pp. 117–18; Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation, p. 32.
 Separatists and Baptists 119

By the autumn of 1607, however, Smyth had definitely become convinced

of the rectitude of the Separatist position and had gathered a Separatist
congregation in the town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire on the
­
Nottinghamshire border. The critical factor in convincing Smyth that he
should leave the Church of England was the promulgation in late 1604 of a
series of church decrees by James I requiring complete conformity of all
Church of England ministers to The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of
Common Prayer, as well as allegiance to the episcopacy. Although James has
been raised in the environment of Scottish Presbyterianism, he was ‘heartily
sick of a lifetime of listening’ to the promulgations of Scottish elders about ‘the
limits of his power’ and thrilled to be in episcopalian England where he could
rule as he deemed a true monarch should.25 Smyth met with a number of other
Puritan leaders, including John Robinson and John ‘Decalogue’ Dod, to discuss
what course of action they should take. Most decided to remain within the
bosom of the Established Church. Smyth, though, along with Robinson, was
convinced that they had to leave, for, in their view, the Church of England was
now beyond hope.26
During the course of 1607 and 1608, the Smyth congregation was harassed by
the state, and the congregation made the difficult decision to leave England for
the free winds of Amsterdam. Once established in Amsterdam, they naturally
looked for fellowship with the other English Separatist congregation in the city,
that pastored by Francis Johnson. Differences, though, soon appeared between
the two congregations. In a book that Smyth published in the year of his arrival
in the Netherlands, The Differences of the Churches of the Separation (1608), he
outlined a number of areas of disagreement between his congregation and that
of Johnson.27 The most significant of these differences had to do with ecclesial
leadership. In the Johnson congregation, there was a pastor—responsible for
preaching, discipline, and leading the congregation in the observance of the
sacraments—a teacher, who primarily taught, and two ruling elders, who
helped the pastor with the exercise of discipline. This differentiation of leader-
ship had its roots in John Calvin’s understanding of the church officers listed
in Ephesians 4:11.28 Smyth, however, believed that pastors, teachers, and elders
were actually indistinguishable, and that every congregation should have a
plurality of these officers.
The net result of these differences was a rupture of fellowship between
the two congregations as well as a split within the Smyth congregation. John
Robinson and about one hundred members found that they could not agree

25 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 67. See Winship’s discussion of James I’s ecclesiastical
handling of the Puritans: Godly Republicanism, pp. 67–72.
26 On Robinson, see especially George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition.
27 For a discussion of these differences, see James R. Coggins, ‘The Theological Positions of John
Smyth’, The Baptist Quarterly, 30 (1983–4), 250–2; Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation, pp. 50–5.
28 See White, English Separatist Tradition, p. 63.
120 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

with the direction in which Smyth was moving, and they separated from Smyth
to relocate in Leiden.29 Robinson’s congregation, at its height some 300 believers,
eventually left the Netherlands for America, landing at Plymouth in southeast-
ern Massachusetts in 1620. Robinson intended to follow, but died in Leiden in
1625. Smyth’s congregation, on the other hand, was down to about fifty mem-
bers, about a third of its original size.
In 1609, Smyth’s thinking took another significant step as he came to accept
believers’ baptism. The issue of baptism had been something of an embar-
rassment to the Separatists. According to their way of thinking, the Church
of England was a false Church. Yet, all of them had been baptized as infants
by this church. Was not the efficacy of their baptism in doubt, therefore? The
Separatists, though, shrank from asking, let alone answering, this question. The
events associated with the revolutionary Anabaptists of Münster were still
etched firmly in the memory of European Christians: believers’ baptism could
only lead to social and political disorder.30 But where others feared to tread,
Smyth, ever the independent thinker, forged ahead. If, he reasoned, the Church
of England is not a true Church, then neither is her baptism a true baptism.
As Smyth studied the Scriptures, he became convinced that the New
Testament Church knew only of believer’s baptism and that paedobaptism
was a post-Apostolic development. He outlined this position in a treatise
entitled The Character of the Beast, which was published in 1609. Baptism,
Smyth argued, typifies the baptism with the Spirit and follows upon one’s verbal
confession of Christ, but infants cannot receive the baptism of the Spirit, nor
can they confess Christ with their mouths. Furthermore, are infants incapable
of repentance, which again must precede baptism?31 Smyth thus concluded
that the practice of infant baptism among the Separatists tarred them with the
same brush of ‘heresy’ as Rome and the Church of England: ‘Be it known there-
fore to all the Separation that we account them in respect of their constitution
to be as very an harlot as either her Mother England, or her grandmother Rome
is, out of whose loins she came.’32 Smyth felt that he and his congregation were
surrounded by a sea of apostasy. He recognized that he needed to be baptized,
but in such a situation of total apostasy to whom could he turn for a proper
baptism? The question of the correct administrator of baptism was as important
as that of the proper subject of the rite. Consequently, he took the radical—and
to his contemporaries, shocking—step of baptizing himself and then baptizing
his congregation.33

29 Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation, pp. 56–61.

30 Watts, The Dissenters, p. 44.
31 John Smyth, The Character of the Beast (1609), sig. A3r. Spelling modernized. For an edition
of his writings, see The Works of John Smyth, ed. W.T. Whitley, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915).
32 Smyth, Character of the Beast, sigs. A2r, A4r.
33 See the discussion of Smyth’s thinking at this point by White, English Separatist Tradition,
pp. 137–8.
 Separatists and Baptists 121

In the controversy that ensued, Smyth was asked by his Separatist

c­ ontemporaries how he could take such a step, for if self-baptism were permis-
sible, then churches could be established of solitary men and women, which
was ridiculous. Smyth’s response was that he knew of no church that practised
believers’ baptism. But, Smyth’s critics pointed out, there was in the Netherlands
a Mennonite group known as the Waterlanders, from whom he could have
received baptism. By the time that Smyth approached the Waterlanders to
investigate where they stood theologically, he had abandoned his Calvinism
and had adopted a view similar to that of the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius,
namely, that predestination was conditional and dependent upon a person’s
response to the Gospel and that God’s saving grace could be resisted success-
fully. Arminius’ theological position was being heavily debated at the time in
the Netherlands, and it is therefore quite understandable how Smyth might
have come under the influence of this position.34 From the vantage-point of
his newly adopted Arminianism, the Waterlanders were orthodox, and Smyth
now came to regard his self-baptism as a premature and hasty step. Thus,
together with thirty-one other members of his congregation, he applied to join
the Waterlander church. This meant another baptism at the hands of these
Mennonites, and consequently an admission on the part of the Smyth con-
gregation that their baptism by Smyth was invalid. But there were some in the
Smyth congregation who refused to admit this. Led by Thomas Helwys, they
decided in 1612 to return to England.35 Smyth died the same year and his con-
gregation, eventually received into the Waterlander church, was assimilated
into Dutch Anabaptist culture. At some point after the emigration of Smyth,
Helwys, and their congregation to the Netherlands, Smyth commented that ‘we
being now come into a place of liberty, are in great danger, if we look not well
to our ways; for we are like men set upon the ice, and therefore may easily
slide and fall’.36 Helwys might well have seen Smyth’s words as a self-fulfilling
prophecy after the latter gave his allegiance to the Mennonites.
The Helwys congregation retained the Arminianism that they had adopted
under Smyth’s leadership, and thus became known as General Baptists for
their commitment to general redemption. Helwys also retained Smyth’s dire

34 White, English Separatist Tradition, p. 139. Though, cf. Coggins, ‘Theological Positions of
John Smyth’, 257–8.
35 For the history of the congregation after Smyth’s break with Helwys and the former’s death,
see Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation, pp. 107–14. On Helwys, see Ernest A. Payne, Thomas
Helwys and the First Baptist Church in England (second edn; London, 1966); B.R. White, ‘Helwys,
Thomas’ in R. Greaves and R. Zaller, eds, Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals, II, pp. 76–7;
Johnson, ‘Soteriology of the English General Baptists’, 250–86; Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration
of the Mystery of Iniquity (1611/1612), ed. Richard Groves (Macon, GA, 1998), pp. xi–xxxiv; Marvin
Jones, The Beginning of Baptist Ecclesiology: The Foundational Contributions of Thomas Helwys
(Eugene, OR, 2017); Wright, Early English Baptists, p. 8: ‘Thomas Helwys has rightly been identi-
fied as a pioneer of the English Baptists, co-equal with . . . John Smyth’.
36 Cited Young, Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, p. 450.
122 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

vision of the larger Christian world. In A Short Declaration of the Mystery

of Iniquity (1612), a copy of which was sent personally to James I,37 Helwys
denounced both the Puritan leaders within the Church of England and the
Separatist elders who had exited that body as alike ‘false prophets’, for neither
group possessed ‘the seal of the Spirit’ that was given by God only to those who
both believed and were baptized as believers. With regard to the Separatist
leaders especially, Helwys found clear proof of their being ‘deceitful hearted’
from the fact that they had not stayed in England and suffered persecution for
the sake of the truth.38 Undergirding Helwys’ critique of both Puritan and
Separatist was his apocalyptic conviction that a key mark of the Antichrist was
the use of religious coercion by the state. The irony of Helwys’ argument is that,
like the Separatists, he assumed that ‘ecclesiology was not adiaphora, but a mat-
ter of salvation which demanded careful obedience’.39
Helwys’ tract almost definitely landed its author in jail not long after the
congregation returned to England, and he died there around 1616. Helwys’
small congregation—which must have consisted of no more than ten or
so members when they first returned to England—survived their leader’s
imprisonment and death, and became the seedbed of the General Baptist
denomination. By 1626 they had established congregations in London,
Coventry, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Tiverton, with roughly 150 members.40 Despite
the fact that these congregations were the first English-speaking Baptists, it
was the Particular Baptists who would become the main conduit of future
Baptist witness.41

‘WE REFUSE NOT ON O CCASION TO COMMUNICATE’:

THE JACOB-LATHROP-JESSEY CHURCH

The community that stands at the fountainhead of the Particular Baptists was
the London-based congregation known as the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church,
so-called because of the names of its first three pastors: Henry Jacob, John

37 Helwys included a handwritten plea with the copy sent to the king in which he boldly called
James I to remember that he was ‘a mortal man & not God, therefore hath no power over the
immortal souls of his subjects, to makes laws & ordinances for them, and to set spiritual lords over
them’ (Helwys, Mystery of Iniquity, ed. Groves, p. vi; spelling modernized).
38 Helwys, Mystery of Iniquity, ed. Groves, pp. 65, 91, 127–8, 149–54. See also the reflections of
Wright, Early English Baptists, pp. 50–4 on Helwys’ critiques.
39 Brachlow, ‘Puritan Theology and General Baptist Origins’, p. 180.
40 On the history of the Helwys congregation after its return to England, see Watts, Dissenters,
pp. 49–50; Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation, pp. 104–7; Wright, Early English Baptists,
pp. 58–64.
41 See Ian M. Randall, ‘ “The Low Condition of the Churches”: Difficulties Faced by the General
Baptists in England—the 1680s to the 1760s’, The Pacific Journal of Baptist Research, 1 (2005), 3–19.
 Separatists and Baptists 123

Lathrop, and Henry Jessey. With a group of like-minded believers in London,

Jacob, ‘a shadowy figure’,42 had established the congregation in 1616. To what
extent Jacob and his congregation were influenced by Separatists like Francis
Johnson and John Robinson remains an open question,43 but Jacob’s congre-
gation was determined not to cut itself off from all fellowship with Puritans
who had stayed within the Church of England. In the statement of faith that
this congregation published when it was first established, it was openly stated,
‘we refuse not on occasion to communicate’ with local parish churches as
long as ‘neither our assent, nor silent presence is given to any mere human
tradition’.44 Unlike the Separatists, Jacob and his congregation refused to
deny that the Church of England still possessed ‘true visible churches’, and
thus it was not at all wrong to continue fellowshipping with them where this
did not involve countenancing what Jacob’s congregation regarded as definite
error. It is not surprising that the authorities in the Church of England har-
assed the congregation as a Separatist body, and that the Separatists dubbed
them idolaters.
Due to harassment and persecution, Jacob decided to leave England for
Virginia in 1622, where he died two years later. During the pastorate of his
successor, John Lathrop, at least two groups amicably withdrew from the
church to found Separatist congregations, one of which came to be pastored by
a certain Samuel Eaton. Eaton had problems with the legitimacy of the baptism
of infants by ministers in the Church of England, though it does not appear to
be the case that he had actually come to embrace believers’ baptism as the only
basis for membership in the church.45
When William Laud, the Arminian Archbishop of Canterbury, was using
violence to curb the influence of Puritanism in the 1630s, Lathrop also decided
to emigrate to the New World. He left in 1634, and it was not until 1637 that a
new pastor was found in the person of Henry Jessey.46 Jessey had been priested

42 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 81.

43 On Henry Jacob, see especially Robert S. Paul, ‘Henry Jacob and Seventeenth-Century
Puritanism’, Hartford Quarterly, 1 (1967), 92–113; Stephen Brachlow, ‘The Elizabethan Roots of
Henry Jacob’s Churchmanship: Refocusing the Historiographical Lens’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 36 (1985), 228–54. On the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church, see [W.T. Whitley, ed.] ‘Records
of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church 1616–1641’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, 1
(1910), 203–25; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints. The Separate Churches of London
1616–1649 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 7–27; Winship, Godly Republicanism, pp. 81–4, 99–102.
44 Henry Jacob, A Confession and Protestation of the Faith of Certaine Christians in England
([London,] 1616), sig. A2v–A3v.
45 Paul Linton Gritz, ‘Samuel Richardson and the Religious and Political Controversies
Confronting the London Particular Baptists, 1643 to 1658’ (PhD thesis, Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary, 1987), pp. 25–9.
46 On Jessey, see especially B.R. White, ‘Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion’, in R. Buick Knox,
ed., Reformation Conformity and Dissent. Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London, 1977),
pp. 132–53; Jason G. Duesing, Henry Jessey: Puritan Chaplain, Independent and Baptist Pastor,
Millenarian Politician and Prophet (Mountain Home, AR, 2015).
124 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

in 1626 after having embraced Puritanism while studying at Cambridge in the

early 1620s. Over the next eight years or so, though, he grew increasingly uneasy
with the liturgy and worship of the Established Church. In 1635 he came into
contact with the Jacob-Lathrop Church, presumably began to worship with the
congregation, and two years later was called to be the church’s pastor. An irenic
individual, Jessey continued to uphold the ‘Jacobite’ tradition, that is, the policy
established by Henry Jacob of keeping in fellowship with Puritans within the
Church of England.

‘ THAT ORDER LAID D OWN BY CHRIST AND HIS

APOSTLES’: JOHN SPILSBURY, WILLIAM KIFFEN, AND
THE FIRST PARTICULAR BAPTIST CHURCHES

A year or so after Jessey became the pastor of this church, the question of the
validity of infant baptism arose within the congregation. In a document drawn
up at this time, the so-called Kiffin Manuscript, we read that in 1638 ‘Mr Tho:
Wilson, Mr Pen & H. Pen, & 3 more being convinced that Baptism was not
for Infants, but professed believers joined wth Mr Io: Spilsbury the Churches
favour being desired therein’.47 John Spilsbury was probably a cobbler by trade,
and may have been a member of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church at one
point.48 His church appears to be the first that can be assigned the designation
‘Particular Baptist’. For many years the congregation met in Wapping and by
1670 around 300 regularly attended services. Spilsbury wrote a number of small
works that reveal high Calvinist soteriology. For example, in God’s Ordinance,
The Saints’ Priviledge (1646) Spilsbury sounded forth one of the distinctive
notes of the Particular Baptist movement when he stated that ‘Christ hath not
presented unto his Father’s justice a satisfaction for the sins of all men; but only
for the sins of those that do or shall believe in him, which are his elect only.’49
It is vital to note that the Spilsbury congregation, which was probably little
larger than a small house church when it began, maintained a good relation-
ship with its mother church. There is evidence of joint gatherings for prayer
and members of the Spilsbury congregation continued to attend meetings at

47 This text may be conveniently found in Burrage, Early English Dissenters, II, pp. 302–5. The
text cited is from p. 302.
48 On Spilsbury, see R.L. Greaves, ‘Spilsbury (or Spilsbery), John’ in Greaves and Zaller, eds,
Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals, III, pp. 193–4; Robert W. Oliver, From John Spilsbury to
Ernest Kevan. The Literary Contribution of London’s Oldest Baptist Church (London, 1985), pp. 8–9;
B.R. White, ‘The London Calvinistic Baptist Leadership 1644–1660’, in J.H.Y. Briggs, ed., Faith,
Heritage and Witness (London, 1987), pp. 37–8.
49 John Spilsbury, God’s Ordinance, The Saints’ Priviledge (London: Benjamin Allen, 1646),
p. 39.
 Separatists and Baptists 125

the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church. Of all the various groups that eventually left
this church, B.R. White has observed that ‘there were no high walls of bitterness
between them and even the withdrawals are recorded as brotherly’.50 Moroever,
Michael Winship sees in this ecclesial ‘fecundity’ on the part of the Jacob-
Lathrop-Jessey Church ‘dramatic testimony to the electric instability of the
boundary’ between the Puritans and the Separatists.51
By May of 1640 the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church had grown to the point
that it was too large to meet in one place. The decision was thus taken to split
the congregation into two, one half to continue under the pastoral leadership
of Jessey and the other half under that of Praise-God Barebone (c.1596–1679).
That same year Jessey’s congregation was physically assaulted by the Lord Mayor
of London. According to one source, his officers ‘came violently on them, beat,
thrust, pinched, and kicked men or women as fled not his handling’. Among
those who were beaten was a pregnant woman named Mrs Berry, who, as a
result of her ill treatment, not only lost her baby in a miscarriage but also her
own life.52
Illustrative of the spiritual journey of many of these early Particular
Baptists is that of William Kiffen.53 By 1638 Kiffen had come to reject Anglican
arguments for the idea of a state Church and had joined the body of believers
that had once been pastored by Samuel Eaton, what he termed ‘a company of
saints in a congregational way’.54 When Kiffen joined this congregation,
Eaton was in prison, where he would die the following year. Kiffen accepted
an invitation to preach to the congregation, which would later be known as
Devonshire Square Baptist Church in the 1680s though it met in a variety of
places between the 1630s and 1680s. At some point over the course of the
next three or four years after joining this congregation Kiffen was chosen as
their pastor.
During this entire period, Kiffen continued to study the Bible for direction
with regard to the constitution and form of a local church. When, over forty
years later, he recalled this period of his life, what stuck out in his memory
was his diligent examination of the Bible to find the ‘right way of worship’,55
which entailed discovering the ecclesial blueprint embedded in the New
Testament. By the fall of 1642 he and his congregation had arrived at what they
believed to be such a blueprint, namely, what would later be described as a

50 White, ‘Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion’, p. 135.

51 Winship, Godly Republicanism, p. 110. 52 Burrage, Early English Dissenters, II, p. 301.
53 On Kiffen, see especially William Orme, Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin
(London: Burton and Smith, 1823); Barrie R. White, ‘William Kiffin—Baptist Pioneer and Citizen
of London’, Baptist History and Heritage, 2 (1967), 91–103, 126; Larry J. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and
his World, 6 vols to date (Oxford, 2010–).
54 William Kiffen, ‘The Epistle to the Christian Reader’ in A Glimpse of Sions Glory: or The
Churches’ Beautie specified (1641), sig. A1r.
55 William Kiffen, ‘To the Christian Reader’ in his A Sober Discourse of Right to Church-
Communion (1681), sig. A2r.
126 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Particular Baptist congregation. As he wrote in 1681 about his search: he came

to the conclusion that ‘the safest way was to follow . . . that order laid down by
Christ and his Apostles’, namely, ‘after conversion they were baptised, added to
the church, and continued in the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of
bread, and prayer’.56

‘RESEMBLING BURIAL & RISING AGAIN’:

THE REDISCOVERY OF IMMERSION

In the early 1640s the question of baptism once again surfaced in the Jacob-
Lathrop-Jessey Church. Richard Blunt, who had left the congregation in 1633
with Samuel Eaton, began to fellowship with the church once again in 1640.
Blunt soon aired the question of whether or not the baptism of believers
by immersion was the only type of baptism to actually correspond to that
practised in New Testament times. It would appear that up until this point
Spilsbury’s congregation had baptized believers by affusion. According to the
Kiffin Manuscript, ‘Mr Richard Blunt . . . being convinced of baptism that also
it ought to be by dipping ye body into ye water, resembling burial & rising
again . . . Col: 2.12. Rom: 6.4. had sober conference about in ye Church.’57 The
texts that especially convinced Blunt that the baptism of believers should be
by immersion are named here as Colossians 2:12 and Romans 6:4, both of
which relate baptism to the believer’s death, burial, and resurrection with
Christ. But Blunt and those who were like-minded knew of no congregation
in England who baptized believers by immersion and thus had no one close
at hand to whom they could turn for instruction. Enquiries were made and it
was discovered that there was a group of believers in the Netherlands who
baptized by immersion, a Mennonite body known as the Collegiants. Blunt,
who spoke Dutch, thus went to Holland to discuss the issue with them and
presumably see a baptism at first hand. The Kiffin Manuscript indicates that
upon his return Blunt baptized a certain ‘Mr Blacklock that was a teacher
amongst them, & Mr Blunt being baptized, he & Mr Blacklock baptized ye
rest of their friends that were so minded’, forty-one in all.58 Two Particular
Baptist churches were subsequently formed: one pastored by Richard Blunt;
the other by Thomas Kilcop.59

56 Kiffen, ‘To the Christian Reader’, in Sober Discourse of Right to Church-Communion, sigs
A2r–v.
57 Burrage, Early English Dissenters, II, pp. 302–3.
58 Burrage, Early English Dissenters, II, pp. 303–4. See also Wright, Early English Baptists,
pp. 75–99, for a somewhat different reconstruction of events.
59 On Kilcop’s successionism, see Wright, Early English Baptists, pp. 104–10.
 Separatists and Baptists 127

‘LIFTING UP OF THE NAME OF THE LORD JESUS’:

THE FIRST LOND ON CONFESSION OF FAITH

Among those baptized after Blunt’s return from Holland was Mark Lucar,
who played a significant role in the spread of Particular Baptist principles in
New England.60 Soon after Blunt’s return, Spilsbury and his congregation
also adopted immersion as the proper mode of baptism, though there is no
­evidence that Spilsbury required those previously baptized by affusion to be
immersed.61 A fourth London Particular Baptist congregation had also been
planted by this time—in Crutched Fryers by John Green, a hat-maker and John
Spencer, a coachman.62
In all, there were seven congregations by mid-October, 1644, when they
issued a small twenty-four-page tract entitled The Confession of Faith, Of
those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists. Its
authors were not named on the title page, though at the foot of the introductory
letter there did appear fifteen names—the pastoral leadership of the seven
Particular Baptist churches then in existence, all of them located in the capital.
As to which of these leaders were the actual authors of this Confession, later
known as The First London Confession of Faith, John Spilsbury, William Kiffen,
and Samuel Richardson probably played the most prominent role in drawing
it up.63
The Confession was issued mainly in response to various false charges that
were being circulated in the capital. These Baptists had been depicted as men
and women ‘lying under that calumny and black brand of heretics, and sowers
of division’. From the pulpits and in the writings of fellow Puritans, they had
been accused of ‘holding free-will, falling away from grace, denying original
sin, disclaiming of magistracy, denying to assist them either in persons or purse
in any of their lawful commands, doing acts unseemly in the dispensing the
ordinance of baptism, not to be named amongst Christians’.64 From the first
three of these charges it would appear that the Particular Baptists were being
confused with the General Baptists. The next two charges are ones relating to
political subversion and rebellion. Such accusations were probably levelled on
the misunderstanding that the Particular Baptists were akin to the revolutionary,

60 David J. Terry, ‘Mark Lucar: Particular Baptist Pioneer’, Baptist History and Heritage, 25
(1990), 43–9.
61 John Spilsbury, A Treatise concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme (1643), p. 34: ‘I do not
approve of rebaptizing’. See also Wright, Early English Baptists, pp. 107–8.
62 W.T. Whitley, ‘The Seven Churches of London’, The Review and Expositor, 7 (1910), 387–8.
63 B.R. White, ‘The Doctrine of the Church in the Particular Baptist Confession of 1644’, The
Journal of Theological Studies, ns, 19 (1968), 570; William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith
(second edn, Valley Forge, 1969), 145–6. See also the discussion of the Confession by Wright, Early
English Baptists, pp. 129–38, 148–52.
64 ‘To All that Desire the Lifting Up of the Name of the Lord Jesus in Sinceritie’ in The Confession
of Faith, Of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists (1644).
128 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

continental Anabaptists of the previous century. It is noteworthy that in the

title of the Confession, it was emphasized that these Baptists were ‘commonly
(though falsly) called Anabaptists’. The final charge—that of sexual immorality
in the administration of baptism—was pure slander, but one frequently made
against the early Baptists. For example, Daniel Featley, an influential, outspoken
minister devoted to the Church of England, penned a scurrilous attack on the
Baptists entitled The Dippers dipt. Or, The Anabaptists duck’d and plunged Over
Head and Eares (1645). In it he maintained that the Baptists were in the habit
of stripping ‘stark naked, not only when they flock in great multitudes, men and
women together, to their Jordans to be dipped; but also upon other occasions,
when the season permits’!65
The upshot of such charges—charges that the authors of this preface vehe-
mently asserted were ‘notoriously untrue’—was that many godly believers
wanted nothing at all to do with the Particular Baptists and others were
encouraged, ‘if they can find the place of our meeting, to get together in clusters
to stone us, as looking upon us as a people . . . not worthy to live’.66 Spilsbury,
for example, mentioned in 1643 that his convictions regarding believer’s
baptism had made his opponents ‘so incensed against me, as to seek my life’.67
The issuing of the Confession was accompanied by the hope that it would
demonstrate once and for all the fundamental solidarity of these Baptists with
the international Calvinist community.
B.R. White has pointed out that there is a jealous concern for congrega-
tional autonomy within the Confession, which, in turn, was motivated by a
deep desire to be free to obey Christ, and not to be bound by the dictates of
men and human traditions.68 At the same time, though, Article XLVII insisted
that since the individual congregations all ‘walk by one and the same rule’, they
should ‘by all means convenient to have the counsel and help of one another in
all needful affairs of the Church, as members of one body in the common faith
under Christ their only head’. Here is the genesis of what would later become a
characteristic feature of Particular Baptist life, namely, their regional associations
that linked together local congregations in specific geographical areas of the
British archipelago. Undoubtedly the ecclesial experience that many of these
first Particular Baptists had had in the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey congregation
shaped their thinking about the necessity of associations, for that church was
anything but isolationist and had consciously striven to nurture bonds between

65 Cited Gordon Kingsley, ‘Opposition to Early Baptists (1638–1645)’, Baptist History and
Heritage, 4 (1969), 29. For the charge of sexual immorality, see also McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount
of All Heresy’, pp. 41–2.
66 ‘To All that Desire the Lifting Up of the Name of the Lord Jesus in Sinceritie’, in The Confession
of Faith.
67 White, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, 571, n. 1. 68 White, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, 584.
 Separatists and Baptists 129

itself and other congregations.69 The important place that these first-generation
Baptists accorded to their associations is well expressed by White when he
states that ‘they no more believed that an individual congregation should be
free to go its own way than that an individual believer could be a serious
Christian without commitment to a local, visible congregation’.70
These associations, along with the Baptist Confession, which was reprinted
a number of times in the 1640s and 1650s, undergirded the growth of the
Particular Baptists from seven churches in 1644, all based in London, to around
130 throughout England, Wales, and Ireland in 1660.71 And although a few
members of these congregations were wealthy, like William Kiffen or the
Abingdon maltster John Tomkins who left £6,000 in his will, the majority of
them were composed of ‘small craftsmen and tradesmen’, such as ‘weavers,
shoemakers, tailors, ironmongers, bakers, glovers, and buttonmakers’.72

‘IN HEARING OF MOSES WE HEAR GOD’:

THE SEVENTH-DAY BAPTISTS

To Anglican and Presbyterian eyes, the radical religion of the Baptists exacer-
bated the social and political tumult of the 1640s and 1650s. And to make
matters worse, in the early 1650s a variant of the Particular Baptists emerged
who challenged a key element of the Puritan ethos, namely the Sabbatarian
interpretation of the Lord’s Day. James Ockford’s The Doctrine of the Fourth
Commandment, Deformed by Popery; Reformed & Restored to its Primitive
Purity (1650), the earliest of a number of Seventh-day Baptist treatises, argued
that Saturday, not Sunday, is ‘the Sabbath which Christians ought to keep holy
to the Lord’.73 One of the most vociferous advocates of Seventh-day Baptist
distinctives was Edward Stennett, who adopted Sabbatarian convictions in the
late 1650s and was the first of a distinguished line of Stennetts who pastored
Seventh-day congregations.74 It is noteworthy that his sons were gifted scholars

69 R. Dwayne Conner, ‘Early English Baptist Associations. Their Meaning for Baptist
Connectional Life Today’, Foundations, 15 (1972), 167–8, 172–7.
70 B.R. White, ‘The Origins and Convictions of the First Calvinistic Baptists’, Baptist History
and Heritage, 25, no.4 (October, 1990), 47. See also McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’,
pp. 33–5.
71 White, ‘Doctrine of the Church’, 570; White, ‘The Origins and Convictions of the First
Calvinistic Baptists’, Baptist History and Heritage, 25 (1990), 45; Watts, Dissenters, pp. 160–1.
72 McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, pp. 36–7.
73 James Ockford, The Doctrine of the Fourth Commandment, Deformed by Popery; Reformed
& Restored to its Primitive Purity (1650), 62. I am indebted to David W. Bebbington for drawing
my attention to this text in his Baptists Through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (Waco,
TX, 2010), p. 51.
74 On Edward Stennett, see Ernest A. Payne, The Baptists of Berkshire Through Three Centuries
(London, 1951), pp. 47–51; R.L. Greaves, ‘Stennett (or Stennet), Edwards (d.1705)’ in his and Zaller, ed.,
130 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

as well as his only daughter, who mastered both Greek and Hebrew to the extent
that she could read ‘the scriptures in their originals, with ease and pleasure’.75
Stennett contended that congregational worship on any other day but the
one appointed in the Old Testament, namely the seventh day, was tantamount
to man-made worship.76 From Stennett’s perspective, the ‘great design’ of the
devil in his day was ‘to deprive us of the Scriptures of the truth, because they
are the sword of the Spirit by which we must resist him’. Some, and he has the
Quakers in mind, ‘forsake them all as a rule, and betake themselves to a dark
lantern, or blind nature’s light, which they call the light within them’. Others
argued that ‘nothing must be their rule but what is given forth in the New
Testament’, and so seek a way to discard the fourth commandment as it was
actually given. Stennett, though, was adamant that ‘it is the duty of all men to
keep the seventh-day-Sabbath’ as part of the new covenant, for ‘God com-
manded all that Moses commanded’ in the Decalogue, and ‘in hearing of Moses
we hear God, and in hearing of Christ we do no more’.77
There were only around twenty Seventh-day Baptist congregations by 1690,
and some of them quite small,78 yet the volume of literature against them by such
authors as Richard Baxter, John Owen, John Bunyan, and Thomas Grantham is
a tacit admission of their perceived influence.79

‘ THOUGH WE STO OD IN THE SNOW THE SUN SHONE

UPON US’: THE BAPTISTS PERSECUTED

During the British Civil Wars, many Baptists had been ardent Republicans,
though during the Commonwealth, the London Particular Baptist leadership
had supported the Cromwellian regime against more radical elements like the
Levellers and the Fifth-Monarchy movement.80 The Plymouth Baptist Abraham
Cheare’s tract Sighs for Sion (1656) is typical in this regard. Cheare urged the
tract’s recipients in the West Country not to be encumbered with tertiary

Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals, III, pp. 204–5. On the Seventh-day Baptists, see
especially Bryan W. Ball, Seventh-Day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and
Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1994).
75 “Memoir of the Rev. Edward Stennett’, The Baptist Magazine, 10 (1818), 282.
76 See Edward Stennett, The Royal Law Contended For (1658) and Stennett, The Seventh Day is
the Sabbath of the Lord (1664).
77 Stennett, The Seventh Day is the Sabbath of the Lord, sig. A3r, pp. 27, 32–3.
78 Ernest A. Payne, ‘More about the Sabbatarian Baptists’, The Baptist Quarterly, 14 (1951),
164–5.
79 R.J. Bauckham, ‘Sabbath and Sunday in the Protestant Tradition’, in D.A. Carson, ed., From
Sabbath to Lord’s Day: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Investigation (1982; repr. Eugene, OR,
1999), p. 333.
80 Wright, Early English Baptists, pp. 143–227.
 Separatists and Baptists 131

matters such as millenarianism—the Fifth Monarchists are in view here—but

rather to pursue ‘the advancement of that Name, Interest, and Glory of God,
that should be upon our hearts’.81 Following the collapse of Puritan rule in
1659–60, Charles II sought to reassure the godly by issuing the Declaration of
Breda (April 1660), in which the new king guaranteed ‘liberty to tender con-
sciences’ and that none ‘shall be disquieted or called in question for differences
of opinion in matter of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom’.82
The Anglican hierarchy who came to power with Charles II, however, were not
as favourably disposed towards the Puritans, for they viewed the various reli-
gious groupings outside of the Established Church as disturbers of the peace.
This view seemed to find confirmation in January 1661, when Thomas
Venner, a lay-preacher attached to a congregation in Swan Alley, London,
and a cooper by profession, led an armed revolt to overthrow Charles II. Parts
of London were terrorized for three days by Venner and his violent Fifth-
Monarchist followers, who were convinced that Christ’s kingdom was to be
ushered in by such bloody means. Over forty people were killed in street
fighting, with Venner himself killing at least three or four people. Unrepentant
to the end—he was hanged, drawn, and quartered on January 19, 1661—Venner
affirmed his allegiance to ‘King Jesus’ and that what he had done had been
for ‘the propagation of his [i.e. Christ’s] government and rule, and for the
advancement of his kingdom’.83
Venner had links through the Swan Alley congregation with a number of
Baptist leaders, and it is not surprising that one immediate consequence of the
uprising was the imprisonment of a large number of Baptists, who, despite their
attempts to distance themselves from Venner, were now regarded as dangerous
to the peace of Charles II’s kingdom along with others, like the Quakers and
Independents.84 A more far-reaching consequence of the Venner uprising was
its strengthening the hand of the Cavalier Parliament that was bent on the
destruction of religious Dissent and to this end, between 1661 and 1665, passed
the series of acts known as the Clarendon Code.85 Between 1661 and 1688, the
year of the so-called Glorious Revolution when Charles II’s younger brother

81 Sighs for Sion (1656), p. 5. See further B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London, 1972).
82 Charles II, The Declaration of Breda in Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation
(Minneapolis, MN, 1994), p. 545.
83 The Last Speech and Prayer with other Passages of Thomas Venner (1660 [1661]), p. 5. For the
life and thinking of Venner, see Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground
in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 50–7; Bernard Capp, ‘A Door of Hope Re-opened: The
Fifth Monarchy, King Charles and King Jesus’, Journal of Religious History, 32 (2008), 16–30.
84 Anonymous, Behold a Cry! Or, a True Relation of the Inhumane and Violent Outrages of
divers Souldiers, Constables, and others, practised upon many of the Lord’s People, commonly
(though falsly) called Anabaptists, at their several Meetings in and about London (London, 1662),
pp. 1–5; B.R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (second edn, London, 1996),
pp. 98–102.
85 For the actual acts, see Andrew Browning, English Historical Documents, 1660–1714 (New
York, 1953).
132 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

James II was removed from power by an Anglican coup d’état and religious
toleration finally secured, hundreds of Baptists along with equal numbers of
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Quakers were incarcerated. Pastors
were especially targeted and many of them emerged from prison with their
health deeply impaired. On occasion, full-fledged attacks were carried out on
the rank and file of congregations. On June 29, 1662, for example, a squad of
soldiers came to the Baptist congregation in Petty France, ‘full of rage and
violence, with their swords drawn; they wounded some, and struck others,
broke down the gallery, and made much spoil’.86 The following month, when
another London Baptist meeting was subjected to a similar attack, one of
the attackers whose name was Brown punched a number of pregnant women
in the congregation, ‘striking . . . them with his fists such blows that made
them reel’.87 Although there were periods of respite—for example, in 1672, when
Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence and then again in 1687 when his
brother made a similar declaration—there was no lasting peace from perse-
cution till 1688.
Ironically, by silencing the preaching of the Baptist leaders and other
Nonconformist preachers, the state gave many of these men time to attend to
writing: ‘eloquent preachers [thus] became gifted authors’.88 After John Bunyan,
a Congregationalist who favoured believer’s baptism rather than a ‘big-B
Baptist’, was arrested on November 12, 1660, as he was about to preach in
Lower Samsell, a hamlet near Harlington, Bedfordshire, he spent twelve years
in prison. Bunyan’s imprisonment proved to be the catalyst for developing his
gifts as an author. Here he wrote his powerful apology for nonconformity, I will
Pray with the Spirit (1662), as well as a rebuttal of antinomianism, Christian
Behaviour (1663), along with his classic Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
(1666), which went through six editions in his lifetime. But a good number of
the Baptist leaders did not survive the ordeal of imprisonment. Two notable
Baptists, for example, who were in London’s Newgate Prison in the mid-1680s
perished there: Francis Bampfield, a leading pastor among the Seventh-day
Baptists, and the learned Thomas Delaune, an Irish Baptist author who came
from Cork, where a Baptist congregation had been established around 1651.
The worst and darkest bout of persecution was just before the dawn of
toleration, in the early 1680s, when a number of Dissenters supported an
attempt by the Whig party in parliament to prevent Charles II’s brother, the
future James II, from ever becoming king. Angered by this act against his
brother, Charles dissolved parliament in 1681 and turned his wrath on the
Dissenters.89 In Bristol, for example, the Broadmead congregation was forced

86 Anonymous, Behold a Cry!, p. 7. 87 Anonymous, Behold a Cry!, p. 8.

88 Raymond Brown, Spirituality in Adversity: English Nonconformity in a Period of Repression,
1660–1689 (Milton Keynes, 2012), p. 335.
89 Watts, The Dissenters, pp. 252–4.
 Separatists and Baptists 133

to meet in nearby fields or woods to escape detection by the authorities. When

Samuel Buttall preached to this congregation in a field on March 12, 1682, the
church minutes record that there were close to 1,000 people present.90 On one
occasion when the Broadmead Baptists met in December of the following
year, the church minutes noted that as they met outside there was ‘a hard
frost, and snow on the ground, . . . and though we stood in the snow the sun
shone upon us, and we were in peace’.91 Meetinghouses in the West Country—
at Lyme Regis, Dorset, and Taunton, Somerset—were physically attacked, with
pulpits and pews being destroyed by mobs loyal to the state Church. Similar
oppression occurred in Bedfordshire. The Bedford congregation of John
Bunyan, for instance, appears to have held few meetings between August 1684
and December 1686 due to the harshness of persecution.
Most Baptists, during this time of persecution, embraced an apolitical
stance. However, when some West Country Baptists took up arms in the revolt
of James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate Protestant son of
Charles II, to overthrow his uncle James II, they may well have been hoping
to relive the halcyon days of the 1640s and 1650s when Dissent was in the
ascendancy. The rebellion was soon crushed, however, at the Battle of
Sedgemoor in Somerset on July 6, 1685. Baptists executed in the wake of this
defeat included two of William Kiffen’s grandsons, William and Benjamin
Hewling, as well as Sampson Clarke, minister of the Particular Baptist church
in Lyme. Andrew Gifford, pastor of the Pithay Baptist Church in Bristol, had
also actively supported the uprising by securing funds and ammunition for
Monmouth’s men. Fortunately for Gifford, his links to the rebellion were not
discovered until much later.

‘ THE PRACTICE OF THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANS’:

CONTROVERSY, CONFESSION, AND CONCORD

Despite the persecution, the Baptists still had the energy to carry on various
controversies. Thomas Grantham, the leading General Baptist theologian,
engaged in a lengthy debate over infant baptism with John Connould, the
Anglican vicar of St Stephen’s, Norwich. Like a number of other Baptist writers,
Grantham also took the time to refute the pneumatological claims of the
Quakers: ‘When the Quakers tell us they have the Holy Ghost, and that what
they speak they speak as they are moved by the Holy Ghost, etc. Then indeed
we say we are to try what they thus tell us, by what the Spirit hath said in the

90 J.M. Cramp, Baptist History: From the Foundation of the Christian Church to the Present Time
(London, 1875), pp. 308–9.
91 Cited Cramp, Baptist History, p. 310.
134 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Scripture; and when we find them contradict what the Spirit saith in the
Scripture, or wrest and abuse those Scriptures, etc. then we reject them as vain
boasters, led by fancies, and not by the Spirit of God.’92
The controversy with the most far-reaching implications, though, was an
internal one, among the Particular Baptists over the relationship between bap-
tism and the Lord’s Supper. When John Bunyan was released from prison in
1672, he published A Confession of my Faith, A Reason of my Practice in which
he rejected the standard Particular Baptist argument that believers’ baptism
must precede membership in the local church or any of the privileges of that
membership, in particular, participation in the Lord’s Supper. Not surprisingly
this sparked a response and Bunyan published a second tract the following year,
Differences in Judgment About Water–Baptism, No Bar to Communion (1673).
Bunyan’s position was shared by a small number of Baptist figures, including
Henry Jessey.93 The most notable response to Bunyan was William Kiffen’s
A Sober Discourse of Right to Church-Communion (1681), which is character-
ized by ‘clear logic and crisp presentation’.94 It is undoubtedly aimed at Bunyan,
although the Bedford pastor is never explicitly named in the work.
From Kiffen’s perspective, the practice of open communion and open
­membership ‘flatly contradicts the practice of the Primitive Christians’. The
‘right gospel order’ is laid down in Acts 2:41–2, where believers are first bap-
tized, then ‘received into church–fellowship’, and only then share in the Lord’s
Table.95 What is fascinating, however, is that any insistence on closed communion
is absent from the Second London Confession (1677/1688), destined to become
the most important confessional document in Baptist history. In an appendix
attached to the Confession when it was first issued in 1677, the differences
among the Particular Baptists as to baptism as a prerequisite of ­communion
was noted and as such ‘we have purposely omitted the mention of things of that
nature, that we might concur, in giving this evidence of our agreement, both
among ourselves, and with other good Christians, in those important articles of
the Christian Religion’.96
Nehemiah Coxe, who was closely involved in drawing up the Second
London Confession, had been called to the ministry in 1672 by Bunyan’s Bedford

92 Christianismus Primitivus: or, The Ancient Christian Religion (1678), IV, p. 50. For these
debates between the Baptists and the Quakers, see especially T.L. Underwood, Primitivism,
Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England
(New York/Oxford, 1997).
93 As Richard L. Greaves notes, ‘Bunyan is rightly regarded as an open-membership Baptist’
(‘Conscience, Liberty, and the Spirit: Bunyan and Nonconformity’, in N.H. Keeble, ed., John
Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus. Tercentenary Essays (Oxford, 1988), p. 35).
94 T.L. Underwood, ‘ “It Pleased Me Much to Contend”: John Bunyan as Controversialist’,
Church History, 57 (1988), 468.
95 William Kiffen, A Sober Discourse of Right to Church-Communion (London, 1681), pp. 16–17.
96 Second London Confession of Faith, appendix 4 in W.J. McGlothlin, ed., Baptist Confessions
of Faith (Philadelphia, PA, 1911), p. 287.
 Separatists and Baptists 135

congregation. Even more significant was the fact that by 1677, both open- and
closed-communion Particular Baptist churches had a shared experience of
seventeen years of persecution. As Robert W. Oliver has put it, ‘disunity was a
luxury that they could ill afford’.97
The Second London Confession was adopted as the denomination’s confes-
sional standard at the 1689 national assembly in London. This gathering
was the first of its kind for Baptists, a direct result of the passage of the
Toleration Act under William III, who brought to an end nearly three decades
of persecution. Little wonder Baptists at the time and well into the eighteenth
­century were confident that the ‘Most High sent the glorious King William
the Third, and saved us’.98 The Toleration Act specifically exempted ‘dissent-
ing Protestants’ who ‘scruple in the baptising of infants’ from having to agree
to those paragraphs of the Thirty-Nine Articles that concerned infant bap-
tism. The assembly also passed a resolution to the effect that their churches
be given the liberty to follow their own judgement when it came to open or
closed communion.99 A.C. Underwood and Joshua Thompson have under-
stood this resolution to mean that while fellowship and recognition was to
be extended to open communion churches with closed membership, it was
not to be extended to those churches which, like Bunyan’s, held to both open
communion and open membership.100 Yet, as B.R. White has pointed out,
there was at least one open-membership church that sent a representative to
this Particular Baptist Assembly in 1689; namely, Broadmead Church in
Bristol.101 Believer’s baptism and a personal profession of faith before the
church were the normal requirements for admission to membership in this
church, but on occasion some were received into membership solely on
the basis of a personal testimony.102 Broadmead was unusual in other ways:
Dorothy Hazzard, the wife of a Puritan minister, was key to the church’s
founding and when Thomas Hardcastle was called to be the church’s pastor
in 1671, of the ninety-eight members who signed the letter calling him, seventy-
two were women.103

97 Robert W. Oliver, ‘Baptist Confession Making 1644 and 1689’ (unpublished paper presented
to the Strict Baptist Historical Society, March 17, 1989), p. 20.
98 Benjamin Wallin, The Joyful Sacrifice of a Prosperous Nation (London, 1760), p. 26.
99 Joseph Ivimey, A History of the English Baptists (London, 1811), I, p. 490.
100 A.C. Underwood, A History of the English Baptists (London, 1947), p. 129; Joshua Thompson,
‘The Communion Controversy and Irish Baptists’, Irish Baptist Historical Society Journal, 20
(1987–8), 29–30.
101 ‘Open and Closed Membership among English and Welsh Baptists’, The Baptist Quarterly,
24 (1971–2), 332.
102 The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687, ed. Roger Hayden (Bristol, 1974),
pp. 52–3. Kiffen’s relationship with the Broadmead Church appears to have been cordial; see
White, English Baptists, pp. 113–15. Kiffen was the second of the signatories to this confession.
103 White, English Baptists, pp. 150–1. White devotes a chapter to ‘Women in Seventeenth-
Century Baptist Churches’ (White, English Baptists, pp. 134–58).
136 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

‘CHRIST DIED FOR ALL MEN’: THOMAS GRANTHAM

AND THE GENERAL BAPTISTS

A year after the first appearance of the Second London Confession, the General
Baptists also issued what some of them hoped would become their doctrinal
standard, An Orthodox Creed (1678). This sophisticated confession devoted the
first eight of its articles to a detailed explication of the Trinity and orthodox
Christology, an explicit refutation of the unorthodox views of the General
Baptist Matthew Caffyn.104 As a footnote to the confession’s preface stated, ‘We
are sure that the denying of baptism is a less evil, than to deny the divinity, or
humanity of the Son of God’.105 Despite the best efforts of the framers of this
creedal text, though, heterodox views of Christ proved to be a perennial prob-
lem among General Baptists in the following decades. The confession also
staked out a position between Arminianism and Calvinism. While it affirmed
that ‘Christ died for all men’, it also confessed that ‘those that are effectually
called, according to God’s eternal purpose, being justified by faith, do receive
such a measure of the holy unction, from the Holy Spirit, by which they shall
certainly persevere unto eternal life’.106
The foremost General Baptist leader during this period was undoubtedly
Thomas Grantham, ‘a born organizer’,107 who was involved in planting General
Baptist churches in Lincolnshire, Warwickshire, and throughout East Anglia.
Grantham wrote what can be best described as the first systematic theological
treatise by a Baptist, the four-volume Christianismus Primitivus: or, The Ancient
Christian Religion (1678). Similar to An Orthodox Creed, Grantham’s theology
remained distinctively Arminian, but he disagreed with many of his Arminian
contemporaries by affirming total depravity, a penal substitutionary view of
the atonement, justification by faith alone, and the perseverance of the saints.
Grantham’s theology cannot be neatly aligned with either consistent Calvinism
or the mainstream Arminianism of his day.108
Grantham’s theological convictions may also account for the fact that he
longed for a union of all the English Baptists: ‘Let some pillar or monument of
our love and unity in general be erected in this generation, which may give

104 Yet, see the revisionist article by Alex Carver, ‘Matthew Caffyn Revisited: Cooperation,
Christology, and Controversy in the Life of an Influential Seventeenth-Century Baptist’, The
Baptist Quarterly, 47 (2016), 44–64.
105 An Orthodox Creed: or, A Protestant Confession of Faith (1679), sig. A6r.
106 An Orthodox Creed, articles XVIII and XXXVI.
107 Charles Boardman Jewson, The Baptists in Norfolk (London, 1957), p. 32. On Grantham,
see especially John Inscore Essick, Thomas Grantham: God’s Messenger from Lincolnshire
(Macon, GA, 2013) and Clint Bass, Thomas Grantham (1633–1692) and General Baptist Theology
(Oxford, 2013).
108 J. Matthew Pinson, ‘Thomas Grantham’s Theology of the Atonement and Justification’,
Journal for Baptist Theology and Ministry, 8 (2011), 7–21.
 Separatists and Baptists 137

evidence to posterity that we were one people.’109 Grantham’s plea went

unheeded by the Particular Baptists. When he died in 1692, though, his
­one-time theological interlocutor, the Anglican John Connould, conducted
Grantham’s funeral within St Stephen’s parish church and eleven years later,
when he was dying, asked to be buried in the same tomb in the Anglican
sanctuary.110 Most of Grantham’s Separatist and Baptist forebears probably
would not have approved, but Grantham well knew of the provisional character
of all historical judgements.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Ball, Bryan W., Seventh-Day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and
Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford, 1994).
Bass, Clint, Thomas Grantham (1633–1692) and General Baptist Theology (Oxford,
2013).
Brachlow, Stephen, ‘The Elizabethan Roots of Henry Jacob’s Churchmanship:
Refocusing the Historiographical Lens’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36
(1985), 228–54.
Burrage, Champlin, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research
(1550–1641), 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912).
Carlson, Leland H. and Albert Peel, eds, The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert
Browne (London/New York, 1953).
Coggins, James Robert, John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite
Influence, and the Elect Nation (Waterloo, On/Scottdale, PA, 1991).
Duesing, Jason G., Henry Jessey: Puritan Chaplain, Independent and Baptist Pastor,
Millenarian Politician and Prophet (Mountain Home, AR, 2015).
Essick, John Inscore, Thomas Grantham: God’s Messenger from Lincolnshire (Macon,
GA, 2013).
George, Timothy, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, GA,
1982).
Greaves, Richard L., Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663
(Oxford, 1986).
Gritz, Paul Linton, ‘Samuel Richardson and the Religious and Political Controversies
Confronting the London Particular Baptists, 1643 to 1658’ (PhD thesis, Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary, 1987).
Jones, Marvin, The Beginning of Baptist Ecclesiology: The Foundational Contributions of
Thomas Helwys (Eugene, OR, 2017).
Jones, R. Tudur, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London, 1962).
Kreitzer, Larry J., William Kiffen and his World, 6 vols to date (Oxford, 2010–).
Lee, Jason K., The Theology of John Smyth: Puritan, Separatist, Baptist, Mennonite
(Macon, GA, 2003).

109 Grantham, Christianismus Primitivus, III, pp. 36–7.

110 Jewson, Baptists in Norfolk, p. 36.
138 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Lumpkin, William L., Baptist Confessions of Faith (second edn; Valley Forge, 1969).
McGregor, J.F., ‘The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy’, in McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical
Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984), pp. 23–63.
Paul, Robert S., ‘Henry Jacob and Seventeenth-Century Puritanism’, Hartford Quarterly,
1 (1967), 92–113.
Payne, Ernest A., The Free Church Tradition in the Life of England (London, 1944).
Peel, Albert, The First Congregational Churches: New Light on Separatist Congregations
in London 1567–81 (Cambridge, 1920).
Randall, Ian M. ‘ “The Low Condition of the Churches”: Difficulties Faced by the General
Baptists in England—the 1680s to the 1760s’, The Pacific Journal of Baptist Research,
1 (2005), 3–19.
Spufford, Margaret, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995).
Tolmie, Murray, The Triumph of the Saints. The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649
(Cambridge, 1977).
Underwood, T.L., Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker
Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (New York/Oxford, 1997).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
White, B.R., The English Separatist Tradition from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim
Fathers (London, 1971).
White, B.R., ‘Henry Jessey in the Great Rebellion’, in R. Buick Knox, ed., Reformation
Conformity and Dissent. Essays in honour of Geoffrey Nuttall (London, 1977),
pp. 132–53.
White, B.R., The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (second edn, London,
1996).
Wright, Stephen, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006).
 6

Early Quakerism and its Origins*

Ariel Hessayon

Of all the new religious movements that emerged during the English Revolution
of 1641–60 the Quakers were the largest, most successful and enduring. Barry
Reay, for example, estimated that by the early 1660s there were certainly
between 35,000 and 40,000 Quakers, and perhaps as many as 60,000 out of a
population numbering some 5.28 million.1 Naturally the importance of early
Quakerism means that it is an extremely well-studied subject so my intention
here is to present an overview, informed by my own interpretation, of what is
largely familiar evidence.
Accordingly, this chapter begins with some historical background followed
by a summary of the main scholarly literature on early Quakerism, with an
assessment of its merits. I will then examine the origins of the name, comparing
it with the ways in which polemicists used other terms of abuse, before suggest-
ing that Quakerism had multiple, loosely interlinked beginnings rather than a
singular basis. Other aspects of early Quakerism that will be discussed briefly
include its defining characteristics, social composition, and the beliefs of its
adherents: namely the supremacy of individual experience over religious tradi-
tions and dogma; their anti-sacramentalism, anticlericalism, hostility to tithes,
pleas for toleration, concern for social justice, and calls for legal and medical
reform; as well as their attitude towards the Bible, Apocrypha, extra-canonical
texts, and the ‘occult’. In addition, I will look at Quaker preaching, literary style,
modes of speech, use of silence, prophetic behaviour, and attempted miracle
working within the context of a widespread belief in an imminent apocalypse
and the re-emergence of Christian primitivism. Finally I will suggest some
reasons for early Quakerism’s success.

* Earlier versions of this chapter were read at the Quaker History Meeting at Friends House,
London and the Institute of Historical Research. I would like to thank the participants for their
helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, I have profited from the advice of Gerard Guiton,
Diego Lucci, and Phil Smith. I alone remain responsible for any mistakes or shortcomings.
1 Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (Hounslow, 1985), pp. 11, 26–9.

Ariel Hessayon, Early Quakerism and its Origins In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I.
Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0007
140 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

CONTEXTS AND HISTORIO GRAPHICAL

DEVELOPMENTS

The emergence of Quakerism must be situated within wider contexts: the

breakdown of pre-publication censorship in 1641; rebellion in Ireland and
widespread fear of popery; a recently concluded yet devastating Civil War that
had spread through many regions of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland,
and Ireland, during which an estimated 80,000 soldiers were killed or maimed;
the execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, abolition of episcopacy and
emasculation of the Church of England; the unprecedented trial and public
beheading of a reigning monarch; the abolition of the monarchy and the House
of Lords; the imprisonment, disarmament, and occasional execution of defeated
royalists; the seizure and sequestration of a number of royalists’ estates together
with the state’s confiscation and redistribution of property that had belonged
to the crown, bishops, dean, and chapters; the growing belief among all sides
in the conflict that the sinful shedding of innocent blood was a pollutant that
had defiled the land; harvest failure; murrain, famine, destitution, and local-
ized outbreaks of plague; army mutinies over arrears of pay; sick and maimed
soldiers together with the widows and orphans of slain combatants in need of
charity; as well as campaigns to release people imprisoned for debt, introduce
liberty of conscience, initiate ecclesiastical, educational, electoral, legal, medical,
and taxation reforms, abolish the maintenance of ministers by tithes, and
promote free trade.
Then there was the political transition from the English Commonwealth
inaugurated in 1649 to the Cromwellian Protectorate of 1653–9. Here the new
republic failed to fully legitimate itself. Partly this was through some missed
opportunities; partly through the absence of systematic brutality. Indeed, the old
world was turned upside down but never eradicated as the ruling majority sought
moderation, compromise, and restraint—the quest for settlement. Consequently
an oligarchic republic was eventually supplanted by an uncrowned Lord Protector
presiding with the aid of his council and successive parliaments over a perpetual
Reformation implemented by an unsteady alliance of magistracy, ministry, and
military power.
Like other Protestant nonconformists that survived the restoration of the
monarchy, the Quakers’ refashioning of their history and identity began early
and in earnest. Unsurprisingly, while several of their enemies provided a
genealogy for them that stretched from the mystics and spiritual reformers of
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century continental Europe such as Hendrik
Niclaes and Jacob Boehme to their immediate forerunners—Grindletonians,
Levellers, Diggers, Baptists, Seekers, and Ranters—Quakers themselves pre-
ferred to concentrate upon the sufferings of their founding fathers and ­mothers.
Coupled with this established tradition of martyrology were biographical studies
of the leadership and their more prominent followers. There was also a related
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 141

emphasis on genealogy, regional and local history, and bibliography that chimed
with antiquarian research interests. From William Sewel’s early-eighteenth-
century history of the rise of the Quakers to William Braithwaite’s early-
twentieth-century account of the beginnings of Quakerism these narratives
had common elements. Thus Quaker origins were explained as a long-term
development of the Reformation and contextualized against the backdrop of
Puritan Separatists, continental and native Baptists, Civil War, regicide, and
revolution. The major personality was George Fox, although there were other
‘first publishers of truth’—supposedly a ‘valiant sixty’—including James Nayler,
Edward Burrough, Francis Howgill, George Whitehead, Margaret Fell, and
Elizabeth Hooton. These pioneer evangelists followed in the Apostles’ footsteps,
boldly preaching their message of the revelation of Jesus Christ as an indwelling
presence—the light within. Despite religious persecution they remained stead-
fast in their opposition to clerical authority, church worship, infant baptism,
tithes, and oath taking, refusing to take the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or
remove their hats, and using plain speech. Gathered primarily from pre-existing
northern communities of Independents and Seekers, these Quakers, as they
were scornfully called, engaged in theological disputations with various groups:
notably Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, as well as ‘some of the less
stable products of Puritanism’, i.e. Ranters and Muggletonians.2 Itinerant
preaching spread their ideas from the fertile soil of the northern counties to the
midlands, eventually reaching London, Norwich, Bristol, and beyond—thereby
fulfilling, in lawyer William Prynne’s eyes, Jeremiah’s prophecy ‘That out of THE
NORTH AN EVILL SHALL BREAK FORTH UPON ALL THE INHABITANTS
OF THE LAND’.3 Thereafter they crossed the sea westward to Ireland, the West
Indies, and North America; eastward to the Dutch Republic, German territor-
ies, and Ottoman Empire; southward to France, Spain, the Italian states, Malta
and North African ports (Algiers).
While there is no watershed in Quaker historiography, there was a gradual
shift from a predominantly self-serving denominational version that venerated
the founders towards a more critical appraisal of their role within the move-
ment and its broader contribution to the English Revolution. The bulk of this
work, as before, was biographical and regional, concentrating on the leader-
ship’s itinerant preaching combined with Quaker sufferings in local and nation-
al context. Yet there was also renewed interest in old questions. Hence Geoffrey
Nuttall rejected Rufus Jones’s suggestion that Quaker origins could be traced to
continental Anabaptism, spiritualism, and mysticism, insisting rather that
Quakerism was indigenous, having evolved from English Puritanism. Further
studies examined the early Quakers’ interests in law, medicine, Hermeticism,

2 William Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism to 1660 (1912; second edn, revised Henry
Cadbury, Cambridge, 1955; reprinted, York, 1981), p. 18.
3 William Prynne, The Quakers Unmasked (second edn, London, 1655), p. 36.
142 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Hebrew, and Jews, as well as their attitudes towards the Bible, Apocrypha, and
extra-canonical texts. Others considered the meaning of the Quakers’ prophetic
gestures, attempts at faith healing, and the symbolism of silence, together with
their understanding of eschatology and apocalyptic belief that they were the
children of light called to fight the Lamb’s war with spiritual weapons in the
last days. The social origins of the early Quakers, their relationship with their
neighbours, and attitudes towards them generally also received attention, as
did their customs, costume, and manners. So too did their opposition to tithes,
and controversies with rival religious groups—notably Baptists, Ranters, and
Muggletonians. In addition, scholars explored early Quaker speech, testimonies,
and self-representation, noting the emergence of a distinctive literary style.
At the same time a number of books and articles extended our knowledge of
women Quakers, focusing on their activities as prophetesses, preachers, pamph-
leteers, prisoners, publishers, missionaries, and letter writers.
The sources from which these studies of early Quakerism were constructed
are well known. Like Baptists and Muggletonians, Quakers carefully collected,
collated, and copied manuscripts, which, together with bound volumes of
printed tracts, constitute the majority of the group’s archives. Although a num-
ber of documents were lost as a result of the Great Fire of London of 1666, and
although it has been convincingly demonstrated that Fox and the editor of
his Journal—possibly in collusion with an ‘official board of censorship’ (the
Morning Meeting)—suppressed or distorted unwelcome evidence so as to
magnify and sanitize his foundational role within the movement,4 there are still
important collections surviving from this period and today held at Friends
House Library: particularly the Abram Rawlinson Barclay, William Caton, and
Swarthmore manuscripts. There are also calendars available of George Fox’s
papers by Henry Cadbury and the Swarthmore Manuscripts to 1660 by Geoffrey
Nuttall, as well as Norman Penney’s Extracts from State Papers relating to
Friends, 1654 to 1672. In short, historians of the Quaker movement tread on
well-worn ground.
Among the first to stress the radical nature of early Quakerism was Alan
Cole, whose seminal work of the mid-1950s on Quakers and politics between
1652 and 1660 rejected the largely denominational view that early Quakers were
pacifists aloof from political life; if anything ‘it was forced upon them by the
hostility of the outside world’.5 Barry Reay agreed: ‘from the start, the Quaker
movement was a movement of political and social as well as religious protest’;
it was ‘very much a creature of its age, part of the radicalism and enthusiasm of
the revolutionary years’.6 Likewise, in a lecture delivered at Friends House in 1991
Christopher Hill speculated about the nature of the Quakers’ pre-Restoration

4 W.S. Hudson, ‘A Suppressed Chapter in Quaker History’, Journal of Religion, 24 (1944), 110.
5 A. Cole, ‘The Quakers and the English Revolution’, Past and Present, 10 (1956), 42.
6 Reay, Quakers, pp. 9–10, 32.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 143

political programme: they ‘expected the rule of the saints’ and ‘expected that
rule to bring about a better society’.7 James Nayler’s entry into Bristol on horse-
back in October 1656, however, in imitation of Christ’s messianic entrance into
Jerusalem, exposed divisions among the leadership in what was undoubtedly
the most dramatic and damaging schism in the history of early Quakerism; a
‘parting of the ways’ that suited Fox’s preference for discipline, law, and order.
For Hill the failure of English radicalism—including by implication the radical
aspects of early Quakerism—was partly attributable to duplicity. This was the
betrayal by the propertied bourgeoisie of the plebeian revolution that never
happened; what he termed the ‘revolt within the Revolution’. With the triumph
of the ‘protestant ethic’ and the Stuart Restoration the Quakers became part of
a nonconformist remnant forced to adapt or perish in an unreceptive environ-
ment. In the immediate aftermath of Thomas Venner’s bloody and disastrous
Fifth Monarchist insurrection of January 1661 they therefore adopted the ‘peace
principle’ as a means of ensuring their survival.8
Relatively recently, a new generation of Quaker students of their own history
has emerged. Usually drawing on Hill and other conceptually outmoded
studies of the period for their historical framework, often asking the same sort
of questions as their predecessors, they have tended not so much to challenge
or even reframe our existing picture as to coat certain aspects in new varnish.
Nonetheless, interesting work has still been produced. And while space pre-
cludes discussion, mention should be made of Douglas Gwyn’s exploration of
Quaker apocalyptic thought, particularly within Fox’s message, together with
Gerard Guiton’s focus on Jesus’s proclamation of the ‘Kingdom of God’ within
early Quaker theology. Both are good examples of innovative—if not entirely
unproblematic—approaches.

REPRESENTATIONS AND PERCEPTIONS

OF EARLY QUAKERISM

Scripture states that God favours those of a contrite spirit who tremble at his
word.9 Nonetheless, Quakers were so called in order to mock their actions.
Moreover, although a newsletter from London dated 14 October 1647 referred

7 Christopher Hill, ‘Quakers and the English Revolution’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical
Society [hereafter J.F.H.S.], 56 (1992), 173.
8 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (1972; Harmondsworth, 1984 edn), pp. 14–15, 241–58; Hill, ‘Quakers and English
Revolution’, 165, 175.
9 Isaiah 66:2.
144 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

to ‘a sect of women . . . from beyond sea called Quakers’,10 Fox recalled that the
term was first used of his group in 1650 by Justice Gervase Bennett of Derby.11
This defining feature of the formative years of the movement was variously
interpreted by polemicists as evidence of diabolic possession, witchcraft, or
epileptic seizures. Thus disparaging relations of Quaker assemblies narrated
how certain adherents would lie on their bellies or backs, their expressions
distorted, mouths contorted, ‘strangely whining, squealing, yawling, groaning’
as if in a trance. Others were said to be suddenly taken with fits, falling down to
the ground as if in a swoon:
while the Agony of the fit is upon them their lips quiver, their flesh and joynts
tremble, their bellies swell as though blown up with wind, they foam at the mouth,
and sometimes purge as if they had taken Physick.12
Quick to defend their behaviour, the early Friends explained their ecstatic
posturing as a benign affliction, as an affirmation of their prophetic calling.
Their worldly critics, however, were disdainful. While some mocked, ridiculing
the self-regarding children of light for shivering with fear before the secular
authority of magistrates, others pointed to the malefic origins of their unseemly
gestures, suggesting that it was not the Holy Spirit but the Father of Lies that
possessed their rapturous bodies. A few detractors looked not to diabolic pacts
but to natural causes, detecting melancholic temperaments and a predispos-
ition to apoplectic or epileptic fits behind the pretended trances of the Quakers.
Long considered a sacred disease, associated with prophecy, divination, hallu-
cination, intelligence, and even lunacy, the falling sickness or epilepsy was a
readily believable explanation for the ecstasies experienced by the Quakers.
Even so, that all the quaking Quakers suffered from recurrent seizures appears
improbable. It is more likely that the manner in which the early Friends trem-
bled was indicative both of their immersion in the Bible and their belief that
collectively they constituted an elect nation, an uncorrupted remnant speaking
a pure language in the last days initiated with the coming of Christ.
In addition to their trembling, early Quakers were depicted as of low social
standing—‘the dregs of the common people’ to quote one heresiographer;13
ignorant lying blasphemers puffed up with malice and pride; presumptuous
dissimulators; railing fanatical disrupters of organized religious services; disre-
specters of ministry and magistracy; flouters of the law; fomenters of sedition;
even papal agents bent on undermining the foundations of the Reformation.

10 R. Scrope and Thomas Monkhouse, eds, State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon,
3 vols (Oxford, 1767–86), II, p. 383; H.J. Cadbury, ‘Early Use of the Word “Quaker” ’, J.F.H.S., 49
(1959), 3–5.
11 John Nickalls, ed., Journal of George Fox (Cambridge, 1952; reprinted, 1986), pp. 22, 58.
12 Donald Lupton, The Quacking Mountebanck or The Jesuit Turn’d Quaker (London, 1655), pp.
16–17; Francis Higginson, A Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the Northern Quakers (London,
1653), p. 15.
13 Ephraim Pagitt and continuators, Heresiography (London, 1662 edn), p. 244.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 145

Besides often being defamed as sufferers from mental illness, even as people
willing to sacrifice children (the charge was by no means unique), there were,
moreover, lampoons depicting their engagement in bestial sexual practises—
not to mention, as Reay has outlined, ‘allegations of incest, buggery and general
immorality’.14
These textual and visual representations of Quakers, it must be emphasized,
resonated with distorted portrayals of oppositional social and political move-
ments, as well as with other religious communities mostly real but occasionally
imagined—that had separated from or refused to reach an accommodation
with the Church of England. Hence the Catholic recusant minority, who prob-
ably numbered more than 60,000, were accused of licentiousness, idolatry, and
superstition, as well as being suspected of conspiracy, disloyalty, and treason.
Against a background of alarming stories warning of foreign intervention and
widespread fear of popish plots, the pope became increasingly identified with
Antichrist, while Jesuit became a byword for casuistry. Similarly, just as medi-
eval Jews had been associated with leprosy and accused of spreading the Black
Death, so Anabaptism was compared to a contagion, canker, or gangrene that
had infected several limbs of the body politic. Shocking accounts of adult bap-
tism rituals contained lurid allegations that young women were immersed
naked in rivers, afterwards indulging their carnal appetites with those who had
dipped them. As for a handful of Anabaptist splinter groups’ adoption of com-
munism, their enemies purposefully conflated communal ownership of property
and possessions (community of goods) with polygamy (community of women).
In the same vein, Levellers were accused of seeking to abolish social distinctions
and private ownership of property, of levelling men’s estates and introducing
anarchy. They were also defamed as atheists, devils, mutineers, rebels, and vil-
lains. Another group, though much smaller in size and envisaging themselves
as both a spiritual and temporal community of love and righteousness, were
regarded as new-fangled, distracted, crackbrained, and tumultuous. These
were the Diggers, one of whose leaders was accounted a blasphemous, violent
mad man and reputed sorcerer. Then there were those whom heresiographers
categorized as new sect of Seekers or Expecters. These people sought and await-
ed a return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostles questioning the validity
of outward gospel ordinances such as baptism, yet were likened to libertines
that had scandalously defected from the bosom of the Church.
More infamous still were the Ranters, who were regularly demonized as a
lustful, ungodly crew given to all manner of wickedness. Their allegedly filthy
lascivious practises and sinful theatrical antics (cursing, excessive drinking,
revelling, roaring, smoking, whoring, and parodying of religious ceremonies)
were envisaged as a threat to patriarchal norms and societal order, their teachings

14 B. Reay, ‘Popular Hostility towards Quakers in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Social

History, 5 (1980), 391.
146 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

denounced by Presbyterian moralists and scandalized former co-religionists

alike as detestable doctrines inspired by the Devil. John Reeve and Lodowick
Muggleton meanwhile, a pair of London artisans who believed they were the
two witnesses foretold in Revelation 11, were frequently abused and derided by
their contemporaries as wild, impudent, railing madmen who vented strange
senseless blasphemies and other ridiculous opinions. Then there were Jews,
whose pleas for readmission to England in autumn 1655 were accompanied by
the circulation of pernicious stories that recycled prevailing negative stereo-
types. These dwelt on horrible accusations revolving around the appalling if
familiar themes of deicide, blasphemy, superstition, spiritual blindness, diabol-
ism, magic, and blood, together with an imagined Jewish predisposition towards
avarice, clannishness, conspiracy, criminality, cruelty, dishonesty, disloyalty, and
stubbornness. Finally, it is noteworthy that from the late Elizabethan period
Christian converts to Islam were derogatorily called renegados—especially on
stage—while Islamic customs such as circumcision, polygamy, concubinage,
and divorce scandalized the majority of English Protestants. Muhammad,
moreover, was typically regarded as an impostor, pseudo-prophet, and instru-
ment of Satan who had spread a pernicious heresy enshrined in a book of false-
hoods; not to mention an ambitious, bloodthirsty, epileptic, plundering rapist.
Taken together these distasteful representations suggest a number of provi-
sional ways in which we can contextualize and explain predominantly hostile
perceptions of, and reactions to, early Quakerism. First, there were the com-
pilers of early modern English heresy catalogues. These heresiographers tended
to position themselves within a long line of anti-heretical writing that stretched
from Paul, Irenaeus, and Augustine to Luther, Calvin, and the Presbyterian
controversialist Thomas Edwards’s notorious Gangraena (1646). As Ann
Hughes has shown, heresiographies should be read cautiously—less as accurate
guides to what they denounced, more as exaggerated and self-serving accounts.
Their purpose was to represent doctrinal and behavioural errors as inversions
of truths so as to facilitate their extirpation.15 Second, those engaged in con-
structing damaging portrayals of Protestant Dissenters were constantly alert to
precedents. They attached labels (sometimes borrowed from their predeces-
sors) to aid categorization, thereby providing loosely connected individuals
with a sectarian identity and genealogy that may have deliberately obscured or
ignored subtle doctrinal distinctions. Third, in mobilizing political opinion,
primarily through the medium of print, they illustrate not only the effective-
ness with which well-financed, organized polemical campaigns were able to
damage the religious and sexual reputations of their actual and supposed
enemies, but also how imagined types of heretical, blasphemous, and sectarian
‘Others’ were disseminated, popularized, and received at moments of tension
and conflict.

15 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004).
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 147

These constructed ‘Others’—in the sense of that which lay outside or was
excluded from the group with which someone identified themselves—had
some obvious differences yet also shared several significant features. Among
them were an emphasis on blasphemous religious beliefs and rituals, diabolic
inspiration, sinful conduct (especially sexual immorality), mental instability,
dissimulation, disloyalty, and disorder. By preying upon individual and collect-
ive fears they combined to create panics centred on perceived threats to the
progress of the Reformation, national security, good government, a hierarchical
social system, the maintenance of law and order, property ownership, and
patriarchal authority. Furthermore, because contemporaries envisaged these
‘Others’ as the antitheses of perfect models (divine truths, religious orthodoxy,
constant devotion, sexual probity, virtuous conduct, faithfulness) their inverse
reveals constructed notions of idealized individual and communal selves.
Resemblances between perceived Quakers and some of their immediate con-
temporaries—particularly Baptists, Familists, Diggers, and Ranters—therefore
suggest that these were not interchangeable static stereotypes but rather a blur-
ring of notional boundaries between different types of ‘Others’. This noticeable
degree of fluidity was partly a consequence of the readily available repertoire of
constantly evolving tropes from which they derived as well as the common
functions they served. It also highlights the type of problems associated with
sources of this nature together with the need to be wary of unsympathetic
explanations of the antecedents and origins of Quakerism.

ANTECEDENTS AND ORIGINS

During a night-time meeting in 1660 at a Dorchester inn, Fox had his hat
removed and his head carefully inspected for signs of the ‘Jesuit’s shaven crown’.16
By then William Prynne’s allegation that Quakers were Jesuit or Franciscan
agents despatched from Rome ‘to seduce the intoxicated Giddy-headed English
Nation’ had become widespread.17 Thus Edward Terrill, compiler of an account
of the Broadmead Baptist Church, identified the doctrine of the light within
together with the Quakers’ ‘affected Sanctity, manner of speaking, and Brutish
deportment’ towards magistrates as marks of a Jesuitical design.18 These
charges were vigorously refuted by, among others, Margaret Fell in an unpub-
lished rebuttal of seven supposed similarities.

16 Nickalls, ed., Journal of George Fox, p. 362.

17 Prynne, Quakers Unmasked, title page.
18 Roger Hayden, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687, Bristol Record
Society, 27 (1974), pp. 107–9.
148 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Yet the muck stuck. Indeed, the Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter
essentially concurred with Prynne. Baxter linked the Quakers to their
‘German Brethren’, the Paracelsians and Behmenists, assuming that with their
forerunners—‘Seekers, Ranters, and Anabaptists’—they were part of a popish
confederacy let loose by the Devil to undermine the pillars of the Reformation.19
Hence in The Quakers Catchism (1655) he recounted the ‘abundance’ of popery
that the Quakers and Behmenists maintained.20 Likewise, the heresiarch
Lodowick Muggleton supposed that Boehme’s writings ‘were the chief Books
that the Quakers bought’, insisting that the ‘Principle or Foundation of their
Religion’ was to be found there.21 Although Muggleton’s ability to observe subtle
doctrinal distinctions was impaired, and although he seems to have associated
Behmenism with a conception of God as immanent in direct opposition to his
own view of him as corporeal, he was still right to emphasize Boehme’s Quaker
readership—even if many Friends eventually repudiated the so-called Teutonic
Philosopher.
Elsewhere I have suggested that both the Quakers’ engagement with Boehme’s
difficult, inconsistent ideas and their association in contemporaries’ minds
with his teachings was more extensive than has usually been acknowledged.22
And while it is clear that only a minority of early Quaker printed texts and
extant manuscripts show familiarity with Boehme’s terms or doctrines, none-
theless among those that were influenced by Boehme were several important
figures in the British Isles, Europe, the West Indies, and North America at a time
when Quakerism was taking shape. It is also significant that some of Boehme’s
Quaker readers became schismatics; a few were also active outside England;
while others were foreigners. Yet many who became convinced of Quakerism
turned away from the Teutonic Philosopher—as they did from other authors
too. Partly this was due to a preference for Friends’ plain style over Boehme’s
abstruse notions. But the crucial sticking point in this instance was that, unlike
the Behmenists, Quakers denied the validity of the sacraments of baptism
and the Lord’s Supper as well as the Lord’s Prayer. Moreover, the minor post-
Restoration controversy between Quakers and Behmenists that flared up over
these issues illustrates in miniature the extent to which certain Quaker leaders
were able to transform their followers into an organized, disciplined, doctrinal-
ly coherent group, particularly by shunning what Quakers held in common
with their sectarian opponents and instead accentuating doctrinal differences
between Friends and others.
Whereas Baxter, who was influenced by the Calvinist heresiographer Christian
Beckmann, had focused on Germany, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More

19 Richard Baxter, One Sheet against the Quakers (London, 1657), pp. 1, 2.
20 Richard Baxter, The Quakers Catchism (London, 1655), sig. C3v.
21 Lodowick Muggleton, A Looking-Glass for George Fox (London, 1668), p. 5.
22 A. Hessayon, ‘Jacob Boehme and the Early Quakers’, J.F.H.S., 60 (2005), 191–223.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 149

looked to Holland. Writing in September 1670 to Anne, Viscountess Conway

(who eventually converted to Quakerism), More indicated it would take too
long to explain why the Quakers were ‘descended’ from Hendrik Niclaes, a
merchant active in Amsterdam and Emden, who in the 1540s had founded the
Family of Love. Represented by polemicists as a Nicodemist mystical sect who
allegorized the Scriptures and stressed the immanence of Christ, not to men-
tion being rebuked for seeking to attain perfectibility on earth, More believed
that Familists had entered England through the wiles of popish priests and
their emissaries.23 Having met with the Scottish Quaker George Keith, Lady
Conway asked More to reconsider his judgement: ‘I hope we may believe the
account they give of themselves, that they never were infect’d with what you call
Familisme’.24 Although unwilling to pronounce upon the ‘generality of their
Sect’, More responded that Lady Conway was overconfident that from the
beginning the Quakers had ‘nothing to do with Familisme’. He cited the
example of James Nayler as a ‘demonstration’ of how many Quakers had been
‘tinctured with Familisme’. Furthermore, he had been informed in London by a
purported associate of about twenty Familists that they were ‘downright’ Quakers.
Indeed, More confessed that he had always regarded Quakers as ‘Familists
onely armed with rudenesse and an obstinate Activity’. That the Quakers had
‘emerged into a greater nearnesse to the true Apostolick Christianity’ was a
cause for good Christians to rejoice, ‘but that they are hardly come off from all
points of Familisme, is plaine’.25 Henry Hallywell’s An Account of Familism As it
is Revived and Propagated by the Quakers (1673) developed this argument,
which was swiftly refuted by William Penn.
The Quaker reception of works by Hendrik Niclaes and indeed Hendrik
Jansen van Barrefelt, a prominent member of the Family of Love who broke
from Niclaes and used the name Hiël (the ‘Life of God’), requires detailed
examination. This was recognized long ago by William Braithwaite, who, fol-
lowing Rufus Jones, pointed to common elements between Familism and
Quakerism (rejection of oaths, war and capital punishment; waiting in silence;
attitudes towards the Bible and sacraments) as well as between Niclaes’s and
Fox’s experiences of spiritual illumination. In the same vein, Geoffrey Nuttall’s
reassessment of Nayler explored the milieu in which a ‘struggle . . . took place in
the soul of infant Quakerism: the struggle between Familism and Apostolic
Christianity’.26 And while Familism was as much a polemical construction
as some of the other disreputable labels we have noted, there is evidence
indicating individual engagement with the teachings of Niclaes and Hiël. Thus
in April 1658 Richard Hickock reported disputing not just with Ranters at

23 Marjorie Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, eds, The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne,
Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642–1684 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 512, 513.
24 Nicolson and Hutton, eds, Conway Letters, p. 408.
25 Nicolson and Hutton, eds, Conway Letters, pp. 416, 417–18.
26 G.F. Nuttall, ‘James Nayler: A Fresh Approach’, J.F.H.S., supplement 26 (1954), 1–8.
150 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Leek, Staffordshire, but also encountering a ‘woman of ye familie of loue’.27

Furthermore, Robert Dring owned a large manuscript containing a number of
works by Niclaes in Low German to which he prefixed a table of contents iden-
tifying individual titles by their more familiar Latin equivalents and a list in
English of other important writings excluded from the collection—including
several secret texts meant only for ‘fellow-elders’. Dring knew Giles Calvert, the
leading publisher of both Niclaes and Quaker authors in the mid-1650s, and
also hosted Fox at his London home.28 Fox himself possessed a copy of Niclaes’s
Den Spegel der Gerechticheit [The Glass of Righteousness] in Low Dutch.29 In
addition, between 1687 and 1690 Jacob Claus of Amsterdam, a Quaker who
had published Robert Barclay in Dutch, issued German translations of the
complete works of Hiël.
Turning next to Grindletonians, whom the Puritan minister Stephen Denison
regarded as but a northern offshoot of Familism, Braithwaite, Jones, Theodor
Sippell, and Nuttall all detected significant antecedents. David Como, who has
produced a fine and detailed study of this religious community—which takes
its name not from an activity or founder but a village in the West Riding of
Yorkshire—agrees: ‘Quakerism was almost certainly the unwitting progeny
of Grindletonian divinity’.30 Here modern scholarship accords with opponents
of Quakerism. Thus Roger Williams thought it probable that Quakers, an ‘upstart
party or Faction’ lately risen up in Lancashire, were the ‘Offspring of the
Grindletonians’. Williams supposed that the Grindletonians derived from
Familism and identified their two chief doctrines as those also espoused by
Quakers: that they could not sin since they were perfect, and that the Holy
Spirit was responsible for their actions.31 The Church of England polemicist
Thomas Comber repeated the charge, drawing on Denison for his knowledge
of Grindletonian teaching. Although Fox denied a genealogical connection,
insisting the Grindletonians knew otherwise, this appears disingenuous. For it
was atop Pendle Hill—less than five miles from Grindleton—that Fox claimed
he had received a vision in 1652 of a ‘great people’ to be gathered.32 Moreover,
since it is commonly accepted that the Pennine valleys had ‘provided safe places
for the holding of unorthodox assemblies’, and that Fox thereafter made several
converts in the region, it seems likely that the sermons of the Grindletonian
progenitor Roger Brereley—subsequently circulated and amplified by his

27 FHL, MS Swarthmore I 148; FHL, MS Swarthmore IV 208.

28 L .Monfils, ‘Family and Friends: Hendrik Niclaes’s “Low German” Writings, Printed in
England during the Rise of the Quakers’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002), 257–83.
29 J.L. Nickalls, ‘George Fox’s Library’, J.F.H.S., 28 (1931), 4, 9; H.J. Cadbury, ‘George Fox’s
Library Again’, J.F.H.S., 30 (1933), 9.
30 David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), p. 324.
31 Roger Williams, George Fox Digg’d out of his Burrowes (Boston, 1676), pp. 42, 204.
32 Nickalls, ed., Journal of George Fox, pp. 103–4.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 151

followers—created a receptive environment for Quakerism.33 Indeed, on turning

Quaker the cloth merchant Thomas Barcroft of Colne wrote a brief treatise
intended mainly for those with whom he had once enjoyed:
sweet society and union in spirit in the days of that glimmeringe Light under the
Ministry of Breerely . . . and some few more whose memories I honnor, called then
by the p[ro]fessors of the world, Grinletonians, Antinomians, Hereticks, Sectaries,
and such like names of reproach.34
More problematic is the Quakers’ relationship to Seekers—particularly in light
of J.F. McGregor’s contention that they should not be regarded as approximating
to ‘a movement, let alone a sect, professing a particular doctrine’. Moreover, as
McGregor notes, the traditional narrative of Fox’s progress through northern
Seeker heartlands preaching to receptive communities is not only triumphalist
in tone, but also based on retrospective evidence.35 All the same, it has proved
difficult to dislodge the established orthodoxy. Thus Douglas Gwyn claimed
in Seekers Found that ‘nearly all of the earliest Friends underwent classic Seeker
phases before becoming Friends, and the earliest Quaker preachers found
their most receptive audiences among those mournful “travellers after Sion” ’.36
Certainly Presbyterian critics frequently grouped Quakers with Seekers and
other undesirables, identifying them—as we saw with Baxter—as one of several
Quaker forebears. In addition, there are a couple of significant references in
contemporary Quaker sources, notably to ‘many honest hearts . . . among the
Waiters’ and ‘an assembly of people called Seekers’ at London in summer
1654.37 So if we discount polemically constructed notions of Seekers and
instead understand the term as denoting a collective if variegated spiritual state
rather than a distinct sect, it is unsurprising to find Quaker accounts that
looked back to encounters with a ‘seeking’ and religious people sometimes
called ‘Seekers’.38
Just as contentious is the Quakers’ connection with former Levellers. Thus
Henry Brailsford thought it a ‘natural development’ that ‘many of the Levellers
found a spiritual refuge in the Society of Friends’, while Hill assumed that ‘many
former Levellers became Quakers’.39 These appear to be overstatements, how-

33 Ronald Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York 1560–1642
(London, 1960), pp. 39–43, 127.
34 FHL, MS Swarthmore I 174.
35 J.F. McGregor, ‘Seekers and Ranters’, in J.F. McGregor and Barry Reay, eds, Radical Religion
in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984), pp. 123, 128–9.
36 Douglas Gwyn, Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience (Wallingford, PA,
2001), p. 13.
37 A.R. Barclay, ed., Letters, & c., of Early Friends (London, 1841), pp. 13–14.
38 Norman Penney, ed., The First Publishers of Truth (London, 1907), pp. 55, 56, 106, 158, 235,
243, 244.
39 H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961; second edn, ed. Christopher
Hill, Nottingham, 1983), pp. 637–40; Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some
Contemporaries (London, 1984), p. 131.
152 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

ever, and Reay was doubtless closer to the mark when he found ‘no evidence of
any substantial continuity’ between Levellers and Quakers.40 For although the
Leveller leader John Lilburne became a Quaker towards the end of his life,
other documented Leveller adherents turned Quaker are few and far between.41
Even so, hostile observers perceived Quakers as the scummy residue of Levellers,
Diggers, Seekers, Ranters, atheists, and whatnot. Hence John Ward, vicar of
Stratford-upon-Avon, concluded that ‘severall levellers setled into Quakers’.42
More specifically, Quakers were accused of promoting community of goods
and being ‘downright Levellers’ who ‘affirmed that there ought to be no distinc-
tion of Estates, but an universall parity’.43 ‘Magistrate, People, Husband, Wife,
Parents, Children, Master, Servant’: all were supposedly alike for the Quakers.44
Accordingly an MP denounced Quakers as a ‘growing evil’ espousing a ‘plausible
way; all levellers against magistracy and propriety’.45 In the same vein, a senior
army officer writing in April 1657 explained that he had discharged one of
his subordinates because he had become a Quaker. This ‘sottish stupid genera-
tion’ were ‘blasphemous herritickes’ who would corrupt the rank-and-file with
their ‘levellinge principle’ since they neither valued the Scriptures, ministry,
magistracy, nor anything else.46 Little wonder that Fox was keen to disasso-
ciate Quakers from Levellers, condemning those ‘who goe under a colour of
Levelling’.47
Disassociation has also long marked Quaker reactions towards Ranters.
Indeed, even allowing for polemical exaggeration and distortion, an earlier
generation of Quaker scholars frequently denounced the Ranters as a danger-
ous pantheistic aberration and disorganized degenerate movement whose
extreme mystical doctrines and immoral excesses had threatened to spread like
a contagion across the nation had it not been for the spiritual antidote afforded
by Fox’s ministry and Quakerism. The verdicts of Robert Barclay, Rufus Jones,
and William Braithwaite, however, merely echoed contemporary Quaker
antipathies. Thus, Edward Burrough denounced the Ranters as a viperous gen-
eration deceived by Satan in the guise of an angel of light and corrupted by the
Whore of Babylon. Similarly, Margaret Fell reproved them for asserting several
blasphemous doctrines: notably that God is darkness as well as light; that all

40 Reay, Quakers, pp. 19–20.

41 A. Hessayon, ‘The Resurrection of John Lilburne, Quaker’, in John Rees (ed.), John Lilburne
and the Levellers. Reappraising the Roots of English Radicalism 400 Years on (Abingdon, 2017),
pp. 95–116.
42 Charles Severn, ed., Diary of the Rev. John Ward (London, 1839), p. 141.
43 Higginson, Irreligion of Northern Quakers, p. 10.
44 Thomas Collier, A Looking-Glass for the Quakers (London, 1656), p. 12.
45 John Rutt, ed., Diary of Thomas Burton, 4 vols (London, 1828), I, p. 169.
46 Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 7 vols (London, 1742), VI,
pp. 167–8.
47 George Fox, A Declaration Against All Profession and Professors (London, 1653), p. 4; George
Fox and James Nayler, A Word from the Lord, unto All the Faithless Generation of the World
([London?], 1654), p. 13.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 153

acts were good in God’s eyes; and that to the pure even unclean or unlawful acts
were pure. Nor were these isolated voices, for other Quaker authors condemned
the Ranters in manuscript, print, and person, including Fell’s future husband
Fox, who rebuked them for their blasphemous expressions, cursed speaking,
swearing, drunkenness, tobacco smoking, dancing, and unbridled lust.48
Forged in the heat of religious controversy this vitriolic if largely one-sided
exchange demonstrated the early Quakers’ evident concern to distinguish
between the Ranters’ sinful behaviour and their own upright conduct, since a
variety of critics—Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Baptists, and Muggletonians
among them—tarred Ranters and Quakers with the same brush. And for good
reason, because despite the Quakers’ ‘outward austere carriage’,49 there appeared
to hostile observers little theological difference between them: Fox accused the
Ranters of claiming they were God and boasting of their communion with God
and Christ, yet was himself charged with affirming that he had the divinity
essentially within him and that he was equal with God. Moreover, both were
attacked for maintaining that the Light (Christ) was within everyone, denying
the validity of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, antiscripturism,
anticlericalism, falling into trances, and public nakedness. Fox even conceded
that the Ranters had experienced a ‘pure convincement’ (religious awakening),
before straying from the path of righteousness and becoming enemies of Christ’s
doctrine.50 Indeed, he admitted some Quakers had been Ranters, the most
notable being the former Baptist evangelist John Chandler, who wrote a tract
urging all Ranters to examine their conscience and turn to the light of Christ.
Speaking of Ranters, according to Muggleton their ministry had mainly
proceeded from the Baptists’, while the bulk of the Quakers’ doctrines—but
not their proud, conceited, sanctimonious conduct—derived from the Ranters.
In contrast to this derivation of Quakerism, several critics suggested that it
was not the Ranters but the Diggers, and especially the works of their chief
ideologue Gerrard Winstanley, that were instrumental in shaping the forma-
tion of Quaker thought. Though the extent of this connection is still vigorously
debated, Winstanley’s teachings do seem to have served as a bridge between
the Quakers and their predecessors. Winstanley, formerly a General Baptist
and buried as a Quaker, reportedly recognized this himself, claiming that the
Quakers were ‘sent to perfect that worke which fell’ in the Diggers’ hands.51
And certainly the resemblances between his heterodox notions and ‘the very
draughts and even Body of Quakerism’ were, as several contemporaries
remarked, startling.52 This can be seen most vividly by highlighting some sug-
gestive parallels between Winstanley’s and Fox’s tenets.

48 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters’, in Laura Knoppers, ed., The Oxford
Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 346–74.
49 Collier, Looking-Glass for Quakers, p. 7. 50 Fox and Nayler, Word from the Lord, p. 13.
51 FHL, MS William Caton, III 147.
52 Thomas Comber, Christianity no Enthusiasm (London, 1678), p. 5.
154 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Winstanley maintained that he had been given the gift of the manifest ‘light
of Christ within’. This belief in the revelation of Jesus Christ as an indwelling
illuminating presence, the light within, became the battle cry of the early
Quakers who regarded themselves as the children of light called to fight the
Lamb’s War in the last days. Nor was the Lamb’s War to be a bloody struggle
since in Fox’s mind it was an inward conflict between flesh and spirit, Fox’s
refusal to bear arms echoing the pacifist principles of the Schleitheim Articles
(1527) enunciated by some early Anabaptists and mirroring Winstanley’s oppos-
ition to using weapons in self-defence. Again, both Winstanley and Fox made
frequent reference to the verse concerning enmity between the woman’s and
the serpent’s seed and bruising the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15): Winstanley
interpreting it as a prophecy of the killing of the flesh by the rising spirit or
indwelling Christ, Fox understanding it to speak of Christ’s coming within.
Furthermore, Winstanley’s writings were characterized by deep-seated anti-
clericalism: he censured proud learned scholars as ‘enemies’ to the ‘Spirit of
truth’ that had inspired the Prophets and Apostles (John 14:17). For by exercis-
ing a monopoly on preaching they prevented humble fishermen, shepherds,
husbandmen, and tradesmen—latter-day Apostles—from speaking about
their spiritual experiences and revealing ‘truths’ that they had ‘heard and seen
from God’ (Acts 4:20). Fox too insisted that he was required to obey Christ’s
command and preach the everlasting gospel (Revelation 14:6), as the Apostles
had done before him, because he was sent by God to turn people from darkness
to light.53 And in the same vein, Fox regarded parish ministers as hirelings
possessed by a ‘black earthly spirit’, who collectively had made vast sums of
money by selling the Scriptures and preaching in steeple-houses: stone temples
of God where the Lord did not dwell since he lived in people’s hearts.54
Although the surviving evidence is uneven, the most plausible explanation
for the Quakers’ origins is therefore to conceive of it as polygenetic rather than
monogenetic; that is, they had multiple instead of singular beginnings. Those
who became prominent early Quakers came from different parts of the country
(but predominantly the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Westmorland);
were generally quite young, with an average age of twenty-eight; of low social
status; engaged in humble artisanal or agricultural occupations and thus
either relatively poor or of modest means; and—with the exception of a few
university-educated converts—either meagrely schooled or autodidacts. In
short, it might be better to reconceptualize the Quakers as initially consisting
of an assortment of spiritual and temporal communities that, while occasionally
overlapping, were nonetheless given added cohesion by their enemies. When
Fox, Nayler, and other pioneer itinerant evangelists proclaimed their message
they sometimes cast their seed on ploughed ground, harvesting support from

53 A. Hessayon, ‘Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods’, Journal
for the Study of Radicalism, 3 (2009), 28–9.
54 Nickalls, ed., Journal of George Fox, p. 39.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 155

pre-existing communities of Independents, Baptists, and so-called Seekers who

had passed beyond the outward observance of gospel ordinances. Quakerism
then was, ultimately, one of the main beneficiaries of the fragmentation of
Puritanism. All the same, it should be emphasized that its antecedents were not
exclusively English.

BELIEFS

Besides believing in the light within, early Quakers denied the validity of the
sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as well as the Lord’s Prayer.
Denouncing university-trained preachers as hirelings and objecting to the
forced maintenance of ministers by tithes, Quakers were steadfast in their
opposition to clerical authority and church worship conducted in ‘steeple-
houses’. Instead they attended largely silent meetings where they spoke as they
were ‘moved by the holy Ghost’ (2 Peter 1:21), and ‘as the Spirit gave them utter-
ance’ (Acts 2:4).
Turning from modes of worship to attitudes towards the Bible, Apocrypha,
extra-canonical texts, and occult learning more generally, here the pioneering
work was undertaken by Henry Cadbury.55 While few Quakers—except for a
notorious schismatic—were accused of publicly burning their Bibles, a more
common charge was that Quakers denied the Scriptures to be the word of God.
Certainly Fox was accused of dissuading people from reading the Scriptures,
telling them the outward letter was ‘carnal’ and that the Scriptures were
Antichrist. Similarly, on being indicted for blasphemy Nayler explained that
there was no written word of God; there was only the word of Christ, which
was spiritual and not to be apprehended with carnal eyes. These views of the
Bible were part of a broader, generally millenarian, outlook that privileged the
spirit over flesh, inner illumination over outward ordinances, divinely revealed
knowledge over university-trained scholarship, latter-day Apostles (in the
guise of humble tradesmen) over Pharisees (ordained ministers).56
As regards the Apocrypha, Quakers seem to have been largely unfamiliar with
these writings and seldom cited from them; that is, Jewish texts omitted from the
Hebrew Bible but found in certain copies of the Septuagint (a Greek version of
the Hebrew Scriptures) and together with 2 Esdras included in the Vulgate.57

55 H.J. Cadbury, ‘Early Quakerism and Uncanonical Lore’, Harvard Theological Review, 40
(1947), 177–205.
56 Ariel Hessayon, ‘ “Not the Word of God”: The Bible in the Hands of Antiscripturists during
the English Revolution’, in Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, eds, The English Bible in
the Early Modern World (Leiden, 2018), pp. 161–82.
57 Ariel Hessayon, ‘The Apocrypha in Early Modern England’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith,
and Rachel Willie, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700
(Oxford, 2015), pp. 146–7.
156 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Nonetheless, a few Quakers were concerned with the fate of ‘those Scriptures
mentioned, but not inserted in the Bible’. In about 1659 a catalogue of these
writings appeared in Something concerning Agbarus, Prince of the Edesseans.
Reminiscent of extra-canonical compositions identified by certain early Christian
heretics and later Christian Kabbalists, this list included the prophecy of Enoch
(Jude 14); the book of Jehu (2 Chronicles 20:34); the book of the battles of the
Lord (Numbers 21:14); the book of Jasher (2 Samuel 1:18); the first epistle to the
Ephesians (Ephesians 3:3); the epistle to the Laodiceans (Colossians 4:16); and
the Revelation of Peter. Occurring verbatim in a work by Edward Billing and
afterwards placed in some Bibles owned by Quakers, it may have been compiled
by the controversialist Samuel Fisher. In Rusticus ad Academicos (1660) Fisher
defended Quakers from the calumny that they slighted the Scriptures. Examining
the bounds of the canon he enumerated ‘inspired’ writings cited in Scripture
but missing from the Bible, observing in addition that the Testaments of the
Twelve Patriarchs was still extant. All the same, the most infamous example of
engagement with these sources was James Nayler, who wore his hair long not
only in the manner of the Nazarites, but also provocatively imitated the likeness
of Christ as outlined in the apocryphal account of Publius Lentulus.58
While Nayler knew the forged epistle spuriously attributed to Lentulus, the
Quaker schismatic George Keith and perhaps also George Fox were familiar
with some of the corpus of Greek writings written from about the third century
bce to about the fourth century ce either ascribed to or written under the name
of Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian deity. Thus Fox was said to have spoken
with a deep and wonderful understanding of ‘the Egiptian Learning, & of the
Language of the birds’. Suggestively, his illuminative experience when ‘the cre-
ation was opened to me’ resembles a phrase in the English translation of The
Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (1649) when ‘all things were
opened unto me’.59 For his part, Keith cited both Pymander and a variation of a
saying attributed to Hermes that ‘God is a circle, whose centre is everywhere,
and is nowhere circumscribed’.60

BEHAVIOUR

Following the execution of Charles I there were, in Muggleton’s estimation,

many ‘false Christs, false Prophets, and false Prophetesses’ in the world. Yet this
was only to be expected by those who yearned for the establishment of Christ’s
1,000-year monarchy since it was interpreted as a warning that the Scriptures

58 Hessayon, ‘ “Not the Word of God” ’, pp. 176–9.

59 Penney, ed., First Publishers of Truth, p. 278; Nickalls, ed., Journal of George Fox, p. 27; The
Divine Pymander, trans. John Everard (London, 1649), p. 14.
60 Cadbury, ‘Early Quakerism and Uncanonical Lore’, 195.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 157

were being fulfilled. Invariably these charismatic figures of revolutionary

England, who claimed to be forerunners of Christ’s second coming, fashioned
aspects of their identity from scriptural sources. Among this profusion of ­people
who professed themselves ‘to be God, or Christ, or Prophets, or Prophetesses,
or Virgin Maries, or the Lords high Priest’ were several who went ‘about the
Streets, and declared the Day of the Lord, and many other wonderful Things’.61
Significantly, prophetic performances warning of impending divine judge-
ment and other comparable symbolic actions were also a feature of certain
Quakers’ behaviour. Gesture was a powerful, dramatic medium that enabled
the prophet to transmit God’s message in visual form. Through a repertoire of
signs, the meaning of which was sometimes unclear, the prophet involuntarily
simulated in miniature God’s future intent at large. Though many Quaker signs
transgressed accepted codes of conduct they usually had an authority vested in
Scripture. Thus, some Quakers such as James Nayler, George Fox, and Richard
Hubberthorne undertook extraordinary fasts; a few like Solomon Eccles even
challenged their opponents to public trials of fasting, believing that such
ordeals would vindicate the purity of their faith. There were also attempts by
George Fox to perform miracles—including faith healing and, it seems, raising
from the dead—while others engaged in prophetic behaviour by eating their
own dung; becoming silent; trembling; dispensing with items of clothing; going
barefoot, bareheaded, and partly or entirely naked; blackening their faces; don-
ning sackcloth; and casting ash upon their heads. Moreover, during a dialogue
with Cromwell in 1655 Thomas Aldam removed his cap and tore it to pieces,
informing the Protector ‘so should his kingdom be rent from him’. Similarly,
Elizabeth Adams ‘was moved to go to the Parliament that was envious against
Friends and to take a pitcher in her hand and break it to pieces, and to tell them
so should they be broken to pieces’. In the same spirit Solomon Eccles passed
through Bartholomew Fair naked with a pan of coals on his head ‘burning
with Fire and Brimstone’ saying, ‘Repent speedily, for God will not be mocked.
Remember Sodom and Gomorrah, who are your Examples; they do endure the
vengeance of Eternal Fire’.62
Another characteristic Quaker gesture was refusing to ‘put off ’ one’s hat
to anybody, ‘high or low’. Disregarding this ‘Heathenish Custome’, however,
provoked criticism. For while Quakers asserted that there was no scriptural
justification for honouring ‘mens persons’, their critics charged them with
disrespectful behaviour and flouting the magistrate’s authority (it was even
maintained that they imitated the precedent set by Ignatius of Loyola, founder
of the Jesuits).63

61 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English
Revolution (Aldershot, 2007), p. 164.
62 Hessayon, ‘Gold’, pp. 96, 377. 63 Hessayon, ‘Gold’, pp. 377–8.
158 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

WRITING

Recent scholarly interest in the construction, dissemination, and reception of

manuscripts (scribal publication) and books (print publication) has brought
to the fore an important question: which was more important in spreading
the Quakers’ message, the spoken or written word? There is no straightforward
answer but a few observations can be made. As we have noted, early Quaker
worship was largely silent, while prophecies were generally enacted through a
combination of speech and symbolic gestures. Moreover, Quaker ministers
walked up and down the land and even sailed across the sea to spread their
message. If these men and women believed that writing had made itinerant
preaching redundant they could have stayed at home instead of feeling inspired
to follow scriptural precedents. Writing was clearly important, especially for
the leadership, but it must be seen as operating in conjunction with other factors
in facilitating the spread of Quakerism.
It is not known how many Quakers were literate, nor how many read Quaker
publications but writing cannot have been an integral feature of Quaker identity
since less than 0.3 per cent of Quakers were published authors. Nonetheless,
Kate Peters has maintained that writing ‘played an important practical role in
the establishment and maintenance of the Quaker ministry’. She estimates that
about one hundred Quaker authors had their works published by 1656, con-
tributing to a total of 291 publications. The most prolific was James Nayler,
whose name is attached to almost one-fifth of all Quaker publications between
1652 and 1656. Peters also notes that papers, letters, or printed tracts could be
‘more widely dispersed than oral preaching’ and indeed writing enabled the
leadership to disseminate their message more widely, to have their activities
and sufferings commemorated more effectively, and to replace their absence
with a textual trace. Furthermore, Peters has persuasively argued that the Quaker
leadership had a strategy for spreading their faith by targeting urban centres
with a proselytizing campaign. This in turn would create martyrs for the move-
ment whose experiences and sufferings could then be publicized to a wider
audience through the medium of print. Writing was also essential in vigorously
refuting calumnies and Quakers were quick to use this medium—notably
through printed addresses to parliament—to stress both their lack of involve-
ment in anti-government plots and simple desire for liberty of conscience. In
conjunction with disputation, writing, moreover, was vital to winning or at
least protracting beyond reasonable measure intra-sectarian disputes. Here as
we noted earlier, a key aspect was accentuating doctrinal differences.64

64 Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 16–18, 21–3, 26, 29,
31, 42.
 Early Quakerism and its Origins 159

DISCIPLINE, ORGANIZATION, AND REASONS

FOR THE QUAKERS’ LONGEVIT Y

Beyond devising and coordinating evangelizing strategies, there is a great deal

of evidence indicating the highly organized nature of early Quakerism, at least
at leadership level. Thus, Quakers corresponded extensively and held regular
meetings that developed into institutional mechanisms for imposing doctrinal
uniformity. Moreover, they collected funds nationally for a common treasury
that was variously disbursed relieving prisoners and sufferers, buying clothing
and books, and subsidizing printing.
Like other emerging sects and religious movements, early Quakerism was
not immune to schism or free from personal rivalry. And while splinter groups
increasingly used printed tracts to rally support, after the Restoration effect-
ive institutional mechanisms were developed for disciplining and—where
necessary—expelling dissidents and troublemakers.
For reasons of space, this brief overview of early Quakerism and its origins
has a number of omissions: notably Quaker customs and costume, modes of
speech and distinctive literary style, as well as calls for legal and medical reform
and concomitant schemes for alleviating the sufferings of the poor—not to
mention their attitudes towards the Cromwellian Protectorate and New Model
Army. Moreover, for the same reason I have stressed certain distinguishing
features of the emerging movement while glossing over others. These caveats
aside, I will conclude by suggesting some reasons for the success of early
Quakerism: the appeal of its message and charisma of those who preached
it—notably George Fox and James Nayler; an organized programme of evan-
gelism wedded to contemporary political concerns; the willingness of believers
to undergo sufferings and even martyrdom for their faith; the resilience of
those engaged in pamphlet wars with competing sects and other detractors; the
effective manner in which money was raised to finance and distribute these
publications; the ability of the leadership to impose doctrinal uniformity and
overcome rivalry and schism; and the ways in which Quakerism was able to
evolve and adapt so as to survive the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in
1660 and the changed political and religious landscape that came in its wake.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Bailey, Richard, New Light on George Fox and Early Quakerism (San Francisco,
CA, 1992).
Barbour, Hugh, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, CT, 1964).
Bauman, Richard, Let your Words be Few: Symbolism of speaking and silence among
Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge, 1983).
160 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Braithwaite, William, The Beginnings of Quakerism to 1660 (1912; second edn,

Cambridge, 1955; reprinted, York, 1981).
Cadbury, H.J., ‘Hebraica and the Jews in Early Quaker Interest’, in Howard Brinton,
ed., Children of Light: In Honor of Rufus M. Jones (New York, 1938), pp. 135–63.
Cadbury, H.J., ‘Early Quakerism and Uncanonical Lore’, Harvard Theological Review,
40 (1947), 177–205.
Cole, A., ‘The Quakers and the English Revolution’, Past and Present, 10 (1956), 39–54.
Cope, J.I., ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 71 (1956), 725–54.
Corns, Thomas and Lowenstein, David, eds, The Emergence of Quaker Writing:
Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1995).
Guiton, Gerard, The Early Quakers and the ‘Kingdom of God’ (San Francisco, CA, 2012).
Gwyn, Douglas, Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox, 1624–1691
(Richmond, IN, 1984).
Gwyn, Douglas, Seekers Found: Atonement in Early Quaker Experience (Wallingford,
PA, 2001).
Hessayon, Ariel, ‘Jacob Boehme and the early Quakers’, Journal of the Friends Historical
Society, 60 (2005), 191–223.
Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (1972; Harmondsworth, 1984 edn).
Hill, Christopher, ‘Quakers and the English Revolution’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical
Society, 56 (1992), 165–79.
Ingle, H.L., First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (New York
and Oxford, 1994).
Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England
(Berkeley, CA, 1992).
McGregor, J.F., ‘Ranterism and the Development of Early Quakerism’, Journal of
Religious History, 9 (1977), 349–63.
Monfils, L., ‘Family and Friends: Hendrik Niclaes’s “Low German” Writings, Printed in
England during the Rise of the Quakers’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002), 257–83.
Moore, Rosemary, The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666
(University Park, PA, 2000).
Nuttall, G.F., ‘James Nayler: A Fresh Approach’, Journal of the Friends Historical Society
Supplement, no. 26 (1954), 1–20.
Peters, Kate, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005).
Reay, Barry, ‘Popular Hostility towards Quakers in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’,
Social History, 5 (1980), 387–407.
Reay, Barry, The Quakers and the English Revolution (Hounslow, 1985).
Trevett, Christine, Women and Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century (York, 1991).
 Part II
Traditions Outside England
 7

The Dutch Republic

English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile,
c.1575–1688

Cory Cotter

Religious heterodoxy was a political crime across much of post-Reformation

Europe. In the Dutch Republic, however, religious diversity was tolerated.1
Leiden University, founded in 1575 and built upon a Protestant foundation,
welcomed students of all faiths, including Catholics and Jews. Forced from
their homelands, a flood of refugees poured into the Low Countries—perhaps
100,000 by 1600. Among them were English Pilgrims, Puritans (those who
later came to be known as Congregationalists or Independents), and Scottish
Presbyterians. Substantial numbers of Separatists fled to escape execution in
Elizabethan England (1558–1603); Puritans fled to escape the government’s
crackdown on Protestant Dissent after the accession of James VI of Scotland to
the throne of England (1603–25); Presbyterians fled to escape the Episcopal
persecutions of Laudian England (1633–45); and boatloads of ejected ministers
fled in the wake of the Restoration (1660–2). Persecution drove them together.
Recent historiography has argued that ‘it is unlikely’ that the English and
Scottish exile communities in the Dutch Republic ‘would have had much
in common’. In her recent Scottish-centred monograph The Scottish Exile
Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (2004), Ginny Gardner ac­know­
ledges that the Dutch ‘played host to English exiles during the Restoration
period’, but shortsightedly concludes that ‘there is little evidence that there was
much contact between them and the Scots’.2 Contemporary accounts tell a
different story. Stretching traditional historiography both temporally and

1 Recent scholarship has uncovered the Janus-faced image of Dutch tolerance/intolerance:

R. Po-Chia Hsia and H.F.K. Van Nierop, eds, Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch
Golden Age (Cambridge, 2002).
2 Ginny Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton,
2004), p. 207.

Cory Cotter, The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile, c.1575–1688 In: The Oxford History of
Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0008
164 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

spatially, this chapter follows the ebb and flow of more than one hundred
English and Scottish exiled ministers who migrated (back and forth) from the
British Isles to the United Provinces of the Netherlands during the Tudor–Stuart
period. Exploring their intellectual networks, this chapter will, first, map out
their cross-channel connections. Second, it will argue that contrary to ­current
historiography, national boundaries proved irrelevant to intellectual and
social exchanges between the two communities. And finally, focusing on a
small but tightly knit community of ejected ministers in Dutch exile during the
post-Restoration period, it will suggest that the ‘two groups’ shared much more
in common than is sometimes supposed.3

AMSTERDAM

Amsterdam’s oldest and largest Separatist congregation, the so-called Ancient

Church, was founded by Francis Johnson, as ‘Pastor of the banished English
Church’, and by Henry Ainsworth, as teacher.4 As a suspected ringleader of the
Separatist movement, Johnson had been arrested, committed to the Fleet
Prison in London, where he spent more than four years, deprived of his living,
ejected from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and expelled from
the university. Henoch Clapham, one of Johnson’s contemporaries at Cambridge
and fellow prisoners in the Fleet, established himself as pastor of a small con-
gregation of near-Separatists (in several cases, ex-Separatists) in the late 1590s,
independent from that served by Johnson and Ainsworth. John Smyth, who
had been tutored by Johnson at Cambridge before being deprived of his lec-
tureship at Lincoln, led a flock of Separatists from Gainsborough to Amsterdam
in 1608. John Robinson, ejected fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
and silenced curate of St Andrew’s, Norwich, led another group of Separatists
(Pilgrims) from Scrooby to Amsterdam in 1608, and thence to Leiden in 1609.
By 1610 there were at least five English-language churches in Amsterdam, four
of them Separatist.5 The fifth was the non-Separatist English Reformed Church,
pastored by John Paget, ejected rector of Nantwich, Cheshire.6
Paget served as the church’s first pastor (1607–37). Four future New
Englanders (Hugh Peter, Thomas Hooker, John Davenport, and Thomas Weld)

3 Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community, p. 207.

4 George Johnson, A Discourse of Some Troubles and Excommunications in the English Church
at Amsterdam (Amsterdam, 1603), p. 4.
5 Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the
Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), pp. 45–70.
6 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 91–122; Alice C. Carter, The English Reformed Church in
Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam, 1964), pp. 69–89; Polly Ha, English
Presbyterianism (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 47–73.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 165

preached there in the 1630s.7 Succeeding seventeenth-century ministers were

Thomas Potts (co-pastor 1617–31); Johannes Rulice (1636–9); Julius Hering
(1637–45); Thomas Paget (1639–46); Richard Maden (1647–68); William Price
(1648–59); Richard Woodward (1660–99); Alexander Hodge (ziekentrooster:
1665–8; co-pastor: 1669–89); and Adriaan Oostrum (1691–2). Seven of them
had been either sequestered or ejected from their English benefices before
taking up their posts in Amsterdam (the Pagets, Potts, Hering, Maden, Prince,
and Hodge). The ministers were typically supported by four elders, three dea-
cons, a reader, a coster (custodian), a ziekentrooster (someone to pray with and
care for the sick), a deaconess, and a schoolmaster.8
English Quakers, during the post-Restoration period, held monthly meet-
ings in Amsterdam. William Penn, who helped organize the Society’s meetings
with Quaker founder George Fox, recorded their proceedings in his travel
journal. Embarking upon a ‘Religious Voyage’ from London to Brielle via
Harwich, Penn (accompanied by Fox and several other Friends) travelled
through Rotterdam, Leiden, and Haarlem before reaching Amsterdam.9 On 2
June 1677 Penn and his travelling companions attended the General Meeting of
Quakers in Amsterdam, ‘where men & women Preach, as thire Spiret moves
them’.10 Penn, who was imprisoned several times for writing and preaching
about Quakerism, including an eight-month confinement in the Tower of
London, subsequently sailed across the Atlantic to lay the groundwork for his
‘holy experiment’ in the Province of Pennsylvania. As proprietor-governor, he
drafted his colony’s Frame of Government (1682). Article XXXV guaranteed
that all law-abiding ‘persons living in this province, who confess the one
almighty & eternal god, [. . .] shall [in] no wayes be molested or prejudiced for
his [or her] religious perswasion or practice in matters of faith & worship, nor
shal [sic] they be compelled at any time, to frequent or maintaine any religious
worship, place or ministry whatsoever’.11

DELFT

The city’s English-language church, established in 1636, was pastored by the

following seventeenth-century ministers: Robert Park (1636–41); Patrick Forbes
(1641–2); Edward Richardson (1643–5); Alexander Petrie Jr (1645–68; 1669–83);

7 Carter, The English Reformed Church in Amsterdam, p. 19.

8 Carter, The English Reformed Church in Amsterdam, pp. 218–22 (Appendix IV: List of
Officers).
9 William Penn, An Account of W. Penn’s Travails in Holland and Germany [in 1677] (1694),
pp. 1–8.
10 Carr to Sancroft, 20 August 1680, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Tanner MS Vol. 37, fol. 123v.
11 ‘A draught of government framed by William Penn’, 25 April 1682, BL Sloane MS 79, fols 193–9.
166 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Alexander Hodge (1668–9); John Sinclair (1684–7); Thomas Hoog (1689–94);

and Wilhelm van Schie (1694–1724). Petrie, Sinclair, and Hoog were Scots;
Hodge was an Anglo-Scot (Scottish father, born in England); and Van Schie
was Dutch.12 The church’s leather-bound ‘Booke of Records’ indicates that it
was a small congregation of less than fifty members. Members, both English
and Scottish, represented a wide range of professions, including shoemakers,
brewers, merchants, and military officers.13
Edward Richardson’s highly mobile career illustrates well the cross-cultural
connections between the two communities. Richardson, who had studied the-
ology at and graduated from Cambridge, received his letter of calling to Delft
in July 1643; he was appointed in August and subscribed to the Belgic Confession
on 10 October.14 On 29 July, before taking up his post in Delft, he had married
Dorcas, daughter of Julius Hering, minister of the English Reformed Church at
Amsterdam.15 Soon after his arrival in Delft, Richardson began crossing swords
with the Dutch consistory, the Classis of Delft en Delfland, and the Synod of
South Holland regarding the consistory’s subordinate role to the city’s civil and
ecclesiastical authorities.16 The Dutch Reformed Church of Delft, as elsewhere
in the Republic, claimed a supervisory responsibility over the city’s English
Reformed Church. The Delft consistory, as Sprunger has shown, was one of
the most diligent in attempting to impose control over the English church,
which ‘acted rather independently’.17 In fact, the Dutch consistory was cha-
grined to learn that after Forbes’s departure, the consistory called and installed
Richardson ‘without the knowledge of this church council’.18 De kerkenraedt
did, however, agree to approve his appointment ex post facto, after Richardson
pointed out, in the form of a letter, that ‘not all of you were completely ignorant
of this matter’.19 In approving Richardson’s call, the magistrates, at the urging of
the consistory, laid down conditions intended to regularize the system of call-
ing and installing public preachers. Henceforth, all state-sponsored ministers
(English-Scottish or otherwise) were to be approved by both the city magistrates
and classis, subscribe to the Belgic Confession, and apply for membership in
the Classis of Delft en Delfland. Richardson subscribed to the Dutch Reformed
confession, but never became a member of the classis.20

12 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 157–8, 423. 13 Gemeentearchief Delft, CR 14/102.

14 Richardson’s papers (‘5 stuks’), Gemeentearchief Delft, 445/325.
15 Richardson published his marriage banns on 10 July 1643, Stadsarchief Amsterdam,
Doopregisters, Trouwregisters en Begraafregisters (DTB) 459/296; and was married on 29 July
1643, Huwelijksregister, 318/120.
16 Richardson’s letter to the Dutch consistory of Delft, 28 August 1643, Gemeentearchief
Delft, 445/325.
17 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 160.
18 Minutes from the city’s Dutch consistory, 24 August 1643, Gemeentearchief Delft, Acta
Kerkeraad, V, 232v.
19 Richardson’s letter to the city’s Dutch consistory, 28 August 1643, Gemeentearchief Delft,
445/325.
20 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 160–1.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 167

Richardson’s ministerial responsibilities were spelled out in his letter of

c­ alling. He was to expound the Word of God, administer the holy sacraments,
visit the sick, exercise ecclesiastical discipline, and do ‘all things which are
required in a faithful Pastor [. . .] to the Glory of God, the welfare of the Church
and the salvation of many Soules’.21 ‘A Catalogue of the Children’s names that
have been baptized in our English Church in Delft’, which Richardson himself
had begun, records only five names, including that of his own son, Edward
Jr, who was christened on 3 July 1644.22 Five days later, on 8 July, Richardson
matriculated at Leiden University. He was inscribed with the honorific title of
‘Nobilis ac generosus vir’ and identified as twenty-six years old, a student of
philology, and living with Petrus Pauw ‘op de Papengraft’.23 Richardson’s initial
Dutch sojourn ended in April 1645, when he accepted the call to return to
England as minister at Deighton, Yorkshire.24 He was appointed by the Long
Parliament to officiate at Ripon Minster;25 was a co-signatory of Vindiciae
Veritatis . . . by the Ministers of the Gospel within the West-Riding of the Countie
of York, in favour of Presbyterian government;26 was dean of Ripon during the
Interregnum; and was ejected at the Restoration.27
In August 1663, exactly one year after the Act of Uniformity came into force,
Richardson launched a holy crusade against the English government and its
supposed breach of faith. As chief architect of the Yorkshire conspiracy,
Richardson drafted their revolutionary manifesto, ‘A Door of Hope Opened in
the Valley of Achor for the Mourners in Sion out of the North’.28 Armed with
the sword of the Lord, it began by declaring, in the name of God, that it was the
Gospel duty of true believers, as soldiers in the Lamb’s army, to ‘beate’ their
‘plowe shares into swords and fight’ for their faith.29 ‘Their numbers were small,
but their faith strong’, confessed Richardson, who ‘believed miracles would
attend their godly design’.30

21 Richardson’s letter of calling to Delft, July 1643, Gemeentearchief Delft, 445/325.

22 Baptismal Register of the city’s English Reformed Church, 3 July 1644, Gemeentearchief
Delft, 14/101, fol. 1.
23 ‘Archieven van Senaat en Faculteiten der Leidsche Universiteit’, 1575–1877 (ASF), Inv. No. 9,
fol. 475.
24 Notification of Richardson’s call to England, 14 April 1645, Gemeentearchief Delft, Acta
Kerkeraad, VI, 3.
25 A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934), p. 410.
26 Vindiciae Veritatis (1648), p. 11.
27 In the preface of his Anglo-Belgica (Amsterdam, 1677), Richardson identifies his successor as
Doctor Wilkins, who, after the Restoration, was installed as dean of Ripon, and was also made a
prebendary of York Minster.
28 Richardson’s manifesto, BL Add. MS 38856, fols 79r–80v; On Richardson’s cabal, see
Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (Oxford,
1986), pp. 178–9.
29 Richardson’s manifesto, BL Add. MS 38856, fol. 80r.
30 Custis to Bennet, 18/28 March 1664, The National Archives, Kew (TNA), State Papers (SP)
29/94/112.
168 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Fifth Monarchists failed to conquer the world for Christ. They ‘often
showed more enthusiasm for uprooting Babylon than for planting Jerusalem’.31
On 6 August 1663 the crown captured over one hundred of Richardson’s
co-conspirators. Twenty-two of them were hanged, drawn, and quartered.32
Richardson, chief contriver of the conspiracy, was seized and sent to York
under ‘great security’.33 But he and his sureties escaped execution by fleeing to
Holland.34 Between November and early December, Richardson was reported
at Rotterdam, Delft, and Amsterdam before arriving in Leiden, where he
graduated MD on 3 April 1664.35 The ‘doctor of plotters’ then moved to
Haarlem, where he preached, practised physic, and prudently purchased citi-
zenship (poorterschap).36 Dr Richardson served as minister-physician first in
Haarlem (1664–70) and then in Leiden (1670–4). There, if not before, he joined
forces with fellow Fifth Monarchists Sir Johannes Rothe.37 Empowered by the
sword of the spirit, many Fifth Monarchists believed that Christ’s millennial
kingdom ought to be ushered in, if necessary, by forcible means. The only hope
of salvation, they believed, lay in the sword of the Lord.
Alexander Petrie Jr, Richardson’s Scottish successor, provides further evi-
dence of the cross-cultural connections between the two communities. After
graduating from St Andrews (MA) and a short-term preaching post at Brielle,
Petrie served as reader for the Scots Church of Rotterdam (where his father was
the incumbent minister) before accepting the call to Delft. In March 1668, in
the wake of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Petrie ‘made known to the members
of this consistorie his accepting of a call to the charge of a congregation in
Scotland’.38 Petrie agreed to remain at his post, however, until a suitable replace-
ment could be found. In the Dutch fashion the church board (consistory com-
posed of elders and deacons elected by the congregation) was first required
to petition the Court (burgomasters and magistrates), who were the true
governors of Delft, for their approval to call a new minister; and after a formal
election by the consistory (which began under Petrie’s ministry), his name

31 Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London, 1972), p. 142.

32 Deposition from the Castle of York, Relating to Offences Committed in The Northern Counties
in the Seventeenth Century, Surtees Society, 40 (1861), p. xix; Cf. plotters’ confessions, BL Add. MS
33770, fols 1–48v.
33 Gower to Bennet, 6 August 1663, TNA SP 29/78/53.
34 Custis to Bennet, 18/28 March 1664, TNA SP 29/94/112.
35 Leiden University’s ‘Catalogus eorum qui examinati et promoti’, 25 March 1664, ASF Inv.
No. 414, fols 72–73; Richardson matriculated in medicine on 2 April 1664, ASF Inv. No. 11, fol. 90;
and graduated MD on 3 April, Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek (UB), De Dolore Nephritico, 236
B 1:59.
36 Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, ‘Burgemeestersresolutien’, 6 May 1666, fol. 335.
37 Johannes Rothe, Some Prophecies and Revelations of God (Amsterdam?, 1672), translated
from Dutch into English by E[dward] R[ichardson], who concluded his dedicatory epistle, dated
18 November 1672, by declaring that he does not ‘fear’ the ‘terrour’ of any ‘Earthly King or
Potentate’. ‘They can kill me, [but] they cannot hurt me’, said Richardson quoting Epictetus.
38 Gemeentearchief Delft, 9 March 1668, CR 14/102, fol. 35v.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 169

required final approval by the De Burgemeesteren ende Regieders der Stadt

(the burgomasters and regents of the city), who financially supported the
Reformed congregation with a provincial stipend of 500 guilders (c.£50) for a
preacher, ‘which the States allow for maintenance’.39
On 9 March 1668, as required by custom, the consistory petitioned the munici-
pal authorities for ‘liberty to choose another pastor’. On 16 March Alexander
Hodge, ejected out of Exeter by the Act of Uniformity, was elected ‘by unani-
mous consent of all’; he was called on 19 March and installed on 8 April.40
Hodge’s ministry in Delft was short-lived. Called back to Amsterdam, Hodge,
in January 1669, gave notice of his resignation, was ‘dismissed’ of his duties
by the deputies of Delft, preached his farewell sermon, and (after magisterial
approval) announced the return of his ‘Beloved Brother Mr Alexander Petrie
unto the Pastorall charge of this place’. He ‘accordingly resigned up the Flocke
of Christ of ye English (or British) Congregation unto his particular inspection,
and so ended his Ministeriall relation to this Congregation’.41 Petrie returned to
his post in February 1669 and continued as pastor until his death fourteen years
later; his passing was recorded in the church’s consistory register, which he
himself had begun in 1645, under the date of 2 June 1683.42

HAARLEM

Haarlem had a short-lived English church in the mid-1660s. Its only pastor was
Edward Richardson, whom we have already met as a former minister at Delft
and ejected dean of Ripon. Turning to medicine, he was admitted an extra-
licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London on 10 November 1662
and received his medical degree from Leiden on 3 April 1664.43 On 11 April
he requested permission from the burgomasters of Haarlem to preach at the
Orphan Church (Weeskerkje); received approval on 11 May; and advertised for
sale ‘two sermons preached by him on the inner love and life power’ in the
Oprechte Haerlemse Saterdaegse on 5 July.44 From May 1664 through December
1669 the burgomasters modestly supported him. The financial records refer to
Richardson as ‘preacher of the English Church in this city’ and the money was
paid ‘as a gratuity for good service and for the progress he is making in the

39 Gemeentearchief Delft, 16 March 1668, CR 14/102, fol. 35v.

40 Gemeentearchief Delft, 9 March 1668–8 April 1668, CR 14/102, fol. 35v.
41 Gemeentearchief Delft, 27 January 1669, CR 14/102, fol. 34v.
42 Gemeentearchief Delft, 2 June 1683, CR 14/102, fol. 30r.
43 William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London (London, 1861), Vol. I,
p. 307.
44 Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, ‘Burgemeestersresolutien’, 11 April 1664, fol. 48; ibid.,
11 May 1664, fol. 64v; Joh. Enschedé Museum, Oprechte Haerlemse Saterdaegse, 5 July 1664, no. 27.
170 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

English Church’.45 He also practised medicine there, making ‘1500 guilders on

average per annum’, according to his own account.46
In 1666, during the second Anglo-Dutch war, Richardson was named in
yet another royal proclamation recalling home those who have ‘treasonably
engaged themselves in actual service of this war’ with the Republic.47 On 6 May
1666, two weeks after his name appeared in print, Richardson ‘bought his
­citizenship & made the required oath’ of allegiance, a legal means by which to
avoid extradition, should the Dutch government authorize his arrest.48 On
16 August he wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, Edmund Custis, an English
merchant operating out of Bruges (present-day Belgium), informing him that
he was ‘of no party but that of righteousness against unrighteousness, for Jesus
Christ against every way of wickedness among whomsoever it is practiced’, and
that he concerned ‘not myself in the trickeries on either side, onely tis my duty
to pray & praise god for the safety of the places and people where I enjoy the
just freedom which few left on earth are willing to give’; but he added: ‘I see
grander things upon the wheel’, and hoped soon to be ‘found on Mount Zion
sharing in song of prayers with those who follow & take part with the Lamb,
when the grandeurs of the Earth shall lye wringing their hands’ in blood.49
The threat of an alliance between Richardson’s cabal and the Dutch persuaded
the restored regime of Charles II (r. 1660–85) to re-issue earlier pro­clama­tions.
A placcaet (proclamation) had to be published before the English government
could request their banishment from the Netherlands. Articles VI and VII of
the Anglo-Dutch Treaty (1662) stipulated that ‘notice shall be given or declaration
made’ before either country could demand the banishment of a rebel.50 The
proclamation dated 21 April 1666 contained fourteen names, including those
of former army officers John Desborough and Thomas Kelsey, both of whom
spent time in Dutch exile after the Restoration as Independents, and
Dr Edward Richardson, against whom an act of attainder had been issued.51
Nor was Richardson the only ejected minister whose name appeared on the
English government’s list of most-wanted fugitives. His co-religionists, exiled
ministers Matthew Newcomen and Henry Hickman, were also included on the
list of ‘traitorous conspirators’ who were ordered home to stand trial and pun-
ishment. All were suspected to have ‘treasonably engaged themselves in actual
service in the said war’.52 The government struck the names of several suspects,

45 Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, ‘Burgemeestersresolutien’, 11 April 1664, fol. 48; ibid.,

11 May 1664, fol. 64v; ibid., 17 November 1665, fol. 281; ibid., 9 September 1666, fol. 355; ibid.,
23 December 1669, fol. 494v.
46 Richardson’s petition to the Leiden magistracy, 27 October 1674, Regionaal Archief Leiden
(RAL), SA II 3375.
47 Proclamation dated 21 April 1666.
48 Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, ‘Burgemeestersresolutien’, 6 May 1666, fol. 335.
49 Richardson to Custis, 16 August 1666, TNA SP 29/167/159.
50 Articles of Peace and Alliance (1662). 51 Proclamation, 21 April 1666.
52 ‘A Draught of a Proclamation’, 9 April 1666, TNA SP 29/153/57.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 171

including Newcomen and Hickman, whose names were initially inserted

but afterwards removed from the list.53 Newcomen, minister of the English
Reformed Church at Leiden, died during an outbreak of plague in 1669;
Richardson succeeded him in his pastorate; and Hickman, who lodged with
Newcomen whilst a student at Leiden, sailed back to England after the second
Anglo-Dutch war and returned to Leiden to replace Richardson after the third.
Their intellectual centre of gravity was located in the university town of Leiden,
to which we now turn.

LEIDEN

Leiden had two English-language churches in the seventeenth century: the

Pilgrim Church (for the Separatists) and the English Reformed Church (for the
non-Separatists). Leiden’s English Reformed Church, unlike the city’s Pilgrim
congregation (1609–c.1644), lasted for 200 years (1607–1807) and was pastored
by the following seventeenth-century ministers: Robert Durie (1610–16); Hugh
Goodyear (1617–61); James Simpson (1662); Matthew Newcomen (1663–9);
Edward Richardson (1670–4); Henry Hickman (1674–92); William Carstares
(co-pastor, 1688); Robert Fleming Jr (1692–5); and John Milling (1696–1702).
The church, although known as the English Church, was officiated by both
English and Scottish ministers, sometimes simultaneously, as was the case with
Hickman and Carstares. Four of them were deprived of their benefices by
the restored regime for religious nonconformity: Simpson, silenced from his
ministry in Stirlingshire; Newcomen, ejected from his lectureship in Essex;
Richardson, removed from his ministry at Ripon; and Hickman, ousted from
his fellowship at Oxford. Simpson, like Durie before him, fled to Leiden after
having been imprisoned in and banished from Scotland, where Carstares was
tortured for his complicity in the Rye House Plot of 1683, a foiled attempt to
assassinate King Charles II and his brother (and heir to the throne) James,
Duke of York. And all of these predikants were supported (financially) and
protected (politically) by the Dutch, who, in the Glorious Revolution, invaded
England, overthrew its king, seized its crown, and delivered the people from
‘POPERY and SLAVERY’.54
Exiled minister Matthew Newcomen (the ‘mn’ of Smectymnuus)55 played an
important role in connecting the two wings of Anglo-Dutch Dissent. Ejected

53 Sir John Webster to King Charles II, 5 March 1666, TNA SP 29/193/48. Webster’s letter
is mis-calendared in the State Papers (SP) as 5 March 1667. Webster appears to have used his
powerful connections to have the names of Newcomen and Hickman removed from the list,
9 April 1666, SP 29/153/58.
54 A Letter from William Henry Prince of Orange, TNA SP 8/2, fol. 29.
55 Smectymnuus, or an antiprelatical Answer to a Book Entitled An Humble Remonstrance (1641),
was an acronym for Steven Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and
172 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

from his lectureship at Dedham in Essex when the Act of Uniformity came into
force on 24 August 1662 (St Bartholomew’s Day), Newcomen accepted his call
to Leiden on 23 October and was invested as minister of the city’s English
Reformed Church on 1 May 1663. The provincial authorities (States of Holland)
paid him an annual salary of 750 guilders (£75), plus an additional 400 guilders
(£40) for moving expenses.56 His wife Hannah and their five ‘sickly’ children
accompanied him into ‘ye Land of my Pilgrimage’.57
Newcomen was neither the first nor the last pilgrim to pitch his tent in
Leiden.58 As pastor of the city’s sole surviving English-speaking church, he
ministered to a highly mobile community of religious refugees, who, like the
Pilgrims before them, sought sanctuary in Leiden. Twelve of them, some with
families to support, are known to have lodged with him during the course of
their studies at Leiden; six of them were fellow Bartholomeans. At the heart
of Newcomen’s intellectual network were his co-religionists Hickman and
Hill—the only two Bartholomeans to matriculate in theology at Leiden after
their ejections.59 From 1663 to 1666 they assisted Newcomen with preaching at
one of the three weekly services.60
Alexander Hodge, ejected fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and silenced
vicar of St Thomas the Apostle, Exeter, matriculated in medicine at Leiden on
30 June 1665. Hodge, an Anglo-Scot, identified himself as ‘Scoto-Brittannus’,
thirty-five years old, a student of medicine, and living on the centrally located
Langebrug: a long, vaulted-over canal that runs perpendicular to the Papengracht,
the street upon which Newcomen lived.61 Hodge practised in both fields.
First as ziekentrooster at Amsterdam (1665–8) and then as minister-physician
in Delft (1668–9) and Amsterdam (1669–89), where he became a burgher and
served as co-pastor of the city’s English Reformed Church.62
Hodge’s peregrinatio medica was fairly typical. John Oxenbridge, who was
subsequently deprived by Laud, silenced at the Restoration, and ejected by the
Act of Uniformity, also matriculated in medicine at Leiden.63 Richard Abbott,

William Spurstowe. They were all subsequent members of the Westminster Assembly (1643), the
gathering of clergy called by the Long Parliament to lay the foundations of a new state Church.
56 Resolutien Raeckende de Kerkelijke Zaken, 29 July 1662–23 October 1663, RAL SA II 3377,
fols 50–2, including 51Ar–51Av; Register van Kerkelijke Zaken, SA II 3364, 1 May 1663–2 July 1663,
fol. 156r–156v.
57 Sir John Webster to King Charles II, 5 March 1666, TNA SP 29/193/48; M[atthew]
N[ewcomen] to Mr Alefounder, at Dedham, July 1666, SP 29/162/60.viii.
58 Keith L. Sprunger, ‘Other Pilgrims in Leiden: Hugh Goodyear and the English Reformed
Church’, Church History, 41 (1972), 46–60.
59 ASF Inv. No. 11, 13 July 1663 (Hickman), fol. 50; ibid., 29 March 1664 (Hill), fol. 90.
60 Sermon notes from Hill, Hickman, and Newcomen (Leiden, 1664) are in BL Sloane MS 608.
61 ASF Inv. No. 11, 30 June 1665, fol. 126.
62 On 26 July 1685 Hodge was identified as a burgher of Amsterdam, Stadsarchief Amsterdam,
Poorterboek.
63 ASF Inv. No. 9, 19 September, 1631, fol. 28. Following his ejections, Oxenbridge then spent
some time in Surinam and Barbados before settling in Boston, Massachusetts as minister at the
First Church (1670–4).
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 173

one of the seven fellows ejected from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, at the
Restoration, graduated MD on 17 January 1662; John Wilkinson, ejected vicar
of Ansty, Warwickshire, on 8 September 1662; Robert Thomas, ejected rector
of Gelligaer, Glamorgan, Wales, on 14 August 1663; Edward Richardson,
ejected dean of Ripon, on 3 April 1664; Francis Crosse, another ejected fellow
of Wadham College, Oxford, on 19 May 1664; Josias Lane, ejected fellow of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 27 May 1664; Gilbert Rule, ejected curate of
Alnwick, Northumberland, on 2 October 1665; Henry Sampson, ejected fellow
of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and silenced rector of Framlingham, Suffolk,
on 12 July 1668; George Long, one of the fifteen fellows ejected from Trinity
College, Cambridge, at the Restoration, also on 12 July 1668; Robert Brinsley,
ejected fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 13 July 1668; Edward
Hulse, another ejected fellow from Emmanuel, on 14 July 1668; and Samuel
Morris, of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 16 July 1668. Morris had matriculated
together with his travelling companions, Hulse and Long, with whom he also
lodged in Leiden.64 Sampson and Brinsley, friends and former colleagues
from Cambridge, lived around the corner with Newcomen, who died soon
after their departure during an outbreak of plague that struck Leiden at the end
of the decade.65
After Newcomen’s death in August 1669,66 the congregation’s consistory
­controversially appointed Richardson as their new pastor, without magisterial
approval. Leiden’s city council did, however, agree to approve his appointment
ex post facto, accompanied by a stern warning that such ‘ignorance’ would not
be allowed to happen again.67 Richardson became a burgher on 4 July 1670.68
On 23 February 1671, ‘Eduardus Richardson, Eboracensis [of York], Verbi dei
in Ecclesia Anglicana Minister’, who evidently moved into Newcomen’s former
parsonage op de Papengracht with his wife and several of their children, became
an honorary member of Leiden University, which, among other fringe benefits,
entitled him to tax-free beer and wine.69
The honeymoon, however, proved short-lived. Censured by the Court, for
seditious preaching, Richardson suffered ‘severe consequences’ for causing ‘great
commotion and confusion, both within and outside this City’. In November
1674 Leiden’s civil authorities, at the urging of the consistory, ‘stopt’ his salary,
ejected him from his pastoral charge, seized his belongings, and declared him

64 All three of them matriculated together at Leiden, ASF Inv. No. 11, 4 July 1668, fol. 250.
65 ASF Inv. No. 11, 30 December 1667 (Sampson), fol. 234; ibid., 28 June 1668 (Brinsley),
fol. 249.
66 RAL Iventaris van het Archief van de Kerkvoogdij van de Nederlands Hervormde Gemeente te
Leiden (1669–72), p. 39.
67 Resolutien Raeckende de Kerkelijke Zaken, 24 and 30 June 1670, RAL SA II 3377, fol. 78;
Register van Kerkelijke Zaken, 20 October 1670, RAL SA II 3365, fol. 95.
68 Poorterboek, 4 July 1670, RAL SA II 1269.
69 ASF Inv. No. 11, 23 February 1671, fol. 350.
174 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

an enemy of the state and disturber of the public peace.70 Richardson, aged
fifty-five, sought refuge in Amsterdam.71 Here he reconnected with Rothe, a
radical millenarian, who, in December 1676, was arrested, ‘rigorously punished’
(rigoureusement puni),72 and imprisoned for spreading anti-government
propaganda during the third Anglo-Dutch war.73 Richardson was replaced by
Hickman, who had served as one of the church’s elders under Newcomen’s
ministry.74 Hickman served as pastor at Leiden from 1674 until his death in
1692. William Carstares assisted him before accompanying the prince (and his
army) out of Holland.75 After the Revolution, Carstares was appointed royal
chaplain for Scotland, minister at St Giles’ in Edinburgh, and principal of the
University. His Anglo-Dutch career provides further evidence of the cross-
cultural connections between the two communities.76

MIDDELBURG

The history of Anglo-Dutch dissenters in Middelburg dates back to 1582.

One of the early exiles to pass through town in the late sixteenth-century
was Henoch Clapham. Clapham frequently travelled back and forth between
Scotland and the Low Countries (preaching for a time in Amsterdam) before
returning to England around the turn of the century.77 The English Reformed
Church of Middelburg, founded in 1623, had its own building, the Engelse Kerk,
behind the Stadhuis, and was pastored by the following seventeenth-century
ministers: John Drake (1623–42); Petrus Gribius (1642–52) and while he was
absent, Johannes Teellinck (1646–7) and John Skase (1648); William Spang
(1652–64); David Anderson (1664–6); Joseph Hill (1667–73); Nicholas Shepheard
(1674–9); John Quick (1680–1); William Spang Jr (1682–3); Robert Tory (1683–91);
and John Leask (1692–7). William Spang, former minister at Flushing, was the

70 The evidence concerning this case has been pieced together from a number of archives:
Richardson’s petition to the Leiden magistracy, 27 October 1674, RAL SA II 3375; Carr to
Williamson, 29 October 1674, TNA SP 84/196/201; RAL Acta of the Leiden Kerkeraad, 5 October
1674–23 November 1674; Temple to Coventry, 6 November 1674, Coventry Papers at Longleat
(from the archives of the Marquess of Bath), Vol. 41, fol. 127.
71 The city’s notarial archives shed some light on Richardson’s Anglo-Dutch business ventures,
Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Not. Arch. 4777/78 (21 July 1676) and 4777/327 (28 April 1677).
72 Placcaet, 1 December 1676, TNA SP 119/354/796; L’Imprimeur de libelles de Rothe,
29 December 1676, TNA SP 101/60/118; Report of Rothe’s arrest by the Amsterdam Gazette,
31 December 1676, TNA SP 119/23/164.
73 Rothe’s Works, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), The Hague, KB 514 G 29.
74 Register van Kerkelijke Zaken, 9 December 1674, RAL SA II 3366, fol. 42.
75 Register van Kerkelijke Zaken, 30 January 1688, RAL SA II 3367, fol. 55; King William III’s
letter to the burgomasters of Leiden, 15 July 1689, regarding Carstares, RAL SA II 278.
76 A. Ian Dunlop, William Carstares and the Kirk by Law Established (Edinburgh, 1964).
77 Henoch Clapham, Antidoton (1600), p. 6.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 175

first state-supported Scottish minister at Middelburg. Spang began calling it a

‘British Church’ and even the ‘Scottish Church’ because, he explained, ‘the church
is equally consisting of English and Scots’.78 Four of them were Bartholomeans
(Anderson, Hill, Quick, and Tory).
After his ejection, David Anderson, silenced vicar of Walton on Thames,
Surrey,
immediately retired with his family into Zealand, & settled himself at Middelburg
with his wife & five small children. Here he spent about two years without any
imployment, in wch time he had quite consumed that little stock of money, wch
he brought over with him, & stood indebted for one year’s rent for ye house in
wch he lived.79
After the burial of Spang, who had been laid to rest on 17 June 1664, the church
council appointed Anderson, also a Scotsman, to serve as interim minister
‘till ye election of a Pastor’. On 9 July 1664 the consistory concluded, ‘after
serious deliberation’, to go and speak with Petrus Laccher, minister of the
Dutch congregation at Middelburg, for ‘his Assistance to the Consistory’ and
‘ye good of ye Congregation’ in the calling ‘of a Minister to this Church’. Dominie
Laccher, acting as prefect, followed the customary provincial procedure of call-
ing in the governing authorities to form a Collegium Qualificatum, a distinctive
Zeeland committee composed of both ministers and magistrates that acted
on min­is­ter­ial elections. On 24 July Anderson ‘was chosen with unanimous
consent’ by the committee, who prayed that ‘ye Lord of ye Harvest & the great
Shepherd of our soules vouchsafe his grace & approbation to this Election’; he
received ‘full approbation’ by the Dutch Classis of Walcheren on 28 July and
‘was Solemnly Confirmed & Settled’ by Dominie Laccher in his ministerial
office on 17 August, two years after his ejection.80 Anderson ‘grew sickly & died’
on 27 March 1667, leaving ‘five orphans’ behind him.81
On 19 June 1667 the Collegium Qualificatum ‘resolved to proceed to the
­election of a new pastor in the place of Mr David Anderson deceased’. After
nom­in­at­ing ten candidates, from whom the committee selected two finalists,
they ‘then elected unanimously, nemine contradicente, Joseph Hill, B.D. formerly
fellow of Magdalene College in Cambridge, & then residing as a Travellor &
Student in the University of Leyden in Holland’; he was approved by the
Classis of Walcheren on 30 June, called on 1 July, and installed on 7 August;
‘thence declaring his weakenes for the worke, want of their prayers, [and]
desire to serve his Lord as a minister of Christ in the service of their soules’.82

78 Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, 20 February 1642, CR 1721/1, fol. 91, cited in Sprunger, Dutch
Puritanism, pp. 189–90.
79 John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, Dr Williams’s Library, London (DWL), Vol. I, p. 271.
80 Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, CR 1721/1, fols 228–31.
81 John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, DWL, Vol. I, pp. 275–6.
82 Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, 7 August 1667, CR 1721/2, fols 23–5.
176 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Hill’s religious rhetoric became increasingly politicized during the Rampjaar,

or ‘disaster year’ of 1672, when England and France joined forces against
the Dutch.
The outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch war in 1672 forced Hill to fight for
his faith: ‘with a pen as well as a pike’.83 His ‘dangereuse en erroneuse’ Interest
of these United Provinces (published anonymously, translated into Dutch, and
printed in both Amsterdam and Middelburg in 1673) was declared by the
provincial authorities to be ‘false, calumnious and criminal’.84 Deposed from
his pulpit for meddling in politics, he was ‘ordered and commanded’ by the
magistrates of Middelburg ‘to absent himself ’ from Zeeland.85 ‘Whereupon he
retreated into Holland and was called unto the ministry of the English Church
of Rotterdam, in which he is still living, a most learned and laborious pastor’,86
wrote the exiled minister John Quick, who succeeded Hill in his pastorate
at Middelburg.87

ROT TERDAM

‘The Toleration and Liberty of Religion in Rotterdam is as open as their Ports’,

observed a seventeenth-century traveller.88 Quakers held their religious
meetings in the home of English merchant Benjamin Furly, in whose house
the ‘Gospel was Preached, the Dead was Raised, and the Living Comforted’,
according to Penn’s own Account.89 Bayle, Burnet, Fox, Limborch, Locke, Penn,
and Sidney all either lodged in or gathered at Furly’s home on the Wijnstraat,
‘the epicentre of the early Enlightenment’.90 Furly operated as Penn’s agent for
the emigration of Quaker (and non-Quaker) colonists from the Rhineland, and
prepared for publication Dutch and German editions of Penn’s Accounts of the
Province of Pennsylvania.91 He also contributed a ten-page preface to his Dutch
translation of Penn’s Truth Exalted (De Waarheyt Ontdekt), defending Quakers
against charges by Rotterdam ministers that they were Fifth Monarchists.92
Rotterdam had two, sometimes three or four, English-language churches.
The Engelse Kerk was founded in 1619, the Merchant Adventurer church in

83 [Joseph Hill], The Interest of these United Provinces (Middelburg, 1673), p. [100].
84 Reported by the Res. States of Holland, August 1673, no. 106, p. 95.
85 Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, 19 August 1673, CR 1721/2, fol. 58.
86 John Quick, ‘Icones Sacrae Anglicanae’, DWL, Vol. I, p. 276.
87 Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, 5 January 1681, CR 1721/2, fol. 137.
88 John Northleigh, Topographical Descriptions (1702), p. 11.
89 Penn, An Account of W. Penn’s Travails in Holland and Germany [in 1677], pp. 4–5.
90 John Marshall, John Locke, Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), p. 331.
91 Gemeentearchief Rotterdam, Not. Arch. 1126/299–301 (21 June 1683) and 954/549–51
(24 June 1683).
92 William Penn, De Waarheyt Ontdekt, en Verhoogt (Amsterdam, 1675).
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 177

1635, and the Schotse Kerk in 1643. The city’s English Reformed Church, which
closed down in 1876, was pastored by the following seventeenth-century min-
isters: Thomas Barkely (1620–9); Hugh Peter (1629–35); William Ames (1633);
John Davenport (1636–7); William Bridge (1636–41); John Ward (1636–41);
Jeremiah Burroughes (1639–41); Sydrach Simpson (1639–41); Joseph Symonds
(1641–7); Robert Park (1641–9); Thomas Cawton (1651–9); Richard Maden
(1660–80); Joseph Hill (1678–1705); John Spademan (1681–98); and Joseph Hill
Jr (1699–1717). Distinguished Puritan theologian William Ames, former fellow
of Christ’s College, Cambridge, joined a sizeable Anglo-Scottish community
in the Netherlands after his ejection from the university. He reconnected
with Robert Parker, Henry Jacob, and John Robinson in Leiden (1610–11),
ministered at The Hague (1611–19), and tutored students in theology at Leiden
University (1619–22) before taking up his post as professor at the University
of Franeker (1622–33). Ames returned to Holland in the autumn of 1633 to
become co-pastor with Peter, but died of pneumonia soon after his move. Peter,
subsequent minister at Salem, Massachusetts, preached his funeral sermon in
November 1633.93
The church split apart soon after Ames’s death and Peter’s departure. In the
late 1630s the congregation rose up and deposed Ward for opposing Bridge
(over the issue of prophesying) and for recycling some of his old sermons. Half
sided with Simpson-Symonds, deprived of their livelihoods in London by
Archbishop Laud; half sided with Burroughes-Bridge, deprived in Norwich
by Bishop Wren. A conference of the two Independent congregations was
called, a ‘solemne assembly’, and Ward was reinstated. By the end of 1641
Bridge, Burroughes, Simpson, and Ward had returned to England to serve
Congregational churches.94 Bridge, Burroughes, and Simpson, along with
two other recently returned exiles, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, were
the Five Dissenting Brethren in the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1643),
an Independent faction in opposition to the Presbyterian majority.
The next wave of exiles came over after the Restoration. Nathaniel Mather,
who had been schooled in New England Congregationalism at Harvard in
the 1640s, crossed over after having been driven from Devon.95 Writing from
Rotterdam in the wake of the Restoration, Nathaniel invited his younger
brother Increase to come over and join the ‘many English [that] are of late come
over into these parts’. Those of us that are of the Congregational Way ‘have
joyned in a peticon to the Magistrates that they would allow us a publique
meeting place’, which I doubt not that ‘wee shall obtayne’.96 Increase, having

93 Keith Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames (Champaign, IL, 1973).
94 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 168–72.
95 He subsequently settled in Dublin as successor to his brother Samuel, ejected curate of
Burtonwood, Lancashire.
96 Nathaniel to Increase, 1661, Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department,
published in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th series, 8 (Boston, MA, 1868),
pp. 5–6.
178 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

been ‘persecuted out of two places, Glocester and Guernsey’, by the restored
regime, chose to return to Massachusetts, where he went on to become minis-
ter in Boston and president of Harvard.97 In Rotterdam, Nathaniel congre-
gated with Richard Lawrence, ejected rector of Trunch with Swafield, Norfolk;
Nicholas Lockyer, expelled provost of Eton College; John Reyner, ejected rector
of Rollesby, Norfolk; Edward Richardson, ejected dean of Ripon; Edward
Riggs, ejected vicar of St John’s, Isle of Thanet; and George Thorne, ejected
rector of Radipole, Dorset.98 Rotterdam ‘is ye general azile of all ye sectaries,
& discontented persons, or to all them by their own approbation, of all yt are
persecuted’ for conscience’s sake, reported Colonel Joseph Bampfield in
August 1663.99
Most notorious among them was Richardson, who escaped execution by
fleeing to the Netherlands, where Bampfield, operating as an agent for the
crown, tried to have him captured.100 ‘Providence hath now cast me my lot in
these Lands’, Richardson wrote from Rotterdam, ‘where through mercy I find
such employment as preserves mee, & yt wth such a freedom to my Conscience
as England would not afford mee’.101 On 10 November 1663 Richardson (along
with several other ejected ministers) was proclaimed a fugitive.102 Protected by
the Dutch, for whose freedom he claimed to have fought in all three Anglo-
Dutch wars,103 Richardson was ‘advised secretly’ by the municipal authorities
of Rotterdam ‘to absent himselfe from thence for a while’, lest he should be
seized and ‘carried on board one of the English ships, with which the river
swarms’.104 Ambassador Downing, sometime scoutmaster general of the
English army in Scotland, spent the rest of the decade trying to catch him,
but confessed to Clarendon (who had been made Lord Chancellor in 1658)
that ‘it is a most difficult enterprise in such a Countrey as this to take a man by
fource & carry him away’.105 So he vainly offered a £50 reward, plus all expenses,
to have him kidnapped.106 Both Richardson and Hill operated as ‘geheime
agenten’ (secret agents) for the Dutch government.107 Hill’s activities led to his

97 Increase Mather, Autobiography, ed. Michael G. Hall (Worcester, MA, 1962), p. 285.
98 Examination of George Thorne, ejected rector of Radipole, Dorset, 27 March 1663, TNA SP
29/70/38.
99 Bampfield to Williamson, 16 August 1663, TNA SP 84/167/240.
100 Custis to Bennet, 18/28 March 1664, TNA SP 29/94/112.
101 Richardson to Jennings, 4 November 1663, TNA SP 29/84/65.1.
102 Downing to Bennet, 20 November 1663, TNA SP 84/168/125–6; Proclamation, 10 November
1663.
103 Richardson’s petition to the Leiden magistracy, 27 October 1674, RAL SA II 3375.
104 Bampfield to Bennet, 12 February 1664, TNA SP 84/169/63; Custis to Bennet, 21 March
1664, SP 29/94/67.
105 Downing to Clarendon, 1 February 1664, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Clarendon Vol. 107,
fol. 72.
106 Downing to Bennet, 22 January 1664, TNA SP 84/169/51.
107 ‘Engelse geheime agenten’, within which are found several letters from Richardson and
Hill to Pierre du Moulin, the prince’s spymaster, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, Collectie Fagel
(1513–1927), 1.10.29/547.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 179

arrest and brief imprisonment in England on charges of treason during the

second Anglo-Dutch war.108
After having been imprisoned in England and banished from Zeeland
(during the third Anglo-Dutch war), Hill ‘was unanimously chosen’ second
minister of the English Reformed Church at Rotterdam; he was approved by
the city’s civil authorities on 14 October 1678, called on 16 October, and installed
on 4 January 1679. Under that date in the church’s consistory register the senior
pastor, Richard Maden Jr, Hill’s brother-in-law, inscribed the following letter to
the ‘Scotch Consistory in this city’. We underwritten, Revds Maden and Hill,
by order of our consistory desire you for the preventing of confusion & disorder yt
you would admit none of our Members to the Lord’s Supper in your congregation,
but such onely as bring a certificate under our hands. As we have not, & shall not
admit any of yours, without a certificate from you, God being the God of order &
not of confusion’.109
The minister of the Scots Church at that time was Robert Fleming (1677–94),
ejected minister of Cambuslang, on the south-eastern outskirts of Glasgow,
Scotland, who had recently received his call to Rotterdam after the banishment
of his covenanting colleague, Robert MacWard (1676–7), from the Republic.110
At the Restoration, MacWard, sometime minister of the Outer High Church
in Glasgow, had been silenced, imprisoned, and banished from Scotland ‘for
sedition and treasonable preaching’.111
With many of the earlier generation of religious radicals such as Richardson
and MacWard dead by the early 1680s, the life of the exile community entered
a new phase. Following the discovery of new plots in Britain (Rye House,
Argyll’s, Monmouth’s), waves of ‘Rebells & factious Reformers’ flooded the Low
Countries.112 There are ‘swarms’ of them, Ambassador Skelton told Secretary
Middleton.113 Included in the stream of refugees pouring into Holland (Utrecht
and Cleves) were Walter Cross, Robert Ferguson, John Howe, Matthew Meade,
and Thomas Woodcock—Bartholomean brothers all!114 By the end of the
decade most of the exiles (having been pardoned by the king’s prerogative
power) chose to return home, shortly before the Protestant prince seized
the English crown from the Catholic king. Ferguson, excluded from the royal
act of clemency, accompanied the prince (and his army) out of Holland. He was

108 Hill’s confiscated papers, 10 July 1666, TNA SP 29/162/60.i–viii.

109 Gemeentearchief Rotterdam, 4 January 1679, CR 993/1, fol. 4.
110 On MacWard, see Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community, pp. 108–13, 140–3.
111 William Steven, The History of the Scottish Church, Rotterdam (Edinburgh, 1833), p. 28.
112 Everard to Jenkins, 20 November 1685, BL Add. MS 41818, fols 125–6.
113 Skelton to Middleton, 20 November 1685, BL Add. MS 41812, fol. 229v.
114 For the exile community in the Low Countries during the 1680s, see Richard Ashcraft,
Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ, 1986), especially
chapters 9 and 10.
180 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the only Bartholomean to join the Dutch invasion of England.115 Only three
ejected ministers remained at their posts in the Republic after the Revolution:
Hodge, Hickman, and Hill. Writing after the Revolution, Hill predicted
that it would be difficult to procure ministers to come over and preach in
Holland because ‘There being liberty granted by law, for the Presbyterians to
preach publiquely now in England’.116 The legalization of Dissent restored
Presbyterianism in Scotland, granted toleration for Dissenters in England, and
significantly reduced the refugee population in the Republic. Of the more than
thirty English and Scottish Reformed churches of the early seventeenth century,
only twelve survived to 1700.117 Nonconformist ministers such as Carstares,
Ferguson, Howe, and Mead (to name only a few of the more high-profile mem-
bers of the recently returned exile community) helped win popular support
for the new regime. They helped their compatriots understand and accept the
new order brought by the Stadholder-King, an order that very much reflected
the conditions of William’s Dutch rule. Catholics, they insisted, should be barred
from holding public office, a notion incorporated into the Toleration Act of 1689,
itself based upon the long-standing Dutch Reformed model, within which the
devout Calvinist prince had been indoctrinated.118

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Appleby, David J., Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration
Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007).
Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
(Princeton, NJ, 1986).
Bangs, Jeremy Dupertuis, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and
the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA, 2009).
Capp, Bernard, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London, 1972).
Carter, Alice C., The English Reformed Church in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century
(Amsterdam, 1964).
Gardner, Ginny, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East
Linton, 2004).
Greaves, Richard L., Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain,
1660–1663 (Oxford, 1986).
Ha, Polly, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010).

115 ‘Lyste van Heren Engelsche, Schotte, Fransen, gaande als Voluntarien’, TNA SP 8/6, fols
223–5.
116 Gemeentearchief Rotterdam, 14 August 1690, CR 993/1, fol. 20.
117 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 456.
118 As Carswell has noted, the religious constitution of the United Provinces ‘corresponded
exactly to what William was now offering England: no persecution, but a monopoly of office for
the adherents of the state church’, John Carswell, The Descent on England (New York, 1969), p. 110.
 The Dutch Republic: English and Scottish Dissenters in Dutch Exile 181

Hsia, R. Po-Chia and Van Nierop, H.F.K., eds, Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the
Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2002).
Marshall, John, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994).
Sprunger, Keith L., ‘Other Pilgrims in Leiden: Hugh Goodyear and the English
Reformed Church’, Church History, 41 (1972), 46–60.
Sprunger, Keith L., Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the
Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982).
Spurr, John, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (London, 1998).
 8

Scotland
R. Scott Spurlock

Dissent is a problematic term not easily accommodated in the history of

Scottish Protestantism before the late seventeenth century. More frequently
nonconformity described Presbyterian reactions against episcopacy. Scotland’s
reputation for fragmentation and dissent thus rests largely on the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. In 1560 Scotland’s parliament established a Protestant
state Church emphasizing religion’s political role: ‘true religion and the com-
mon welfare of this realm are . . . to be entreated, ordered and established to the
glory of God and maintenance of the commonwealth’.1 John Knox had promul-
gated the political importance of unity in religion even before his return to
Scotland and continued to preach it throughout the Reformation.2 The rapid
and largely ‘bloodless’ nature of Reformation reinforced the theory and William
Maitland, addressing the 1567 parliament, declared Scotland’s reform as ‘a sin-
gular testimony of God’s favour and a peculiar benefit granted only to the realm
of Scotland’.3 The inseparable link between nation and right religion became
even more explicit in the subscription of the 1581 Negative Confession or ‘King’s
Confession’, which rejected all forms of Catholicism and bound the whole
nation together in its right religion.4 Subscription of the confession came to be
understood by many as a covenanting or bonding, and the Negative Confession
as a ‘National Covenant’.

1 Sir John Skene, The Lawes and Acts of Parliament maid be King James the First and his
Successors Kings of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1597), section 6, ff. 3r–9v.
2 John Knox, The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1846–64), IV, p. 505.
3 Keith M. Brown et al., eds, The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, www.rps.ac.uk:
A1567/12/50 (date accessed throughout: 7 June 2013). Hereafter Brown, RPS.
4 Gordon Donaldson, ed., Scottish Historical Documents (Edinburgh, 1970), p. 151.

R. Scott Spurlock, Scotland In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0009
 Scotland183

NATIONAL CHURCH

These processes set the expectation for national unity in religion, although
the pattern of ecclesial government remained contested. Even in the early
days of Protestant Scotland the schismatic impulses evident among English
Puritans were emphatically rejected due to two important principles in Scottish
Protestantism: (i) an ecclesiology established at the national level, as demon-
strated above, and (ii) a high regard for local congregation and its endowment
with particular rights, particularly the rights of elders to rule.5 These endowed
the Reformed Kirk with a sense of national unity and local autonomy, whereas
the impetus in English Puritanism from the 1580s gravitated towards covenant-
ing at the congregational level. While the latter eventually underpinned Puritan
ecclesiologies in England and New England’s locally gathered and covenanted
churches, Scottish Protestants (Episcopal and Presbyterian) held the church
to be constituted/covenanted nationally and expressed locally. As a result
the arrival of the English separatist Robert Browne in Scotland in 1584 elicited
a cold response.6 While supporters of episcopacy and Presbyterianism vied
for control over the national Church during the decades that followed, there is
little evidence of godly minorities gathering to the exclusion of all others. In
fact, Scotland is notable for its lack of Protestant sectarianism alongside aims
for a comprehensive national settlement. Not even the Swiss or Dutch pursued
full comprehension of national populations.
However, tensions did run high over church polity. By the 1580s two compet-
ing jure divino theories led to serious dissension. Andrew Melville and his
supporters advocated a Presbyterian system appointed in Scripture, while the
Archbishop of St Andrews, Patrick Adamson, credited as architect of the Black
Acts (1584), linked episcopacy to the divine nature of the crown and Eusebius’s
description of Constantine as ‘Bishop of Bishops and universall Bishop in his
realme’.7 In the wake of the 1582 Ruthven Raid, in which hard-line Protestants
seized the young James VI to ensure he would be influenced by Presbyterian-
thinking lairds, James Stewart, Earl of Arran, became regent. Arran carried out
an aggressive policy against proponents of Presbyterianism through the imple-
mentation of the Black Acts, which set the king as the ultimate authority in
both political and spiritual matters, limited ecclesiastical courts, raised episcopal
authority, and established legal grounds for removing ministers on ‘just causes’.8

5 For the rights of the congregation, see James Cameron, The First Book of Discipline
(Edinburgh, 1972), passim. For the increased emphasis on elders, see James Kirk, ed., The Second
Book of Discipline (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 163–79.
6 David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, 8 vols (Edinburgh, 1843), IV, pp. 2, 3.
7 Ibid., IV, pp. 263–4; Patrick Adamson, A Declaration made by King James, in Scotland; con-
cerning Church-Government, and Presbyters (London, 1646), pp. 7–8.
8 Brown, RPS, 1584/5/7–12, 75–6.
184 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

He banished Melville in 1584 and enforcement of the acts caused several other
leading Presbyterians into self-exile. When Arran’s regency fell apart in 1585,
exiled Presbyterians returned and rose to a dominant position. By 1592 support
for Presbyterianism ran high, forcing James to pass the so-called ‘Golden Act’,
fully establishing a Presbyterian polity, although he retained the power to call
(or not call) General Assemblies.9 While the contest over church polity led to
competing traditions, by and large it did not lead to dissenting traditions.
Presbyterian and episcopal sympathizers alike competed for the destiny of the
entire national Church, not for differentiation or separation from it. Instead
Presbyterians simply refused to conform. In fact, the weak implementation of
the Black Acts meant that ‘before 1606 there was no meaningful episcopate or
objectionable polity against which to organise’.10

REJECTION OF LITURGICAL INNOVATION

The generally accepted sea change occurred with the implementation of the
Articles of Perth in 1618, whereby James strong-armed the General Assembly
into significant liturgical innovations including kneeling at communion, the
observance of high feast days, and confirmation by a bishop at age eight,
while permitting private communion for the infirm and private baptism.11
Dissatisfaction had bubbled away during the previous decade with the reestab-
lishment of diocesan episcopacy in 1606 and the appointment of bishops as
permanent moderators of presbyteries, the crown’s assertion of authority over
clerical dress in 1609, and, more importantly, the full restoration of bishops’
secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in 1610. But the Articles of Perth repre-
sented fundamental innovations many Protestant Scots perceived to be moves
back towards Rome. As a result, ministers and their parishioners began meet-
ing in secret gatherings, particularly in Edinburgh, for the first time since
before 1560.12 The grounds of dissatisfaction were largely liturgical, although
exacerbated by polity. Theologically, however, the Kirk had unilaterally affirmed
its Reformed pedigree in 1616 with the General Assembly confirming the
doctrine of double predestination by eternal decree.13
Kneeling at communion generated the greatest opposition of all the inno­v­
ations and many resisted. For instance, a 1620 report claimed only twenty of

9 Ibid., 1592/4/26.
10 Alan MacDonald, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625 (Farnham, 1998), p. 174.
11 Robert Blair and William Row, The Life of Mr Robert Blair, Minister of St Andrews,
ed. T. M’Crie (1848), pp. 12–13, 35.
12 D. Stevenson, ‘Conventicles in the Kirk, 1619–37: The Emergence of a Radical Party’, Records
of the Scottish Church History Society, 18 (1972), 99–114.
13 D. G. Mullan, ‘Theology in the Church of Scotland 1618–c.1640: A Calvinist Consensus?’, The
Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), 595–617 (597).
 Scotland185

1,600 communicants in one Edinburgh church knelt as instructed. As conformity

came to be pushed more aggressively, parishioners refused to go forward for
communion or even attend communion services. Alternatively, they attended
other parishes that refused to introduce kneeling, which as late as 1622 several
country parishes did.14 Ultimately, alternative religious gatherings began to
take place.
Critics accused nonconformists of meeting in ‘conventicles’ during time
of public worship and of calling themselves congregations, which resulted in
accusations of being ‘Brownists, Anabaptists, Shismaticks, Separatists’.15 A few
scholars have taken these claims to indicate schismatic tendencies within
these private gatherings. However, as John Coffey has demonstrated, conventi-
cling did not represent a move towards separation akin to what developed in
England.16 Scottish nonconformists of the 1620s remained thoroughly com-
mitted to the principle of a national Church, the traditional liturgy of the
Reformed Kirk and gathering for private prayer and worship with the intention
of reforming the national Church, and avoiding corruption through liturgical
innovations. Nevertheless their opponents did call this ‘rebellion, arrogance
and schism’ to the shock of all other Reformed Churches.17 The claim that
meetings regularly took place during Sunday public worship is probably a mis-
interpretation of evidence. Those missing from Edinburgh’s communion ser-
vices may have instead attended nearby parishes where kneeling had yet to be
imposed. Certainly a number of Edinburghers made their way across the Firth
of Forth to Kinghorn and ministers in Dunbar, Duns, Haddington, Kirkcaldy,
and Lasswade refused to introduce kneeling.18 Samuel Rutherford, known to
have participated in 1620s nonconformity in Edinburgh, sheds light on the
subject. Writing in 1640 he emphatically denied the lawfulness of choosing
private worship during the time of public worship, calling it ‘Brownism . . . the
act of separation’.19 It is therefore unlikely that this is what happened during the
1620s. Moreover, since the primary issue remained kneeling at communion,
the infrequency of the Eucharist in Scottish churches meant abstention might
only have been an issue as infrequently as once a year—usually at Easter—
although royal policy sought to increase its regularity to a minimum of four
times a year in burgh parishes and twice in rural ones.20 Therefore reports from
the king’s informants claiming thousands missing from communion services

14 The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, XII, pp. lxiv, 707. Hereafter RPCS.
15 Calderwood, History, VII, p. 449, 614.
16 John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolution: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford
(Cambridge, 1997), p. 192.
17 John Forbes of Corse, The First Book of the Irenicum, trans. and ed. E.G. Selwyn (Cambridge,
1924), pp. 107, 111.
18 RPCS, XII, pp. 186, 200.
19 Samuel Rutherford, The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, ed. A.A. Bonar (Edinburgh, 1904),
pp. 578–9.
20 Calderwood, History, VII, p. 229.
186 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

did not necessarily mean poor attendance the rest of the year.21 For many the
norm meant partial conformity with attendance at public worship supple-
mented by private meetings for prayer and scriptural exposition.
A number of factors could affect the experience of nonconformists. Often
bishops required a lesser degree of conformity than the king demanded. William
Row argued persecution for nonconformity was lax in the 1620s compared
with the Restoration. Bishops attempted to moderate royal policies, resisted
liturgical innovations, ‘deposed very few of the nonconformists’ (only two in
Fife), and permitted deposed ministers to preach publicly and assist with com-
munion services.22 Yet David Lindsay, Bishop of Brechin, denied that different
practices could be ‘tollerat in the same Kirk’.23 Some nonconformists expressed
equally intolerant attitudes. Although Thomas Sydserff offered a compromise
whereby communion could occur with a mixture of standing and kneeling
depending on individual consciences, a 1624 pamphlet (probably by David
Calderwood) argued it would be unsafe for believers to take communion
alongside kneeling communicants.24 Due to the conflict’s intractable nature the
king prohibited private meetings for religious worship in 1624.25
James’s policies prompted many nonconformists to leave Scotland for Ulster.
By 1622 sixty-four Scots ministers served Irish parishes. While not uniform, the
experiences of Robert Blair and John Livingstone are indicative. They worked
within the established episcopal Church of Ireland and allowed bishops to
attend ordinations on the agreed understanding they represented the equiva-
lent of presbyters or elders. They were also permitted to edit the service book to
suit their consciences. Some historians have referred to this system as ‘prescopa-
lian’, but the situation was less clearly defined than such a term might suggest.26
Scots ministers worked reasonably well under Andrew Knox, Bishop of Raphoe,
and James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh from 1625, but jarred with other
bishops and had little time for the English Separatists they encountered in
Ireland because ‘they did not come to public worship’.27 Like their colleagues
in Scotland, Presbyterians in Ulster rejected schism. However, in 1636 a group
probably funded by Sir John Clotworthy attempted to join the Puritan
Massachusetts Bay Colony, but bad weather prevented their crossing. Blair and
Livingstone, leading figures in the enterprise, interpreted this as a providential

21 David Laing and Beriah Botfield, eds, Original Letters Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of
Scotland (Edinburgh, 1851), II, p. 599.
22 Blair and Row, Life of Robert Blair, p. 137.
23 Robert Wodrow, Selections from Wodrow’s Biographical Collections, ed. R. Lippe (Aberdeen,
1890), p. 168.
24 J.D. Ford, ‘Conformity in Conscience: The Structure of the Perth Articles Debate in Scotland,
1618–38’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46 (1995), 256–77, 264.
25 Calderwood, History, VII, pp. 611–14.
26 A.F.S. Pearson, Origins of Irish Presbyterianism (Belfast, 1947), p. 1.
27 Patrick Adair, A True Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland,
ed. W.D. Killen (Belfast, 1866), pp. 27–8.
 Scotland187

judgement against abandoning the Church of Scotland. In conjunction with

increasing pressure against nonconformity to the Church of Ireland under
Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland, they soon returned to Scotland to
support the growing Presbyterian reaction against Charles I’s policies.
Charles initially did not pursue religious conformity with any great vigour.
However, in 1633—the eighth year of his reign—the king visited Scotland for
his first royal visit and coronation. Supporters of Presbyterianism took the
opportunity to present a list of grievances to the monarch including the litur-
gical innovations and the alteration to the role of bishops during his father’s
reign.28 Charles’s disposition changed and his desire for religious uniformity
across his kingdoms led him to appoint new Scottish bishops friendly to
Laudian-style reforms. These bishops reinvigorated the pressure on noncon-
formist ministers. In 1636, after debating with the recently appointed Bishop of
Galloway Thomas Sydserff, Samuel Rutherford was deposed from Anwoth and
removed to Aberdeen. Though geographically displaced, Rutherford continued
to encourage churches to ‘conference and prayer at private meetings’, but reject-
ed the claims of Separatists and Brownists in other places (beyond Scotland)
who ‘make a kirk in private homes of their own’.29
Charles pushed liturgical change through the publication of a Scottish Booke
of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Parts of
Divine Service imposed through royal and episcopal authority. Its introduction
in St Giles on 23 July 1637 resulted in the outbreak of carefully contrived public
riots. In October, nobles, lairds, burgesses, and ministers signed a supplication
against the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer and by year’s end
established an opposition government. ‘The Tables’ represented the represented
traditional constituencies asserting their historic rights and opposed Charles’s
innovations.

COVENANTED UNIFORMIT Y?

Once established politically, the Tables sought to solidify popular support and
affirm the religious foundations of their actions. They commissioned Alexander
Henderson, a minister, and Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, a lawyer, to
produce a new National Covenant. Besides reasserting the Negative Confession
and Scotland’s historical anti-Catholic legislation, the document sets out
three imperatives: (i) the maintenance of Reformed religion, (ii) the rights of
the Stewart monarchy, and (iii) the political sovereignty of Scotland. These

28 John Rushworth, ‘Grievances of the Scottish ministers, 1633’, in Historical Collections of

Private Passages of State: Volume III: 1639–40 (London, 1721), pp. 143–55.
29 Coffey, Politics, p. 197; Rutherford, Letters, pp. 561, 564.
188 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

represented the three constitutional (albeit unwritten) pillars upon which nation
stood. As such, the document served as ‘a band against innovations’.30
From February 1638 public subscription began, often accompanied by
­emotive sermons. In total an estimated 300,000 Scots signed the covenant. Its
broadly inclusive language facilitated widespread subscription—except in the
Highlands and the north-east. Opposition to subscription rested primarily in
questions raised by early critics, such as John Strang, Principal of Glasgow
University. Before eventually signing the National Covenant, Strang raised
­concerns over the legal status of bishops established by parliamentary legisla-
tion and the covenant’s prejudicial impact on royal authority. More nuanced
and sustained opposition came from the Aberdeen Doctors, who queried the
legality of mutual bands of defence, the risk the rejection of episcopacy posed
to scandalizing other Reformed churches, the limitations placed on the
­monarchy, and the authority the Covenanters had to interpret the Negative
Confession as stringently as they had done.31 The north-east of Scotland
became a contested space, with both the Aberdeen Doctors and Covenanting
leaders printing texts setting out their positions. King Charles sought to
­capitalize on the groundswell of support for covenanting, and to frame his
own claims to royal supremacy in similar fashion. He authorized the produc-
tion of an alternative document for subscription, which upheld royal authority.
The King’s Covenant, as it was known, received an estimated 28,000 signatures,
­primarily in the north-east. Among its subscribers were the Aberdeen Doctors.
However, this level of subscription paled in comparison with that of the
National Covenant.32
For William Row, reflecting back years later on the success of the National
Covenant, the widespread subscription equated to the whole of the nation.
He explains:
through the whole kingdom or kirk of Scotland, except the Secret Councill and
some of the nobility, and except Papists and some few who for base ends adhered
to the prelates, the people universally entered into Covenant with God for a refor-
mation of religion against prelates and ceremonies.33
His claims raise two important issues. First, despite his assertion no explicit
denunciation of episcopacy existed in the original document. This was added
at the General Assembly in December 1638—ten months after subscription
began—and became known as the ‘Glasgow determination’. The Assembly
‘abjured and removed’ bishops. Only Robert Baillie registered dissent on the

30 Peter Donald, ‘The Scottish National Covenant and British Politics, 1638–40’, in John Morrill,
ed., The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, 1638–51 (Edinburgh, 1990), 90–105, p. 91.
31 D. Stewart, ‘The “Aberdeen Doctors” and the Covenanters’, Records of the Scottish Church
History Society, 22 (1984), 35–44; G.D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland
(Cambridge, 1937), pp. 168–9.
32 David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44 (Edinburgh, 1973; repr. 2003), pp. 108–12.
33 Blair and Row, Life of Robert Blair, p. 155.
 Scotland189

grounds that episcopacy should be removed but not abjured.34 As Alexander

Campbell’s recent work demonstrates, Baillie held a distinctly nuanced view of
episcopacy, but his opposition to abjuring the role of bishops no doubt rested
in concerns about how such a complete denunciation would be received by
other Protestant churches. The Assembly deposed all Scotland’s bishops and
excommunicated eight (including both archbishops) and renounced all General
Assemblies since 1606 as illegal—including the Articles of Perth. In relation to
the National Covenant, the General Assembly ordered the universal adoption
of the Glasgow determination, demanded all existing copies be amended and
resubscribed with the additional text, and ordered all other copies to be des-
troyed. However, surviving copies without the alteration indicate this did not
always happen. Hence some subscribers to the Covenant may not have under-
stood or accepted their commitment to include opposition to episcopacy.
Second, although Row glosses over the significant number of Scots who refused
the Covenant, he reveals the Covenanters’ ecclesiology had developed to view
the nation and the visible church as coterminous.
In many respects the Covenanting tradition represented the fruition of a
long process of ecclesiological development. Rooted in Knox’s belief that
Scotland represented a nation elected and covenanted to God, the nation now
represented a visible church. Thus, just as Jews born into the Abrahamic covenant
were subject to particular religious and political obligations, so too Covenanters
understood Scots to be born into covenant promises and obligations. Ironically,
whereas opposition to liturgical innovations and aggressive royalist policies in
previous decades had not led to separation, the developments under the
Covenanters did sow seeds of division. Fusing a belief in national election with
a Reformed doctrine of limited election to salvation created difficult theologic-
al and social expectations. For Walter Mathieson, this fundamental tension in
Knox’s Reformed theology made him the ‘parent of schism’ in Scotland.35
David Mullan, too, argues that Knox ‘unwittingly, embraced two distinct cov-
enanting ideas: one, a national, corporate, sociological construct absent from
Calvin, the other very much focused on the individual salvation of those elected
to grace from eternity’.36 However, Knox took this two-fold model of individual
(internal) and corporate (external) covenanting directly from Calvin. But it
was in Scotland that the enormous tensions created by the theological commit-
ment to uphold external holiness corporately, in the face of a largely reprobate
and unregenerate population, came to be tested.37

34 Alexander D. Campbell, The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion
and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 43–4.
35 William Mathieson, Politics and Religion: A Study in Scottish History from the Reformation to
the Revolution, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1902), I, p. 115.
36 David Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, p. 179.
37 R. Scott Spurlock, ‘Polity, Discipline and Theology: The Importance of the Covenant in
Scottish Presbyterianism, 1560–c.1700’, in Elliot Vernon and Hunter Powell, eds, Church Polity
and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–1666 (Manchester, 2020).
190 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The rapid removal of Scotland’s bishops left little space for galvanized epis-
copal resistance. Eight of Scotland’s fourteen bishops fled to England within the
months that followed. Four died in England before they could secure new
appointments: John Spottiswood (St Andrews) and James Wedderburn
(Dundee) in 1639, David Lindsay (Edinburgh) in 1641, and Patrick Lindsey
(Glasgow) in 1644 being noted to have fallen into great poverty. Two took up
English parishes (Walter Whitford, Brechin, and Adam Bellenden, Aberdeen),
while John Maxwell (Ross) moved to Ireland as Bishop of Killala and Ackenry
and later Archbishop of Tuam. Of the bishops that fled, only Thomas Sydserff
(Bishop of Galloway) survived until the Restoration to be appointed Bishop of
Orkney in 1662. While clearly a recognition of his loyalty, it was the most remote
of all Scotland’s dioceses, which may indicate something about Restoration
policy. Only John Guthrie (Moray) sought to resist his removal by force,
although only briefly, and after a period of house arrest he retired to his private
estates until his death in 1649.38 Scotland’s five other bishops submitted to the
covenanting regime and renounced their episcopal offices. George Graham
(Orkney) retired and John Abernethy (Caithness) died in 1639, while Neil
Campbell (Isles), Alexander Lindsey (Dunkeld), and James Fairlie (Argyll) all
returned to parish ministry. Thus, there were no leading figures remaining to
galvanize behind.
Despite the dismantling of the episcopal infrastructure, fears began to grow
by 1641 that ‘lately deposed episcopall ministers beganne to crowde so thickte
at this wicket into ther owne pulpitts againe, by the assistance of ther parishon-
ers, that the following Assemblyes this latitude was restrained’.39 Authorities
were less concerned about resurgent claims of the old polity than about the
undermining of the Kirk and responded by establishing travelling committees
appointed by the General Assembly to carry out visitations. Between 1638 and
1651 these led to the deposition of 236 ministers, some for scandal, but at least
90 per cent for failing ‘to support enthusiastically enough, the predominant
faction in the Kirk—which might include a lingering affection for episcopacy’.40
Ministers as well as academics, like John Forbes of Corse and the Aberdeen
Doctors, were among those deposed. By 1640 subscription of the National
Covenant had become obligatory by act of parliament, and this required the
renunciation of episcopacy. Evidence from Fife and Orkney, however, suggests
some deposed ministers and their congregations simply ignored these deposi-
tions and continued in open defiance of the Kirk.41 William Watson, Minister

38 Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, pp. 190–4.

39 James Gordon, History of Scots Affairs, ed. J. Robertson and G. Grub, 3 vols (Aberdeen, 1841),
III, p. 54.
40 David Stevenson, ‘Deposition of Ministers in the Church of Scotland, 1638–1651’, Church
History, 44 (1975), 321–35 (324).
41 R. Scott Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660 (Edinburgh,
2007), pp. 101–4.
 Scotland191

of Duthil, expressed his frustration with Covenanting rule in 1646 declaring

before the Synod of Moray: ‘How can we speak against Sects seing we are the
most abominable sect in all the world because of our government’.42 But
those who continued in local ministry did not vocally advocate episcopacy;
they simply refused to abrogate their charges, spinning the intervention of the
national Church as invasive. Such an interpretation could be based on the
precepts set out in the First Book of Discipline, and need not be interpreted
as anti-Presbyterian. Ministers continued to serve within parishes and did not
seek to establish alternatives. Thus no dissenting episcopal tradition galvanized in
Scotland under the Covenanting regime like the non-juring tradition of the
eighteenth century. The efficiency of Covenanter governance, and antipathy of
the Interregum regime, precluded this.
Gradually it became clear early in the Covenanting years that the risk to
Covenanted Scotland came not from a resurgent episcopacy, but rather from
fragmentation within. Robert Baillie identified Brownist-like tendencies among
the parishioners of Glassford, who in 1639 refused a minister tried by the
presbytery before the congregation had called him. However, he noted their
claims to be attempting to uphold obligations to the Covenant and discipline of
the Kirk.43 In 1640 he more specifically identified Scots returning from Ulster
perpetuating private meetings and espousing Brownist principles, particularly
in Stirling.44 Two years later Baillie reported small numbers of ‘Brownists’ in
Kilwinning as well as Ayr and Aberdeen in 1643.45 The Aberdeen reports are
corroborated by John Spalding, who, like Baillie, made a direct Irish connection.
Spalding identifies Othro Ferrendail, ‘an Irishman, and ane skynner’ as the
source and reports his imprisonment for preaching ‘Nocturnall doctrein, or
Brownism’ in private homes.46 Under pressure Ferrendail appeared in the local
kirk, affirmed the national Church, denied Brownist doctrines, and signed the
Covenant.47 Baillie and Spalding’s accounts both indicate Ireland as a conduit
for new schismatic impulses, albeit returning Scots ministers seem to have
been unaffected. Another of Spalding’s Brownists, Gilbert Gordon or Gairdin,
of Tullifrosky (Tilliefroskie), faced excommunication and later sources identi-
fied him as a Baptist.48
Except for these notable aberrations, the impression at the national level
remained that ‘heresy and schism’ derived from outside Scotland and remained
a largely English problem.49 In fact the term ‘dissenter’ only entered Scottish
theological discourses in the mid-1640s in relation to events in England,

42 William Cramond, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Synod of Moray (Elgin, 1906), p. 100.
43 Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1841–2), I, pp. 237–41.
44 Ibid., I, pp. 249–50. 45 Ibid., II, pp. 28, 54.
46 John Spalding, History of the Troubles and Memorable Transactions in Scotland, 2 vols
(Edinburgh, 1829), II, p. 81.
47 Ibid., pp. 94, 95, 107, 114, 126. 48 Ibid., pp. 94–5, 151.
49 Brown, RPS, 1648/3/83.
192 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

through Robert Baillie and George Gillespie. Both men related the term to the
heterodoxy of Revolutionary England and their experiences of the Westminster
Assembly.50 Their concerns pertained to maintaining unity and what consti-
tuted the difference between dissent and schism. Gillespie articulated dissent
as being limited to disagreements over principles not practices, so as not to
create separation. In particular this related to the Dissenting Brethren who
sought to formulate a national Church settlement of independently gathered
congregations, influenced by experiences of some of their number in the
Netherlands.51 While a number of the Scots representatives at Westminster
sympathized with their position, they could not reconcile how such a divesting
of the national Church could produce anything but schism. Scotland’s involve-
ment in English political and theological discussions came to be rooted in the
Solemn League and Covenant entered into by both nations in 1643. The docu-
ment committed Scotland to advancing the covenanted obligations, already
established at home in the National Covenant, into England and Ireland. For
David Stevenson, the Solemn League and Covenant represented Scottish
ambitions for a federal union with England under the conditions of religious
uniformity.52 In Scottish minds, however, this meant a renewed commitment
to maintaining the purity of religion and church government at home, along-
side a covenanted obligation to support the furthering of reform in England
and Ireland. This process was expressed theologically in Scottish contribu-
tions to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and politically through ongoing
military involvement in England’s Civil Wars—although the latter were hotly
disputed and divisive. Thus Mathieson, critical of the fruits of the pan-British
covenant, argued: ‘Instead of the union of three churches, the Solemn League
and Covenant effected only the disunion of one’.53

COVENANTING DIVISIONS

By 1648 serious fissures began to form in the Kirk, which found an expression
in the Engagement Crisis of 1648. Leading Scottish nobles agreed to assist the
king against the English parliament in exchange for a seven-year trial period of
Presbyterianism being introduced in England. Outraged by this, and aided by

50 George Gillespie, Wholsome Severity Reconciled with Christian Liberty (London, 1645),
p. 36; Robert Baillie, Satan the Leader in Chief to All Who Resist the Reparation of Sion (London,
1644), sig. A4r.
51 Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution,
1638–44 (Manchester, 2015).
52 David Stevenson, ‘The Early Covenanters and the Federal Union of Britain’, in
Roger A. Mason, ed., Scotland and England 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 163–81.
53 Mathieson, Politics and Religion, II, p. 63.
 Scotland193

Oliver Cromwell, the extreme wing of the Covenanters willing to prioritize

religious obligations over support for the king, seized control of the Scottish
government in the Whiggamore Raid. This Radical Kirk Party, whose roots
David Stevenson firmly rooted in the conventicling traditions of Dumfries and
Galloway, passed the Act of Classes excluding all participants in the Engagement
from government. By 1649 the Radical Kirk Party controlled Scotland and
pushed through further religious reforms, including the abolishment of
patronage—an issue long contentious for usurping the rights of the congrega-
tion. After Charles I’s execution in 1649, compelled by covenant obligations to
support the Stewart line, Scotland proclaimed Charles II king of all three king-
doms. In response, an English army led by Cromwell crossed the Tweed on
22 July 1650. The Radical Kirk Party, attempting to maintain the purity of their
cause, purged the army of all men deemed to be ungodly thereby reducing it by
at least 5,000. The devastating defeat that followed at Dunbar on 3 September
brought about an internal crisis within the Kirk over the interpretation of God’s
apparent abandonment of the Covenanting cause.
The moderate majority moved a public resolution to relax and eventually
rescind the Act of Classes in January 1651. The populist position became known
as the Resolutioners. Opponents from the Radical Kirk Party submitted a rem-
onstrance arguing for the reinstatement of the Act of Classes and the rejection
of Charles II. When the Resolutioner-dominated General Assemblies of 1651
and 1652 rejected the remonstrances, formal protests were submitted and the
hard-line Covenanting faction became known as Protesters. Divisions between
the two factions lasted until the Restoration and became manifest in several
ways, including whether or not to pray for the king. However, the primary issue
was who should govern the Kirk. Protesters struggled with submitting to a
Presbyterian government they believed had been usurped by an ungodly
majority. Resolutioners responded by condemning their opponents’ position
as sectarian, stressing—as the Second Book of Discipline explains—the power
to rule the Kirk is bestowed directly from Christ to those appointed to rule the
church (ministers, elders, and deacons).54 The division persisted throughout
the Interregnum and took its toll. By the end of the 1650s Samuel Rutherford
struggled to come to terms with how a national Church could be submitted
to if it remained under the rule of an ungodly majority.55 At the Restoration,
Robert Baillie suggested the Protesters be banished to Orkney.56 It seems
inconceivable the divisions between Protesters and Resolutioners could have
been resolved without the Restoration.

54 James Wood, A Declaration of the Brethren Who Are for the Established Government and
Judicatories of this Church (Edinburgh, 1658), p. 8.
55 Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, p. 224.
56 Baillie, Letters and Journals, III, p. 459.
194 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

THE FRUITS OF TOLERATION

While Protesters and Resolutioners debated how Scotland failed to uphold the
Covenants, a number of Scots instead rejected the Covenants themselves as the
root problem. In Aberdeen, Alexander Jaffray, John Menzies, John Row, and a
number of faculty members from Aberdeen’s two colleges formed an
Independent congregation, arguing the Covenants were idols for Scotland and
the national model of the Church corrupted the sacraments by distributing
them to the godly and reprobate alike. They separated in October 1652, no longer
willing to accept a bare confession of faith as sufficient for membership in the
visible church. While critics accused the Aberdeen Independents of falling
under the influence of New England’s Congregationalists, John Row denied
ever reading any works on Independency.57 Jaffray had, however, conversed
with John Owen while in English custody after the Battle of Dunbar and the
English Independent Nicholas Lockyer corresponded with the group. Ultimately,
the Aberdeen Independents seem to have been principally disillusioned by the
fruits of the Covenants and the failures of a comprehensive state Church, rather
than won over by imported ideas. As such, they should probably be understood
as an indigenous response to the failures of the Covenants. The church carried
on for an uncertain period of time, but by the Restoration all its members either
returned to the Kirk or moved on to other separatist traditions.58
Further Independent congregations formed in Edinburgh, Fenwick, Stirling,
Kirkintilloch/Lenzie, Fenwick, Stonehouse, East Kilbride, Perth, Linlithgow,
possibly Birse, Durris, and Kinkellar, and probably elsewhere. In other circum-
stances, English Independent ministers entered Scottish parishes through a
deal brokered by Patrick Gillespie, Principal of Glasgow University, with
Cromwell’s regime known as ‘Gillespie’s Charter’. The arrangement established
regional commissions for filling vacant charges. Baillie and other Resolutioners
bitterly protested against this infringement on the Kirk because a quorum of
known Independents gained the power to fill all vacant charges ‘north of Angus’,
while Gillespie’s faction controlled the west of Scotland.59 Such collusion raised
questions about Gillespie’s Protester credentials and he purportedly declared
the Covenants ‘had served their turn’, but ‘now it was at an end, and no more
obligatory’.60 Certainly Gillespie’s Protester colleagues feared his links with
English sectarians. As in England, the religious milieu of Interregnum Scotland
is probably better summarized as a series of moments rather than movements.61
Even among Scots Presbyterians the lines between traditional conventicling
and Independency could become blurred. In Skirling, Peeblesshire, the minister

57 Row, History of the Kirk, p. 533. 58 Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland, pp. 121–37.
59 Ibid., 116–21, 145–7. 60 Ibid., p. 230, n. 298.
61 Jonathan Scott, ‘The English Republican Imagination’, in John Morrill, ed., Revolution and
Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, 1992), pp. 35–54.
 Scotland195

attempted to prevent meetings for private worship in 1654 claiming they were
against the commands of the General Assembly. The parishioners retorted they
would not neglect their ‘dewtie’, since in 1647 the Kirk commanded: ‘Besides
the publick worship in congregations, mercifully established in this land in
great purity, it is expedient and necessary that secret worship of each person
alone, and private worship of families, be pressed and set up’.62
Independency could develop in Interregnum Scotland because the
Commonwealth regime introduced religious toleration in 1652 to all who
would worship in a ‘Gospel way’.63 This represented a complete innovation in
Scotland. In this environment occupying English soldiers eagerly preached
their preferred religious alternatives and debated with Kirk ministers, viewing
Scotland as a ‘field white for harvest’.64 Baptist congregations formed in Leith,
Edinburgh, Ayr, Perth, Cupar, Aberdeen, Inverness, probably Dundee, and
likely elsewhere.65 These were all in close proximity to English garrisons and,
while Scots did join them, they never developed indigenous infrastructures. As
a result, when military authorities lost trust in Baptists—due to their links with
Fifth Monarchist unrest—and purged them from the army Scots converts
quickly fell prey to Presbyterian opponents. By the Restoration it is unlikely any
Baptist gatherings continued to meet in Scotland.66 Quakers also made inroads
during the Interregnum, with Quaker activity centred in Edinburgh, Lesmahagow,
Douglas, Lenzie, Glassford, and Aberdeen.67 English missionaries poured
into the country, with at least fifty visiting Scotland between 1654 and 1657.68
Experiences varied widely from one location to another, depending on the
disposition of the local population and minister, the proximity of an English
garrison, the English commander’s disposition, and the outlook of the local
Justice of the Peace. However, as the Scots Quaker George Weir of Lesmahagow
described it, Friends experienced ‘Club Law’ at the hands of Scots Presbyterians.69
As a result, convincement always brought the risk of persecution, which ensured
the commitment of proselytes. A number of prominent Scots were convinced
including Lady Margaret Hamilton (possibly the daughter of the Duke of
Hamilton), John Swinton of Swinton, and Sir Walter Scott of Raeburn—Sir
Walter Scott’s great-great-grandfather.70 Whereas Independents and Baptists
failed to survive the Interregnum, Quakers became a permanent fixture of
the religious landscape. In fact, after the Restoration their numbers increased

62 Christopher R. Langley, ‘Times of Trouble and Deliverance: Worship in the Kirk of Scotland,
1645–1658’ (PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2012), p. 148. Church of Scotland, Directory of
Public Worship (Edinburgh, 1647), p. 1.
63 C. Innes and T. Thomson, eds, The Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, 11 vols (Edinburgh,
1814–44), VI, ii, p. 809.
64 B. Evans, The Early English Baptists, 2 vols (London, 1862–4), II, p. 190.
65 Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland, p. 161. 66 Ibid., 160–73. 67 Ibid., pp. 174–5.
68 G.B. Burnet, The Story of Quakerism in Scotland 1650–1850 (London, 1952), p. 15.
69 George Weare, The Doctrins & Principles of the Priests of Scotland (London, 1657), pp. 79–83.
70 Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland, p. 184.
196 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

significantly, especially in Aberdeenshire where they secured an important

foothold with the Barclays of Ury. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these
dissenting traditions in Scotland is not the rapidity of sects in a land unfamiliar
with toleration, but rather the mutual support they demonstrated. Just as dis-
senting traditions turned on one another in late Interregnum England, Scottish
Baptists, Quakers, and Independents jointly petitioned Westminster to secure
their religious toleration. They asked ‘for ourselves, and several others in this
Nation, That you will take care to provide for our just Liberties; that we may
share in those Gospel Priviledges that the truly Godly in England contend
for. . . And that any Laws or Acts of Parliament of this Nation [Scotland] con-
trary hereunto may be abolished.’71 Approximately 200 men and one woman
signed the petition, from as far afield as Orkney.72 In a nation with a population
of over 1 million, the signatories represented a drop in the bucket; however,
they should not be understood to represent a complete list of religious dis-
senters. The evidence from the period suggests women probably outnumbered
men in most of the traditions represented.73 A more realistic estimate might be
attested in James Guthrie’s claim that ‘scarce’ one in 1,000 Scots joined sects.74
Although small in number, their joint action terrified Scots into supporting the
Restoration in hopes of reinstating Presbyterianism and ending toleration.

RESTORATION

Despite widespread hopes for the reestablishment of Presbyterianism, the 1661

Act Recissory rolled the Church of Scotland back to 1618, thereby re-establishing
the episcopacy of James VI’s reign. By 1661 new bishops consecrated in London
filled the sees of St Andrews, Glasgow, Dunblane, and Galloway, and all minis-
ters entered into charges after 1649 (when patronage was abolished) were
required to secure the support of the local patron and be collated by the bishop
of their diocese by 20 September 1662 or face deprivation.75 While the histori-
ography of the period heralds widespread resistance and nonconformity, recent
work has demonstrated the reality was much more complex. In total approxi-
mately 270 ministers—one-quarter to one-third of the total number in the
country—were deprived of their charges by 1662–3, with others hounded out

71 National Library of Scotland (NLS), Wod.Fol.XXX.(27).

72 Spurlock, Cromwell and Scotland, pp. 189–94. 73 Ibid., p. 191.
74 James Guthrie, Some Considerations Contributing Unto the Discoverie of the Dangers That
Threaten Religion and the Work of the Reformation in the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1660),
pp. 65, 66.
75 Robert Wodrow, The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 4 vols (Glasgow,
1828–30), I, p. 283; Brown, RPS, 1662/5/15; 1663/6/19.
 Scotland197

in subsequent years.76 Yet the majority of ministers and laypeople conformed.

Andrew Honyman, a Covenanter who became Bishop of Orkney in 1664, argued
the original National Covenant lacked any renunciation of episcopacy and there-
fore the added Glasgow determination could not be binding. He implored
his fellow ministers to consider the rashness of abandoning ministerial work
‘for the good and salvation of [God’s] people’ rather than accept collation
(not ordination) from a bishop.77 Not all his colleagues agreed, but his fellow
Covenanter Robert Leighton accepted the bishopric of Dunblane. Leighton
could conform because the Covenants needed ‘to be repented for’, since ‘we
placd mor religion in opposing ther [episcopal] ceremonies then in the
weightiest matters of the law of God’. Moreover, he did not consider liturgy or
discipline as weightier matters of faith.78 Another conforming minister was
James Sharp, the great apostate Resolutioner turned Archbishop of St Andrews.
According to Julia Buckroyd, Sharp recognized the inevitably of episcopal
restoration and conformed to ensure Scots maintained some control over
their Church.79 These men may not have been the norm, but it seems likely
their positions give a broad range of opinions to help explain why the majority
of ministers opted to continue their ministries rather than abandon their
charges. This conformity was eased in Scotland by the lack of re-ordination and
the haphazard imposition of liturgical standards, as compared with England.
Moreover, the legal requirement to repudiate the Covenants was ameliorated by
diverse practices in administering oaths among Restoration bishops.
While ministers continued to be hounded out for their dissatisfaction with
the shape of the Episcopalian settlement in the early years of the Restoration,
the policies of John Maitland, Secretary of Scotland, sought to bring noncon-
forming clergy into the national Church by extending indulgences. These
required ministers to be collated by a bishop and attend kirk sessions, presby-
teries and synods.80 The latter point is important. Despite some historians
claiming Presbyterian church courts were abolished, this is not the case. In fact,
the Restoration reaffirmed sessions, presbyteries and synods, albeit they were
temporarily suspended until reorganized by the local bishop.81 The traditional
structure at a local level persisted with the parish church being defined by
the roles of the minister, elders, and kirk session. Moreover, they resumed
their traditional role as the base unit of the national Church with legislation

76 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh and London, 1965),
pp. 365–6.
77 Andrew Honyman, The Seasonable Case of Submission to the Church-Government as Now
Re-Established by Law (Edinburgh, 1662), pp. 8, 36.
78 David Laing, ed., Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, First Earl of Ancram and his Son William,
Third Earl of Lothians, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1885), II, p. 456.
79 Julia Buckroyd, The Life of James Sharp (Edinburgh, 1987), p. 71.
80 Wodrow, History of the Sufferings, I, p. 305.
81 Brown, RPS, 1662/5/9; RPCS, Third Series, I, pp. 130–1.
198 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

forbidding separation from the Church or absence from the local parish during
time of divine worship for either ‘popery or other disaffection to the present
government of the church’.82 Crimes such as slander, adultery, and witchcraft,
as well as poor relief, remained the jurisdiction of the kirk session.83 These
continuities no doubt aided the conformity of many ministers and aided the
success of the indulgences in bringing ministers back into the Kirk: forty-three
in 1669 and ninety in 1672.
Perhaps more importantly than clerical responses, however, are those of the
laity. The complexity of dealing with the dramatic changes of the previous
decades cannot be oversimplified. The promises of being a blessed nation under
the Covenants, the shock of the Cromwellian conquest and occupation, and
the reestablishment of episcopacy made for a challenging interpretation of
providence. The wholesale and rapid transformation of the church in 1662–3,
according to Alexander Brodie, left men wrestling to come to terms by ‘ther
oun light’.84 According to the most recent study of the period, the overwhelm-
ing majority (at least two-thirds) of the laity conformed to some degree. In fact,
according to Alasdair Raffe, ‘only a small number of lay people consistently
refused to recognise the episcopalian church’ and as such he questions whether
any Scots who attended episcopal churches, even occasionally, should be con-
sidered Presbyterian. Moreover, he suggests partial conformity in Scotland
‘was typically a product of pragmatism, rather than of principle’.85 This view, as
yet untested in Scottish historiography, does not adequately take into account
similar experiences in England, where analysis of partial conformity is much
more nuanced and underappreciates the evidence provided in Brodie’s com-
ments, which imply a deep concern for principles.86 In this respect the situation
in Scotland is more difficult to unpick than in England, Wales, or Ireland. In
Scotland it appears many people attended their local churches and supple-
mented this with occasional participation in conventicles. Brodie described his
conformity as ‘complying by titles, fair words, and the lyke’ but hoped ‘this
complacency be no snare to me, nor may it be to others’—albeit he refused to
take communion.87 This may typify a large portion of the Scottish population,
who could not embrace episcopacy wholeheartedly, but neither could he
deny—despite its faults—the Kirk remained the legitimate national Church.
Mark Mirabello helpfully divides Restoration Presbyterian dissent into three
phases: 1663–8, 1668–79 and 1680–7. From 1663 to 1668 very few conventicles
formed and instead a widespread dissatisfaction with the covenanting cause

82 Brown, RPS, 1663/6/19. 83 RPCS, Third Series, I, pp. lvi, 542, 550, 649.
84 Alexander Brodie, Diary of Alexander Brodie of Brodie, 1652–80 (Aberdeen, 1863), p. 266.
85 Alasdair Raffe, The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714
(Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 34, 181.
86 John D. Ramsbottom, ‘Presbyterians and “Partial Conformity” in the Restoration Church of
England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 43 (1992), 249–70.
87 Brodie, Diary, p. 277.
 Scotland199

led to overwhelming conformity.88 Between 1668 and 1679 a gradual growth of

conventicles occurred and these expressed increasingly militant leanings.89 To
a significant extent the growth owed to the mobilization and leadership of a
younger generation who lacked any first-hand experience of the Covenanting
Revolution’s failure or the Cromwellian occupation, but which was reared on the
radicalized ideology epitomized in James Stewart’s Naphtali which emphatically
espoused ‘this whole Nation is perpetually joyned unto the Lord’ and ‘almost as
to the number of persons, the Church of Scotland was of equal extent with the
Nation’.90 Yet Stewart stepped beyond corporate responsibility using the Old
Testament figure Phineas to justify the individual serving as God’s implement
for punishing evil.91 These developments found further support from an exile
community in the Netherlands.92 The most significant aspects of this period
were the assassination of James Sharp in 1679, the mobilization of an estimated
5–7,000 men in the wake of the Battle of Drumclog (1679) and the 1680 Sanquar
Declaration in which Richard Cameron and other covenanting leaders
denounced the king as an enemy and excommunicant. In response, James,
Duke of York, replaced Maitland as the crown’s representative in Scotland.
He brought both an uncompromising policy against radical Presbyterians
and a willingness to extend toleration to Catholics, Quakers, and moderate
Presbyterians. According to Mirabello, 1680–7 witnessed an overall reduction
of conventicles and widespread conformity due in part to the violent and schis-
matic tendencies of the Cameronians and United Societies.93 In 1681 James
coerced the Scottish parliament into passing the Test Oath, which required
all public officials and ministers to swear to the crown’s supremacy in both
political and ecclesiastical matters. This marginalized not only Presbyterians,
but also some Episcopalians like James Blair, who was deprived from his charge,
moved to England, and eventually became commissary to the Virginia Colony
and the College of William and Mary’s founder.94 However, this is not what
has typified the period in popular memory. Instead, with the help of Robert
Wodrow (1679–1734) and Thomas M’Crie (1772–1835), the period between
1681 and 1688 is popularly remembered as the Killing Times. Hagiographical
accounts estimate as many as 18,000 Covenanters died.95 This number is certainly

88 Mark Mirabello, ‘Dissent and the Church of Scotland, 1660–1690’ (PhD thesis, University of
Glasgow, 1988), pp. 168–80.
89 Ibid., pp. 185–206.
90 James Stewart, Naphtali (1667), sigs A2r–A3, pp. 183–4. Mark Jardine, ‘The United Societies:
Militancy, Martyrdom and the Presbyterian Movement in Late-Restoration Scotland, 1679 to
1688’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009), I, p. 42.
91 Stewart, Naphtali, pp. 20–5; Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, p. 177.
92 Ginny Gardiner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton,
2004).
93 Mirabello, ‘Dissent’, pp. 215–30. 94 RPCS, VII, pp. 296–7.
95 ‘Covenants’, in Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland (London, 1994); Andrew N.T. Muirhead,
Reformation, Dissent and Diversity: The Story of Scotland’s Churches, 1560–1960) (London, 2015),
p. 23. J.K. Hewison in his The Covenanters, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1913) interpreted 18,000 as including
all those who suffered: death, persecution, transportation, and banishment (II, p. 512).
200 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

an overestimation—no precise figure is possible to confirm. What is certain

is approximately one hundred men and women faced trial and execution, while
another eighty or so were cut down in the fields.96 Others faced imprisonment
or banishment and others chose self-exile in Ireland or the Netherlands. Yet
not all who adhered to the Covenants through the period were as radical as
Cameron’s followers. In 1684 the Privy Council examined George Smith as
to whether he owned the Covenants, opposed the king, or condoned violence.
Smith replied he held ‘all the covenants’, rejected violence desiring to live and
peace, and would only take up arms in self-defence. He was banished for not
swearing off resistance to the crown.97
Like earlier periods, Restoration nonconformity needs to be understood as
diverse and variable. Despite its numerical minority, it proved fundamental for
the development of Scottish identity and at times may have exceeded rates
of nonconformity estimated in England in the period of 3–5 per cent, but not
consistently. Instead the boundaries between the Established Church and
nonconformity were permeable, and nonconforming networks spanned large
geographical areas, though were particularly strong in the west. Moreover,
nonconformity should not be limited to Presbyterian traditions, nor should all
Scots be understood to have viewed the Restoration in the same way. Despite
Quakers being banned by a 1661 Act of Parliament, they tended to see the
Restoration as a day of reckoning for their Presbyterian oppressors. Andrew
Robeson posited, ‘Who shall turn it backwards? Tho breirs, & thorns may
now spring up, their comes a day of burning. Hath he not washt away thy laite
oppressors [Presbyterians] as with a flood?’98 He expected the same would
eventually happen to the Episcopalian regime. Yet, Quakers did not fare well in
the first decades of the Restoration, facing public ridicule, dispossession of
goods, and extended periods of imprisonment without trial. However, James
worked to ease their situation from 1681. He used connections at court to
support colonial projects, including East New Jersey, which although largely
bankrolled by Quakers also found support from the Catholic Earl of Perth. The
proprietors elected the Aberdonian Robert Barclay as the colony’s first governor,
though he never visited the colony. Quaker numbers increased throughout
the Restoration—especially in Aberdeenshire—and meetinghouses were secured
or built in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kelso, Gartshore, and elsewhere.99
In 1687 they benefited from a toleration by James VII’s royal decree—having
succeeded his brother in 1685—extended to Catholics, Quakers, and ‘moderate’
Presbyterians on condition of an oath upholding the crown’s supreme power
and authority.100

96 Rosalind Mitchison, A History of Scotland (London and New York, 2002), p. 207.
97 RPCS, Third series, IX, p. 210.    98 NLS, MS. 2201, f. 100.
99 Burnet, The Story of Quakerism, pp. 51–5, 92–108, 134, 173.
100 Wodrow, History of the Suffering, IV, p. 418.
 Scotland201

Despite his leniency in matters of religion, the ascendency of James

c­ onsolidated opposition to the Stuart monarchy. A flood of high-profile con-
versions to Catholicism—including the Earl of Perth—the establishment of a
Jesuit school at Holyrood, and toleration of the Mass provoked riots in Edinburgh.
Moreover, toleration proved largely unwelcome to many Presbyterians as it put
them on equal footing with Quakers and Catholics. Nevertheless, Presbyterians
did take advantage and established seventy-two meetings, mostly in eastern
and central Scotland.101 These represented a distinct expression from the
United Societies and proved important. When James fled the following year,
the Glorious Revolution brought the possibility of restoring Presbyterianism.
The Synod of Aberdeen wrote to William of Orange, expressing their hope he
would be ‘the instrument of our deliverence’ for union between ‘our Protestant
brethren who differ . . . only in matters of church government’ so that they
might ‘tolerate one another in these things wherein we may still differ’.102
Importantly, the path chosen rejected the tradition maintained by the radical
Covenanters. The 1690 settlement made no mention of the Covenants and instead
re-established Presbyterianism on the doctrinal grounds of the Westminster
Assembly. This marginalized the small number vehemently supporting the
covenanted position and they remained outside what they perceived to be an
erastian form of Presbyterianism. The settlement also excluded supporters of
episcopacy and those who refused an oath of loyalty to William and Mary—
including all the Scottish bishops—became known as non-jurors and were
outlawed. Five hundred ministers were removed in 1688 and a further 664
between 1689 and 1719, numbers far exceeding the Restoration period.103 In
1695 Scotland’s parliament did extend an indulgence to Episcopalian ministers
allowing them to become qualified upon taking the oath of allegiance, albeit
they also reenssured Presbyterian supremacy by passing an act against irregular
marriages and baptisms.104
The increasingly British nature of Scottish politics by the late seventeenth
century heightened the need for legal parity between England and Scotland,
especially after England established religious toleration in 1689. The catalyst for
change in Scotland came not from English Dissenting traditions, but rather
from English Episcopalians and the crown. A draft act of toleration for all forms
of Protestant was read before the Scottish parliament in 1703 at the instigation
of Queen Anne, but opposition from the Kirk scuppered it.105 The 1707 Act of
Union made the matter even more urgent, but since both kingdoms retained
separate legal and ecclesiastical structures the new united parliament was
understood to have had no remit in religious matters. The issue came to a head
in 1711. After being imprisoned for conducting episcopal worship in Scotland
James Greenshields petitioned parliament. In response, Westminster moved to

101 Jardine, ‘The United Societies’, I, p. 173.    102 Brown, RPS, A1689/6/8.
103 Stevenson, ‘Deposition of Ministers’, p. 334.    104 Brown, RPS, 1695/5/118.
105 Ibid., 1703/5/52, 1703/5/56.
202 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

extend the rights of toleration granted to Protestant Dissenters in England to

‘North-Britain’ through a 1712 Act of Toleration.106 Despite many Scots viewing
this as a fundamental breach of the Union, in May the General Assembly of the
Kirk rescinded the 1695 act against irregular marriage and baptism, ratified the
Act of Toleration and reintroduced patronage so Episcopalian heritors could
present sympathetic candidates. Although primarily intended to grant religious
freedom to juring-Episcopalians, these acts signalled a sea change by removing
the means for preventing schism. Religious diversity increased with the estab-
lishment of Glasite churches (1730), the return of Baptists from 1750, and
Presbyterian secessions in 1733 and 1761. While Scottish Protestantism came to
be typified by secession and division, that represented a marked change. What
typified Protestant Scotland from the Reformation until 1712 were (i) an over-
arching desire for a united national Church, and (ii) resistance to authoritarian
church governance that usurped congregational rights. Both these principles
stretched back to the Reformation. Conflict erupted in Scottish Protestantism
when the equilibrium between local rights and national governance became
imbalanced—as can be seen in both opposition to jure divino episcopacy and
the fragmentation of hard-line Covenanting—but this rarely drifted to the
extreme of a congregation challenging a national ecclesiology.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Buckroyd, Julia, Church and State in Scotland 1660–1681 (Edinburgh, 1976).
Campbell, Alexander D., The Life and Works of Robert Baillie, 1602–1662: Politics,
Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars (Woodbridge, 2017).
Coffey, John, Politics, Religion and the British Revolution: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford
(Cambridge, 1997).
Dawson, Jane E.A., Scotland Re-Formed, 1488–1587 (Edinburgh, 2007).
Donaldson, Gordon, ‘The Emergence of Schism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, in
Gordon Donaldson, Scottish Church History (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 204–19.
Foster, Walter R., The Church Before the Covenants. The Church of Scotland 1596–1638
(Edinburgh, 1975).
Graham, Michael F., The Uses of Reform. ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular Behaviour in
Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (Leiden, 1996).
Greaves, Richard, Theology and Revolution in the Scottish Reformation (Grand Rapids,
MI, 1980).
Jackson, Clare, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690 (Woodbridge, 2003).
Kirk, James, ed., The Second Book of Discipline (Edinburgh, 1980).
MacDonald, Alan, The Jacobean Kirk, 1567–1625 (Farnham, 1998).
Makey, Walter, The Church of the Covenant, 1637–1651 (Edinburgh, 1979).
Mullan, David G., Scottish Puritanism, 1598–1638 (Oxford, 2000).

106 Collection of the Laws in Favour of the Reformation in Scotland, pp. 244–5.
 Scotland203

Raffe, Alasdair, The Culture of Controversy: Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714

(Woodbridge, 2012).
Spurlock, R. Scott, Cromwell and Scotland: Conquest and Religion, 1650–1660
(Edinburgh, 2007).
Stevenson, David, The Scottish Revolution, 1637–44 (Edinburgh, 1973; repr. 2003).
Stevenson, David, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (London,
1977; repr. 2003).
Stewart, Laura A.M., Urban Politics and the British Civil Wars: Edinburgh, 1617–53
(Leiden, 2006).
Stewart, Laura A.M., Rethinking The Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–1651
(Oxford, 2016).
Todd, Margo, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven,
CT, 2002).
 9

Ireland
Crawford Gribben

Protestant nonconformity and dissent in early modern Ireland was both

energized and enervated by its relationships to the Established Church, the
majority Catholic population, and the changing political environments of the
neighbouring island and the religious loyalties of its governments and royal
families.1 The Irish reformation had legal beginnings that reflected its distinctive
political culture: in 1537, three years after the equivalent English act, the Irish
parliament passed its Act of Supremacy, which it renewed in 1560, though, as
throughout the three kingdoms, the Protestant reformation that was thus initi-
ated was not secured until the early eighteenth century and the accession of the
House of Hanover. The community of Irish Protestants that was created by this
legislation existed in a distinctive context at the heart of a European and
increasingly trans-Atlantic nexus of institutions, ideas, and personnel.2 But the
Irish reformation was not a success. Unusually, in European terms, the island’s
majority population did not adhere to the religious determination of its
­governments. The principle of cuius regio, eius religio, which was established in

1 For standard accounts of Protestant dissent and nonconformity in sixteenth- and

s­ eventeenth-century Ireland, see J.C. Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (London, 1968);
Aidan Clarke, ‘Varieties of Reformation: The First Century of the Church of Ireland’, in W.J. Shiels
and Diana Wood, eds, The Churches, Ireland and the Irish: Studies in Church History, Studies in
Church History 25 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 105–22; Phil Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in
Ireland, 1660–1714 (Cork, 1994); Alan Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’ in
Alan Ford, James McGuire, and Kenneth Milne, eds, As By Law Established: The Church of Ireland
Since the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), pp. 52–68; Alan Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland,
1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997); Richard L. Greaves, God’s Other Children: Protestant Nonconformists and
the Emergence of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660–1700 (Stanford, CA, 1997); Crawford
Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 2007); and Robert
Whan, The Presbyterians of Ulster, 1680–1730 (Woodbridge, 2013); Alan Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant
Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, in David Edwards with Simon Egan, eds, The Scots in
Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 116–40; and the
essays contained in Kevin Herlihy’s invaluable edited collections, The Irish Dissenting Tradition,
1650–1750 (Dublin, 1995); The Religion of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1996); The Politics of Irish
Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1997); and Propagating the Word of Irish Dissent (Dublin, 1998).
2 Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, pp. 7–20.

Crawford Gribben, Ireland In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey,
Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0010
 Ireland205

the Peace of Augsburg (1555) as a method of settling the question of national

religious adherence, gave way in Ireland in the face of the practical difficulty of
imposing the new faith, without its failure ever raising suggestions that reli-
gious pluralism might serve as an appropriate alternative. This alternative was
explored elsewhere: in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, after the Warsaw
Confederation (1573), Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Bohemian
Brethren, Unitarians, and Jews were provided with legal recognition.3 In Ireland,
only the most minor Dissenting groups appealed for any policy of toleration,
and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, while throughout most of
the period churchmen and politicians of competing religious loyalties remained
committed to the ideal of a single national religious community.
Irish churchmen and politicians expected to realize the formation of this
single national religious community by political, legal, administrative, and
doctrinal means. The efforts of the changing personnel of the Church of Ireland
hierarchy to identify a doctrinal centre, to manage nonconformity, and then to
enforce conformity, provided their community with a privileged, if perpetually
unsettled, position. In securing the rights of the Church by law established,
the bishops were unable to prohibit the worship of the most important groups
of Protestant nonconformists, who seemed continually to grow in numbers,
wealth, and influence; and, in requiring these nonconformists to adhere to the
establishment, they were creating the conditions for dissent. By the early eight-
eenth century, one of these Dissenting groups, the Presbyterians, had so grown
in terms of membership and political clout, by reason of its close association
with the Church of Scotland and its numerical consequence as a necessary ally
in the face of Irish Catholic danger, seriously to threaten the privileges of the
Established Church. And so the legal position of these Dissenters remained
ambiguous. On the one hand, the act of uniformity (1665) brought education
under episcopal oversight, by requiring schoolteachers to conform to the Church
of Ireland, and imposed a £100 fine on anyone overseeing the administration of
the Eucharist without having been episcopally ordained; on the other hand, three
decades later, in 1697, Irish MPs formally approved the long-standing habit of
not enforcing the provision of the 1560 act that required attendance at parish
worship.4 Throughout the seventeenth century, like other Dissenters, Presbyterians
suffered social, educational, legal, and political inequalities, even as attendance at
Catholic worship was forbidden, under the penal laws, then connived at, until, in
the reign of James II, it was, briefly, rewarded and made fashionable.
The Irish history of religious nonconformity, dissent, and toleration is there-
fore distinctive.5 The English Toleration Act (1689) made little difference to the
circumstances of Irish Protestant Dissenters, and although they benefited from

3 C. Scott Dixon, The Church in the Early Modern Age (London, 2016), p. 89.
4 Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 40.
5 Compare, for example, John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689
(London, 2000).
206 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

James’s Declaration of Indulgence (1687) and the granting of limited rights for
Dissenters under the Toleration Act (1719), their access to the opportunities of
public service was only guaranteed with the removal of the sacramental test in
1780, as Andrew Holmes’s chapter in a subsequent volume observes.6 For much of
the period under discussion in this chapter, Presbyterian marriages were not
subject to the legal liabilities that became increasingly problematic in the first half
of the eighteenth century, when, in different political contexts, representatives of
the establishment grew increasingly frustrated with the government’s indulgence
of their most significant rivals. The continuity of popular Catholicism is therefore
not the only evidence for the frustration of magisterial Protestantism: the manage-
ment of nonconformity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the
emergence of organized Dissent in the mid-seventeenth century, and the
perpetual growth of its community offer additional evidence of popular resistance
to the principle of cuius regio, eius religio. Catholic resilience and the consequent
need for the government to rely on the intransigence of Protestant nonconformity
and dissent were both reasons for the failure of the Irish reformation.
This chapter will survey the emergence and evolution of Irish Protestant
nonconformity and dissent in the period before 1689. It will consider the chan-
ging circumstances of nonconformists and dissenters, and the changing utility
of these descriptors, in the contexts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
During this period, the Irish establishment moved from theological ambiguity
towards two different confessional standards and methods of subscription, and
through the structural tensions caused by Laudian reform and Wentworth’s
insistence upon liturgical conformity, Cromwellian revolution with its associ-
ated ecclesiastical pragmatism and valuing of difference, and the new alle-
giances of the ‘Protestant interest’ after the Restoration. Dissenters, meanwhile,
moved from being the tolerated allies of a sympathetic establishment to become
the victims of Laudian reform, the constituents of Cromwellian innovation, to
become ineffectually marginalized during the Restoration and the most serious
threat to the stability of the Protestant Ireland after the Williamite wars. This
chapter will consider the emergence and evolution of Irish dissent with refer-
ence to attempts at confessionalization; the impact of the migration of ideas
and individuals to and from Scotland, England, the American colonies, France,
and the Palatinate; the functions and occasional absences of confessions of
faith, and the different purposes they served; the negotiation of law, power, and
finance within a colonial situation; and the development of distinctive denom-
inational communities through the 1650s alongside the emergence of a
­pan-denominational ‘Protestant interest’ after the Restoration that could not
overcome the denominational loyalties of Dissent, even in the context of the
early Jacobite exile, the renewal of war across the three kingdoms, and the
expectations of religious and constitutional change that followed.

6 Andrew R. Holmes, ‘Protestant dissent in Ireland’, in Andrew C. Thompson (ed.), The Oxford
History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Vol II: The Long Eighteenth Century, c.1689–c.1828
(Oxford, 2018), pp. 119–38.
 Ireland207

Throughout this period, as Irish dissent absorbed personnel and ideas from
the established Church of Scotland, the new religious movements that emerged
during the English Revolution, the established churches of American colonies,
and, eventually, the Reformed churches of France and the Palatinate, it devel-
oped a numerical strength greater in proportion than that of Dissenters in
England and Scotland, and claimed, in the north-east of the island, a number
of adherents larger than that of the Church of Ireland. The significance of the
Dissenting community was recognized in the early 1670s, when Charles II
began the programme of providing state funding for Presbyterian ministers,
and was confirmed at the Glorious Revolution, when William III consolidated
this regium donum and repealed a great deal of discriminatory legislation—a
financial policy that divided the Presbyterian denomination even as it recog-
nized its social standing and, effectively, admitted the significance of its link to
an Established Church elsewhere in the three kingdoms. The regium donum
privileged one Dissenting group above the others—in contrast to England,
where Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers remained a significant
presence—and identified Presbyterians as the ‘most equal’ of those who would
not conform. By the end of the seventeenth century, other Protestant Dissenting
communities had suffered serious decline, in parallel with the Cromwellian
networks by which they had been supported, and the tiny number of surviving
Baptist and Independent congregations were hovering on the verge of extinc-
tion, hardly warranting a reference in J.C. Beckett’s standard account of
Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (1968). But the Presbyterians, the earli-
est and largest of Irish Dissenting movements, retaining strong links to the
Church of Scotland and its educational institutions, while expanding into the
American colonies, emerged from the ambiguity of the late reformation
and the instability of the Cromwellian interlude to be officially recognized as
an Established Church in waiting. Politically marginal while numerically
superior, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, Dissent had come to be
recognized as the dominant expression of Protestantism in the most
Protestant parts of Ireland. Its significance was structural: the failure of
the Irish reformation was both a cause and consequence of Protestant non-
conformity and Dissent, and the inability of the establishment to control it.
Paradoxically, Dissent dominated, if it did not denominate, the Irish
Protestant experience.

REFORMATION, NONCONFORMIT Y,
AND THE EMERGENCE OF DISSENT

The failure of the Irish reformation made possible the emergence of Protestant
nonconformity. Historians have struggled to explain the extent to which and
the reasons why the reformation failed, despite the fact that this question was
208 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

regularly debated at the end of the twentieth century.7 This debate may not have
paid sufficient attention to the fact that the failure of Protestant confessionali-
zation was represented not only by an enduring popular Catholicism, but also
by the existence of a community of Protestant Dissenters, which through much
of this period, as we have noted, was growing in numbers, wealth, influence,
and confidence.8
Despite their divisions, Irish Protestants had much in common. They tended
to share the same religious-discursive method, drawing on the Reformed
theology that had become normative in the Established Churches of the three
kingdoms, while offering different accounts of church government and, later,
the sacraments. Irish Protestants also tended to share a conspiratorial and
apocalyptic worldview, agreeing that the old faith represented a serious threat
to their security. Their apologists substantiated this claim by reference to
Spanish and Italian incursions in Smerwick (1580) and Kinsale (1601), by the
widely publicized Ulster rebellion (1641), and by fears that its enormities could
be repeated following the reinstatement by James II of Catholics in civil society
in the late 1680s, and by the simultaneous return to its former owners of land
confiscated as a consequence of the Cromwellian settlement. Irish Protestants
located their apocalyptic and conspiratorial concerns at the heart of their fes-
tive culture, with commemorations of the 1641 rebellion held each 23 October
to reiterate the binary division of the Irish population.9 In the later seventeenth
century, these similarities allowed members of different communities to work
together in defence of ‘the Protestant interest’. But this substantial similarity of
belief, and the shared conviction about the perfidy and peril represented by the
Catholic majority, was unable to encourage Irish Protestants to bury their
ecclesiastical differences under the oversight of the Church by law established.
Nonconformity became evident early in the history of Irish Protestantism.
Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Protestant
population, while wielding considerable political, financial, and military
power, consolidated around (and occasionally against) an often weak establish-
ment, drawing support from a tiny minority of the population except in those
areas where policies of ‘plantation’ had been or were being pursued, in the mid-
lands, Munster, and the north-east, as well as in the Pale, the immediate vicinity

7 B.I. Bradshaw, ‘Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland’, Historical Journal,
21 (1978), 475–502; N.P. Canny, ‘Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland: Une question mal posée’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), 423–50; K.S. Bottigheimer, ‘The Failure of the
Reformation in Ireland: Une question bien posée’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 36 (1985),
196–207; S.G. Ellis, ‘Economic Problems of the Church: Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 41 (1990), 239–65.
8 Elizabethanne Boran, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben, eds,
Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, St Andrews Studies in Reformation
History (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 1–13.
9 T.C. Barnard, ‘The Uses of the 23rd October and Irish Protestant Celebrations’, in Irish
Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 111–42.
 Ireland209

of Dublin.10 Outside these centres of English and Scottish cultural, financial,

and political influence, Protestant reform was stymied by the barriers of lan-
guage: for the greater part of this period, the Established Church lacked clergy
and a Bible translation appropriate to the needs of the Irish-speaking majority.
Throughout most of the island, the Established Church was slow to pursue a
programme of confessionalization, clerical appointments did not seem to require
clear commitment to reformist or anti-reformist ideals, and the ideological
leaders of both Protestant and Catholic reformations lamented the financial,
architectural, theological, and moral poverty of the Irish Church.11
The number of Protestants was, initially, small. In the 1590s, Presbyterian
ministers seeking refuge from the Church of England found safe havens in the
recently founded Trinity College Dublin. This fluidity may have permitted the
emergence of a small number of religious communities of Separatists similar to
those that were emerging in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century
England. Alan Ford has suggested that Henry Ainsworth was the Separatist
who, in 1594, condemned the Established Church as being ‘in bondage’ and
bearing ‘the yoke of antichrist’: Ainsworth was certainly operating in Ireland in
the early 1590s, en route to his becoming leader of the Separatist congregation
in Amsterdam. Several Separatist congregations from London moved en masse
to Ireland: one church arrived with its minister in Carrickfergus in the early
1620s, and in the early 1630s another church settled in the nearby town of
Antrim.12 In the same period, John Winthrop was one of a number of English
Puritans who explored the possibility of joining a plantation project near
Mountrath, county Laois, hoping to find an environment in which he could
create ex nihilo the godly society he had so far found elusive. The Mountrath
project was one of several to benefit from organized migration, this time
from the Stour Valley, in the Puritan heartland of Essex.13 For many of these
nonconformists, Ireland represented a final destination, but for others, includ-
ing Henry Ainsworth, the island was a staging post in a journey to religious
freedoms elsewhere.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, religious refugees were
attracted to Ireland by the theological rigour and ecclesiological pragmatism of
the Established Church. The settlement of refugee Calvinists and the formation
of a shadowy nonconformist underground should not obscure the reality that,
pursuing a very conservative tendency to include rather than exclude existing
clergy, the Church that consolidated English power in Ireland was becoming
Protestant at a much slower pace than that of the Church of England. Nevertheless,
in 1615, enthusiasts for further reformation encouraged the Convocation of the

10 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).

11 Boran, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–13.
12 Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, p. 118.
13 Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: American’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, 2015),
pp. 138–40.
210 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Church of Ireland to move beyond the theological ambiguity of the previous

decades formally to adopt a confession of faith that in its doctrinal rigour went
far beyond the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England
(1563). The new statement of faith, the Irish Articles, overwhelmed the theo-
logical constitution of the English Church in terms of length and controversial
precision. Its 104 theological statements advanced a robust Calvinism along-
side an apocalyptic view of the situation of the Irish Church, which, following
a small number of European confessions of faith, including the Hungarian
Confessio Catholica (1562), identified the pope as the antichrist. This zealotry
emphasized the clear blue water that lay between the Established Churches of
Ireland and England. For the Irish Articles included a number of theological
claims that had featured in the Lambeth Articles (1595), a statement of Puritan
grievance that had been repudiated by the English bishops, a situation that
suggests that the Church of Ireland was closer to the ideology of the hotter sort
of English Protestants than to that of the establishment they sought to reform.14
It is for this reason that historians have debated whether the Church of Ireland
might best be described as ‘Puritan’.15
Even as in the early seventeenth century the Established Church grew more
theologically rigorous, however, it continued to offer security to Protestants
who could not accept its preferred model of episcopal government. This
­balance of soteriological precision and ecclesiological pragmatism proved
attractive to Puritans in the other two Stuart kingdoms. The Irish Church was
projecting in emphatic terms its new Puritan identity at exactly the time that
the godly in the Established Churches of Scotland and England were looking
for a new home, and as large-scale plantation projects brought around 10,000
settlers from south-west Scotland into counties Antrim and Down. These
Puritan refugees were welcomed into the Irish Reformed church, and helped to
supply its pastoral needs, with clergy from the highlands and islands some-
times engaging in evangelistic preaching in Irish-speaking areas and occasion-
ally being given opportunities to disseminate their radical opinions by means
of teaching positions in the church’s new seminary, Trinity College Dublin.16
But the loyalty of these English and Scottish Puritans was conditional. As the
plantations in Antrim and Down increased in size, Scottish clergy found them-
selves serving congregations that were dominated by their fellow countrymen,
and who retained many of their Scottish Presbyterian preferences, even as
some of their Gaelic-speaking countrymen began to assimilate into the Catholic

14 Clarke, ‘Varieties of Reformation’, pp. 105–122; Alan Ford, ‘Dependent or Independent: The
Church of Ireland and its Colonial Contexts, 1536–1647’, The Seventeenth Century, 10 (1995),
163–87; Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’ pp. 52–68.
15 See, particularly, Ford, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’
16 See, generally, Ford, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland.
 Ireland211

cultures of the north-east.17 In 1622, Scottish ministers accounted for ten of the
eighteen clergy in the diocese of Down, and thirteen of the twenty-one clergy
in Connor. Between 1613 and 1635, as many as two-thirds of clerical appointees
within Down and Connor may have been Scots,18 and their congregations may
have numbered as many as 1,500 members.19 The bishops of the Church of
Ireland were eager to facilitate this sudden influx of Presbyterians, whose num-
bers would bolster the religious settlement of a province that had long been the
subject of Protestant complaint.20
Seizing the opportunity, ecclesiastical authorities in the north-east of Ireland
turned a blind eye to the liturgical delinquency of some of the Scottish ministers.
It did not take long for some of this delinquency to become established. When
John Livingstone was ordained, for example, the Bishop of Raphoe, Andrew
Knox, asked him to score out any part of the service that he found objection-
able; but, Livingstone noted, ‘I found that it had been so marked by some others
before that I needed not mark anything.’21 Inevitably, this modus operandi
required compromise on both sides. The bishops’ liturgical flexibility—if not
negligence—was made possible by the fact that the Irish Articles had concen-
trated upon soteriological rather than ecclesiological themes, and could not be
used to push these hotter sorts of Protestants into formal ecclesiastical dissent.
For their part, the Presbyterians had resisted the temptation to establish a
fully functioning disciplinary system, for which they had been struggling in
Scotland. Neither the bishops nor the émigré Presbyterians were insisting
on the details of their competing systems, and the result was that the church
prevented dissent by allowing space for nonconformity.
This situation changed in the early 1630s, as Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy
of Ireland, sought to solidify the Irish establishment by pushing forward the
liturgical reforms and doctrinal emphases that were being associated with
Laudian reform in England. He attempted to divide the Ulster Presbyterians
from their brethren in Scotland, many of whom were then engaged in the
delinquency that would consolidate into military action at the beginning of the
Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), by introducing a controversial oath as a test of fealty
to the Established Church.22 His clumsy attempt to advance the uniformity of
the Established Church had the effect of breaking up its fluid and ambiguous
character: he seemed to be more committed to full-scale confessionalization
than had been several generations of Irish Calvinists. In 1634, Wentworth had

17 John Richardson, A Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland to the
Establish’d Religion (London, 1712), pp. 13–14.
18 Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent’, p. 120.
19 Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent’, p. 128.
20 See, for example, the complaints about Ulster made in John Derrick, The Image of Ireland
(1581), and Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596).
21 Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent’, p. 122.
22 For more on this context, see John McCafferty, The Reconstruction of the Church of Ireland:
Bishop Bramhall and the Laudian Reforms, 1633–1641 (Cambridge, 2007).
212 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the Irish Convocation agree that clergy had now to subscribe to a statement of
faith. This was an unwelcome innovation. For all the Puritan zealotry of the
earlier decades, ministers in the Irish Church had not been required to submit
to its Articles—they had merely to agree not to preach against them. Wentworth’s
intervention required Irish clergy to subscribe both to the Thirty-Nine Articles
and to the Book of Common Prayer. The doctrinal commitment required of
ministers within the Irish Church had been suddenly extended to include
episcopal government. But these tools that had been provided to establish
conformity also worked to create dissent. Bishop Bramhall led a crusade against
intransigent clergy, and many of those who scrupled at the new requirements
returned to the Church of Scotland.23 Wentworth’s activities pushed many for-
merly pragmatic Presbyterians to elevate the significance of ecclesiology with
the support of another Established Church on the other side of the narrow Irish
channel—and, as a consequence, to move from nonconformity into dissent.
It is important to note that the emergence of religious dissent in Ireland was
delayed because of a widely shared sense of the threat of the Catholic majority
population, as well as by the cementing effect of widely shared commitment to
Reformed ideas, and, crucially, a willingness to suspend ecclesiological belief.
The success of the Church of Ireland in preventing dissent was based on its
recognition that Irish Protestants required a limited space for disagreement.
Dissenting groups emerged not because of theological differences about the
Trinity, soteriology, or eschatology, for example, but because of differences in
understanding church government and the sacraments. And it was Wentworth’s
demand for ecclesial uniformity in the early 1630s that gave Irish Protestants
the language to articulate these differences. The immediate impact of the reli-
gious and political crises engendered by Wentworth’s poorly planned efforts
were experienced alongside the energizing of the Ulster Scots by the Scottish
National Covenant (1638) and the subsequent Bishops’ Wars, as well as the
sectarian violence fomented by the rebellion of large sections of the native
population in 1641: these were all important catalysts in the fragmentation of
the Protestant population into competing religious communities. The attempt by
James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, to propose in The Reduction of Episcopacy
(drafted in 1641, but printed in 1656) a design for the formal combination of
episcopal and Presbyterian government came as too little, too late. The Church
of Ireland could not continue to contain its nonconformists.
This fragmentation began with the Presbyterians. Those Ulster Scots who
survived the atrocities of the rebellion appealed to the Scottish government for
help. They obtained the defence for which they hoped, but this intervention
facilitated the undoing of the Irish Church. For when a Covenanter army landed
at Carrickfergus in 1642, its soldiers organized themselves into a distinctly
Presbyterian body, following the discipline of the Church of Scotland, in a

23 Ford, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent’, p. 127.

 Ireland213

move towards militarization that was rapidly replicated elsewhere in the

north-east, which defended the Protestant interest by dividing the Protestant
Church. Drawing on the resources of an Established Church in a neighbouring
country, the Ulster Scots established distinctive institutions and defined their
theological convictions, expanding through Ulster, formalizing links between
congregations that would evolve into a regular Presbyterian system with con-
comitant disciplinary and educational provision, while drawing a small amount
of support from the native population.24 The theologically advanced cultures of
the Church of Ireland had provided accommodation for Scottish Puritan refu-
gees, and then, in the 1630s, provided them with something to resist. Over one
century after the legislative beginnings of Protestant reformation, and in
circumstances that confirmed rather than denied the necessity of a state Church,
many Scots abandoned the habit of nonconformity, and Irish dissent was born.25

THE CONSOLIDATION OF DISSENT

The founding of Presbyterian institutions in Ulster in 1642 illustrated the

broader patterns that would characterize the emergence of other expressions of
Irish dissent in the period before 1660. Like other religious movements that
would be established in the 1650s, the new Presbyterian community was not, in
the main, indigenous: it was formed, principally, of those Scottish settlers who
had become involved with plantation projects in the north-east of the island,
and expanded only very slowly to include members of the native population.26
This reflected a broader trend in religious change in the period. While revolu-
tionary England provided fertile ground for the development of new religious
movements, the Dissenting groups that gained significant traction in Ireland
were all imported, until, perhaps, the emergence of the so-called ‘Plymouth’
Brethren movement among an Anglo-Irish elite in county Wicklow in the 1820s.
The new Presbyterian community, therefore, was not the result of a large-scale
programme of evangelization. The plantation projects in north-east Ulster and
elsewhere had not been designed to promote conversion: planters did not
arrive with aspirations to bear cross-cultural witness to the native population,
and neither is there evidence that those planters regularly witnessed movement
into their religious communities, with the possible exception of those involved
in the preaching meetings held in Antrim and along the Six Mile Water in the
mid-1620s, memories of which may have been elaborated upon to provide a

24 The Minutes of the Antrim Ministers’ Meeting, 1654–8, ed. Mark S. Sweetnam (Dublin, 2012).
25 Alan Ford, ‘The Origins of Irish Dissent’, in Herlihy, ed., The Religion of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800,
pp. 9–30. Herlihy’s four collections of essays on Irish dissent, which include some of the most
valuable work in this area, focus on the period after 1650.
26 See, generally, The Minutes of the Antrim Ministers’ Meeting.
214 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

founding myth for the new community, and the narratives of conversions,
which may sometimes have been editorially adapted, reported in Independent
churches in Cromwellian Dublin. Instead, the Presbyterian community in Ulster
was largely formed as a by-product of the economic aspiration of the settlers
and those substantial landowners who promoted their migration.
In addition, the Presbyterian institutions, like the new religious communi-
ties of the following decade, were established with armed backing. The infor-
mal proto-Presbyterian networks that had existed within the confines of the
Established Church for several decades before the 1640s had not sought to
establish a distinctive ecclesiastical infrastructure. But these networks of clergy
and parishioners gained new confidence with the arrival of the Scottish army.
This army landed in Carrickfergus with the stated aim of defending the safety
of their co-religionists, but also provided for their forming a denomination.
Similarly, in the 1650s, English Dissenting groups would be established with the
backing of the parliamentary army, but this force sought to defend its religious
dependents as part of the much broader war aim of the subjugation of the
island. Significantly, the decision of the Scottish Presbyterian soldiers to for-
mally establish an ecclesiological structure similar to that with which they had
been familiar in Scotland was not a decision to imagine a multi-denominational
Ireland, a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the European west—their
intention and expectation was to supplant the ambiguity of the establishment
with the doctrinally specific infrastructure that would be required by the
Solemn League and Covenant (1643) and facilitated by the publications of the
Westminster Assembly (1643–52), which were used gradually to refine the wor-
ship patterns and theological convictions of Irish Presbyterian communities.
Other Dissenting groups would make similar plays for power, through the
1650s and beyond: Baptists and Quakers were perhaps the only Dissenting
groups to articulate a critique of the religious establishments of traditional
Christendom, even as members of the former community took active part in
staffing and overseeing the state-funded preachers in the Cromwellian ‘civil
list’, and engaged in an ineffective coup on the eve of the Restoration. Dissenters
were divided on the question of whether their congregations should form a
new state Church—but there were few voices that did not argue that the erstwhile
Dissenting congregations should enjoy state support.
Further, despite this aspiration to reform the national Church, the new
Presbyterian community was geographically limited and regionally varied. The
location of those congregations that made their first advances in the 1640s
tracked the dispersion of Scottish migrants in the north-east counties. One
decade later, a community of English Presbyterians emerged independently in
the vicinity of Dublin, and made common cause with a rebranded community
of former episcopalian clergy in Munster, but they made little impact in
extending their influence beyond the Pale and the southern plantation. This
geographical division made it difficult to maintain doctrinal cohesion. As the
Ulster Scots adopted and continued to uphold the Westminster Confession,
 Ireland215

their southern counterparts permitted a latitude of creedal interpretation that

expanded as the decades progressed. Both groups existed within a single eccle-
siological infrastructure, but struggled to overcome uneasy cultural differences,
and began noticeably to diverge in theological emphasis, with some of the
southern Presbyterians developing sentiments that would eventually be seen as
being at variance, for example, with traditional thinking about the Trinity. And
neither party within the emerging Presbyterian denomination secured large
numbers of native converts. The Scots were of course better equipped to
grapple with the linguistic barriers that such evangelism involved, and there is
evidence of Gaelic-speaking ministers from the highlands and islands engaging
in the evangelism of native Catholics in Connacht. Yet, in this pastoral neglect,
Presbyterians were typical of other Irish Dissenters: throughout this period,
Protestant Dissenting groups were less likely than the clergy of the Church of
Ireland to engage in evangelism among Irish Catholics, though Presbyterian
communities in the north-east did include adherents with Gaelic names.
Nevertheless, like most of the Dissenting groups that were introduced into
Ireland in the 1650s, Presbyterians did manage to organize around a series of
documents and institutions that survived the period, allowing the community
to emerge as a fully fledged denomination, the structures of which could for
several decades effectively conceal the extent of regional theological diversity.
The Presbyterian experience in Ulster would prove to be typical. Irish Dissent
was born in 1642, and it did not take long to consolidate: its theological variety
could not obscure sociological similarities between the communities of Dissent.
The formation in 1642 of a Scottish Presbyterian organization in County
Antrim presented a growing number of Irish Protestants with a choice between
two rival organizations, therefore, each of which expected to be identified as a
national Church, and each of which claimed a right to governmental support.
As the new Presbyterian infrastructure consolidated, as meetings of ministers
were convened and disciplinary structures enacted, the reach of the new
Presbyterian organization extended across the northern counties. Both the
new Presbyterian movement and the Established Church competed for the
allegiance of Irish Protestants.27 But Irish Protestants did not long continue as
a bi-denominational community.

‘DISSENT ’ AND CROMWELLIAN RELIGION

In the summer of 1649, the appearance of Irish Protestantism suddenly changed.

A series of new religious movements were imported into Ireland by the 30,000

27 Robert Armstrong, ‘The Scots of Ireland and the English Republic, 1649–60’, in David
Edwards with Simon Egan, eds, The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation in Two
Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 251–78.
216 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

invading soldiers of the New Model Army.28 Many of these soldiers had
experienced the excitement and danger of civil war in England—a conflict that
John Morrill has described as the last of the European wars of religion29—and
had witnessed the debates about theology of which the wars had been both
cause and consequence. For over a century, Irish Protestantism had been iden-
tifiable with the church by law established. The nonconformity that had existed
had been largely localized in the north-east and north-west of the island, and
was largely limited in appeal to Scottish settlers. But the abolition of episcopacy
in 1646 shattered the traditional order of the Church of Ireland. The state
Church continued to exist, but its creed and constitution were rapidly forgot-
ten, as the soldiers of the London parliament introduced a range of new reli-
gious movements that would spread throughout the island to fundamentally
alter the religious environment of Irish Protestantism and the geographical
centre of Dissent, and this, often, with varying degrees of official support. This
range of religious movements cannot properly be described as dissenting, for
the episcopal national Church was not quickly replaced by any alternative, and
these groups were often, in effect, negotiating their place in a new establish-
ment. In Ireland, in the 1650s, the Dissenters were those who could not worship
within the limits of the non-episcopal evangelical Protestantism outlined in the
two Cromwellian constitutions—those, that is, who promoted non-Trinitarian
views, or who continued to use the prayer book after it had been proscribed.
One of the significant features of the ‘world turned upside down’ was its inver-
sion of the relationship between the old establishment and those it sought to
contain. In the 1650s, it was prayer book episcopalians, like Jeremy Taylor, who
were being pushed into dissent.
The new religious movements took full advantage of the inchoate character
of the Cromwellian religious settlement. During and after their campaign of
conquest, English soldiers carried their religious convictions throughout
Ireland, establishing centres of influence in garrison towns along the southern
and eastern coasts. The most important of these new religious movements were
Independents, also known as Congregationalists, some of whom remained
agnostic on the proper mode and subjects of baptism; Baptists, who argued that
baptism should be reserved for those able to make a confession of faith, and
whose congregations were often closely associated with the military; and Quakers,
who argued against any form of sacramental observation, developed looser
networks of association, often disrupting the public worship of other groups,
and, consequently, falling foul of the law, except in locations where influential
members of the military could offer some degree of protection. Just as the Ulster
Presbyterians capitalized on their connections with the Church of Scotland,
so the southern networks, as they were evolving into new religious movements,

28 See, generally, Gribben, God’s Irishmen.

29 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (New York,
1993), p. 68.
 Ireland217

developed close links with their co-religionists in England, with Dublin Baptists,
for example, receiving admonitions from London. The boundaries between
these movements were often porous. Many individuals moved between move-
ments in search of their religious ideal. Baptists lost members to Quakers, while
some radicals pursued more idiosyncratic religious practices, sometimes
claiming prophetic gifts, and others dallied with antinomianism or mysticism
outside any formal congregational context.30 One preacher worried about
radical preachers who had travelled to Ireland to ‘vaunt themselves to be
God . . . in the open streets with detestable pride, atheism, and folly’.31 Only a
tiny handful of individuals explored the possibilities of atheism. But for some
observers, the situation was out of control.
The situation was certainly ripe for religious radicalization. Outside Dublin,
five independently controlled armies, in a shifting series of alliances, were
waging total war in free-fire zones of almost apocalyptic brutality. Inside the city,
the population was being ravaged by disease and was experiencing acute
shortages of food. One English observer recalled seeing ‘poor parentless children
that lie begging, starving, rotting in the streets, and find no relief; yea, persons
of quality . . . seeking for bread, and finding none’.32 English preachers could not
appeal for help to the Presbyterians in the north of the island. The army that
had entered Ireland to protect the interests of the Scottish settlers as ‘Covenanted
Protestants’, and who had ‘sworn, in the presence of the great God to extirpate
Popery and prelacy’, had joined forces with the army of the Irish royalists, led
by James Butler, first Duke of Ormond, who ‘counted themselves under no less
sacred bond for the maintenance of prelates, service books, and the like’, and
native Catholics, ‘a mighty number that had for eight years together sealed
their vows to the Romish religion with our blood and their own’. The Scottish
Presbyterians had made an alliance with ‘that party which themselves had
laboured to render most odious and execrable, as most defiled with innocent
blood’, to conceal evidence of the atrocities committed in 1641 and to defend
the Catholic faith.33 In the chaos of the invasion, and in the face of the over-
whelming Catholic threat, the religious divisions that had formed in and after
the 1630s were reflected in the formation of rival armies. The members of the
new religious movements, and those of the establishment they sought to
replace, were being militarized. Ecclesiology was weaponized, and dissenters
were fighting each other.
As these Protestant armies engaged, apologists for rival religious bodies
sought to capture the hearts and minds of individuals under their control. The
Cromwellian army took pains to provide its soldiers with appropriate reading

30 Crawford Gribben, ‘Angels and Demons in Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland: Heresy
and the Supernatural’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76 (2013), 377–92.
31 John Owen, Works, 16 vols, ed. William H. Goold (Edinburgh, 1850–5), VIII, p. 236.
32 Owen, Works, VIII, p. 237. 33 Owen, Works, VIII, pp. 232–3.
218 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

material. It purchased 4,000 Bibles just before the invasion, and was still
organizing their distribution three years later.34 Some of these Bibles had
enthusiastic readers. John Rogers, who led an Independent congregation in
Dublin with strong links to the army, recorded a series of conversion narra-
tives, offered by prospective church members, which illustrate the role of Bible
reading and the development of introspective piety among the godly in this
period.35 The conversion narratives he collected reveal the idiosyncratic spir-
ituality of the members of his important Congregational church: one member-
ship applicant, Dorothy Emett, remembered that ‘[John] Owen was the first
man by whose means, and Ministry I became sensible of my condition’, adding
that God had assured her of salvation in a voice that she heard in her sleep.36
Owen, who was preaching in Dublin as Cromwell’s chaplain in the early 1650s,
would have regarded this claim to extraordinary revelation as entirely spuri-
ous. But Emett’s claims to spiritual experience reveal that religious communi-
ties could agree on church polity without necessarily signing up to a broader set
of expectations about the Christian life: Emett shared Owen’s views on church
government without necessarily subscribing to his views on the doctrine of
revelation. If the Church of Ireland had pursued a Puritan consensus by refusing
to divide on ecclesiological issues, religious movements in Cromwellian Ireland
that were dividing on the basis of ecclesiological differences were not necessarily
participating in a broader culture of agreement.
Cromwellian administrators took advantage of the religious divisions.
Members of the new religious movements jockeyed for influence within the
administration, and the most astute politicians, including Charles Fleetwood
and Henry Cromwell, played off religious movements against each other,
securing their own interests, rather than those of any particular religious group.
After all, the Cromwellian reformation of the Irish Church continued in the
absence of any national confession of faith, with some networks continuing to
use the Westminster Confession that had fallen out of favour in official circles
in England: the Commonwealth and Protectorate parliaments were pursuing
the formation of a new confession of faith, to replace that which had been
drawn up by the Westminster Assembly, which had been only partially adopted

34 W.M. Clyde, The Struggle for Freedom of the Press: From Caxton to Cromwell (Oxford, 1934),
p. 225, 281–2; John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (New York, 1868), p. 78.
See Crawford Gribben, ‘The Commodification of Scripture, 1640–1660: Politics, Ecclesiology and
the Cultures of Print’, in Kevin Killeen et al., eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern
England, 1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 224–36, and Crawford Gribben, ‘Bible Reading, Puritan
Devotion and the Transformation of Politics in the Puritan Revolution’, in Robert Armstrong and
Tadhg Ó hAnnrachain, eds, The English Bible in the Early Modern World, St Andrews Studies in
Reformation History (Leiden, 2018), pp. 141–60.
35 Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin,
2000), pp. 149–71; Gribben, God’s Irishmen, pp. 55–78.
36 John Rogers, Ohel or Bethshemesh (1653), p. 412. Note the errors in pagination in this part of
the book.
 Ireland219

by the Long Parliament. In England, drafts of new confessions of faith extended

from the sixteen sentences of The Humble Proposals (1652) and the twenty sen-
tences of A New Confession of Faith (1654) to the full-scale revision of the
Westminster Confession in the Savoy Declaration (1658). But no similar pro-
ject was pursued in Ireland. The Scottish Presbyterian communities in the
north-east of the island continued to refer to the Westminster Confession as an
authoritative text.37 And this confession was recommended in publications of
individual associations of ministers, like that in Dublin and Leinster. It is not
clear whether the confession of faith published by Particular Baptists in London
in 1644 was circulated in Ireland, as it was in Scotland, where it was reprinted in
Leith. But these efforts at creedal expression were developed in isolation from
the government. The Irish parliamentary commissioners and lords deputy
developed a state-backed religious administration that drew heavily on the
methods of Triers and Ejectors that had been developed in England and that
depended entirely on the orthodoxy of the persons doing the trying and ejecting.
Throughout the 1650s, therefore, there was no church by law established, but
a long ecclesiastical experiment, for the state Church, insofar as it can be said to
exist, operated without reference to a particular ecclesiological theory or con-
fession of faith. In that context, the only Protestant Dissenters were those whose
consciences could not tolerate such ambiguity, or those who could not find a
place in any of the state-approved religious communities: as the world was turned
upside down, a new community of dissent encompassed prophetic individualists
who steered clear of all congregational life, such as Walter Costello, as well as
members of the erstwhile party of prayer book conformists, including Jeremy
Taylor, who moved to County Antrim in 1658 with a pass from the Lord
Protector to function as a household chaplain. Some Irish preachers grew tired
of this constitutional experimentation, the endless proliferation of religious
novelty, and the debate that inevitably escalated. Faithful Teate, who in the late
1650s was preparing to return to Ireland from a brief pastoral career in England,
lamented that an individual could not declare himself ‘Congregationall, but
must presently be Schismaticall, nor Presbyterian, but presently Antichristian’.
The discussions had become so heated that ‘a man cannot follow Peace with all
men, no not with all good men . . . but . . . hee becomes an Heteroclitall Erasitan,
and is almost Anathematized, or severall hands, by some lesse charitable Zelots,
for a Neutralizing Merozite’.38 Irish ministers were certainly concerned to police
the boundaries of their ecclesiological communities: in April 1658, Irish
Presbyterians enquired of their counterparts in London why they ‘owne no
such thing as a Ruling Elder by Divine Right’, compelling the London Provincial
Assembly to reiterate their commitment to A Vindication of the Presbyterial

37 See, generally, The Minutes of the Antrim Ministers’ Meeting.

38 Faithful Teate, The Character of Cruelty in the Workers of Iniquity (1656), p. 93. The Merozites
were cursed by God for failing to assist the Israelites in the conquest of Canaan (Judges 5:23).
220 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Government and Ministry (1650).39 By the end of the decade, as the revolution
and its experiment in religious novelty failed, the Cromwellian administration
turned to prefer the more conservative religious communities, setting the stage
for the formation of ‘the Protestant interest’ that would, later in the century,
combine their political, if not their ecclesiastical, interests.

DISSENT AFTER THE RESTORATION

Despite their bargaining for power at the end of the Richard Cromwell
administration, Irish Dissenters found themselves at the mercy of the restored
king, Charles II, and, at least initially, his less than sympathetic parliaments.40
In England, the provisions of the so-called Clarendon Code created the condi-
tions for the emergence of distinctive Dissenting communities, which, in the
early 1660s, were gathered around the memory of martyred leaders by means
of a vigorous and innovative culture of print.41 In Ireland, the situation was, as
ever, more ambiguous, as governments remembered that the threat of Protestant
Dissent was outweighed by the menace of Catholic rebellion.42 For the number
of Dissenters continued to increase. In 1670, Sir William Petty estimated that
the total number of Presbyterians equalled the membership of the Established
Church, though the membership of other Dissenting bodies likely declined
throughout the later part of the century. This Dissenting population was
clustered into one province. By the end of the seventeenth century, Presbyterians
made up the majority of Protestants in Ulster, and dominated religious life in
Antrim and Down.43 For all the strength of numbers, the quality of the reli-
gious life of Presbyterians may have significantly varied: William King recorded
that his Presbyterian childhood in the 1650s and 1660s had done very little to
provide him with Christian instruction, but he may have made this case
to justify his conversion into the establishment, in which he was elevated to
become Archbishop of Dublin.44 Presbyterian commitment was likely
replenished by a wave of migration from Scotland after the defeat of the
Covenanter force at Bothwell Bridge (1679).45 The community was, in some

39 Lambeth Palace Library, Sion College MS Arc L40 2/E17 (2), [244r]—25 April 1658. I am
grateful to Elliot Vernon for providing this reference.
40 See, generally, Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland.
41 Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England
(Leicester, 1987).
42 Raymond Gillespie, ‘Dissenters and Nonconformists, 1661–1700’, in Herlihy, ed., The Irish
Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750, pp. 11–28; Jacqueline R. Hill, ‘Dublin Corporation, Protestant
Dissent, and Politics, 1660–1800’, in Herlihy, ed., The Politics of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800, pp. 28–39;
James McGuire, ‘Ormond and Presbyterian Nonconformity, 1660–63’, in Herlihy, ed., The Politics
of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800, pp. 40–51.
43 Whan, The Presbyterians of Ulster, p. 1. 44 ODNB, s.v.
45 Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 23.
 Ireland221

senses, expanding beyond its ability to sustain itself—though that expansion

was not necessarily to its disadvantage. Francis Makemie, from Donegal, could
not find a pastoral charge after his graduation from the University of Glasgow
in 1682, and moved to Maryland, and thence to Virginia and Barbados, to
establish Ulster Presbyterianism as a trans-Atlantic faith. The rapid improve-
ment of his financial situation in new world plantations paralleled his rise
through a consolidating denomination, in which he became its first American
moderator.46 By the 1680s, therefore, the Irish Presbyterian community was
being renewed and growing in confidence. Unlike their fellow travellers in
Scotland and England, Irish Presbyterians were not involved in any significant
way with the Rye House Plot (1683), the Monmouth rebellion (1685), or other
potential acts of anti-governmental violence. Instead, their growing confidence
was expressed in a new commitment to evangelize Catholics and in the devel-
opment of a culture of serious theological enquiry that would facilitate struc-
tural challenges to conventional assumptions about orthodoxy, and, later, the
division of the community into confession (and Trinitarian) and non-confessional
(and eventually non-Trinitarian) denominations.47 But after 1685, as James II
became the first Catholic monarch since the mid-sixteenth century, and began
to formulate his principles of religious toleration, these Presbyterians became
alarmed. Their united front included a significant number of adherents who
had recent experience of fighting against an episcopal hierarchy and a sup-
portive national government, and who were ‘little likely to welcome an indul-
gence, when they thought themselves entitled to an establishment’.48 They may
not have realized how much they stood to gain from James’s indulgence.
For, throughout this period, Dissenters were also, in unusual ways, protect-
ed. In 1662, the Duke of Ormond introduced into parliament ‘An Act for
Encouraging Protestant Strangers and Others to Inhabit Ireland’, encouraging
the tradition of immigration from those whose religious scruples often hesi-
tated at conforming to the establishment.49 Refugees from France and, later,
the Palatinate settled in communities such as Portarlington, county Laois,
building an infrastructure that would create a distinctive society, which even in
its conformity to the Established Church continued to advertise difference
from its norms.50 (It is notable that, in the early nineteenth century, the growth

46 ODNB, s.v.
47 Terence McCaughey, ‘General Synod of Ulster’s Policy on the Use of the Irish Language in
the Early Eighteenth Century: Questions about Implementation’, in Herlihy, ed., Propagating the
Word of Irish Dissent, pp. 46–62; R. Finlay Holmes, ‘The Reverend John Abernethy: The Challenge
of New Light Theology to Traditional Irish Presbyterian Calvinism’, in Herlihy, ed., The Religion of
Irish Dissent, 1650–1800, pp. 100–11.
48 Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 24.
49 Toby C. Barnard, ‘Identities, Ethnicity and Tradition among Irish Dissenters, c. 1650–1750’,
in Herlihy, ed., The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750, pp. 29–48.
50 Ruth Whelan, ‘Sanctified by the Word: The Huguenots and Anglican Liturgy’, in Herlihy, ed.,
Propagating the Word of Irish Dissent, pp. 74–94; Raymond Pierre Hylton, ‘The Less-favoured
222 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of the congregations linked to Thomas Kelly, and the earliest assemblies of

larger and more significant community of ‘Plymouth’ Brethren, was strongest
in those areas where, in the 1660s, there developed nonconformity and con-
formity combined with significant cultural difference.) In 1663, Charles II
banned John Wilson’s play, The Cheats, which had been performed in Dublin,
on account of its negative portrayal of a Dissenting minister.51 In 1665 new
legislation threatened non-episcopal clergymen with a fine of £100 for admin-
istering the Eucharist, but reservations appear to have been made for those
ministers serving the French congregations, who were likely using the French
translation of the Book of Common Prayer that was published in Dublin in
1665.52 Throughout the period, those French Protestants who could not con-
form to the Church of Ireland were treated with much greater leniency than
those Presbyterians who defended very similar theological commitments and
ecclesiological structures in English. The ‘stranger’ churches benefited from
this flexibility, and by 1696 had established two congregations in Dublin, with
others in Cork, Waterford, Carlow, Portarlington, and Castleblaney.53 Quakers
were also afforded special accommodation by successive Restoration govern-
ments. Like the French Protestants, they represented no significant political
or military threat to the regime, and while some Quakers were imprisoned for
refusing to pay tithes, they benefited from an accommodation that was formal-
ized in 1715 in an act of the Irish parliament concerning militia service, and
from the beginnings of de facto toleration in 1719.
The position of Irish Dissenters was therefore not substantially changed by
the Act of Toleration of 1689. By the time of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the cir-
cumstances of Irish Dissent had become quite distinct. Almost all Dissenters
agreed that the government should support a single national religious commu-
nity, and argued only over its character. Hardly any Irish Dissenters argued for
toleration: there is no evidence for the widespread reading of pro-toleration
literature, including work by John Milton and Roger Williams, or even Jeremy
Taylor’s early interventions, which might have been expected to circulate around
his base in county Antrim. No Protestant was executed for heresy in Ireland,

Refuge: Ireland’s Nonconformist Huguenots at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’, in Herlihy,
ed., The Religion of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800, pp. 83–99; G. Andrew Forrest, ‘Religious Controversy
within the French Protestant Community in Dublin, 1692–1716: An Historiographical Critique’, in
Herlihy, ed., The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750, pp. 96–110; Vivien Hick, ‘ “As Nearly Related
as Possible”: Solidarity Amongst the Irish Palatines’, in Herlihy, ed., The Irish Dissenting Tradition,
1650–1750, pp. 111–25.
51 Stephen Austin Kelly, ‘Anglo-Irish Drama? Writing for the Stage in Restoration Dublin’, in
Kathleen Miller and Crawford Gribben, eds, Dublin: Renaissance City of Literature (Manchester,
2017), pp. 206–27.
52 Mary Ann Lyons, ‘Foreign Language Books, 1550–1700’, in Raymond Gillespie and Andrew
Hadfield, eds, The Oxford History of the Irish Book: Volume III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800
(Oxford, 2006), pp. 347–67, at p. 359.
53 Beckett, Protestant Dissent in Ireland, p. 127.
 Ireland223

and the state was less systematically persecutory than elsewhere in the Stuart
kingdoms. And yet, whatever the claims of later mythologies, it was James’s
Declaration of Indulgence, in 1687, rather than William’s Toleration Act, in 1689,
that ‘marked the end of large-scale religious persecution’ in England and Ireland.54
As James abandoned his throne, and the three kingdoms entered a new period
of civil war, Irish Presbyterians threw their weight behind the claims of the
Dutch usurper. But, as Andrew Holmes’ chapter in another volume illustrates,
they could hardly have anticipated how little their position would be changed
by his ‘Glorious Revolution’.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Armstrong, Robert, ‘The Scots of Ireland and the English Republic, 1649–60’, in David
Edwards with Simon Egan, eds, The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation
in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 251–78.
Beckett, J.C., Protestant Dissent in Ireland, 1687–1780 (London, 1968).
Boran, Elizabethanne and Gribben, Crawford, eds, Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and
Scotland, 1550–1700, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Aldershot, 2006).
Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001).
Ford, Alan, ‘The Church of Ireland, 1558–1641: A Puritan Church?’ in Alan Ford, James
McGuire, and Kenneth Milne, eds, As By Law Established: The Church of Ireland since
the Reformation (Dublin, 1995), pp. 52–68.
Ford, Alan, The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641 (Dublin, 1997).
Ford, Alan, ‘Scottish Protestant Clergy and the Origins of Dissent in Ireland’, in David
Edwards with Simon Egan, eds, The Scots in Early Stuart Ireland: Union and Separation
in Two Kingdoms (Manchester, 2015), pp. 116–40.
Gillespie, Raymond, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland
(Manchester, 1997).
Greaves, Richard L., God’s Other Children: Protestant Nonconformists and the Emergence
of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660–1700 (Stanford, CA, 1997).
Gribben, Crawford, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland
(Oxford, 2007).
Herlihy, Kevin, ed., The Irish Dissenting Tradition, 1650–1750 (Dublin, 1995).
Herlihy, Kevin, ed., The Religion of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1996).
Herlihy, Kevin, ed., The Politics of Irish Dissent, 1650–1800 (Dublin, 1997).
Herlihy, Kevin, ed., Propagating the Word of Irish Dissent (Dublin, 1998).
Kilroy, Phil, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland, 1660–1714 (Cork, 1994).
Whan, Robert, The Presbyterians of Ulster, 1680–1730 (Woodbridge, 2013).

54 Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, p. 191.

 10

Wales, 1587–1689
Lloyd Bowen

HISTORIO GRAPHY

In 1862 the Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and
Control, a nonconformist pressure group that campaigned for the disestablish-
ment of the Church in England and Wales, held a major conference at Swansea.
It was a propitious moment and a shrewd choice of venue. The 1851 census had
shown the numerical superiority of nonconformists in Wales, and the patriotic
energies of the increasingly confident Dissenting community were connecting
powerfully with new currents of Liberal political activism. 1862 was, of course,
the 200th anniversary of the great ejection of nonconformist ministers on
‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’, and historical resonances echoed in the proceed-
ings of the Swansea conference as well as through the principality more generally.1
Welsh nonconformists published tracts and pamphlets in memory of the
ejected; mass commemorative meetings were held; memorial chapels were built.
The Welsh Dissenters of 1862 saw their seventeenth-century forebears as heroes,
originators, and carriers of a type of national spirit that they looked to mobilize
and celebrate in the political and spiritual struggles of the nineteenth century.
Recognizing the tremendous influence of nonconformist culture in modern
Wales is essential for understanding the dominant and enduring approach to
Dissenting history that emerged from this context. While not the simple hagi-
ographies of chapel polemic, much of the literature on early nonconformity in
Wales betrayed the influence of a patriotic culture searching for its spiritual
origins. One canonical text was Thomas Rees’s History of Protestant Nonconformity
in Wales, first published in 1861 and again in a much expanded edition in
1883. A Congregational minister and twice chairman of the Union of Welsh
Independents, Rees dedicated his volume to four other nonconformist
­ministers, hoping that they would ‘advance the good work commenced two

1 The Cambrian (26 September 1862); Ryland Wallace, Organise! Organise! Organise!: A Study
of Reform Agitations in Wales, 1840–1886 (Cardiff, 1991), p. 126.

Lloyd Bowen, Wales, 1587–1689 In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0011
 Wales, 1587–1689 225

hundred and fifty years ago [i.e. in 1633] by the worthy FATHERS OF WELSH
NONCONFORMITY’.2 His volume, although deeply researched, charted an
alternative progressive narrative to the Whig version of English national
history. The Welsh story told how a few persecuted heroes in the seventeenth
century helped drag Wales from ‘the depths of degradation, ignorance, and
superstition, to the highest rank amongst the enlightened Protestant nations of
the world’, without the assistance of the state or the local gentry.3 The popularity
of Congregationalism in modern Wales favoured the history of seventeenth-
century Independency, and many histories such as Rees’s located the fountain-
head of Welsh Dissent in the formation in 1639 of an Independent congregation
at Llanfaches, Monmouthshire, under the leadership of William Wroth.
Rees’s History is emblematic of a vigorous trend of historical enquiry in
modern Welsh nonconformity, and its influence has informed the research
agenda into the era of professional history. Religious history in Wales, then, has
been unusually susceptible to the influence of Dissenting traditions and inter-
pretations, and these often fuse with patriotic or proto-nationalist agendas.
Without a separate state and political system to panegyricize, many historians,
often themselves from nonconformist backgrounds, celebrated instead the dis-
tinctive successes of Welsh Dissent. The towering twentieth-century scholar of
early Welsh nonconformity, Thomas Richards, for example, was deacon at a
Baptist chapel and onetime president of the Baptist Union of Wales.4 It was less
than the strict empirical enquiry for which he is often fêted that led him to the
conclusion that Congregationalism prevailed in mid-seventeenth-century
Wales because the Westminster Assembly could not ‘make a people Presbyterian
who had no Presbyterian traditions’.5 The authoritative Welsh biographical
textbook produced by the London Welsh Cymmrodorion Society in 1959
(a Welsh language version had appeared in 1953) carried extensive entries on
minor nonconformist figures, but dealt only fleetingly with their Anglican and
gentry contemporaries.6 The leading modern historian of Congregationalism
in Wales, R. Tudur Jones, was himself a Congregationalist minister and Welsh
nationalist.7 Denominational periodicals were, and indeed remain, important
venues for religious history.8 Academics can still write freely of the period

2 Thomas Rees, History of Protestant Nonconformity in Wales, from its Rise in 1633 to the Present
Time (London, 1883 edn), dedicatory epistle.
3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Doc Tom’: Thomas Richards (Cardiff, 1999).
5 Thomas Richards, A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales (Liverpool, 1920), p. 200.
6 In one review, Penry Williams noted its ‘predilection for dissenting preachers’: English
Historical Review, 75 (1960), 706.
7 Robert Pope, ‘R. Tudur Jones 1921–98: Congregational Minister, Church Historian and Welsh
Nationalist’, The Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 6 (2000), 529–51.
8 Eryn M. White, ‘Welsh Dissent and the Bible, c.1750–1850’, in Scott Mandelbrote and Michael
Ledger-Lomas, eds, Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c.1650–1950 (Oxford, 2013), p. 119.
226 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

1662–89 that it ‘has rightly been called “the heroic age” of Dissent. . . . Here,
indeed, were an enormously sincere and courageous people.’9
This is not to suggest that there is some kind of Dissenting conspiracy within
the Welsh academy that silences opposing voices, but is rather to draw atten-
tion to the particular texture of the historiographical landscape here and the
kinds of emphases that have shaped the literature. As a result of these prevailing
interests, a good deal of early modern Welsh history has been (pre)occupied
with the early history of nonconformity and the forebears of the ‘national’
religion of modern Wales. It is thus an extremely well-researched and
­well-documented field, with a good deal of agreement over the main dramatis
personæ and the narrative arc of the performance. However, there has also been
a tendency to overstate nonconformity’s precociousness and influence, as well
as sometimes isolating it from the extra-national (i.e. non-Welsh) contexts in
which it should be situated. One can also discern a propensity to impute
‘Puritan’ and ‘Dissenting’ characteristics to individuals and developments that
are better located within the mainstream of the Established Church.10 Another
issue that should be mentioned is nonconformity’s relationship with the Welsh
language and ideas of Welsh nationhood. Since the mid-nineteenth century
there has been a tendency to construct ‘genuine’ Welshness as residing in a
powerful amalgam of patriotism, dissent, and a Welsh language culture. These
features have on occasion been read back anachronistically into the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries at the expense of a close historicization of noncon-
formity in context. Although issues of language and culture were clearly central
to religious causes in an early modern Wales where some 90 per cent of the
population only spoke Welsh, scholars nevertheless need to be careful about
blurring the lines between contemporary and modern concerns.

THE REFORMATION AND JOHN PENRY

One of the most salient features of the Reformation in sixteenth-century Wales

was its slow and halting progress. Despite the absence of Catholic revolt and
rebellion, many viewed the country as half-reformed; cold and slow in respond-
ing to the call of Protestantism. This hesitant and tentative progress of the
reformed faith was connected closely to issues of language. It was not until 1563
that the crown officially acknowledged the need for a Bible and Prayer Book in
Welsh, and a full translation of the Scriptures had to wait until 1588. Given the

9 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘The Friends of Montgomeryshire in the Heroic Age’, Montgomeryshire

Collections, 77 (1988), 17.
10 John Gwynfor Jones, ‘Some Puritan Influences on the Anglican [sic.] Church in Wales in
the Early Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Welsh Religious History, New Series, 2 (2002), 19–50.
 Wales, 1587–1689 227

preponderance of monolingual Welsh speakers in the country, reformers

lacked even the basic apparatus to advance the cause of Protestantism. As one
Welsh bishop observed, God’s Word was closed up ‘from [the Welsh people] in
an unknown tongue’.11 It was thus largely bilingual elite figures, who had usually
been educated in England, who accessed the tenets of the reformed faith easiest
and earliest, while bilingual market towns such as Carmarthen, Cardiff, and
Wrexham seem to have been important entrepôts for the new faith. Moreover,
the kind of bibliocentrism and close scriptural study associated with a good
deal of Puritanism in England was hampered by the absence of cheap printed
texts in Welsh. The Welsh Bible was, until 1630, only available in a large and expen-
sive folio volume and remained beyond the means of most men and women.
Given the social and linguistic dynamics prevailing in sixteenth-century
Wales, then, it is unsurprising that the seeds of Elizabethan Puritanism found
fallow ground there. A major exception, however, was John Penry. Hailing
from a minor gentry family in rural Breconshire, Penry was educated at
Cambridge and Oxford in the mid-1580s, and it was almost certainly here that
he encountered a more forward form of Protestantism than was to be found in
Wales. Penry burst onto the scene in February 1587 when he persuaded the
Carmarthen MP, Edward Donne Lee, along with Job Throckmorton, to present
to parliament a tract Penry had written on the state of religion in Wales, The
Aequity of an Humble Supplication . . . in the Behalfe of the Countrey of Wales.12
A plea for planting a preaching ministry in Wales, Penry’s tract was a red-blooded
critique of the ecclesiastical establishment that landed him in prison, but
still articulated broadly a position from within the Established Church. This,
however, was the beginning of a brief but remarkable pamphleteering career
that saw Penry adopt Presbyterianism and latterly semi-separation from the
Church. Largely responsible for the press that produced the Martin Marprelate
tracts, three of Penry’s own publications dealt specifically with the spiritual
plight (as he saw it) of Wales, which he attributed in no small part to the neglect
of its bishops, ‘butchers and stranglers of souls’ in the country.13 His increas-
ingly radical writings saw him captured and executed in 1593: Wales’s first
nonconformist martyr. The view he pedalled of a spiritually destitute principal-
ity was influential at the time. One seventeenth-century author felt the need to
combat the ‘heavie aspersion of a Galilaean barrennesse’ that he had placed
upon the country.14 It has also been influential among modern historians, who
have perhaps given rather too much credence to Penry’s polemical fireworks in
their portrayal of the Church of England as an ineffective and somewhat alien

11 David Matthew, ed., ‘Some Elizabethan Documents’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies,
6 (1953), 77.
12 T.E. Hartley, ed., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 3 vols (Leicester, 1981–92), II,
pp. 390–1.
13 David Williams, ed., Three Treatises Concerning Wales (Cardiff, 1960), pp. 61–6.
14 Thomas Thompson, Antichrist Arraigned (London, 1618), sig. ¶4r.
228 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

presence in early modern Wales. In fact Protestantism established secure roots

in the country during Elizabeth’s reign, but Wales remained largely isolated
from the Anglophone networks of Puritan controversy and publication.

THE HARLEY CONNECTION AND THE

COMING OF CIVIL WAR

Most scholars concur that the early Stuart period was one of comparative quiet
and slow improvement for the Church of England in Wales. The Welsh Bible
and Prayer Book were complemented by a number of other translations such as
Maurice Kyffin’s 1595 rendering of John Jewel’s Apologia, Deffynniad Ffydd
Eglwys Loegr, while the general standard of clerical appointments and spiritual
provision, particularly in the Welsh language, was making steady progress.15
This was a broadly conservative religious culture, as seen by the muted response
to the introduction of Laudian reforms during the 1630s.16 Muted, but not
entirely absent. The first glimmerings of something like a Puritan network in
Wales emerged during Charles I’s Personal Rule, principally in areas border-
ing England, and among a group of individuals connected with the godly
Herefordshire gentleman, Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan.17 Harley had
a particular concern for Wales’s spiritual welfare, seeing the country as mired in
a semi-popish darkness. The trope of Wales as a benighted country requiring
spiritual enlightenment, often from without, had been employed by Penry and
would remain a powerful image legitimating many of the godly initiatives in
the country throughout the early modern period.18 For Harley, this ‘vaile of
darknesse’ was to be lifted by supporting Puritan preaching and godly minis-
ters in the Welsh Marches, and his household, ‘the center where the saints met
to seek God’, attracted several figures during the Personal Rule who would be
crucial in establishing an enduring nonconformist presence in the principality
in the 1640s and 1650s.19 The most important of these were William Wroth,
Walter Cradock, and William Erbery.
William Wroth was the minister of Llanfaches in Monmouthshire, and was
brought before the Court of High Commission in 1635, possibly for opposing

15 Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 361–96; R.G. Gruffydd,
‘Anglican Prose’, in R.G. Gruffydd, ed., A Guide to Welsh Literature, c.1530–1700 (Cardiff, 1997),
pp. 176–89.
16 Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality: Wales, c.1603–42 (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 207–34.
17 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660 (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 1–17; Jacqueline Eales,
Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil
War (Cambridge, 1990).
18 Lloyd Bowen, ‘Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the Civil Wars and
Interregnum’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 358–76.
19 Thomas Froysell, Yedidyah, or, the Beloved Disciple (London, 1658), pp. 100, 102.
 Wales, 1587–1689 229

the Book of Sports.20 He abandoned his living around 1638, and shortly
thereafter formed the first Welsh Separatist church at Llanfaches ‘according to
the New England pattern’, although one contemporary account had it that he
and his followers ‘give out that they will have the govern[en]t of Scotlande’.21
Llanfaches was a key focus for the first wave of Welsh nonconformity, and even
before Wroth’s death in 1641 a fairly substantial cluster of dissent seems to have
accreted in south-east Wales. One commentator claimed ‘many of that coun-
try’ were ‘adheringe unto him [Wroth]’, while a petition emerging from the
group in February 1641 possessed some 300 signatures, although this probably
also included reformers from Cardiff and the surrounding area.22 From 1633
Cardiff was the location for the ministry of William Erbery, a local man who
had come under Wroth’s influence. He too fell afoul of the Laudian authorities,
and was reported to High Commission for having ‘preached very schismatically
and dangerously to the people’.23 Like Wroth he resigned his living in 1638, and
established links with the Llanfaches group while becoming an unlicensed
preacher. Erbery had adopted some highly unorthodox positions by mid-1640,
when he was accused of preaching that the church only consisted of the ‘saints
by calling’, who should choose their own pastors and separate from the ‘anti-
Christian synagogue’ of the Church of England.24 Walter Cradock, meanwhile,
was Erbery’s curate at Cardiff in the early 1630s but was suspended and went on
to acquire a curacy in Wrexham, where he converted the future littérateur and
mystic Morgan Llwyd. Cradock too was close to Harley (who sheltered him in
1639) and Wroth, and helped the latter establish the Llanfaches community.25
There does not seem to have been a theological ‘party line’ among this fairly
compact group of Puritan separatists, and indeed their differences would be
imprinted in the DNA of early Welsh nonconformity and produce splits and
differences among later progeny. But there was a unity of purpose around the
need to reform the Church in Wales and oppose the Laudians that fused them
together in the later 1630s and early 1640s. Their close connections speak to the
comparatively circumscribed nature of Puritanism in pre-Civil War Wales, but
these foundational figures would be enormously important in the critical
political and religious developments of the 1640s and 1650s.

20 R.G. Gruffydd, ‘In That Gentile Country . . .’: The Beginnings of Puritan Nonconformity in
Wales (Bridgend, 1976); Thomas Richards, ‘Eglwys Llanfaches’, Transactions of the Honourable
Society of Cymmrodorion (1941), 150–84.
21 William Erbery, Apocrypha (London, 1652), p. 8; British Library (BL), Add. MS 35,331,
fol. 74.
22 BL, Add. MS 35,331, fol. 74; Add. MS 70,109, no. 69.
23 Kenneth Fincham, ed., ‘Annual Accounts of the Church of England, 1632–1639’, in Melanie
Barber, Gabriel Sewell and Stephen Taylor, eds, From the Restoration to the Permissive Society
(Woodbridge, 2010), p. 99.
24 Somerset Heritage Centre, D/D/Ca 334, fols 104, 105v.
25 Nuttall, Welsh Saints, pp. 18–36; M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Disgybl a’i Athro: Morgan Llwyd a
Walter Cradoc’, in J.G. Jones, ed., Agweddau ar Dwf Piwritaniaeth yng Nghymru yn yr Ail Ganrif
ar Bymtheg (Lampeter, 1992), pp. 111–27.
230 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The calling of the Long Parliament and the concomitant assault on the
Laudian ascendancy offered this coterie of Welsh Puritans an important
opportunity to circumvent the obstructive conservatism of local secular and
religious elites and give wider currency to their appeals for religious change.26
In December 1640 Erbery presented a petition to parliament that lamented the
lack of preaching and the absence of an able ministry, arguing that Wales was a
land of ‘gross ignorance, idolatry, superstition’ where ‘all manner of sins abound
every where; the people led by blind guides & the sheepe having dumb doggs to
be their shepheards’.27 Calling for a ‘seconde reformacon’, he argued that the
removal of bishops and the prayer book would allow the people to seek new
means for their salvation. A subsequent petition of February 1641 was more
substantial. Presented in the name of seven ministers, including Wroth,
Erbery, and Cradock, it was supported by a large number of signatories, and
aligned itself more firmly with the aggressive anti-episcopal language of the
contemporaneous ‘Root and Branch’ campaigns.28 The petition survives
among Sir Robert Harley’s papers, and it seems that the core of Welsh
Puritanism, centred on Llanfaches and the Harley enclave, was operating as a
sophisticated political lobby. The petitioners won the concession that they be
allowed to preach wherever they wished in Wales, but beyond this their suc-
cesses were meagre. There seems to have been little sympathy for their position
among the majority of Welsh governors, clergy, or laity, or, indeed Welsh MPs
at Westminster, which was one reason the reformers turned to men like
Harley.29 With the outbreak of Civil War the hopes of the Welsh nonconform-
ists were dashed as the prevailing royalism of the principality scattered them to
places like Bristol and London. Writing in the early 1660s, the Fifth Monarchist
Vavasor Powell recalled ‘the late war coming suddenly on, there could be no
redresse obtained [by the Welsh Puritans]; but on the contrary most (if not all)
of those preachers and professors [in Wales] were forced, through violence of
their persecutors, to leave their habitations and country’.30 Men like Erbery
would minister in the New Model Army, but it was only after the final pacifica-
tion of Wales in 1648 that the advocates of Welsh reform could become activists,
able to translate theory into action.

PURGATION AND PROPAGATION: 1646–60

The narrowness of the parliamentary state’s support base in Wales meant that
its attempts to secure compliance in Church and government represented a

26 Lloyd Bowen, ‘Wales and Religious Reform in the Long Parliament, 1640–42’, Transactions
of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, New Series, 12 (2005), 36–59.
27 BL, Harleian MS 4,931, fol. 90. 28 BL, Add. MS 70,109, no. 69.
29 BL, Add. MS 70,106, fol. 155.
30 Vavasor Powell, The Bird in the Cage, Chirping (London, 1661), sig. A8.
 Wales, 1587–1689 231

genuine revolution as individuals and groups outside traditional governing

elites were thrust into places of authority. The piecemeal efforts at remodelling
the Welsh pastorate through parliament’s committee for plundered ministers
were overtaken by a step-change in reforming impulses with the introduction
by the Rump Parliament in 1650 of the Commission for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Wales. Although the cause of political and religious Presbyterianism
had some notable supporters in Wales such as the parliamentarian general
Sir Thomas Myddleton of Chirk Castle and the pamphleteer John Lewis of
Glasgrug, the cause of Independency meshed more closely with the interests
and outlooks of men like William Erbery, Walter Cradock, Morgan Llwyd,
Vavasor Powell, and the congregations associated with them in south-east and
north-east Wales. Moreover, Independency’s loose association of gathered
believers provided a more flexible and practical means of bringing together the
comparatively small and scattered nonconformist populations of rural Wales
than the Presbyterian model.
An important intervention came in December 1649 when a petition was pre-
sented to the Rump in the name of the well-affected of north Wales. It called for
the relief of ‘the souls and bodies of our poor brethren and country men’ by the
appointment of godly commissioners who could examine and displace ‘ignor-
ant and scandalous ministers, who have been and still are the greatest enemies
to religion and reformation’, and replace them with ‘pious, sound and able
men’.31 This was to be the germ of the Propagation Act, which was passed on
22 February 1650. The petitioners were probably connected with the Wrexham
congregation of Morgan Llwyd, while in parliament the regicide John Jones of
Maesygarnedd, Merioneth, and his millenarian army associate Colonel Thomas
Harrison seem to have been key point men for the scheme.32 It was thus a pro-
ject closely associated with the radical Independents, and it bore the impress of
this genealogy in its design and personnel. However, as Stephen Roberts has
argued, the Presbyterians could support its aims of purging unworthy minis-
ters and the fact that the Act never exempted Wales from the other instruments
of national ecclesiastical policy. However, they were largely side-lined when it
came to implementing the scheme.33
The Propagation Act appointed empowered seventy-one lay commissioners
to examine ‘scandalous’ clergymen and dismiss them if found unworthy or pol-
itically suspect. In their place they could install godly ministers to a settled
living or to become itinerant preachers; this was subject to the approbation of a
further commission of twenty-five clerical ‘approvers’. Among these were
Walter Cradock as well as three of his fellow Puritan petitioners from 1641,
Ambrose Mostyn, Henry Walter, and Richard Symonds, as well as Morgan

31 Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 12 (14–21 December 1649), p. 149.

32 Stephen Roberts, ‘Propagating the Gospel in Wales: the Making of the 1650 Act’, Transactions
of the Honourable Society of Cymmorodrion, New Series, 10 (2004), 72–5.
33 Ibid., 74.
232 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Llwyd. The scheme was to be supported by the confiscated tithes of ejected

clergy and sequestered impropriators.
It is important to note that the geographical origins of the commissioners
reflected the dynamics of Puritan power in mid-seventeenth-century Wales,
as many hailed from established centres like Wrexham and Cardiff, while
there were hardly any representatives from the counties of Carmarthenshire,
Cardiganshire, Caernarvonshire, Merioneth, or Anglesey, which were the most
thoroughly Welsh in culture. By contrast, many of the commissioners were
Englishmen, several of whom had come to have an interest in Wales during the
war as military commanders, while the Commission itself was dependent on
the support of enthusiasts in the Rump Parliament in London. This has led
some to suggest that propagation was an essentially English scheme for the
spiritual regeneration of Wales.34 Given the tenuous nature of Welsh Puritanism
in the pre-war years, this should not surprise us, but neither should the alien
nature of the commission be overstated. Many of the most active propagators
were native Welshmen who were passionately concerned with the spiritual
wellbeing of their countrymen, while at parish level humble yeomen and
husbandmen discharged the daily business of collecting its tithe revenues.35
Moreover, there was a real effort to attract godly ministers who could serve the
needs of the monoglot majority, although one of the chief propagators later
admitted to being unable to furnish a sufficient number proficient in Welsh, a
major failing in the whole enterprise.36
The Commission functioned officially between 1650 and 1653, but its per-
sonnel and legacy dominated Welsh religious life down to the Restoration and
was enormously important for providing a context in which self-sustaining
enclaves of nonconformity established themselves. It was envisaged as the
agent for transforming the religious landscape of the country ‘which heretofore
abounded in ignorance and profaneness’.37 Its work devolved largely to a com-
pact group of enthusiasts, the most prominent of whom emerged as Vavasor
Powell, styled by one opponent as the ‘metropolitan of the itinerants’.38 A native
of Cnwclas (Knucklas) on the Radnorshire–Shropshire border, Powell had
been an acolyte of Walter Cradock and became a thoroughgoing Independent
firebrand, adopting a millenarian fifth monarchism which brought him into the
circle of Thomas Harrison. The Propagation Commission gave Powell a con-
duit for his enormous energy and zeal, for he was an impressive communicator

34 Richards, Puritan Movement, p. 93.

35 Stephen Roberts, ‘Godliness and Government in Glamorgan 1647–1660’, in Colin Jones,
Malcolm Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, eds, Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in
Honour of Ivan Roots (Oxford, 1986), pp. 225–51.
36 Powell, The Bird in the Cage, sig. B1v.
37 An Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales (London, 1650; reprinted Cardiff, 1908), p. 13.
38 Strena Vavasoriensis: A New Years Gift for the Welsh Itinerants, or, A Hue and Cry After
Mr Vavasor Powell (London, 1654), title page.
 Wales, 1587–1689 233

who supported itinerancy as a means of communicating God’s Word and the

imminence of the apocalypse most effectively in a ‘darke country where there is
want of the Gospell’.39 His biographer portrayed Powell as an indefatigable
preacher who held forth in many ‘churches, chappels, town halls . . . upon the
very mountains and very frequent in fairs and markets . . . preaching in two or
three places a day . . . he would ride a hundred miles in a week . . . speaking and
praying sometimes 3, 4, nay 6 and 7 hours together’.40 His particular area of
influence was Breconshire, Radnorshire, and Montgomeryshire, and his impact
was the greater because of his facility to preach in both Welsh and English.
However, Powell’s dynamism and millennial radicalism also made him the
lightning rod for an organized pamphleteering campaign against the Commission
organized principally by the sequestered minister, Alexander Griffith. His
publications portrayed the Commission as an unbridled vehicle for the most
extreme opinions and heresies, arbitrary proceedings, and financial impropri-
eties.41 One of the key criticisms of the Commission was that it was much more
successful in knocking down than in building up. Some 278 clergymen were
ejected by the propagators, with nearly three-quarters of the ejections occur-
ring in south Wales. However, the problems of attracting qualified clergy to
replace them, particularly those who could speak Welsh, led to a reliance on a
system of itinerant preachers who were vilified by opponents as low-born
and ill-educated. As a result, many communities were left destitute of spiritual
leadership or had inadequate provision by English-speaking minsters or
occasional itinerants.
Nevertheless, under the aegis of the propagators, who retained a good deal of
control and influence in Welsh religious and political matters even after the
Commission’s formal discontinuation in April 1653, this was a period in which
Dissenting communities established a durable presence in the principality. The
powerful missionary efforts of men like Powell bore fruit in ways that were
recognized by supporters of the Propagation Commission, including Oliver
Cromwell.42 Looking back from the Restoration, the Bishop of St David’s
believed that the propagation era had encouraged a wide dissemination of het-
erodox religious ideas and republican opinions in his diocese, those ‘evill prin-
ciples formerly instilld during the late rebellion . . . [when] they were governed
by itinerants’.43 Vavasor Powell himself claimed that whereas there had only
been one gathered church in Wales (at Llanfaches) at the beginning of Civil
War, by 1660 he estimated there were more than twenty such congregations

39 John Goodwin, Truths Conflict with Error (London, 1650), p. 111.

40 Edward Bagshaw, The Life and Death of Mr Vavasor Powell (London, 1671), pp. 107–8.
41 Lloyd Bowen, ‘ “This Murmuring and Unthankful Peevish Land’: Wales and the Protectorate’,
in Patrick Little, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 144–64.
42 Ivan Roots, ed., Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1989), pp. 15–16.
43 Bodleian Library (Bodl.), Tanner MS 146, fol. 138.
234 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

‘in some two, in some three, some four hundred members’.44 The rule of the
commissioners was long after seen as a decisive point in the spread and growth
of nonconformist opinion in Wales. For example, a clerical visitation of 1763 in
Merthyr and Gelligaer, Glamorgan, reported that ‘before the grand rebellion’
the nonconformists were ‘not so many, but in those unhappy times of usurp-
ation [they] multiplied apace, took firme footing, and overspread this part of
the country in every way.’45
Although there was not a single theological ‘party line’ for the propagators,
the initiative was clearly hostile to Presbyterianism and much more amenable
to radical Independency and the sects. However, as Thomas Richards noted
long ago, ‘references to the discipline and government of the new “gathered”
churches in Wales are exceptionally few’, and much of the organizational coher-
ence between the various congregations was often provided by personal con-
nections as much as any institutional congruity.46 Perhaps the community
closest approximating the formal organization of the Presbyterians was the
Baptists. The sect had gained a foothold on Wales’s eastern borders during the
Civil Wars but was given a major boost under the propagation regime. John
Miles, a Herefordshire man and propagation approver, was a Particular Baptist
who established the first Welsh Baptist community in 1649 at Ilston in the
English-speaking area of the Gower peninsula in Glamorgan, adding four
more associated congregations in south Wales by 1652. Sharing preachers
among these communities, as well as the institution from 1650 of general meet-
ings, helped sustain a sense of common fellowship and a degree of institutional
robustness.47 However, despite these advances, by 1656 Miles was moved into
print to denounce a new sect that was challenging the territories of the Welsh
Baptists: the Quakers.48
The anti-formalist and antinomian strains found in early Quakerism echoed
positions adopted by two influential figures in republican Wales: William
Erbery and Morgan Llwyd. Erbery has been categorized as a ‘Seeker’ for reject-
ing all forms of church membership from the early 1650s.49 By 1653, a year
before his death, he was discussing the importance of Christians responding to
God’s message within them, which overlapped with the Quaker emphasis on
the ‘inner light’. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his wife and daughters
became Quaker missionaries.50 One opponent actually described Erbery as

44 Powell, Bird in the Cage, sig. B3v. 45 National Library of Wales, LL/QA/1.
46 Richards, Puritan Movement, p. 195.
47 B.G. Owens, ed., The Ilston Book: Earliest Register of Welsh Baptists (Aberystwyth, 1996);
D. Rhys Phillips, ‘Cefndir Hanes Eglwys Ilston, 1649–60’, Trafodion Cymdeithas Hanes Bedyddwyr
Cymru (1928), 1–99. T.M. Bassett, The Welsh Baptists (Swansea, 1977), ch. 1.
48 John Miles, An Antidote Against the Infection of the Times (London, 1656).
49 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), pp. 154–8; Christopher
Hill, The Experience of Defeat (London, 1984), pp. 84–97.
50 Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Seeds and Fruits of Revolution: The Erbery Family and Religious
Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century Glamorgan’, Welsh History Review, 25 (2011), 346–73.
 Wales, 1587–1689 235

‘a forerunner and preparer of the way for these deceivers [i.e. Quakers]’.51
Morgan Llwyd, whose ministry centred on Wrexham, was initially attracted
to the millenarianism of Fifth Monarchists like Vavasor Powell, but from
around 1653 his theology moved to focus on the inner spirit and the mysticism
of Jacob Boehme.52 In July 1653 Llwyd sent emissaries to Swarthmoor Hall to
better understand the emergent Quaker doctrine that was paralleling his
own ­spiritual development, although he himself never joined the sect. The
kinds of experimental spirituality associated with propagators like Erbery and
Llwyd, as well as the millennial strain that ran through the teachings of Vavasor
Powell, may have prepared the way for the sympathetic reception Quakerism
received in parts of the principality.53 John ap John of Ruabon in Denbighshire,
a member of Llwyd’s Wrexham congregation and one of the emissaries he sent
to Swarthmoor, was convinced there and became the first Quaker missionary
in Wales.54 Many more followed including such luminaries of the movement as
Thomas Holme, Francis Howgill, and even George Fox himself. They had
particular successes in south and east Wales, but also in Merioneth in the west.
Yet although new enthusiasm accompanied these conversions, Quakerism met
stiff resistance among many of the Welsh Independent congregations. For
example, it united in opposition Vavasor Powell and Walter Cradock, who had
themselves become estranged by the debate over whether or not the saints should
be reconciled with Cromwell’s Protectorate. And there was also, of course, the
usual catalogue of opposition to Quaker activity from orthodox clergy and
magistrates.
The period of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, then, was crucial in establish-
ing not only sectarian congregations, but a nonconformist presence more gen-
erally in Wales. The impetus offered by the Propagation Commission and the
protection afforded by sympathetic local gentry, such as Colonel Philip Jones
in Glamorgan, succoured pockets of dissent where previously there had been
none. The landscape was variegated: Independent congregations predominated
but clusters of Baptists and Quakers were locally significant, while Presbyterian
sympathies were sustained in some places, as at Emeral and Worthenbury,
Flintshire, under the notable preacher, Philip Henry. Dissent remained, how-
ever, very much a minority concern in Wales, and was sometimes portrayed as
antipathetic to the Welsh language and Welsh culture. Morgan Llwyd was the
only propagator who published in Welsh during this period, while conservative
Welsh language poets such as John Griffith of Llanddyfnan, Anglesey, claimed
to be representing more faithfully Welsh religious convictions in compositions
such as Bustl yr Eglwys, sef erlidiaû Eglwys Loegr Anno 1653 (‘Bile of the church,

51 Ralph Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d in his Chair of Pestilence (London, 1657), p. 18.
52 M. Wynn Thomas, Morgan Llwyd (Cardiff, 1984); Nuttall, Welsh Saints, pp. 52–4.
53 Nuttall, Welsh Saints, pp. 63–6.
54 W.G. Norris and N. Penney, eds, John ap John and the Early Records of Friends in Wales
(London, 1907).
236 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

namely persecutions of the Church of England, 1653’), which lamented the loss
of familiar services and the proliferation of ‘a hundred faiths, all abhorrent’
(‘ffyddiau gant ffiaidd i gyd’).55 Major General Charles Fleetwood’s appraisal of
the Welsh in 1654 was bracing: ‘There are some precious good people in Wales
though very few. The generality of people in those parts, I fear, are little better
than the Irish. They have envenomed hearts against the ways of God.’56 The
return of monarchy and the structures of the Church of England in 1660, then,
promised a difficult period fighting for survival in the face of a hostile lay and
clerical elite and a majority of unsympathetic neighbours.

RESTORATION TO TOLERATION

After a spasm of fearful retribution by the authorities shortly after the

Restoration, which saw many Quakers and republican activists such as Vavasor
Powell incarcerated, an important period in the history of Welsh Dissent came
with the clerical ejections of 1660–2.57 In all some 130 ministers were removed
in Wales, and the pattern of their ejection gives us some indication of the geo-
graphical inroads made by the nonconformists in the previous two decades.
Glamorgan was in advance of other areas with twenty-three ministers removed,
while Breconshire (fourteen), Montgomeryshire (thirteen), Cardiganshire
(thirteen), Denbighshire (eleven), and Monmouthshire (ten) also experienced
some significant disruption. Notably, these were often areas open to influences
from across the border, and were also regions in which the Propagation
Commission had been most active. In the heartland of Welsh language culture,
the three north-western counties of Caernarvonshire, Merioneth, and Anglesey,
however, only nine ministers were displaced. This general pattern of noncon-
formist weakness in the north-west and relative strength in the south-east is
further confirmed by the licences requested under the Indulgence of 1672
and a report on Welsh Dissent compiled by the Independent minister Henry
Maurice in 1675. The predominance of the Independents in Wales is also
confirmed in these accounts.58

55 D.W. William, ‘Traddodiad Barddol Môn yn yr XVII Ganrif ’ (PhD thesis, Bangor University,
1983), pp. 1501–5; Gwyn Thomas, ‘John Griffith, Llanddyfnan, Bardd o’r Ail Ganrif ar Bymtheg’,
Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, New Series, 6 (1999), 22–5.
56 Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 7 vols (London, 1742),
II, p. 256.
57 R. Tudur Jones and B.G. Owens, ‘Anghydffurfwyr Cymru, 1660–1662’, Y Cofiadur, 32
(1962), 3–93.
58 Thomas Richards, Wales under the Indulgence, 1672–1675 (London, 1928); Edward Bean
Underhill, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687
(London, 1847), pp. 511–18.
 Wales, 1587–1689 237

The panoply of measures designed by the Restoration authorities to suppress

Dissent collectively known as ‘The Clarendon Code’ was enforced fitfully and
with considerable variation across Wales. In periods of political upheaval and
religious strife such as the early years of the Restoration and during the Popish
Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the authorities appear to have implemented the pro-
visions against Dissenters more thoroughly than at other times, but generally
the period is characterized by sullen resentment and sporadic harassment as
much as concerted and sustained persecution. The attitude of the diocesan was
important in calibrating the response. Bishop Lloyd of St Asaph initially tried
to win over nonconformists by argument and disputation (although he later
adopted a more repressive line), while William Lucy of St David’s epitaph at
Brecon read ‘averruncator strenuus schismatis et haeresium’ (‘a vigorous opponent
of schismatics and heretics’).59 The temper of local gentry and magistrates
could also be important in determining whether Dissenting groups were
indulged or harassed. The gentry of eastern Glamorgan, for example, complained
in 1664 that conventicles ‘abound in the western parts [of the county], and that
we could not well remedy the same without giving some disgust to the deputy
lieutenants and justices of the peace of those limits’.60 They probably had in
mind Swansea and the surrounding area where John Miles’s Baptist community
had been influential. Bishop Lucy would note a decade later that a Dissenting
school had been established in the town and that the Independent minister
Stephen Hughes was also prominent there, and was ‘countenanced by the
leading men of the country’.61 Swansea was representative of a concentration of
Dissenting sympathies in the small urban centres of south Wales, which
included Carmarthen, Brecon, Cardigan, and Haverfordwest. It has been
suggested that trading contacts with radical communities in Bristol helped
reinforce and nurture these urban nonconformist enclaves.62
The dynamics of Welsh nonconformity in this period is difficult to chart
given its necessarily clandestine nature, but Congregationalists continued
to represent the dominant strain of Welsh Dissent, followed by Baptists and
Quakers. That said, denominational boundaries were often permeable, with
different Dissenting groups not infrequently pooling resources and worship-
ping together in straitened and difficult circumstances. Henry Maurice record-
ed twelve Independent churches in Wales in 1675, which were spread across the
country from Caernarvonshire to Pembrokeshire, but strongest in Glamorgan

59 Richard Davies, An Account of the Convincement . . . of . . . Richard Davies (London, 1710),

pp. 207–10; National Library of Wales, Facsimiles 125, nos 20–1; Penrice and Margam MS L.97;
Bodl., Tanner MS 35, fol. 162; MS 136, fols 33v, 113, 138; Edward Parry, ‘Prelates and Preachers:
Anglicanism and Dissent in Breconshire, 1621–1721’, Brycheiniog, 35 (2003), 49.
60 Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: Glamorgan, The Gentry, 1640–1790 (Cambridge,
1983), p. 121.
61 Bodl., Tanner MS 146, fol. 138.
62 Philip Jenkins, ‘ “The Old Leaven”: The Welsh Roundheads after 1660’, Historical Journal, 24
(1981), 820–2.
238 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

and Monmouthshire. Their arrangements were flexible, with members often

dispersed over quite wide areas, not infrequently across county boundaries, but
coming together at agreed locations. There were evidently differences of degree
in terms of their internal organzation. There seemed to be greater authority
placed in the elders of the churches in Carmarthenshire and Llanbadarn Fawr
in Cardiganshire, while a more egalitarian Congregationalism prevailed at
places like Wrexham and Haverfordwest.63 The Baptists were not infrequently
associated with these Independent churches, and a significant moment for the
sect came in 1663 when John Miles emigrated to Massachusetts (where he
established the town of Swansey), and the Baptist cause suffered a major down-
turn in west Glamorgan. However, his successor, William Jones, established an
important new centre of the faith at Rhydwilym in Pembrokeshire in 1667,
which served as the Baptist hub for south-west Wales.64 Another Baptist enclave
centred on Llanigon and Merthyr Tydfil, where the Vavasorian influence was
kept alive by church elders such as Thomas Gwyn, Lewis Prytherch, David
Williams, and Henry Williams, the last a former itinerant preacher under the
Propagation Commission and acolyte of Powell.65 In numbers, the Baptists
were a distant second to the Congregationalists and were also largely confined
to south Wales. By contrast, during the 1660s and 1670s significant inroads
were made by the Quakers in Merioneth, Montgomeryshire, and Radnorshire,
often at the expense of older congregational groupings, one scholar noting that
in these areas ‘the old Puritanism was almost completely subsumed in the new
quakerism’.66 George Fox’s structures of regular meetings, including, from 1682
a Welsh yearly meeting, helped the Quakers endure in the face of some bitter
maltreatment. However, the Quaker cause suffered a severe blow from the early
1680s with the decision of some 2,000 adherents, particularly from Merioneth,
to escape persecution by establishing a community that became known as ‘The
Welsh Tract’ in Pennsylvania.67
Importantly, it seems that the generational shift from the era of propagation
to that of persecution was accompanied by a more thoroughgoing incultur-
ation of nonconformity within a Welsh language milieu. Henry Williams,
the leader of a large mixed congregation in Merthyr Tydfil, for example, was
a monoglot Welsh speaker, while the Quaker advance into places such as
Merioneth necessitated an accommodation with a largely Welsh-speaking

63 R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in Wales, ed. Robert Pope (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 73–4.
64 Thomas Richards, Wales under the Penal Code (London, 1925), pp. 106–14.
65 R. Tudur Jones, ‘Religion in Post-Restoration Brecknockshire, 1660–1668’, Bryncheiniog, 8
(1962), 41–3.
66 Jenkins, ‘ “The Old Leaven” ’, 813.
67 Richard Allen, ‘In Search of a New Jerusalem: A Preliminary Investigation into the Causes
and Impact of Welsh Quaker Emigration to Pennsylvania, c.1660–1750’, Quaker Studies, 9 (2004),
31–53; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘From Ysgeifiog to Pennsylvania: The Rise of Thomas Wynne, Quaker
Barber-Surgeon’, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 28 (1977–8), 39–61.
 Wales, 1587–1689 239

population.68 The historian of Welsh Congregationalism has even claimed that

‘[o]ne of the greatest blessings of the persecution was that it made Welsh
Puritanism thoroughly Welsh-speaking’.69 The publication of religious texts in
Welsh was important in this development, and a principal figure in this regard
was Stephen Hughes of Meidrim, ‘The Apostle of Carmarthenshire’. Hughes
had acted as an approver under Cromwell, but was ejected from his living in
1661. As Bishop Lucy indicated, however, he continued to operate and live in
Swansea and ministered to a number of local congregations. As part of his
ministry, Hughes was concerned to encourage Welsh literacy among his flock
and also promote the availability of edifying texts in the Welsh language. He
produced popular editions of the religious poems of the Carmarthenshire min-
ister, Rees Prichard, partly to foster literacy among a population who were
already fairly familiar with Prichard’s verse from oral performance.
From 1675 Hughes also became involved with an important initiative, the
Welsh Trust. Although an ecumenical project, the Trust was closely associated
with the ejected London clergyman, Thomas Gouge, and the Bishop of Bangor
for one saw it as a stalking horse for ‘sectaries’ intent on spreading factious
principles among the gentry and people.70 A chief aim of the Trust was the
publication and distribution of Welsh language religious texts, and Hughes was
instrumental in their translation, editing, and printing.71 With the backing of
Gouge and another Dissenting Welsh minister and author, Charles Edwards,
sufficient capital was raised to allow Hughes to produce a new edition of the
Welsh Bible in 1678; 8,000 were printed, and 1,000 of these were to be distrib-
uted gratis. He was also closely involved in producing Welsh translations of
English devotional literature, including an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress (Taith
neu Siwrnai y Pererin). At the end of his publications Hughes often added a
Welsh alphabet and instructions on how to read, and in many of his sermons he
‘exhorted the illiterate to learn to read their own language, which great num-
bers did’.72 Hughes’s efforts, then, were important in bringing together noncon-
formity, the Welsh language, and the technologies of print culture, although
none of the texts produced were themselves outside of moderate Anglican
opinion. This was a countervailing force to the Anglicizing tendencies of a non-
conformist tradition that had been largely articulated in English. Indeed, one
criticism of the Welsh Trust was that its laudable efforts to establish charity
schools in the principality were undercut by the decision to conduct lessons in
English; as one patron had it, so that learning English would allow Welsh

68 G. Lyon Turner, Original Records of Early Nonconformity under Persecution and Indulgence,
3 vols (London, 1911–14), I, p. 46; G.H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642–1780
(Oxford, 1993), p. 190.
69 Tudur Jones, Congregationalism, p. 75. 70 Bodl., Tanner MS 40, fols 18r–19v.
71 G.H. Jenkins, ‘Apostol Sir Gaerfyrddin: Stephen Hughes, c.1622–1688’, Y Cofiadur, LIV (1989).
72 Edmund Calamy, An Account of the Ministers . . . Ejected or Silenced after the Restoration,
2 vols (London, 1713), II, p. 719.
240 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

children to be ‘more serviceable to their country and live more comfortably in

the world’.73 Hughes retorted to such sentiments in a manner which echoed the
original Elizabethan translator of the Bible into Welsh, Bishop William Morgan:
‘yn barnau nad do printio math yn y byd o lyfrau cymraeg i gynnal y iaith i
fynu; one ei fod yn weddus i’r bobl golli ei iaith, a dysgu saesneg. Digon da. Ond
cofied y cyfryw, mai haws dywedyd “mynydd” na myned trosto’ (‘some people
think that printing Welsh books to sustain the language is not a good thing and
that it is becoming for the people to lose their language and learn English. Very
good. But let us remember that it is easier to say “mountain” than to cross it’).74

CONCLUSION

Hughes died shortly before the passing of the Toleration Act in May 1689.
Although he had lived among a fairly dynamic nonconformist community in
Swansea, this was very much the exception rather than the rule in late-Stuart
Wales. Dissenters remained a small minority in a population which was still
largely wedded to an Established Church that had long been a cornerstone of
both Welsh elite and popular culture.75 Moreover, Welsh nonconformity was
geographically circumscribed, being largely confined to south Wales with the
north, apart from the notable exception of Wrexham, largely an ultima thule for
Dissent. The structural weaknesses of the Church of England, and a rather
high-handed attitude towards the Welsh language by its diocesans and elements
among the clergy, would in time encourage the drift towards nonconformity,
particularly in the large and scattered parishes of the uplands. Yet we should
not overstate these problems, nor be too eager to fold them into a linear narra-
tive that connects seventeenth-century Dissent with the growth of Welsh
Methodism in the mid-eighteenth century and the explosion of nonconformist
numbers in the nineteenth. Many of these issues did not rear their head until
the mid-eighteenth century, and the strength of the Anglican Church in Wales
and the strength of lay loyalty helped curb the influence and expansion of non-
conformity. The Welsh Methodists themselves were eager to portray Tudor and
Stuart Wales as languishing in a long spiritual darkness that their evangelical

73 M.G. Jones, ‘Two Accounts of the Welsh Trust, 1675 and 1678’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic
Studies, 9 (1937–9), 72.
74 Stephen Hughes, ed., Gwaith Mr Rees Prichard (London, 1672), sig. A3v, quoted in Geraint
H. Jenkins, Richard Suggett, and Eryn White, eds, The Welsh Language before the Industrial
Revolution (Cardiff, 1997), p. 86.
75 Philip Jenkins, ‘The Anglican Church and the Unity of Britain: The Welsh Experience,
1560–1714’, in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barker, eds, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British
State, 1485–1725 (London, 1995), pp. 115–38; Philip Jenkins, ‘Church, Nation and Language: The
Welsh Church, 1660–1800’, in Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain, eds, The Local Church
in National Perspective (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 265–84.
 Wales, 1587–1689 241

revival helped illuminate. This Methodist vision of the Puritan past profoundly
informed the Victorian historical view of a benighted Wales awaiting the
­forward-looking shock troops of a precocious national nonconformity to
rescue it from the mire of spiritual ignorance and moral turpitude. As a result
the historical reputation of the Established Church suffered, with the criticisms
of the Dissenters and Methodists being taken rather too much at face value.76
Nevertheless, when properly historicized and contextualized it remains clear
that the mid-seventeenth century was a crucial time in establishing noncon-
formity in the principality, shaping its character, and accommodating it with
the prevailing cultural landscape. Connections with English Dissent were con-
tinuous and vital, from the patronage of Sir Robert Harley and down to the
involvement of metropolitan Dissenters like Thomas Gouge in the 1670s. The
‘foreignness’ of nonconformity is suggested by its initial hold in the eastern
fringes of Wales and its strength in bilingual urban centres like Swansea and
Cardiff. We should be wary, however, of seeing such processes as only operat-
ing in one direction. It is clear, for example, that the Erbery clan were exporting
novel strains of radicalism into Bristol and south-west England in the early
1650s, and often the dynamics of Welsh nonconformity are best understood as
a web of reciprocal interconnections between Welsh and English groupings.
Scholars should take care not to simply reproduce the Puritan trope of English
enlightenment being brought to Welsh spiritual darkness.77 In addition, the
Anglophone or bilingual profile of early Puritanism was increasingly counter-
balanced by Welsh-speaking nonconformist communities such as that in
Llanigon and Merthyr Tydfil. Moreover, men like Morgan Llwyd and Stephen
Hughes suggest the ways in which efforts were made in this period to adjust, or
naturalize, nonconformity to a Welsh language environment. Llwyd and William
Erbery also argued that the developments of the 1640s and 1650s showed God’s
particular favour for the Welsh, who were said to have been in the vanguard of
religious reform down the ages.78
This attempt to suggest that nonconformity, and in particular Independency,
was somehow the ‘natural’ faith of the Welsh was to be influential, especially
when later commentators looked back to the resilience of embattled saints in
the seventeenth century. As one Welsh author observed in 1912 on the eve of
Welsh disestablishment (and the 250th anniversary of the 1662 ejections), ‘the
future of Welsh religion found its clearest voice in Morgan Llwyd. . . From the
first, Nonconformity in Wales was Welsh . . . from the first, the Independents

76 For example, Richards, Wales under the Penal Code, pp. xii–xii, 132–60.
77 Bowen, ‘Seeds and Fruits of Revolution’.
78 Stephen Roberts, ‘Religion, Politics and Welshness, 1649–1660’, in Ivan Roots, ed., ‘Into Another
Mould’: Aspects of the Interregnum (Exeter, 1998 edn), pp. 30–46; Lloyd Bowen, ‘The Battle of Britain’,
in Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin and Robert Armstrong, eds, Celtic Christianities: Adapting and Interpreting
the Faith in Celtic Britain and Ireland 1450–1750 (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 135–50.
242 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

and Baptists of Wales preached in the Welsh language and were Welsh at heart.’79
The picture may be more fragmented and disjointed than such denominational
histories allow, but there remains a sense that the seeds of nonconformity that
germinated in Wales in the mid-seventeenth century produced robust shoots.
The modern varieties of Welsh Dissent may have developed from different
cuttings, but the importance of memorializing the advances made in the early
modern period was grafted deeply into them and helped shape their character
and growth.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Allen, Richard C., Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales: From Resistance to
Respectability (Cardiff, 2007).
Bassett, T.M., The Welsh Baptists (Swansea, 1977).
Bowen, Lloyd, ‘Wales and Religious Reform in the Long Parliament, 1640–42’,
Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, New Series, 12 (2005), 36–59.
Gruffydd, R.G., ‘In That Gentile Country . . .’: The Beginnings of Puritan Nonconformity in
Wales (Bridgend, 1976).
Hill, Christopher, ‘Puritans and “the Dark Corners of the Land” ’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 13 (1963), 77–102.
Jenkins, Geraint H., Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff, 1978).
Jenkins, Geraint H., Protestant Dissenters in Wales, 1639–1689 (Cardiff, 1992).
Jenkins, Philip, ‘ “The Old Leaven”: The Welsh Roundheads after 1660’, Historical Journal,
24 (1981), 807–23.
Jones, John Gwynfor, Crefydd, Cenedlgarwch a’r Wladwriaeth: John Penry (1563–1593) a
Phiwritaniaeth Gynnar (Cardiff, 2014).
Jones, R. Tudur, Vavasor Powell (Leominster, 1971).
Jones, R. Tudur, Congregationalism in Wales, ed. Robert Pope (Cardiff, 2004).
Nuttall, Geoffrey F., The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660 (Cardiff, 1957).
Richards, Thomas, A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales (London, 1920).
Richards, Thomas, Religious Developments in Wales, 1654–1662 (London, 1923).
Roberts, Stephen, ‘Godliness and Government in Glamorgan 1647–1660’, in Colin
Jones, Malcolm Newitt, and Stephen Roberts, eds, Politics and People in Revolutionary
England: Essays in Honour of Ivan Roots (Oxford, 1986), pp. 225–51.
Roberts, Stephen, ‘Religion, Politics and Welshness, 1649–1660’, in Ivan Roots, ed., ‘Into
another Mould’: Aspects of the Interregnum (Exeter, 1998 edn), pp. 30–46.
Roberts, Stephen, ‘Propagating the Gospel in Wales: the Making of the 1650 Act’,
Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmorodrion, New Series, 10 (2004),
57–75.

79 D. Brynmor Jones, The Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of England in

Wales (London, 1912), pp. 68–9.
 Wales, 1587–1689 243

White, Eryn M., ‘The Established Church, Dissent and the Welsh Language, c.1660–1811’,
in Geraint H. Jenkins, ed., The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution
(Cardiff, 1997), pp. 235–87.
White, Eryn M., ‘From Ejectment to Toleration in Wales, 1662–89’, in Alan P.F. Sell, ed.,
The Great Ejectment of 1662: Its Antecedents, Aftermath and Ecumenical Significance
(Eugene, OR, 2012), pp. 125–81.
Williams, David, ed., Three Treatises Concerning Wales (Cardiff, 1960).
 11

Dissent in New England

Francis J. Bremer

New England was founded in the early seventeenth century by men and women
of faith who in conscience could no longer conform to what was demanded of
members of the Church of England. But in establishing new societies they were
themselves challenged by the task of establishing boundaries to define what
ideas and practices were to be allowed and those that were intolerable. As the
century progressed, the one-time dissenters earned a reputation for their lack
of tolerance for Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers. In
examining these issues a distinction should be drawn between dissent from
doctrinal teachings and non-conformity to liturgical practices, and to under-
stand both in terms of New England requires that we start by trying to understand
what Puritanism was and how it developed in England.

DEFINING PURITANISM

The difficulty of identifying Puritans stems largely from the fact that prior to
1630 those we are accustomed to apply that label to did not have a distinct
identity but considered themselves members of the Church of England. Rather
than seeing themselves as Dissenters they claimed that their labours were
designed to keep the Church of England anchored to standards they believed
had been established by Edwardean and Elizabethan reformers.1 Those

1 Supporting this view are the works of Nicholas Tyacke, in particular Anti-Calvinists: The Rise
of Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990), where he argued that Puritans were seeking to pre-
serve the best in the Elizabethan Church, particularly its Calvinist theology, and that it was
Laudian bishops who were the innovators. Tyacke’s views have been questioned by Peter White in
Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the
Reformation to the Civil Wars (Cambridge, 1992), but most scholars have found that Tyacke has
the better of the argument. See Tyacke’s further reflection in Aspects of English Protestantism,
c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2011).

Francis J. Bremer, Dissent in New England In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0012
 Dissent in New England 245

standards included a Calvinist theology, a strong anti-Catholic posture regarding

church practices and foreign policy, and a commitment to placing educated
preachers in all the nation’s pulpits. But these criteria are problematic as a
means of definition. There were clearly men and women who adhered to one or
all of these goals who were not viewed as Puritans by their contemporaries or
as Dissenters or nonconformists by later scholars. Furthermore, the relative
importance of each of these criteria themselves (and the specific agenda that
led from them) regularly shifted with the changing circumstances of the times
and the policies being pursued by England’s monarchs and bishops.
As the momentum for change slowed, some Englishmen determined not to
tarry for the magistrate in making the changes God demanded in their prac-
tice. Separatists may not have initially dissented from the teachings of the
Church of England (though some later did), but their disdain for its practices
led to their decision to separate from the institution of the Church, establishing
their own independent congregations of believers. Faced with arrest, fines,
and imprisonment, many such dissenters left England and relocated in the
Netherlands. Members of one of these groups, originating in Scrooby, England,
and settling first in Amsterdam and then in Leiden, eventually decided to move
on yet again. Popularly known to posterity as the Pilgrims, they founded the
Plymouth Colony in New England in 1620.2

SET TLING NEW ENGLAND

After Charles I became king in 1625 the price for Puritans seeking to remain in
the Church of England became steeper. The new monarch was sympathetic to
a faction of bishops who were perceived by Puritans as seeking to move the
national Church back towards Catholic doctrine and practice. Following
William Laud’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 conformity
was imposed with increasing vehemence, with attention paid not only to what
had been nominally required in prior decades, but to new policies that Puritans
found dangerous.
Even before this campaign for conformity was fully ramped up, many Puritans
had perceived the looming threat. Some followed the example of Separatists
and moved to the Netherlands. Others planned the establishment of a Puritan
refuge in New England. In June of 1628 the Puritan dominated New England
Company sent John Endecott to take charge of a number of small fishing villages

2 For general discussions of Separatists, see Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of the Saints:
Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988) and Stephen Wright, The
Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006). For the Pilgrims in particular, see Jeremy
Dupertuis Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of
Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA, 2009).
246 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

along the coast of New England that fell under the company’s jurisdiction.
Following contacts with the Plymouth settlers to the south, Endecott and
fellow settlers at Naumkeag (which he renamed Salem), organized a church in
the spring of 1629. That church was virtually identical in its organization and
practices to the Plymouth congregation and its Separatist predecessors in
England and the Netherlands.3 At the same time the New England Company
achieved sounder legal footing with a new royal charter and reorganization as
the Massachusetts Bay Company. Leaders of that group, including the new
governor John Winthrop, determined to emigrate themselves, bringing their
charter with them, thus establishing full control over the colony’s affairs in
New England.4
Addressing the large group of colonists ready to sail from Southampton in
April 1630, Winthrop called upon them to live exemplary lives when they
arrived in New England. They would be ‘as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all
people are upon us.’ Drawing on the social gospel commonly preached by
Puritan ministers, Winthrop reminded his fellow colonists to be that they were
to ‘delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together,
mourn together, labor and suffer together – always having before our eyes our
commission and community in the work, our community as members of the
same body’.5
Before examining the Puritan experiment Winthrop and his fellow colonists
engaged in, how they defined their religious culture, and the role of dissent in
New England, a few words need to be said about how the original colonial
churches related to the Church of England. The very act of migrating to the
New World and establishing churches different from anything to be found in
England at the time could be considered a blatant expression of non-conformity,
and it is certainly reasonable to depict the New England venture in its entirety
as nonconformist. Yet the Massachusetts colonists loudly proclaimed that they
were not Separatists in principle. In the Humble Request they asserted that they
remained ‘members of the same body’ as the English Church and that ‘such
hope and part as we have obtained in the common salvation we have received

3 The degree to which the Salem congregation, and by implication, the subsequent churches
established in Massachusetts were influenced by Plymouth, has long been a matter of controversy.
For a discussion of that historiography and an important new contribution, see Michael Winship,
Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
4 This story can be followed in Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding
Father (New York, 2004), pp. 147–70.
5 John Winthrop, ‘A Model of Christian Charity’, Winthrop Papers: Volume II: 1623–30 (Boston,
MA, 1931), p. 282. The sermon, when and where it was preached, and an analysis of its content is
to be found in Bremer, John Winthrop, pp. 173–84. An alternative reading of the sermon’s origins
is to be found in Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay
Sermon (Princeton, NJ, 2018), pp. 13–30. References to the sermon will be to the edition in the
Winthrop Papers, though the best edition of the sermon is that newly transcribed and printed in
Rodgers, City on a Hill, pp. 289–308.
 Dissent in New England 247

in her bosom and sucked it from her breasts’.6 This was not merely for an
English audience. Roger Williams, referred to by Winthrop as ‘a godly minister’
when he arrived in Boston in 1631, soon left Massachusetts for Plymouth
because the Boston church ‘would not make a public declaration of their
repentance for having communion with the Churches of England while they
lived there’.7 As men and women seeking to provide an example to fellow
Christians in England, the colonial leaders believed that it was essential that
they remain engaged with the Church of their homeland.
That engagement manifested itself in various ways over the decades that
extended to the Restoration of 1660. In the 1630s colonial ministers regularly
responded to questions about New England church practices sent to them by
friends who continued to serve in the English ministry.8 When the conflict
between parliament and the king developed into war in 1642 colonists were
quick to identify with and assist the Puritan cause in England. William Hooke’s
New England’s Tears for Old England’s Fears (1641) captured the colonists’ sense
of identity with their homeland. The noted colonial clergymen John Cotton,
John Davenport, and Thomas Hooker were invited to join in the deliberations
of the Westminster Assembly to reform the Church of England. Though those
individuals declined the invitation, over the following decades many colonists
returned to England and took up livings in reformed parishes and independent
congregations.9 Clergy who remained in the colonies participated fully in the
print debates over the future of England’s Church. Only when the hope of a
Puritan national Church in England ended with the Restoration can the colo-
nial churches be truly considered a separate Dissenting entity, allied primarily
with England’s Congregational Dissenters. But the question of dissent is more
complicated, for even in the period when New Englanders did not see them-
selves as distinct from the national Church there were colonists who dissented
from the New England Way. The nature of that dissent and the way it was dealt
with by the colonial authorities will be examined in the following pages.

ERECTING A PERIMETER FENCE

The story of dissent in New England is often simplified as one of intolerant

Puritans seeking to suppress various pioneers of religious freedom. To under-
stand it properly it is important to understand that New England Puritanism

6 The “Humble Request”, Winthrop Papers, II, p. 232.

7 The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, eds Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia
Yeandle (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 44, 50.
8 These exchanges are discussed in Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical
Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, MA, 1994), pp. 117–20.
9 The most recent treatment of colonists who returned to England at this time is to be found
in Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England
(Woodbridge, 2013).
248 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

was for a long time a work in progress. When they sailed for America the
founders did not have a blueprint for how either state or Church was to be
constructed. Rather, Winthrop advised them that if they lived godly lives God
would ‘command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much
more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth than formerly we have been
acquainted with’.10 Implicit in this was an acceptance of the fact that, like all
Christians, the colonists were searching for truth by looking through a glass
darkly, and that through the inspiration of the spirit they might see more clearly
and grow incrementally in knowledge and thus godliness. As they struggled
to erect a perimeter fence that would define the boundary between beliefs
and practice that were acceptable and those that were intolerable, some of the
colonial Puritan leaders were aware enough of their own frailties as fallen men
that they were willing to engage in discussion of such matters with those who
advanced differing views, so long as they were presented with humility.11 Thus,
as a representative of the Boston church John Winthrop travelled to Watertown
to discuss with that church’s pastor George Phillip the latter’s belief that the Church
of Rome was a true Church. After discussion, Phillips abandoned that position.12
Differences focused attention on disputed points, leading to debate and
potentially new insights. Where differences remained all were to live with them
pending further light, unity being more important in such instances than
uniformity. Whether issues were resolved or not, dissent could be constructive.
In his important study of radicalism in New England during the period between
1620 and 1660 Philip F. Gura pointed out how much of ‘the ecclesiastical and doc-
trinal underpinnings of New England’s theology evolved as a result of a constant
dialectic between nonseparating Congregationalists and those in the population
who argued for more radical reorganization of seventeenth-century society’.13
Some leaders, however, were more certain of knowing the answers to questions
about faith and practice, and they led efforts to suppress views that differed
from what they were certain of. In examining how New Englanders treated
dissent it is important to recognize that decisions that seem straightforward—
such as to banish Roger Williams or hang the Quaker Mary Dyer—were actu-
ally contested between those who were more open to discussion of controversial
ideas and those who were convinced of the need for limiting debate. It was a
conflict over whether unity was enough or uniformity required. Three factors are
important in establishing the framework for these debates—the congregational

10 Winthrop, ‘Christian Charity’, p. 294.

11 I have found the concept of a perimeter fence, as discussed by Alexandra Walsham in
Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), to be a
useful tool in dealing with the question of how much latitude of opinion and practices Puritans
allowed in the public spheres that they created. A similar idea can be found in Kai Ericson’s
Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966), in which he discusses
conflict as a means of settling boundaries.
12 Bremer, John Winthrop, pp. 221–2.
13 Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660
(Middletown, CT, 1984), p. viii.
 Dissent in New England 249

nature of the Church order, the role of the state, and the awareness that
New England was a land of immigrants. All of them affected the debates over
different ideas.
The church established by John Endecott and his fellow believers in Salem in
1629 became the model for all of New England. Townsmen would identify a
small number of their neighbours as particularly godly and those ‘pillars’ would
draw up a covenant. Individuals desiring to join the church were tested as to
their beliefs and behaviour, the colonists believing that the faith and conduct of
those infused with saving grace were discernibly different from those of individ-
uals who were not of the elect. Membership having been extended to those who
sought it and met the criteria, the lay members would then elect clerical and lay
elders. As in the choice of ministers, so too in all other matters, decisions were
made by the congregation.14 This included matters of discipline, so that while
decisions to censure or excommunicate dissenters from a congregation were
declared by the clergy, they were actually made by the lay members of the church.
The very nature of this congregationalism, with its emphasis on the au­ton­
omy of the individual congregation, explains why there was less uniformity in
New England than is often assumed. Peter Hobart, the pastor of Hingham,
Massachusetts and the Newbury, Massachusetts clergymen Thomas Parker
and James Noyse believed in a more Presbyterian polity that featured broader
membership criteria and rejected lay ordination of clergy. Their ideas were
rejected by a gathering of area clergy in 1643, but there was no effort to impose
a more thorough congregationalism on the two towns.15 In 1653 Hartford’s
Samuel Stone, famously known for having characterized New England church
practice as ‘a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy’, asserted the
right to reject his congregation’s choice of a candidate to join him in the minis-
try.16 Years later, Samuel Willard would similarly assert the right of a pastor to
exercise a negative voice over the deliberations of his congregation.17
In part because congregations were independent, over time the civil author-
ities took steps intended to ensure religious order. In many respects, the spheres
of church and state in New England were more separate than elsewhere in the
western world. Those holding religious office could not hold civil posts. Action

14 The standard account of church membership requirements is Edmund S. Morgan, Visible

Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, NY, 1963). I have offered a different perspective of
what was required for membership in ‘ “To Tell what God hath Done for thy Soul”: Puritan
Spiritual Testimonies as Admission Tests and Means of Edification’, New England Quarterly, 87
(2014), 625–65. The governance of these congregations is the subject of James F. Cooper’s
Tenacious of their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999).
15 David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the
Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972), p. 209.
16 I have discussed the resulting dispute in the Hartford church in Francis J. Bremer, Building
a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT, 2012), pp. 258–62.
See also Baird Tipson, Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying
God (Oxford, 2015).
17 Hall, Faithful Shepherd, p. 212.
250 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

against an individual by a church had no civil consequences. The colony

governments had no authority that would have enabled them to define or
approve doctrines. Yet the magistrates were expected to be nursing fathers and
mothers to the churches, and in the 1630s the Massachusetts General Court
sought to put a limit on lay empowerment and establish greater uniformity by
stipulating that any new congregation needed to be approved by the magistrates
and the ministerial ‘elders of the greater part of the churches in this jurisdiction’.18
In 1646 the General Court ordered that every person must attend services on
the Lord’s Day and on all public fast days and days of thanksgiving, though
making clear that it was not compelling individuals to join the churches, nor
forcing them to participate in the ceremonies of worship. On various occasions
the civil authorities invited the churches to send representatives to assemblies
that were asked to address matters of religious concern and make recommenda-
tions to the congregations.
Even as they advised their allies in England during the years of the Civil
Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate, New Englanders showed an aware-
ness of their unique situation as a society of immigrants. Thomas Shepard, the
minister at Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the less flexible colonists.
At one point he called for ‘axes and wedges . . . to hew and break through this
rough, uneven, bold, yet professing age’.19 Yet in writing about the English situ-
ation, in 1645 Shepard acknowledged that ‘the case may be such as a state may
tolerate all, because of necessity they must, the numbers being so many and the
hazard more’.20 Transforming a nation where many had been raised in error
was a different task from ensuring orthodoxy in a society of men and women
who had moved there knowing the principles New England stood for.

DISSENTERS BEYOND THE PALE:

RO GER WILLIAMS

With these factors in mind, it is worth reviewing the major controversies that
involved the definition and treatment of unacceptable dissent. The first of those
members of the society whose protests put them beyond the pale was Roger
Williams.

18 Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed.
Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston, MA, 1853), I, pp. 142–3. The term ‘nursing mothers’ is from Isaiah
49:23: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers.’
19 Shepard’s role in the Free Grace Controversy is well described in Michael P. Winship, Making
Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
Shepard and his ally Thomas Dudley are discussed in Francis J. Bremer, First Founders: American
Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World (Hanover, NH, 2012), pp. 63–78, where the state-
ment about axes and wedges is quoted.
20 ‘Thomas Shepard to Hugh Peter, 1645’, American Historical Review, 4 (1898), 105–6.
 Dissent in New England 251

The first incident involved the formation of the Salem church. That
c­ ongregation having been formed, the chosen ministers, Samuel Skelton and
Francis Higginson, dispensed with the use of the English Prayer Book and
adopted practices such as allowing laymen to ask questions and offer their own
insights during services. This offended some of the members of the community,
who, led by John and Samuel Browne, began to meet separately and conduct
readings from the Prayer Book. The Brownes accused the congregation of
separatism and Anabaptism. When they would not desist, Governor Endecott
deemed that their complaints threatened the unity of the community and shipped
them back to England.21
After having criticized the Boston church for refusing to explicitly separate
from the Church of England after his arrival in Massachusetts in 1631, Roger
Williams had settled in Plymouth. But despite being recognized as a man of
deep piety, he soon, according to the colony’s Governor William Bradford,
‘began to fall into some strange opinions, and from opinion to practice, which
caused some controversy between the church and him’.22 Among those opin-
ions were ‘that it is not lawful for an unregenerate man to pray, nor to take an
oath, and in special not the oath of fidelity to the civil government; nor was it
lawful for a godly man to have communion, either in family prayer, or in an oath,
with such as they judged unregenerate’.23 Disappointed when the Plymouth
church would not accept his views, Williams moved again and settled in Salem,
where he was soon preaching by way of prophesying. There he advanced some
other positions that stirred controversy, namely that the red cross in the English
ensign was a symbol of papist idolatry, that women should wear veils during
church services, and that the king had no true claim to the land he granted to
the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The Massachusetts leaders were divided on how to deal with Williams. John
Endecott and John Winthrop, along with some clergy, had some success in
getting him to temper his views. But, following Thomas Dudley’s election to the
governorship in May 1634, the Court of Assistants (the colony magistrates)
was dominated by a faction that held a more restrictive view on what was
tolerable. Dudley himself was later memorialized by his daughter, the poet Anne
Bradstreet, as being ‘to sectaries, a whip and maul’, and he was convinced that
Williams’ views posed a threat to the civil order.24 While rooted in his religion,
Williams’ positions on the validity of oaths and of the king’s right to grant the
charter had strong implications for the colony’s survival, and John Endecott’s

21 Massachusetts Records, I, pp. 51–69.

22 William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Worthington C. Ford,
2 vols (Boston, MA, 1912), II, p. 162.
23 Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial (Boston, MA, 1855 [originally published
1669]), pp. 102–3.
24 Anne Bradstreet, ‘To the Memory of My Dear and Ever Honoured Father’, in Jeannine
Hensley, The Works of Anne Bradstreet (Cambridge, MA, 1967), p. 203.
252 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

action in cutting the cross from the ensign used by the Salem train band in
November 1634 highlighted how incendiary Williams’s views might be.
Even with this action, the most the court was willing to do was to order
Williams in April 1635 to desist from promulgating his controversial views.
This was in keeping with the practice of not seeking to dictate what one must
believe, but rather prohibiting the proselytization of what the majority deemed
to be error. When there was evidence that Williams was violating the order, in
October 1635 the magistrates decided that he was to be sent out of the colony.
John Winthrop warned Williams of the impending action, prompting the dis-
senter to travel through the winter snows to settle in what was to be Providence,
Rhode Island. Over the following decades Williams became further convinced
of the futility of creating a truly reformed church prior to Christ’s second
coming. This did not, however, mean that he was unsure of his own religious
beliefs—indeed, he was as insistent on his views as those who banished him
were of theirs. He did not seek to force uniformity on the settlers of Rhode
Island, which colony became notable for broad toleration. On his journeys to
England to secure a charter for his colony, Williams jumped into the polemics
of the time, writing against the intolerance of Massachusetts and that colony’s
treatment of him in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644). John Cotton
responded to this in The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, and Made White in the Bloude
of the Lambe (1647), to which Williams replied in The Bloudy Tenent Yet More
Bloudy (1652), the latter published following Cotton’s death.
Cotton’s position—and in general that of New Englanders—was that toler-
ation could be granted to those who differed on matters of polity and on non-
fundamental religious beliefs, but not to those who differed on fundamentals.
This was also essentially the position of England’s Congregationalists, but the
difficulty with implementing it was how to define ‘fundamentals’.25 Williams,
for his part, wanted no state interference in religion, not because he deemed
separation of church and state necessary for the good of the state, but because
he had experiences that led him to fear the effect that the state might have in
dictating religious belief and practice. In his famous ‘ship of state letter’ of 1655
he asserted that ‘it hath fallen out sometimes, that both Papists and Protestants,
Jews, and Turks [Muslims] may be embarked on one ship’. In such a case, he
affirmed, that ‘all Liberty of Conscience that I ever pleaded for, turns upon
these two hinges, that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, and Turks be

25 Most historians have accepted at face value Williams’s depiction of the colonial position and
sided with the Rhode Islanders. But a more nuanced view of the debate, with greater sympathy for
Cotton’s position, is to be found in Conrad Wright, ‘John Cotton Washed and Made White’, in
F. Forrester Church and Timothy George, eds, Community and Discontinuity in Church History
(Leiden, 1979), pp. 338–50. The most recent biography of Roger Williams, covering his entire life,
is John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the
Birth of Liberty (New York, 2012).
 Dissent in New England 253

forced to come to the ship’s prayers or worship, nor, secondly, compelled from
their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any’.26

DISSENTERS BEYOND THE PALE:

ANNE HUTCHINSON

While the Massachusetts magistrates were still deliberating what to do with Roger
Williams, in 1634 the seeds of another conflict were being sown, when Anne
Hutchinson arrived in Boston. Hutchinson became a prominent member of the
godly community there. John Cotton later recalled that she ‘readily fell into good
discourse with the women about their spiritual estates’, and that she ‘found loving
and dear respect from both our church-elders and brethren, and so from myself ’.
Soon men as well as women turned to her for advice. According to John Winthrop
‘her ordinary talk was about the things of the Kingdom of God’, and ‘her usual
conversation was of righteousness and kindness’.27 There were other centres of
lay religiosity in the town, but the meetings in her home were special. Cotton
acknowledged that ‘[all] the faithful embraced her conference and blessed God for
her fruitful discourses’.28 Among those who were drawn to her meetings was
Henry Vane Jr, the son of a prominent member of the king’s council but a devout
Puritan who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1636.
Some of the religious ideas raised by Hutchinson and other Boston saints in
the mid-1630s tested the limits of orthodox Puritan belief (to the extent we can
define what was ‘orthodox’). Yet, as Michael Winship has pointed out, while
‘the Boston church was certainly a potential agent of disorder, yet it was at the
same time a striking example and capacity for containing and avoiding doctri-
nal conflict that gave Puritanism its rough, practical coherence’.29 Among the
ideas that were being discussed were what happened to the soul after death,
whether sanctification provided evidence of salvation, the resurrection of the
body, whether Christ had descended into hell after his death on the cross. Many
of these would have been recognized as issues debated in the London under-
ground in the previous decades.30
It would be a mistake to underestimate the theological sophistication and
charisma of Anne Hutchinson, but it would also be a mistake (which some have

26 The Correspondence of Roger Williams: Volume II: 1654–1682, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie
(Providence, RI, 1988), p. 424.
27 Marilyn Westerkamp discusses Hutchinson in this context in ‘Anne Hutchinson: Sectarian
Mysticism and the Puritan Order’, Church History, 59 (1990), 487–8.
28 Quotes in Winship, Making Heretics, pp. 41–3.
29 Winship, Making Heretics, p. 44.
30 David Como provides an excellent treatment of these English controversies in Blown by the
Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England
(Stanford, CA, 2004).
254 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

made) to depict her as the sole force behind the challenge to the establishment
that emerged. There were certainly other laymen and women who engaged
vigorously in the discussion that was going on, and some were more radical
than her. Those who gathered at Hutchinson’s for conference would, according
to the clergyman Thomas Welde, ‘appear very humble, holy, and spiritual
Christians, and full of Christ; they would deny themselves far, speak excellently,
pray with such soul-ravishing expression and affections’.31 For well over a year
following her arrival neither of the congregation’s ministers—John Cotton and
John Wilson—nor its most prominent layman, John Winthrop, saw anything
amiss in the discussions going on in her home.32
It was Thomas Shepard, the new minister of the church at Newtown (soon to
be renamed Cambridge), who first raised questions about what was happening,
first in a letter he sent to John Cotton, and then raising concerns in a ministerial
meeting in October 1636. Towards the end of 1636 the situation became more
explosive. An effort to call Anne’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright, closely
affiliated with Hutchinson and Vane, to join the ministry of the Boston church
failed to gain the unanimous support required. Members of the Hutchinson
circle, branded by others as opinionists, began to publicly assert more extreme
positions and to challenge those who questioned them. Fuel was added to the
fire when Wheelwright, delivering a fast-day sermon in January 1637, lashed
out at those who were critical of his faction, calling on his supporters to prepare
for spiritual combat and be prepared to suffer martyrdom. Eventually Wheelwright
would be banished for what the magistrates viewed as the insurrectionary
nature of the sermon.
With Thomas Shepard wielding his rhetorical axe, a process of polarization
began that developed a life of its own, with individuals of various opinions
gradually abandoning dialogue and beginning to hurl negative labels at one
another, and soon each side came to believe the categorization they had shaped
to define their opponents. John Wilson told church members that attending the
conference in Hutchinson’s home would ‘rob you of your ordinances, rob you
of your souls, rob you of your God’, and forbade members of his household
from participating.33 Thomas Welde recorded that the clergy ‘must have dung
cast on their faces, and be no better than legal preachers, Baal’s Priest, Popish
factors, Scribes, Pharisees, and Opposers of Christ himself ’, and that the opin-
ionists would claim that ‘a church officer is an ignorant man, and knows not
Christ; . . . such a pastor is a proud man, and would make a good persecutor;
such a teacher is grossly popish’. Opinionists were seeking out clergymen at
weekday lectures, and Welde wrote how ‘after our sermons were ended at our
public lectures, you might have seen half a dozen pistols discharged in the face
of the preacher, I mean so many objections made by the opinionists in the open

31 Welde quoted in Winship, Making Heretics, p. 59.

32 Winship, Making Heretics, p. 62.    33 Quoted in Winship, Making Heretics, p. 117.
 Dissent in New England 255

assembly against our doctrine delivered’. And, in Boston, ‘you might have seen
many of the opinionists rising up, and contemptuously turning their backs
upon the faithful pastor [John Wilson] of that church, and going forth from the
assembly when he began to pray or preach’.34
Following the colony elections in March 1637 the ‘orthodox’ party gained
control of the situation. John Winthrop had been elected governor. The General
Court condemned Wheelwright’s fast-day sermon as seditious but deferred his
sentencing till a later meeting. The Court also issued a call for representatives
of the churches of New England to gather to address the controversy. The meeting
convened in the Newtown meetinghouse at the end of August, 1637. Rather than
identifying and condemning specific ideas broached in the colony in recent years,
the Synod discussed and eventually condemned a list of eighty-two opinions
without specifying that they were actually upheld by anyone in the colony.35
In November the General Court tried and sentenced to banishment some of
Wheelwright’s more aggressive supporters and Hutchinson herself. Those
trials, while carrying religious overtones, were civil proceedings and, the
decision were based on the threat the divisions posed to the political order.
In March 1638 Anne Hutchinson was brought to trial before the Boston con-
gregation, with outside ministers also present. She was allowed to engage in
theological discourse with those who had doubts about her positions. Declining
to admit that she had embraced particular errors, Hutchinson was willing to
acknowledge that on some points she may have been mistaken. This wasn’t
enough for her clerical critics. After considerable debate over more than one
day, the congregation decided that she was guilty and with all but a few abstain-
ing, voted to excommunicate her.36 The Sunday following the verdict one of
Hutchinson’s supporters, William Dyer, was called before the church to explain
his view that Adam was not made in God’s image. He defended his position
against John Cotton and was admonished by the church. Together with other
members of the Hutchinsonian group, Dyer and his wife Mary moved to Rhode
Island and settled in the town of Aquidneck.

DEBATING BAPTISM

The next defining debate over dissenting views developed in the 1640s and
involved those who questioned the practice of infant baptism. There is little
question but that many of those we identify as New England Baptists began

34 Welde quoted in Winship, Making Heretics, p. 116.

35 Winthrop quoted in Winship, Making Heretics, p. 157.
36 The transcript of Hutchinson’s church trial is in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian
Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Middletown, CT, 1968), pp. 349–88. The sentence
of excommunication is on p. 388.
256 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

their spiritual progress as Puritans and the case can be made that many of those
who opposed infant baptism remained Puritan in all other respects. And
colonists were well aware at the time of the fact that many of their English
Congregational friends and allies hesitated to define infant baptism as a funda-
mental of faith, allowing into their congregations godly men and women who
had conscientious scruples about the baptizing of infants.
One of the first New Englanders to espouse Baptist views was John Clarke,
an Englishman who had received some university education and studied medi-
cine for a time, perhaps in Leiden. He emigrated to Massachusetts in November
1637, when the Free Grace controversy was at its height. Clarke sided with
the dissidents and moved with them to Rhode Island, settling eventually in
Newport. Like other Puritan churches without a trained clergyman, the con-
gregations in those towns functioned without an ordained minister, allowing
laymen to preach by way of ‘prophesying’.37 Clarke viewed prophesying as ‘a plain,
and brief declaration of the mind and counsel of God, in words significantly
and easily understood . . . and brought forth for the edification, exhortation,
and comfort of the whole’. He believed that spiritual discussions in church or
separate conferences promoted greater understanding, writing that the Spirit
would lead members ‘from truth to truth, until they be brought to all truth’.38
None of these position distinguished Clarke from the mainstream of Puritan
Congregationalism. But by 1644 he and his Newport congregation had come to
the conclusion that infant baptism was unscriptural. While Roger Williams
had briefly embraced Baptist views in 1639, the Newport church led by
Clarke is properly considered the first true Baptist church in America. Over the
following decades Clarke would assist other New Englanders seeking to
worship as Baptists, and join with English advocates of toleration, travelling to
Massachusetts on more than one occasion, where he was arrested and fined.
In December 1642 it became evident that Lady Deborah Moody, a
­well-regarded English gentlewoman who had joined the Salem church two
years previously, and whom John Winthrop referred to as ‘a wise and anciently
religious woman’, had come to doubt the validity of infant baptism, though she
did not insist that the practice was clearly wrong. After various individuals
failed to persuade her of the validity of the sacrament she decided to voluntarily
leave the colony to avoid further controversy, settling on Long Island, in the
Dutch colony of New Netherland, where she eventually became a Quaker.39
While en route to New Netherland, Lady Moody stopped in New Haven to
visit her friend, Anne Eaton, the wife of Theophilus Eaton, governor of the

37 Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing, or News from New England (1642), edited with an intro-
duction by J. Hammond Trumbull (Boston, MA, 1867), p. 94.
38 Sydney V. James, John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island
1638–1750, ed. Theodore Dwight Bozeman (University Park, PA, 1999), pp. 21–42, where Clarke
is quoted.
39 For Lady Moody, see Francis J. Bremer, First Founders, pp. 91–3.
 Dissent in New England 257

New Haven colony. The two women may first have encountered Baptist teaching
when they knew each other in London, but they clearly discussed the ideas in
New Haven, and Moody lent her friend a copy of Andrew Ritor’s A Treatise of
the Vanity of Child-Baptism (1642). Shortly thereafter, as New Haven’s pastor
John Davenport prepared to conduct an infant baptism in the New Haven
church, Eaton rose up and left the congregation. Over the following weeks
Davenport sought to dissuade her from her position, reviewing with her and
(to his mind) refuting Ritor’s arguments. While these discussions were ongoing,
separate charges were levelled against Anne, asserting that she had treated
members of her household—from her mother-in-law to servants—in an
abusive fashion. She was eventually censured and excommunicated for that
behaviour. In the end neither the church nor the civil authorities dealt with
her Baptist views and, while excluded from church services for her abusive
behaviour, she was allowed to continue as a member of the community and
provided a seat just outside the meetinghouse where she could listen to sermons
and prayers.40
A sentence of excommunication such as those voted against Anne Hutchinson
and Anne Eaton was the ultimate weapon employed by the New England churches
against those who were intransigent in refusing to desist from unacceptable
beliefs or practice, but it was only used when counselling and censure had
failed and was intended to bring the offender back to the fold. The laity who
voted to cast a fellow member out of the church were not consigning them
to the outer darkness forever. In the 1640s the Boston church sent messen-
gers to Rhode Island to persuade Anne Hutchinson and those who had left
with her to rejoin their communion. Hutchinson rejected these overtures,
but most laymen who were excommunicated were eventually reunited with
the church.
Other less noteworthy individuals also embraced Baptist views. Thomas
Painter was a labourer and member of the Hingham church when he refused to
allow his wife to bring their child to be baptized in 1644. William Witter of
Salem was first presented to the county court for claiming that it was sinful to
baptize infants and calling the sacrament the ‘badge of the whore’ in February
of 1644.41 In response to the evidence that Baptist views were spreading
(or perhaps due to the movement’s appeal to lower classes), the Massachusetts
General Court passed a law in November 1644 against those who maintained
the position, basing their decision on the potential disruption to civil order and
allowing for their banishment. Citing how ‘experience hath plentifully and
often proved since the first rising of the Anabaptists about a hundred years

40 Anne Eaton and her views are discussed in Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John
Davenport, A Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT, 2012), pp. 220–5.
41 William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of
Church and State, 2 vols (Cambridge MA, 1971), I, pp. 16, 18.
258 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

since, they have been the incendiaries of commonwealths, and the infectors of
persons in the main matters of religion, and the troublemakers of churches in
all places where they have been’, the court ordered that if any person openly
condemned ‘or oppose the baptizing of infants, or go about secretly to seduce
others from the approbation or use thereof, or shall purposely depart the con-
gregation at the administration of the ordinance’, they should be banished if
they do not repent.42 Implied in the law was the association of Anabaptism
with the effort to establish a communal sectarian government in the German
city of Munster in the 1530s. While the authorities were hoping to suppress the
Baptists, John Cotton contended that he knew of many who silently had doubts
about infant baptism but did not espouse them publicly.43
There is a danger in judging all or even most of New England by what was
done in Massachusetts. It may be noted that New Haven, where John Davenport
was more willing to consider Anabaptism something to be discussed, never passed
a law against it. Nor did Connecticut.44 There is no evidence that Plymouth
passed legislation against Baptists and this roused the ire of Massachusetts, the
Bay’s General Court sending a letter to the Plymouth authorities in 1649
complaining that they had ‘heard heretofore of divers Anabaptists arisen up in
your jurisdiction’, and that recently ‘there have been at Seekonk thirteen or
fourteen persons rebaptized’ without the authorities doing anything about it.
They feared that ‘the infection of such diseases, being so near us, are likely to
spread into our jurisdiction’. Plymouth ignored the complaint.45
Some Baptists were won back to orthodoxy, while others persisted in their
views or went on to embrace more radical positions. Perhaps the most famous
of those who did express and retain an opposition to infant baptism was Henry
Dunster. A member of the Cambridge, Massachusetts church whose ‘confes-
sion’ was carefully recorded by Thomas Shepard, Dunster was the president
of Harvard College who put that institution on the right path after a rocky
beginning. But, having come to question the practice of infant baptism, he
consequently refused to present an infant son for the sacrament. Despite the
Massachusetts law allowing for the banishment of Baptists, many of New
England’s Puritan leaders were willing to tolerate those who had adopted these
views so long as they did not try to proselytize. Clerical friends tried to per-
suade Dunster of the error of his ways, or at least to avoid espousing them.
Because he was not willing to go that far, he resigned in October 1654. He set-
tled in the town of Scituate, in the Plymouth Colony, where he preached on
occasion until his death in 1659, having no problems with the other Plymouth
churches, though they espoused infant baptism.46

42 Massachusetts Records, II, p. 85. 43 McLoughlin, New England Dissent, I, p. 9, n.2.

44 Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, p. 269. 45 Massachusetts Records, III, pp. 173–4.
46 Francis J. Bremer, ‘Dunster, Henry (bap. 1609, d. 1659)’, ODNB. See also Jonathan Den
Hartog, ‘ “National and Provinciall Churches are Nullityes”: Henry Dunster’s Puritan Argument
 Dissent in New England 259

Earlier, in 1638, Charles Chauncy, formerly lecturer in Hebrew and Greek at

Trinity College, Cambridge and a respected member of the East Anglian
Puritan brotherhood, had settled in the town of Plymouth in the colony of
that name. Chauncy raised different issues regarding the sacraments. He
believed that baptism should be by full immersion, not sprinkling (as most
Puritans practised), and that the Lord’s Supper should only be celebrated in
the evening. While the Plymouth colonists accepted immersion as lawful
they were not willing to practise it, believing—as Governor Bradford
expressed it—that it was not convenient in the cold climate of New England.
In 1641 Chauncy moved on to Scituate, in the same colony. There was no
effort to suppress or restrict his expression of his views, though the Scituate
congregation was divided over them.47 It is interesting that when Dunster
resigned as Harvard president he was replaced by Chauncy while Dunster
settled in Scituate.
The 1644 law against the Baptists represented the triumph of those Bay col-
onists who believed in a more rigid definition of what was acceptable to dis-
cuss. But it also revealed how conflicted the New Englanders were over how
Baptists should be treated. Stephen Winthrop, John’s son, who was in England,
where Congregationalists were not as convinced that infant baptism was a
fundamental of faith, wrote that there was ‘great complaint against us for our
[New England’s] severity against the Baptists’. John Winthrop’s nephew George
Downing added his own observation on ‘the law of banishment for conscience
which makes us stink everywhere’.48 In October 1645 a petition by various lay
leaders requested that the law be repealed, citing the ‘offence taken thereat by
many godly in England’. Many members of the colony’s General Court, likely
including John Winthrop, were in favour of at least suspending the law for a
time, but a group of the clergy, protesting the ‘advantage it would give to the
Anabaptists (who began to increase very fast through the country here), and
much more in England (where they had gathered divers churches, and taught
openly, and published a confession of their faith)’ petitioned that the law be
kept in force. And in May 1646 ‘seventy seven inhabitants of this colony’ peti-
tioned the court, ‘humbly requesting all due strengthening and keeping in force
such laws’ against the Anabaptists.49

against the Puritan Established Church’, Journal of Church and State, 56 (2014), 691–710. I would
like to thank Dr Den Hartog for sharing a copy of his essay.
47 Chauncy’s stay in Scituate and the split in that congregation are carefully analysed in Jeremy
Dupertius Bangs’ introduction to his edition of The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate,
Massachusetts, Vol. I (Boston, MA, 1997), pp. 31–44.
48 Winthrop and Downing quoted in Bremer, John Winthrop, p. 339.
49 Winthrop’s Journal, pp. 611–12, 629; Massachusetts Records, II, p. 141; Massachusetts Records,
III, pp. 51, 64.
260 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

THE QUAKER CHALLENGE

Unlike the Baptists, who were, in essence, fellow church members who had
become convinced of the error of infant baptism, the early Quakers who came
to New England were for the most part strangers.50 This meant that any action
against them would be taken by the civil authorities, since the churches only
exercised jurisdiction over their members. Justification for acting against the
Quakers rested on their perceived threat to social order and public peace. Sarah
Gibbons and seven other English Friends arrived in Boston in August 1656.
They were questioned, placed in prison, and banished. While Daniel Boorstin’s
characterization of the Quakers as individuals who had come to Massachusetts
‘in quest of punishment’ is too simple and too harsh, there is no denying that
Quakers accepted suffering not only as a witness to Christ but as a means of
gaining sympathy and support for their cause.51 Whereas previous exiles
from Massachusetts had stayed away once banished, Quakers came back. There
was a steady arrival of Quaker missionaries moving between Barbados, New
Amsterdam, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. As was the case in England,
they disrupted church meetings by interrupting sermons and confronting cler-
gymen. One report claimed that Gibbons and Dorothy Waugh confronted
John Norton during a service, smashing a bottle as a sign of Norton’s spiritual
emptiness.52 If true it is hardly surprising that Norton became one of the most
vociferous critics of the Quakers.
Faced with the Quaker refusal to accept simple banishment, the colonial
authorities passed further legislation against the sect. Massachusetts enacted a
law in 1656 stipulating that Quakers were to be whipped and incarcerated while
awaiting deportation. New Haven passed a law in 1657 that ‘no Quaker, Ranter,
or other heretic of that sort be suffered to come into nor abide in this jurisdiction’.
But this did not mean that colonial clergy were not willing to engage Quakers
and attempt to persuade them of the errors of their way. Humphrey Norton, an
English Quaker, arrived in the New Haven colony in 1658 and disrupted a
church service in Southold, ‘slandered and reproached’ the clergyman, John
Youngs, ‘together with his ministry and all our ministers and ordinances’. He
was arrested and tried in New Haven, where John Davenport debated him, but
failed to shake his views. Norton was whipped, branded on his hand with an ‘H’
for heretic, and sent out of the colony. Shortly thereafter New Haven’s General
Court moderated its laws, allowing Quakers to come into the colony on business
and prohibiting only efforts to proselytize.53

50 For the Quakers in New England, see Arthur J. Worrall, Quakers in the Colonial Northeast
(Hanover, NH, 1980), pp. 1–58. See also Jonathan Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The
Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay (New York, 1985).
51 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958), p. 38.
52 Catie Gill, ‘Gibbons, Sarah (1634/5–1659)’, ODNB.
53 Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, pp. 271–4.
 Dissent in New England 261

As the Quaker challenge continued, the Commissioners of the United

Colonies (Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth) recom-
mended that the individual colonies consider the death penalty for members of
the sect who kept returning from banishment. Massachusetts, urged on by
John Wilson and John Norton, was the only colony to enact such legislation. In
October 1659 Marmaduke Stevenson, William Robinson, Nicholas Davis, and
Mary Dyer—who had been a follower of Anne Hutchinson before being con-
vinced of Quaker beliefs—were sentenced to death, though Dyer was given a
reprieve at the last moment. But she too was executed when she challenged the law
again in 1660. William Ledra became the last Quaker hung in the Bay in 1661. This
was a landmark in the history of New England dissent, because shortly thereafter
the newly restored English monarch, Charles II, ordered a halt to executions.
Even before executions were prohibited, there were some Puritans who
questioned the harshness employed by Massachusetts. The Boston merchant
John Hull observed that ‘in those parts of the country [New England] where
they might with freedom converse (as in Rhode Island . . .) they take no pleas-
ure to be’, whereas in Massachusetts ‘they seemed to suffer patiently, and take a
kind of pleasure in it’. Learning of the execution of the three Quaker men in
Boston in 1659, John Davenport expressed the wish that the authorities had
accepted an offer made by Thomas Temple to carry the Quakers away at his own
expense. ‘The Quakers’, he wrote, ‘would have feared that kind of banishment
more than hanging, it being a real cutting themselves off from all opportunities
and liberty of doing hurt in the colony by gaining proselytes, which would have
been more bitter than death to them’.54
The story of the influx of aggressive Quakers into New England and their
treatment there accentuates the differences between the two groups. But atten-
tion to the external relations between Quakers and Puritans can obscure the
real inner relationship that existed between the two groups.55 Various contem-
poraries pointed to connections they saw between the spiritist views of Anne
Hutchinson and her followers and the Quaker reliance on the Inner Light.
Mary Dyer was a living example of the progression that could take place from
Puritan to Hutchinsonian, to Quaker. Similarly, many of the leaders of English
Quakerism had been raised in Puritan households. And the evolution of
Puritanism into Quakerism can be examined in the cases of two members of
the colonial establishment. Samuel Winthrop was one of the sons of John and
Margaret Winthrop. He studied at Harvard, apprenticed briefly with a merchant
in the Canary Islands, then settled as a sugar planter and merchant on Antigua.

54 Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, pp. 272–6.

55 J.F. Maclear, ‘ “Heart of New England Rent” The Mystical Element in Early Puritan History’,
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 42 (1956), 622. The inner relationship between Puritans and
Quakers is also made by Geoffrey F. Nuttall in The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience,
with a new introduction by Peter Lake (Chicago, IL, 1992).
262 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Without an adequate ministry on the island, Samuel was forced to nurture his
faith and that of his family through private readings of Scripture and household
devotions. Appeals to New England friends for help in securing a competent
clergyman were unsuccessful. At some point in the 1660s he encountered a
Quaker missionary, perhaps Jonas Langford, and found in his teachings an
expression of the piety and reliance on the Spirit comparable to and compatible
with the faith he had been raised in. Winthrop became a leader of the Quaker
community in that part of the West Indies. Despite his embracing of Quakerism
he never lost his affection for New England and his ties with his family and
friends there remained intact.56
In England in the 1620s William Coddington had been a prosperous mem-
ber of John Cotton’s English parish who had gone to prison for refusing to
contribute to Charles I’s so-called ‘Forced Loan’. He emigrated to Massachusetts,
where he became a prominent merchant, an assistant in the Bay Colony
­government, and the colonial treasurer. Coddington was a supporter of Anne
Hutchinson and voluntarily left the Bay when she was banished. He helped
found the Rhode Island town of Portsmouth, and then moved on to Newport.
After the various towns in the region combined to form Rhode Island, he was
elected governor of that colony. By that time he had, like some others who had
followed Hutchinson, become a Quaker. Despite this, he had maintained strong
relations with some of the Puritan leaders of the region, and engaged in corres-
pondence with Connecticut’s John Winthrop Jr, among others.
Reflecting on the harsh treatment of Quakers by the Massachusetts author-
ities, Coddington in 1672 wrote a letter to three of his former friends in the
Massachusetts leadership—Richard Bellingham, William Hathorne, and Simon
Bradstreet—in which he accused them of abandoning their early principles. He
lamented how they had ceased to possess the ‘tenderness in you (for I have
known you both long, . . . above this forty five years)’ and gone ‘so far to degen-
erate from Christianity to hardnesss and cruelty’. He reminded Hathorne of
how when they sailed together for America ‘in the ship I know thou wast
tender, serious and retired, as became the Gospel of Christ (for I had speech
with thee many times.)’ ‘Then and afterward’, he recalled, Hathorne had given
‘testimony against persecution, and stinting or limiting the spirit of prophecy
in any, viz., to refrain from preaching but by allowance of certain persons’.
According to Coddington, at the time Hathorne had argued that ‘if that should
take place in New England thou lookest at it as one of the most horrid acts as
ever was done in New England’. And yet, now, decades later Hathorne was
among those who sought to suppress the prophets.57

56 See Francis J. Bremer, First Founders, pp. 169–94.

57 William Coddington, A Demonstration of True Love Unto You the Rulers of the Colony of the
Massachusetts in New England (London, 1674), pp. 6, 10. This tenderness towards those who
disagreed was characteristic of many Puritans. It is a central theme in Abram C. Van Engen,
Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (New York, 2015).
 Dissent in New England 263

Coddington reminded his old friends of how John Cotton had spoken of
grace and the need to magnify it. He was harsh in his recollection of how ‘a
persecuting Spirit arose’ among the majority of the clergy, who he referred to as
‘priests’, who demanded that ‘Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright must be
banished, and all that stood in their way must remove, and the unclean spirit
like frogs came out of the mouth of the false prophet, so that persecution was
ushered in’. Coddington, ‘as a man and a Christian, . . . would have no hand in it’
and left the colony. He had particularly harsh words for John Norton, whom he
saw as a key figure in urging harsh treatment of Quakers in the 1650s and 1660s.
Towards the end of his letter he asked his former friends to ‘consider that forty
five years past thou didst own such a suffering people, that now thou dost per-
secute; they were against Bishops and ceremonies and the conformable priests;
they were the seed of God that did serve him in spirit, then called Puritans,
now called Quakers’.58 It is hard to see a Humphrey Norton or a Marmaduke
Stevenson as part of the New England Puritan community. But the lives of
Samuel Winthrop and William Coddington serve to remind us of what Puritans
and Quakers shared, and the shifting boundaries of what was tolerable.

REACTING TO REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION

During the 1640s and 1650s some New Englanders expressed concerns about
aspects of England’s Puritan Revolution, but on the whole the colonists saw
events back home as advancing the godly kingdom that they had long sought and
prayed for. Many returned home to contribute directly to that cause through
service in the army, the Church, and the government, while others who remained
in Americas offered prayers and advice.59 The colonies profited from positive
relations with England’s Interregnum government, and particularly from
the support of Oliver Cromwell.60 All this changed with the fall of the Protectorate
and the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
Though no longer the beneficiary of a ‘Great Migration’ such as had swelled
the population in the 1630s, New England did remain a refuge for English
Puritans who were displaced and marginalized by the Restoration. Some
colonists, notably Increase Mather, who had journeyed to England in the 1640s
and 1650s, returned home. But others came to New England for the first time,

58 Coddington, Demonstration, pp. 12, 13, 19–20.

59 I have discussed these subjects in Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical
Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, MA, 1994). Further
treatment of those who returned to England can be found in Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims:
New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT, 2007) and Moore, Abandoning America.
60 See Francis J. Bremer, ‘The View from America: New England, the Civil Wars, and Oliver
Cromwell’, Cromwelliana, Series II, 1 (2004), 87–99.
264 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

including a number of clergy who would play important roles in the colonies,
such as James Allen, Charles Morton, Samuel Lee, John Oxenbridge, and Edward
Taylor. Thomas Goodwin and John Owen considered, but eventually declined
invitations to New England pulpits. Individuals such as these, with experience
on both sides of the Atlantic, formed key roles in a network that enabled
Puritans to continue to exchange ideas and material support.61
In the 1660s colonial members of this Atlantic network of Puritan Dissenters
raised money and offered prayers on behalf of English clergy ejected from their
livings as well as for Londoners afflicted by the effects of the plague and the
Great Fire. In the 1670s Thomas Jollie and other English ministers raised funds
for the relief of New Englanders dispossessed by a fire that destroyed much of
Boston’s North End, and then by the ravages of Indian war. Advice also regularly
crossed the Atlantic. Jollie, Robert Mascall, and other English supporters of
New England encouraged Increase Mather to push for the convening of what
became known as the Reforming Synod of 1679 in Boston. Other English
Congregationalists warned colonial leaders about what they perceived to be
New England’s drift towards Presbyterianism, raising questions in particular
about the expansion of church membership (the ‘Half-Way Covenant’) and the
promotion of the consociation of churches recommended in the Synod of 1662.62
Ultimately, however, the shared identity of New Englanders and English
Dissenters eroded, partially because of the different circumstances they faced.
The evolution of the New England Way saw that region’s religious culture
increasingly differ from the situation of English Puritans. Recommendations of
a series of colonial synods, beginning with the Cambridge Assembly of 1648,
increasingly fostered the distinct and independent identity of the colonial
churches. New laws banned believers without university training from being
called to the ministry, required candidates for such posts to be approved by
neighbouring clergy, and required townsmen to provide appropriate financial
support for their ministers. The ministry was increasingly perceived as a
profession with superior skills in interpreting the Scriptures and the under-
standing of the Spirit-inspired lay reader called into question.63 New England
Congregationalism steadily took on the character of a church with controls
beyond the individual congregation. At the same time Baptists and Quakers,
though not free from efforts to control their practices, gained a limited degree
of toleration as dissenters from that established order.

61 One of the most significant such networks is charted in Francis J. Bremer, ‘Increase Mather’s
Friends: Personal Relations and Politics in the Trans-Atlantic Congregational Network of the
Seventeenth Century’, American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 94 (1984), 59–96.
62 I have discussed these interactions in Bremer, Congregational Communion, pp. 220–52.
63 I have argued for a strong emphasis on the importance of lay understanding of Scripture
early in the history of Puritanism and the assertion of greater clerical authority during the late
seventeenth century in Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke and
New York, 2015).
 Dissent in New England 265

While the crown consistently sought to curtail the relative autonomy of the
colonies, not until the revocation of the Massachusetts charter in 1684 and
the subsequent merger of all the region’s colonies into the Dominion of New
England was this Puritan establishment seriously threatened. The colonial
counterpart of England’s Glorious Revolution brought back an unofficial res-
toration of the power of the Congregational churches, albeit in a less formal
fashion. Meanwhile, during the same time period the situation of English
Dissenters was far different, with nonconformists denied access to the univer-
sities and to political office, and their freedom to worship as they chose with
ministers they chose severely restricted. Increasingly, those who corresponded
across the Atlantic were known to each other by reputation alone, as opposed
to previous face-to-face contacts. These differences, as well as theological chal-
lenges not experienced by New Englanders, weakened English Dissenting ties
with colonial Puritans. Furthermore, the colonists did not experience and
found it hard to identify with the divisions that in the 1690s disrupted the
efforts of English Congregationalists and Presbyterians to form a ‘Happy
Union’ and conflict between Socinians and Hyper-Calvinists in the years that
followed. As the eighteenth century progressed the colonists would call on the
Dissenting Deputies to lobby for their interest in London, but the unity that
had characterized the Puritan movement for much of the seventeenth century
ceased to exist.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Bangs, Jeremy, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the
Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, MA, 2009).
Barry, John M., Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State,
and the Birth of Liberty (New York, 2012).
Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and
Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
Brachlow, Stephen, The Communion of the Saints: Radical Puritanism and Separatist
Ecclesiology (Oxford, 1989).
Bremer, Francis J, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, 2003).
Bremer, Francis J., Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds
(New Haven, CT, 2012).
Bremer, Francis J., First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic
World (Hanover, NH, 2012).
Chu, Jonathan, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism
in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay (New York, 1985).
Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1588–1689 (Abingdon,
2000).
Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004).
266 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Cooper, James F., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial

Massachusetts (New York, 1999).
Fisher, Linford, Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding
Father (Waco, TX, 2014).
Foster, Stephen, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England
Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991).
Hall, David D., The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the
Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, New York, 1972).
Hall, David D., The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2019).
Hall, Timothy D., Anne Hutchinson: Puritan Prophet (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2009).
James, Sydney V., John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode
Island 1638–1750, ed. Theodore Dwight Bozeman (University Park, PA, 1999).
Juster, Susan, Sacred Violence in Early America (Philadelphia, PA, 2016).
McLoughlin, William G., New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the
Separation of Church and State, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1971).
Pestana, Carla, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Masschusetts (New York, 1991).
Tipson, Baird, Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying
God (Oxford, 2015).
Van Engen, Abram, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England
(New York, 2015).
Weimer, Adrian, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England
(Oxford, 2011).
Winship, Michael P., Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in
Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
Winship, Michael P., Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims and a City on a Hill
(Cambridge, MA, 2012).
Winship, Michael P., Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America
(New Haven, CT, 2019).
Worrall, Arthur J., Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (Hanover, NH, 1980).
 12

Colonial Quakerism
Andrew R. Murphy and Adrian Chastain Weimer

English Friends arrived in the American colonies as early as 1655, as missionaries

aiming to convince settlers and Native Americans of the Light of God within
every human being, and of the possibility of a more just social order. These itin-
erant ‘publishers of Truth’ travelled along a route from Barbados to Massachusetts
and back again, with Rhode Island and Maryland serving as bases for their
work in the north-east and south. They usually arrived in dramatic fashion:
upon entering a town, Quakers often interrupted the local Anglican or
Congregationalist services, refusing rituals of social deference such as hat
honour and prophesying doom on a ‘hireling’ ministry (clergy who received a
salary) and lifeless, formalistic worship. In prophetic language, Quaker mis-
sionaries declared that the Light, or presence, of Christ within, unleashed the
power to defeat sin and injustice in the hearts of believers as well as throughout
society. Quakers were dramatic, they were controversial, and they often found
themselves on the receiving end of punitive sanctions ranging from fines and
whippings to banishment and even death at the hands of governing authorities.
‘How does thou think to expect any thing from the Lord, but a Sore Destruction,
a Famine, and a Plague, which is hastening upon thee, if thou continue still in
Rebellion?’ asked the Quakers William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson
of their New England persecutors in 1659.1 The two men were hanged later that
year on Boston Common when they returned after banishment; two more
Quakers, Mary Dyer and William Leddra, later suffered the same fate.
But there was another face of colonial Quakerism, exemplified by the emer-
gence of the first ‘Quaker colony’ in West Jersey during the 1670s and, early in
the next decade, the colonial endeavour undertaken by William Penn. In this
scenario, Quakers were far from the bane of established governments, anything
but radically subversive insurgents; rather, they represented the forces of order
and stability wielding political authority and playing an increasingly influential

1 William Robinson, An Appendex [sic] to . . . New England Judged being Certain Writings,
(Never Yet Printed) of those Persons which were there Executed (1661), p. 180.

Andrew R. Murphy and Adrian Chastain Weimer, Colonial Quakerism In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting
Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0013
268 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

role in the seventeenth-century British empire, which David Armitage has

described as ‘a political community encompassing England and Wales, Scotland,
Protestant Ireland, the British islands of the Caribbean and the mainland
colonies of North America’.2 Penn wrote to Irish Quaker Robert Turner upon
receiving his colonial charter that ‘[T]his day my country was confirmed to me
under the great seal of England, with large powers and privileges, by the name
of Pennsylvania . . . it is a clear and just thing; and my God that has given it
me . . . will, I believe, bless and make it the seed of a nation.’3 Friends had, of
course, held public office before New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But these two
were proprietary colonies, in which Quakers functioned not simply as one
group in a diverse religious landscape but rather as direct possessors of political
power (in Penn’s case, with a direct grant from the crown).
These two pictures of colonial Quakerism are not mutually exclusive, nor
do they divide neatly along chronological lines. Dissenters in England became
magistrates in America, and often had to manage conflict within their own
communities, where they found themselves in the unfamiliar role of enforcing
social order (e.g. the Keithian controversy in early 1690s Pennsylvania, to which
we return at the end of this chapter). At the same time, Quakers continued to
face hostility in many colonial locales well into the eighteenth century, long
after the relatively safe zones of New Jersey and Pennsylvania had become
thriving settlements. But the two faces of colonial Quakerism introduced here
do highlight different aspects of the broader history of the Society of Friends.
In what follows, we emphasize George Fox’s visit to America during the early
1670s—which provided a link with Friends in England, bolstered ties among
colonial Quakers, and encouraged uniformity in Quaker discipline, while
upholding the ideal of ecstatic religious experience and prophetic encounter
with the world—along with William Penn’s involvement with West Jersey and
Pennsylvania, as crucial to the transition from Friends as itinerant insurgents
and martyrs to wielders of political power.

QUAKERS AND THE COLONIAL

RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

Even among the diverse array of believers that populated the early colonial
landscape, Quakers were distinct. Eschewing such outward forms of ritualized
piety as sacraments, elaborate liturgies, and formal creeds, colonial Friends
gathered in silence until any member of the group, male or female, offered
spontaneous prophecies and prayers for the benefit of all. Without professional

2 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), p. 7.
3 William Penn to Robert Turner, 5 March 1681; Papers of William Penn, eds Richard S. Dunn
et al., 5 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1981–6), II, p. 83 (hereafter PWP).
 Colonial Quakerism 269

clergy, meetings were led informally by respected Friends unless a travelling

missionary was present; most seventeenth-century Quaker Meetings outside
of Pennsylvania did not own property, and so met in the homes of wealthier
members. Prominent Friends also acted as financial administrators and arbiters
of intra-Quaker disputes.
Shocked by their heterodox views and willingness to publicly curse ministers
and magistrates, many colonists considered Quaker beliefs and behaviours to
be incompatible with the common good of well-ordered communities. Though
their religious heterodoxy was a concern, it was most often Quakers’ refusal to
take loyalty oaths and join in the civic duty of defence that undermined their
relationships with other colonists. Most American colonies quickly passed
anti-Quaker laws, or used laws against vagrancy or public disorder to prosecute
Friends.4 Steeped in an apocalyptic understanding of suffering as a crucial
weapon in the end-times battles, Quakers were eager to demonstrate their
ability to suffer cheerfully, using a prison cell or whipping block as a platform
for witness.
Given Friends’ zeal and thirst for martyrdom, colonies with the strongest
anti-Quaker laws often became magnets for missionaries. Up and down the
eastern seaboard, Quakers were fined, imprisoned, or whipped. Often they
refused to pay fines or jail fees, thereby lengthening their own sentences. These
episodes were quickly printed in collections of sufferings or hagiographic
pamphlets, the narratives of suffering serving to reinforce ties of sympathy and
affection. Though pressured by other New England colonies, Rhode Island
magistrates deliberately did not legislate against Quakers in hopes that they
would then bypass Rhode Island on their journeys.5 It was a singularly unsuc-
cessful strategy: when George Fox visited Rhode Island in the summer of 1672,
he discovered that the colony’s ‘leading officials, from governor and lieutenant
governor and judges down through local justices, were all Friends’.6
But not all was radicalism and disruption. Quakers in early colonial America
creatively struggled with the tension between caring for their families and
maintaining a prophetic, reforming stance towards the societies in which they
lived.7 Though embracing a plain style in decoration as well as dress, colonial
Quaker homes and workplaces looked much like those of other English settlers.
Friends preferred each other in trade, but also did business with non-Quakers.
Quaker parents were concerned for their children’s piety, and especially the

4 Opposition to anti-Quaker legislation was the animating impulse behind the 1657 Flushing
Remonstrance. See Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious
Liberty (Philadelphia, PA, 2012), chs 5–6.
5 Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, ed. John Russell Bartlett
(Providence, RI, 1856), I, p. 377.
6 H. Larry Ingle, First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (New York,
1996), p. 238.
7 J. William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society of Friends
(New York, 1973), pp. 1–5.
270 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

conduct of young adults, just like other English families. Advice literature directed
at children and parents developed during the 1680s, to support British and
American Quakers striving to nurture the younger generation in the faith.
Colonial Quakers also built strong ties with fellow Friends, viewing them-
selves as part of an international network and corresponding regularly with
Friends in England.8 During the 1660s and 1670s, Maryland Friends began to
take responsibility for support and discipline for communities further south.
After 1684 Pennsylvania gradually emerged as the centre of American
Quakerism. Early colonial Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, drawing together
representatives from a county and region, reported to the London Yearly
Meeting and read letters of encouragement and discipline from England. They
also contributed to the maintenance of itinerant missionaries.

NEW ENGLAND

If the Massachusetts Bay Colony—with such Puritan luminaries as John Winthrop,

John Cotton, and several generations of Mathers—has long occupied a central
role in the mythos of American founding, it has also played an outsized role in
Quaker martyrology. (When dissenting Quaker George Keith was looking for
a title for his 1693 tract denouncing Pennsylvania Quaker magistrates, he set-
tled on New England’s Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsilvania.9) Mary
Fisher and Ann Austin were the first itinerant Friends to reach the Bay Colony,
ministering initially in Barbados and arriving in Boston in July of 1656.10 Having
heard reports from England indicating that Quakers would pose a serious
threat to their colony, Massachusetts authorities had legislated against Quakers
two years earlier. Deputy Governor Richard Bellingham quarantined Fisher
and Austin on their ship, fined its captain, and burned their books; the women
spent five weeks in prison before they were banished from the colony. While in
prison, local Boston residents brought the women food, either out of sympathy
or because they were reluctant to play the role of cruel persecutors.11 Fisher and
Austin were followed the next year by Josiah Coale and Mary Clark, and then
by an almost continual stream of Quaker missionaries to New England over the

8 Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early
Modern Community (Basingstoke, 2015).
9 New-England’s Spirit of Persecution Transmitted to Pennsilvania [sic] and the Pretended
Quaker found Persecuting the true Christian-Quaker (New York, 1693).
10 Henry Bowden, History of the Society of Friends in America (London, 1850), pp. 32–6, 108–9;
William C. Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism (London, 1912), pp. 402–3; Stefano Villani,
‘Fisher, Mary’, ODNB.
11 Adrian Chastain Weimer, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England
(New York, 2011), ch. 5.
 Colonial Quakerism 271

next two decades. After an initial period in which Puritan ministers tried to
dissuade Quakers from their errors, Friends were prosecuted with increasing
vigilance, and three of them (John Copeland, Christopher Holder, and John
Rous) suffered ear-croppings in late 1657.12
The Quaker message of an egalitarian social order and immediate assurance
of salvation was attractive to people especially on the social and geographic
periphery in New England. The major exception to this pattern was Salem,
Massachusetts, long a hotbed of religious radicalism, where a Quaker commu-
nity took root in 1657. Convinced largely through the missionary work of
William Brend, William Leddra, Christopher Holder, and John Copeland, the
Salem Quaker community grew to around fifty individuals by 1660. Many of
these converts came from several extended families or were linked to them
through economic relationships; the core of the Salem Quaker community was
not itinerant missionaries, but rather well-established families, many of whom
had been members of Salem’s Congregational church. Their convincements
tested Massachusetts Bay’s commitment to prosecution.13
Although colonial charters included the prerogative of regulating who could
and could not settle within a colony’s jurisdiction (and so deporting non-resident
Quakers was within colonial rights), banishing longtime, upstanding resi-
dents was another matter, and local Quaker converts on the whole received
milder sentences. Even local converts often refused to pay fines and so ended
up in prison, with non-Quakers frequently stepping in to pay fines on their
behalf. Only in Boston were Quakers executed. Fines, brandings, whippings,
banishments, and prolonged imprisonments seemed only to strengthen
Quakers’ resolve.
In October 1658, a group of merchants in Boston asked the Massachusetts
General Court for stronger anti-Quaker laws. The Court responded with a
law for banishment upon pain of death. Marmaduke Stephenson, William
Robinson, Mary Dyer (a Rhode Island resident), and William Leddra were
all banished and subsequently returned to continue their missionary work.
Predictably arrested, Stephenson, Robinson, and Dyer wrote letters from
prison that were later featured in Quaker martyrologies. Comparing herself to
the biblical Queen Esther, Dyer wrote, ‘if through the enmity [to Quakers] you
shall declare yourselves worse than Ahasuerus, and confirm your law, though
it were but by taking away the life of one of us . . . the Lord will overthrow
both your law and you, by his righteous judgments and plagues poured justly

12 Bowden, History of the Society of Friends, pp. 121–2.

13 Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1991),
pp. 25, 28–9; Bowden, History of the Society of Friends, pp. 87–9; Rachel Love Monroy, ‘From
Puritan to Quaker: Mary Dyer and Puritan-Quaker Conversion in the Seventeenth-century Atlantic’,
in Andrew R. Murphy and John Smolinski, eds, The Worlds of William Penn (New Brunswick, NJ,
2019), pp. 303–30.
272 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

upon you’.14 Fearing a violent Quaker uprising at the site of the execution, Boston
selectmen set up a military patrol and escort, including drums to overpower
the Quakers’ final speeches. Released at the last minute through the petitions of
her son, Dyer had to be dragged off the scaffold, expressing intense disappoint-
ment at having to delay her martyrdom. She returned to the colony yet again
and was sent to the scaffold in June of 1660, this time with no reprieve. The last
Boston martyr, William Leddra, was hanged in March 1661.
Charles II had returned to the throne in 1660, and Quaker petitioners in
London persuaded him to intervene on their behalf. Another banished Quaker,
Samuel Shattock, arrived in Boston the next year with the king’s letter forbid-
ding the death penalty against Quakers. Concerned about their relationship to
the Restoration monarchy, the General Court had already ceased to enforce
banishment upon pain of death, releasing missionary Wenlock Christenson along
with at least two dozen other Quakers held in the Boston jail. The Massachusetts
Court then instituted the more lenient Cart and Whip Act in 1661, whipping
Quakers to the edge of the colony. Although the king soon retracted his leniency
towards Quakers, the colony continued to weaken prosecution by deferring it
to local county courts.
Salem Quakers took part in one of the most important disputes within
the international Quaker community during the 1660s. These disputes arose
in response to George Fox’s reforms, which included separating Men’s and
Women’s Meetings and instituting higher standards of discipline and uniform-
ity across global Quakerism.15 Like other Quaker radicals such as John Perrot,
Salem Quakers resisted any centralized authority that might quench the Spirit,
and spurned routinized practices like taking off hats in worship.16 New England
converts attracted to the ecstatic and anti-formalistic nature of the Quaker
message struggled with the English-led movement towards a more centralized
faith with clear mandates and uniform practices. When prominent English
Quaker missionary John Burnyeat visited Massachusetts in 1672, he found the
community strongly opposed to Fox’s insistence on separate Men’s and Women’s
Meetings. Burnyeat disciplined the Salem community, exhorting them ‘to con-
demn that spirit, by which they had been led aside, and to wait for the universal
Spirit of life’. The Quaker women of Salem led the resistance to Burnyeat,
alarmed about the shift to an overly formalistic faith as well as the likelihood

14 Mary Dyer, ‘To the General Court in Boston’, 1659, in Joseph Sewel, History of the Rise,
Increase, and Progress of the People Called Quakers, Vol. I (Philadelphia, PA, 1811), p. 395; Bowden,
History of the Society of Friends, pp. 180–93, 201–2; Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism,
pp. 403–4.
15 For more details see Rosemary Moore, The Light in their Consciences: Early Quakers in
Britain, 1646–1666 (University Park, PA, 2000), ch. 15; Carla Gardina Pestana, ‘The Conventionality
of the Notorious John Perrot’, in Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion, eds, Early Quakers and
Their Theological Thought, 1647–1723 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 173–89; Bowden, History of the
Society of Friends, pp. 285–6.
16 Arthur Worrall, Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (Hanover, NH, 1980), p. 30.
 Colonial Quakerism 273

that separate Women’s Meetings would weaken their leadership.17 Fox did not
travel to Connecticut or Massachusetts on his journey to America, though he
did hold a meeting in Narragansett for the people of Connecticut. He also sent
books to the Governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop, Jr, who was known for
his moderation. Fox may have hoped Winthrop Jr would be influenced by his
brother Samuel Winthrop, who had converted to Quakerism in Barbados.18
Quakers who met openly or who disrupted church services or court sessions
were fined, whipped, and imprisoned sporadically in New England through
the 1670s. Elizabeth Hooton, Fox’s first convert and a major figure in the inter-
national Quaker movement, visited New England several times during the
1660s and received severe whippings. A well-to-do matron, she went directly to
Charles II in order to argue that Massachusetts Bay was seditious. He gave her
a royal licence to buy property anywhere in the English colonies. Her attempts
to set up a Quaker refuge in Boston were denied, contributing to the tensions
between Massachusetts Bay and the Restoration government. Fewer Quaker
missionaries came to Massachusetts Bay in the 1670s, and in 1681 the colony
suspended all anti-Quaker legislation.19

QUAKERS IN RHODE ISLAND

Through banishment or choice, Massachusetts Quakers had found their way

to Rhode Island by 1656. English missionaries came directly to Rhode Island
in 1657 and found a willing audience among other radical Protestants. Rhode
Island did not prosecute Quakers, and Friends quickly became leading mem-
bers in colonial society and government. The prominent Newport men William
Coddington and Nicholas Easton joined the movement, and Quakerism became
the dominant religion in Portsmouth. The Newport Yearly Meeting, held in
Coddington’s home, served as the central business meeting for all New England
Quakers.20 In the early 1670s Quakers organized themselves for political action

17 Journal of John Burnyeat, eds William Evans and Thomas Evans, Friends’ Library, XI
(Philadelphia, PA, 1847), pp. 147–8; Jean Soderlund, ‘Burnyeat, John’, American National Biography
[Online].
18 Francis Bremer, First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World
(Durham, NH, 2012), p. 181.
19 Adrian Chastain Weimer, ‘Elizabeth Hooton and the Lived Politics of Toleration in
Massachusetts Bay’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 74 (2017), 43–76; Emily Manners,
Elizabeth Hooton, First Quaker Woman Preacher (1600–1672) (London, 1914), pp. 18–54;
Jonathan M. Chu, Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to Quakerism in
Seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay (Westport, CT, 1985), p. 162.
20 Sydney James, Colonial Rhode Island, A History (New York, 1975), p. 39; Braithwaite, Beginnings
of Quakerism, p. 403; Bowden, History of the Society of Friends in America, p. 153. Quaker meeting-
houses were constructed in 1672–1673 in Newport and Sandwich, but they were not large enough for
the Yearly Meeting. Rufus Jones, Quakers in the American Colonies (New York, 1966), p. 137, n. 2.
274 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

and were overwhelmingly successful in Rhode Island’s general elections. When

Fox arrived in 1672, as mentioned above, he discovered that most of the Rhode
Island magistrates, including Governor John Easton and Deputy Governor
John Cranston, were Friends. Many of these magistrates attended when Fox
called a General Meeting for Quakers in New England. Fox’s 1672 visit had a
significant influence on the organizational practices of Rhode Island Quakers,
who for the most part submitted to Fox’s reforms. In addition to higher standards
of discipline and scrupulous recordkeeping, they developed committees for
poor relief, marriage, and petitioning the civil government.
Though Rhode Island offered the greatest degree of toleration to early Quakers,
it also proved among the most difficult of Fox’s mission fields, since he had
to compete in a lively religious marketplace with other sects. Regarding a
large meeting at Providence, Fox wrote that he had a difficult time keeping
the diverse sects ‘quiet and bringing the truth over them & in them for they
were above the priests in high notions’.21 Fox also directly disputed with
local radicals he labelled ‘Ranters’, who were disrupting Quaker meetings.
Quakers also attracted hostility from Rhode Island’s founder Roger Williams,
who proposed a debate with Fox. Because Fox departed before he received
Williams’s invitation, their debate took place in print rather than in person.
Williams decried Quakers as dangerous and duplicitous in George Fox Digg’d
Out of his Burroughs, to which Fox and John Burnyeat responded in their 1678
A New-England Fire Brand Quenched. Williams had read Fox’s Great Mystery
and debated Burnyeat, William Edmundson, and John Stubbs in person soon
afterwards, arguing for the authority of the Bible and traditional Christology.22
The Quaker peace testimony was sorely tested during King Philip’s War, a
devastating conflict between English colonists and Wampanoag and allied
tribes in the north-east between 1675 and 1676. Rhode Island Quakers, who
had maintained relatively strong relationships with local tribes through the
mid-seventeenth century, saw those relationships begin to deteriorate in the
late 1660s due to conflicts over land and livestock.23 The Friend John Easton
tried without success to set up peace negotiations between Philip and the
English colonists in June of 1675. There is little evidence that Quaker Governor
William Coddington was himself a pacifist, though out of respect for pacifists
among Quakers and Baptists in Rhode Island he tried to stay neutral in the
conflict. He did, however, assist the neighbouring English colonies by providing
supplies, intelligence, scouts, and ammunition. This assistance came as a shock

21 ‘The American Journey of George Fox’, Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 9 (1912), 11.
22 Edmundson printed his version of the debate as A Narration of a Conference (London, 1676).
For the larger context of this debate, see Adrian Chastain Weimer, ‘Quakers, Puritans, and the
Problem of Godly Loyalty in the Early Restoration’, in Andrew R. Murphy and John Smolenski,
eds, The Worlds of William Penn (New Brunswick, NJ, 2019), pp. 283–302.
23 Joshua Micah Marshall, ‘ “A Melancholy People”: Anglo-Indian Relations in Early Warwick,
Rhode Island, 1642–1675’, The New England Quarterly, 68 (1995), 402–28.
 Colonial Quakerism 275

to local tribal leaders. Narragansetts demanded why ‘Rode Island rose, and
joined with Plymouth against Phillip’.24 Coddington said his help for Plymouth
stemmed from ‘all of us being Englishmen and subjects of our King’.25 In war-
time, it seems, English identity prevailed. Rhode Island magistrates did allow
for conscientious objection, and there was less social stigma for pacifists in
Rhode Island than in other colonies.

MARYLAND, AND FOX’S ENCOUNTERS WITH

NATIVE AMERICANS

The Quaker population of Maryland grew rapidly over the second half of the
seventeenth century, with at least two dozen active meetings.26 There was no
Established Church in Maryland under the Catholic Lord Baltimore, and after
the suppression of Catholics in 1654 religious institutions in rural Maryland
remained weak. Quaker missionary Elizabeth Harris preached successfully
throughout Maryland beginning in 1655 or 1656. Those convinced included
William Fuller, acting governor from 1654 to 1658, and the wealthy planter
Robert Clarkson.27 Harris remained free to continue preaching largely through
their personal influence. She continued to support Chesapeake Quakers after
her return to England (c.1657) by sending letters and Quaker literature. One
Maryland Quaker wrote of his appreciation to Harris in late 1657: ‘the measure
of God in us was abundantly refreshed in reading of the motions of the fathers
love in you towards us’.28
Friends were often caricatured as theologically unsophisticated, but in real-
ity they relished a lively theological debate. Preaching in Maryland in the late
1650s, missionary Josiah Coale debated a Jewish colonist, Jacob Lumbrozo.
(Pressed on his views of God and the trinity, Lumbrozo ended up arrested
for blasphemy.29) Maryland magistrates’ concerns seem not to have been

24 The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie, 2 vols (Hanover, NH, 1988),
II, p. 694; Meredith Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford, 2009), p. 147.
25 Roger Williams responded in a similar way as Coddington. The same Narragansett leaders
also demanded to know why Massachusetts rose against them, perhaps a reflection of the close
ties forged by John Eliot’s mission. Letter from Governor Coddington to Governor Winslow,
23 June 1675, in Emily Coddington Williams, William Coddington of Rhode Island: A Sketch
(Newport, RI, 1941), p. 72; Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace, pp. 144, 147.
26 Thomas Story, A Journal of the Life of Thomas Story (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1747), pp. 226–37;
Kenneth L. Carroll, Quakerism on the Eastern Shore (Baltimore, MD, 1970), pp. 23–57; 221–4.
27 Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘Elizabeth Harris, The Founder of American Quakerism’, Quaker
History, 57 (1968), 96–101; Steven C. Harper, ‘Harris, Elizabeth’, ODNB.
28 Robert Clarkson to Elizabeth Harris, transcribed in Carroll, ‘Elizabeth Harris’, 105.
29 Edward D. Neill, Founders of Maryland (Albany, MD, 1876), p. 132; Stephen Weeks, Southern
Quakers and Slavery: A Study in Institutional History (Baltimore, MD, 1896), pp. 13–14.
276 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

theological, but rather political, citing Quakers’ contempt for magistrates, their
‘seducing’ the people away from loyalty oaths, and their neglect of ‘complying
with the Military discipline’. Along with another travelling preacher, Thomas
Thurston, Coale was imprisoned in 1658 for insolence at court and refusing to
swear a loyalty oath. In July 1659, Maryland’s legislature passed a law calling for
any known Quakers to be ‘whipped from Constable to Constable until they be
sent out of the Province’.30 Colonists who hosted or assisted Quakers were also
subject to fines and whippings, though the laws were sporadically enforced.
As in Salem, so also in Maryland: during the 1660s, several prominent
Maryland Quakers sympathized with the spontaneous, anti-institutional side
of Quakerism over Fox’s emphasis on standardized practices, including regular
meetings for discipline and separate Men’s and Women’s Meetings.31 When
John Burnyeat travelled to the Chesapeake between 1665 and 1666, and again in
1671, he laboured to return the Chesapeake community to Foxian Quakerism.
Perhaps because of these controversies, or because of the substantial local
Quaker population, Fox chose Maryland as his first mainland stop on his 1672
preaching tour. (Fox’s freedom to preach in America stood in stark contrast to
his recent fourteen-month imprisonment in England.) Upon their arrival, Fox
and his companions led two four-day meetings of Quakers from the northern
Chesapeake region. The meetings attracted a broad audience, including local
magistrates, and resulted in even more local converts.
For a second Maryland meeting, Fox sent out invitations to local native
sachems. At least one accepted and lodged with Fox himself, responding posi-
tively (by Fox’s account) to Quaker preaching. After this initial success, Fox
attempted to include native communities along the rest of his preaching tour,
and he and other Quaker missionaries enjoyed native hospitality as they trav-
elled up and down the east coast. Fox continually urged Friends not to preach
only to Europeans, insisting in a 1679 letter that ‘All Friends, everywhere, that
have Indians or Blacks, You are to preach the Gospel to them, and other
Servants, if you be true Christians . . . for David saith, that saw Christ in his New
Covenant, Let all Nations Praise the Lord.’32 Quakers and Algonquians had
some overlapping practices, which may have facilitated these interactions.
Quakers were more comfortable with silence than other colonial groups, enter-
ing and leaving each other’s homes without elaborate greetings. Quakers shared
with Algonquian, Lenape, and Iroquois a similar emphasis on divine revelation
through dreams and prophecy. Also, Quakers were unusual among colonists in
that they were likely to lend credence to native dreams and prophetic messages

30 W.H. Browne, ed. Proceedings of the Council of Maryland, 1636–1667 (Baltimore, MD, 1885),
pp. 349, 362.
31 Journal of John Burnyeat, pp. 136, 144.
32 ‘George Fox from Swarthmore 10th Month 1679’, in A Collection of Many Select and Christian
Epistles, Vol. II (London, 1698), p. 426.
 Colonial Quakerism 277

rather than assuming they were false or satanic.33 One north-eastern sachem
admitted that he liked the Quakers best of all, but if he converted to Quakerism
‘then the professors [Puritans] would hang him and put them to death and
banish them as they did the Quakers, and therefore he thought it was the best
to be as he was’.34 While Native Americans did not often join Quaker commu-
nities, they occasionally asked Quakers to serve as mediators in their disputes
with colonial authorities.

NEW NETHERLAND

Dutch magistrates were no less concerned about Quakers than their English
counterparts. Quakers in New Netherland faced continually shifting political
circumstances as the government changed hands during the 1660s and 1670s.
The first Quaker missionaries to Dutch New Netherland, Dorothy Waugh and
Mary Witherhead, began preaching in the streets of New Amsterdam in August
1657. The Dutch magistrates quickly banished them to Rhode Island. However,
their companion Robert Hodgson continued missionary work less overtly
among the English residents of Long Island. Arrested by local English magis-
trates, Hodgson was brought before the Dutch authorities. When the Dutch
confiscated his books, papers, and knives, and put him under house arrest,
Hodgson continued to preach through the prison window. He was then tied
to the back of a cart and dragged to a prison in New Amsterdam. Hodgson
again tried to preach through the prison window, for which he was flogged
almost to the point of death before Dutch authorities decided they would rather
deal with a prisoner than a martyr. After a few weeks’ further labour, he was
sent to Rhode Island.35
Dutch Reformed ministers considered Quakers dangerous and perhaps
even diabolical, and many Dutch magistrates (including Governor Peter
Stuyvesant) shared the English belief that Quakers’ contempt for authority
would undermine civil order. In late 1657 New Netherland legislated a £50 fine
for those who hosted Quakers, with an incentive to informants. At least one
English sympathizer living in Dutch territory was imprisoned for refusing to
pay the fine. In protest, other Long Islanders drafted a petition to the Dutch
magistrates, which became known as the Flushing Remonstrance, asking for
leniency towards Quakers. Some of the signers were associated with the Baptist
Lady Deborah Moody or with the late Anne Hutchinson, and some would later

33 Carla Gerona, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture
(Charlottesville, VA, 2004), ch. 3.
34 George Fox, Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (Cambridge, 1952), p. 624.
35 Haefeli, New Netherland, pp. 159–68; Bowden, History of the Society of Friends, pp. 311–16.
278 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

become Quakers.36 Stuyvesant and his council considered the authors of the
pro-Quaker remonstrance seditious and arrested several of them. They were
mindful, however, of the economic imperative of open trade and ongoing
settlement, and were probably more influenced by the West India Company
than the Flushing Remonstrance in their decision to look the other way as
Quakers continued to preach on Long Island and in other pockets of English
settlement in New Netherland. The Dutch had also come to see the futility of
corporal punishment as a deterrent to people like Hodgson, who returned
within a few years to resume his missionary work. Although after 1657 Quakers
refrained from preaching publicly in New Amsterdam, they continued to work
elsewhere, and were continually subject to imprisonments and banishments
if they tried to hold large meetings. In 1662 a group of local Quakers were
banished on ‘payne of corporal punishment’.37
After the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the Duke of York’s
milder laws granted limited rights to all Christians so long as they did not
disturb the worship of others. Quakers were now free to hold their own
meetings. In the late 1660s and 1670s, though, they were still interrupting
others’ church services and thus facing prosecution. When a group of Flushing
men refused to serve in the militia in 1667 they were banned from New York
as potentially seditious.38
Arriving in 1672, George Fox was intent on turning Long Island Quakers
back towards loyalty and discipline. At the six-day long Half-Yearly Meeting at
Oyster Bay on Long Island, he clashed with ‘hatt spirits which was Judged
Downe & condemned and the truth was sett over all’.39 After rebuking the ‘hatt
spirits’ (those who resisted his reforms, including removal of hats in prayer),
Fox turned his attention to dialogue with outsiders, debating a young Dutch
Reformed man on ministerial ordination, women’s roles, and worship prac-
tices. As elsewhere, Fox also tried to ensure Quakers’ political rights. The new
Governor Francis Lovelace may have personally attended one of Fox’s New York
meetings, and under Lovelace’s administration Quakers worshipped freely.
However with the reestablishment of the Dutch Reformed Church during the
Dutch reconquest of 1673–4, Quakers were again briefly deprived of full political
rights.40 A small meeting that had begun in the city of New York seems to have
scaled back in the later 1670s. Writing after her visit to this struggling meeting
in 1680, the English missionary Joan Vokins declared, ‘I laboured to settle
it again, and God’s eternal power wrought wonderfully in me, in several

36 Lady Moody worked to protect Quakers before her death; she may have become convinced
herself. Bowden, History of the Society of Friends, pp. 322–3; Carol Berkin, ‘Moody, Lady Deborah’,
ODNB.
37 Haefeli, New Netherland, pp. 159–71, 183, 224. 38 Haefeli, New Netherland, p. 261.
39 ‘The American Journey of George Fox’, 10; Ingle, First among Friends, p. 238.
40 Haefeli, New Netherland, p. 269.
 Colonial Quakerism 279

meetings with his people, and we were well refreshed.’ Vokins ministered in the
still-thriving Quaker community on Long Island into the 1680s.41

QUAKERS IN THE CHESAPEAKE

The Quaker community in Virginia was much smaller than in Rhode Island
or Maryland, with about a dozen meetings for worship by 1700.42 Most
Virginians who converted to Quakerism were already nonconformists, and
so Quakerism was strongest in south-eastern Virginia where nonconformists
had settled. As in Massachusetts, Quakerism tended to spread within extended
families and those with economic and social connections to those families.
There was an active meeting at Nansemond as early as 1661 and a Yearly
Meeting at Chuckatuck by 1674. Quakers in Anglican-controlled Virginia
were initially prosecuted according to a 1643 law against nonconformist
preachers; in the early 1660s, Governor William Berkeley’s government legis-
lated directly against Quakers. Anyone not willing to take a loyalty oath faced
a prison sentence.43 Known Quakers were imprisoned, whipped, fined, and
banished; Virginia’s Quaker converts experienced enormous loss of property.
The records for Norfolk County list fines of £100 and 20,750 lb of tobacco in
1663 alone. Associating with Quakers could also mean loss of office. In 1663
the Virginia Assembly expelled one of its own members, John Porter, for
his Quaker sympathies. Virginia Quakers were understandably drawn to
the relative freedom of Maryland and some migrated to the area around the
Annemessex River.44
Though some Quaker preachers kept to the Virginia backwoods and avoided
conflict with authorities, William Robinson was sent to prison in 1658, and
George Wilson was arrested, severely whipped, and imprisoned at Jamestown.
Wilson died in prison in 1662, probably from an infection resulting from the
whippings.45 Two of the most ardent missionaries in Virginia, Mary Tompkins
and Alice Ambrose, arrived in 1663. The women focused on strengthening the
local Quaker community and on disrupting Anglican services. Their ministry,

41 Bowden, History of the Society of Friends, p. 332.

42 Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery, p. 46, Appendix III.
43 Babette Levy, ‘Puritanism in the Southern Colonies’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian
Society, 70 (1960), 154; Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery, pp. 7, 16–19.
44 Kenneth Carroll, ‘Quakerism on the Eastern Shore of Virginia’, The Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography, 74 (1966), 174; Levy, ‘Puritanism in the Southern Colonies’, 155; Weeks,
Southern Quakers and Slavery, p. 22.
45 Carroll, ‘Quakerism on the Eastern Shore of Virginia’, pp. 171–3; Warren M. Billings,
‘A Quaker in Seventeenth-Century Virginia: Four Remonstrances by George Wilson’, The William
and Mary Quarterly, 33 (1976), 127–40.
280 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

however, was short-lived; they were arrested, whipped, and forcibly banished
from Virginia.46
When travelling Friend William Edmundson arrived in 1671 he found that
‘things were much out of Order’ in Virginia’s Quaker community (probably a
reference to their spontaneous rather than ordered schedule of meetings and
lack of set practices).47 He established a meeting in order to discipline wayward
Friends, just in time for Fox’s visit in 1672. Fox spent just ten days in Virginia,
holding three smaller meetings, though the Quaker community at least doubled
as a result.48 Fox was especially concerned to make sure that Quakers were not
paying tithes to the Anglican church, that they were supporting families of
imprisoned Friends, and that sufferings were recorded and sent to London.
There was another bout of prosecution in 1674–5, directed at Quaker meetings
in Nansemond County, though local magistrates who were either converts or
sympathizers impeded enforcement. By the 1680s magistrates were less inter-
ested in suppressing Quakers, and esteemed travelling Friend John Copeland
(recipient of a Boston ear-cropping) made his home in Virginia and helped to
lead the Quaker community there.49
Quakers in Carolina lived mostly in the north-east of the colony, and were
closely connected to the Virginia communities. The Carolina context was dif-
ferent, however, because the colony emphasized liberty of conscience in its
promotional materials and its early Anglican establishment was relatively
weak. William Edmundson came to Albemarle in 1671 and was surprised to
discover former New Englander Henry Phillips and his family still practising
the Quaker faith in religious isolation. Edmundson stayed only three days, but
other Carolinians converted and a small Quaker meeting began. Fox also visit-
ed Carolina during his American tour, preached to native tribes, and debated a
doctor on theological points. Edmundson visited Virginia and Carolina again
in the mid-1670s hoping to maintain these disciplinary reforms.50 Of Carolina
he wrote approvingly, ‘People were tender and loving, there was no room for
the Priests . . . for Friends were finely settled.’51 Friends held high offices in the
Carolina government from the 1670s. The Quaker John Archdale became a
proprietor of the colony in 1678 and worked assiduously to protect Quaker
rights, migrating in 1683 and assuming the governorship in 1694.

46 Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery, pp. 21–3.

47 William Edmundson, Journal of the Life, Travels, Sufferings (London, 1715), p. 57.
48 Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism, pp. 240–1.
49 Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery, pp. 25–6, 43–4; Levy, ‘Puritanism in the Southern
Colonies’, 156.
50 Michelle Lise Tarter, ‘ “Varied Trials, Dippings, and Strippings”: Quaker Women’s Irresistible
Call to the Early South’, in Mary Carruth, ed., Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies
(Tuscaloosa, AL, 2006), p. 81.
51 Edmundson, Journal, pp. 101–2.
 Colonial Quakerism 281

QUAKERS IN BARBAD OS AND JAMAICA

Many Quaker missionaries travelled to Barbados either before or after

their trips along the eastern seaboard of North America. Mary Fisher and
Henry Fell worked alongside local convert John Rous as early as 1655 or 1656.
From the conversion of planter Thomas Rous (John Rous’s father) around 1657,
Quakerism spread rapidly on the sugar islands. By 1672 Barbados Friends had
five meetinghouses and were the second largest religious group in the colony.
Barbados colonists were some of the wealthiest Quakers in the movement.52
After an initial period of prosecution they gathered a thriving community. Openly
scorning what they saw as the moral laxity of Anglican planters, Quakers were
initially subject to assaults and imprisonments. But Governor Daniel Searle was
sympathetic to Quakers, personally paying their fines and opposing Anglican-
crafted legislation requiring inhabitants to bear arms.
One of the few English colonies to actively recruit Quakers, Jamaica also had
a substantial Quaker population. In 1662 the Jamaican government pledged
that Quaker colonists would not have to serve in the local militia (though this
policy was not consistently implemented). Fox’s meetings on Barbados and
Jamaica in 1671 and 1672 drew significant crowds. Though experiencing some
initial opposition from local clergy, Fox expressed surprise at the respect
accorded him by planters and even by the governor. He set to work organizing
Men’s and Women’s Meetings and instructing local Quaker communities. Fox
laboured diligently, if not entirely successfully, to counteract the anti-institutional
teachings of John Perrot, who had lived on Barbados and Jamaica from 1662 to
1665. Fox and his co-labourers encouraged strict order within Quaker house-
holds and meetings, and encouraged plantation owners to oversee the morality
of both blacks and whites on the island. Fox had long insisted that Quakers
preach to all races, yet in Barbados he was the first Quaker to hold meetings
among slaves and had more of these meetings than any subsequent missionaries.53
Even so, Fox’s larger priority was to convince local magistrates that Quakers
would not foment rebellion among their slaves, and that they would be loyal
citizens even if they refused to bear arms. Quakers in this era participated
in the slave trade. While Friends had substantial freedom of worship in the
West Indies they still experienced informal persecution throughout the 1670s,

52 Ingle, First Among Friends, p. 233; Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados:
Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia, SC, 2009), pp. 38–9; Braithwaite,
Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 402.
53 Ingle, First Among Friends, p. 232. For a careful study of Quaker writings about slavery in
Barbados, see Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American
Antislavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT, 2012), pp. 40–69. For a discussion of Quaker understand-
ings of the body and bodily performance in relation to slavery, see Heather Miyano Kopelson,
Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York, 2014), pp. 141–8,
and for the longer history see Jean Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton,
NJ, 1985).
282 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

often relating to their refusal of military service. One of the earliest Quakers
to condemn slavery as an institution, William Edmundson initially preached
freely on Antigua and Nevis in 1671, though when local converts started refus-
ing to bear arms the Governor of Nevis refused him re-entry. When Edmundson
ministered in Barbados in 1675, local Anglicans decided to interrupt the
Quaker worship service, though Edmundson and the Anglican priest later
agreed to a debate.54
Except for Rhode Island, where Quakers were elected to positions of authority
and their security was maintained by longstanding practices of toleration, the
prospects for Quakers varied widely from colony to colony and across time.
In most early colonies, the decision to join a Quaker meeting involved signifi-
cant risk. English missionaries travelled thousands of miles through difficult
terrain to support and instruct these colonial Quaker meetings, and often
continued their support by sending letters, pamphlets, and books. While
London remained the hub of colonial Quakerism, local meetings developed
variations in religious practice that often came into conflict with metropolitan
impulses towards uniformity.55

QUAKERS IN POWER (I): NEW JERSEY

Although William Penn’s ‘Quaker colony’ of Pennsylvania receives the lion’s

share of scholarly attention, it was hardly the first such undertaking. A new
phase in the history of colonial Quakerism came with the Dutch surrender of
Fort Amsterdam to the English in 1664. The English colony of New Jersey grew
out of that conquest, and its proprietors, Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley,
issued the February 1665 Concession and Agreement, which guaranteed that ‘no
person . . . shall be any ways molested, punished, disquieted or called in question
for any difference in opinion or practice in matter of religious concernments’,
and promised all residents the right to ‘freely and fully . . . enjoy . . . their judgments
and consciences in matters of religion’. The Concession and Agreement also con-
tained incentives aimed at inducing settlers to bring slaves with them when they
settled in New Jersey. The simultaneous protection of religious liberty and chat-
tel slavery—guaranteeing one species of liberty while simultaneously rewarding
the deprivation of another—falls outside the narrower focus of this chapter on
colonial Quakerism, though it does illustrate, with stark clarity, the enduring
paradoxes of American colonization and American history more generally.56

54 Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery, pp. 3–4; Gragg, Quaker Community on Barbados, p. 44;
Edmundson, Journal, pp. 54–5, 73.
55 Landes, London Quakers.
56 For the text of the Concession and Agreement, see https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/
nj02.asp
 Colonial Quakerism 283

A number of Quakers moved from Long Island to central New Jersey in the
years that followed. New Jersey and (later) Pennsylvania were proprietary
colonies, in which the king devolved ruling authority onto an individual or
individuals. Although the proprietary history of New Jersey is more complicated
than that of Pennsylvania,57 the presence of Quakers as proprietors or their
trustees meant that Friends had attained a level of political power in the
Americas that they could only have dreamt of in Britain, where they continued
to face fines, corporal punishment, imprisonment, and distraint of goods.
Five years before he first petitioned the king for his own territory in America,
William Penn was asked to serve as mediator for an intra-Quaker dispute
between John Fenwick (a soldier under Oliver Cromwell who had joined the
Society of Friends in 1665) and Edward Byllinge, an English Quaker, which
involved a share of the West Jersey proprietorship that the two had purchased
from Lord Berkeley.58 The experience added a new and unexpected dimension
to Penn’s activism, which heretofore had been directed against persecution in
England and Europe: despite Penn’s claims, twenty years after the fact, of ‘an
opening of joy’ towards America during his teenage years at Oxford, the editors
of his Papers refer to him as ‘a colonizer by accident’ and add that ‘there is no
evidence that he had any interest in America before he was suddenly drawn
into the settling of a dispute between two Quakers over land in West New
Jersey’.59 After some tense negotiations, Penn brought Fenwick and Byllinge to
agreement. Fenwick travelled to America in 1675, founding the first English
settlement on the Delaware River’s eastern shore, at Salem. Fenwick guaranteed
civil and religious liberty to settlers in his territory, though he soon found him-
self imprisoned by the Governor of New York due to conflicting territorial
claims along the Delaware.60
Byllinge’s portion of the West Jersey lands passed to William Penn and several
associates as a result of Byllinge’s increasingly difficult financial circumstances,
and in the summer of 1676, Penn and about 150 others signed the West Jersey
Concessions. In forty-four chapters, the Concessions laid out the structure of
government and fundamental laws by which the colony was to be governed.61
The Concessions held that legitimate government was based in the consent
of the people, and placed legislative authority in representative institutions:
‘we put power in the people . . . to meet, and choose one honest man for each
propriety . . . all these men to meet as an assembly there, to make and repeal

57 The original grant to the two proprietors was subsequently subdivided, and the 1676
Quintipartite Deed divided New Jersey into East and West portions.
58 For the details, see John Edwin Pomfret, Colonial New Jersey: A History (New York, 1973).
Penn’s correspondence with Fenwick is printed in PWP, I, pp. 384–7.
59 PWP, I, p. 383. The ‘opening of joy’ remarks are made by Penn in a letter to Robert Turner,
Anthony Sharp, and Roger Roberts of 12 April 1681, PWP, II, p. 89.
60 Thomas Shourds, History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony (Bridgeton, NJ, 1876), pp. 4–12.
61 The Concessions are widely available online; see, for example, http://westjersey.org/ca77.
htm; they are reprinted in PWP, I, pp. 388–408.
284 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

laws . . .’ They also guaranteed trial by jury, forbade imprisonment for debt, and
emphasized the fundamental importance of religious liberty: ‘No person to
be called into question or molested for his conscience, or for worshipping
according to his conscience.’62 Jane Calvert has persuasively argued that the
substantive commitments enshrined in the Concessions—juries, consent,
representative institutions, liberty of conscience—are ‘indicative of a Quaker
understanding of a rightly ordered government’. They certainly reflect a strand
of thinking shared by Quakers and Whigs during the 1670s.63 Shortly thereafter,
Penn and his fellow West Jersey trustees empowered several Friends to travel
to America as commissioners and lay the foundations of government.
New Jersey, and West Jersey in particular, was widely seen as a Quaker colony
from the start; Robert Barclay, one of the foremost Quaker theologians, served
as nonresident Governor of East Jersey from 1682–8 (although Barclay seems
to have been as concerned with recruiting Scots as with recruiting Quakers).
Two other prominent Friends, Thomas Rudyard and Gawen Lawrie, served as
East Jersey deputy-governors during the early 1680s. Penn and associates pointed
out that many Friends had been involved in the effort, and that they did ‘in real
tenderness and regard as friends, and especially to the poor and necessitous,
make friends the first offer’.64 Over the next few years, nearly 800 settlers made
their way to West Jersey, most of them Friends. Two groups—from Yorkshire
and London—purchased a large tract of land and settled Burlington, which
would become the West Jersey capital. Burlington Monthly Meeting was estab-
lished in 1678, and in 1681 the first Yearly Meeting of Friends in the area was
held there.

QUAKERS IN POWER (II): PENNSYLVANIA

In the wake of his involvement in West Jersey, and of the political and constitu-
tional crises of the late 1670s in England, William Penn petitioned the crown
for a grant of land in America.65 Penn’s status as a well-known Dissenter—a
high-profile Quaker convert and a strong supporter of Fox’s leadership in
the Society of Friends—who had agitated on behalf of Friends in England
and across Europe, as well as for liberty of conscience as a general principle,
facilitated his request. (His personal ties with the royal family—from his father’s

62 William Penn to Richard Hartshorne, 26 August 1676, PWP, I, p. 416.

63 Jane Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson
(Cambridge, 2008), p. 101; also Andrew R. Murphy, ‘The Emergence of William Penn, 1668–1671’,
Journal of Church and State, 57 (2015), 333–9; and Andrew R. Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and
Toleration: The Political Thought of William Penn (Oxford, 2016), chs 1–2.
64 To Prospective Settlers in West New Jersey, PWP, I, p. 420.
65 For background on these events, see J.P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London, 1972).
 Colonial Quakerism 285

naval career alongside the Duke of York to Penn’s own relationship with
James, whom he met in 1673 and with whom he shared tolerationist commit-
ments, were also instrumental in this regard.) He received his royal charter
for Pennsylvania in spring 1681, ostensibly as repayment of debts owed by the
crown to Penn’s father. To James Harrison, an English Quaker who would
later emigrate to Pennsylvania, Penn expressed his well-known ‘desire that
I may not be unworthy of [God’s] love . . . that an example may be set up to
the nations. There may be room there, though not here, for such an holy
experiment.’66 Penn began the arduous task of promoting his new undertak-
ing, drawing on the extensive network of Friends known to him from his
activities in England, his travels on the Continent, and his previous experi-
ence working on his father’s (and later his own) estates in Ireland. In corres-
pondence, Penn made no secret of his high hopes for the colony, expressing
‘my God that has given it me through many difficulties will, I believe, make it
the seed of a nation. I shall have a tender care to the government that it be
well-laid out at first.’67
The central role of Quakerism to Penn’s aspirations in the colony that bore
his (or, as he insisted, his father’s) name has been noted by many scholars:
J. William Frost has described him as aiming for a ‘non-coercive Quaker
establishment’, Thomas Hamm has argued that Penn ‘framed [Pennsylvania]
according to Quaker principles’, and Jane Calvert has described the colony as
‘self-consciously Quaker in its origins, identity, goals, structures, and internal
processes’, with a government that ‘was conceived in the spirit of the Quaker
Meeting for business, the administrative assembly of the ecclesiastical polity’.68
Though many of Penn’s promotional efforts relied on networks of Quakers like
Barclay, Dublin Friend Anthony Sharp, Fox, and Margaret Fell (a major figure
in early Quakerism in her own right, who married Fox in 1669), the public face
of Penn’s colonization often downplayed its Quaker dimensions. Some Account
of the Province of Pennsylvania, published shortly after he received his charter,
presented an extended and multifaceted economic argument in favour of
colonization in general and Pennsylvania in particular, grounded political
legitimacy in the rule of law and in the consent-based tradition of English
liberties, and issued an enthusiastic invitation for ‘sober people of all sorts’ to
seek prosperity in the new colony.69 The final governing document published

66 Penn to James Harrison, 25 August 1681, PWP, II, p. 108.

67 Penn to Robert Turner, 5 March 1681, PWP, II, p. 83.
68 J. William Frost, ‘Religious Liberty in Early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography, 105 (1981), 449; Thomas Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York, 2003), p. 27;
Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism, p. 105.
69 The phrase is taken from Penn’s Fundamental Constitutions of Pennsylvania, a privately
­circulated early draft of a frame of government. Although this was a private document, its general
thrust is in accord with Some Account’s de-emphasis of specifically Quaker principles regarding
settlement in Pennsylvania. On the founding of Pennsylvania and its foundational founding
documents, see Andrew Murphy, ‘The Limits and Promise of Political Theorizing: William Penn
286 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

by Penn before he journeyed to America, the spring 1682 Frame of Government

and Laws Agreed Upon in England, similarly made little explicit mention of
Friends’ principles or liberty of conscience. (It guaranteed that all persons
who confessed belief in God ‘shall in no wayes be molested or prejudiced . . . in
matters of Faith and Worship, nor shall they be compelled at any time to fre-
quent or maintain any Religious Worship, Place or Ministry whatever’, but this
guarantee did not appear until the thirty-fifth law, out of a total of forty.70) Even
without a more explicit linkage of religious liberty with Pennsylvania, however,
the process of recruiting settlers was surely facilitated by Penn’s extensive net-
works among European dissenters and his reputation as defender of persecuted
religious minorities.71
After writing a final personal farewell to his wife and children, Penn departed
for America in August 1682, and spent one of his first nights in America at the
home of Robert Wade, which had also served as a Quaker meetinghouse, in
Upland (renamed Chester by Penn). The first Philadelphia Monthly Meeting
was held in Christopher Taylor’s home early in January 1683, less than three
months after Penn’s arrival. Those present agreed to establish the usual compo-
nents of Quaker meetings (recordkeeping, registration of certificates of Friends
arriving from other countries, tracking marriages and deaths, and so on), and
followed Quaker custom in approving the meeting’s first marriage.72 By spring
of 1683, Pennsylvania Friends had formed nine meetings, and each of the three
counties (Philadelphia, Chester, Bucks) had their own Monthly Men’s and
Women’s Meetings.73 Correspondence with Friends in England emphasized
the thriving meeting structure in place in Pennsylvania, which apparently
attracted even those from outside the Society: Penn reported that ‘blessings
flow amongst us . . . heavenly are our assemblies and large, and the people flock
in that are not Friends’. All of these developments encouraged him in his as­pir­
ations for the colony: ‘Truth’s authority is [raising] I hope an example to the
nations.’74 The first Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took place in 1683, and the
following year apparently saw two Yearly Meetings—one in Burlington and one
in Philadelphia—after which Yearly Meetings alternated between the two locales.

and the Founding of Pennsylvania’, History of Political Thought, 34 (2013), 639–68; and Andrew
Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration, ch. 5.
70 Penn, The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania [sic] in America: Together
with certain Laws Agreed upon in England by the Governous and Divers Free-Men of the aforesaid
Province (London, 1682), p. 11.
71 Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, in America (London, 1681), reprinted in
William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania: A Documentary History (Philadelphia, PA,
1983), pp. 58–66. See Sally Schwartz, ‘William Penn and Toleration: Foundations of Colonial
Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania History, 50 (1983), 296.
72 Minute of Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, 9 January 1683, PWP, II, pp. 333–6. See also Frost,
Quaker Family in America.
73 Samuel M. Janney, Life of William Penn, 5th ed. (Philadelphia, PA, 1882), p. 234.
74 To John Blaykling and others, 16 April 1683, PWP, II, p. 376; see also To John Alloway,
29 November 1683, PWP, II, pp. 503–5.
 Colonial Quakerism 287

Penn also corresponded with Friends in Barbados, although a planned Barbadian

Quaker settlement in Pennsylvania never came to fruition, due in large part to
Penn’s failure to secure access to the mouth of the Susquehanna River.75
Although it was hardly the first place in which Quakers exercised the powers
of civil magistracy, the outsized role played by Penn in the construction of
Pennsylvania’s government and the overwhelming dominance of Friends with-
in the colony brought tensions within Quakerism to the fore. Penn soon found
that shared Quaker commitments did not always translate into a smoothly
functioning Quaker society.76 In a terse reply defending himself against charges
that he had failed to ensure Quakers’ political control over the colony, Penn
wrote to Jasper Batt that ‘we should look selfish, and do that, which we have
cried out upon others for, namely, letting no body touch with government but
those of their own way. And this hath often been flung at us. . . . If you Quakers
had the power, none should have a part in the government but those of your
own way.’77 The broader contours of Penn’s political theory relied heavily on
representative institutions (e.g. juries, legislatures) as embodiments of popular
consent, and the Fundamental Constitutions’ invocation of ‘sober people of all
sorts’ as welcome within the colony’s borders produced strains as the ‘lower
counties’ (the eventual state of Delaware) increasingly chafed at the dominance
of Pennsylvania Friends.78 Tensions between the (Quaker-dominated) Upper
and (largely non-Quaker) Lower Counties would lead eventually to the separ-
ation of the colony into two political entities early in the eighteenth century.
In the view of Pennsylvania’s Quaker elites, religious difference was directly
implicated in the strife: Pennsylvania correspondents later referred to the
inhabitants of the Lower Counties as ‘our stepbrethren of the Lower Counties’,
calling them ‘both strangers to our selves and [principles]’, and describ-
ing the 1682 Act of Union, which incorporated the counties into Penn’s
­colony, as a ‘Pandora’s box’, which had produced ‘innumerable miseries’ upon
its opening.79
We mentioned George Fox’s encounters with natives during his American
travels in 1671 and 1672 earlier in this chapter; Penn’s relationship with the
tribes that populated his colony has long formed part of the mythic lore of

75 From Elizabeth Gretton, 20 March 1684, PWP, II, p. 533; To Ralph Fretwell, 3 April 1684,
PWP, II, pp. 546–7.
76 Given his extensive experience mediating divisions among English Friends, and defending
George Fox from the criticisms of fellow Quakers, this discord should probably not have sur-
prised him. Then again, Penn had high hopes for the potential of an American colony to attain the
kind of harmonious social order that had proven elusive in England.
77 William Penn to Jasper Batt, 5 February 1683, PWP, II, p. 347. Further criticism from Batt
(August 1683) appears in PWP, II, pp. 462–6.
78 For the broader outlines of Penn’s political theory, see Mary Maples Dunn, William Penn:
Politics and Conscience (Princeton, NJ, 1967); and Murphy, Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration.
79 ‘From the Provincial Council and Assembly’, 3 May 1691, PWP, III, pp. 316, 317. ‘From Joseph
Growden’, 28 April 1691, PWP, III, p. 309.
288 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Pennsylvania and, by extension, American Quakerism. ‘Quakers were neighborly

with Native Americans, purchasing rather than stealing land from them, and
finding a kinship between tribal beliefs and their own’, David Yount claims in
his account of Quakers’ influence on American culture.80 True, Penn did write
to the ‘King of the Indians’, invoking ‘one great God and Power that hath made
the world and all things therein’, and Pennsylvania witnessed far less carnage
than Massachusetts or Virginia in the early years of its settlement.81 Benjamin
West’s iconic 1771 painting William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians represented
this view graphically to great effect.
There is much to be said for differentiating Penn from other colonial founders
(and Pennsylvania Quakers from, say, Virginia Anglicans) in describing his
interactions with native tribes in America. That said, Penn began selling Indian
lands before he had obtained clear title to them, a practice that Allan Greer has
called ‘dispossession in a commercial idiom’.82 Other recent scholarship has
elaborated the complex realities of Pennsylvania’s early years. ‘By offering
pacification to local tribes’, Vicki Hsueh argues, ‘Penn was able to open up vari-
ous trading and diplomatic opportunities without excessive arms or financial
investment . . . his pacific outlook added dimensions of moral and ethical com-
plexity to familiar realist interests’.83 John Smolenski highlights the ‘disagreements,
miscommunications, and missed opportunities [that] marked colonial-native
relations’, emphasizing the keen interest that Pennsylvania Quaker ethnog-
raphers showed in many aspects of Lenape culture while also stressing that
‘their exclusive focus on a single Indian group blinded them to the reality of the
region’s changing demographics’.84 As William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter
succinctly put it, ‘mutual understanding was rare’; the chapters in their vol-
ume Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods explore the many ways in which
early Pennsylvania provided the backdrop for complex interactions between
Euro-Americans and Native Americans.85 More recently, Jean Soderlund has
elevated the Lenape Indians (along with the Swedes and Finns who predated
English Quakers) to a coequal status in the formation of the middle Atlantic
region, with its distinctive decentralized political practices and fluid cul-
tural exchange.86

80 David Yount, How the Quakers Invented America (Lanham, MD, 2007), p. 79. Yount’s
account is particularly simplistic, but it differs only in degree from many more widely accepted
descriptions.
81 ‘To the Kings of the Indians’, 18 October 1681, PWP, II, pp. 128–9.
82 Allan Greer, ‘Dispossession in a Commercial Idiom: From Indian Deeds to Land Cession
Treaties’, in Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, eds, Contested Spaces in Early America
(Philadelphia, PA, 2014), pp. 63–93.
83 Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions, p. 100.
84 Smolenski, Friends and Strangers, pp. 123, 96.
85 William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, ‘Introduction’, in Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods:
Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park, PA, 2004), p. xiii.
86 Jean Soderlund, Lenape Country: The Delaware Valley Before William Penn (Philadelphia,
PA, 2014).
 Colonial Quakerism 289

Although our consideration of colonial Quakerism concludes in 1689—the

year of the Toleration Act—it is also worth mentioning that 1689 also marks
the arrival in Pennsylvania of George Keith, the Scottish Quaker who had
accompanied Penn and Fox across Germany and Holland in the 1670s, sur-
veyed the East–West Jersey border in 1686, and harangued Cotton Mather and
New England clergy in 1688. Keith would soon become the leader of a virulent
group of dissenting Friends in and around Philadelphia, whose dissatisfaction
with the theological laxity among Pennsylvania Quakers would lead him to
articulate a strident critique of the colony’s ruling (Quaker) elite. Keithians
also published one of the first Quaker protests against slavery in 1693.87
(Although a group of Philadelphia Friends issued an earlier protest against
slavery, in 1688, it was never formally approved by the Yearly Meeting.) In 1692,
Keith would find himself charged in the colony’s civil courts with ‘traduc[ing]
and vilely misrepresent[ing]’ the colony’s (Quaker) magistrates, a charge against
which he defended himself by invoking liberty of conscience and the example
of Friends from the Society’s founding.88

CONCLUSION

The two different pictures of colonial Quakerism that we have presented in this
chapter—insurgents whose treatment ranged from outright suppression and
prosecution to benign tolerance on the one hand, and representatives of estab-
lished authority on the other—paint a complex picture of the Society of Friends
as it emerged from its English roots and spread across the Atlantic. The history
of Quakerism in the colonies involves a multitude of particular adaptations of
British practices to American realities, a process that John Smolenski describes
as ‘creolization’: ‘the creative process through which individuals and groups
constructed new cultural habits and identities as they tried to make Old-World
inheritances “fit” in a New-World environment’.89 Drawing on a powerful belief
in the Light within to reform Christianity and remake society, Quakers both
challenged and built colonial institutions. Missionaries like Mary Fisher and
magistrates like William Penn took substantial risks against long odds to fur-
ther their vision of the Kingdom of God on American soil. Among their most
difficult challenges was dissension within Quaker communities, whether it was

87 An Exhortation and Caution to Friends, Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes

(New York, 1693), reprinted in J.W. Frost, The Keithian Controversy in Early Pennsylvania
(Norwood, PA, 1980), pp. 213–18.
88 Andrew Murphy, ‘Persecuting Quakers?’, in Christopher Beneke and Chris Grenda, eds,
The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Religious Intolerance in the Making of America
(Philadelphia, PA, 2010).
89 Smolenski, Friends and Strangers, p. 4.
290 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

over disciplinary reforms, distribution of land, or theological rigour. Supported

by the generosity of Friends in England, who sent books, missionaries, and
supplies, and who collected their stories, colonial Quakers formed tightly knit
communities that significantly shaped the politics and culture of colonial
America. By 1689 colonial Quakers were maintaining an impressive network of
local and regional meetings and, while still in close communication with English
Quakers, were forming stronger organizational ties amongst themselves.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Allen, Richard C. and Rosemary Moore, eds, The Quakers, 1656–1723: The Evolution of
an Alternative Community (University Park, PA, 2018).
Caroll, Kenneth L., Quakerism on the Eastern Shore (Baltimore, MD, 1970).
Chu, Jonathan M., Neighbors, Friends, or Madmen: The Puritan Adjustment to
Quakerism in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay (Westport, CT, 1985).
Frost, J. William, The Quaker Family in Colonial America: A Portrait of the Society
of Friends (New York, 1973).
Gerona, Carla, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture
(Charlottesville, VA, 2004).
Gragg, Larry, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Changing the Culture of the Planter
Class (Columbia, SC, 2009).
Haefeli, Evan, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty
(Philadelphia, PA, 2012).
Ingle, H. Larry, First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism
(New York, 1996).
Landes, Jordan, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early
Modern Community (New York, 2015).
Murphy, Andrew R., Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious
Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA, 2001).
Murphy, Andrew R., Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration: The Political Thought of
William Penn (Oxford, 2016).
Murphy, Andrew R., William Penn: A Life (Oxford, 2019).
Pestana, Carla Gardina, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York,
1991).
Peters, Kate, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005).
Weddle, Meredith Baldwin, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the
Seventeenth Century (New York, 2001).
Weimer, Adrian Chastain, Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England
(Oxford, 2014).
 Part III
Dissent and the World
 13

Dissent in the Parishes

W.J. Sheils

Despite the institutional dominance of the late-medieval Church, parochial

dissent in England had an established history long before the break with Rome
in the 1530s. From the late fourteenth century small groups of evangelical
Christians, chiefly influenced by the teachings of John Wyclif but also drawing
on the late-medieval European Christological devotional tradition, began to
withdraw from participation in parochial religion to varying degrees. These
groups, located principally in the market towns and villages of the Chilterns
and the Kentish Weald as well as London and elsewhere, did not have a formal
structure of ministry, but were served by travelling clergy and, sometimes,
by laypeople. These ministers, or brethren, maintained contact between the
Lollard communities, as they came to be known, somewhat disparagingly.
Thus, while the Lollards shared an evangelical piety, less priestly and sacramental
than the Established Church, and more sceptical of the value of intercessory
prayers or devotion to the saints, the different groups displayed an eclectic
range of devotional practices, which, however, were sustained by a shared com-
mitment to the vernacular Bible, manuscripts of which passed among them.1
Earlier historiography stressed the separateness, or nonconformity, of these
Lollards, resulting in the persecution of many of them for heresy by the Church
authorities.2 More recent research, reflecting work on later dissent, has revealed
a more nuanced relationship between the Lollards and the Established Church,
at least at the parochial level, showing that many individuals, whilst with-
drawing from parochial religion for their particular evangelical devotional
life, nevertheless continued to participate in Sunday worship and to share the

1 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford,
1988), pp. 446–70.
2 K.B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952);
A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964), pp. 22–37.

W.J. Sheils, Dissent in the Parishes In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0014
294 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

responsibilities of parochial office with their orthodox neighbours.3 To the

early reformers however, it was their separateness and their witness in the face
of persecution and martyrdom that marked them out as the true ‘gospellers’
and heralds of the Reformation, suffering under an idolatrous ecclesiastical
authority. From the very beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, therefore,
dissent was an integral component of its tradition, as revealed by the historical
works of John Bale and John Foxe.4
That emphasis on separateness and suffering was reinforced by the experi-
ence of Protestants in the reign of Mary when not only were leaders of the
nascent Protestant Church, such as Cranmer and Ridley, put to the stake, but
ordinary members of congregations in places such as Colchester and Norwich,
suffered the same fate. In such times of persecution it was these congregations
and others like them, such as the ‘privy churches’ of London, among them a
group which met secretly aboard the Jesus boat on the Thames, which pre-
served the gospel.5 To Protestant historians the survival of the Reformation
owed much to men and women whose devotional life lay outside the official
Church and who were willing to defy papal ecclesiastical authority in defence
of their beliefs. This congregational legacy was to prove problematic after the
accession of Elizabeth, when the Church itself was Protestant. Evidence about
the practice of parochial religion in the first decade of the Elizabethan Church
is sketchy; the mid-century upheavals, the shortage of preachers, and the
­survival of Catholicism all contributed to uncertainty, and ecclesiological
­differences among Protestants were submerged in furthering the shared task of
Reformation. But differences there were: not only did the churchmanship of
the ‘gospellers’ sit uneasily with the hierarchical structures of the Elizabethan
Settlement, but other reformers had also experienced non-episcopal forms of
churchmanship while in exile under Mary.6 From the 1560s the nature of the
Reformation was itself contested, and it is in that context that the history of
parochial dissent needs to be considered.

THE MEANINGS OF ‘DISSENT ’ IN THE PARISHES

At this point it is worth reflecting on what constituted ‘dissent’ in this new

church, and this can best be done by consideration of the competing traditions
of the ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’ church. The tradition inherited from the Lollards

3 Derek Plumb, ‘A Gathered Church? Lollards and their Society’, in Margaret Spufford, ed., The
World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 132–63; Robert Lutton, Lollardy and
Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 149–95.
4 Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England:
the Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011), esp. pp. 45–62.
5 Dickens, English Reformation, pp. 272–7, 283–94.
6 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 21–55.
 Dissent in the Parishes 295

was essentially linked to the notion of the ‘invisible church’, in which the truth
of the gospel was preserved by the faithful meeting together without reference
to any overarching institutional structure. In contrast a tradition of dissent
associated with the returning exiles reflected the view of more radical
Protestants that the Elizabethan Settlement was no settlement and that
­further reform was necessary, usually considered along Presbyterian lines. This
­trad­ition demanded a purer ‘visible church’, hence the name ‘Puritan’, which
became attached to its advocates.
In practice these two traditions often overlapped in the experimental
­ec­cle­sio­logic­al conditions of the reign of Elizabeth, when there were significant
differences about the nature of the Reformed Church among its episcopal lead-
ership and much divergence of practice between clergy in the parishes. Dissent
in these conditions was not a homogenous phenomenon, nor was it always
consistently adhered to, often being a response by the godly to local ecclesias-
tical practice, which was considered deficient, usually in matters of worship or
preaching.7 A change of local practice could return such dissenters to their
parish church quite quickly. In the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign the bound-
ary between dissent and conformity was often a porous one. By way of illustra-
tion we can consider the practice of ‘gadding to sermons’, which led to a number
of prosecutions in several dioceses in the 1570s and 80s. In 1570 some local
Puritan gentry invited the former Genevan exile Percival Wiburn to establish a
supra-parochial preaching ministry in Northampton, initially with the support
of the bishop, Edmund Scambler. That support was soon withdrawn, however,
and Wiburn removed to the parish of Whiston where, unbeneficed, he con-
tinued to minister, abandoning the Prayer Book and replacing it with psalm
singing and preaching. Wiburn attracted many of his former congregation to
his services as well as ‘diverse persons of other parishes to the communion,
such as disobey their own ministers’, establishing a tradition of nonconformity
in the neighbourhood that undermined the parochial structure for the next
thirty years.8 This sort of ‘dissent’ more often than not reflected dissatisfaction
with the prevailing preaching or ceremonial practices of a locality, or particular
minister, and was regularly reported throughout the country in the years
between 1560 and 1640, often reflecting the changing priorities of the author-
ities rather than marking any change in practice by parishioners. This was so
during the 1630s when Laudian bishops dominated the Established Church,
and practices that had been tolerated by their predecessors suddenly were
­subject to ecclesiastical censure as nonconformist; for example, when Richard
Neile became Archbishop of York in 1634 many congregations and their clergy

7 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625
(Oxford, 1982), pp. 247–52, 274–80.
8 W.J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1559–1610 (Northampton, 1979),
pp. 120–9.
296 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

found themselves in trouble with the courts for practices, such as sitting to
receive communion, which had been tolerated under a predecessor Tobie
Matthew, archbishop from 1606 until 1628.9
During the reign of James I the practice of conventicling, by which parish-
ioners withdrew to private houses or inns in order to hear and/or discuss
­sermons, had also become a feature of parochial life in many places, and espe-
cially in the towns, where they attracted the suspicion of the authorities, who
charged their leaders with dissent. These gatherings were not dissimilar to the
meetings of the Lollards or those ‘gospellers’ who sustained true religion in
times of persecution, a time that some thought had returned with the emer-
gence of the Arminians, but the extent to which they represented withdrawal
from the notion of a national visible church rather than a desire for that church
to be further reformed varied from congregation to congregation and over
time.10 Many members of conventicles remained attached to the Established
Church, albeit loosely, through the practice of what came to be known as
‘occasional conformity’, attending legally required services, such as the yearly
communion and those on the great feasts, but little more. In this they were the
Protestant counterparts of that other problematic group, church papists.11
That said, not only was the boundary between that sort of nonconformity
and conformity a porous one, but so was the boundary between it and a more
definitive ‘dissenting’ ecclesiology drawing on the notion of the invisible, or at
least, the non-institutional church. To illustrate this we can return to Whiston.
In 1592, two decades after Wiburn started preaching there, a group of seven
inhabitants of the neighbouring parish of Earls Barton were disciplined for
absenting themselves from the parish and deriding the minister. The charges
against their leader, a yeoman called Robert Welford, were more specific: he
was accused of going to Whiston, of despising the discipline of the church (that
is to say, episcopacy), of remaining excommunicate, and being a ‘notable
Brownist’.12 These were turbulent years, following the Star Chamber trial and
imprisonment of leading Presbyterian clergy and the discovery of a ‘conspiracy’
by an idiosyncratic individual named William Hackett, from the nearby town
of Oundle.13 In this context the charge of Brownism against Welford is signifi-
cant. Robert Browne was a clergyman who, in the early 1580s, had become
disillusioned with the prospects of reform of the English Church and held

9 R.A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York (London, 1960),
pp. 52–69.
10 P. Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, eds, Voluntary
Religion, Studies in Church History, 23 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 223–59.
11 Christopher Hill, ‘Occasional Conformity and the Grindalian tradition’, in his Collected
Essays, 3 vols (Brighton, 1985–6), II: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England,
pp. 301–20, esp. pp. 313–18; Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholics, Conformity and
Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993), esp. pp. 36–9.
12 Sheils, Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, pp. 127–9, 136–40.
13 Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 403–40.
 Dissent in the Parishes 297

unlicensed conventicles before leading his congregation at Bury St Edmunds to

‘joine them selves to the Lord, in one covenant and followshipp together’. This
separatist theology was followed by practical separation when, after imprison-
ment by the bishop, Browne and his followers emigrated to Middleburg in the
Netherlands. Returning via Scotland to a teaching post in London Browne
subsequently developed his separatist ideas, adopting a congregational model of
the church equally critical of both Presbyterianism and episcopacy. The charges
against Welford, therefore, imply that by the 1590s he had absorbed some of
Browne’s ideas and a dissenting tradition of separation from the Established
Church, rather than one that merely sought its further reform, had begun to
emerge in some parishes in provincial England as well as in the cap­ital. It is this
tradition that forms the main subject of this chapter, though the complicated
relationship between this tradition and that of the godly reformers is illustrated
by the career of Browne himself: by the time of Welford’s prosecution Browne
had renounced his Separatist views, and was serving another Northamptonshire
parish, Thorpe Achurch, where he ministered for another forty years,
­occasionally appearing before the courts for nonconformity alongside some
parishioners before being caught up in the Laudian reaction, resulting in his
excommunication in 1631, sequestration in 1632, and imprisonment and death
in 1633.14

PARO CHIAL DISSENT BEFORE THE CIVIL WARS

Groups of dissenters were to be found in parishes throughout England in the

years up to 1640, but there were distinct administrative and topographical
­conditions that favoured the emergence and continued presence of dissent.
Above all there was London, with its complex parochial structure and its mobile
and rapidly expanding population. From the start of Elizabeth’s reign the
­capital had been the locus of religious experiment, with English exiles returning
from Calvinist cities like Geneva, and Protestant refugees from the Netherlands
and France fleeing from persecution.15 In such circumstances eclectic congre-
gations emerged cutting across parochial boundaries and drawing their con-
gregations from across the city. The leaders of the most famous of these early
dissenting groups, known as the Plumbers’ Hall congregation, had adherents
from forty-two separate streets and locations in the city as diverse as Aldgate,
Southwark, Holborn, and Smithfield. They were prosecuted and imprisoned in

14 ‘Browne, Robert’, ODNB.

15 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Puritans and the Foreign Reformed Churches in
London’, in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983),
pp. 245–72.
298 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

1567 for abandoning their parishes and discarding the Prayer Book in favour of
the order of Geneva. On their release some of these returned to their parishes,
but others separated from the Established Church, ‘the church of the traditioners’,
gathering themselves into a congregation that had its own covenant and elected
its own officers. Similar congregations soon emerged, one observer suggesting
four or five by 1570, and many of their members suffered imprisonment
throughout the 1570s and 80s. They proved problematic to the more conservative
Puritans, who disowned them, and these ‘separators’ (perhaps a more accurate
term than ‘Separatist’ at this date) looked to the stranger ­churches of the French
and Dutch exiles, whose independence was acknowledged by the authorities,
for inspiration.16
The capital continued to be a home for dissenters throughout the period;
congregations led by Henry Barrow and John Greenwood attracted craftsmen
and their families from across the city and the social spectrum, including gold-
smiths and apothecaries as well members of the lesser crafts. Like their Marian
predecessors many of them were imprisoned for their beliefs, and in 1593 the
arrest of fifty-six members whilst at a gathering for worship in the woods near
Islington ended in the execution of Barrow and Greenwood and the flight
of some of the congregation to Amsterdam.17 Thereafter organized Separatist
­dissent did not return to the capital until 1616 when Henry Jacob returned from
exile in Middleburg to gather a church under a shared confession of faith. Its
members included merchants like Sabine Staresmore, booksellers, a wherry-
man, and representatives of most trades across the city. It separated from the
Established Church on the issue of baptism, and it permitted any man it deemed
fit to expound the Scriptures in the congregation but, despite this, Jacob’s
­congregation continued to share fellowship with members of less radical
Puritan parishes in the city. Jacob’s church proved the model for other congre-
gations in the capital and offshoots were formed, not always amicably, so that,
on the eve of the Civil Wars there were seven gathered churches in London
descended from it, in varying degrees of separation from their Puritan neigh-
bours. Notwithstanding the continuing threat of prison, numbers increased
and when Samuel Eaton, the leader of one congregation, died in 1639 200
­followers accompanied his body to burial.18
London was exceptional, but not unique. Other towns and cities housed dis-
senters; Norwich, with its tradition of medieval heresy and early radicalism,
not only had a congregation of Dutch refugee weavers with their own church,
but its Puritan magistrates established supra-parochial lectureships in the
town. Here and elsewhere the sermons preached by these lecturers were often

16 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 88–90.

17 R.B. White, The English Separatist Tradition (Oxford, 1971), pp. 68–90.
18 Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London, 1616–49
(Cambridge 1977), pp. 12–27.
 Dissent in the Parishes 299

the subject of ‘repetition’ and discussion in less formally public, and in some
cases, private meetings by their more evangelical, or godly hearers.19 These
meetings, which came to be known as conventicles, occupied an ambiguous
ecclesiastical and legal space. In 1593 parliament passed a Conventicle Act
making it illegal to attend unlawful religious gatherings under pain of impris-
onment, but it was not clear who decided on the legality. In some cases they
were held with the approval of local magistrates, but in others they became
objects of suspicion, especially during the Laudian ascendancy. Conventicles
were ubiquitous: at Yarmouth in 1607 the shopkeepers joined with the minister
on Sunday evenings to repeat the sermon, as was the case at Norwich too,
whose MP was a noted attender; in Kidderminster one hundred families were
said to participate; at Kingston on Thames they were justified as a means for the
people to be ‘edified one by another’; and in Lancashire and the West Riding
they were the means of sustaining the godly in regions considered hostile to the
Reformation. Extra-parochial religious gatherings were found in many towns,
but whether they constituted full or partial withdrawal from the parish church
and the wider Christian community varied from place to place. Some sort of
separation from ‘the profane multitude’ was an essential feature of this religious
culture, and leading Dissenters of the post-Restoration period looked back
to these gatherings as the precursors of their congregations. That this was
sometimes the case is revealed by the early seventeenth-century annals of the
Broadmead Church in Bristol, which chronicle a progression from informal
meetings for repetition of sermons to full separation from public worship and
the appointment of gifted brethren to the ministry.20
Despite the importance of such conventicles to the growth of dissent, they
were not confined to the larger urban centres. Rural dissent, where it existed,
was often found in villages within the hinterland of the smaller market towns,
or near to main routes along which pedlars traded in ideas as well as goods,
often combining the two in the form of cheap print. Other environments were
also important: sparsely settled communities in large dispersed parishes, often
in upland and moorland regions in the north or in forest and fen in the south;
or settlements in administratively detached or border locations far from the
reach of the authorities. For the rural impact of the country town we have
the example of Royston, Hertfordshire, where, in the 1630s, farmers from the
nearby villages met on market day ‘in a private room . . . that they might freely
talk of the things of God’; no doubt some of these were conformable Puritans
but others, like the dairy farmer Richard Conder, subsequently became members
of separated gathered churches. The meetings he attended were not gatherings

19 M.C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in
Tudor Norwich (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 37–61, 239–41; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement,
pp. 186–8, 213–14.
20 Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, pp. 240–5.
300 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of the poor or marginalized, but comprised some of the more established

­families of the neighbourhood, who, in the years after 1660, played leading
roles in their congregations and offered their premises for worship.21
It was probably at such markets that rural dissenters purchased godly literature
from travelling pedlars and carriers: the early-seventeenth-century accounts of
John Tayer, a shoemaker from Thornbury in Gloucestershire, reveal how he
acquired godly books in Bristol, probably through a London carrier, and more
directly the leading nonconformist minister Richard Baxter later recalled how
his father had bought ‘good books’ from a poor pedlar at the door of their house
in the Shropshire village of Eaton Constantine in 1630. The networks of com-
munications between London, major towns, and smaller country markets
meant that cheap print circulated and ‘the things of God’ could be discussed by
dissenters in inns and other meeting places beyond the church. Nowhere is this
better represented than in the villages and market towns of the Chilterns, along
whose routes pedlars carried psalters and chapbooks to godly congregations in
the seventeenth century, following the footprints of those Lollard brethren who
had carried vernacular manuscript Bibles to fellow evangelicals two centuries
earlier.22
Elsewhere, on the main road from Cambridge to Colchester lay the village of
Balsham, where, in the later sixteenth century, settled a group of members of
the Family of Love, followers of the beliefs of a Dutch mystic, Hendrick Niclaes,
whose works became available in English in the 1570s. Niclaes advocated a
spirituality of individual direct inward transformation that had no need of an
institutional church. His followers in Balsham were among its prosperous
­yeomen, occupying over half the land in the parish in 1592, and they used that
prosperity in helping each other and their poorer brethren in the towns and
villages of the Cambridgeshire, Essex, Suffolk border through a ‘distinctly
masonic level of economic support’, lending money, transferring small parcels
of land, and administering each other’s wills. Thus, a gathered and, in this case
secret, congregation (for its members were Nicodemite and conformed out-
wardly to Established Religion) could sustain itself across an extensive rural
hinterland spread across the borders of three counties and dioceses in the face
of determined government harassment, although in the years after 1630 its
existence remains shadowy and elusive to the historian.23

21 Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 230–2.
22 Tessa Watt, ‘Piety in the Pedlar’s Pack: Continuity and Change, 1578–1630’, in Spufford, ed.,
The World of Rural Dissenters, pp. 255–6; Michael Frearson, ‘Communications and the Continuity
of Dissent in the Chiltern Hundreds during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Spufford,
ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, pp. 273–86.
23 Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994),
pp. 68–74, 95–8, 190–3.
 Dissent in the Parishes 301

Further north another neighbourhood crossing diocesan and county

boundaries existed around the towns of Bawtry and Gainsborough, where
south Yorkshire met Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Situated at considerable
distance from the episcopal seats at York and Lincoln the area was nevertheless
well connected to other parts of the country by both the River Trent and the
road from London to York. A Puritan tradition was established in the neigh-
bourhood from the later 1580s around the person of William Brewster at
Scrooby, where he and a number of other parishioners were cited for unauthor-
ized repetition of sermons and for absenting themselves from their parish. This
looked like a Puritan conventicle, and Scrooby and other neighbouring par-
ishes had Puritan ministers for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign. The imposition of
the Canons of 1604, and the deprivation of some of these ministers, was the
catalyst for the move from Puritanism to more formal separation. This was
precipitated by the arrival in the area of two deprived clergymen, John Smyth
and John Robinson, both former fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who
gathered a following among Brewster’s associates and, by 1607, had developed
a separatist ecclesiology that looked to the example of the former London
Separatists, now resident in Amsterdam. Both Smyth at Scrooby and Robinson
at Gainsborough led congregations that identified themselves as Separatist,
and individual Separatists were identified in neighbouring parishes. Their
presence was viewed sufficiently seriously for the archbishop, Tobie Mathew, to
preach a sermon ‘Contra Brownists’ at Bawtry in September 1607. Thereafter,
the leading laymen were pursued in the church courts and, although the
remoteness of their location gave them some immunity from the enforcement
of the law, by 1608 the congregations decided to emigrate and join the English
Separatists in Amsterdam, before Robinson’s followers went on to New England
and some of Smyth’s congregation returned home following his death in 1612.
Again, these congregations comprised members of the well-established farm-
ing community with sufficient resources to organize an emigration, Brewster
was himself the bailiff of the archbishop’s manor at Scrooby and a Cambridge
graduate, and Gervase Nevile, imprisoned at the end of 1607, was the grandson
of a former sheriff of Yorkshire. Both of them emigrated.24
Elsewhere in Yorkshire, in the upland district of Craven on the border with
Lancashire, a group of dissenters, led by Roger Brearley, the charismatic curate
of Grindleton, a chapelry in the parish of Waddington, attracted the attention
of the authorities in the 1610s. Brearley preached at the nearby market town of
Gisburn, along with other like-minded clergy, most notably Richard Tennant,
and the two were again before the diocesan court for their heterodox opinions
in 1627. Brearley’s ministry moved between parishes along the Yorkshire/
Lancashire border (also a diocesan boundary) and the antinomian views of his

24 R.A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts, pp. 141–66; R.B. White, The English
Separatist Tradition, pp. 120–6.
302 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

congregation continued to trouble the authorities up to the Civil Wars, the

community winning over Brearley’s successor as curate of Grindleton to their
views in 1635. Having persuaded their minister, some of the congregation took
on a preaching mission throughout Yorkshire, including in the West Riding
town of Halifax and at Goathland on the North York Moors, and it is clear that
these sparsely settled communities—Halifax lay at the centre of the largest par-
ish in England containing dozens of subsidiary settlements—fostered both a
tradition of independent religious initiative and provided an environment in
which it could flourish. The leading Grindletonians were not anchored to one
place, but took on a missionary role not unlike that subsequently undertaken
by the Quakers, or of their contemporary, John Traske, the wandering prophet
of Saturday sabbatarianism, whose ministry passed through large parts of
south and south-west England from the 1610s, attracting followers who prac-
tised their faith quietly and in secret.25
It was in such places that dissent could take root and flourish, but it also
benefited from the peculiarities of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, whereby parishes
lay outside diocesan control. This was especially true of Bocking in Essex, and
Hadleigh in Suffolk, both formally part of the diocese of Canterbury but lying
beyond the diocesan boundary across the Thames. Their location made the
enforcement of orthodoxy difficult for the authorities and a group of Lollards,
around the Bocher family of Bocking, endured in the neighbourhood for sev-
eral generations. In the reign of Edward VI a group of radical Kentish Protestants
fled to Bocking to escape persecution; in 1551 sixty of them, including some
locals, were discovered and charged with a range of anti-Calvinist heresies.
Their radicalism later exercised the Marian regime, and in the 1570s the ‘forceful
and unorthodox vernacular Protestantism’ of this group continued to t­ rouble
the bishops. One of the Edwardian free willers, Thomas Upcher, subsequently
moderated his views and became rector of St Leonard’s, Colchester after
Elizabeth’s accession; he was later involved in the opposition to Whitgift’s policies
in the 1580s and on the fringes of the Presbyterian Dedham ‘classis’, which
operated in this cloth-making region on the Essex-Suffolk border at that time.26
Parochial dissent in the years before 1640 took root in a variety of contexts
and it co-existed with godly Puritan nonconformity in a number of places.
The boundary between the two traditions was sometimes porous, as at Bristol
where Puritan dissatisfaction with the church led some into disaffected dissent,
but elsewhere, as in the Scrooby neighbourhood, Puritan preachers were

25 David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), pp. 144–7, 173–5, 266–324.
26 Hudson, Premature Reformation, p. 379; J.F. Davis, Heresy and Reformation in South-East
England, 1520–1559 (Woodbridge, 1983), pp. 102–3; A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, p. 238;
P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979),
p. 114; Patrick Collinson, John Craig, and Brett Usher, eds, Conferences and Combination Lectures
in the Elizabethan Church, 1582–1590 (Woodbridge, 2003) pp. 265–6.
 Dissent in the Parishes 303

vigorous opponents of the Separatists. Dissent took root in towns, and ­especially
in the capital, and in manufacturing rural locations such as the Kentish Weald
or the Stour valley, and was aided by being able to slip between different eccle-
siastical and secular jurisdictions. This ‘borderland’ location and the relative
absence of dissent in prosperous, nucleated agrarian parishes have led some
historians to characterize dissent as a religion of the marginalized and the poor
but, as we have seen, dissenters could be found among all sectors of rural soci-
ety and occasionally among civic leaders too. As a consequence different groups
could retain contact with each other over wide geographical distances, including
with London churches and those in exile. These contacts did not represent a
formal network but they do illustrate the solid social foundations of dissent in
this period, and its capacity to adapt and survive in a hostile ecclesiastical
environment.27

MID-CENTURY UPHEAVAL, 1640–60

The outbreak of Civil War in 1642, followed by the victory of parliament and the
various ecclesiastical experiments tried by successive governments during
the Interregnum, make it difficult to talk of Puritan dissent in the parishes
­during these years. First, during the 1640s, the parochial structure itself was
disturbed by the presence of opposing armies in the countryside, each with
their own chaplains, producing congregations of soldiers far removed from
their parochial life. Second, in areas controlled by parliament, normal ecclesi-
astical discipline broke down, and this was extended nationally after the aboli-
tion of episcopacy in 1646. With no system of enforcement, the prohibition of
the Book of Common Prayer, and the lifting of censorship in 1642, the religious
landscape in most parishes had changed utterly by 1650, and these changes
make it ana­chron­is­tic to impose ‘rigid categories on the mid-century flux of
ideas’.28 Indeed, with about a quarter of the clergy being removed from their
parishes during these decades, episcopalians sometimes found themselves as
de facto parochial dissenters during the 1650s. The usefulness of dissent as a
descriptive term at the parochial level in these decades is therefore limited.
Nevertheless the upheavals of these decades, described by one authority as ‘the
liberation of dissent’, were to have significant consequences for dissent as it
emerged in the years after 1660. Clearly those congregations that had existed

27 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (London, 1972), pp. 39–56, for the link between dissent and the socially marginalized.
28 B. Reay, ‘Introduction’, in J.F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English
Revolution (Oxford, 1983), pp. 1–21, quotation at p. 14.
304 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

and survived in the years before 1640 were able to flourish, at least during the
war years of the 1640s, following the collapse of the ecclesiastical courts.29
Also of significance was the struggle for control of the Church among the
Puritans in parliament, between the Presbyterians and those of a more congre-
gationally minded churchmanship, usually called Independents at this time.
Theirs was, of course, a struggle for the religious character of the national
Church, rather than an argument about religious toleration, though arguments
about toleration were central to the debates of the 1640s and 50s. In the process
the intellectual argument for toleration, advocated by John Milton among
­others, transformed the language of conscience and liberty, in politics as well as
religion, though the impact of their ideas was not turned into practice until the
following centuries.30 What these discussions did reflect was an environment
in which experimentation was possible, and nowhere was this more possible
than in the capital. Rejection of infant baptism among the early seventeenth-
century exiles had fostered the emergence of a few General Baptist congrega-
tions in London and elsewhere following the return from Amsterdam of some
members of Smyth’s former congregation in 1612. Led originally by Thomas
Helwys, little is known of their activities in the 1630s, in which decade the
London congregation led by Henry Jacob was well chronicled, thanks largely to
the pressure placed upon it by the Laudian regime. The more radical members
of Jacob’s congregation espoused believers’ baptism and by 1644, when they
published their own confession of faith, there were seven congregations of
these Particular Baptists in London. Despite theological differences both
General and Particular Baptists dramatically demonstrated their separatism by
adopting the ritual of baptism by total immersion in the years following 1640.
The London congregations of the mid-1640s were marked by revivalist meet-
ings, public debates, and printed tracts, and many of their members enlisted in
the parliamentary army, sometimes achieving officer rank. It was through the
army that the Baptists were able to reach beyond the capital so that, by 1660,
there were over 250 congregations throughout the country, with numbers
ranging between 18 and 261. Some congregations formed themselves into
regional associations to fund full-time preachers and evangelists, but there was
no national organization. Their main strength was in the Midlands, South and
West, where they attracted some minor gentry support, but they made little
impact in the northern counties.31

29 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford,
1978), pp. 77–220; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and
Nonconformity, 1646–1660’, in Jason McElligott and David Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism
during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), pp. 18–43.
30 John Coffey, ‘The Toleration Controversy during the English Revolution’, in Christopher
Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 42–68.
31 J.F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, in McGregor and Reay, eds, Radical
Religion in the English Revolution, pp. 23–64.
 Dissent in the Parishes 305

If Baptists were few in the north the same was not true of the other great
Dissenting group to emerge in these years. This was not a product of the
­war-torn 1640s, for although some early leaders had been soldiers in the New
Model Army and George Fox had begun preaching near his Midland home in
the late 1640s, the movement really took off in 1651 when Fox and his associates
undertook a preaching ministry among the dissenting communities of the
north, thereby marking the beginnings of Quakerism. The Quakers drew their
support mainly from the ‘middling sort’ in rural and urban communities with
a solid following among the poorer classes, and they were especially strongly
represented among women, who preached, participated in church government,
and engaged in printed controversy. The movement eschewed church worship
and the clerical estate, meeting in barns, inns, and the open countryside, and
they refused to pay tithes to the clergy. From the mid-1650s Quaker communities
spread rapidly throughout the country and, despite vigorous campaigns against
them by the authorities, they proved resilient, numbering about 60,000 in 1660.
The movement quickly established a national structure of meetings, held
together by a printed and epistolary ministry by its leaders.32
At the Restoration in 1660 there were not only older Puritan nonconformists,
represented by the Presbyterians and Independents, but the newer Dissenters,
chiefly Baptists and Quakers but including other smaller groups such as the
millenarian Fifth Monarchists and Muggletonians.33 For the most part these
congregations stood outside the newly restored Anglican Church, though
many Presbyterians continued to attend parochial services as well as their own
worship through to 1689. Congregations of one or more of these religious
groups could be found in parishes and towns throughout the country, as was
the case in Kent. The county town of Maidstone can serve as an example: dom-
inated by a Presbyterian preacher supported by the mayor and cor­por­ation
from 1644 until 1653, the town also contained a congregation of Independents
during those years. In 1655 Quaker missionaries met with a Baptist congrega-
tion on their way to Maidstone, where they addressed the Presbyterian and
Congregational churches separately. They got a hostile reception, being put in
the stocks and whipped from the town, but achieved a following in the neigh-
bourhood if not in Maidstone itself, and in 1656 John Reeve, leader of the
Muggletonians, also made contact with supporters in the vicinity of Maidstone,
among them a tanner and heel-maker. Clearly the elite of the town were
Presbyterian, but there was a sizeable congregation of Independents there too
and, by the later 1650s, radicals like the Quakers and Muggletonians could be

32 B. Reay, ‘Quakerism and Society’, in McGregor and Reay, eds, Radical Religion in the English
Revolution, pp. 141–64.
33 Bernard Capp, ‘The Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism’, in McGregor and Reay,
eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, pp. 165–89; Barry Reay, ‘The Muggletonians:
An Introductory Survey’, in Christopher Hill, William Lamont, and Barry Reay, eds, The World of
the Muggletonians (London, 1983), pp. 23–63.
306 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

found among the poorer crafts and in the neighbouring villages. The religious
diversity practised here was far from exceptional in the late 1650s.34

POST-RESTORATION DISSENT

The religious landscape in 1660 looked very different from what it had been in
the early seventeenth century. Attempts to create a broad or ‘latitudinarian’
national Church that would embrace the ‘old dissenters’, those Puritan
Presbyterians and Independents, foundered in the early 1660s with parliament’s
passing of a series of acts, later known as the Clarendon Code, enforcing con-
formity and imposing civil restrictions on Dissenters.35 Some Puritan clergy
did join the new Church; some, like the Suffolk minister Isaac Archer, hovered
uncertainly on the boundary of conformity and dissent and, although accept-
ing a parish living, remained ‘tender of the nonconformists’; but others, like
John Shawe, left the Established Church after 1662 and ministered to a
Presbyterian congregation in his home town of Rotherham as well as preaching
to congregations throughout the north.36 The boundary between old dissent
and the Established Church remained porous: in Staffordshire Richard Baxter
preached in his house to as many as could hear him and then proceeded with
his congregation to the parish church; in Yorkshire Oliver Heywood encour-
aged his congregation to attend their parish church as well as his sermons, and
even preached there himself when the curate was absent; in Lancashire Adam
Martindale retained his commitment to attending public worship in the parish
church alongside preaching to his congregation in small family groups in order
to circumvent the Conventicle Act. However, this was no easy path for these
men and their congregations: all three preachers suffered periods of imprison-
ment in the years up to 1689, as did some of their followers.37 Like these congre-
gations, ‘old dissent’ was generally located in towns or in urbanized regions,
and in some larger towns, like Coventry and Norwich, the mid-century Puritan
tradition created a significant dissenting presence that, notwithstanding the
restrictions of the Corporation Act, continued to influence urban government.38
The strength of their presence was revealed in the licences for worship granted

34 Jacqueline Eales, ‘ “So Many Sects and Schisms”: Religious Diversity in Revolutionary Kent,
1640–60’, in Durston and Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England, pp. 238, 241–2.
35 John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven, CT, 1991), pp. 29–61.
36 Spurr, Restoration Church of England, p. 206; William Sheils, ‘John Shawe and Edward
Bowles: Civic Preachers at Peace and War’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, eds, Religious
Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 222.
37 ODNB entries for Richard Baxter, Oliver Heywood, and Adam Martindale.
38 Ann Hughes, ‘Coventry and the English Revolution’, in R.C. Richardson, ed., Town and
Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester, 1992), pp. 66–99; Judith Hurwich, ‘ “A Fanatick
Town”: The Political Influence of Dissenters in Coventry, 1660–1725’, Midland History, 4 (1978),
 Dissent in the Parishes 307

under the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672: at Norwich five premises were

licensed for Presbyterian worship and four by Congregationalists, at Coventry
three for Presbyterians and two for Congregationalists. These figures were
repeated elsewhere: in Kent, although dissent seems to have disappeared from
Maidstone, neighbouring towns like Cranbrook and Tenterden had multiple
licences, and in the far north all the major towns in County Durham had at
least one licensed house for either Presbyterian or Congregational worship.39
The membership of these congregations included many of the middling sort
of craftsmen, if not the aldermanic elite, as well as more modest journeymen
and their families, with women making up a significant proportion of these
congregations, as in Oliver Heywood’s Presbyterian church at Coley in
Yorkshire, not just as members but as patrons and supporters of the community,
albeit excluded from public functions.40 The membership of these congrega-
tions cut across parochial boundaries, not only within the towns but also in
the rural hinterland, from which some members came. We can see this in
Gloucestershire where ‘the fellowship of Independency clearly transcended the
customary residential group of the parish’ at Tewkesbury, where family con-
nections and religious allegiance percolated not just through the town but in
the neighbouring villages of Ashchurch and Pannington.41
One of the premises licensed for worship in 1672 was the house of John
Bunyan in Bedford. For much of the 1660s Bunyan was forced to conduct his
ministry from prison, and the church at Bedford was forced underground, its
minute book silent from 1663 until September 1668, when Bunyan was released
for a time before returning to prison until 1672. Prison not only established
Bunyan as a nationally known religious writer, but also gave him the space to
organize the Bedfordshire church. Despite persecution, church membership
increased in the 1660s, with fifteen new members noted in 1663 ‘during a time
of violent persecution’ and the Anglican vicar of St Paul’s, Bunyan’s parish,
recording in 1668 that ‘the separatists increase daily’. In 1661 the church was
organized into three areas under the supervision of leading members in order
to sustain numbers and reduce losses, and in 1669 the congregation took on
a letter-writing campaign to maintain contact with those members living at a
distance from Bedford. By the mid-1670s the Dissenters in Bedford numbered
121, almost 10 per cent of the population, spread throughout the town’s five
parishes, and a panel of preachers recruited from the artisan class had emerged

15–47; J.T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690
(Oxford, 1979), pp. 247–58, 320.
39 F. Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence, 1672: A Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent
(Liverpool, 1908), appendix VII, pp. xvi, xxxii–iii, xli–ii, lii–iii.
40 W.J. Sheils, ‘Oliver Heywood and his Congregation’, in Sheils and Wood, eds, Voluntary
Religion, pp. 261–77.
41 Dan Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690
(Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 276–7.
308 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

to sustain dissent in the villages of the county. Bunyan had organized a countywide
structure of ‘visitors’ and formally appointed missionaries, which linked
­congregations together and minimized the risk that small rural congregations
would drift away through isolation and lack of leadership. These measures
ensured the continued growth of the Particular Baptist churches in Bedfordshire
into the next century.42
One group that did not appear among the licenses of 1672 were the Quakers,
for they did not seek any. The remarkable growth of Quakerism during the
Interregnum was sustained after the Restoration despite continued harassment
by the authorities and hostility from other Dissenting congregations. Their
unwillingness to swear oaths or pay tithes brought them into conflict with secu-
lar authorities, and their rejection of a ministerial class and liturgical forms set
them apart. This was increased by social practice: a strong predisposition to
endogamy and the witnessing of marriages by the whole community, will-
making and administration was often retained within the society, and Friends
chose to bury their dead away from the churchyard in gardens and, later, in
appointed burial grounds. These religious bonds were reinforced by the devel-
opment of a national organization of Men’s and Women’s Meetings to maintain
contacts and frame policy. These factors, and the willingness of Friends to
accept the testimony and ministry of women, all contributed to make the
Society socially distinctive in its practices.
Their separation, however, did not make them marginal. In Essex, Quakers
were found in all sectors of rural and urban society: in Colchester half of the
Society came from the artisan class throughout the period 1655–94 but, signifi-
cantly, growing numbers of the wholesale and large producers joined the
­society, increasing from a quarter to a third of the membership over the same
period, suggesting that the social background of Quakers in Colchester was
higher in 1689 than it had been in 1660. In contrast prosperous Quakers in the
cathedral city of York found it more difficult, and wholesalers reduced as a
proportion of the community from a third to under a quarter during these
years, though the numbers of retailers and artisans stayed constant. In Essex
more generally wholesalers, retailers, and artisans each accounted for about a
fifth of the membership throughout the period, but there was a falling off of the
largest group, the farming community from 44 per cent around 1660 to just
under a third at the end of the period. It would seem that Quakers prospered
better in the market towns and more mixed manufacturing areas of the county
than in the high farming region, just as the Lollards had done earlier. That said,
however, the farming community was still the largest component of Essex
Quakerism in 1689.43

42 Michael Mullett, John Bunyan in Context (Keele, 1996), pp. 92–9.

43 Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 84–90, 96–8,
151–4; David Scott, Quakerism in York, 1650–1720, Borthwick Papers, 80 (York, 1991), pp. 8–10.
 Dissent in the Parishes 309

Their social status did not render the Quakers immune from the hostility
and fear of neighbours as well as from authority, a fear increased by their
­willingness to give women an active role in ministry and church discipline,
especially in the early years. Quaker ‘sufferings’ became a mark of identity and
were duly recorded in ‘books of sufferings’ county by county; between 1660 and
1684 285 sentences of imprisonment were imposed on Quakers in Essex, over
half of these in the 1660s, but persecution revived in the early 1680s when sixty
more were sentenced. Most cases concerned the refusal to swear oaths or pay
tithes, but attendance at illegal meetings and disturbing ministers in service
time were also punished. In Lancashire between 1650 and 1700 over 500 pro-
secutions against Quakers were made for non-payment of tithe alone from
twenty-one parishes throughout the county, but with a concentration in their
heartland of the Furness district. Prosecution on this scale probably had some
impact on the decline in numbers among the better-off farming community in
this period, but Friends also found support as well as hostility among their
neighbours. That too could prove problematic, when local sympathizers
paid tithes for prosecuted Quakers it often brought the recipient under the
discipline of the local Meeting.44
In the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire
Quakers were a ‘predominantly rural agrarian movement of the lower and
middling variety’ with three-quarters of its members living in country parishes.
Without the social clout of Essex Friends Quakers in these counties were inte-
grated in the wider community: some even served parochial office and in 1670
Richard Cope of Chatteris, yeoman and parish constable despite being a
Quaker, found himself in trouble for refusing to distrain on a fellow Quaker for
non-payment of tithe. In 1682 John Fisher of Wyddial in Hertfordshire was
prosecuted for non-attendance at church, but was chosen constable the follow-
ing year and, in 1684, appeared again before Quarter sessions along with fellow
Quakers. When prosecuted Quakers could also find support in the community:
when in 1670 the local magistrate went to distrain the goods of John Adams of
Haddenham, then in gaol at Cambridge, John Bishop, a neighbour, refused
repeated requests by the officers to break down Adams’ door. In 1676 the parish
officers of Fenstanton refused to distrain the goods of their neighbour Tobias
Hardmeat for his refusal to pay a fine; and in the following decade the parish
constable of Ramsey paid the fine himself rather than distrain the cattle of his
Quaker neighbour Samuel Nottingham.45

44 Davies, Quakers, p. 184; Nicholas Morgan, Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment,
1660–1730 (Halifax, 1993) pp. 222–7, 289.
45 Bill Stevenson, ‘The Social and Economic Status of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’,
in Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, pp. 338, 358; Stevenson, ‘The Social Integration
of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters,
pp. 369–70, 372–3.
310 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The ubiquity of Dissent in the years after 1660 is clear from the examples
given above, and the capital was no exception. Under the Declaration of
Indulgence over one hundred Londoners licensed premises for worship and
further licences were granted in suburban parishes like Islington, Hackney, and
Highgate. In addition to their homes Dissenters licensed inns, a theatre, the
Currier’s Hall, and even a ‘new built meeting-house’ in Westminster. Almost all
these licences were sought by Presbyterians and Congregationalists and there-
fore underestimate the extent of dissent in the capital: no Quaker licences were
sought and only seven Baptists were licensed, but we know that there were
active communities of each in the capital in these years, as well as the continuing
Dutch and French churches, the latter greatly expanded at the end of the period
following Louis XIVs expulsion of the Huguenots in 1685. No London parish
was unaffected by dissent and in some parts, notably the easternmost parishes,
Dissenters formed a substantial proportion of the population. Following
the Act of Toleration, seventy-four Dissenting churches were licensed in the
capital.46
Ubiquity also entailed proximity and, although all Dissenters suffered
­prosecution by both Church and state, that common experience did not always
lead to a shared sympathy. We have already noted the animosity that some
Puritans showed towards Separatists in the early seventeenth century, and this
con­tinued in some places into the Restoration period. Many Presbyterians still
thought in terms of a national Church and were dismissive of the more radical
Dissenters, but divisions were found even among these: in Cambridgeshire the
Quaker mission of the late 1650s had antagonized the local Baptists and bad
relations continued between them into the 1670s. In the north Oliver Heywood
was concerned about the influence of Quakers on his congregation.47 Parochial
dissent was far from a uniform phenomenon and divisions between dissenting
congregations were not uncommon in the religiously competitive environment
of the late seventeenth century. They may have been united in their aggressive
opposition to popery and their suffering at the hands of the Establishment, but
in some parishes and towns they found themselves in competition for the souls
of their members.
To conclude, Parochial dissent in the years before 1640 was a marginal, but
not a socially marginalized, phenomenon, which attracted some locally
im­port­ant supporters but whose experience can only be traced intermittently

46 Bate, Declaration of Indulgence, appendix, pp. xxxvii–xl, lxxiii; Andrew Pettegree, ‘The
French and Walloon Communities in London, 1550–1688’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan Israel, and
Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration: the Glorious Revolution in England (Oxford,
1991), pp. 93–6; Ole Peter Grell, ‘From Persecution to Integration: The Decline of the Anglo-Dutch
Communities in London, 1648–1702’, in Grell, Israel, and Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to
Toleration, pp. 122–7.
47 Spufford, Contrasting Communities, pp. 283–5, 295–7; John Spurr, The Post Reformation:
Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714 (London, 2006), p. 321.
 Dissent in the Parishes 311

through the legal records. Although they had an important place in Protestant
self-understanding, in the face of prosecution by authority dissenters were
often forced into exile or into a precarious existence. The events of mid-century
changed this dramatically and, in the later seventeenth century, different
­congregations of Dissenters were a common feature of English religious life,
attracting significant support among local urban and rural elites as well as
among the people. Organized, and exercising their own church discipline, with
women sometimes participating and often forming a large part of the congre-
gation, Dissenters were found everywhere, sometimes at loggerheads with each
other. Relations with the Establishment remained problematic and the threat of
imprisonment continued to be present into the 1680s, but by 1689 Dissent had
become a distinctive and ubiquitous feature of the religious landscape in par-
ishes and towns throughout the country. They remained a minority, but in the
city of Bristol, the market town of Luton, and the moorland settlements of
Calderdale in Yorkshire or the Furness district of Lancashire, they comprised
up to a fifth of the population. The Act of Toleration represented a hard-won
victory for those who wished to accommodate the Dissenters more fully, if not
yet equally, into English political and social life and, despite the continuing
opposition of many within the Established Church, it was a belated recognition
of the significant contribution that these men and women had made to the
English Protestant tradition over the previous two centuries.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Beaver, Dan, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester,
1590–1690 (Cambridge, MA, 1998).
Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967).
Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625
(Oxford, 1982).
Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004).
Davies, Adrian, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford, 2000).
Davies, Michael, Dunan-Page, Anne, and Halcomb, Joel, eds, Church Life: Pastors,
Congregations and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England
(Oxford, 2019).
Evans, J.T., Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690
(Oxford, 1979).
Evenden, Elizabeth and Freeman, Thomas, Religion and the Book in Early Modern
England: the Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011).
Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (London, 1972).
Hill, Christopher, Collected Essays, 3 vols (Brighton, 1985–6).
312 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Keeble, N.H., ed. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter (London, 1974).

Marsh, Christopher, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge,
1994).
McFarlane, K.B., John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London,
1952).
McGregor, J.F. and Reay, Barry, eds, Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford,
1983).
Morgan, Nicholas, Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment, 1660–1730 (Halifax,
1993).
Mullett, Michael, John Bunyan in Context (Keele, 1996).
Sheils, W.J. and Wood, Diana, eds, Voluntary Religion, Studies in Church History, 23
(Oxford, 1986).
Spufford, Margaret, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974).
Spufford, Margaret, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995).
Spurr, John, The Post Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–1714
(London, 2006).
Thomas, Samuel S., Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish Co0ngegations
in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax (Leiden, 2013).
Tolmie, Murray, The Triumph of the Saints: the Separate Churches of London, 1616–49
(Cambridge 1977).
Turner, J. Horsfall, ed. The Revd Oliver Heywood 1630–1702; his Autobiography, Diaries
etc, 4 vols (Brighouse, 1882–5).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
White, R.B., The English Separatist Tradition (Oxford, 1971).
 14

Dissent and the State

Persecution and Toleration

Jacqueline Rose

The category of Dissent was created by the activity of persecution. In the first
century and a half of the Church of England’s existence, very few consciously
sought to create a separate church, and those who ‘dissented’ from the estab-
lishment would have rejected with horror the idea that they had much in
common with other nonconformists. Overwhelmingly, dissenters wanted to
capture rather than to reject the state; they became its opponents by happen-
stance rather than by default. The Civil War and Interregnum dissenters who
succeeded in becoming the state authorities persecuted some of their opponents
in an effort to enforce their version of godliness.
In origin, therefore, Dissent was a legal category—those who refused to con-
form to the Acts of Uniformity. But over time this legal status did come to
generate a mental consciousness too. The ‘godly’ who refused to comply with
the ‘rags of popery’ of the Elizabethan Church had shared an outlook with the
bishops of the Edwardian and early Elizabethan establishments. Nonconformists
normally sought further Puritan reformation of the national Church rather than
dissenting from the idea of a compulsory establishment. Later sixteenth-century
and Jacobean Puritans were theologically at one with their archiepiscopal critics.
Over the course of the seventeenth century Puritans and prelates grew further
apart. Yet as late as the Restoration there was still a desire to create a broad
‘comprehensive’ Church in which a variety of religious practices could be
accommodated. The failure of this in 1661–2 forced the moderate Presbyterians
out of the Church’s ministry, but they continued to attempt comprehension
until 1689. Only retrospectively did they seem to have an earlier history distinct
from that of the established Church. The early eighteenth-century Dissenters
who wrote the earliest denominational histories identified their forebears
through an extended reflection on persecution. Thus persecution created

Jacqueline Rose, Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting
Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0015
314 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Dissent, suffering fostered the identity of Dissent, and the memory of suffering
retrospectively solidified categories of Dissenters.
This chapter investigates the complex relationship between dissent and the
polity, in which both sides could advocate persecution and toleration, two atti-
tudes that sometimes bookended a spectrum of positions and at others proved
paradoxically closely interwoven. After outlining changes in the historiograph-
ical treatment of the topic, it will probe three questions. First, what counted
as ‘persecution’ and how did this change? Second, while the state created perse-
cution, did persecution create the state (in all its various guises)? Third, what
counted as toleration and how far could the government’s position on it actually
influence the experience of dissenters? As will be shown, the answers to all
these questions involve not only the government and Protestant groups, but
also contemporaries’ sense of an ever-present Catholic threat.

PERSECUTION AND TOLERATION:

ENEMIES AND FRIENDS

In the mid-twentieth century the present chapter would have been a heroic story
of how a persecuting state came to be a tolerant state, partly under the influence
of a Protestant sense of individual religious freedom and the inviolability of
conscience. The mid- to late seventeenth century did indeed see an outbreak of
writings calling for toleration (at least of Trinitarian Protestant groups), a regime
that encouraged exploration of liberty of conscience in 1653–8, and the statutory
enactment of Protestant freedom of worship in 1689. Nevertheless, the recent
historiographical tendency has been to stress the limits of toleration. Toleration
of Catholics was rarely endorsed; the monarch who sought it was deposed. The
re-admittance of the Jews came through monarchical prerogative, not enlight-
ened Cromwellian pluralism. Roger Williams’s call for toleration was penned
against the New England Puritan migrants who punished and excluded radical
challenges to their godly community. Atheists were intolerable both to Locke
and to the Scottish authorities who executed Thomas Aikenhead in 1697.
Totemic theorists and eras have been reassessed. Despite his radical redefinition
of church–state relationships, the great English theorist of toleration John
Locke was far less liberal and far less ‘modern’ than his Huguenot counterpart
Pierre Bayle; Oliver Cromwell’s unprecedentedly religiously pluralist regime
endorsed ‘liberty of conscience’ rather than ‘toleration’.1

1 Sally L. Jenkinson, ‘Two Concepts of Tolerance: Why Bayle is not Locke’, Journal of Political
Philosophy, 4 (1996), 302–21; Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in
W.J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984), pp. 199–223, although seventeenth-century
terminological usage tended to be more fluid. For a restatement of the growth of toleration in
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 315

This historiography has rightly forced closer attention to what ‘toleration’

meant, especially the multifarious forms of it that were more widely debated
than simple freedom of belief and worship. Religious reconciliation was one
cognate pursuit, on an English and European scale, especially through drawing
distinctions between theological necessities and optional ‘matters indifferent’. This
manifested itself in schemes of ‘accommodation’ or comprehension—creating
broad churches with varied practices of worship. Co-existence was another way in
which Europe’s population negotiated religious differences. Although Benjamin
Kaplan’s shared and hidden churches (Simultankirche and Schuilkerken) and tem-
porary travel outside city boundaries for worship (Auslauf) were not found in
Britain,2 it seems that many parishioners lived with their Catholic, Presbyterian,
and even Quaker neighbours to a remarkable extent. Although the toleration
which these social historians have uncovered seems fragile, prone to crumble if
there was an Irish fright or popish panic or fanatic plot, it sits peculiarly with
official statutory and ideologically dominant intolerance. This suggests that we
need to see persecution and toleration as interwoven, not mutually exclusive.3
Just as important as recovering the multiplicity of toleration has been serious
engagement with the concept of persecution. Understanding intolerance has
sharpened our sense of its nature as a principled stance, not just narrow-minded,
pre-modern bigotry; and the support it enjoyed. The dominant mode of thought
remained an Augustinian one of antipathy to heresy and schism, and we should
not assume that dissenters disowned such beliefs. This was a world in which
‘toleration’, as the ex-Presbyterian minister Francis Fullwood explained in 1672,
was still a pejorative term.4 It makes sense, therefore, to begin with a taxonomy
of persecution and to investigate the ideology behind it, to understand why
dissenters were condemned to suffer and why they were so ready to impose
such penalties on others.

JUSTIFICATIONS OF PERSECUTION

At the heart of claims to persecute was the idea of a single religious truth to
which all must adhere in order to be saved.5 In contrast to modern ideas of the
primacy of individual sincerity and plural paths to salvation, early modern

seventeenth-century England, see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England,
1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000).
2 Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
3 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700
(Manchester, 2006); Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton, eds, Getting Along: Religious Identities
and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2012).
4 Francis Fullwood, Toleration not to be Abused (London, 1672), p. 5.
5 Assuming one had access to it: heathens were a separate category.
316 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

people insisted on a single truth. Even those who decried persecution, like Locke,
nevertheless claimed they accepted one religion was true, simply denying that
men could legitimately and effectively be forced into believing it. The root of
these notions was the theology of the Church Father Augustine, in his writings
against the Donatists of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. While force
could not persuade the mind, it might jolt the erring into rethinking what they
had unquestioningly absorbed from custom and bring them to a state of mind
in which they were open to the persuasion that was the only means of true
conversion. Coercion complemented conversion in a Damascene model, a
notion parroted by many early modern divines and into the 1690s by Locke’s
opponent Jonas Proast.6
Alongside these epistemological claims sat ecclesiological understandings
of the need to hold the Church together. Drawing again on Augustine, it was
felt that schism inevitably ended in heresy—a fear apparently confirmed by
the fragmentation of Protestantism in the two centuries after its emergence.
Even the theologically correct who failed to fully conform to the Church (Puritans
and Presbyterians) could therefore be deemed dangerous. Importantly, it was
also felt that schismatics did not just include those who separated from the
Church but also anyone who countenanced such behaviour. If the civil magis-
trate failed to enforce laws of uniformity then they too were guilty of schism: a
warning note sounded when the government wobbled towards offering dis-
senters too much.
Persecution could be justified on these epistemological and ecclesiological
grounds, both to ‘save’ the dissenter/heretic—the ideal being always their
recantation or conformity—or to protect the wider community from being
‘polluted’ by their errors. Using medical metaphors, critics denounced heresy
as an infection that needed cauterizing before it spread too rapidly around the
body politic. Calling opponents diseased both justified their punishment for
the common good and demoted them from Christian humans to a lower order
of beings.
These medical metaphors fed into the political justification of persecution,
which overlapped not just with Augustine’s general Christian ecclesiology of
the Church but also with the particular Reformation understanding of the
national Church–state. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age in
which the sense of religious dissenters as political agitators was at its height.
‘Papists’—Catholics—could be persecuted as well as heretics on this basis. Papists
owed allegiance to a foreign power that claimed the right to excommunicate
and depose kings and to release subjects from their allegiance; indeed, to assas-
sinate the ungodly tyrant. All Catholics’ efforts to find a formula to demonstrate

6 Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter
Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford, 1991),
pp. 331–68.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 317

their political allegiance to the monarch was compatible with their spiritual
allegiance to Rome and their distinctions between the ‘Court’ and ‘Church’ of
Rome proved unavailing. While Protestant dissenters did not pose the same
threat of foreign allegiance, their co-religionists’ resistance theories and their
radical brethren’s denunciations of Christian magistracy and the social order
placed them in a vulnerable position. Fundamental to the English Church–state’s
persecutory claims was the distinction between hanging, drawing, and quartering
‘papists’ for treason, the burning of heretics, and the fining and jailing (and
occasional banishment) of nonconformists. In a Europe riven by wars of religion,
all seemed necessary mechanisms to ensure the survival of the state.
These three arguments—the epistemological, the ecclesiological, and the
political—were sufficiently common and sufficiently flexible to be deployed by
a wide variety of groups across the religious spectrum. While the emphasis
between them varied according to time, user, and audience, they were all extant
from the 1530s to the 1690s. Dissenters were normally the targets of such argu-
ments, but many had no problem with them in principle. Persecution of false
religion so as to defend the true Church was a shared and not a divisive concept;
it was its application that was fraught with tension.
What did this application involve? A spectrum of persecution can be iden-
tified: from capital punishment; to jailing, fining, and political exclusion; to
the quotidian persecution of segregation, shunning, and name-calling. Moving
through these in turn will demonstrate how dissenting sufferers gradually
applied the term for the first (martyrdom) to an increasing range of the rest.
Furthermore, while the state was the agent behind many of these acts, it was
merely complicit in others. Persecution was partly outwith government con-
trol. The flip side of the question of whether the state had power to persecute
was whether it wielded the authority to tolerate.

FORMS OF PERSECUTION

Early modern dissenters faced a variety of laws under which they could be
prosecuted. Some might be severely punished under the heresy laws of the early
fifteenth century. While Henry VIII repealed the anti-heresy statute de haeretico
comburendo of 1401, he upheld that of 1414; both were repealed under Edward VI
and temporarily revived under Mary I. More frequent, however, was prosecu-
tion for failing to attend or fully conform to the Church. Clergy could not only
be deprived for failing to use or for preaching against the Book of Common
Prayer, they might also be jailed for life for a third such offence according to the
1559 Act of Uniformity. The laity could also be fined or jailed for disparaging
Common Prayer (1 Eliz. c. 2), for non-attendance at church, or for conventicling.
Especially vicious were the statutes 35 Eliz. c. 2 (which imposed jail for a first
318 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

offence of conventicling and £10 per month fines for absence from church); and
the heavy fines of up to £100, jail, and transportation imposed by the 1664
and 1670 Conventicle Acts. The third category of penal laws consisted of those
imposed on specific sects, particularly the Quakers, prosecuted from the start
of the Restoration for refusing to swear oaths (14 Car. II c. 1). Fourthly, dissenters
could be insulted through prosecution under statutes intended to fine Catholic
recusants, which caught anyone absent from the established Church.
While for most these laws rarely imposed the death penalty (though jail
might end in death), they sometimes did for especially radical individuals or,
during Mary I’s reign, for Protestants in general. The apex of persecutory
suffering was the act of martyrdom—death as the ultimate witness of one’s
faith. This not only attested to the firmest belief in the new faith, but also linked
it back to Christ and the early apostolic and patristic Church, as martyrs modelled
themselves on—or were depicted in ways akin to—early Christian martyrs.
Famously collectively commemorated in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the
blood of Protestant martyrs would provide the seed for the new Church. While
endeavouring to remain true to his sources, Foxe papered over the divisions
amongst Marian Protestants, carefully omitting anything which seemed too
heterodox, and creating a metahistory of the false Roman (pagan and Catholic)
Church persecuting the true suffering minority. His focus was primarily
persecution that resulted in death, either at the stake or in massacres of
European Protestants. This fitted into a distinctively early modern under-
standing of martyrdom as dying for the truth, as opposed to the unjust violent
death that could earn the epithet in the late Middle Ages when martyrdom
could encompass disease, seclusion, prayer for one’s enemies, and marriage.7
In the sixteenth century it regained a more specific reference of death for the
truth, a sense sharpened by debates between Protestants and Catholics over
pseudomartyrs.
This began to change in the seventeenth century. Ironically, given the rising
number of epitomes of Foxe’s vast tomes, which focused purely on the Marian
burnings and omitted his wider historical interests, the meaning of martyrdom
began to expand. One manifestation of this was the application of the term to
political deaths, spurred by the hagiographic literature developed for the ‘royal
martyr’ Charles I after the regicide of 1649. The State Martyrologie (1660)
depicted royalists like Derby and Montrose who had died for their king. On the
opposing side, the republican Sir Henry Vane the younger presented himself as
a martyr at his death, donning a scarlet waistcoat and declaring ‘this Cause
shall have its Resurrection in my Death . . . My Blood will be the Seed sown’.

7 Miri Rubin, ‘Choosing Death? Experience of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Europe’, in Diana
Wood, ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies (Blackwell, 1993), pp. 153–83; Danna Piroyansky, ‘ “Thus
May a Man be a Martyr”: The Notion, Language, and Experiences of Martyrdom in Late Medieval
England’, in Thomas Freeman and Thomas Mayer, eds, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England,
c.1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 70–87.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 319

Secularized or classicized by late seventeenth-century republicans, Vane’s death

was rewritten as a disciplined piece of mystic piety by the Victorians. This
obliteration of his apocalyptic mentality was inaccurate, but Vane did occupy a
liminal position between religious and political martyrdom.8
The expansion of martyrdom beyond death to any sort of persecution facili-
tated dissenting depictions of themselves as martyred by a fellow Protestant
regime. The Caroline Puritans whose ears Laud docked were ‘martyrs’.9 The
term also stretched beyond corporal suffering to include the more commonly
experienced persecution of exile, fines, and jail. As early as the 1550s, those
Protestants who fled into exile had spoken of their sufferings in order to refute
accusations of cowardice: John Ponet wrote of his ‘crosses’, while Foxe described
the escapee John Glover as one who ‘may well be counted with hys [burned]
brother Robert for a Martyr, beyng no lesse desirous with him of the same
Martyrdome’.10 But the expanded sense really took off in the later seventeenth
century, fuelled by Quaker memorialization of their sufferings. Gathering these in
the eighteenth century, Joseph Besse called mob attacks on Quaker property
persecution, drawing on 2 Timothy 3:12 and Exodus 1:12. The persecutors of
the Quakers were struck down by God and jailors blasted with providential
punishments in Foxean mode, while the persecuted were shown as adopting
courageous and heroic poses of passive suffering, martyrs who died in jail.11
This wider sense of persecution made it possible for almost any Dissenter to
claim the mantle of martyrdom, and to connect themselves to their dissenting
forebears, Marian ancestors, and earliest Christian martyrs.
Perhaps the most frequently experienced—though hard to trace—attacks
were the ‘persecution of the tongue’,12 the name-calling and stereotyping of
dissenters as different and therefore suspicious. Automatically placing a religious
minority at a social disadvantage, such behaviour linked polemical categories
with real individuals. At their best, cross-confessional encounters prevented the
specific application of a general stereotype, or undercut the caricature entirely,
but they could easily result in the radicalization of dissenters into an alien other.
That dissenters were integrated into local communities rather than being
geographically ghettoized facilitated interaction, but it was also a recipe for
religious strife. The ban on ‘reproachful’ religious terms and name-calling
imposed by the state of Maryland in 1649 demonstrated concern about the

8 John Coffey, ‘The Martyrdom of Sir Henry Vane the Younger: From Apocalyptic Witness to
Heroic Whig’, in Freeman and Mayer, eds, Martyrs, pp. 221–39. See John Tutchin, The Protestant
Martyrs (London, 1688), for another political use.
9 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 172.
10 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1583), p. 1733. See Jonathan Wright, ‘Marian
Exiles and the Legitimacy of Flight from Persecution’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001),
220–43, at 237–8.
11 John R. Knott, ‘Joseph Besse and the Quaker Culture of Suffering’, in Thomas Corns and
David Loewenstein, eds, The Emergence of Quaker Writing (London, 1995), pp. 126–41.
12 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 127.
320 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

impact of divisive nomenclature.13 Admittedly dissenters often did not help

themselves by adopting godlier-than-thou postures of spiritual superiority
and practising cultural segregation. Indeed, religious proximity and non-
separating dissenting worship could stimulate greater cultural segregation
than outright separatism.14 It could also mean asymmetrical mutual persecu-
tion: a godly Puritan clergyman could impose moral discipline while being
verbally abused by his parishioners. Where dissenters lacked protection from
temporal or spiritual authority, their cultural inferiority could quickly become
dangerous. Quite apart from the psychological harm of verbal bullying, what
Moore and Scribner have termed definition/classification and discovery/­
stigmatization—identifying (partly creating) a group and deeming them
opponents—were steps on the road to ‘persecution’ or ‘destruction’. Language
lowered the threshold for violence,15 especially that which treated heresy as a
disease to be purged. The conversion of definition and discovery into destruc-
tion was slightly less likely for Protestant dissenters than for Catholics, but the
potential was present.
The role of the state in these diverse forms of persecution was remarkably
varied, not least because of the complexities involved in defining what ‘the
state’ constituted. The ‘state’ might stretch a long way down the social hier-
archy: our assumptions about the weakness of a government lacking a police
force, standing army, and salaried bureaucracy look rather shaky when we
think of officeholders like justices of the peace and constables, archdeacons,
and churchwardens. Through such men the tentacles of the state stretched into
every parish. Nevertheless, official legislation relied on individual initiative and
could be ignored, undermined, manipulated, and exploited at every level. Early
modern England was neither a persecuting society nor a tolerant state, but a
patchwork of them both.

THE ROLE OF THE STATE

What was the ‘state’? Three senses are particularly important here. The first is
the state as an apparatus or machinery of enforcement. How powerful was this
and did the demand to persecute dissenters impel its development? Second, the
state was an entity distinct from the person of the monarch: an abstract thing
to which one owed allegiance. Third, the Reformation state integrally bound the

13 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, pp. 127–8.

14 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Grell et al., eds,
From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 51–76.
15 R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe,
950–1250 (Oxford, 1987); R.W. Scribner, ‘Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-
Century Germany’, in O.P. Grell and B. Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European
Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 32–47.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 321

crown or realm to the notion of a national Church. Persecution and toleration

bore a complex relationship to all three senses of the state and their development,
although their emergence could be stimulated more by persecution of Catholic
than of Protestant dissenters.
The ways of prosecuting dissent bequeathed by medieval to early modern
England already offered a sophisticated and potentially potent apparatus to
discover dissent, methods that tied Church and state firmly together. These
techniques had developed in response to the emergence of heresy in the 1380s
in the form of Wycliffism and, later on, Lollardy. The secular arm was closely
involved from the beginning of this process—naturally enough, given its
canonical Christian duty to aid the Church in upholding orthodoxy.16 In theory
heresy was detected (discovered) to or by the Church (through inquisitorial
investigation), the secular authorities then assisted in the arrest of the suspect,
and handed them back to the Church for trial, receiving them again to apply
capital punishment if need be. In practice the remits of Church and state over-
lapped: in 1382 bishops were permitted to arrest suspects, in the late 1380s
the royal council supervised investigations, early fifteenth-century justices
of the peace hunted hidden books and enquired into heresy according to the
statute of 1414. While the cumbersome process of getting a writ to arrest a sus-
pect has led some historians to speak of the ‘virtual impotence of ecclesiastical
authority’,17 Ian Forrest has described Church–state relations as dominated
by ‘co-operation, with lapses in enthusiasm on both sides from time to time’.
Church and state worked together proactively, and with increasing coordin-
ation from the centre, to effectively combat heresy when coupled with the
cooperation of local laity like justices of the peace and the parish fidedigni
(trustworthy, locally substantial men) who attested character.18 Indeed, Forrest
argues that heresy hunting made such locally prominent individuals ‘part of
the state . . . drawn into much larger political and conceptual communities . . . as
active participants’.19 However, while the Reformation world inherited many of
the officials who detected dissent, such as justices of the peace, the positions
of some of these ostensibly continuous groups subtly changed. For example,
churchwardens mutated from representatives of their parish to officials of the
Church/state as they were given new regulative tasks during the Tudor refor-
mations, as they became not purely elected by the parish but in part chosen by
the minister according to the canons of 1604, and as their relative social status
increased in the later seventeenth century.20

16 See Ian Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005), pp. 31–2.
17 H.G. Richardson, ‘Heresy and the Lay Power under Richard II’, English Historical Review,
201 (1936), 1–28, at 24.
18 Forrest, Detection, p. 59 and passim. 19 Forrest, Detection, p. 234.
20 Eric Carlson, ‘The Origins, Function, and Status of the Office of Churchwarden, with
Particular Reference to the Diocese of Ely’, in Margaret Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters,
1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 170, 181, 199–200.
322 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Our image of the apparatus of the early modern state is of a weak and
undeveloped machinery that relied on individual initiative and cooperation
for any statute to actually be enforced. Statutes themselves suggest that legisla-
tors recognized this problem, as increasingly clauses were inserted imposing
penalties on non-compliant officers. While the Second Edwardian Act of
Uniformity (1552) failed to outline who was responsible for reporting offenders,
its Elizabethan successor (1559) noted that churchwardens would gather the
fines on non-attenders at church but was silent on who reported these offenders
(in practice churchwardens did this too).21 The statute 5 Elizabeth c. 23
attempted to improve the enforcement of punishments of the excommuni-
cated, fining sheriffs if they filed false returns or failed to process writs. The
Second Conventicle Act of 1670 tightened up on its predecessor of 1664 by
fining constables and churchwardens who failed to inform on Dissenters
£5 and justices £100. It also allowed summary conviction by a single justice of
the peace.22 Nevertheless such clauses were futile in the face of determined
recalcitrance in reporting dissent. Elizabethan churchwardens made vague
returns to visitation articles, while their late Stuart successors—after a brief
burst of energy in the early 1660s—lapsed back into declaring omnia bene.
Indeed, while the ability of church courts to enforce obedience had always been
limited, especially over those for whom excommunication from the Church of
England meant nothing, the abolition of those courts in the Interregnum
and their close association with persecution afterwards seems to have led to a
decline in all sorts of their business, not just disciplinary actions.23
Pressure from both above and below could stymie efforts to enforce uniformity.
The Wiltshire rector Nathaniel Aske complained that the 1672 Declaration of
Indulgence emptied churches. Both ‘fear of o[u]r neighbours’, fuelled either
by vexatious prosecutions of justices of the peace and informers, or simple
non-cooperation with distraint of Dissenters’ goods; and, perhaps, a principled
dislike of disrupting the local community, inhibited persecution.24 Enforcement
of the penal laws was geographically patchy and chronologically sporadic. How
compact was a settlement? Was it urban or rural? Was it proximate to ecclesias-
tical courts? Had there just been a panic about a Dissenting plot or was there an
imminent sense of Catholic attack? Were the local lay powers sympathetic to
dissent or recusancy? In South Lancashire—perhaps an example of the last of
these—prosecutions at quarter sessions for not attending church fluctuated

21 Carlson, ‘The Origins, Function, and Status of the Office of Churchwarden’, p. 171.
22 See also Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts, 1664–1679’, in Shields,
ed., Persecution and Toleration, p. 236.
23 Donald Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740
(Cambridge, 2000), pp. 59–70.
24 Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger, pp. 162, 165; Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the
Conventicle Acts’, pp. 242, 244; Carlson, ‘The Origins, Function, and Status of the Office of
Churchwarden’, p. 174.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 323

from two in 1636 to sixty-two in 1638, dropping back to four in 1640, and
shooting up to 480 in 1648.25 Such patterns were further complicated by the
individual being prosecuted: a longstanding member of the community might
be less suspected than an outsider; an excommunicated woman might find a
midwife willing to attend her if her punishment was imposed for sleeping in
church—less so if her child was illegitimate.26
Outright defiance of orders about the Church was probably far less frequent
than silent non-compliance or partial or occasional enforcement. While the
last was in one sense a ‘failure’ of the state, it was also part of its success. Whether
that touchstone of good government, order, was best achieved by enforcement
of impersonal legislation or whether such regulative energy would cause local
conflict was a decision made hundreds of times by individual county justices
and parish constables. We should not be deluded into rose-tinted views of pre-
modern parochial harmony: prosecution could become a weapon in personal
rivalries. The Essex churchwarden John Hills’s presentments of his fellow
parishioners for fornication, absence from church, and unlicensed alehouse-
keeping were part of a tangled personal battle that spilt over into the courts.27
But in general the judicious exercise of judicial discretion helped reconcile the
competing demands of the enforcement of true religion and the maintenance
of good neighbourhood. Perhaps it even helped prevent wider wars of religion
or more violent religious strife.
This tale of limited enforcement can also be read against the grain: at times
it was weak, but at others it could be vigorous, energetic, and effective. In the 1670s,
presentations for Dissent matched the returns of the Compton Census. When
churchwardens were summoned and questioned verbally they were more
forthcoming about offenders than when merely making written returns. Not
presenting an absentee could stem from a very strict interpretation of absence for
‘obstinacy of religion’: someone appearing amenable to persuasion might escape
punishment.28 If threatened with powerful lay protectors of nonconforming clergy
then, before 1641, recourse could be had to the High Commission Court, which
benefited from being able to step outside common law and use ex officio pro-
cess to secure unwitting self-incrimination—and yet could impose civil penalties.
In Caroline Cleveland, offenders’ movements across jurisdictional boundaries—a
classic way of avoiding prosecution—were noted down. This was not simply a
Laudian drive for conformity: the archdeacon at the time was a Puritan, although

25 Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables, and Jurymen in Seventeenth-
Century England’, in John Brewer and John Styles, eds, An Ungovernable People (London, 1980),
appx, pp. 300–1 (1.2, 24.3, 2.2, and 52.4 per cent of all prosecutions, respectively). See also Roland
Marchant, The Church under the Law (Cambridge, 1969), ch. 6.
26 Marchant, Church under the Law, p. 221.
27 Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order’, pp. 26, 41–3.
28 Carlson, ‘The Origins, Function, and Status of the Office of Churchwarden’, pp. 173, 178.
324 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Archbishop Neile did increase attendance at and obedience to church courts.29

Clergy and laity showed remarkable flexibility in prosecuting offenders in
multiple courts—ecclesiastical, common law, equity, and High Commission—
while MPs exchanged notes with local officeholders about the number of dis-
senters in order to argue for stronger statutes against them. Naturally enough,
when the local representatives of Church and state blended into partnership
(or indeed were the same) then prosecution was more effective: Hull in 1599,
the diocese of Ely where the bishop held his own quarter sessions.30
Indeed, at times the problem was not so much a state prodding reluctant
officers into acting as a central government seeking to restrain intolerant local
officials. The energetic northern magistrate Daniel Fleming continued to pros-
ecute nonconformists under the First Conventicle Act even after it had expired.
One of his fellow justices of the peace managed to levy £700 in fines from
Dissenters; their counterparts in Middlesex secured over 900 convictions of
nearly 800 men in the space of eighteen months.31 When principle or prudence
drove monarchs not to prosecute Dissenters and Catholics, they came under
pressure from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, staunchly Protestant MPs, and
sometimes their privy councillors as well.
This links the first aspect of the state, the development of a machinery of
enforcement, to the second: the state as an abstract and impersonal entity distinct
from the monarch. One of the main stimuli to this development in England was
the sense that the monarch was failing in their duty to protect the country from
false religion. While such a claim could be made without reference to the state,
the new concept crept in during Elizabeth I’s reign, its emergence assisted by the
Renaissance recovery of Ciceronian republican values and the divisions that
opened up within the regime over how to respond to dynastic, religious, and mili-
tary threats. The queen’s apparent complacency about these perils encouraged
councillors like William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to conceive of the state as having
distinct interests from the monarch’s. They urged the queen to secure the Protestant
commonwealth through executing the Catholic claimant Mary, Queen of Scots
and enforcing harsher laws against an internal fifth column of papists. Such
‘monarchical republicanism’ manifested itself in plans for a temporary interreg-
num in which the country would be run by a ‘council for the estate’ in the event of
Elizabeth’s sudden death. It also fuelled both persecutory anxiety about Catholics
and tendencies to tolerate Puritan critics of a half-heartedly Reformed Church.
Countenancing further reformation would shore up English Protestantism and be
rewarded by providential protection of a fragile and vulnerable godly polity.32

29 Marchant, Church under the Law, p. 123; pp. 206–7 calculates the national rate at 42–46 per cent.
30 Spaeth, Age of Danger; Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts’, p. 237; Marchant,
Church under the Law, pp. 118, 226.
31 Fletcher, ‘The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts’, pp. 238, 243.
32 From a vast literature, see Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), ch. 2;
John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007).
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 325

While before the Civil Wars the pressure for extra persecution tended to
focus on the Catholic threat, in the Restoration the demand switched to the
Church pleading for more zealous enforcement of laws against Protestant
Dissenters. These criticisms implied that the monarch had a duty to the realm
and not just to their own wishes; the confessional need to secure the state over-
rode personal royal preferences for uniformity. In such circumstances, subjects
of monarchs transmuted into citizens of a state, public men willing to act with-
out royal authority for the good of the realm. Although the articulation of the
idea of the state cannot be attributed purely to a search for persecution, the
politics of tolerance and intolerance did feed into the complex ways in which
the crown could be criticized for not fulfilling their duty of protecting the
realm. Paradoxically, this novel language of the state was deployed in circum-
stances in which decisions about persecution and toleration were dividing
the government. A further irony was that this innovative sense of the state as
distinct from the person of the ruler was voiced to further a longstanding sense
of the primary role of earthly government being to bring its people to godliness
and salvation.
In the age of the confessional state we might expect Protestant dissenters
to have developed a distinctive position on the nature of political authority.
Persecution and toleration certainly caused them to engage with such ques-
tions, and to adopt certain political positions, but there was no collective
constitutional view to which they all adhered. The Reformation made it almost
impossible for religious dissenters to prove their political loyalty. Some radical
Protestants’ rejection of the notion of a state Church did lead them into acts
of sedition. The defacing of the royal arms in Bury St Edmunds in 1583, the
prophetic denunciation of Elizabeth’s queenship by William Hacket in 1591,
Venner’s Fifth Monarchist Rising of 1661, perhaps even the crisis of the Stuart
monarchy in the mid-seventeenth century, were all impelled by resistance to
ungodly rule. Such events made it easy for the government to insist that loyalty
to the state required obedience to the Church. Nevertheless, most dissenters
would have endorsed the vision of a unified Church–state that would foster a
godly society. The Foxean model of a new Constantine purging the Church of
its rags of popery and expelling ungodly clergy lived long. Throughout the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, Puritans and Presbyterians appealed to the
monarch to implement their vision of the Church. They adopted a loyalist pos-
ition to the state, claiming that they were more obedient to the crown than the
English episcopate, which undermined royal authority with its iure divino
claims and independent ecclesiastical courts.33 Even Independents were will-
ing to adopt such postures, albeit sometimes marrying them up with toleration
for a congregational church structure. The Savoy Declaration of 1658 carefully
presented toleration as an act of godly magistracy, not an abdication of it. And

33 Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 4.

326 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the marginalized status of Restoration Baptists and Quakers meant it was they
who responded most to Declarations of Indulgence, praising royal prerogative
actions that suspended statutory intolerance.
This monarchical Constantinian strain could, however, sit alongside a
parliamentary constitutionalist one. If the monarch was unwilling to relieve
dissenters (as was usually the case before the Civil Wars), the persecuted could
turn to parliament. Even after 1660 many would have preferred a position of
limited monarchy with either comprehension or toleration safely secured by
statute. This shift from Constantine to parliament began after further reforma-
tion failed in the Convocation of 1563, heralded by the Admonition to Parliament
of 1572. Elizabethan and early Stuart calls in parliament for reform could be
construed as a legitimate appeal to part of the government. Yet the need to
emphasize parliament’s role in governing the Church, on the basis of the Tudor
Reformations’ use of statute, also began to destabilize politics by questioning
parliament’s role relative to the monarch’s in determining the confessional
state. Furthermore, the printed literature that called for further Reformation
stretched from the Admonition to Parliament to the debate between Cartwright
and Whitgift in the public arena of print culture, to the use of seditious print
by Martin Marprelate to satirize the bishops. Similarly, the calls for Root and
Branch reform of the Church in the Long Parliament in 1640–2 by means of
mass petitioning encouraged recourse to extra-parliamentary pressure, and
sometimes crowd action. Thus dissenters could begin with an appeal to duly
constituted authority in the state and end by undermining or bypassing
established mechanisms of political action.
Importantly, this search for further reformation was simultaneously tolerant
(of the claims of Puritan reform) and intolerant (of popish remnants in the
Church). The consequent calls both for state intervention in imposing moral
discipline and Reformed purity and for government respect for godly con-
sciences resulted in the apparent religious schizophrenia of the Cromwellian
regime of the 1650s. Broadly open to sectarian exploration of belief and yet
narrow-mindedly Puritanical in opposing popular recreations and prayer book
worship, Cromwell’s version of promoting godliness and punishing its counter-
part offered a novel twist on the godly prince.
Persecution and toleration thus fed into the notion of the state in a variety of
ways. They led dissenters to adopt certain political positions as they engaged
in debates not just about the authority of ‘the state’ over consciences, but also
about the relative power of various elements within the constitutional struc-
ture. These positions were contingent on events, but they were nonetheless
significant. Secondly, the demand for persecution fed into the development of
both the practical machinery and the theoretical concept of the state. However,
it is important to remember that part of the machinery of persecution was
developed in response to pre-Reformation dissent. Apart from the High
Commission, the majority of new persecutory legislation during the early
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 327

modern period before 1660 was aimed at Catholics. Similarly, the calls for the
monarch to live up to their persecutory duties to protect the state had more to
do with fears of a Catholic than a dissenting threat. Cross as they were at having
recusancy laws applied to them, Puritans and Presbyterians were very keen on
an effective disciplinary machinery that could enforce moral behaviour and
obedience to a properly Reformed Church. John Hills’s attacks on ungodly
neighbours may have been encouraged by the new Puritan curate.34 Puritans
were also at the forefront of criticisms of monarchs who were soft on papists,
while their Dissenting heirs critiqued the lack of moral reformation in the later
Stuart polity. In a variety of ways, therefore, early modern dissenters were less
the victims of a newly developing state than agents complicit in its creation.

TOLERATION AND CO-EXISTENCE:

IDEAS AND PRACTICES

A number of arguments could be deployed by those rare people who mounted

arguments for toleration in the strongest sense of the word—i.e. who pled for
the removal of statutory penalties on worship outside the national establishment.
The vast majority of justifications for toleration rested on firmly theological
and Christian foundations, although on occasion secular arguments were
brought in to support these. Since many of their authors wrote from a disad-
vantaged position, toleration can be seen as a ‘losers’ creed’,35 a fallback position
when one’s own preferred worship was unlikely to be established.
The most important argument was that from the nature of conscience and
who governed it. Most writers called not for ‘toleration’ but for ‘liberty of con-
science’, urging respect for divinely determined belief and not merely for indi-
vidual opinion. The conscience was the internal faculty that applied general
moral laws to particular cases, a view which persecutors deployed to emphasize
the fact that it might err. Those calling for toleration hinted at our sense of
conscience as an inviolable sphere of individual sincerity, but few went so far as
Pierre Bayle’s assertion that a sincere but erring conscience was more acceptable
to God than a correct one.36 Liberty of conscience was necessary in order for
individuals to seek God. Although this argument contained the germs of a
theory of areas in which coercive human law had no place, persecution was not
normally denounced because it infringed someone’s individual or human

34 Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Order’, p. 42.

35 Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620’, in Grell
and Scribner, eds, Tolerance and Intolerance, p. 198.
36 Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on these Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, eds John
Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis, IN, 2005), pt II, ch. 8.
328 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

rights but because it invaded God’s arena.37 Thus the tolerationist call for lib-
erty of conscience was frequently intolerant of those whose consciences
either obviously erred (Catholics and antinomians) or did not exist at all (athe-
ists). For dissenters, freedom of conscience was unbreakably linked to freedom
of worship, for it was dissembling hypocrisy to believe one thing and to act in
an opposing manner. ‘Must [men] be Persecuted here if they do not go against
their Consciences and punished hereafter if they do?’ asked Penn.38 Kneeling
to receive communion, or wearing a surplice when conscientiously believing
such minor practices to be wrong, thus committed the major error of hypocrisy
and false worship. Defenders of uniformity sometimes denied this by using the
claim that God had authorized Naaman to bow to the idol,39 but they more
usually argued that what dissenters found objectionable were merely external
rites, which human law bound the conscience to obey.
Dissenters’ belief that their consciences ought to be left free to discover the
single true path to salvation, which the magistrate could not force people to
take, linked to two other arguments for freedom of conscience. It explains why
a radically sceptical case that truth was impossible to find was mounted so rare-
ly (although a milder questioning of religious certainty can certainly be found).
Adherence to the idea that a way to salvation must be left accessible for those
whom God enlightened precluded much development of the notion that this
way was epistemologically impossible to assess. Christ had left a number of
means to the truth—the Bible, backed up by preaching and, depending on one’s
point of view, individual divine inspiration as well. Toleration was necessary
not because truth was impossible to attain, but because the system in power did
not adhere to that truth, or allow godly consciences to do so. This linked with
the major argument associated with liberty of conscience, which rested on the
nature of Christianity. Christ had persuaded, not persecuted; he had preached,
not prosecuted. The early modern ecclesiastical establishment’s array of laws,
courts, canons, and secular assistance was foreign to early apostolic simplicity
and humility; and was part of the decline of the Church when it became entan-
gled with worldly interests. While a number of dissenters pointed to the era
of Christian Roman emperors as an age of indulgence and toleration, others
decried any clerical involvement with the state as inherently corrupting.40 The
latter claim, while incorporating criticism of lordly prelates more interested
in power than in pastoral care, rarely resulted in cries for disestablishment.
Although uneasy about a Church that drew on state resources so as to perse-
cute, many dissenters did not want to reject the idea of an established Church
altogether. Such an establishment was necessary to police the boundaries of

37 For example, William Penn, The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience (1670), ch. 1.
38 Penn, Great Case, p. 22.
39 Most famously in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols (Oxford, 2012), III,
pp. 784–5.
40 Rose, Godly Kingship, pp. 174, 180.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 329

toleration and to impose moral discipline. Indeed, the argument of Puritans

like William Prynne was not so much that the Church should not persecute as
that it was persecuting the wrong type of deviance, fussily demanding con-
formity to external rituals while failing to enforce sober morality.41 While
there were sectarian writers in the Civil Wars who questioned an ecclesiastical
state apparatus, there was no teleological march of disestablishment—a call
rare in the years after the Restoration, and one that the largest Dissenting
group, the Presbyterians, did not wish to make. Indeed, the most famous
late-seventeenth-century call for disestablishment came from an Anglican
conformist, John Locke, and he himself did not seem unduly concerned to
keep making the case after 1689.
Theological arguments were the most prominent ones for toleration, but
others could be used in certain circumstances. A growing theme was the need
to tolerate dissenters because they were the most economically vibrant sector of
the population. Originating in calls to license stranger churches of skilled arti-
san refugees in the sixteenth century, the links between dissent and trade were
emphasized by Restoration writers such as Charles Wolseley. Wolseley further
argued that the magistrate could benefit politically from toleration, by dividing
and ruling quarrelling subjects, balancing Dissenting and Anglican power.42
This case was occasionally exploited to assert that dissenters were more loyal to
the monarch than bishops were, usefully cohering with appeals for royal pre-
rogative indulgence when Puritans, Presbyterians, and sects were unable to
escape statutory intolerance.
Even those unwilling to go so far were inclined to argue that toleration was
the only route to political peace. Europe’s wars of religion, these men insisted,
derived not from the now inescapable problem of religious pluralism, but from
the endeavour to persecute one group or other out of existence. ‘All the Mischief
arises not from Toleration but from the want of it.’43 It is this argument that
bears closest resemblance to the crucial, but rarely articulated, belief which
fostered practical toleration; that is, that persecution unnecessarily disrupted
the bonds of neighbourhood. Sometimes the cost of persecution made pros-
ecution simply not worth it. The economic dislocation consequent on disrupting
the supply chain by seizing and forcibly auctioning Dissenters’ property, the
unhappy ruptures of the ties of kinship and friendship that shunning the
excommunicated might involve, and—perhaps most of all—the overwhelming
sense that individual dissenters whom people knew were not the rebellious or
fanatic plotters of stereotypes all fostered a climate in which social harmony
trumped theological purity. Again, however, tolerance quickly shaded into
intolerance of anyone who showed signs of deviance: keeping the peace of both

41 William Prynne, A Moderate Seasonable Apology (London, 1662).

42 Charles Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience the Magistrate’s Interest (London, 1668).
43 Bayle, Commentary, pp. 199–200; William Walwyn, Tolleration Iustified (London, 1646), p. 7.
330 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

the parish and the state involved treading a quivering tightrope between
­forbearance and enforcement. Dissenters were rarely free from the threat of
potential enforcement, a situation that might still be deemed persecution.
While all of the arguments mentioned above could be deployed to justify
toleration in the strongest sense, many of them fed into proposing and practis-
ing other forms of co-existence. Since the majority of the dissatisfied were
Puritans and Presbyterians, their ultimate aim was a role within the Church
rather than an independent existence outside of it. If their goal of a fully
Reformed establishment was impossible, they would fall back on comprehen-
sion within the Church, able to omit the ceremonies they hated even if the
pastor in the neighbouring parish still used them. Under Elizabeth and James
VI and I, localities with gentry or urban governments that patronized hotter
Protestants created a de facto preaching ministry through extra sermons and
prophesyings which dissenters could attend to top up their edification after
parish services. If Elizabeth disapproved of such practices, many of her coun-
cillors and episcopate were willing to tolerate them, and even (in the case of her
second Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal) to defy royal wishes to
suppress them. While the spaces in which such Puritanism could be subtly
practised shrank in the 1620s and 1630s, this did not end all hopes for a Church
that might comprehend a broader clerical pastorate. Even after being thrust out
of the Church in 1662, Presbyterian Puritans held extra edificatory events
outside of ‘church time’ so that they and their congregations could attend the
parish as well. While the older generation of Presbyterians were reluctant to
take advantage of the Declarations of Indulgence, which permitted greater
liberty than they wanted, their younger co-religionists who came of age during
and after the 1672 Indulgence began to break links with the established Church.44
But even in the later seventeenth century, both Presbyterian Puritans and
those members of the establishment who sympathized with their calls for
accommodation were rigidly opposed to offering relief to more radical groups
outside the Church. Toleration in the form of comprehension remained severely
intolerant of schism.
Unlike the Presbyterians, the new religious groups that had emerged in the
mid-seventeenth century (Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers) neither
wished for nor hoped for accommodation, and instead sought prerogative
indulgence in order to get round uniformity. They temporarily succeeded in
the winter of 1662–3, spring 1672 to spring 1673, and 1687–8. Indeed, while
these phases of prerogative indulgence were temporary, and only the last
proudly endorsed liberty of conscience, they had a broader effect in inhibiting
the enforcement of the penal laws. When justices of the peace arrived to break

44 Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2007 and 2016), pp. 229–30,
237, 245.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 331

up conventicles, they were told that the Indulgences were still in force, while
the licences for Dissenting chapels were only recalled in 1675.
Originally intended to have been paired with a bill for comprehension,
the statutory ‘toleration’ enacted in 1689 grudgingly authorized worship
outside the established Church but—because comprehension died—failed
to give Puritans the life inside the Church that they had always wanted. It
was, furthermore, a temporary measure that high Anglicans endeavoured
to overturn on several occasions, or to render useless through acts against
occasional conformity. For the Presbyterians who made up the majority of
Dissenters, the 1689 statute was less the triumph of toleration than the failure
of national reformation.

PERSECUTION, TOLERATION,
AND DISSENTING IDENTITIES

The decrease in prosecution as toleration became entrenched in the years after

1689 meant that nonconformists had to find new ways to differentiate them-
selves from each other. A new free market of religious voluntarism fostered the
conditions and provided the motivation to create distinct identities through
constructing denominational ancestries. The Puritans’ heirs were no longer
faced with the problem of trying to reconcile their earlier history as partly within
and partly without the Church.45 Instead they could tell of forebears searching
for religious liberty against a persecuting Church, a story told by Edmund
Calamy for the Presbyterians, Daniel Neal for the Independents, and Joseph
Besse for the Quakers. These denominationally driven tales of suffering pre-
sented early modern Dissenters as the persecuted victims of a pre-tolerant age
and granted their eighteenth-century successors the legitimating mantle of a
martyr ancestry. In a world of religious liberty, Dissenters found persecution
remained the key to creating their identity, now through a discourse on their
early modern history rather than their lived experience.

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(1997), 365–84.
Coffey, John, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English
Revolution’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 961–85.

45 See Goldie, Roger Morrice, pp. 276–80.

332 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow,

2000).
Coffey, John, ‘Church and State, 1550–1750: The Emergence of Dissent’, in Robert Pope,
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Coffey, John, ‘Scripture and Toleration between Reformation and Enlightenment’, in
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Collinson, Patrick, ‘The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful’, in Ole Peter
Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration
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Thought, Freedom of Worship?’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas
Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration (Oxford, 1991), pp. 171–93.
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ed., Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford, 1984),
pp. 235–46.
Ford, Alan, ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland’, in
Alan Ford and John McCafferty, eds, The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern
Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 1–23.
Goldie, Mark, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter
Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds, From Persecution to Toleration
(Oxford, 1991), pp. 331–68.
Israel, Jonathan, ‘Toleration in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English Thought’, in
Simon Groenveld and Michael Wintle, eds, The Exchange of Ideas: Religion,
Scholarship and Art in Anglo-Dutch Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Zutphen,
1994), pp. 13–30.
Jenkinson, Sally L., ‘Two Concepts of Tolerance: Why Bayle is not Locke’, Journal of
Political Philosophy, 4 (1996), 302–21.
Kaplan, Benjamin, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
Keeble, N.H., ed., Settling the Peace of the Church: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014).
Marshall, John, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge,
2006).
Milton, Anthony, ‘The Unchanged Peacemaker? John Dury and the Politics of Irenicism
in England, 1628–1643’, in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor,
eds, Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 95–117.
Murphy, Andrew R., Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious
Dissent in Early Modern Europe and America (University Park, PA, 2001).
Racaut, Luc, and Ryrie, Alec, eds, Moderate Voices in the European Reformation
(Aldershot, 2005).
Schochet, Gordon, ‘From Persecution to “Toleration” ’, in J.R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured?
Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford, CA, 1992), pp. 122–57.
 Dissent and the State: Persecution and Toleration 333

Schochet, Gordon, ‘The Act of Toleration and the Failure of Comprehension: Persecution,
Nonconformity and Religious Indifference’, in Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold,
eds, The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of
1688–1689 (Stanford, CA, 1996), pp. 165–87.
Sheils, W.J., ‘Catholics and their Neighbours in a Rural Community: Egton Chapelry
1590–1780’, Northern History, 34 (1998), 109–33.
Spufford, Margaret, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995).
Spurr, John, ‘The Church of England, Comprehension and the Toleration Act of 1689’,
English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 927–46.
Thomas, Roger, ‘Comprehension and Indulgence’, in Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen
Chadwick, eds, From Uniformity to Unity, 1662–1962 (London, 1962), pp. 189–253.
Walsham, Alexandra, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700
(Manchester, 2006).
Worden, Blair, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W.J. Sheils, ed.,
Persecution and Toleration, Studies in Church History, 21 ([Oxford], 1984),
pp. 199–233.
 15

Dissent Empowered
The Puritan Revolution

Bernard Capp

The Civil Wars transformed Puritans into the new ‘establishment’, the dom­in­ant
strand in a purged and radically reformed national Church. Greeting the col-
lapse of the king’s personal rule in 1640 with delight, they eagerly anticipated
the long-desired reformation of the Church, ministry, and people. In 1659, on
the eve of the Restoration, the eminent Puritan Richard Baxter expressed
pride in what reformation had achieved. Far more often, however, hopes and
ex­pect­ations had faded into disappointment and anxiety. Many Puritans
ac­know­ledged that they had failed to make the most of what turned out to be
a unique opportunity. While Dissent survived, never again was it to be
empowered.1
The ‘empowerment of dissent’ is, of course, a problematic phrase. The pro-
cess was slow, and remained far from complete. Moreover Puritans found
themselves under attack not only from traditionalists but from radical
Separatists whose numbers, tiny before 1640, now swelled rapidly. ‘Dissent’
itself took on very different connotations. The ‘Dissenting Brethren’ of 1644
were Independents who rejected the hierarchical structure of the proposed
new Puritan Church settlement, while traditionalists who clung on to the old
prayer book services could now occasionally find themselves labelled
nonconformists.2

1 William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979), pp. 180–6. For
s­ urveys see Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978); Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English
Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke, 1996); John Spurr, The Post-Reformation, 1603–1714
(Harlow, 2006); Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England
(Manchester, 2006).
2 Watts, Dissenters, pp. 100n., 102.

Bernard Capp, Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions,
Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0016
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 335

DISMANTLING THE LAUDIAN CHURCH

Charles I’s attempt to impose a new prayer book on the Scots triggered a rebel-
lion that forced him to call a parliament in the spring of 1640, in the hope of
securing taxes and political support.3 Finding it obstructive, he summoned
another (later known as the Long Parliament), which assembled in November
1640. Puritan reformers, a prominent group within it, recognized the king’s
weak position and seized their moment. Over the next eighteen months, par-
liament effectively seized control of the Church from both king and bishops.4
The reformers’ first goal was to reverse the ‘popish’ Laudian innovations of the
1630s and destroy their authors. Archbishop Laud was impeached in December
1640 and soon consigned to the Tower, and the Commons launched attacks on
his key allies. At the same time, prominent victims of Laud’s regime, such as
Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, were released from prison and their sentences
overturned.5 The threat that Charles might counter-attack, dissolve parliament,
and reverse these changes was met by an Act preventing parliament from being
dissolved without its own consent, and by the Protestation oath, which bound
members and then the entire nation to protect and defend the ‘true reformed
religion’.6 In January 1641 the House voted to appoint local commissioners to
remove Laudian innovations, such as altar-rails, and destroy superstitious
and idolatrous images. Many radicals proved unwilling to wait, and a wave of
iconoclastic disturbances swept through southern England. In Hertfordshire a
glazier, Edmund Aylee, was accused of leading a band of newly recruited
soldiers in a rampage of destruction, demolishing altar-rails in seventeen
­churches. At Radwinter, Essex, truculent conscripts seized images of saints,
fastened them to a tree, and whipped them in derision.7 Initially conservative
peers held back the Commons’ zeal, but the bishops were expelled from the
House of Lords early in 1642 and over the following months many peers and
MPs abandoned parliament to join the king. Iconoclasm now secured official
endorsement. In 1643 London’s Cheapside Cross was demolished on the orders
of both parliamentary and city authorities.8 Parliamentary ordinances in
August 1643 and May 1644 ordered altars and altar-rails to be destroyed, with

3 For political developments and their religious impact, see for example, Austin Woolrych,
Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002); Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire:
A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2009).
4 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 85–6 (hereafter
Morrill, English Revolution).
5 Morrill, English Revolution, pp. 57, 79, 81–2.
6 John Walter, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture in the
English Revolution (Oxford, 2017).
7 David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 92–3,
153–7, 180–1; Braddick, God’s Fury, pp. 144–7.
8 Judith Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), esp.
pp. 42–7, 73, 85–6; Braddick, God’s Fury, pp. 262–4.
336 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

communion tables restored to their traditional position in the body of the

church, and condemned images of any person of the Trinity, angels and saints,
clerical vestments such as surplices, ‘holy-water fonts’, organs, and crosses.9
Parliament also took action on the Sabbath, a long-standing Puritan issue.
Charles had tolerated, and indeed encouraged, ‘profane’ games and dancing on
Sunday afternoons, through the ‘Book of Sports’, issued in 1633. In April 1644
parliament ordered the Book to be burnt, and earlier statutes on Sabbath obser-
vance to be strictly enforced. Sports, games, and dancing were prohibited, and
anyone found working or travelling would face a fine or the stocks. Maypoles,
‘a Heathenish vanity’ that often featured in Sabbath merrymaking, were to be
cut down and destroyed.10

BUILDING A PURITAN CHURCH

In the early months of the Long Parliament many reformers sensed the dawn
of a new age, and their mood was euphoric. Here at last was the opportunity
to ‘reform the Reformation itself ’, as the minister Edmund Calamy put it,
by removing the popish elements that Puritans had always identified in the
Elizabethan Settlement.11 Puritan ministers preaching to parliament urged
members to press forward with God’s work. For some radicals, the almost
miraculous turn of events had a millennial flavour. A Glimpse of Sions Glory,
published in 1641, rejoiced that Babylon was falling and that Christ would soon
reign in glory. It was thus ‘the work of the day to give God no rest, till he sets
up Jerusalem’, with parliament as God’s instrument in both demolition and
reconstruction.12 But how far should this work of demolition go? And what
form should a reformed Church take? Divisions swiftly appeared. Many mod-
erates, both inside and outside parliament, wanted merely to reverse Laudian
in­nov­ations and restore the Church to its Jacobean character. By contrast, in
December 1640 Londoners presented a mass petition calling for the episcopal
system to be swept away ‘Root and Branch’, and many provincial petitions fol-
lowed to similar effect. Sir Thomas Aston, a Cheshire landowner, was among
many horrified at the prospect of what he feared would be a Presbyterian cler-
ical tyranny. Why drive out twenty-six bishops, he asked, only to ‘set up 9324

9 Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm, pp. 75–80; Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed.
C.H. Firth and R.S Rait, 3 vols (London, 1911), I, pp. 265–6, 424–6.
10 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 420–2.
11 Edmund Calamy, England’s Looking Glass (1642), cited in Spurr, Post-Reformation, p. 102.
12 [Jeremiah Burroughes or Thomas Goodwin], A Glimpse of Sions Glory (London, 1641),
pp. 2, 7–8.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 337

potentiall Popes’, one in every parish?13 Long, heated debates in parliament

brought no agreement.
The outbreak of Civil War in the summer of 1642 transformed the reli-
gious as well as political situation. Bitter disagreements over the future shape
of a reformed Church would disrupt the war effort, something an embattled
parliament could ill afford. Its response in June 1643 was to set up the
Westminster Assembly, charged with drawing up recommendations for a
reformed liturgy and new structures of Church discipline and government.
The objective was a model ‘most agreeable to God’s Holy Word’ and the best
Reformed churches in Scotland and abroad, a formulation that left consid-
erable room for manoeuvre and debate. Thirty peers, MPs, and lawyers
served as assessors alongside the main body of ninety ministers drawn from
every part of the land. While progress proved painfully slow, the Assembly’s
deliberations helped keep contentious religious issues away from the political
foreground.14
Much had changed by the time parliament finally enacted a new religious
settlement in the winter of 1645–6. Its alliance with the Scots in 1643, the
Solemn League and Covenant, strengthened the position of those pressing for
a strict Presbyterian model on the Scottish pattern. The Scots’ commissioner in
London, Robert Baillie, reported optimistically in July 1645 that London’s city
parishes were now all in the hands of committed Presbyterians.15 But in every
other respect Presbyterian prospects had receded. Many moderate Puritans,
both ministers and laymen, wanted a reformed church but recoiled from the
rigidity of the Scottish model. Equally important, the New Model Army, now
winning the war, contained many religious radicals among its officers and
cavalry troopers. Oliver Cromwell, its Lieutenant-General, used victories as
leverage, and pressed hard for religious liberty for Puritans outside the
Presbyterian fold. Writing to the Speaker after the victory at Naseby in June
1645 he observed that Presbyterians and Independents (who shared their the-
ology but rejected a hierarchical Church government) were able to work
together harmoniously in the army, and that similar harmony should be pos-
sible everywhere. After the capture of Bristol a few weeks later he pointedly
reminded the Speaker that the soldiers were doing their part, and would expect
something in return.16 Richard Baxter, riding out from Coventry to judge this

13 Morrill, English Revolution, pp. 71–85; Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil
War (London, 1981), pp. 191–227; J.S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 49–52.
14 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 180–4; Braddick, God’s Fury, pp. 309, 338–9; John Coffey, ‘The
Toleration Controversy during the English Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Judith
Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 45–6.
15 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1841–2), II,
pp. 296, 299.
16 Wilbur Cortez Abbott, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols (Oxford,
1988 edn), I, pp. 360, 377–8. On religion and the New Model Army, see for example Ian Gentles,
The New Model Army (Oxford, 1992), pp. 87–119.
338 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

strange ideological army for himself, found that while radicals were perhaps
only one in twenty, they held many of the key positions and enjoyed Cromwell’s
favour and support.17
The outcome was a Church settlement that fell short of Presbyterian
as­pir­ations, and proved very hard to implement. The ordinance setting up
the Westminster Assembly had made it clear that bishops, deans, and chapters
were to be swept away as obstacles to reformation. (Laud, almost forgotten in
the Tower, had been put on trial and executed in January 1645.) In their place
parliament legislated for a system under which the church would be governed
at each level by ministers and elected lay elders, meeting weekly. Parishes were
to be organized into groups, with officers from each congregation meeting
monthly in a classis; representatives from each classis would meet twice a
year in two provincial assemblies. London and its environs were organized into
twelve classes, with arrangements elsewhere left for further consideration.18
Parliament also established new machinery for the approval and ordination of
ministers, and for ignorant and scandalous persons to be barred from receiving
communion. Scandalous behaviour, the ordinance explained, could range
from drunkenness and sexual immorality to playing football or dancing on the
Lord’s Day.19 It is striking, however, that the new structures gave the reformed
Church no disciplinary powers other than exclusion from communion. Puritans
had long complained that the old ‘bawdy courts’ were weak and ineffective; this
new system would be toothless. Parliament preferred to bring moral regulation
into the secular sphere, to be handled by the secular courts. Moreover, to
Presbyterian dismay, the reformed Church would owe its authority to the secu-
lar power of parliament, and its highest ecclesiastical body, the national assem-
bly, would meet only when and for as long as parliament chose. The formal
abolition of bishops and cathedral deans, and the confiscation of their estates,
followed a few months later. But in the event, the new Presbyterian system was
erected only in London and Lancashire, and to a limited extent in a few other
counties, and on a voluntary basis.20
The other main features of the religious settlement were a revised Confession
of Faith and the replacement of the prayer book by a new Directory, which
set out the broad shape of reformed services but did not provide a new lit-
urgy. Instead of being reformed, as Puritans had long demanded, the prayer
book was now swept away altogether. From January 1645 services would

17 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), Part I, pp. 51–4.
18 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 749–54; William A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during
the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth 1640–1660, 2 vols (London, 1900), I, pp. 256–337, II,
pp. 1–33; Elliot Vernon, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’,
in Durston and Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England, pp. 116–17.
19 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 789–97, 865–74.
20 Morrill, English Revolution, pp. 155–7; Shaw, History, II, pp. 1–33, 98–142; Vernon, ‘Ministry’,
pp. 117–19.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 339

comprise prayers by the minister (all extemporary, except the Lord’s Prayer),
readings from Scripture (selected by the minister), congregational psalm
singing, and sermons. The Directory thus gave ministers huge discretion to
shape services as they wished; only in communion and baptism services was
any specific wording prescribed, and even there very little. Two years later,
in June 1647, parliament abolished Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and all other
holy days, compensating disgruntled servants with a new secular holiday
each month.21
Parliament recognized that ‘godly reformation’ would remain a dead letter if
parishes were allowed to continue in the hands of ministers still wedded to the
old ways. The legislative revolution of the 1640s was accordingly accompanied
by an extensive purge of ‘scandalous’ and ‘malignant’ ministers. The Long
Parliament initiated this process almost as soon as it assembled, encouraging
parishioners to petition against alleged offenders. The campaign intensified
during and after the war, and eventually produced some 2780 ‘sufferers’, roughly
28 per cent of the clergy. Few of those displaced were genuinely ‘scandalous’;
most were targeted for neglecting pastoral duties or enforcing Laudian in­nov­
ations. As studies by Ian Green and Fiona McCall have shown, the scale of
sequestrations varied considerably across the country, affecting 96 per cent of
livings in London, 54 per cent in Westmorland, 38 per cent in Essex, 20 per cent
in Norfolk, and only 14 per cent in Yorkshire. These figures reflect variables
such as the strength of Puritan control and support, the zeal of local officials,
and fears over threats from Scotland in the late 1640s. Visitations of the two
universities, Cambridge during the war and Oxford in 1647–8, led to the
replacement of most college heads and roughly half the fellows.22 Despite their
efforts, the reformers never succeeded in creating a ministry that was uniformly
Presbyterian or even Puritan. Many Puritan ministers felt no commitment to
any particular Church model, some Independents and even a few Baptists held
parochial appointments, and hundreds of ministers remained in place whose
sympathies still lay with an episcopalian church, if not its Laudian incarnation.
They were prepared to conform, more or less, to the new order, from a sense of
pastoral responsibility or to preserve their livelihoods, and often perhaps both.

21 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 755–7, 954, 985–6; Judith Maltby, ‘ “Extravagances and
Impertinences”: Set Forms, Conceived and Extempore Prayer in Revolutionary England’, in
Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, eds, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain
(Farnham, 2013), pp. 224–9.
22 Ian Green, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the
English Civil War’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 507–31; John Twigg, The University of
Cambridge and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, ‘Oxford
and the Civil Wars’, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford. IV: Seventeenth-
Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), pp. 723–37; Fiona McCall, Baal’s Priests. The English Clergy and
the English Revolution (Farnham, 2013), esp. pp. 127–35.
340 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

But they were never likely to promote the cause of Puritan reformation. And
almost 400 of those ejected managed to find new parish livings elsewhere.23

THE CHURCH UNDER THE REPUBLIC

AND CROMWELL

The success of this new Reformation would also depend heavily on political
developments. The king, though forced to the negotiating table after losing the
war, refused to abandon the episcopal Church, and believed he could secure
a more favourable settlement by negotiating with the army leaders and Scots
as well as parliament. In 1647 the army leaders put forward the Heads of the
Proposals, under which bishops would survive, stripped of their coercive
­powers, and with freedom for both prayer book and other Protestant forms of
worship. Charles chose instead to throw in his lot with the Scots, who changed
sides to join him in a new war that broke out in the summer of 1648. It took only
a few months for the New Model Army to crush both royalists and Scots, and
in December a military coup (‘Pride’s Purge’) paved the way for the king’s trial
and execution in January 1649. These developments ended any prospect of a
rigorous implementation of the Presbyterian model. The Scots, defeated in
battle and refusing to recognize the new English Commonwealth, inevitably
lost all their former leverage. Ultimate power clearly lay now with the New
Model Army propping up the republican regime. Only a minority of the MPs
still sitting in the Commons, however, were religious radicals. Parliament
resisted pressure from radicals to abolish or reform tithes, and gave only
grudging toleration to Independents and Separatists. In 1650 it repealed the
Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, which had required all adults to attend their
local parish church, but pointedly declined to establish any principle of reli-
gious liberty. Most MPs disliked religious radicalism, and deeply resented
pressure from the army. At the same time they had no intention of giving
the Church the powers that rigid Presbyterians demanded. Their ideal, fore-
shadowed by their actions in 1640–2, was a reformed, lay-dominated national
Church. Faced with conflicting pressures from the army and Presbyterians,
they made very slow progress towards framing a new settlement to embody
these principles.24
These leisurely deliberations were rudely interrupted in April 1653 by
Cromwell’s dissolution of parliament. He replaced it by a Nominated Assembly
(‘Barebone’s Parliament’), whose members included many radicals, among

23 Ann Hughes, ‘ “The Public Profession of these Nations”: The National Church in Interregnum
England’, in Durston and Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England, pp. 93–114; Green
‘Persecution’, pp. 525–31.
24 Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 238–9, 321–8.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 341

them Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, and future Quakers. Their fierce attack on
tithes alarmed moderates, who engineered the Assembly’s resignation in
December 1653. Cromwell now assumed power as Lord Protector, under a new,
written constitution, the Instrument of Government. Its religious clauses pro-
vided for the continuation of a national, parish-based Church, with a ministry
still supported by tithes.25 With nothing specified on the form of services, the
Directory remained in force as guidance. Other Protestant groups, differing in
judgement, now received guaranteed freedom of worship, a hugely significant
development reflecting Cromwell’s personal determination to protect ‘tender
consciences’. Minority rights were further strengthened in 1657 under parlia-
ment’s revised constitutional proposals, the Humble Petition and Advice.
While Cromwell declined its offer of a crown, he accepted the other provisions,
including an explicit guarantee that Protestants outside the established Church
would also enjoy full civil rights to hold public employment. Both the Instrument
and Petition and Advice excluded ‘Popery or Prelacy’, a major failing to modern
eyes.26 Most people continued to attend their parish church, however, so that
rigid episcopalians had become, in effect, a small nonconformist minority. The
Cromwellian Church had no hierarchical structure. Instead a national body
known as the Triers, eminent Puritan ministers assisted by several godly lay-
men, examined candidates for the ministry. A second body examined ministers
accused of scandalous behaviour or insufficiency. The Ejectors, as they were
known, were laymen, operating on a county basis with a number of clerical
assistants.27 The Presbyterian settlement of 1645–6 was not revoked, and where
classes had been established they continued to meet, on a voluntary basis,
with steadily dwindling support and significance. Attendance at the London
Provincial Assembly fell off sharply in the 1650s, and though Lancashire classes
were active in promoting catechizing for the young, there too attendance tailed
off. And in the capital and north-west alike, it often proved very difficult to
persuade parishioners to elect lay elders, or find elders willing to serve.28

THE PURITAN PARISH: MINISTERS,

SERVICES, AND SACRAMENTS

New laws and institutions tell us, of course, only half the story. What was the
impact of Puritan ascendancy at grassroots level? How did individual parishes
experience this revolution?

25 Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982); The Constitutional

Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, ed. S.R. Gardiner (third edn, Oxford, 1906), p. 416.
26 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 454–5.
27 Hughes, ‘Public Profession’, pp. 97–102.
28 Vernon, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel’, pp. 118–19; Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars:
Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 51–2.
342 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

The most striking changes for parishioners would surely have been the
ejection of hundreds of clergy, the removal of images, vestments, and other
furnishings judged superstitious, and the transformation of services. A national,
parish-based ministry survived, along with the system of tithes to maintain it.
Cathedrals survived too, albeit downgraded and in deteriorating condition, but
their canons, organs, choirs, and elaborate services all vanished. Even their
names were diminished: St Paul’s Cathedral, for example, was now known
simply as Paul’s, with both ‘Saint’ and ‘Cathedral’ rejected as popish. The dis­
appear­ance of the ecclesiastical courts also affected many more lives than we
might imagine. Alongside their disciplinary functions, they had handled a
mass of private business over testamentary and defamation issues.
Most of the ejected parish clergy had lost their livings during the Civil Wars
or shortly afterwards. Only about 200 were removed by the Ejectors, most of
them in 1655–6 under pressure from the Cromwellian Major-Generals. The
Triers, by contrast, were highly active, approving over 3500 new ministers.
Cromwell was highly impressed by their work, and they have received a gener-
ally positive verdict from modern scholars. Ann Hughes has shown, moreover,
that while Cromwell as Protector enjoyed enormous rights of ecclesiastical
patronage, he generally followed the wishes of the parish concerned, and was
willing to accept Puritan nominees of widely different views.29 Following the
Restoration in 1660 over 2000 ministers in England and Wales resigned or were
ejected for nonconformity, but none as ‘scandalous’.30 Most of the ‘dumb dogs’
despised by Elizabethan Puritans had been swept away, and the Church had
more zealous preachers than ever before, and perhaps ever after.
But as the reformers themselves conceded, this was far from a story of
straightforward progress. Many parishes experienced years of instability, with
a rapid turnover of ministers, or had to make do with men of poor quality.
Other livings remained vacant. In the north, south-west, and especially Wales,
it often proved impossible to find an educated minister to take on a parish
whose previous incumbent had been ejected. It may be significant that Cobham,
Surrey, famous for the Digger experiment in 1649, had no settled minister
between 1644 and 1656. Even in Norwich, England’s second city, many poorly
funded parishes remained vacant, or were served by ministers ejected else-
where or otherwise considered unsatisfactory.31 The long-standing problem of
poorly endowed parishes was considerably eased in this period by a system of

29 Hughes, ‘Public Profession’, pp. 97–107; Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver
Cromwell’, History, 285 (2002), 18–40; Christopher Durston, ‘Policing the Cromwellian
Church: the Activities of the County Ejection Committees, 1654–1659’, in Patrick Little, ed.,
The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007), 188–205.
30 Watts, Dissenters, pp. 153, 219.
31 Thomas Richards, A History of the Puritan Movement in Wales 1639–1653 (London, 1920);
James D. Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: What Do We Know of his Life?’, in Andrew Bradstock, ed.,
Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999 (London, 2000), p. 28; Capp, England’s Culture Wars,
pp. 110–11.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 343

‘augmentations’, supplementing low stipends with funds drawn from former

episcopal revenues and sequestered royalist estates.32 But money was not the
only problem. An intruded minister often found it hard to establish his pos­
ition in the face of hostile parishioners still attached to his predecessor and the
old services. An ejected minister might refuse to yield possession, and resentful
parishioners might abuse his successor, boycott his services, and refuse to pay
church fees or tithes. In livings with no Puritan tradition a new minister often
found that parishioners were deeply resistant to his message. One, isolated in
rural Hampshire, complained bitterly that life in prison would be preferable.
A well-endowed urban parish would generally possess at least a core of godly
and educated inhabitants, and many ministers gravitated to these more wel-
coming environments whenever the opportunity arose.33
The Church faced another problem in these years over access to the
­sacraments, an old issue now grown acute. Many Puritans wanted to restrict
communion to genuine believers, with prospective communicants examined
beforehand on their faith and lives. Many saw it as their duty to preach to the
whole congregation, and baptize all newborn infants, while restricting com-
munion to a small group of the godly. Such a policy, however, proved deeply
divisive. Many respectable parishioners considered access to the sacraments as
a right, not a privilege, and refused to be grilled by the minister or (where they
existed) lay elders. But ministers who adopted a more relaxed approach found
that this generated resentment among the more strict parishioners. Many
despaired of finding a solution, with the consequence that communions were
simply abandoned, sometimes for as long as five or ten years. Other ministers,
including the celebrated preacher Stephen Marshall, chose to leave a parish
living and take up a lectureship instead, where duties would be limited to
preaching and they could duck the issue. Where communions did continue on
a regular basis, in traditionalist parishes, they were often still celebrated at
Easter, and sometimes Christmas and Whitsun, despite the formal abolition of
these festivals.34
Ordinary Sabbath services presented a different set of problems. In 1645
many parishes proved reluctant to adopt the new Directory, and for several
years some continued to hold traditional prayer book services. While such
open defiance had become rare by the 1650s, many ministers found ex­tem­por­ary

32 Rosemary O’Day and Ann Hughes, ‘Augmentation and Amalgamation’, in O’Day and
Felicity Heal, eds, Princes and Paupers in the English Church, 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1983),
pp. 167–93.
33 Jacqueline Eales, Community and Disunity: Kent and the English Civil Wars (Faversham,
2001), pp. 35–43; Morrill, English Revolution, p. 171; Derek Hirst, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the
English Republic’, Past and Present, 132 (1991), 37–9; Capp, England’s Culture Wars, pp. 1–2, 111–14,
129–30.
34 Watts, Dissenters, pp. 153–5; Morrill, English Revolution, pp. 166–8; Capp, England’s
Culture Wars, pp. 114, 123–8; Vernon, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel’, pp. 127–9, 132; Hirst, ‘Failure’,
46–8.
344 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

prayer distasteful or too demanding and prepared texts in advance. This enabled
them to mix their own words with passages drawn from other authors and the
prayer book itself, which some parishioners welcomed and others failed to
recognize. Most parishes appear to have followed the broad outlines laid
down by the Directory, but with no one authorized to police these arrange-
ments, local practice reflected the preference of the minister and influential
parishioners. The extraordinary decentralization of the reformed Church
gave it a flexibility that helped secure a measure of acceptance.35 The Directory
offered the congregation no scope for participation, however, except in the
psalms, and lengthy sermons and extemporary prayers were not to the taste of
many parishioners. Some ministers recognized that godly preachers preoccu-
pied with the needs of a spiritually minded, literate minority were neglecting
those of the majority. Moreover the priority that many gave to preaching meant
less focus on pastoral duties, including catechizing.36 We have little hard evi-
dence on levels of church attendance in this period. From 1650 it was no longer
compulsory to attend one’s parish church, though in some rural parishes we
occasionally find churchwardens still prosecuting villagers who failed to do so.
In larger communities, with many parishes and several Separatist congrega-
tions, it was impossible to police the new requirement that everyone must
attend some place of worship on the Sabbath. Indeed, it was unclear who was
supposed to enforce this requirement, or what the penalty should be for
non-compliance. There was no statute to give teeth to the directive laid down
in the Instrument of Government.
In some communities the parish church itself now had to accommodate
different and sometimes rival congregations. A large urban parish, for example,
might find itself with a Presbyterian minister and Independent lecturer,
each with a vocal body of supporters, feuding over who had the right to use
the church at which times. In one London parish, a bitter dispute between a
Presbyterian minister and Fifth Monarchist lecturer forced the Council of
State to intervene and adjudicate.37 At Exeter and Great Yarmouth, Presbyterian
and Independent congregations reached an accommodation, one worshipping
in the nave, the other in the chancel. At Hull, by contrast, a thick, soundproof
wall had to be built to separate the chancel and nave, so that hostile congrega-
tions could worship at the same time. One assembly sang psalms lustily; the
other viewed psalms as popish.38

35 Morrill, English Revolution, pp. 163–5; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian
Conformity and Nonconformity 1646–60’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, eds, Royalists
and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), pp. 18–43; Maltby, ‘Extravagances’,
pp. 229–30, 236–41; Capp, England’s Culture Wars, pp. 118–23.
36 Hirst, ‘Failure’, pp. 42–4. 37 Hughes, ‘Public Profession’, p. 107.
38 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957), p. 12n.;
‘The Life of Master John Shaw’, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies of the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Charles Jackson, Surtees Society, 65 (Durham, 1877), p. 144.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 345

Almost all parish ministers continued to baptize infants. Puritan ministers

sometimes replaced the ‘popish’ font with a basin, and refused to make the sign
of the cross on the infant’s forehead. The churching of women, a rite trad­ition­
ally performed a month after childbirth, disappeared except where parents
could find an ejected minister to perform it privately.39 Funerals proved a more
contentious issue. The Directory provided for little more than unceremonial
interment, with a minister no longer even required to be present. John Taylor
the ‘water-poet’ satirized the new situation with the chilling refrain, ‘Ashes to
ashes, dust to dust/Here’s a hole, and in thou must’. Some defiant fam­ilies
found an ejected or unbeneficed minister to conduct a traditional prayer book
service.40 Weddings proved still more contentious. The Directory’s outline
retained many of the elements of the prayer book form, but in 1653 parliament
made any church wedding illegal. In the years following, some couples were
prosecuted for being married by a minister, and a few, bizarrely, were even
charged with fornication, for the law no longer recognized their union as valid.
Marriages were now to be conducted by a justice of the peace, after being
announced three times in church or the marketplace. The new law proved
hugely unpopular, and thousands of couples rushed to marry in church before
the Act came into force. Few wanted their wedding plans proclaimed in the
marketplace, and the new secular ‘ceremony’ offered no emotional satisfaction.
Many couples were now married by a magistrate to satisfy the law, and then
again, privately, by a minister, to legitimate their union in the eyes of their fam­
ilies and friends, and indeed themselves. Anne, Lady Halkett, married in 1656,
recalled that the magistrate had held the Directory in his hand and simply asked
the couple if they intended to marry one another, to which they replied yes.
‘Then, says he, I pronounce you man and wife.’ Calling for a glass of sack he
wished them happiness, and with that the ceremony was over. They were
married again privately and ‘more solemnly’ by a minister, and Anne said that
otherwise she would not have believed her marriage ‘lawfully done’. Statute law
was hopelessly at odds with moral law and custom, and both proved far stronger.
The new law expired in 1656 and was renewed, after fierce parliamentary
debate, for only six months. When that period expired, it was no longer clear
what form of marriage ceremony, if any, was now legitimate. There was a drift
back to marriage by a minister, whether in church or in private. The confusion
lasted until the Restoration, when the new regime declared that all marriages

39 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and
Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 173–80, 225; Christopher Durston, ‘Puritan Rule and the
Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Durston and Eales, eds,
Culture of English Puritanism, pp. 226–8.
40 Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 416–17; Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 121; John
Taylor, Some Small and Simple Reasons (Oxford, 1643), p.8; Morrill, English Revolution, p. 168;
Durston, ‘Puritan Rule’, p. 229.
346 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

contracted in the Cromwellian period, whatever form they had taken, were to
be accepted in law as legitimate.41
The Puritan evangelical spirit, by contrast, remained strong throughout the
period. From the mid-1640s parliament took action to boost evangelism in
major towns and in parts of the country seen as in particular need, especially
the north and west. In 1645, with Civil War still raging, it channelled funds
to support preaching ministers in York, Durham, Carlisle, Newcastle, and
Berwick. In Wales, still viewed as one the ‘dark corners’ of the land, the purge
of ‘malignant’ clergy was accompanied by a missionary campaign, given parlia-
mentary authority under the act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales
(1650).42 The evangelical campaigns, however, encountered many problems.
In the event it proved impossible to find a sufficient body of committed,
Welsh-speaking Puritans to replace most of the 278 ejected. While men such as
Morgan Llwyd and Vavasor Powell proved tireless and powerful evangelists,
they were also highly divisive figures and, more important, many parishes
remained vacant. Parliament turned against the campaign, and allowed the Act
to expire in 1653. The problems remained, of course, and the repercussions of
the Propagation’s activities blighted the province throughout the decade.43
Evangelism faced a very different challenge in many other parts of the
country: it became fiercely competitive. Baptists, Quakers, and other radicals
often sought new converts by challenging parish ministers to meet them in
large-scale public confrontations. Dozens are recorded in the 1640s and 1650s,
with champions of the Established Church taking on radicals to debate a wide
range of issues, including the Scriptures, the ministerial call, tithes, and the
sacraments. Such events often attracted hundreds of rowdy spectators, and
might last for hours. In some cases the disputants published rival accounts of
the proceedings, which frequently triggered lengthy pamphlet wars. Some lis-
teners were moved by what they heard, and went on to become converts to
a new denomination; many others were confirmed in their old beliefs; some
were left confused; and some may have attended more to enjoy the gladiatorial
combat than in search of spiritual truths. The religious marketplace offers
striking proof of the religious freedoms that England enjoyed in these years,
but it was also a major distraction for ministers, taking them away from their
pastoral responsibilities.44

41 Christopher Durston, The Family in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1989), pp. 71–84, esp.
pp. 81–2; Capp, England’s Culture Wars, pp. 147–9.
42 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 669–71, II, pp. 342–8l; Richards, Puritan Movement.
43 Richards, Puritan Movement; Worden, The Rump Parliament, pp. 327–8; Lloyd Bowen,
‘ “This Murmuring and Unthankful Peevish Land”: Wales and the Protectorate’, in Little, ed.,
Cromwellian Protectorate, pp. 144–64.
44 Bernard Capp, ‘The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum
England’, English Historical Review, 129 (2014), 47–78; Ann Hughes, ‘The Pulpit Guarded:
Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in Revolutionary England’, in A. Laurence,
W.R. Owens and S. Sim, eds, John Bunyan and His England 1628–88 (London, 1990), pp. 30–50.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 347

REFORMING MANNERS AND DEFENDING THE FAITH

Empowered Puritans were never likely to restrict their energies to reforming

the Church. They wanted to reform the people too, a ‘reformation of manners’
to sweep away the profane behaviour and customs that still sullied the nation.
Reformers had pursued such a goal for several generations. Long before 1640
they had secured laws against swearing, drunkenness, and profanation of the
Sabbath, and in localities where Puritan magistrates held sway they had sought
to impose a strict moral discipline. In the 1640s, for the first time, this campaign
now enjoyed the support of central government. Laws were tightened further,
and enforced more widely and more harshly. The Sabbath was strictly enforced,
with travel, commerce, dancing, sports, and games all prohibited. Alehouses
remained firmly closed during service time, and thousands of ‘disorderly’ ale-
houses were suppressed. The theatres were shut temporarily on the outbreak of
the Civil War, and closed permanently in 1648, with most soon demolished.
Such reforms were far from popular, and historians differ on how far they could
be enforced. Some, such as Christopher Durston, Derek Hirst, and (to a lesser
extent) Ronald Hutton, have emphasized resistance and evasion; others, such
as Anthony Fletcher and myself, have seen this as a period of unprecedented
moral discipline in practice as well as on paper.45
In the popular imagination, Puritan zeal has always been associated with a
fierce code of sexual morality, and the Adultery Act of 1650 (which made adul-
tery a felony and fornication also a crime) is probably the most notorious legis-
lation of the period. In practice it proved almost impossible to implement, for
conviction required a direct witness or a confession, both predictably difficult
to obtain. But these decades certainly witnessed a harsher regime for sexual
offenders, with more imprisoned, whipped, and fined.46 There was also a crack-
down on blasphemy and casual oaths, with zealous magistrates enforcing the
new system that calibrated fines according to the social status of the offender.
While ordinary people faced a fine of 3s 4d for each profane oath, a gentleman
had to pay 6s 8d, and a peer £1. Most magistrates and parish constables were not
Puritan zealots, of course, so enforcement remained very patchy, especially
in the countryside.47 The campaign to suppress Christmas and other festivals,
as popish, pagan, or profane, had similarly mixed results. The state largely
­succeeded in preventing church services on Christmas Day. It failed altogether
to turn Christmas into an ordinary working day; most people observed it as a
holiday, eating, drinking, and merrymaking at home, and perhaps singing carols
to preserve something of its religious traditions. MPs meeting in parliament

45 Durston, ‘Puritan Rule’; Hirst, ‘Failure’; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England
(Oxford, 1994), pp. 200–26; Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, CT, 1986),
pp. 229–81; Capp, England’s Culture Wars.
46 Capp, England’s Culture Wars, pp. 132–51; Fletcher, Reform, pp. 252–61.
47 Capp, England’s Culture Wars, pp. 92–100.
348 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

on 25 December 1656 grumbled at having been kept awake by noisy festive

­preparations, and complained that all the shops were closed.48
All these campaigns reflected long-standing concerns. But many Puritans
were now increasingly preoccupied by a different challenge: the rise of new
heresies and blasphemies. Far more alarming than traditional casual oaths was
the rapid spread of dangerous new heretical ideas and movements, which saw
some radicals rejecting the divinity of Christ, the existence of heaven and hell,
and most other central tenets of Christian faith. The Presbyterian Thomas
Edwards published a massive compendium in 1646 that he called Gangraena,
presenting these new heresies as a rotting disease that would prove fatal to
religion, morality, and social order unless cut off like a gangrenous limb.49
Parliament responded with its draconian Blasphemy Ordinance in 1648, and a
Blasphemy Act in 1650 aimed at so-called Ranters, who rejected both trad­
ition­al religion and morality. The most notorious of them, Abiezer Coppe,
denounced Puritan ministers as unchristian hypocrites, obsessed with out-
ward forms yet indifferent to the sufferings of the poor and needy.50 The Ranter
threat proved short-lived, but Puritans soon faced new challenges from Fifth
Monarchists and then the Quakers, who proved alarmingly popular. In 1656
MPs responded with horror to accounts of the Quaker leader, James Nayler,
riding into Bristol in what appeared a blasphemous parody of Christ’s entry
into Jerusalem, and sentenced him to be flogged, bored through the tongue,
and branded.51
These new preoccupations help explain why it was only in Ireland that the
years of Puritan empowerment produced the ruthless campaign against
‘popery’ that Catholics had feared. For generations Puritans had been obsessed
with popery and papists, and in 1641 the bloody Irish rebellion triggered panics
that English papists were similarly about to rise and slaughter their Protestant
neighbours.52 Fear heightened repression; while no Catholic priest had been
executed during Charles’s ‘personal rule’ in the 1630s, twenty-four suffered in
the 1640s.53 But popular fears gradually subsided when no popish massacre
materialized, and the Civil War focused attention elsewhere. Popery was con-
spicuously absent from Edwards’s Gangraena. While Cromwell hated Irish

48 Hutton, Rise and Fall, pp. 206–17; Durston, ‘Puritan Rule’, 223–4; Capp, England’s Culture
Wars, pp. 20–4.
49 Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004).
50 Acts and Ordinances, I, pp. 1133–6, II, pp. 409–12; Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll
(London, 1650).
51 Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on
the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996).
52 Keith Lindley, ‘The Impact of the 1641 Rebellion upon England and Wales, 1641–5’, Irish
Historical Studies, 18 (1972), 143–76; Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the
English Revolution’, Past and Present, 52 (1971), 23–55.
53 John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow, 2000),
pp. 134, 142.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 349

Catholics, he had no appetite for the persecution of English Catholics as long as

they remained quiet. Only one Catholic priest, John Southworth, was executed
in England under Cromwell’s rule, a man desperate for martyrdom who
thwarted all attempts to save him.54 Anti-Catholic sentiment did not disappear
altogether, of course. Several ordinances and proclamations throughout the
1650s ordered Catholics to leave London and Westminster, and remain within
five miles of their homes. And early in 1657 parliament passed an Act directing
magistrates to present the names of all local Catholics to quarter-sessions
or assizes, where they would be required to take an Oath of Abjuration,
repudiating the Catholic Church and papal authority. Those who refused
would forfeit two-thirds of their lands and goods. Many Catholics suffered real
hardship under this measure, though it was only patchily enforced. Politics
probably played a larger role than religious zeal in prompting these measures,
with recurring fears of royalist risings or foreign invasion.55 The preamble to
the Act of 1657 complained that Catholic numbers had swollen in recent years
because of the lax enforcement of the laws and proclamations. If the 1650s
proved uncomfortable for English Catholics, they were far from the nightmare
they had anticipated.
‘Prayer book traditionalists’ experienced somewhat similar treatment. Many
of the loyalist ministers forced out of their livings secured positions as domestic
chaplains or schoolteachers, and many others found new parochial livings
within the Established Church. A declaration by the Protector and Council in
September 1655, prompted by a recent cavalier rising, stipulated that no ejected
minister was to preach or teach school, or be employed as a private chaplain
or tutor. But Cromwell agreed to meet a delegation of episcopalian ministers
protesting against these harsh provisions, and repeatedly acceded to petitions
from those affected to be exempted from their terms.56 Semi-public prayer
book services continued throughout the 1650s in several aristocratic houses in
London, as the authorities were well aware, and for the most part they were left
alone. There were similar semi-covert prayer book congregations elsewhere.
At Newcastle prayer book traditionalists worshipped in private with ‘full liberty’
from the town’s magistrates, who were angry when it was disturbed, without
their authorization, around the time of the cavalier rising.57 All this was very
different from the Elizabethan regime’s bloody harassment of Catholics and
Separatists, and from the Restoration monarchy’s fierce persecution of non-
conformist conventiclers. Cromwell was even tolerant towards the Fifth

54 William Sheils, ‘English Catholics at War and Peace’, in Durston and Maltby, eds, Religion in
Revolutionary England, p. 149.
55 Acts and Ordinances, II, pp. 1170–80; Sheils, ‘English Catholics’, pp. 142–50.
56 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656, 4 vols
(New York, 1965 edn), III, pp. 323–4, 334–6.
57 Fincham and Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity’; W.H.D. Longstaffe, ed., Memoirs of the Life
of Mr Ambrose Barnes, Surtees Society, 50 (Durham, 1867), p. 188.
350 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Monarchists, despite their ferocious attacks on him, unless they appeared to

pose a direct political threat. And while local magistrates locked up hundreds
of Quakers, Cromwell sometimes intervened to order their release unless there
were pressing reasons to detain them. Across the religious spectrum his instinct
was to respect private conscience except where it posed a direct challenge to
morality, Christian fundamentals, or public order. Religious liberty, he told
parliament in 1654, was a fundamental ‘for us and the generations to come’.
While his ideal remained a reunited Puritan national Church, he showed toler-
ance in practice towards sectarians, episcopalians, Catholics, and Jews.58
In 1660 most moderate Puritans welcomed the Restoration. They had never
wanted to see monarchy toppled, and they believed (rightly) that a restored
monarchy would be more energetic in combating the threat from Quakers
and other radicals. They also welcomed Charles II’s Declaration of Breda
(April 1660), which promised ‘a liberty to tender consciences’, and they believed
(wrongly) that he would deliver a Church settlement sufficiently reformed for
them to feel comfortable within it. For most moderate Puritans, the form of
Church government was a secondary concern; a godly national Church with a
reformed liturgy was more important than the issue of bishops. Looking back,
on the eve of the Restoration, many felt disappointed by what they had achieved.
Plentiful preaching had not produced the flood of new converts that many had
expected. The people, it was often said, had become ‘sermon-proof ’, and even
the most eloquent preachers had to overcome resentment at the suppression of
traditional services and popular customs. Moreover, ministers had directed too
much of their energy to serving a core of godly parishioners, at the expense of
the rest, and to pursuing denominational rivalries. The Association movements
of the later 1650s, inspired by Baxter, were an attempt to remedy that mistake,
but they came too late.59 In the larger towns, and some rural parishes, attend-
ance levels at parish church services appear to have declined, with some of the
godly deserting to the Separatists, and the worldly simply staying at home.
It would be wrong, though, to take Puritan lamentations at face value. Their
hopes had been pitched unrealistically high. If millenarian hopes had soon
faded, godly reformation had made significant progress, despite its very limited
institutional framework and patchy support from local government. Cromwell
never abandoned his commitment, and reformers achieved many local successes,
especially where they could build on local traditions and enjoyed magis­ter­ial
support. Cities such as Exeter, and towns such as Kidderminster, Maidstone,
and Rye, witnessed major transformations. And not all those advances were

58 Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, pp. 147–9; Colin Davis, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in
David L. Smith, ed., Cromwell and the Interregnum (Oxford, 2003), pp. 139–66; Blair Worden,
‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W.J. Sheils, ed., Persecution and Toleration,
Studies in Church History, 21 (Oxford 1984), pp. 199–223; Bernard Capp, ‘Cromwell and Religion’,
in Jane A. Mills, ed., Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester, 2012), pp. 93–112.
59 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Richard Baxter (London, 1965), pp. 65–76; Shaw, History, II, pp. 152–74.
 Dissent Empowered: The Puritan Revolution 351

lost after the Restoration. Over three-quarters of the Cromwellian parish

clergy conformed, more or less, to the Anglican settlement, and while some
had never been committed Puritans, others, like the Essex minister Ralph
Josselin, clung on to Puritan convictions and practices. Many Puritan
­magistrates, in cities like Coventry, adopted a comparable tactic of semi- or
occasional conformity. Those Puritans who refused to conform now faced
persecution far harsher than anything their predecessors had experienced
under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The resolution they displayed, some-
times over many years, suggests that the reformers had made a far greater
impact than they realized.
Measuring success and failure is, of course, only one way to assess the years
of Puritan empowerment. Equally significant was their effect on Puritanism
itself, notably its dramatic fragmentation, explored elsewhere in this volume.
Moreover, while in 1640 Puritans were rightly viewed as having their own
authoritarian mindset, many had come to champion the principle of religious
freedom, for others as well as themselves. Religious freedom and civil liberties
were initially seen as entirely distinct categories, but Levellers and other rad­
icals increasingly argued they were linked. In the 1650s Cromwell came to share
that view and pronounced religious and civil liberty inseparable, an idea that
quickly gained wide currency. It was to prove a momentous development.60

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Braddick, Michael, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars
(London, 2009).
Capp, Bernard, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the
Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012).
Capp, Bernard, ‘The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and
Interregnum England’, English Historical Review, 129 (2014), 47–78.
Coffey, John, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow,
2000).
Davis, Colin, ‘Cromwell’s Religion’, in David L. Smith, ed., Cromwell and the Interregnum
(Oxford, 2003), pp. 139–66.
Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism
(Basingstoke, 1996).
Durston, Christopher, and Maltby, Judith, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England
(Manchester, 2006).

60 Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty’, in
Charles W.A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, eds, England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham, 2011),
pp. 231–51.
352 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Fincham, Kenneth and Taylor, Stephen, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity

1646–60’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism during
the Interregnum (Manchester, 2010), pp. 18–43.
Fletcher, Anthony, Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, CT, 1986).
Green, Ian, ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the
English Civil War’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 507–31.
Hirst, Derek, ‘The Failure of Godly Rule in the English Republic’, Past and Present, 132
(1991), 33–66.
Hughes, Ann, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004).
Little, Patrick, ed., The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge, 2007).
McCall, Fiona, Baal’s Priests: The English Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham,
2013).
Morrill, John, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).
Spraggon, Judith, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003).
Spurr, John, The Post-Reformation, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006).
Walter, John, Covenanting Citizens: The Protestation Oath and Popular Political Culture
in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2017).
Watts, Michael R., The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution
(Oxford, 1978).
Worden, Blair, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty’, in
Charles W.A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, eds, England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited
(Farnham, 2011), 231–51.
 16

The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity

From Martin Marprelate to Reliquiæ Baxterianæ*

N.H. Keeble

‘ THE PUBLICKEST MANNER OF TEACHING’

Print was essential to the development of early nonconformity. Indeed, its

­history might be said to have begun with a book: An Admonition to the Parliament
(1572), with its resounding assertion that ‘we in England are so far off, from
hauing a church rightly reformed, according to the prescripte of Gods worde,
that as yet we are scarse come to the outward face of the same’,1 set Puritanism
on a course that, save for the 1650s, could find no accommodation within the
established national church, and toleration outside it only at the very end of
the seventeenth century. Between these dates, battling and embattled, noncon-
formity’s great asset in its holy war with an unreformed church and an unre-
generate state was the press. In this, it was continuing a distinctive Protestant
strategy: from the days of Luther, Protestants had turned to the press to define,
defend, and promote reformed religion. In England, religious books had in
consequence formed much the largest single category of publication since the
time of Elizabeth, somewhere in the region of 50 per cent of the total. In 1621
Robert Burton, acknowledging divinity ‘to be the Queen of Professions’, could
nevertheless claim to have taken melancholy as the subject of his great work
since ‘in Divinity I saw no such great neede . . . there be so many Bookes in that
kinde, so many Commentators, Treatises, Pamphlets, Expositions, Sermons,

* I am grateful to Dr Tessa Whitehouse for her comments on a draft of this chapter.

1 [John Field and Thomas Wilcox], An Admonition to the Parliament, second edn (London,
1572), sig. Aiiv. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 478,
n. 24, notes that the first edition read ‘not’ for ‘scarse’.

N.H. Keeble, The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity: From Martin Marprelate to Reliquiæ Baxterianæ In: The Oxford
History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0017
354 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

that whole teemes of Oxen cannot draw them’.2 Their number was subsequently
greatly inflated by the outpouring of print through which were articulated the
political and religious tensions of the first half of the seventeenth century. The
gathering momentum of the English Revolution generated an unprecedented
increase in press activity that saw annual output rise from 625 titles in 1639 to
3,666 in 1642, never again to fall back to its pre-war level.3 This material and
intellectual productivity brought the legend of Cadmus’ dragons’ teeth to the
minds of both John Milton and Andrew Marvell,4 and no wonder: between
1640 and 1661 the stationer George Thomason collected an astonishing 20,000
pamphlets, books, and tracts.5
While it is impossible to say how many of these publications were by
­nonconformists, the number was very high, proportionally far higher than the
output of conformists given their overwhelming preponderance in the popula-
tion at large. Among the century’s most popular titles were many works by
nonconformists, such as John Ball’s Short Catechisme ([1615?]), which had been
reprinted some sixty times by the end of the century, and John Brinsley’s The
True Watch . . . or, A Direction for the Examination of our Spiritual Estate (1607),
William Bradshaw’s A Direction for the Weaker Sort of Christian (1609, vari-
ously revised and titled), Thomas Hooker’s The Poor Doubting Christian (1635),
Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert (1641), Thomas Brooks’ Precious
Remedies against Satan (1652), Thomas Gouge’s Christian Directions (1661),
Thomas Doolittle’s Treatise concerning the Lord’s Supper (1667), John Flavel’s A
Saint Indeed (1668), Joseph Alleine’s Alarme to the Unconverted (1672), and
Benjamin Keach’s War with the Devil (1673), all of which had reached ten or
more editions by the end of the century.6 Their number also included the
­century’s outstanding bestsellers: the fourteen seventeenth-century editions of
Richard Baxter’s 600-page work of apologetic, devotional, and practical divinity,
The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), and the twenty-eight editions of his A Call to
the Unconverted (1658). Most notably, in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678; Part II 1684) the nonconformist tradition produced a publishing

2 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, eds Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiesling,
and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford, 1989–2000), I, p. 20.
3 For fuller discussion and statistical data, see John Barnard, D.F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell,
eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: vol. IV: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), chapters
1, 2, and 26 (especially pp. 557–67), and appendix 1 (hereafter cited as Camb. Hist.); Ian Green,
Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 13–14 and appendix 1.
4 The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, eds Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von
Maltzahn, and N.H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven, CT, 2003), I, pp. 45–6; The Complete Prose Works
of John Milton, gen. ed. Don Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT, 1953–82), II, p. 492.
5 G.K. Fortescue, ed., Catalogue of the Pamphlets . . . Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661,
2 vols (London, 1908).
6 This list is not exhaustive. Data taken from: Donald Wing, ed., A Short-Title Catalogue of
Books Printed . . . 1641–1700, second edn newly rev. and eds John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson,
4 vols (New York, 1988–98); Green, Print and Protestantism, appendix 1. A print run for an edition
was generally between 1,000 and 1,500 copies.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 355

­ henomenon, its worldwide print history unrivalled by any other English prose
p
work save the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer.
Three imperatives prompted this press productivity. First, the homiletic,
rather than sacerdotal, emphasis of Protestantism was at its most pronounced
in the Puritan and nonconformist traditions. Baxter was typical in asserting
that ‘he is no true Minister of Christ . . . whose heart is not set on the winning,
and sanctifying, and saving of Souls’. In this evangelistic context, publication
was not an end but a means: ‘The Writings of Divines are nothing else but a
preaching the Gospel to the eye, as the voice preacheth it to the ear.’ There is
biblical precedent in the example of the Apostles ‘for Writing, as well as for
Vocal Teaching’; they are but ‘two wayes of predicating or publishing the same
Gospel’. And the former has one great advantage: ‘the Press hath a louder
voice then mine’ and is ‘the publickest manner of Teaching’, able to reach ‘many
thousands’.7
Hence derived not only printed sermons and sermon treatises but volumes
of practical divinity and casuistry, guiding their readers through the many
dilemmas and cases of conscience encountered in their daily lives, for this
was the field of Christian endeavour: there was, in John Milton’s famous words,
no merit in ‘a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that
slinks . . . out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not
without dust and heat’.8 This pastoral address to common experience demanded
circumstantial realism and psychological accuracy to be persuasive, developed
often into forms of anecdote, exempla, and storytelling that anticipate the
novel, famously in The Pilgrim’s Progress, but also in such other texts as Baxter’s
Poor Man’s Family Book (1674) and Benjamin Keach’s The Travels of True
Godliness (1683) and The Progress of Sin (1684). In championing the individual
conscience above worldly authorities these works privileged inwardness and
sincerity above formalism and convention.9 Attentiveness to inner experien­
tial (or, as the seventeenth-century term was, experimental) Christianity was
fostered by the common practice in gathered churches of requiring from pro-
spective members personal professions of faith and, often, accounts of their
conversion experiences,10 and by the encouragement of self-scrutiny to analyse

7 Baxter, Compassionate Counsel to all Young-Men (London, 1681), p. 48; id., A Christian
Directory (London, 1673), p. 60; id., A Second Admonition to Mr. Edward Bagshaw (London, 1671),
p. 87; id., True Christianity (London, 1655), sig. A4v.
8 Milton, Prose Works, II, p. 515. On Milton and nonconformity, see further N.H. Keeble,
‘Milton’s Christian Temper’, in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden, eds, John Milton: Life, Writing,
Reputation (Oxford, 2010), pp. 107–24 (esp. pp. 112–15).
9 This was especially marked in, but not peculiar to, nonconformity: see Keith Thomas’s argu-
ment that ‘the seventeenth century can justly be called the Age of Conscience’ in ‘Cases of
Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds,
Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 29–56.
10 On this practice, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660
(Oxford, 1957; rpt. Oswestry, 2001), esp. pp. 109–16.
356 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

spiritual progress and to achieve assurance of grace. Baxter’s titles The Vain
Religion of the Formal Hypocrite (1660) and The Mischiefs of Self-Ignorance
(1662) make the point.
This habit of introspection, coupled with the duty to bear witness, led to the
development of spiritual autobiography as a distinct genre,11 as well as to the
publication of a variety of forms of meditative, devotional, and confessional
works, in verse as well as prose. In general, the inclination to declare ‘what the
Lord hath done for my soul’ (Ps. 66:16) became more pronounced the further
the nonconformist moved from episcopalianism and Presbyterianism. Baxter
was disinclined to engage in what he terms the ‘somewhat unsavory’ business
of rehearsing in detail ‘Heart-Occurrences, and God’s Operation on me’.12
Among radical groups, notably the Quakers, and among Independents and
Baptists such as Bunyan, it was much commoner. Indeed, there is no more
intense or harrowing example than the ‘Relation of the work of God upon my
own Soul’ in Grace Abounding (1666). ‘It is’, wrote Bunyan, ‘profitable for
Christians to be often calling to mind the very beginnings of Grace with their
Souls’ and he noted that ‘It was Pauls accustomed manner . . . to open . . . the man-
ner of his Conversion’ to others, particularly his critics and accusers. Grace
Abounding thus substantiated Bunyan’s claim to divine grace, and hence his
authority both to preach and to write: it proved that, in the words of 1 Peter 4:10
quoted by Bunyan at his trial, he had ‘received the gift’, and validated the stand
he took when, arrested in November 1660 for preaching at a conventicle, he
remained in Bedford jail for twelve years, rather than repudiate his ministry.13
This preoccupation with religious experience is exemplified in the godly
discourse of Bunyan’s pilgrims. They are inveterately curious about each other,
keen whenever they meet to learn from others’ personal experiences through
the rehearsal of their autobiographical histories, to ‘talk with you of all the
things that have happened to you in your Pilgrimage’ that ‘perhaps we may better
our selves thereby’. ‘To prevent drowsiness’ as they cross the Inchanted Ground,
Christian proposes to Hopeful that they ‘fall into good discourse’, to which
Hopeful responds, closely questioned by Christian, with a full account of his
conversion and subsequent spiritual experiences. This example of ‘Saints
­fellowship’ is tellingly juxtaposed with the self-ignorance of Ignorance who
‘take[s] . . . pleasure in walking alone’ and ‘trusts his own heart’, resenting

11 See further: Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative; The Beginnings of American
Expression (Cambridge, 1983); Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-
Century Anglo-phone World (Oxford, 2012); D. Bruce Hindmarsh, Spiritual Autobiography in
Early Modern England (Oxford, 2005); Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London, 1972).
12 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (London, 1696), i.124, §213 (hereafter cited as Rel. Bax.;
reference is to part, page, and paragraph number).
13 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford,
1962), pp. 1–2, 108 (hereafter cited as GA). For Bunyan’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment, see
Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA, 2002),
127–72.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 357

Christian’s encouragements to look inward and examine his true motives and
proclivities.14
For nonconformists, books performed just such work of spiritual encour-
agement and instruction. They played an especially crucial part in preserving
‘Saints fellowship’ during the period of vilification, marginalization, and perse-
cution that followed the Restoration since, though ‘Preachers may be silenced
or banished’, ‘Books may be at hand’.15 For Bunyan, separated from his people
by imprisonment, publication was the one way he could continue his preaching
ministry. Unable in person to ‘perform that duty that from God doth lie upon
me, to you-ward’, through print he could yet address not only his congregation
but also the wider community.16 Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress
are only the most notable of many prison books written by ministers seeking
to fulfil their duty of pastoral care even though separated from their people.
Their precedent lay in the epistles of ‘the prisoner of Jesus Christ’ St Paul, ‘the
­prisoner of the Lord’ (Eph. 3:1, 4:1; Phm. 1:9), which were fundamental to the
self-construction, and to the confidence, of nonconformist authors. By repeat-
edly and explicitly locating their texts in jail they associated their work with
Paul’s ministry,17 thereby claiming their readers’ attention despite official disap-
probation and implicitly adducing that condemnation as proof of their integ-
rity. And, as they take the role of Paul, so the Restoration authorities are cast in
the role of the persecuting Romans.18
The third nonconformist incentive to turn to print was doctrinal, apologetical,
and polemical. Throughout its early history nonconformity was under attack
for its perceived enthusiasm and theological heterodoxy and for its dangerously
democratic ecclesiology. From the time of Henry Ainsworth and Francis
Johnson’s anonymous An Apologie or Defence of such True Christians as are
Commonly (but Uniustly) called Brownists (1604) it was ceaselessly engaged
in defending its theology against charges variously of antinomianism,
Arminianism, fanaticism, and Socinianism, and its church order against
ac­cusa­tions of ‘a world turned upside down’ (Acts 17:6) by its abandonment of
traditional ecclesiastical hierarchies. Writers invariably disclaimed a willing-
ness to engage in controversy and polemics, but these nevertheless occupied

14 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1960), pp. 47, 136, 137, 144,
145 (hereafter cited as PP).
15 Baxter, Christian Directory, p. 60. On the use of writing and print to maintain contact within
the persecuted nonconformist community, see N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity
in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987), pp. 78–92.
16 GA, p. 1.
17 See e.g. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock, 13 vols (Oxford,
1976–94), III, pp. 5, 69; IV, pp. 10, 135, 136; VI, pp. 39, 42.
18 On nonconformist prison writing, see Kathleen Lynch, ‘Into Jail and into Print: John Bunyan
Writes the Godly Self ’, and Rivkah Zim, ‘Writing behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority
of Carceral Experience’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2009), 273–90, 291–311; Sharon
Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 59–83; Keeble,
Literary Culture, 187–214.
358 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

hours of their time and reams of print, directed against not only their episcopal
opponents (of both the established English and Roman churches) but also each
other in debates over the nature of the ministerial office and the polity of the
apostolic and early church; the practice of baptism; the soteriological subtleties
of predestination, justification, and sanctification; the illuminating work of the
Spirit; and, of course, the practice of nonconformity itself. In this the moderate
Baxter emerged as their great champion, in a series of tracts initiated by The
Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679) arguing that the responsibility for schism
lies not with the nonconformists but with those who would unreasonably
coerce individual consciences.19 This material is little read nowadays, though it
can on occasions take wittily satiric and ironic form, most conspicuously in
Marvell,20 but also in the poetry and prose of the Presbyterian Robert Wild,21
the Congregationalist Vincent Alsop,22 and the lay pamphleteers George
Wither and Ralph Wallis.23
A more lasting product of the fissiparous tendency of early English
Protestantism than controversial divinity is to be found in the doctrinal and
ecclesiastical statements and creeds that each developing tradition of early
nonconformity had perforce to compose and to publish to define its dis­tinct­
ive­ness, and, implicitly, to contradict its detractors. Examples include A
Confession of Faith, of the Severall Congregations or Churches of Christ in
London, which are Commonly (though Unjustly) called Anabaptists (1644), the
formularies produced by the Westminster Assembly and the Apologeticall
Narration (1643) of its dissenting members, and the Savoy Declaration of Faith
and Order (1658) of the Independents. From its inception in the early 1650s
Quakerism was extraordinarily adept at making repeated use of the press to
disseminate its message in occasional, usually brief, broadsides, tracts, proph­
ecies, diatribes, and personal testimonies by a wide range of male and female
authors. Margaret Fox challenged patriarchal prejudice head-on by arguing in
Women’s Speaking Justified (1666) that women are as entitled as men to a public

19 On this press campaign, see N.H. Keeble, ‘Rewriting the Public Narrative: The Publishing
Career of Richard Baxter, 1662–1696’, in Tessa Whitehouse and N.H. Keeble, eds, Textual
Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Oxford, 2019), pp. 97–113.
20 On Marvell’s interaction with nonconformity, see Johanna Harris and N.H. Keeble, ‘Marvell
and Nonconformity’, in Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton, eds, The Oxford Handbook of
Marvell (Oxford, 2019), ch. 9.
21 For Wild, see English Nonconformist Poetry, ed. George Southcombe, 3 vols (London, 2012),
passim.
22 On Alsop, see R.A. Beddard, ‘Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Dissent’, Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 24 (1973), 161–84.
23 For Wallis, see Thomas Charlton, ‘Continuity and Change in English Radical Writing,
1659–1675’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005), pp. 164–75; Keeble, Literary Culture,
pp. 106–8; and for him, Wither and Marvell, Stephen Bardle, The Literary Underground in the
1660s (Oxford, 2012).
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 359

voice (and so, implicitly, to publish).24 Even Quakerism, however, finally

­produced a comprehensive and systematic doctrinal statement in Robert
Barclay’s Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1678). In short, it was through
print that the identities of the evolving denominations of Dissent were defined
and defended.

‘ THE SCHO OL OF CHRIST ’

Or, more accurately, through the dissemination and reading of print publica-
tions. The reception of their texts concerned nonconformist authors quite as
much as their composition. They were actively engaged in promoting the dis-
tribution and readership of their works. Early nonconformity was insistently
bookish, determined to increase literacy and the habit of reading, presenting
both as religious duties enabling believers to study the Bible and to benefit from
the wealth of religious works available. The godly should ‘be much in Reading’.
Baxter advised parents ‘By all means let children be taught to read, if you are
never so poor, and whatever shift you make’. To this end, Bunyan’s A Book for
Boys and Girls (1686) included an alphabet and numerical tables and Benjamin
Keach published Instructions for Children ([1664?]).25 To reach their intended
market, nonconformist publications were often cheaply produced and sold at
the lowest prices.26 Bunyan’s first wife came from a poor family, but texts were
not beyond its reach: she brought with her as dowry two of the century’s best-
sellers: Lewis Bayley’s Practise of Pietie (1612) and Arthur Dent’s Plaine Mans
Path-way (1601).27 Ministers frequently gave away copies of their own books, or
arranged with stationers to sell them more cheaply by forgoing any income
from the sales, as did Baxter. Reading aloud within families or to groups of
neighbours was encouraged, as was lending, bequeathing books, and establishing
libraries.28 This mission was exemplified in the 1670s in the translation and
publication work of the Welsh Trust and of Thomas Gouge, who, after his

24 Camb. Hist., pp. 70–5. On publication by Quaker women, see Kate Peters, Print Culture and
the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), esp. pp. 121–40; Michelle Lise Tarter and Catie Gill, eds,
New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 (Oxford, 2018).
25 Baxter, Christian Directory, pp. 580, 548 (repeated on p. 582); Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works,
VI, pp. 194–6. This topic is admirably and comprehensively treated by Andrew Cambers, Godly
Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England (Cambridge, 2011).
26 For examples of booksellers’ pricing see Keeble, Literary Culture, pp. 133–5; Tessa Watt,
Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Green, Print and Protestantism,
pp. 445–502.
27 GA, p. 8 §15.
28 Baxter, Christian Directory, pp. 580–3, 586; id., The Poor Man’s Family Book (London, 1674),
pp. 305, 318, 322, 327, 332; id., A Paraphrase on the New Testament (London, 1685), sig. A4; id., An
Apology for the Nonconformists Ministry (London, 1681), pp. 10, 73; Rel. Bax., i. 89, §137(14), ii. 249,
§101(3), iii. 142, §260, iii.159, §288 (IV), iii.190, §69, iii. 191, §74, and appendix vii, pp. 117–18.
360 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

ejection engaged in tireless evangelistic and philanthropic work in Wales,

­giving away ‘many thousand Bibles Printed in Welsh’, printing ‘many thousands
of his own practical Books, and giveth them freely throughout Wales, (at his
own charge)’, and establishing ‘Three hundred or Four hundred Schools’ ‘to
teach Children . . . to read, and the Catechis[m]’,29 believing, like Baxter, that
‘Education is God’s ordinary way for the Conveyance of his Grace, and ought
no more to be set in opposition to the Spirit, than the preaching of the Word’.30
The same interpenetrating educational and religious incentives are evident in
John Eliot’s greatly admired missionary work to the American Indians, which
included the publication of translations into Algonquian of the Bible and of
works of divinity.31
To reach as wide a readership as possible nonconformist texts were ­commonly
explicitly addressed to those styled the ‘vulgar’, that is, to ordinary ­readers. John
Owen’s treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity was ‘written for the Use of
Ordinary Christians’ and so aimed at ‘Plainness and Perspicuity [and] Brevity’.
In his practical and devotional works Baxter ‘laboured to fit all, (or almost all)
for Matter and Manner, to the Capacity of the Vulgar’ and had rather his publi-
cations were ‘numbred with those Bookes that are carryed up and downe the
Country from doore to doore in Pedlers Packs, then with those that lye on
Booksellers Stalls, or are set up in the Libraries of learned Divines’. John Flavel
adopted a style ‘plain, familiar, and easy to be understood by all’. Bunyan could
‘have stepped in to a stile much higher than this in which I have here discoursed’
but preferred to be ‘plain and simple’ and to ‘lay down the thing as it was’.32
This was not only to encourage reading but also to impose on readers a new
responsibility: both the book and the act of reading were being revalued.
Readers, whatever their socio-economic background, were not to be unduly
impressed by the fact of a book’s publication, nor by the reputation of its author.
They were, as Bunyan’s pastor John Gifford taught, to take ‘not up any truth
upon trust, as from this or that or another man or men, but to cry mightily to
God, that he would convince us of the reality thereof ’. In the oft-quoted words
of I Thessalonians 5:21, the godly were themselves to ‘Prove all things, hold fast
that which is good’, to assess, weigh, and analyse evidence before accepting an
author’s contentions. Faith, that is to say, carried the obligation to be a critical
and self-aware reader.33 One of Baxter’s favourite images for believers was of

29 Rel. Bax., iii. 148, §267, iii.190, §73; Camb. Hist., pp. 730–1.
30 Rel. Bax., i. 7, §6(3). On this emphasis in Baxter see further N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter:
Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982), pp. 22–47.
31 Sidney H. Rooy, The Theology of Missions in the Puritan Tradition (Delft, 1965),
pp. 156–241.
32 John Owen, A Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (London,
1669), pp. 213–14; Baxter, True Christianity, p. 120; id., A Treatise of Conversion (London, 1657),
sigs a2–a4v; John Flavel, The Redemption of Time (London, 1683), p. viii; GA, pp. 3–4.
33 GA, p. 37 §117. See further Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 361

the ‘Schollars of Christ’ studiously applying themselves in the ‘Church . . . his

School’ where ministers serve as the ‘Ushers’ and ‘School-masters’ and the
Bible as the ‘Grammer’. For these ‘schollars’ he frequently included in his works
lists of recommended reading, the most extensive running to many hundreds
of titles, which, though they ‘may seem too many’, still constitute only a ‘poor
man’s library’, ‘few to a full and rich and full Library’.34

‘ THESE FANTASTIC TERRORS OF SECT AND SCHISM’

A reading public and the free expression of personal commitment and individ-
ual aspiration were not at all to the liking of early modern governments, which
regarded all this press activity with deep suspicion. The history of early non-
conformity is in part a history of its struggle with governing elites seeking to
control a developing public sphere, that is, to control the press. There was noth-
ing novel about this. From its inception printing had had to contend with gov-
ernment attempts to restrict its output. Laws on defamation, libel, slander,
sedition, and treason proved very serviceable in dealing with printed works
deemed critical of, or disruptive to, the state: very substantial fines and terms of
imprisonment, and even banishment, were risked by printers who produced,
booksellers who disseminated and authors who wrote what were deemed sub-
versive texts. In addition, however, there developed an elaborate apparatus of
pre-publication censorship. Essentially, every legally published title required
prior approval (that is, a licence to publish) from an appointed censor (gener-
ally an episcopalian cleric), to be entered in the register of the Stationers’
Company, and to be printed on a legal press.35
The likelihood of finding a sympathetic licenser among the Bishop of
London’s chaplains (with whom after 1662 nonconformists had chiefly to deal)
was slim. Their role was to safeguard the ecclesiastical status quo. It is no sur-
prise to find Baxter’s Cure of Church-Divisions refused a licence by the Samuel
Parker who, while Gilbert Sheldon’s chaplain and a censor, appeared in print
as an uncompromising defender of the monarch’s absolute supremacy over
­private consciences and as a remorseless advocate of persecution to enforce
conformity. One of Andrew Marvell’s targets in The Rehearsal Transpros’d
(1672) was the partisan licensing policy of Parker and his fellow chaplain

34 Baxter, Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor (London, 1656), pp. 59, 324; id., Compassionate
Counsel to All Young-Men (London, 1681), p. 96; id., Christian Directory, pp. 921–8.
35 This apparatus is reproduced in Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott, eds., Censorship and the
Press, 1580–1720, 4 vols (London, 2009) and discussed in: Frederick Siebert, Freedom of the Press
in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, IL, 1952); Cyndia Clegg’s three volumes on Press Censorship in
Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England (Cambridge, 1997, 2001, 2008); Keeble, Literary
Culture, pp. 91–126; Martin Dzelzainis, The Flower in the Panther: Print and Censorship in England
1662–1695 (Oxford, in preparation).
362 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Thomas Tomkins, like Parker a polemicist against nonconformity. Of these

‘two Say-masters of Orthodoxy . . . all Theology must ask License’. The result is
not the authorization of sound doctrine but ‘a more authoriz’d way of libelling’
while those libelled must keep silent.36 However, precisely because censorship
was left to individual judgement, there was flexibility and inconsistency in the
system. Thomas Grigg, chaplain to Bishop Humphrey Henchman, told Baxter
that his manuscripts would be turned down even when the same material
would have been licensed from an unexceptionable author. However, the book
Grigg refused, Directions for Weak Distempered Christians, subsequently
appeared in 1669, duly licensed. The Cure, which Parker rejected, was author-
ized two years later by Henchman’s chaplain Robert Grove and published in
1670, to whom Baxter made grateful acknowledgement as ‘the only Man that
Licenseth my Writings for the Press’ since ‘being Silenced, Writing is the far
greatest part of my remaining Service to God for his Church, and without the
Press my Writings would be in vain’.37 Furthermore, licensers were, like every-
one else, subject to pressure from above. Owen in 1668 acknowledged that it
was ‘through the countenance of [the] Favour’ of Secretary Morice that his
works ‘received Warrant to pass freely in the world’. It was also commonly
believed that a guinea would do the trick: Marvell ironically hoped that Parker
had ‘payd his Fees’ for his imprimatur.38
Pre-publication censorship briefly collapsed in the early 1640s but the Long
Parliament quickly found that it had no more liking for a free press than had
earlier regimes and by an ordinance of 14 June 1643 licensing of texts before
publication was re-instituted.39 This was the immediate occasion of Milton’s
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing
(1644), which construed a free press, the availability of cheap print, and pamph­
let­eer­ing as essential marks of a free and Christian commonwealth:
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much
writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous
thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirr’d up. . . What some
lament of, we rather should rejoyce at.40
Milton’s plea wonderfully captures the disputatious ferment of the revolutionary
years but it had no effect on governing elites, not during the Interregnum and
certainly not at the Restoration, when the Licensing Act (1662) re-imposed the
old press controls.41 This was especially galling since it prevented nonconformist

36 Marvell, Prose Works, I, pp. 291, 292.

37 Rel. Bax., i.123, §211(2), iii. 61, §§137, 140 and iii.86, §186.
38 John Owen, Exercitation on the Epistle to the Hebrews (London, 1668), sig. A2; Marvell, Prose
Works, 1: 67.
39 Kemp and McElligott, Press Censorship, II, pp. 72–5.
40 Milton, Prose Works, II, p. 554.
41 Kemp and McElligott, Press Censorship, III, pp. 13–19.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 363

writers from publicly explaining themselves: ‘men do . . . importune me to

­publish the reasons of my Non-conformity, when they know that the Law
­forbiddeth it, and there is no expectation of procuring a Licence’ wrote Baxter;
‘It may be some small Pamphlet may with much a do creep out; but so cannot
any thing that is full and satisfactory: Our Cause is a meer Stranger to our
Accusers . . . because we cannot have leave to print it’.42 It was only with the tem-
porary lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 that his apologetic series of tracts
initiated by The Nonconformists Plea for Peace began to appear, and that he
could print his argument that prelacy is ‘the diseasing tumour of the church’ in
his Church-history of the Government of Bishops (1680) and its sequel, The True
History of Councils Enlarged (1682). Vincent Alsop’s Anti-sozzo (1675), an exercise
in Marvellian irony directed at William Sherlock’s The Knowledge of Jesus Christ
(1675), was perforce unlicensed, but in 1680 no licence was needed for
The Mischief of Impositions, his defence of nonconformity against Edward
Stillingfleet’s The Mischief of Separation (1680), though it was still anonymous.
The nonconformist book trade had one very particular adversary: Roger
L’Estrange. His attitude is tersely summed up in the subtitle to his reply to the
Presbyterian John Corbet’s Interest of England in the Matter of Religion (1660):
The Holy Cheat (1662). Showing none of the politic restraint towards the
Presbyterians displayed in general by the restored regime immediately after
1660, in a series of heated anti-Presbyterian tracts, culminating in Toleration
Discuss’d (1663), he insisted on the points he would reiterate tirelessly until
1688: that the Restoration was not due to Presbyterian assistance; that the non-
conformists were factious and schismatic; that 1641–2 showed what was really
in their minds; that nothing less than their complete suppression would secure
the realm; and that, since nonconformists were hypocritical subversives, to
allow them the freedom of the press was the greatest folly. In A Memento (1662)
he claimed that ‘Libells were not only the Forerunners, but in a high Degree, the
Causes of our late Troubles’, and now ‘this Kingdom, at This Instant [is] labouring
under the same Distempers; the Presse as Busie, and as Bold; Sermons as
­factious; Pamphlets as seditious . . . and Scandalous Reports against the King and
State, are as current now as they were twenty years agoe’.43 In short, 1662 might
go the way of 1642.
To prevent this, in Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of
the Press (1663) he argued for the establishment of a formal office of Surveyorship
of the Press on the grounds that the Stationers’ Company is incapable of
ef­fect­ive­ly policing its own members. ‘There have been Printed, and Reprinted’
since the Restoration ‘not so few as a Hundred Schismatical Pamphlets’ of which
‘The Instruments’ are ‘Ejected Ministers, Booksellers and Printers’; no less than
‘near Thirty Thousand Copies of Farewel-Sermons’ have appeared ‘in Defiance

42 Baxter, A Defence of the Principles of Love (London, 1671), pp. 27–8; Rel. Bax., appendix V,
p. 109.
43 L’Estrange, A Memento (London, 1662), pp. 6–7.
364 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of the Law’; ‘Scarce any one Regicide or Traytor has been brought to Publique
Justice . . . whom either the Pulpit hath not Canonized for a Saint, or the Press
Recommended for a Patriot, and Martyr’. L’Estrange believed, in fact, in the
existence of a well-organized publishing underground which held ‘Intelligence
Abroad by the means of Posts, Carryers, Hackney-Coachmen, Boatmen, and
Marriners’ and, ‘for fear of Interceptions’, corresponded ‘by False Names, and
Private Tokens’.44 His campaign brought its reward: on 15 August 1663 a warrant
was issued ‘for erecting the office of Surveyor of printing and printing presses’,
appointing Roger L’Estrange surveyor, ‘With power to search for and seize all
treasonable and schismatical books and papers’.45
The pamphlets L’Estrange had already published made it abundantly clear
whom he would suspect to be the authors of such books and papers. It was his
animus and zeal that made censorship and press control during the Restoration
period so vindictively obsessed with nonconformists.46 Just how menacing
L’Estrange could be is illustrated by an episode in 1672 recorded by Baxter.
Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d had answered Samuel Parker’s
preface to John Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy from
the Presbyterian Charge of Popery (1672) in a manner ‘so exceeding Jocular, as
thereby procured abundance of Readers, and Pardon to the Author’, but Baxter
planned his own answer to the Vindication since it animadverted on his The
Grotian Religion Discovered (1658):
But Mr. [Nevill] Simmons, my Bookseller, came to me, and told me, That Roger
Lestrange, the Over-seer of the Printers, sent for him, and told him, That he heard
I was Answering Bishop Bromhall [sic], and Swore to him most vehemently, that if
I did it, he would ruin him and me, and perhaps my Life should be brought in
question: And I perceived the Bookseller durst not Print it, and so I was fain to
cast it by.47

CONFRONTING THE ‘ANTICHRISTIAN ARMORY’

Such interventions by L’Estrange only heightened the atmosphere of risk and

menace created for the nonconformist press by the pre-publication licensing
system, inefficient though it may have been,48 and the possibility of legal action

44 L’Estrange, Considerations and Proposals (London, 1663), sigs A3–A3v, p. 6 (Kemp and
McElligott, Press Censorship, III, pp. 24–5, 32).
45 Kemp and McElligott, Press Censorship, III, p. 50 (CSPD 1663–64, p. 240). In February 1662
L’Estrange had been less formally appointed to the role (CSPD 1661–62, pp. 282–3).
46 On L’Estrange’s pursuit of nonconformist printers and writers see Keeble, Literary Culture,
pp. 102–10, and for his contribution more generally, Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch, eds,
Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Aldershot, 2008).
47 Rel. Bax., iii. 102, §221 (cf. iii. 196, §§78–9).
48 Camb. Hist., pp. 560–7, is sceptical that censorship in fact inhibited the publishing industry,
as is Jason McElligott, ‘The Book Trade, Licensing, and Censorship’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers,
ed., The Oxford Handbook of Literature of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012), pp. 142–9.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 365

against those involved in the production of works deemed seditious. Exceptional

though it was, the execution of the printer John Twyn in 1664 demonstrated
just how real the risk could be.49 A number of measures were adopted in
response. The practice of manuscript copying and circulation remained an
available, if limited, form of publishing for proscribed material. Heterodox
works, such as Milton’s theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, might
evade the censor by remaining in manuscript. Most of Marvell’s political and
religious satires were available only in anonymous manuscript copies until the
end of the century. Marvell himself may have passed to Sir Edward Harley
handwritten instalments of The Growth of Popery. Charles Morton, who ran the
principal Congregational academy in London at Newington Green, is known
to have written a republican Utopia entitled Eutaxia that circulated among his
friends in manuscript but was never printed and has not survived.50 The
Pilgrim’s Progress, begun probably in 1668 and completed in 1671, was shared
with friends before its publication in 1678; the seven-year delay was perhaps
due in part to apprehensions about its reception by the authorities.51 Posthumous
publication in this period often implies authorial self-censorship by withholding
material from the press. Baxter’s autobiographical papers, begun in the 1660s,
were published as Reliquiæ Baxterianæ only in 1696. Bunyan’s inflammatory
Relation of His Imprisonment remained in manuscript until 1765. This, however,
was far from a foolproof safeguard. ‘Publication’ need not necessitate print and
private papers might be seized for incriminating evidence. The diary of the ejected
minister Richard Steele was seized in April 1665, prompting Philip Henry to make
erasures in his own diary and henceforth to be ‘more Cautious’. Roger Morrice
wrote passages of his unpublished Entring Book in shorthand for safety’s sake.52
In printed works, a variety of rhetorical and allusive strategies might allow
oblique and implicit expression of meanings that could be denied if need be.
Fiction and allegory were especially serviceable in this respect: is it worldliness
in general or Restoration London that is represented in Vanity Fair? When for
nonconformists the ‘Bloodmen’ in The Holy War (1682), the ‘chief strength’ of
Diabolus’ army, would so inescapably recall their persecutors, is not the
­allegory’s encouragement to resist the forces of Antichrist inseparable from
encouragement to resist the Restoration forces of law and order?53 It was upon

49 On the case of Twyn see Kemp and McElligott, Press Censorship, III, pp. 59–80; Charlton,
‘Continuity and Change’, pp. 1–4, 101–10.
50 Gordon Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford,
2007); Marvell, Prose Works, II, p. 186; Samuel Palmer, A Vindication of the . . . Learning . . . of the
Dissenters (London, 1705), pp. 52–3.
51 PP, p. 2; Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, pp. 211, 216–18, 226.
52 Philip Henry, Diaries, ed. M.H. Lee (London, 1882), p. 173; Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and
the Puritan Whigs (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 128–9; Douglas Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary
Politics (New Brunswick, NJ, 1969), p. 369.
53 PP, pp. 88–9; John Bunyan, The Holy War, eds Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford,
1980), p. 228. For readings of Bunyan in this way see Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and
Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford, 1988), pp. 215–21, 243–50.
366 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

precisely such points of textual interpretation that Baxter’s conversation with

Grigg turned. When Grigg ‘askt me, whether I did not think my self that
Nonconformists would interpret . . . as against the Times’ what Baxter had writ-
ten ‘of the Prosperity of the Wicked, and the Adversity of the Godly’, Baxter
replied: ‘Yes, I thought they would; and so they do all those Passages of Scripture
which speak of Persecution and the Suffering of the Godly; but I hoped Bibles
should be licensed for all that’. It seems not so: the evidence for Baxter’s trial for
seditious libel in 1685 was provided by his glosses on the hypocrisy of Pharisees
in his Paraphrase on the New Testament (1684), which were deemed by Judge
Jeffreys to be aimed at the Church of England: ‘BAXTER for Bishops . . . That’s a
merry Conceit indeed!’ was his response to defence counsel.54
Unlicensed publication avoided, if not the risk of prosecution after publica-
tion, at least the risk of works not being printed. Anonymous and unlicensed
publication was commonest among more radical nonconformists, particularly
the Quakers; their incidence steadily decreases through Baptists, Independents,
and Presbyterians as the distance from separatist Dissent increases. The Quaker
leader George Fox was habitually anonymous in his (literally) hundreds of
tracts. When William Penn was committed to the Tower for the unlicensed
Sandy Foundation Shaken (1668) he promptly took advantage of his imprison-
ment to repeat the offence: the classic No Cross, No Crown appeared in 1669,
unlicensed and with a blank imprint. The Baptist Benjamin Keach was
­frequently anonymous, on occasion his imprints identifying him as his own
publisher (‘Printed, and sold by the author’). Only eight first editions of the
forty or so titles published by Bunyan appear to have been properly licensed,55
including the two parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but neither Mr Badman (1680)
nor The Holy War, both of which might be readily construed as deeply
­critical of the social values and political practices of the Restoration. The
Congregationalist leader John Owen was far oftener anonymous than Baxter—
fifteen times after 1660. Baxter was accustomed ‘to put my Name to my Writing’,
was ‘not used to publish any thing unlicensed’, and did not think it ‘fit to break
the Law of Printing without necessity’. When the Presbyterian Oliver Heywood
sent a manuscript for publication ‘if it may pass the presse’ he implied he would
proceed no further were it refused.56
In satiric works, the Licensing Act and the cat-and-mouse game with the
authorities might become part of the rhetorical strategy of the texts. The
‘Cobbler of Gloucester’ Ralph Wallis, who in the 1660s adopted the scurrilously
anti-clerical and linguistically unruly manner of ‘Martin Marprelate’, derided

54 Rel. Bax., i.123, §211(2); Kemp and McElligott, Press Censorship, III, p. 300.
55 Greaves, Glimpses of Glory, 637–41.
56 Baxter, Catholick Communion Doubly Defended (London, 1681), p. 29; id., A Defence of the
Principles of Love (London, 1671), pt i., p. 40; Oliver Heywood, His Autobiographies, Diaries,
Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols (Brighouse and Bingley, 1882–5), III, p. 224
(and cf. III, p. 335).
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 367

‘Crackfart’ L’Estrange and his inability to silence him with his ‘Antichristian
Armory’ of ‘Gate-house and Gallows, and Warrants granted forth for my
apprehension’.57 In his printed but unlicensed prose satires The Rehearsal
Transpros’d and Mr Smirke (1676) Marvell repeatedly ridiculed the impotency
of the censors and the absurdities of the system they attempt to operate. In The
Holy War Bunyan caricatured Roger L’Estrange in the figure of Mr Filth.58
Characteristically, the Quakers adopted their own strategy, ignoring the
Licensing Act but from 1673 requiring Friends’ intended publications to be first
submitted to the Second-day’s Morning Meeting for approval and their titles to
be recorded in order to ensure ‘that young Friends’ books that was sent to be
printed might be stood by’. The Meeting retained copies of every Quaker and
anti-Quaker publication and not only authorized publication and safeguarded
copyright but discussed details of format and setting, even on occasions
marking up copy for the press.59

THE NONCONFORMIST PRESS

Unlicensed work had perforce to be surreptitiously printed, either on secret

presses or secretly on registered presses. Such clandestine operations were
almost as old as printing itself. William Tyndale had issued works from
mainland Europe with false imprints in the 1520s, as did John Bale, both under
Henry VIII and during exile under Mary. An English New Testament was
printed at Geneva by Protestant exiles in 1557, subsequently utilized in the 1560
‘Breeches Bible’ (so-called from its translation of Gen. 3:7), also printed at
Geneva (whence ‘Geneva Bible’), the first English translation to appear in
roman type (rather than black letter).60 The trade continued such that in the
1590s an Overseer was appointed to improve the effectiveness of searches at
ports for illegal book imports. The mockingly scurrilous, subversively parodic,
and colloquially inventive anti-episcopal tracts by ‘Martin Marprelate’ (1588–9)
were printed surreptitiously by a committed Puritan printer, Robert Waldegrave,
on an illegal mobile press, as in the 1640s were those of the Leveller leader John
Lilburne. During the early seventeenth century there was a steady stream of
Puritan publications from presses in Holland; in the late 1630s Lilburne’s prison

57 [Ralph Wallis], More News from Rome (London, 1666), sig. A4.
58 Marvell, Prose Works, I, pp. 45–6, II, pp. 51–2, 56; Bunyan, Holy War, p. 312, with n. on p. 257.
59 William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, second edn rev. Henry Cadbury
(York, 1979), pp. 279–81; Thomas P. O’Malley, ‘The Press and Quakerism’, Journal of the Friends
Historical Society, 54 (1979), 169–84 (at 173–4).
60 Anthony Hope, ‘The Printed Book Trade in Response to Luther’, in Vincent Gillespie and
Susan Powell, eds., A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558 (Woodbridge,
2014), pp. 272–89; John N. King, English Reformation Literature (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 21,
72, 418.
368 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

tracts were printed in Amsterdam and smuggled into England.61 Illicit printing
on this scale did not survive into the Restoration. The Licensing Act’s restriction
of printing to Oxford, Cambridge, and London seems not to have been evaded,
though there were secret presses in the capital. In 1668 one of L’Estrange’s spies
was confident that a secret press run by John Darby, his wife Joan, and Ann
Brewster was in ‘one of five houses in Blue Anchor Alley; but by reason of so
many back doors, bye-holes, and passages, and the sectarians so swarming
thereabouts, I have been afraid of being discovered in scouting’.62
The imprints of works illegally produced would generally, and understandably,
admit to no more than the year of publication, if that. Sometimes they were
deliberately misleading. ‘Printed at Amsterdam’ claim the imprints of the 1677
and 1679 editions of Marvell’s Growth of Popery, disguising their London printing,
as did Robert Ferguson, the probable author of its unlicensed and anonymous
second part in 1682, with the imprint ‘Cologne: printed for Philliotus’. The 1698
edition of Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs, ‘Printed at Vivay in the Canton of Bern’,
was almost certainly printed in London, probably by Darby. Sometimes title
pages tauntingly parodied the imprints of legal publications. The Nativity of Sir
John Presbyter (1645), one of the six linguistically and satirically inventive Martin
Mar-Priest tracts of the 1640s by the Leveller and General Baptist Richard
Overton, supposedly written by the son of Martin Marprelate, but now directed
not against bishops on behalf of Presbyterianism but against the Presbyterians
of the Westminster Assembly, was ‘Licensed by Rowland Rattle-Priest, a terrible
IMPRIMATUR’. His An Arrow against All Tyrants (1646) was ‘Printed on
the back-side of the Cyclopian Mountains, by Martin Claw-Clergy, Printer to the
reverend Assembly of Divines, and are to be sould at the signe of the Subjects
Liberty, right opposite to persecuting Court’. Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d
was initially printed ‘for the assigns of John Calvin and Theodore Beza’ and
Ralph Wallis’s More News from Rome (1666) was ‘Imprinted at London for the
Author, for the only benefit of his Wife and Children’.63
These illicit publications were produced by a network of committed radical
printers and stationers operating in London in defiance of the authorities
­constituting, in effect, an underground publishing industry, much as L’Estrange
believed.64 In the early 1660s he relentlessly pursued those he dubbed ‘the
Confederate Stationers’, Giles Calvert, Thomas Brewster, and Livewell Chapman.

61 Joseph L. Black, ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge, 2008), esp. pp. xlvi–lvi;
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 118–21, 391–6; Leona Rostenberg, The Minority
Press (Nieuwkoop, 1971), pp. 170–86, 190–8; Pauline Gregg, Freeborn John: a Biography of John
Lilburne (1961; rpt London: Dent, 1986), pp. 69, 119, 136–40; Camb. Hist., pp. 737–41.
62 CSPD 1667–68, p. 319.
63 Marvell, Prose Works, I, p. 41, II, pp. 204, 214, 215, 216; Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the
Watchtower, ed. Blair Worden, Camden 4th ser. 21 (London, 1978), pp. 18–21.
64 Richard Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil (New York, 1986), pp. 207–25, and Enemies Under His
Feet (Stanford, CA, 1990), pp. 167–90; Timothy Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press in
England, 1660–1688’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1977); John S.T. Hetet, ‘A Literary
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 369

These former publishers of Quaker, Ranter, Digger, Fifth Monarchist,

Behmenist, and mystical tracts celebrated the stand of the ejected ministers by
issuing their farewell sermons;65 they commemorated the restored regime’s
most prominent enemies as victims and martyrs by publishing the regicides’
Speeches and Prayers (1660); they delivered in A Phenix: or the Solemn League
and Covenant (1661) a riposte to the public burning of the Covenant by publi-
cizing Charles II’s acutely embarrassing acceptance of the Covenant at his
Scottish coronation in 1651; and they refuted royalist interpretations of recent
providences in their book of portents, Annus Mirabilis: or the Year of Prodigies
(1661), reputedly the work of the Baptist Henry Jessey. L’Estrange had broken
the group by 1664 but their work was continued by Francis Smith, a General
Baptist and in 1672 licensed preacher who, despite a bewildering succession of
arrests, examinations, and imprisonments for publishing allegedly subversive
works, survived to become a prominent Whig publisher during the Popish Plot
and Exclusion Crisis; by Calvert’s widow Elizabeth, who died a Baptist, and
Brewster’s widow Ann; and by John Darby and his wife Joan, the widow of the
printer Simon Dover, an associate of the ‘Confederates’.66 This collaborative,
and often familial, dissenting commitment is evident too among Quakers
­publishers. The most eminent among them, Andrew Sowle, was actively sup-
ported by his wife Jane and daughter Tace, who succeeded to the business in the
early 1690s.67
By the end of the century, however, nonconformist stationers had become a
mainstay of their profession through the work of men such as Benjamin Alsop,
Brabazon Aylmer, Thomas Cockerill, John Dunton, John Lawrence (or
Laurence), Dorman Newman, Nathaniel Ranew, Jonathan Robinson, William
Rogers, and Thomas Parkhurst, in 1703 elected Master of the Stationers’
Company, described at the time as ‘the most eminent Presbyterian Bookseller,
in the Three Kingdoms’ and by a recent historian as ‘the crucial lynchpin in
presbyterian networks’.68 These men had a publishing policy as marked, though
quite different from, that of the ‘Confederates’ or Quaker stationers. Their lists
offered works chiefly in the latitudinarian, low church, Baxterian, and
Presbyterian traditions—authors such as Isaac Barrow, William Bates, Edward

Underground in Restoration England: Printers and Dissenters . . . 1660─89’ (PhD thesis, University
of Cambridge, 1987).
65 David Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day (Manchester, 2007), esp. ch. 4.
66 Keeble, Literary Culture, pp. 121–2, where see p. 123 for further examples of wives and
­fam­ilies supporting nonconformist printing and publishing.
67 Russell S. Mortimer, ‘The First Century of Quaker Printers, Part I’, Journal of the Friends
Historical Society, 40 (1948), 47–9.
68 John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (London, 1705), p. 281; Cambers, Godly
Reading, p. 131. For these men, and the stationers mentioned earlier, see H.R. Plomer, Dictionaries
of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work . . . 1557–1775 (London, 1977) and ODNB.
370 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Fowler, John Howe, Thomas Manton, John Tillotson.69 They transmitted the
seventeenth-century tradition to eighteenth-century Dissent by publishing in
the 1680s and 90s handsome folios and multi-volume editions of the works and
memoirs of recently deceased nonconformist leaders.70 They often associated
in large-scale commercial ventures: the five-volume edition of Thomas
Manton’s One Hundred and Ninety Sermons (1681–1701) was initially under-
taken jointly by Alsop, Aylmer, Parkhurst, and Robinson. Dunton joined with
Parkhurst, Robinson, and John Lawrence to issue Baxter’s Reliquiæ (1696).
Newman and Alsop, who had been partners in the production of Bunyan’s Holy
War, that same year were joined by Cockerill in undertaking the publication of
Stephen Charnock’s Several Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of
God. The following year, the Alsop–Aylmer–Parkhurst–Robinson col­lab­or­ation
that had produced Manton’s sermons was joined by Cockerill and Newman to
publish the Annotations upon the Holy Bible of the Presbyterian Matthew Poole.
Such partnerships spread the investment and the commercial risk, as did the
practice of subscription publishing, which these same men pioneered, thereby
securing advance capital and sales. Manton’s sermons on Psalm 119 were adver-
tised to subscribers for £1 4s., ‘10s. in hand towards the carrying on the said
work; and the remaining 14s. upon the delivery of the said Book’.71 This made
good business sense, but the determination of nonconformist stationers not to
be silenced had achieved more than commercial success: as the indomitability
of nonconformity contributed to the creation of a public sphere of open debate,
so to the resilience of nonconformist stationers was in no small part due that
other essential of Enlightenment, a free press.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
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Achinstein, Sharon, ‘Texts in Conflict’. in N.H. Keeble, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 50–68.
Achinstein, Sharon, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003).
Appleby, David, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration
Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007).
Bardle, Stephen, The Literary Underground in the 1660s (Oxford, 2012).
Barnard, John, McKenzie, D.F., and Bell, Maureen, eds, The Cambridge History of the
Book in Britain: vol. IV: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002).

69 Wing, Short-Title Catalogue, vol. 4, indexes printers, publishers and booksellers against
titles.
70 For the political and cultural context of this partisan publishing programme see N.H. Keeble,
‘Reliquiae Baxterianae and the Shaping of the Seventeenth Century’, in Edward Jones, ed., A
Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early
Modern Texts (London, 2015), pp. 229–48 (229–36).
71 Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues 1668–1703, 3 vols (London, 1903–6) I, p. 390.
 The Print Culture of Early Nonconformity 371

Baxter, Richard, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, eds N.H. Keeble, John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and
Tom Charlton, 5 vols (Oxford, forthcoming 2020).
Black, Joseph L., ed., The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge, 2008).
Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1960).
Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford,
1962).
Cambers, Andrew, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England
(Cambridge, 2011).
Charlton, Thomas, ‘Continuity and Change in English Radical Writing, 1659–1675’
(PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005).
Crist, Timothy, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press in England, 1660–1688’ (PhD
thesis, University of Cambridge, 1977).
Greaves, Richard L., Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA,
2002).
Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000).
Harris, Johanna and Keeble, N.H., ‘Marvell and Nonconformity’, in Martin Dzelzainis
and Edward Holberton, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Marvell (Oxford, 2019),
pp. 14–63.
Hetet, John S.T., ‘A Literary Underground in Restoration England: Printers and
Dissenters . . . 1660–89’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1987).
Keeble, N.H., Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford, 1982).
Keeble, N.H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century
England (Leicester, 1987).
Keeble, N.H., ‘Reliquiae Baxterianae and the Shaping of the Seventeenth Century’, in
Edward Jones, ed., A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books,
and the Production of Early Modern Texts (London, 2015), pp. 229–48.
Keeble, N.H., ‘Rewriting the Public Narrative: The Publishing Career of Richard Baxter,
1662–1696’, in Tessa Whitehouse and N.H. Keeble, eds, Textual Transformations:
Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Oxford, 2019), pp. 97–113.
Kemp, Geoff and McElligott, Jason, eds, Censorship and the Press, 1580–1720, 4 vols
(London, 2009).
Knoppers, Laura Lunger, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Literature of the English
Revolution (Oxford, 2012).
Lynch, Kathleen, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone
World (Oxford, 2012).
Marvell, Andrew, The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, eds Annabel Patterson, Nicholas
von Maltzahn, and N.H. Keeble, 2 vols (New Haven, CT, 2003).
Milton, John, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don Wolfe, 8 vols
(New Haven, CT, 1953–82).
Peters, Kate, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005).
Rostenberg, Leona, The Minority Press (Nieuwkoop, 1971).
Siebert, Frederick, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, IL, 1952).
Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991).
Wing, Donald, ed., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed . . . 1641–1700, second edn
newly rev. and eds John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson, 4 vols (New York,
1988–98).
 Part IV
Congregations and Living
 17

The Bible and Theology

John Coffey

On 20 June 1567, eight leaders of a London Separatist congregation were

­cross-examined before the Court of High Commission. They had been appre-
hended the day before, meeting in Plumbers’ Hall under the pretext of a wed-
ding celebration. Now they stood before the Bishop of London (Edmund
Grindal), the Lord Mayor, and the Dean of Westminster. Grindal was perplexed
as to why the Separatists were ‘severing yourselves from the society of other
Christians’. The Church of England had its faults, but it had the hallmarks of a
true church: the word was preached, the sacraments administered, and good
order kept. The dean told the Separatists that they were out of line with the
magisterial Reformers: ‘All the learned men in Europe are against you’. The
Lord Mayor declared that they were refusing obedience to ‘the Queen’s Majesty’s
good laws’. The Separatists were unmoved. They took their stand on Scripture
alone. A true church, they insisted, must be ordered ‘according to God’s word’.
The New Testament knew nothing of clerical vestments and ceremonies. If
Christ was to be king of his church, men must ‘suffer him to reign with the
sceptre of his word’. The Separatists reverenced the Protestant martyrs and
the Reformers, but the rule they followed was biblical: ‘We will be judged by
the word of God.’ The bishops, they alleged, ‘cannot maintain their doings
by the scriptures’, and so resorted ‘to punish them that they cannot overcome
by scripture’.1
This confrontation between Bishop Grindal and the Separatists dramatizes
the crisis of authority that ensued in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.
Luther too had taken his stand on Holy Scripture, encapsulated in the Latin
slogan, sola scriptura. Only Scripture was an infallible authority. At the Diet of
Worms in 1521, he famously declared: ‘Unless I am convinced by the testimony

1 First published in A Parte of a Register (Middleburgh, 1593), the congregation’s account of

the High Commission examination was republished in The Remains of Edmund Grindal, ed.
W. Nicholson (Cambridge, 1843), pp. 201–16, and in Protestant Nonconformist Texts: Volume I:
1550–1700, ed. R. Tudur Jones (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 23–33.

John Coffey, The Bible and Theology In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0018
376 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in
councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contra-
dicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my con-
science is captive to the word of God.’2 Luther’s Roman Catholic critics insisted
that his stress on individual conscience as the interpreter of Holy Scripture was
a recipe for chaos. Any appeal to the authority of the Bible raised the issue of
interpretation. As the Dean of Westminster asked the Separatists: ‘But who will
you have to be judge of the word of God?’ The Separatists retorted: ‘Why, that
was the saying of the papists in Queen Mary’s time.’ Grindal observed in turn:
‘There has been no heretic but that he hath challenged the word to defend him.’
For the bishop and the dean, the Separatists were being naïve and rigid in their
biblicism. Scripture, Grindal argued, prescribed some things, and proscribed
others, but left various matters to be determined by civil and ecclesiastical
authority. This was the key concept of adiaphora, or ‘things indifferent’. For
the Separatists, however, it was a way of evading the authority of the Bible in
the church.3
The Scripture principle of the Reformers was a powerful generator of reli-
gious dissent. The break with Rome was justified by appeal to sola Scriptura; so
too were separations from mainstream, magisterial Protestantism. Protestant
dissent was authorized by the Bible. Indeed, Dissenters imagined themselves to
be re-enacting the protest of biblical characters: prophets confronting kings,
Daniel in the lion’s den, Christ before Caiaphas or Pontius Pilate, the apostles
before Roman authorities, the persecuted saints of the Book of Revelation
whose blood cried out from under the altar.4 They saw themselves as biblical
outsiders and pilgrims: the nomadic children of Abraham, or the oppressed
children of Israel, escaping out of Egypt and wandering through the Wilderness
to the Promised Land.5
Yet there was more to Protestant dissent than dissent. Dissenters were not
always in oppositional mode, and the Bible was not merely a polemical weapon;
it was also a devotional aid and a theological resource. So this chapter will think
in broad terms about the Bible culture of post-Reformation dissenters and the
way it shaped their theological imagination. It begins by depicting a biblical
age, one marked by intensive biblical scholarship and mass circulation of the
vernacular Bible. It then considers the biblically grounded theologies of the
Dissenters, and their relation to the wider Reformed tradition. It argues that

2 Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London, 2016), p. 183.
3 For a recent analysis of debates over adiaphora, see Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Debate over
Authority: Adiaphora, the Civil Magistrate, and the Settlement of Religion’, in N.H. Keeble, ed.,
‘Settling the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford, 2014), ch. 1.
4 See John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge,
1993).
5 See N.H. Keeble, ed., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century
England (Leicester, 1987), pp. 263–82.
 The Bible and Theology 377

doctrinal disputes often cut across ecclesiastical lines. Although most Dissenters
were wedded to Reformed orthodoxy, radical Dissenters presented powerful
challenges to Reformed teaching on Scripture, Trinity, predestination, and the
moral law. Finally, the chapter turns to the shared quest for a biblical ec­cle­si­
ology. We shall see that while the practice of biblical study exercised a centri-
petal force, pulling Protestants together around their sacred text, it also had a
centrifugal effect, throwing them outwards into rival factions. Having gathered
around the Word, Protestants quickly fell to arguing over its proper in­ter­pret­
ation. Dissenters would accuse each other, not just conformists, of being insuf-
ficiently biblical. Scripture provided them with a common reference point, a
common language, and thus a powerful sense of affinity. Yet at the same time,
Scripture was a textual battleground.

A BIBLICAL CULTURE

Historians have always known that the Bible mattered in early modern England.
Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, pronounced the Victorian J.R. Green,
‘the English became the people of a book, and that book the Bible’.6 In the
mid-twentieth century, when a student approached the formidable economic
his­tor­ian, Jack Fisher, for a reading list, Fisher reportedly advised: ‘If you really
want to understand the period, go away and read the Bible.’ Another eminent
authority on the era, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill (who had been
raised a Methodist), declared that ‘The Bible was central to the whole life of
the society: we ignore it our peril.’7 The truth of that statement has been docu-
mented by a wealth of scholarship over the past generation. Inspired in part
by the vogue for reception studies, historians and literary critics alike have
explored the biblical construction of literary culture, material culture, gender
relations, political thought, national identity, and many other fields.8

6 J.R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), p. 447.
7 Christopher Hill, The Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993), p. 4.
8 See, for example, Hill, The Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution; Peter Harrison, The
Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998); David Daniel, The Bible in
English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT, 2003); David Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading
the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, CT, 2004); Lori Anne
Ferrell, The Bible and the People (New Haven, CT, 2009); Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish
Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Acsah
Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2010); Tara
Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven,
CT, 2011); Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible
in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015); Mark A. Noll, In the Beginning was the
Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (New York, 2016); Robert Armstrong and
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, eds, The English Bible in the Early Modern World (Leiden, 2018).
378 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

So ubiquitous was the Bible that it cannot be regarded as the property of

Dissenters, or of evangelical Protestants. Scripture had been woven into the
warp and woof of late medieval religious culture, and after the Reformation
Bible production was a major priority of the political and religious establish-
ment. The frontispiece of the Great Bible (1539) depicted Henry VIII handing
the ‘Verbum Dei’ to clergy and laity; the Bishops’ Bible (1568) was the second
authorized version of the English Reformation; and the King James Bible (1611)
was translated ‘by his Majesties special Comandment’. Yet the vernacular Bible
in English was also the work of dissidents, working underground and in exile.
The first full vernacular translation was by John Wycliffe and other Lollards in
the late fourteenth century; the greatest of English Bible translators, William
Tyndale, laboured in exile and was burned at the stake for heresy near Brussels
in 1536; the Geneva Bible (1560), was the product of a team of exiled scholars
(led by William Whittingham) who had fled persecution in Marian England
and taken refuge in the city of Calvin.9
The Geneva Bible proved far more popular than its official rival, the Bishops’
Bible. Printed in accessible roman type, the Geneva was also the first English
Bible to have numbered verses, allowing its readers to navigate their way around
its chapters but also to engage in proof-texting. It was the first Protestant study
Bible, complete with extensive marginal notes, maps, tables, and indexes, and
published in quarto; a compact, portable Bible that one could carry to church,
not an unwieldy folio designed to reside on a lectern. Yet its popularity meant
that it was not merely the Bible of Puritans and nonconformists, but also
the Bible of Shakespeare. Only after 1611 was it superseded by the Authorised
Version (AV), later known as the King James Version (KJV), ironically a trans-
lation first suggested and requested by the Puritan spokesman, John Rainolds,
at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. After a few uncertain decades, the
AV/KJV became the English Bible, though contemporaries would continue to
cite other translations, especially the Geneva. The letters and speeches of Oliver
Cromwell were saturated in Scripture allusions from both the Geneva and the
AV, as were the pronouncements of Governor John Winthrop in Massachusetts
Bay. Cromwell’s friend, Sir Henry Vane the younger, another of the English
Revolution’s major figures, was ‘most familiar with KJV, but used Geneva
Bibles’: when he cited I Corinthians 13, he always wrote that the greatest virtue
was ‘love’ (the Geneva’s word) rather than ‘charity’ (as in the King James).10
The Bible consisted of the Old and New Testaments, but Tudor and Stuart
Protestant Bibles also contained the Apocrypha. This set of inter-testamental
Jewish texts had been included in the Greek Septuagint translation (the version

9 On the formative experience of exile, see John Coffey, ‘Exile and Return in Anglo-American
Puritanism’, in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Early Modern Ethnic and Religious Communities in Exile
(Cambridge, 2017), pp. 289–312.
10 Daniel, The English Bible, p. 475.
 The Bible and Theology 379

cited by New Testament writers) but not in the Hebrew version of the Jewish
Scriptures. As Ariel Hessayon explains, ‘the Apocrypha’s presence in the Bible
and the lectionary prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer was a perennial
grievance for dissenters from the Elizabethan Reformation to the Glorious
Revolution’. The Prayer Book contained over one hundred readings from the
Apocrypha, and the sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles recommended these books
as edifying reading, though not authoritative in establishing doctrine. The
lectionary readings were criticized by the Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright in
his famous debate with the conformist John Whitgift, and Martin Marprelate
demanded the complete removal of the Apocrypha from new printings of
the Bible. When some Puritan printers began to do just that around 1615,
Archbishop Abbot threatened them with a year’s imprisonment. The
Westminster Confession (1646), designed to replace the Thirty-Nine Articles,
declared that ‘The Books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of Divine
inspiration, are no part of the Canon of the Scripture.’ This conviction
ensured that the Apocrypha was not included in the Indian Bible published in
Massachusetts in 1663. At the Restoration, nonconformist ministers objected
to the fact that the revised Book of Common Prayer (1662) ‘added more readings
from the Apocrypha to the lectionary’. While John Bunyan took great comfort
in a verse from the book of Sirach, the Apocrypha was a bone of contention
between conformists and Dissenters.11
Confessional conflict drove erudition, just as war drives technological in­nov­
ation. Tyndale himself was a brilliant linguist who went back to the sources
(ad fontes), using Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament (1516) and
learning biblical Hebrew in order to translate the Old Testament. The greatest
scholars of the age—figures such as Erasmus, Beza, Scaliger, Casaubon, Grotius,
Selden, and Le Clerc—devoted years to biblical criticism, producing monu-
mental works of humanist scholarship that also served specific confessional
and political interests.12 Thousands of less illustrious scholars also pored over
the biblical text. If their work was not quite up to the standards of modern
‘critical exegesis’, neither does it merit dismissal as ‘pre-critical’. Early modern
scholars typically worked on the biblical text in its final form, rather than recon-
structing and dating the sources that lay behind the text (the so-called ‘higher
criticism’), yet in the past generation, there has been a renewed appreciation of
the sophistication of Reformation-era exegesis.13

11 Ariel Hessayon, ‘The Apocrypha in Early Modern England’, in Killeen, Smith and Willie,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, ch. 8, quotation at p. 147.
12 Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of
Letters (Oxford, 2017).
13 An influential defense of this scholarship was mounted by David Steinmetz, ‘The Superiority
of Pre-Critical Exegesis’, Theology Today, 37 (1980), reprinted in Steinmetz, Taking the Long View:
Christian Theology in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2011), ch. 1. See also Richard A. Muller and
John L. Thompson, eds, Biblical Interpretation in the Age of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, MI,
1997); and, for a literary perspective, Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice
380 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Although Protestant Dissent is often associated with the marginalized, we

should not draw too sharp a distinction between establishment elites and popu-
list sectaries. It is true that some of the most famous Dissenting leaders were
of humble origins, if typically skilled artisans: the baptistic Congregationalist
John Bunyan was a tinker, the General Baptist Thomas Grantham had been
apprenticed to a tailor, while the Quaker George Fox had served as an appren-
tice to a shoemaker and trader. Yet other leaders of English Dissent were not
horny-handed artisans, but university graduates. The Elizabethan Separatists
Robert Browne, Henry Barrow, Francis Johnson, and John Penry were all
Cambridge men; so were Jacobean Separatists like John Robinson, and the
Baptist John Smith. Even among the radical sects of the English Revolution, we
find well-educated writers like the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, and the Quakers
Samuel Fisher and Isaac Pennington Jr (son of a Lord Mayor of London).14
The ejected ministers of 1662 were nearly all university graduates; some
had been heads of colleges, and John Owen had been vice-chancellor of
Oxford University.15 A rare exception was Richard Baxter, who despite never
attending university, turned himself into one of the most formidably erudite
of all Puritan divines. Excluded from the universities after the Restoration,
Dissenters were already establishing their own academies from the 1670s,
as well as sending their sons to Reformed universities in Scotland and the
Dutch republic.16 Presbyterians and Congregationalists especially were
committed to the Reformed tradition of the ‘learned ministry’, believing
that clergy should be thoroughly schooled in the biblical languages, as well
as theology, philosophy, and the arts. The New England clergy produced
America’s ‘first substantial corpus of theological writings’. Within a few years
of its founding, the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College
for the training of the clergy, and over the course of the seventeenth century,
‘34 per cent of the New England clergy published at least one tract or trea-
tise’, an astonishingly high proportion that testifies to the bookishness of the
Congregational ministry.17
Because Holy Scripture was the book that really mattered, it is not surprising
that Dissenters of various stripes devoted themselves to biblical commentary.
The Separatist Henry Ainsworth (educated at St John’s College, Cambridge),

and Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA, 1994). For a digest of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century com-
mentary on each book of the Bible, see the series Reformation Commentary on Scripture, gen. ed.
Timothy George, 15 vols to date (Downers Grove, IL, 2011–).
14 See Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution,
1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003).
15 See their biographies in Calamy Revised: Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the
Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–62, ed. A.G. Mathews (Oxford, 1934).
16 On the Dissenting academies see ‘The Dissenting Academies Project’ directed by Isabel
Rivers: http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/research/the-dissenting-academies-project.
17 E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in American: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to
the Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2003), pp. 25–6.
 The Bible and Theology 381

produced a series of Annotations on the Pentateuch and other biblical

books, and the Westminster divines followed suit in the 1640s.18 Numerous
Presbyterian and Congregationalist divines, either before or after their ejec-
tion from the Established Church, wrote commentaries on individual books
of the Bible. Some were enormous: the Congregationalist Joseph Caryl pro-
duced an 8,000-page Exposition upon the Book of Job (12 vols, 1651–66), but
the most gargantuan was John Owen’s Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews
(1668–84), two million words on a text of just 5,000 words, a commentary
twice as long as the Bible itself. In the same period, the Presbyterian Matthew
Poole digested the work of 150 biblical commentators in his Synopsis critico-
rum biblicorum (5 vols, 1669–76), before embarking on Annotations on the
Holy Bible, a work completed by other nonconformist clergy and published
in two folio volumes in 1685–6. In the 1690s, the New England polymath,
Cotton Mather, would begin to assemble a massive scriptural reference work,
the Biblia Americana. Eventually growing to three million words, it would
only be published in the twenty-first century.19
Despite the persistence of an English nonconformist scholarly culture,
his­tor­ians have registered the impact of the Great Ejection on Dissenting
intellectual life.20 Jean-Louis Quantin concludes that in terms of erudition,
‘Dissenters were no match for Church of England divines’. Baxter was a scho-
lastic logician, rather than an erudite humanist, and his reading in ecclesiastic-
al history was ‘vast and desultory’.21 Dmitri Levitin concurs that ‘the exclusion
from the formalised centres of learning, combined with a refusal to surrender
Reformed scholasticism, led to scholarly stagnation’. Theophilus Gale’s Court
of the Gentiles, 4 vols (1669–76), and his Philosophia Generalis (1676), together
totalled around 3,000 pages and have been described as ‘the largest English
contribution to the history of philosophy in the seventeenth century’. They
displayed a great deal of erudition, but their author was defending a position
that was becoming obsolete: the idea that the wisdom of the ancients was
derived from the biblical patriarchs (Abraham, for example, was said to be a
master of mathematics). Out of touch with the latest continental scholarship,
and determined to put his studies at the service of a beleaguered Reformed
scholasticism, Gale was following in the footsteps of his mentor, John Owen,

18 On Ainsworth’s biblical scholarship, see Richard Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the
Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003), ch. 10.
19 Cotton Mather, Biblica Americana, gen. ed. Reiner Smolinski, 5 vols to date (Tubingen,
2010–).
20 See Carl Trueman, ‘Reformers, Puritans and Evangelicals’, in Deryck W. Lovegrove, ed., The
Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism (London, 2002), pp. 32–3; Trueman, ‘Scripture and
Exegesis in Early Modern Reformed Theology’, in Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller,
A.G. Roeber, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology (Oxford, 2016), pp. 191–2.
21 Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a
Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), pp. 314–16.
382 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

who had fought a rear-guard action in defence of the authenticity of the Old
Testament’s Hebrew vowel points.22
The new findings and arguments of humanist biblical scholarship raised some
doubts about the authority of Scripture. The English Revolution witnessed
a surge in ‘anti-Scripturism’ (a term coined by the heresiographer, Thomas
Edwards). The Seeker Clement Writer drew on scholarly studies to highlight
problems of textual transmission and divergent versions of the Bible, and
Samuel Fisher used his knowledge of humanist textual scholarship to mount a
Quaker critique of Protestant elevation of the external text over the light
within. In Amsterdam, Fisher would associate with the Jewish sceptic, Benedict
Spinoza, who like Thomas Hobbes questioned the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch.23 The first English translation of the Koran was published in 1649,
causing some consternation in the mind of John Bunyan.24 Writing in the
1660s, Richard Baxter admitted that ‘whereas in my younger Days I never was
tempted to doubt of the Truth of Scripture or Christianity’, he had since been
troubled by the ‘sorest Assaults’ on that score.25 Baxter came to recognize that
apologetics would require the kind of investment that Protestants had trad­
ition­al­ly given to confessional polemics.26
Despite the nascent challenge of biblical criticism, the Bible was reverenced,
and enjoyed massive popular circulation. An estimated 600,000 copies of the
whole Bible, plus a million copies of the New Testament and psalter, had been
published in England between 1526 and 1640.27 This in a country whose popu-
lation had just reached four million in 1600, and where only a minority was
fully literate. ‘Up to the mid-seventeenth century’, wrote Patrick Collinson,
‘there were proportionally more Bibles printed and sold in England than
anywhere else in Europe’.28 Everyone who could read had ready access to a
copy of the Bible, but in an oral culture, so did many who were unable to read.
The Bible was read aloud, not just in church, but in households, alehouses,
marketplaces, and workplaces.29 As soon as children learnt their ABC, they

22 Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in
England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 146–53. On Owen and the vowel points debate,
however, see the caveats in Muller, After Calvin, ch. 9; Hardy, Criticism and Confession, pp. 369–70;
for a more sympathetic account of Gale and Baxter, see Dewey Wallace, Shapers of English
Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford, 2011), chs 3, 5.
23 See Ariel Hessayon, ‘ “Not the Word of God”: Varieties of Antiscripturism during the English
Revolution’, in Armstrong and Ó hAnnracháin, eds, The English Bible in the Early Modern World,
ch. 8; Katz, God’s Last Words, pp. 70–115; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), ch. 12.
24 Noel Malcolm, ‘The 1649 English Translation of the Koran: Its Origins and Significance’,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 75 (2012), 261–95.
25 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, or Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of his Life and Times (London, 1696),
I, p. 127.
26 See David S. Sytsma, Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers (Oxford, 2017).
27 David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 23; Daniel, The English Bible, p. 462.
28 Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (London, 2003), p. 38.
29 See Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), p. 25.
 The Bible and Theology 383

graduated to reading the Bible. And it was memorized; indeed, a few of the
godly seem to have committed to memory much, if not all, of the English
Bible (which in the KJV contained a little over 920,000 words, including the
Apocrypha, which was typically printed between the Old and New Testaments).
Contemporaries reported meeting common people with prodigious memor-
ies who could give the chapter or verse of almost any biblical text like a ‘living
concordance’.30
Although literacy levels in early modern England varied enormously accord-
ing to social status, region, and gender, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
saw illiteracy eradicated among social elites and sharply reduced among the
middling sort, including artisans. In Puritan New England, the most literate
region in the Anglophone Atlantic world, ‘the skill of reading English’ was
‘almost universal’, though it was not until the late seventeenth century that the
skill of writing became ‘nearly universal’.31 Tyndale had famously aimed to put
the Bible into the hands of the common people: ‘If God spare my life ere many
years’, he told a critic, ‘I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know
more of the scripture than thou dost.’32 By the 1640s, Tyndale’s dream had
become a heresiographer’s nightmare, as coopers, tailors, tinkers, and soap-
boilers set themselves up as lay preachers, claiming charismatic authority on
the basis of their immersion in the vernacular Bible. There is some truth to Max
Weber’s observation that English Puritanism ‘created a popular religious intel-
lectualism never found since’, prompting ordinary people to master the biblical
text, and to engage in doctrinal dispute.33 At the Nag’s Head Tavern in 1640, the
cobbler Samuel How, lay pastor of a London Separatist congregation, took on
the learned vicar of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, John Goodwin, proving by his
performance that ‘an unlearned man’ could be ‘a public teacher of God’s word’.
How was a virtuoso multi-tasker who studied the Bible as he mended shoes; as
Roger Williams noted, he ‘grew so excellent a Textuary or Scripture learned
man, that few of those high Rabbies that scorne to mend or make a Shoe, could
aptly and readily from the holy Scripture, outgo him’.34
Among How’s admirers was the merchant and lay Baptist pastor, William
Kiffen, his friend John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader, and two of his
close associates, Richard Overton and William Walwyn. The Levellers read
the Bible as history from below, as a book about vulnerable saints and their
powerful oppressors: Abel slaughtered by his brother Cain; the Children of Israel
enslaved by Pharaoh’s taskmasters; the Israelites trembling like grasshoppers

30 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), p. 22.
31 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, p. 32.
32 See David Daniel, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), quotation at
p. 79.
33 Max Weber, Economy and Society, eds Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols (Berkeley,
CA, 1968), I, p. 514.
34 John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 60–1.
384 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

before the giants of Canaan; Old Testament heroes stoned and sawn asunder;
David taunted by the giant Goliath; Elijah facing the prophets of Baal; the
psalmist surrounded by ‘bulls of Bashan’; the exiles in Babylon ruled by
Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar; Christ persecuted by Scribes, Pharisees, and
the temple authorities; the apostles assailed by mobs and priests; the witnesses
of the book of Revelation martyred by the Beast. As Walwyn explained, God
did not choose the learned to be his ‘Prophets and publishers of the Gospel; but
Herds-men, Fisher-men, Tent-makers, Toll-gatherers, etc’. Christ himself, ‘who
thought it no robbery to be equal with God . . . yet despised not to be esteemed
the Son of a Carpenter’.35
This egalitarianism, fostered by lay access to the vernacular Bible and by a
populist reading of biblical narrative, would inspire women preachers as well
as lay preachers. The formidable Separatist leader, Katherine Chidley, the Fifth
Monarchist Anna Trapnell, and the Quaker Margaret Fell would justify ‘wom-
en’s speaking’ by appeal to female prophetesses in the Old and New Testament,
and by the prophecy in the Book of Joel: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward,
that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters
shall prophesy.’ Historians have identified around 300 female prophets active
during the English Revolution.36 Prophecy was the major genre of Quaker
women’s writing, and in the 1650s, almost half of all publications by women
were written by Quakers.37 Presbyterians and Congregationalists frowned
upon women’s preaching, though in 1638 Scottish Presbyterians unleashed a
woman prophet, Margaret Mitchelson, to promote the National Covenant.38 In
New England, Anne Hutchinson was to acquire a significant reputation as a
religious teacher in Massachusetts before she overstepped the mark by attack-
ing the clergy and claiming special revelations. A more acceptable model was
Anne Bradstreet, wife of one of the colony’s governors, and author of domestic
and devotional poems now recognized as some of the most accomplished
writings in early American literature.39 Among English Congregationalists,
Lucy Hutchinson composed a major verse epic based on the Book of Genesis
(‘Order and Disorder’) as well as theological works that show her working
within the Reformed tradition but thinking through her own positions with

35 The Writings of William Walwyn, eds Barbara Taft and J.R. McMichael (Athens, GA, 1989),
416, 418. See further Andrew Bradstock, ‘Digging, Levelling, and Ranting: The Bible and the Civil
War Sects’, in Killeen, Smith, and Willie, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern
England, ch. 25.
36 See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England
(Berkeley, CA, 1992); A Company of Women Preachers: Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-
Century England: A Reader, ed. Curtis Freeman (Waco, TX, 2011).
37 See Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, 1500–1800 (London, 1991), pp. 268–9.
38 David Stevenson, ‘Mitchelson (Mitchell), Margaret (fl. 1638)’, ODNB.
39 Both are set within a wider context by Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early
America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (London, 1999), chs 2–3.
 The Bible and Theology 385

independence of mind.40 Historians and literary scholars have begun to

recover ‘the intellectual culture of Puritan women’.41
There has been a parallel rediscovery of dissenting piety. Amidst the po­lem­
ic­al controversy of the post-Reformation era, it is easy to lose sight of the
devotional ends of Protestant religion, and of Bible reading. Piety, of course,
was not a polemic-free zone, but was refracted through the prism of confes-
sional and denominational identities.42 Protestant piety differed in fundamental
ways from Catholic, partly because of what it rejected—prayer to the saints,
Marian devotion, confession, penance, and pilgrimage—but also because of
its focus on the practice of Bible reading. English Dissent does not boast an
iconic image like Rembrandt’s ‘The Mennonite Preacher Anslo and his Wife’
(1641), where the pastor is captured expounding Scripture (illuminated by
candle light) to his spouse, but English Puritanism had fostered a biblical
culture of unprecedented intensity. Devotional manuals urged Christians to
read Scripture in private as a spiritual exercise. As John White of Dorchester
explained, ‘The reading of Scripture is nothing else but a kind of holy confer-
ence with God, wherein we enquire after, and he reveals unto us himself, and
his will.’43 Reading the Bible was no mere intellectual exercise; it was a spiritual
discipline requiring meditation and prayer. When the Massachusetts Puritan,
Edward Taylor, prepared his sermons for quarterly communion, he prayerfully
composed deeply affecting poems keyed to the biblical passages he was due to
expound.44 The Dissenter Edmund Calamy was one of many to give advice on
the art of Bible reading; in The Art of Divine Meditation (1680), he urged the
reader to take their time and read slowly: ‘when thou comest to read of Christ
sweating drops of blood . . . lay thy book aside, and meditate on those drops
of blood’.45
It was because of its spiritual power that preachers went to such lengths
to expound Scripture in sermons and commentaries. Scottish Presbyterians
led by David Dickson produced a series of practically oriented biblical

40 The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, gen. ed. David Norbrook, 4 vols (Oxford, 2011–).
41 Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Bauman, eds, The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women,
c. 1558–1680 (Basingstoke, 2010).
42 This is generally acknowledged, but the relationship between piety and polemic is keenly
debated by Peter Lake and Alec Ryrie: see Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religious
Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge, 2017), and
Alec Ryrie, ‘On Lake and Stephens’ “Scandal and Religious Identity” ’: http://alecryrie.blogspot.
com/2016/08/on-lake-and-stephens-scandal-and.html.
43 John White, A Way to the Tree of Life: Discoursed in Sundry Directions for the Profitable
Reading of the Scriptures (London, 1647), sigs A3–A4, cited in Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The
Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth Century New England (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1982), p. 159.
44 The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, CT, 1960).
45 Cited in W.R. Owens, ‘John Bunyan and the Bible’, in Anne Dunan-Page, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to John Bunyan (Cambridge, 2010), p. 42.
386 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

c­ommentaries designed for a general readership.46 The most enduring of

Dissenting commentaries—Matthew Henry’s Exposition, 6 vols (1707–21)—was
applied and devotional, rather than academic and controversial. Like Dickson,
its reading of the Old Testament was much more typological and Christological
than the humanist commentaries of Calvin and Ainsworth. Henry wrote for the
laity and for families, not just for clergy, and as Scott Mandelbrote observes,
‘the focus of his interpretation was on a meditative rather than intellectual
engagement with the Bible’. Alongside Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707/9),
his Exposition mediated seventeenth-century Puritan piety to eighteenth-
century evangelical Dissenters. The author’s formation had occurred under his
father Philip Henry, an ejected Presbyterian, who required his children to give
an account of each psalm or chapter of the Bible as it was read in their daily
household worship.47
Bunyan too was steeped in Scripture. For him, observes Bob Owens, ‘the
Bible was the only book that really mattered’.48 Such was his textual immersion
that one could claim that ‘the Bible authored’ Bunyan himself and all his
writings.49 A decisive moment in his life occurred around 1650, when he over-
heard the conversation of ‘three or four poor women sitting at a door in the
Sun, and talking about the things of God’. The women ‘spake as if joy did make
them speak: they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and
with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they
had found a new world’. Bunyan ‘began to look into the Bible with new eyes,
and read as I never did before; and especially the Epistles of Paul were sweet
and pleasant to me: and indeed I was then never out of the Bible, either by
reading or meditation’. ‘The Bible’, he says, ‘was precious to me in those days’.50
The godly have often been depicted as strict, grim, harsh, argumentative, and
agonistic, yet here we find Scripture described as ‘precious’, ‘sweet’, ‘pleasant’,
and joyful. Not for nothing did Puritan preachers gain renown as ‘affectionate’,
‘practical’, ‘experimental’ divines. The appeal of Puritan communities, includ-
ing Dissenting congregations, owed much to the emotional warmth of their
bib­lical piety.51

46 See G.D. Henderson, Religious Life in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Cambridge, 1937),

pp. 22–30; Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, gen. ed. Nigel Cameron (Edinburgh,
1993), pp. 309–10.
47 Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The Henrys and Dissenting Readings of the Bible’, in Scott Mandelbrote
and Michael Ledger-Thomas, eds, Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c.1650–1950 (Oxford, 2013),
pp. 38–56, quotation at p. 46.
48 W.R. Owens, ‘John Bunyan and the Bible’, in Anne Dunan-Page, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to John Bunyan (Cambridge, 2010), ch. 3, quotation at p. 39.
49 Alison Searle, ‘Bunyan and the Word’, in Michael Davies and W.R. Owens, eds, The Oxford
Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford, 2018), p. 86.
50 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, eds John Stachniewski
and Anita Pacheo (Oxford, 1998), pp. 14, 17.
51 There is a vast literature on Puritan piety, much of it wrestling with the tensions between law
and grace, despair and assurance. For the harsher aspects of Puritan theology and spirituality, see
 The Bible and Theology 387

Devotion to Scripture prompted energetic campaigns to disseminate and

translate it. The New Testament and Psalms had been translated into Welsh
in 1567, with the whole Bible appearing in 1588.52 Yet the most remarkable
translation project was undertaken by New England Congregationalists led
by the missionary pastor John Eliot, who used the Geneva Bible as the basis
for a new translation into the Natick dialect of the indigenous Massachusett
language. It appeared in 1663 under the title Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe
Up-Biblum God (literally, The Whole Holy His-Bible God). ‘The Indian Bible’
was the largest print job in colonial America: the first edition of around 1,100
copies required the press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to print more than a
million pages. This was the first complete Bible of any kind printed in the
Americas, and the first known translation of the entire Bible into a previously
unwritten language. Eliot had to create a written alphabet before embarking
on the work of translation, and he was deeply dependent on a team of gifted
Native linguists: Cockenoe, John Sassamon, and Job Nesutan. It was due to
them that alien concepts were translated into familiar terms: ‘hell’ was ren-
dered by the word chepiohkomukqut, meaning ‘the house of empty skulls’. The
immense labour invested into this project testified to the Puritan belief in the
power of the written Word, yet before its intended audience could read it, they
had to be taught to read their newly written language. As a result, this Bible had
few readers, though surviving copies with annotations in Massachusett show
that for some it was a treasured possession.53

DISSENT AND REFORMED ORTHOD OXY

The extraordinary availability and popularity of the Bible carried with it certain
risks. The magisterial Reformers had been alert to the danger of hermeneutical
anarchy, with each person reading Scripture by his own lights. In order to
rein in this centrifugal tendency, they laboured to impose message discipline

especially John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature
of Despair (Oxford, 1991); for a corrective, see Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and
Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford, 2002). Other important studies include
Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, with a new introduction by
Peter Lake (Chicago, IL, 1992); Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety; Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s
Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford, 1986); T.D. Bozeman, The
Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and the Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda, eds, Puritanism and Emotion in the Early
Modern World (Basingstoke, 2016).
52 D. Densil Morgan, Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Theology in Wales, Vol. I: From
Reformation to Revival, 1588–1760 (Cardiff, 2018), pp. 1–8.
53 See Linford Fisher, ‘America’s First Bible: Native Uses, Abuses and Reuses of the Indian Bible
of 1663’, in Philip Goff and Arthur Farnsley, eds, The Bible in American Life (Oxford, 2017), ch. 2.
388 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

on their movement by systematizing the teaching of the Bible. Individual

Reformers did this in major treatises, including Melanchthon’s Loci Communes
(1521), or Common Places in Theology, and Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis
(1536/59), translated as The Institution of the Christian Religion (1561–2). These
two works did much to define the doctrine of the Lutheran and Reformed
traditions, respectively, but the Reformers wished to avoid the charge that they
were followers of single heresiarchs. By forging confessions of faith, like the
Augsburg Confession (1530) and the French Confession (1559), or collections
like The Book of Concord (1580), Lutheran and Reformed divines were able to
present a common front, as reformers of national and regional Churches fully
committed to the ecumenical orthodoxy forged by the councils of the early
Church, and purifiers of Christendom from popish corruptions. Because of
their theological technicality, these confessions did not make easy reading, but
the theologians instilled basic theology into lay minds through the practice
of catechizing. The question and answer format of the catechisms lent itself
to memorization, typically structured around the Ten Commandments, the
Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer.54
The English followed in continental footsteps. An older Anglican historiog-
raphy suggested English exceptionalism, depicting the Church of England as a
via media between Rome and Geneva, eschewing the dogma of continental
Calvinists. Recent scholarship has left us in little doubt that this is fundamen-
tally misleading.55 The English religious establishment under Edward and
Elizabeth was resolutely Reformed in its theological orientation. Both European
Catholics and Protestants saw the Church of England as part of a Reformed
(as distinct from Lutheran) bloc. The Edwardian Reformers invited Peter
Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer to their shores, and the libraries of English
divines were well stocked with the writings of Calvin, Beza, Bucer, and Bullinger,
as well as Luther and Melanchthon. Not until William Perkins in the late
sixteenth century did the English produce a theologian who would win similar
acclaim on the continent.56 English confessions of faith also followed European
Reformed models. The Forty-Two Articles (1552/3), and the Thirty-Nine Articles

54 The most authoritative single-author account of Reformation theology remains Jaroslav

Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Volume IV: Reformation
of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago, IL, 1984). For accessible introductions, see Lehner,
Muller, and Roeber, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology; David Bagchi and
David Steinmetz, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge, 2004);
Alister McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, fourth edn (Oxford, 2012); and Philip
Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT,
2002), chs 1–3, 10.
55 See Anthony Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Vol. I: Reformation and Identity,
c. 1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017); Dewey Wallace, ‘Via Media: A Paradigm Shift?’, Anglican and
Episcopal History, 72 (2003), 2–21.
56 For Perkins as a mainstream Church of England theologian, see W.P. Patterson, William
Perkins and the Making of Protestant England (Oxford, 2014).
 The Bible and Theology 389

(1563) aligned the Church with Reformed theology, reflecting Archbishop

Cranmer’s own migration from Lutheran to Reformed Protestantism.57
The recent rediscovery of the Reformed identity of the post-Reformation
Church of England complicates our understanding of Church and Dissent.
Historians used to trace the ecclesiastical divide to a fundamental theological
rift between ‘Anglicans’ and ‘Puritans’. Increasingly, however, scholars have
emphasized the doctrinal common ground shared by Calvinist conformists
and Puritans. Reformed orthodoxy exercised a strong gravitational pull even
after the rise of the Laudians under Charles I, and a significant phalanx of epis-
copal divines remained wedded to it during the later Stuart era.58 Moreover,
insofar as there were divisions over soteriology, these often cut across the lines
created by disputes over ecclesiology. In the early eighteenth century, the
Anglican theologian John Edwards was more staunchly Reformed in doctrine
than some of the leading Presbyterians, though as the son of the Presbyterian
heresiographer Thomas Edwards, he was not typical of conformist divines.59
Reformed orthodoxy had been forged over the course of the sixteenth century
by Protestant humanists who sought to go back to the sources, re-examining
the biblical text in its original Hebrew and Greek and constructing a theology
that was purely biblical. They found no scriptural basis for the papacy, purgatory,
clerical celibacy, prayer to the saints, prayer for the dead, relics, pilgrimage, and
various other aspects of late medieval religion. By contrast, they did see scrip-
tural support for the doctrine of the Trinity. It is telling that the Thirty-Nine
Articles (1563) began with the Trinity (articles I–V), before addressing the
doctrine of Scripture (VI–VII), endorsing the Nicene, Athanasian, and Apostles’
creeds (VIII), setting out a Protestant soteriology (IX–XVIII), defining the
Church and its sacraments (XIX–XXXVI), and finishing with temporal
­matters—magistrates, property, and oaths (XXXVI–XXXIX).
If theological systems were the product of humanist erudition working away
on sacred texts, they were also chiselled by theologians wielding the tools of
scholasticism, the method of critical thought taught in the ‘schools’ (i.e. univer-
sities) of Catholic and Protestant Europe. Scholasticism has much in common
with modern analytical philosophy with its emphasis on conceptual rigour,
precise distinctions, logical reasoning, and disputation, yet it was also wedded
to Aristotelian metaphysics and teleology. It was once common to pit a pristine
early humanist Protestantism against a lifeless, later scholasticism, and to set

57 See Stephen Hampton, ‘Confessional Identity’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of
Anglicanism, ch. 11.
58 Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to
George I (Oxford, 2008).
59 See Jake Griesel, ‘John Edwards of Cambridge (1637–1716): A Reassessment of his
Position within the Later Stuart Church of England’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge,
2019).
390 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

up a conflict of ‘Calvin versus the Calvinists’.60 Here again, recent research has
suggested a much more nuanced picture. Reformed orthodoxy was always
variegated and never static. Scholastic Reformed orthodoxy was in substantial
continuity with the Reformers, and often went hand in hand with humanist
erudition. It was designed to rearticulate Reformed doctrines with greater
precision and reinforce them against the latest assaults of confessional rivals,
whether Catholic, Lutheran, Arminian, Anabaptist, or Socinian.61
Throughout the post-Reformation era, the majority of English-speaking
Presbyterians and Congregationalists adhered to Reformed orthodoxy.62 The
Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright and the Separatist Robert Browne were both
resolutely Trinitarian and Augustinian; it was ecclesiology that divided them
from each other and from the bishops, not the doctrines of God or salvation.
The same was true of the most important dissenting theologian of the early
Stuart era, William Ames, one of the intellectual founders of Congregationalism.
After his nonconformity forced him into exile in the Netherlands, Ames wrote
against the Dutch Arminians and acted as an adviser to the Synod of Dort,
which condemned Arminianism in 1619, before publishing a summary of the
Reformed faith in a Latin treatise entitled Medulla Theologica (1623), translated
into English as The Marrow of Theology (1638).63 The original Latin edition
was adopted as a theology textbook at Harvard, but the leading New England
theologians—John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, John Norton,
Peter Bulkeley, and Richard Mather—published their own theological work
in plain English. As Brooks Holifield observes, ‘The turn from Latin to the ver-
nacular as the language of theology marked a momentous transition in western
theological history. . . Theology was a discipline for the people.’64
When the Puritan parliamentarians established an Assembly of Divines at
Westminster in 1643, it was initially tasked with revising the Thirty-Nine Articles;
in the event, the alliance with the Scots in 1643 meant that the Assembly was
required to draw up a new confession. In contrast with the Articles, this confes-
sion started with an article ‘Of Holy Scripture’, dropped explicit reference to
the creeds, and broke with episcopacy. Despite this, it was firmly Trinitarian,
and its soteriology was close to that of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Westminster
Confession would become the official confession of the Church of Scotland

60 This body of work is surveyed and critiqued in Muller, After Calvin, chs 3–4.
61 See above all Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols (Grand Rapids,
MI, 2003), and his ‘Reformed Theology between 1600 and 1800’, in Lehner, Muller, and Roeber,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, ch. 11.
62 See Michael A.G. Haykin and Mark Jones, eds, Drawn into Controversie: Reformed
Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism (Gottingen,
2011); Aaron Clay Denlinger, ed., Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology,
1550–1775 (London, 2015); Holifield, Theology in America, chs 2–3.
63 William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John Dystra Eusden (1968); Jan van Vliet, The
Rise of the Reformed System: The Intellectual Heritage of William Ames (Milton Keynes, 2013).
64 Holifield, Theology in America, pp. 27–8.
 The Bible and Theology 391

and Presbyterian churches in Ireland and America, and much of it was

incorporated into the Congregationalists’ Savoy Confession (1658), and the
Particular or Calvinistic Baptists’ London Confession (1677).65

DISSENT AND HETEROD OXY

Despite the fact that most Dissenters adhered to Reformed theology, there was
a long association between dissent and heterodoxy, or between what contem-
poraries labelled ‘schism’ and ‘heresy’. Once again, this simplified matters,
for by the late seventeenth century the most intellectually distinguished anti-
Trinitarians were Isaac Newton and John Locke, closeted within the establish-
ment and afraid to broadcast their manuscript heterodoxies in print.66 They
had good reason to worry. Protestants who denied the Trinity on the grounds
that the doctrine lacked scriptural authority had been subjected to fierce perse-
cution. Under the first Protestant monarch, Edward VI, the authorities had
burnt two anti-Trinitarians at the stake; at least six more were burnt in the reign
of Elizabeth, and the last heresy burnings in British history occurred in 1612,
when Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman were executed at Smithfield
and Lichfield, respectively. Since these figures did not expound their theologies
in print, we only know of their ideas through the medley of charges against
them, but it seems that they were mostly Arians, who saw the Son as divine but
not co-eternal with the Father.67
The English Revolution witnessed a new wave of anti-Trinitarianism,
including a more radical variety associated with the Polish Socinians, followers
of the Faustus Socinus, a sixteenth-century Italian exile and radical Reformer.
Socinus had gone beyond the ancient heretic Arius by denying the pre-existence
of the Son, though he did accept the virgin birth of Christ. On his account,
Jesus was the messianic teacher of the way of salvation whose death was exem-
plary not substitutionary, but whose resurrection raised him to divine power.
The Socinians’ Racovian Catechism was published in English translation in
1652, and linked to John Biddle. Biddle’s anti-Trinitarianism was thoroughly
Biblicist and primitivist, for he dismissed tradition and authorities in the name

65 Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, ed.
James T. Dennison, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014), IV, pp. 231–72 (WCF); 457–95 (Savoy
Declaration, 1658); 531–71 (London Baptist Confession, 1677).
66 See Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 2017); John
Marshall, ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism’, in M.A. Stewart, ed., English
Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford, 2000), pp. 111–82.
67 See John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (Harlow,
2000), pp. 80, 99–101, 114–15; Ian Atherton and David Como, ‘The Burning of Edward Wightman:
Puritanism, Prelacy and the Politics of Heresy in Early Modern England’, English Historical
Review, 120 (2005), 1215–50.
392 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of an appeal to Scripture and the primitive Church of the apostles, prior to its
corruption by Antichrist. Whereas magisterial Protestants had (in the words of
Lancelot Andrewes) embraced ‘one Canon . . . two Testaments, three Creeds,
the first four Councils, five centuries’, radical Protestants were dismissive of
creeds, councils, and patristic authorities, especially after the watershed of
Constantine’s conversion in 312 and the Council of Nicaea in 325.68 Their logic
appealed to Protestant biblicists, and Socinianism continued to attract isolated
converts, such as the London merchant Thomas Firmin, who would later
become patron of the ‘Unitarians’, but it also faced a polemical onslaught from
Presbyterian and Congregationalist divines, led by John Owen, Vice-Chancellor
of Oxford University in the 1650s.69
Owen’s learning and reflection would be poured out in voluminous
­writings—eighty books containing eight and a half million words, later repub-
lished in twenty-four volumes by the Victorian Congregationalist William
Goold. Owen wrote much practical divinity, including books on the mortifica-
tion of sin and the work of the Holy Spirit, but he was preoccupied by refuting
some of the major contenders to Reformed orthodoxy, principally Arminianism
and Socinianism. In the 1650s, Owen worked with other Presbyterian and
Independent theologians to establish a national confession of faith that would
consolidate Reformed orthodoxy.70 He was willing to be flexible in search of a
statement of ‘fundamentals’ around which most clergy could unite; in 1652, he
even recruited the Arminian Independent John Goodwin, who had preached a
series of sermons against anti-Trinitarianism.71 Leading statesmen supported
the cause, including perhaps Lord Protector Cromwell himself, and the pol­it­ical
constitution of 1657, the Humble Petition and Advice, called for ‘a Confession of
Faith, to be agreed by your Highness and the Parliament’.72 The 1658 Savoy
Declaration may have been crafted with this article in mind.73
In the event, Cromwellian England had no official confession of faith, and
did not become a confessional state. Radical Independents like Sir Henry Vane

68 On Andrewes’ formula, see Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity,
pp. 155–6.
69 On English anti-Trinitarianism, see Herbert McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-
Century England (Oxford, 1951); Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution:
The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010); Paul C.-H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of
the Trinity in Early Modern England (New York, 2012), chs 1–4.
70 Reformed Confessions, IV, pp. 423–7 (The Principles of Faith, 1652); pp. 428–31 (A New
Confession of Faith, 1654).
71 Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, pp. 233–5.
72 The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, ed. S.R. Gardiner
(Oxford, 1889), p. 454.
73 See Hunter Powell, ‘The Last Confession: A Background Study of the Savoy Declaration of
Faith and Order’ (M.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008); Joel Halcomb, ‘The
Association Movement and the Politics of Church Settlement during the Interregnum’, in Elliot
Vernon and Hunter Powell, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66
(Manchester, 2020).
 The Bible and Theology 393

Jr and his friend John Milton were opposed to confessions, both because of
their own heterodoxies and because of a commitment to individual liberty
of conscience. Both men were lay theologians, and Milton’s unpublished
manuscript, ‘De Doctrina Christiana’, dictated in the 1650s after he had lost his
sight, was a way of claiming theology back from the clergy. A collage of 8,000
scriptural references, it was an expression of radical Protestant biblicism,
marshalling biblical texts against traditional orthodoxies around Christology,
the immortality of the soul, and monogamy. Milton was eclectic: his structure
owed much to Calvinist systematicians (including Ames); his soteriology was
broadly Arminian; his Christology Arian; in other respects he had affinities
with Socinians and Quakers.74 Owen’s plans also met with resistance from the
mainstream Presbyterian Richard Baxter, who argued with the ‘over orthodox
Doctors’ (Owen and Francis Cheynell) on a 1654 clerical committee, pitting the
principle of Scripture sufficiency against subscription to official confessions.75
Baxter’s suspicion of imposed creeds would deepen over the years, and in the
1670s he wrote a scathing account of episcopal politicking in the councils of the
early Church.76 However, the most recent study of his theology finds him to
have been more orthodox than is often suggested. For all his suspicion of coun-
cils and creeds, Baxter was the most scholastic of Puritans, and in his Methodus
Theologiae (1681), a major work of Reformed systematics, he was emphatically
Trinitarian in his method, following medieval theologians in seeing vestiges of
the Trinity in the created order, which manifested the Power, Wisdom, and
Love of God the Father, Son, and Spirit.77 In his Trinitarian orthodoxy, Baxter
stood with the vast majority of Dissenting divines among the Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, and Baptists.
Nevertheless, the ecumenical creeds were omitted from the Westminster
Confession and its offshoots as well as from Dissenting worship.78 Even John
Owen appears to have become more wary of creed-making. An authoritative
recent biography finds the later Owen critiquing the scholastic method that
had hitherto dominated Reformed orthodoxy, complaining that confessions of
faith were being used as ‘a Procrustes’ bed’, ‘abandon[ing] his early sacramen-
talism’, and prioritizing ‘the subjective over the objective’. On this account
Owen ‘was subverting, not epitomizing, the Reformed theological tradition

74 The Complete Works of John Milton, Vol. 8: De Doctrina Christiana, eds John K. Hale and
J. Donald Cullington, 2 vols (Oxford, 2012). For a succinct account of the treatise, see William
Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA, 2017), ch. 8.
75 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Pt. II. p. 55.
76 Richard Baxter, Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680). See
Lim, Mystery Unveiled, ch. 5.
77 See Simon Burton, The Hallowing of Logic: The Trinitarian Method of Richard Baxter’s
Methodus Theologiae (Leiden, 2012).
78 See Chad van Dixhoorn, ‘New Taxonomies of the Westminster Assembly (1643–52): The
Creedal Controversy as a Case Study’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 6 (2004), 82–106.
394 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

that he is often believed to personify’.79 By the early eighteenth century, the

Dissenter emphasis on liberty of private judgement and Scripture sufficiency
would lead to mounting opposition to clerical subscription to the Westminster
Confession, culminating in the Salter’s Hall controversy of 1719.80
If the hottest disputes were over the Trinity and ancient creeds, the threat of
‘Arminianism’ provoked almost as much consternation, at least before 1660.
Reformation soteriology rested on the principle of sola gratia: salvation was by
grace alone, it was not a human achievement. The Reformers had drawn deeply
on the anti-Pelagian writings of St Augustine, who repudiated Pelagius’s claim
that humans had the free will to repent and lead a godly life. Augustine took
a far less sanguine view of human capacities. Citing St Paul, he argued that
humans were dead in their trespasses and sin, and could only be revived by a
special act of divine grace granted only to those whom God had chosen or
predestined.81 In The Bondage of the Will, Luther pressed this Augustinian line
of argument against Erasmus, and he was followed by the leading Reformers,
though with different degrees of rigour. Calvin taught a doctrine of double
predestination: that the fates of the elect and the reprobate had been fixed by a
divine decree in eternity. And Calvin with some other Reformed theologians
added a new element that many readers could not find in Augustine: the idea
that those who had received saving grace could not fall away, but would be
preserved in their faith until death. This doctrine of perseverance was not
incorporated into a Reformed confession of faith until the Synod of Dort, but it
was to have a significant impact on English Puritanism, which placed a new
emphasis on the believer’s assurance of salvation.82
For the most part, the English Reformers embraced the predestinarian
teaching of the magisterial Reformers, while reflecting the different emphases
of Luther, Bullinger, and Calvin.83 Anti-predestinarianism was restricted to
groups on the radical fringes of the Reformation like the ‘Freewillers’ in
Edwardian England or the ‘General’ Baptists of Jacobean England, both of
whom may have been influenced by continental Anabaptists.84 A more serious
threat to the doctrines of grace (as they were subsequently known) came from

79 Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford, 2016),
pp. 10, 271.
80 Roger Thomas, ‘The Non-Subscription Controversy Among Dissenters: The Salters’ Hall
Debate, 1719’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 4 (1953), 162–86.
81 The best way to gauge the scale and complexity of Augustine’s influence is to study Karla
Pollman, ed., The Oxford Guide to the Reception of Augustine, 3 vols (Oxford, 2013).
82 See Jay T. Collier, Debating Perseverance: The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation
England (Oxford, 2018).
83 See Carl Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and the English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford,
1997).
84 T.S. Freeman, ‘Dissenters from a Dissenting Church: the Challenge of the Freewillers,
1550–1558’, in P. Marshall and A. Ryrie, eds, The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge,
2002), pp. 129–56; J.R. Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separation, Mennonite
Influence, and the Elect Nation (Scottsdale, PN, 1991).
 The Bible and Theology 395

‘Arminians’, named after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who argued
that Scripture did not teach the unconditional predestination of single indi-
viduals, but the conditional predestination of the human race. Christ had
atoned for all, and all had been given sufficient grace to repent and believe;
whether a particular person was saved or damned turned not on a divine decree
(for God was not willing that any should perish) but on the undetermined
choice of each person. This re-emphasis on free will, albeit aided by a saving
grace available in principle to all, provoked bitter controversy in the Dutch
Church in the 1610s, even bringing down a government. Condemned (with the
backing of an English delegation) at the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, Arminianism
became a cause celebre in the England of the 1620s, when it was associated
(not entirely accurately) with a rising faction of high church divines inspired by
Lancelot Andrewes: men like Richard Neile, Matthew Montagu, and William
Laud.85 At the same time, some British theologians were in the process of
soft­en­ing Reformed orthodoxy through a doctrine of ‘hypothetical universal-
ism’: James Ussher, John Davenant, and John Preston sought to combine the
Reformation stress on predestination with the insistence that Christ had
atoned for everyone, even though not everyone would be saved (hence the
‘hypothetical’ qualification of ‘universalism’).86 Despite this mediating position
among the Reformed, the charge of Arminianism remained one of the most
potent lines of attack on the Laudians in the 1630s and early 1640s.
Ironically, the Puritan Revolution would witness the rise of Arminianism
among the godly themselves.87 It happened principally among the sects,
especially some of the ‘General’ Baptists. Unlike the ‘Particular’ Baptists, they
insisted that Christ had made atonement for every human person. Some (like
Thomas Lambe, pastor of an influential and notorious congregation in London’s
Swan Alley), were ‘hypothetical universalists’, while others (like Thomas
Grantham) articulated an Arminian soteriology, notably in Christianismus
Primitivus (1678), a 600-page folio that counts as the first systematic theology
of the General Baptists.88 It was also aided by the writings of John Goodwin,
principally his treatise, Redemption Redeemed (1651), an exegetical tour de force
and the first major English-language treatise advancing Arminianism (though
Goodwin studiously avoided labelling himself an Arminian). Increasingly, the
godly clergy were preoccupied by far more extreme challenges to Reformed
doctrine from antinomians, Ranters, and Quakers. In the face of these threats,

85 See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford,
1987).
86 See Jonathan Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of
Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007).
87 The fullest treatment of this development is in Andrew J. Ollerton, ‘The Crisis of Calvinism
and Rise of Arminianism in Cromwellian England’ (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2017).
88 See Clint Bass, Thomas Grantham (1633–1692) and General Baptist Theology (Oxford, 2013),
ch. 5.
396 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Arminianism began to pale in significance. Richard Baxter repented of his

earlier paranoia towards Arminianism, and though he was ‘no Arminian’,
his Catholike Theologie (1675) sought to show ‘that the difference’ with
Calvinism ‘is more verbal and small, than the Zealots of either side do imagine’.89
A growing number of Presbyterians joined Baxter in developing a ‘middle
way’ the­ology that triangulated between Calvinism and Arminianism. By
comparison with the Independents, Presbyterians tended to soft-pedal pre-
destinarian doctrine.90
For Presbyterians, from the 1640s onwards, antinomianism was a more
troub­ling heterodoxy than Arminianism. It preoccupied the Westminster
Assembly, and in contrast to Arminianism, it was very much a product of the
hothouse religious culture of English Puritanism.91 Where Arminians sought
to rethink the relationship between grace and freewill, antinomians questioned
the traditional Reformed attempt to emphasize both faith and law. Sola fides
had been another great slogan of the Lutheran Reformation: sinners were
justified not by their good deeds (‘works of the law’), but merely by faith in the
work of Christ (‘justification by faith alone’). This was another Pauline theme,
though transposed into a religious context far removed from Second Temple
Judaism, and English Puritan divines were to wrestle with Pauline concepts of
justification, sanctification, covenant, election, law, and grace.92 Luther’s read-
ing of Paul, as Catholic critics were keen to point out, could give the impres-
sion that good works were an optional extra for Christians. Before long, the
Lutherans themselves became exercised by the rise of ‘antinomians’; the
Decalogue remained prominently displayed in Protestant churches to remind
believers that as sinners (who had violated divine law) they needed grace, and
that as believers (who sought to please God) they ought to obey God’s com-
mandments. Obedience, for Luther, flowed out of gratitude to God for his
unmerited favour; it could not earn salvation, but it was the fruit of the tree of
faith, demonstrating that such faith was itself a genuine work of God in the
soul. Calvin and other Reformed theologians (such as the authors of the widely
disseminated Heidelberg Catechism (1563)) were even more insistent on the
third use of the law: divine law existed not only to reveal human sinfulness and
bring order to human society; it also had a role in the life of the believer and in
the process of sanctification.

89 Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), p. 24.

90 David Field, ‘Rigid Calvinisme in a Softer Dresse’: The Moderate Presbyterianism of John
Howe, 1630–1705 (Edinburgh, 2004); Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs
(Woodbridge, 2007, 2014), ch. 6. For the intense predestinarianism of a leading New England
Congregationalist, see Baird Tipson, Hartford Puritanism: Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and
their Terrifying God (New York, 2015).
91 Whitney Gamble, Christ and the Law: Antinomianism and the Westminster Assembly (Grand
Rapids, MI, 2018).
92 See John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford,
1970).
 The Bible and Theology 397

The law loomed large in the works of ‘practical divinity’ that flowed from
the pens of English Puritan divines. The godly were known as ‘precisians’, for
they saw the Christian life as a strenuous affair, a disciplined straining after
God. In their preaching, they emphasized the ‘terrors of the law’ in order to
convince their hearers of their sinfulness and need for conversion. At the same
time, they taught that after conversion, believers must be punctilious in obey-
ing God’s law, including the observance of the Sabbath. The extraordinary
intensity of Puritan piety has led one historian to style Puritanism ‘the first
Protestant Pietism’. The rigours and demands of the godly preachers, however,
could provoke an ‘antinomian backlash’.93 In the late 1620s, London’s godly
subculture was roiled by an antinomian controversy, to be followed by a far
more notorious Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts in the mid-1630s,
involving figures like John Cotton, Sir Henry Vane Jr, and Anne Hutchinson.94
They feared that the Puritan ministry had become ‘legal’ preachers, emphasiz-
ing God’s law at the expense of God’s grace. Seeing themselves the champions
of ‘free grace’, they drove the colony to distraction, until order was re-imposed
with the expulsion of Hutchinson, the repatriation of Vane, and the recantation
of Cotton.
The challenge of antinomianism was far from over, however. In the revo-
lutionary atmosphere of 1640s London, the preachers of free grace found a new
audience for their tracts and sermons, and the Presbyterian ministry launched
a powerful counterattack. London, it seemed, had been Amsterdamified,
becoming like the Dutch city, notorious for its religious pluralism. England
seemed to be experiencing its own Radical Reformation: Anabaptism,
Spiritualism, and even anti-Trinitarianism were rampant once again.95 The
most startling evidence of this lay in the rise of the Baptists. In the crowded
parish of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, stomping ground of Samuel How, the
soapboiler Thomas Lambe presided over a Baptist congregation that the her-
esiographer Thomas Edwards depicted as a riotous debating club, where the
ill-informed floated dangerous doctrines like mortalism and antinomianism.96
In New England too, antinomianism continued to flourish even after Anne
Hutchinson was exiled in 1638.97

93 Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain.

94 David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, CA, 2004); Michael Winship, Making Heretics:
Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
95 John Coffey, ‘The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation?
Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Anti-Trinitarianism in the English Revolution’, in Bridget Heal
and Anorthe Kremers, eds, Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform (Göttingen,
2017), pp. 201–24.
96 On heresiography, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004).
For a rich analysis of the rise of heterodox ideas in the early 1640s, see Como, Radical
Parliamentarians.
97 Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England (Middleton, CT,
1984).
398 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Contemporaries feared that doctrinal antinomianism would foster ‘practical’

antinomianism, and in the Ranters this fear seemed to have been realized.
While some historians have lauded the Ranters as if they were precursors of
Sixties bohemianism, others have doubted their very existence; it seems
wiser to view them as a loose network of disaffected sectaries, who cited the
Bible against conventional Protestant mores.98 Abiezer Coppe used prophetic
Scripture to castigate the complacency of the affluent London godly, while
deploying Pauline texts to explain his freedom from the rigid regulations that
troubled the weaker brethren: ‘to the pure all things are pure’. This paradoxical
combination of fierce moralism and outrageous behaviour won the Ranters
few friends. Their ungodly ways—including swearing, drunkenness, and
fornication—minimized their chance of survival in Puritan England. Targeted
by the Blasphemy Act of 1650 (an act commended by John Milton as ‘well
deliberated’), they were soon snuffed out, an object lesson in the dangers of
carrying dissent too far. Only their name survived as a term of opprobrium,
later applied to the lay preachers of Primitive Methodism.
The Quakers were different. In some respects, Quakers were ultra-Puritans.
Many of their leaders, like George Fox and Isaac Pennington Jr, had an impec-
cable godly pedigree, whether in Puritan parishes or religious sects like the
Baptists. Puritanical to a fault, they took austerity and asceticism to new levels,
and intensified the high-octane religion of the conventicle: they trembled
before the Lord and their women prophesied. Escalating the radical Puritan
critique of established religion, they assailed churches as ‘steeple houses’,
and clergy as ‘blackcoats’. Theologically, the Quakers broke decisively with
Reformed orthodoxy. The theology and piety of the godly had maintained a
careful balance between Word and Spirit, clergy and laity, outward signs and
inward experience. Quakers tipped the balance decisively in favour of the
spirit, the laity, and what they called ‘the light within’ or (later) ‘the inner light’.
Puritans had always deplored the ‘formality’ of high church conformists, but
Quakers pursued the logic of anti-formalism much further, repudiating clergy,
formal sermons, and sacraments. Yet they remained drenched in Scripture, and
provided biblical proof texts for their most shocking ideas. Citing the prologue
to John’s Gospel, they argued that Christ ‘enlighteneth every man who cometh
into the world’. This notion of a universal ‘light within’ undercut the Calvinist
doctrine of human depravity, and valorized subjective spiritual experience
over doctrinal systems.99
Indeed, although the Quakers were extraordinarily prolific pamphleteers,
they tended to shy away from systematic statements or confessions of faith,

98 See Ariel Hessayon, ‘Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The
Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012), ch. 18. For an anthology
of Ranter texts, see A Collection of Ranter Writings, ed. Nigel Smith, second edn (London, 2014).
99 See the classic account of the relationship between Puritan and Quaker conceptions of the
Spirit by Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience.
 The Bible and Theology 399

satirizing the elaborations of scholastic theologians like Owen and Baxter.

Following the prosecution of James Nayler, who was flogged, branded, and
imprisoned by parliament in 1656 for imitating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem
while riding into Bristol, Edward Burrough did issue A Declaration to all the
World of our Faith (1657), an eight-page summary of Quaker teachings designed
to underscore their basic Christian orthodoxy while reiterating their distinc-
tives. Burrough affirmed the historic life and work of Christ, and the reality
of hell, and he gestured towards Trinitarianism, but since he eschewed the
tech­nical language of theologians in favour of purely scriptural language, his
positions on the Trinity and predestination were ambiguous—a reader of his
pamphlet would be unclear as to whether Quaker Christology was Arian or
Athanasian, or whether Quaker teaching on election was Calvinist or Arminian.
A much fuller statement of Quaker theology was set out by the Scot Robert
Barclay in A Catechism and Confession of Faith (1673) and An Apology for the
True Christian Divinity (1678). In both texts, Barclay expressed contempt for
scholastic divinity and the pretensions of the learned, alleging that mainstream
Protestants had failed to follow through on their own Scripture principle, and
been ‘forc’d to recur to Tradition’. Quakers had been ‘accused as Hereticks by a
Generation that cry up and exalt the Scriptures’, but the Friends were the true
biblicists, because their ‘Principles’ were ‘found in Scripture, Word by Word’.100
To prove the point, Barclay’s Catechism consisted entirely in questions answered
by biblical quotations. In stark contrast to Reformed confessions of faith,
however, Barclay’s Apology presented a chapter on ‘Immediate Revelation’
before a chapter on ‘the Scriptures’, arguing that ‘Divine revelations’ (whether
by voices, appearances, dreams, or ‘inward objective manifestations in the heart’)
should not ‘be subjected either to the outward testimony of the Scriptures, or
of the natural reason of Man’. The Scriptures were ‘a secondary Rule, subordinate
to the Spirit’. They bore testimony to the work of the Spirit, but it was the Spirit
not the Bible who was ‘the principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge’.101
Quakers thus reversed the priority of Word and Spirit found in the mainstream
Reformers, though they did so by intensifying the Puritan emphasis on the
work of the Holy Spirit.
The Quakers also developed a distinctive soteriology, one at odds with
Reformed orthodoxy. Barclay could readily agree that humanity was corrupted
by an ‘evil Seed’, but he rejected the Augustinian notion of original guilt trans-
mitted to every infant. Like the Arminians, the Quakers emphasized the
universal availability of grace, for Christ ‘inlighteneth the hearts of all in a day,
in order to Salvation . . . if not resisted’. ‘There is an Evangelical and Saving
Light and Grace in all’, declared Barclay, and Christ had died for all mankind,
not merely for a predestined few (as high Calvinists had ‘foolishly’ averred).

100 Robert Barclay, A Catechism (1673), pp. 5–8.

101 Robert Barclay, An Apology (1678), pp. 3–4, 38.
400 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Although salvation was freely available to all, humans had to choose between
the ‘evil seed’ and ‘the light’ within them. ‘For those who do not resist the light,
but receive it, it becomes a holy, pure, and spiritual birth in them.’ Barclay
employed the biblical language of new birth, justification, and sanctification,
but without the sharp conceptual distinctions between them that one finds in
Reformed theologians. He implied the possibility of attaining perfection in
the Christian life, but also insisted that those who had experienced new birth
could still make a shipwreck of their faith. Here too, Quakers sided with the
Arminians against the Calvinists, repudiating the Reformed doctrine of per-
severance. At the same time, their emphasis on ‘inner revelation’ and experi-
ence of the Spirit gave their theology a mystical ethos very different to the
intellectualism of Dutch Remonstrants, who were found ‘wanting’ because
‘they have not placed the [universal] extent of [Christ’s] salvation’ in the prin-
ciple of the inner light.102
During the ‘second period’ of Quakerism, following the Restoration, the
movement attracted the philosopher and mystic Anne Conway (a protégé of
the Cambridge Platonist Henry More), who was visited by Fox, William Penn,
and other Quakers before converting to the movement shortly before her
death in 1679. She committed her mature thought to manuscript and it was
posthumously published as Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissi-
mae (1690), translated into English as The Principles of the Most Ancient and
Modern Philosophy (1692). Here was a philosophical theology, closer in form
to Cambridge Platonist treatises than to early Quaker pamphlets, indebted to
Origen and at odds with the dualism of Descartes and More and the materialism
of Hobbes and Spinoza. Conway’s fascination with kabbalah and her so­terio­
logic­al universalism reflected the Quaker emphasis on the light within every
man; her preoccupation with metaphysics and theodicy won the admiration of
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.103
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists alike devoted much energy
to refuting Quaker teachings, partly because Quakers took many of their con-
verts from the Puritan congregations. There was a particularly fierce sibling
rivalry between Quakers and Baptists; both groups were primitivists, but while
Baptists sought to imitate the structures of the New Testament Church, the
early Quakers were more primitivist still, believing that they could participate
in a new Acts of the Apostles, complete with miraculous signs, revelations, and
spectacular missionary journeys. Baptists stressed the historic, external events
of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, whereas Quakers talked in mystical
terms of the Word that enlightens every man.104 Baptists, Presbyterians, and
Congregationalists sought to refute Quakers in sermons, pamphlets, and

102 Barclay, An Apology, pp. 67–8.

103 See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge, 2004), esp. ch. 9.
104 See T.L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War: Baptist-Quaker Conflict
in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 4–5, passim.
 The Bible and Theology 401

treatises, but also in the public disputations that flourished in the religious
marketplace of Cromwellian England. In 1672, the elderly New England fire-
brand, Roger Williams, canoed through the night to confront George Fox at
Newport, Rhode Island, only to find that the Quaker leader had moved on. The
feisty Williams tackled his subordinates and published George Fox Digg’d out
of his Burrowes (1676). For Williams, as for many other more conventional
Reformed Protestants, the Quakers were heretics, who undermined Scripture,
the Trinity, predestination, justification by faith, and Christ’s substitutionary
atonement. They could make even radical Puritans seem like staunch defend-
ers of trad­ition­al orthodoxy.
The later seventeenth century saw a turn away from the wilder extremes of
the revolutionary decades. Restoration Quakers exemplified the routiniza-
tion of charisma. There was a diminution in female prophets, guerrilla the-
atre, quixotic missionary journeys, trembling, dreams, and visions. Slowly, but
surely, the Quakers would morph from sect to denomination, better known for
commercial acumen than ecstatic fervour.105 Baptists also stabilized, stanching
the flow of converts to more radical sects, and consolidating their Arminian or
Calvinist theologies in confessions of faith. Presbyterians increasingly occu-
pied a mediating position between the high Calvinism of the Congregationalists
and the latitudinarian theology of Anglican neo-Arminians. Indeed, it was the
Established Church that would produce some of the most daring theological
speculation of the period: the Origenist universalism of George Rust, George
Bull’s doctrine of justification, the modernized Trinitarianism of William
Sherlock, the doctrinal minimalism of John Locke. Restoration Dissent, with
the exception of the Quakers, was less revisionist and more conventional.
Presbyterians were far less preoccupied by ‘heresy’ that they had been during
the heated years of the Puritan Revolution, and Dissent was less troubled
(at this stage) by anti-Trinitarianism than was the Church of England. Dissenting
ministers were able to pass the theological test imposed by the Toleration Act
of 1689, which required them to subscribe to thirty-six of the Thirty-Nine
Articles (with some further exemptions for Baptists and Quakers).
Still, even in the 1690s, theological disputes could sharpen denominational
divides. The ‘Happy Union’ between Presbyterians and Congregationalists
was disrupted in part because the spectre of antinomianism reared its ugly
head once more with the republication of the sermons of Tobias Crisp, and the
enthusiastic free grace preaching of Richard Davis.106 One can see the different
emphases of Presbyterians as against Congregationalists and Particular Baptists
in the hymnody of the 1690s and early 1700s, culminating in Isaac Watts’ Hymns
and Spiritual Songs (1707/9). Watts was a successor to John Owen as pastor

105 The best study of this ‘second period’ is now Richard C. Allen and Rosemary Moore, eds,
The Quakers, 1656–1723: The Evolution of an Alternative Community (University Park, PA, 2018).
106 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford,
1978), pp. 289–97.
402 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

of London’s Mark Lane congregation, and he mediated Reformed orthodoxy

to the eighteenth century in a genre that Dissenters found hard to resist,
even if the introduction of hymns provoked much controversy at first. In
later years, Watts would have his doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity, but
his hymns were emphatically Trinitarian and Reformed in their theology.107
These hymns would exercise a powerful influence on Congregationalists and
Particular Baptists, as well as American Presbyterians; in England, however,
Presbyterians and General Baptists would prove more resistant to the theology
of Watts’ hymns, and more open to critiques of Reformation orthodoxy.
In general, however, Dissenters stuck more closely to Reformation theology
than their Anglican contemporaries, at least if we go by the evidence of newly
composed theological works and sermons rather than Cranmer’s Book of
Common Prayer. A recent statistical analysis of printed sermons in the period
1660 to 1780 suggests stark contrasts. Dissenters sounded themes familiar
from the preaching of the Reformers: Providence, Justification, Hearing the
Word, Conversion, Free Grace; Conformists majored on Proper Gospel,
Rebellion, Epiphany, Universal Obedience. More striking still are the different
texts employed in Dissenter and Conformist sermons. Dissenters favoured
the Pauline texts on predestination, justification, and atonement (Ephesians 1,
Romans 5), and Old Testament chapters read as types or prophecies of
Christ’s saving death (Genesis 22, Isaiah 53). Anglicans choose texts that
stressed Christian obedience: the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), the
Epistle of James (‘faith without works is dead’), and Romans 12 (‘present your
bodies as a living sacrifice’).108
This reflects divergent soteriologies. According to the ‘neo-Arminian’ soteri-
ology propounded by most Hanoverian parish clergy, good works were a
condition of justification before God. James Woodforde, author of the famous
Diary of a Country Parson, told his parishioners that heaven was ‘that future
and eternal Glory, which is by the Gospel made a certain Reward of Piety and
Virtue’. The preaching of piety and virtue was of paramount importance, for
the practice of both was how men and women qualified for heaven. It came as
a shock when the Methodists, led by John Wesley and George Whitefield,
preached justification by faith and challenged ‘the reassuring version of paro-
chial Arminianism’ that envisaged the parish community as ‘a company of
baptized Christians treading together the broad road to heaven’.109 By contrast,

107 See John Coffey, ‘Between Puritanism and Evangelicalism: “Heart-Work” in Dissenting
Communion Hymns, 1693–1709’, in Coffey, ed., Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England and
Ireland, 1690–1850 (Oxford, 2016), ch. 1.
108 Mark Anthony Bearman, Jean-Phillipe Cointet, Philipp Brandt, Newton Key, and Peter
Bearman, ‘The (Protestant) Bible, the (Printed) Sermon, and the Word(s): The Semantic Structure
of the Conformist and Dissenting Bible, 1660–1780’, Poetics, 68 (2018), 89–103, esp. 99.
109 See Mark Smith, ‘The Hanoverian Parish: Towards a New Agenda’, Past and Present, 216
(2012), 79–105, quotations at 86, 104.
 The Bible and Theology 403

Dissenters had remained more closely tethered to the Reformation doctrine

of justification by faith alone. Good works could never satisfy God’s right-
eous demands or atone for sin; the sinner’s only hope was to cling to Christ’s
atoning sacrifice.

DISSENTING ECCLESIOLO GY

Yet the defining theological rift between Dissenters and Conformists con-
cerned ecclesiology, not soteriology. Already in the reign of Henry VIII, as Karl
Gunther has demonstrated, England’s radical Protestants were going beyond
controversies over justification and the Eucharist and proposing ‘the creation of
a fundamentally new sort of church in England, one that would have wreaked
havoc on patterns of authority, and all in the name of fidelity of Scripture’.
Early evangelicals like Tyndale, Robert Barnes and John Bale attacked diocesan
episcopacy, clerical hierarchy, ecclesiastical courts, and the clergy’s civil occu-
pations, seeking to replace them with a truly biblical church, one marked by
clerical parity, popular consent, and congregational discipline. Far from break-
ing with the English Protestant tradition, Elizabethan Presbyterians were
re­invig­or­at­ing this call for ‘institutional reformation’.110 Presbyterians believed
that the Church of England must be purged and reformed, but Elizabethan
Separatists went further, concluding that the English religious establishment
was beyond reform, a false church. In subsequent decades, the quest for the
true church drove Presbyterians, Baptists, and Congregationalists alike to
devote themselves to the study of the New Testament, where like the Separatists
of Plumbers’ Hall they sought the ‘primitive pattern’ or ‘model’ for a truly
reformed ecclesiology.111
The primitivism of Dissenters was fuelled by eschatological hope.112 The
Reformers had identified the Papacy with the Antichrist and with the Whore of
Babylon in the Book of Revelation, setting their own struggle within the
apocalyptic climax of history predicted in the Scriptures. Yet as magisterial
Reformers, sixteenth-century Lutherans and Calvinists were hostile to

110 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590
(Cambridge, 2014), ch. 1, quotation at p. 42.
111 On Puritan primitivism see T.D. Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension
in Puritanism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988); on Baptist and Quaker primitivism, see Underwood,
Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War. On the emergence of radical Puritan ecclesiology, see
Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625
(Oxford, 1988).
112 For what follows, see Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War; Crawford
Gribben, ‘Millennialism’, in Haykin and Jones, eds, Drawn into Controversie, ch. 4; Jeffrey Jue,
‘Puritan Millenarianism in Old and New England’, in John Coffey and Paul Lim, eds, The
Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 15; Andrew Crome, ed., Prophecy
and Eschatology in the Transatlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2016).
404 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

s­ ubversive ‘chiliasts’ who predicted a coming golden age of equality and plenty;
instead, they agreed with Augustine that Christians should be looking for-
ward to heaven, not to a future millennium. The 1,000-year reign of the saints
described in Revelation 20 was either in the past or to be understood in a non-
literal fashion as a description of the era of the Christian Church. In the later
sixteenth century, however, Reformers like Theodore Beza began to anticipate
a latter-day conversion of the Jews to Christianity (basing this on Paul’s Epistle
to the Romans, chapter 11). In the first decades of the seventeenth century, a
number of Reformed thinkers went further, arguing that there would be a
future millennium, and giving the Jews a much greater role in Christian
eschatology by advancing a literal interpretation of Old Testament prophecies
concerning Zion, Jerusalem, or Israel. Traditionally, these terms had been
understood to signify the Church; now, they were taken to prophesy the
­conversion of the Jews and even their return to Palestine. Among the pion-
eers of this Judeo-centric millenarianism were the episcopal divine, Joseph
Mede, and the Presbyterian Thomas Brightman, but it would be embraced
most en­thu­si­as­tic­al­ly by Congregationalists and Baptists. For many English
Dissenters, the res­tor­ation of the primitive Church in its original purity was
an integral feature of the latter days. During the 1630s and 1640s, Puritan
exiles like John Cotton and Thomas Goodwin developed a Congregationalist
doctrine of the Church as they meditated on biblical prophecy and the com-
ing millennium. For Baptists too, eschatology inspired ecclesiology, and pro-
jects of church reform.
Despite its importance, ecclesiology was often seen as a secondary matter. In
the confessions of faith produced by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and
Baptists, the doctrine of the Church had to wait its turn; it was only introduced
after the doctrine of Scripture, God, and salvation had been carefully laid out.
Not until chapter 25 did readers of the Westminster Confession encounter the
divines’ statement ‘Of the Church’; in the London Baptist confession of 1646,
ecclesiology was finally broached in article 33; in the Savoy Declaration of 1658,
the Congregationalists dealt with Church and sacraments in chapters 26–30,
while relegating their specifically congregational ecclesiology to a separate
appendix, ‘Of the Institution of Churches, and the Order Appointed in Them
by Jesus Christ’.113 The ‘Principles of Faith’ (1652) and ‘A New Confession of
Faith’ (1654), drafted by Owen and others to serve as national confessions, did
not even mention the Church and its sacraments, as if ecclesiology did not
belong to the fundamentals of the faith.114 The Cambridge Platform of 1648
was different since its Massachusetts’ authors prefaced their document by
noting their agreement with Westminster doctrine, before presenting a lengthy
defence of Congregationalism.115

113 Reformed Confessions, IV, pp. 264–5, 282–3, 484ff, 490–5.

114 Reformed Confessions, IV, pp. 423–31.
115 See Williston Walker, ed., The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York, 1893).
 The Bible and Theology 405

This omission was a silent acknowledgement of how deeply divided the

godly now were over the doctrine of the Church. Quite apart from the divi-
sions between Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, there was also
a power­ful ‘anti-formalist’ or spiritualist strain in radical Puritan piety that
dismissed the importance of ‘outward forms’, including institutions and
ordinances.116 Owen was no doubt aware that leading Independent statesmen
like Oliver Cromwell and his friend Sir Henry Vane the younger, were not
members of a particular congregation or parish church. Their fervent piety
found its outlet in personal, voluntary, and household religion; both had
engaged in lay preaching. Vane was a friend of Roger Williams, who having
founded America’s first Baptist church in 1639, soon became convinced that
the true church was still in the ‘Wilderness’ following its apostasy under
Constantine, and that church and ministry would not be restored until God had
sent new apostles or ‘Witnesses’ (as predicted in Revelation 11); in the mean-
time, believers must seek and wait. It was among such ‘Seekers’ that the early
Quakers won some of their following. Yet rather than presenting themselves as
apostles sent to restore church structures and sacraments, the Quakers taught
an anti-formalist gospel: the res­tor­ation of primitive Christianity was not
manifested in external forms, but in the hearts of believers gathered together to
attend to the light within. Here again, we see the godly divided by a common
quest for the restoration of primitive Christianity.
Ministry and sacraments were especially contentious issues. As we have seen
in earlier chapters, there was a spectrum of opinion on both issues among
Dissenters. On the ministry, Presbyterians and most Congregationalists
hewed closely to magisterial Reformation ideals, emphasizing the necessity
of an ordained and learned clergy. There was much debate in the Westminster
Assembly over ‘the power of the keys’ (Matthew 18:18): had it been given to the
elders, or the congregation, or to both? Presbyterians were divided between a
clericalist and a more populist tendency, whereas Congregationalists generally
accorded a significant role to the congregation, allowing voting in the meet-
ings of gathered churches.117 The Baptists acknowledged a role for ‘ministers’
or ‘pastors’ but made room for lay preachers; most were critical of ‘hireling
ministers’ supported by tithes, believing that true pastors were supported by
voluntary contributions from a gathered church, but some non-Separatist
Baptists (like John Tombes and Henry Jessey) did accept parish livings in the
1650s. Quakers, by contrast, dispensed with ordination altogether, erasing any
distinction between clergy and laity, while recognizing ‘ministers’ of the Gospel
who could be women as well as men.118

116 For what follows, see Como, Radical Parliamentarians, pp. 236–7, 384–408; W. Clark
Gilpin, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago, IL, 1979); Underwood, Primitivism,
Radicalism and the Lamb’s War, ch. 6.
117 See Powell, The Crisis of Protestantism.
118 See Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War, ch. 6.
406 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

On the sacraments, as Susan Hardman Moore explains in her chapter, the

Presbyterians and Congregationalists followed the Reformers, stressing the
importance of the two ‘sacraments’ of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ‘holy
signs and seals of the covenant of grace’.119 Both practised infant baptism, but
whereas the Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists emphatically
rejected believers’ baptism, English Congregationalists from the 1640s onwards
typically operated an open membership policy that allowed members to
choose their own position of baptism (including whether or not to baptize their
children). This was a momentous development, and a remarkable accommoda-
tion. Some Baptists returned the favour, at least insofar as they allowed ‘open
communion’ to Congregationalists, but Particular and General Baptists were
usually insistent on the necessity of believers’ baptism, not for salvation, but
for admission to membership and the Lord’s Supper. They preferred to speak
of ‘ordinances’ rather than ‘sacraments’, a linguistic change that suggests their
distancing from the churches of the magisterial Reformation. Yet while all
three denominations denied the physical presence of Christ in the sacrament
(taking issue with Lutherans and high churchmen as well as Catholics), even
the Baptists could emphasize that the body and blood of Christ was ‘spiritually
present’ so that believers could ‘spiritually receive and feed upon Christ
crucified’.120 It was the Quakers who were the true radicals, rejecting water
baptism and communion.121

CONCLUSION

Dissent in 1689 can be imagined along a theological scale, ranging from the
orthodox Presbyterians to the heterodox Quakers, though this does not cap-
ture the idiosyncrasies of theological opinion. On the doctrines of justification,
atonement, and predestination, for example, the Particular Baptists were typ­
ic­al­ly closer to the Synod of Dort than was Richard Baxter, the most famous
(though not the most representative) of Presbyterians. As we have seen in the
case of the Westminster Assembly and of John Milton, theological alignments
could shift with each twist of the doctrinal kaleidoscope.
One can think of English Dissent as split between heirs of the magisterial
Reformation and proponents of ‘radical Reformation’ with affinities to con­
tin­en­tal Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Socinianism. Presbyterians and main-
stream Congregationalists adhered closest to the magisterial tradition, while

119 Reformed Confessions, IV, pp. 265–9 (Westminster Confession), 485–8 (Savoy Declaration).
See E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology
in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, CT, 1974).
120 Reformed Confessions, IV, p. 568 (London Baptist Confession, 1677). Baptists continue to
debate the place of the sacraments in their tradition: see Anthony R. Cross and Philip E. Thompson,
eds, Baptist Sacramentalism (Carlisle, 2003).
121 See Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War, ch. 5.
 The Bible and Theology 407

Baptists and Quakers were more obviously related to radical Protestantism. Yet
here too, things are more complicated than a simple binary suggests. Baptists
and Quakers owed more to English Puritanism than to continental Anabaptism
or Spiritualism, and the theology of the Baptists (both Particular and General)
was closer to the Reformed tradition than that of the Mennonites, let alone
the Socinians.122
Nevertheless, in various respects and to different degrees, Dissenters were
edging away from the magisterial Reformation and towards a more radical
Protestantism. Some of the defining features of traditional Christendom
were waning in importance. English Presbyterians and New England
Congregationalists increasingly relied on ‘voluntary instead of es­tab­lish­ment­
arian methods’. Baptists and Quakers turned Protestant biblicism against the
union of Church and state. Under William Penn, Quaker Pennsylvania ‘all
but abandoned establishmentarian Christendom’.123 Having rejected episcopacy
and Prayer Book Dissenters marginalized the Apocrypha, ancient creeds, coun-
cils, and Church Fathers. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were increasingly called
‘ordinances’ not ‘sacraments’. Among Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and
Baptists, confessions of faith survived, though the eighteenth century would
witness a backlash against clerical subscription. Much of this change was
le­git­im­ized by an appeal to the Protestant principle of Scripture sufficiency.
Protestant theology was shifting further away from ecumenical traditions asso-
ciated with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. By the later seven­
teenth century, many Protestant intellectuals were turning from the elaborate
systems of the scholastic orthodox, towards either a Pietism that emphasized
experience over dogma, or a ‘reasonable’ Enlightenment Christianity that
sought to strip doctrine down to its bare essentials.124 In the eighteenth cen-
tury, Dissenters would follow these trends, gravitating towards either ‘evangel-
ical’ or ‘rational’ Dissent.125

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Bass, Clint, Thomas Grantham (1633–1692) and General Baptist Theology (Oxford, 2013).
Coggins, J.R., John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separation, Mennonite Influence, and
the Elect Nation (Scottsdale, PN, 1991).
Como, David, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian
Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, CA, 2004).

122 See Coffey, ‘ “The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation”?’
123 See Noll, In the Beginning was the Word, ch. 5, quotation at p. 144.
124 For these trends across Europe, see W.R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual
History, 1670–1789 (Cambridge, 2006); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants,
Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ, 2008), chs 1–3.
125 See Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and
Ethics in England, 1660–1780, Vol. I: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 1991); Knud Haakonssen, ed.,
Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996).
408 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Denlinger, Aaron Clay, ed., Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology,
1550–1775 (London, 2015).
Dennison, James T., ed., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English
Translation, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI, 2014), IV: 1600–93.
Dobranski, Stephen and John P. Rumrich, eds, Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998).
Gribben, Crawford, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxford,
2016).
Gunther, Karl, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590
(Cambridge, 2014).
Gura, Philip, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England (Middleton,
CT, 1984).
Haykin, Michael and Mark Jones, eds, Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological
Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism (Gottingen, 2011).
Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (London, 1972).
Hill, Christopher, The Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993).
Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans
to the Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2003).
Keeble, N.H. and Nuttall, Geoffrey, eds, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard
Baxter, 2 vols (Oxford, 1991).
Lehner, Ulrich L., Muller, Richard A., and Roeber, A.G., eds, The Oxford Handbook of
Early Modern Theology (Oxford, 2016).
Lim, Paul C.-H., Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England
(New York, 2012).
Morgan, D. Densil, Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales:
Volume I: From Reformation to Revival, 1588–1760 (Cardiff, 2018).
Mortimer, Sarah, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of
Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010).
Muller, Richard, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of
Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520–ca. 1725, 4 vols (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003).
Noll, Mark. In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783
(Oxford, 2016).
Nuttall, Geoffrey, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, with a new introduction
by Peter Lake (Chicago, IL, 1992).
Ollerton, Andrew J., ‘The Crisis of Calvinism and Rise of Arminianism in Cromwellian
England’ (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 2017).
Underwood, T.L. Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker
Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997).
Vernon, Elliot and Powell, Hunter, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic
World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester, 2020).
Winship, Michael, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in
Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ, 2002).
 18

Worship and Sacraments

Susan Hardman Moore

‘What is the chief end of man?’ asked the first question of the Westminster
Assembly’s Shorter Catechism, a defining document in the English-speaking
Reformed tradition. The scripted answer—famous because generations of
­children memorized it first and forgot it last—was ‘to glorify God and enjoy
him for ever’.1 Thus the catechism set praise as the purpose of human life, in this
world and the next. What is more, though this might seem surprising in light
of the Reformed tradition’s reputation for austerity, it affirmed that God should
be enjoyed.
Worship stood at the heart of the ideology and experience of Protestant
Dissent. This chapter explores worship and sacraments in the strands of English
Protestantism that, after the Restoration in 1660, became Dissenting traditions.
The story is complex. From the 1540s, zealous Protestants interpreted Jesus’
command to worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:23–4) in different
ways. Many had an ambivalent loyalty to the Book of Common Prayer. Others
wanted to jettison it for purer patterns of worship inspired by the continental
Reformed tradition. In this history, what happened when, and how, is im­port­ant.
But beyond changes to the outward shape of liturgy, it is important also to
investigate the culture of worship that evolved within the Protestant Dissenting
traditions—by accident or design—and to consider how this moulded religious
experience. In John Bunyan’s allegory The Holy War, ‘Diabolus’ and ‘Emmanuel’
fought over the town of Mansoul (man’s soul). Impregnable walls surrounded
the town. In the middle stood ‘Heart Castle’. Access in and out was by five gates:
Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, Feel-gate.2 Coming through these
sensory gates was the only way to reach Heart Castle. Bunyan’s language can be
borrowed to explore how Dissenting worship set out to storm the gates of
Mansoul and capture Heart Castle.

1 The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines . . . concerning a Shorter Catechisme (London,
[1647]), p. 1.
2 John Bunyan, The Holy War (London, 1682), p. 4.

Susan Hardman Moore, Worship and Sacraments In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I.
Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0019
410 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Mapping the hinterland and heartland of Dissenting worship is complicated

by several factors, and it is helpful to lay these out at the start. First, dissent
(with a small ‘d’) inevitably defines itself chiefly by what it opposes. This means
it is always easier to find a negative consensus about ‘what must go’ than it is to
find agreement about what should come in its place. Second, for most of the
period this volume covers, the majority of dissenters stayed within the Church
of England. They squared their Reformed principles, as best they could, with
the legal requirement to use the Book of Common Prayer. Often they came up
with creative workarounds—amending or omitting elements of the Prayer
Book—to satisfy their desire for purity. These patterns of evasive conformity do
not make for a clear picture, though common traits are evident. Third, the
nature of the surviving evidence is problematic: not so much for understanding
ideology, but for finding out what really went on. When prominent dissenters
aired their views in print, what they wrote (beyond listing the Prayer Book’s
faults) was almost entirely prescriptive, not descriptive: what ought to happen
in worship, not what actually happened. Set liturgies and printed prayers are
two-dimensional, with no clues to anything said or done extempore. To add to
the difficulties, parish and Dissenting records are usually silent about what
took place at worship, Sunday by Sunday: this is not a subject for registers,
financial accounts, or vestry minutes. It is true that reading between the lines of
churchwardens’ accounts can give valuable hints as to how a church building
was being used;3 also, Dissenting church books can give some insight into the
operation of church discipline, though this falls short of worship.4 But, on the
whole, what happened in practice has to be pieced together from fragments
embedded in other kinds of evidence: accusations of nonconformity in church
courts; comments in sermons, diaries, or godly biographies; incidental remarks
from the mud-slinging that accompanied religious controversies.
To explore the themes outlined here, this chapter starts with a sketch of the
debates and practice that created the ethos of Dissenting worship evident by
1689. After looking at early campaigns to change the Book of Common Prayer,
or to abandon it, the discussion will focus in on A Directory for the Publique
Worship of God, drawn up by the Westminster Assembly, and approved by
parliament in 1645 to replace the Book of Common Prayer.5 The Directory—
although its official status until the Restoration proved to be a hollow victory—
marked the apex of efforts by ‘the hotter sort of Protestant’ to reform worship
in the national Church. It represented a consensus of mainstream reforming
interests, and so (directly or indirectly) set the tone for worship in the

3 As by Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, in Altars Restored: The Changing Face of
English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007).
4 Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, An Inventory of Puritan
and Dissenting Records, 1640–1714 (London, 2016): http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/
online-publications/dissenting-records.
5 A Directory for the Publique Worship of God (London, 1645).
 Worship and Sacraments 411

Dissenting traditions. Finally, to press deeper into the culture of Dissenting

worship, the discussion will consider how its sensory character shaped
­religious experience.

AGITATION OVER THE B O OK OF COMMON PRAYER

From the first appearance of the Book of Common Prayer, dissenting voices
argued for significant changes to the liturgical practices it prescribed. The
Prayer Book came into use at Whitsun, 1549, followed by a substantially revised
version in 1552. Both were produced under the direction of Archbishop Thomas
Cranmer, who guided a decisive shift to Protestantism but also drew heavily on
liturgical tradition. In the wake of further seismic shifts in English politics,
three new (but only slightly revised) Prayer Books came out in the period
­covered by this volume: in 1559, after Elizabeth I reversed Mary I’s restoration
of Catholicism; in 1604, after James VI of Scotland also became James I of
England; in 1662, as part of the Restoration Settlement that saw Charles II take
the throne after the Cromwellian republic had crumbled.6 The imposition of
the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, with the ejection of all ministers who would
not accept it, saw the start of a distinct identity for Dissent.
The requirement to kneel to receive communion is a good example of what
‘the hotter sort of Protestant’ found objectionable in the Book of Common
Prayer. Ardent Protestants construed kneeling as allowing ‘popish’ adoration of
the elements, perpetuating Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the miracle of
the mass, which transformed the substance of bread and wine into the body and
blood of Christ). As soon as the Prayer Book of 1549 appeared, John Knox—at
this point an army chaplain in the garrison town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on
the fringes of English rule—played fast and loose with its instructions. Rather
than asking his congregation to receive communion ‘reverently kneeling’, he
asked them to sit around the table, following what he understood as the prac-
tice of Christ and the apostles at the Last Supper. What Knox put into practice
quietly up in Berwick, he campaigned for loudly after his appointment as a
royal chaplain brought him down south. He advocated sitting to receive com-
munion in a sermon preached before Edward VI in September 1552, just as the
second Book of Common Prayer was about to go to print. After a bruising fight
with Cranmer, which ‘left in rubble Knox’s arguments about what had actually
happened at the Last Supper’, Knox lost this campaign.7 To make sure no one
could mistake its meaning, a rubric was added to 1552 Prayer Book to explain

6 Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford,
2011).
7 Jane Dawson, John Knox (New Haven CT, and London, 2015), p. 73.
412 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

that kneeling was a sign of grateful thanksgiving for the ‘benefits of Christ’, not
adoration of the elements themselves nor an endorsement of Christ’s ‘real and
essential’ presence in them. Disappointingly for those of Knox’s temper, this
rubric was left out in the Elizabethan Prayer Book of 1559, which has been
described as 1552 with ‘conservative amendments’.8 Friction with the more rad-
ically minded over receiving communion ‘kneeling humbly on their knees’
continued throughout Elizabeth’s reign and those of her early Stuart succes-
sors. Of course, a bishop who valued the preaching and pastoral ministry of his
best clergy might turn a blind eye to those who wanted to ignore the require-
ment to kneel. Equally, clergy who valued keeping tenure of their pulpits might
well bear with allowing their people to kneel, since loss of their episcopal
licence to preach seemed a worse prospect. As recent debate about ‘defining
Puritanism’ has explored, an individual’s willingness to defy the letter of the
Prayer Book often waxed or waned depending on the context.9
Kneeling at communion was only one element that keener Protestants saw as
a ‘remnant of popery’. When James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English
throne, reform-minded clerics hoped that his experience of Reformed worship
would lead him to revise the Book of Common Prayer. In the Millenary
Petition, presented to James in 1603 as he travelled south from Scotland, the
petitioners presented an agenda all too familiar from the reign of Elizabeth: an
end to ceremonies like the sign of the cross in baptism and ring in marriage; the
substitution of the word ‘minister’ for ‘priest’; church music to be ‘moderated to
better edification’; ‘no ministers charged to teach their people to bow at the
name of Jesus’; ‘canonical scriptures only be read in the church’.10 This wish-list
reflected what Elizabethan parish ministers had taken the chance to put into
practice if they could. What is also clear—from manuscript evidence of local
nonconformity as well as in campaigns like the Millenary Petition—is how
close their agenda stayed to revising the Prayer Book (keeping its pattern of
sermon-centred worship, with Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and prayer)
rather than throwing it out altogether.11
In the event, the Millenary Petition (and further appeals for reform at the
Hampton Court Conference of 1604) failed to bring change. A campaign for
conformity ensued, based on the new Canons of 1604, which included a
requirement for ministers to ‘observe the Orders, Rites, and Ceremonies pre-
scribed in the Book of Common Prayer . . . without either diminishing . . . or
adding any thing’ and to affirm ‘That the Book of Common Prayer . . . ­containeth

8 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 33.

9 John Spurr, English Puritanism: 1603–1689 (London, 1998), pp. 6–8.
10 Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (1655), Tenth Book, pp. 21–3 (the original text
of the petition no longer survives); Bryan D. Spinks, ‘Liturgy and Worship’, in Anthony Milton,
ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume 1: Reformation and Identity c.1520–1662 (Oxford,
2017), p. 161.
11 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 366–7.
 Worship and Sacraments 413

in it nothing contrary to the Word of God’.12 In reaction, A Survey of the Booke

of Common Prayer lodged 197 queries, on behalf of more than 260 deprived or
suspended ministers, followed by a rhetorical question: did b ­ ishops intend to
‘make an idoll of the booke of common prayer, as being so perfect, that it
­cannot be amended in any part’; or were they afraid to change anything because
the whole book was ‘ruinous’ beyond repair, and could only be rebuilt from
scratch?13
Up to this point we have looked at those who wanted to amend the Book of
Common Prayer, but now we turn to those who wanted to jettison it com-
pletely. The Survey’s critique looks mild in comparison to the vitriol of the John
Field, who, in An Admonition to the Parliament (1572), excoriated the Prayer
Book as ‘picked out of that popishe dunghil, the Masse booke’.14
For radical Protestants like Field, Reformed practice on the Continent
­provided an inspiration to demand change. During the reign of Edward VI
(1547–53), England offered shelter to continental Protestants suffering religious
persecution, and permitted these ‘Strangers’ to follow their own style of w ­ orship
in their own churches. This put living models of Dutch and French Reformed
worship into London and elsewhere in the south of England. Then, after
Catholicism was restored by Mary I in 1553, English Protestants fled to
Reformed cities like Geneva, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Strasbourg, and absorbed
the religious culture there. In their exile churches, they faced a dilemma:
to press further with the reform of worship, or to stick with what had
been achieved under Edward VI? On one hand, the chance to align their
practice with that of ‘the best Reformed churches’ must have seemed a golden
op­por­tun­ity—or at least the silver lining to a painful exile.15 On the other hand,
holding fast to the Prayer Book (especially while Cranmer was in prison)
showed a determination to uphold the Church of England in Protestant form.
Differences in self-perception fuelled disputes: some exiles saw themselves as
the vanguard of reform, others as the national Church-in-waiting.16 The issue
flared up when the English church in Frankfurt resolved to make selective use
of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. Other English exile churches, they
­proposed, should do likewise. In response, the Zurich and Strasbourg exiles
argued that all exile churches should use the 1552 Book of Common Prayer in
its entirety. It is worth noting that all parties assumed that the scattered English
exiles should use a common form of worship: the idea of ‘unity in diversity’

12 http://www.anglican.net/doctrines/1604-canon-law/#p1-3.
13 A Survey of the Booke of Common Prayer ([Middelburg], 1606), p. 159.
14 W.H. Frere and C.E. Douglas, eds, Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan
Revolt (London, 1954), p. 21; Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 119–20.
15 The model of ‘the best Reformed churches’ was invoked in the Solemn League and Covenant
(1643), but also much earlier: James Kirk, ‘ “The Polities of the Best Reformed Kirks”: Scottish
Achievements and English Aspirations in Church Government after the Reformation’, The Scottish
Historical Review, 59 (1980), 22–3, 39.
16 Dawson, Knox, pp. 90–108, gives a definitive account.
414 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

(a keystone of the modern ecumenical movement) was not something that

sprang to mind in the early modern period. But what should their common
form of worship be? By now, Knox had moved from Geneva to Frankfurt,
where he caused controversy by refusing to celebrate communion using the
1552 Prayer Book. For a short time, it looked as if Frankfurt’s sparring factions
might reach a compromise, but the dynamic changed again when Richard Cox
and others arrived from Strasbourg. Knox was first suspended by the Frankfurt
congregation, then banished by city magistrates for political agitation.
He returned to Geneva, where, with key supporters, he worked on a new
liturgy for the English congregation, published as The Forme of Prayers and
Ministrations of the Sacraments &c., used in the English Congregation at Geneva
(1556). Calvin’s liturgy anchored the structure and content of this influential
text. Knox and his allies used Geneva’s printing presses to disseminate a starter
kit for worship in English-speaking Reformed churches: the Forme of Prayers
and Psalmes of David in Metre (1556), the Geneva Bible (1560).17
The troubles in Frankfurt and what they led to in Geneva are significant for
the evolution of dissenting traditions of worship, for several reasons. First, the
disputes among the exiles prefigured the divisions that opened up in Elizabethan
England, in particular the question of whether worship should be governed by
the ‘regulative principle’: only what was explicitly sanctioned in Scripture
should be allowed in worship; nothing could be merely ‘indifferent’, or hal-
lowed in use by tradition. Second, notwithstanding the emphasis on ‘Scripture
alone’, this episode in the 1550s confirms the importance for English dissent
of learning from patterns of worship in continental Reformed churches (and
living exemplars close to home, the Strangers’ Churches). This would continue
to shape aspirations. Third, for radical Protestants in Elizabethan England, the
Genevan Forme of Prayers stood as a viable alternative to the Book of Common
Prayer, particularly after it was adopted as Scotland’s Book of Common Order
in 1562.18 As Protestantism put down deeper roots in England, the Genevan
Psalter and Bible became staples of worship: why not the Forme of Prayers too?
The allure of Geneva-inspired liturgy, and of the practice of the Strangers’
Churches, showed as the Elizabethan Puritan movement gathered momentum.
In 1567, a Separatist congregation at Plumbers’ Hall in London put the Forme
into clandestine use. In 1572, a bill presented to parliament tried to make it legal
to omit parts of the Prayer Book (to free up time for preaching) and to follow the
style of worship used in the French and Dutch Strangers’ Churches. In 1584–5

17 Dawson, Knox, pp. 119, 150–4; Bryan D. Spinks, From the Lord and “the Best Reformed
Churches”: A Study of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the English Puritan and Separatist Traditions,
1550–1633 (Rome, 1984), pp. 76–83.
18 Dawson, Knox, pp. 263–4.
 Worship and Sacraments 415

and 1586–7, parliament saw ardent campaigns—noisy and unsuccessful—to

authorize use of the Forme of Prayers.19
Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, it became clear—both to those who
wanted reform of the Book of Common Prayer, and to those who wanted to
jettison it altogether—that change on a national scale was out of reach. The
focus changed to what could be achieved locally. A tiny minority abandoned
the Church of England in order to form congregations where they could keep
worship pure. Some of these ‘Separatists’ met on English soil illegally, in secret.
Others went into exile: the Reformed climate of the Netherlands proved at­tract­ive,
most famously to the Mayflower pilgrims who settled in Leiden in 1609 and in
1620 sailed to the New World.20 A majority stayed within the Church of
England, but pressed for change at a local level: amending the Prayer Book as
far as p
­ ossible without attracting the authorities’ attention; promoting volun-
tary activities—psalm-singing, sermon-gadding, fasts, and thanksgivings—
which imbued communal worship with a Reformed intensity above and
beyond what the Prayer Book provided.21
From the 1630s, in the context of Archbishop Laud’s campaign for liturgical
renewal, debate sharpened over an issue that would become critical for the
Dissenting traditions: how far public worship should use ‘set’ or ‘stinted’
prayer—prayers prescribed for general use. For the best part of a century, the
arguments had swirled around how to reform worship, but the need for some
kind of set prayer was generally accepted.22 The Elizabethan Separatist Henry
Barrow was an outlier when he argued that even the Lord’s Prayer should not
be used: Christ had intended it as ‘a summarie groundworke . . . of al faithful
prayers’, not as ‘prescript wordes’, so ‘I thinke it not to be used as a prayer’.23 Far
more representative, even of those who wanted Prayer Book reform, was
Barrow’s contemporary Richard Rogers, who found in the Lord’s Prayer a
knock-down argument for set prayer. What was it, if not ‘a set forme of prayer
prescribed by our Saviour’?24 Change came in the 1630s, when the efforts of the
Laudians to take the reform of worship in new directions injected a provocative
catalyst. The Laudians exerted pressure for strict conformity to the Prayer

19 Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, pp. 88–9, 119, 286–8, 303–9; Spinks, From the
Lord, pp. 113–21.
20 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978),
pp. 14–76.
21 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society, 1559–1625
(Oxford, 1982), pp. 258–68.
22 Christopher Durston, ‘By the Book or with the Spirit: The Debate over Liturgical Prayer
during the English Revolution’, Historical Research, 79 (2006), 52–3; Judith Maltby, ‘ “Extravagancies
and Impertinencies”: Set Forms, Conceived and Extempore Prayer in Revolutionary England’, in
Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, eds, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain
(Farnham, 2013), p. 222.
23 [Henry Barrow], The Examinations of Henry Barrowe John Grenewood and John Penrie
[Dort?, c.1596], sig. B.
24 Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises (London, 1603), p. 224.
416 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Book, and introduced practices that—to ardent Protestants, at least—looked

like a drift back to Rome.25 The result was hostility to imposed forms of pray-
er.26 This became evident not only in Puritan circles in England and New
England, but also in Scotland, where in 1637 Laud introduced a Prayer Book
(known as ‘Laud’s Liturgy’) to replace the Book of Common Order. It should be
noted that opposition to imposed forms of prayer need not mean throwing out
‘set prayer’ in favour of Spirit-inspired prayers composed on the spot. The dis-
tinction between ‘stinted’ and ‘extempore’ prayer was not yet sharp (it would
become sharper in radical circles as the Civil Wars and Interregnum unfolded).
John Cotton of Boston, Massachusetts, illustrates a more nuanced approach.
Yes, a minister could compose prayers in advance, as long as the prayers were
adapted flexibly, under the Spirit’s guidance, during worship, but it was illegit-
imate for one generation to impose a set form of prayer on the next, or for one
church to impose it on another. The hostility of New Englanders to the Prayer
Book is captured in an act of God’s providence recorded by John Winthrop,
Governor of Massachusetts: in a room filled with more than 1,000 books, dis-
cerning ­colonial mice ate only the Book of Common Prayer, even though it was
bound with the Psalms and a Greek New Testament.27
In the long term, the frictions of the 1630s stirred up a resistance to imposed
forms of prayer that became a hallmark of English Dissent. In the short term,
these frictions started a process that led parliament to jettison the Prayer
Book.28

THE WESTMINSTER DIRECTORY:

ITS ETHOS AND IMPACT

In 1645 the Long Parliament issued A Directory for the Publique Worship of God
to replace the Book of Common Prayer. This kept a promise made in the
Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, which united parliament and the Scots
in opposition to Charles I: a vow to bring ‘the neerest conjunction and
Uniformity in religion’ to England, Scotland and Ireland, ‘according to the
Word of God and the Example of the best Reformed Churches’.29 Stepping up

25 Anthony Milton, ‘Unsettled Reformations, 1603–1662’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of
Anglicanism, pp. 70–1; Durston, ‘By the Book’, pp. 54–5.
26 Bryan D. Spinks, ‘Antipathy to Liturgical Forms in the English-Speaking Tradition’, in Lukas
Vischer, ed., Christian Worship in Reformed Churches Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003),
pp. 71–8.
27 John Cotton, A Modest and Clear Reply to Mr Ball’s Discourse of Set Formes of Prayer (1642),
p. 12; The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649, eds Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia
Yeandle (Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 340–1.
28 Milton, ‘Unsettled Reformations’, pp. 75–6.
29 A Solemn League and Covenant (London, 1643).
 Worship and Sacraments 417

to the mark, the Directory claimed to present ‘such things as are of Divine
Institution in every Ordinance’, with ‘Rules of Christian Prudence, agreeable to
the Generall Rules of the Word of God’. Its publication delivered ‘publique
Testimony of our endeavors for Uniformity in Divine Worship’.30
The Directory set out its aspiration for ‘Uniformity’ at a time of rising chal-
lenge to any such idea. From the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, the breakdown
of censorship and suspension of church courts sparked off religious debate and
experimentation, especially in London and within the parliamentary army. The
Baptist movement (which included Arminian ‘General Baptists’ and Calvinist
‘Particular Baptists’) advocated ‘believer’s baptism’: adult baptism after a pro-
fession of faith. In practice, as most people had been baptized as infants, this
meant re-baptism: schismatic and scandalous to the ‘orthodox’. From the early
1640s, Baptists advocated total immersion, to signify the washing of the soul in
Christ’s blood, and dying and rising with Christ. They plunged converts into
rivers and ponds, a provocative public spectacle that drew attacks not only for
its iconic rejection of infant baptism but also on grounds of health and safety
(Richard Baxter argued it risked breaking the commandment not to murder)
and immodesty (which led London Baptists to stress the use of ‘convenient
garments . . . with all modestie . . . as many eye witnesses can testifie’). Baptism
could be administered by any disciple, an endorsement of lay ministry rooted
in the priesthood of all believers. Baptists called baptism and communion
‘ordinances’, acts of obedience to Christ’s command, rather than ‘sacraments’
(channels of grace). Other ‘ordinances’ were preaching, including lay proph-
esying; foot-washing before the Lord’s Supper; ‘love-feasts’ (shared meals
before communion, derived from 1 Corinthians 11:25); anointing the sick
with oil.31 In the mid-1640s, Thomas Edwards, Presbyterian whipper-up of
fears about all things religiously radical, pulled no punches when describing
the Baptist lay preacher Thomas Lambe as a ‘sope-boyler’ who presided over
‘yards full’ of ‘young men and wenches’ at his church in Bell-Alley, London,
‘such a confusion and noise, as if it were a Play’; some went there just ‘for
Novelty, because of the disputes and wranglings’.32 In a list of 176 ‘Errours,
Heresies and Blasphemies’, Edwards sounded the alarm about new departures
in worship: ‘tis as lawful to baptize a cat, or a Dog, or a Chicken’, as to baptize
infants; ‘tis lawful for women to preach’. His rhetoric, though larger than life,
pinpointed a direction of travel in radical worship: ‘there is a perfect way in this

30 Directory, pp. 3, 4.
31 Anon., The Confession of Faith (1644), articles 39–41; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology
in England: from Cranmer to Baxter and Foxe (Grand Rapids, MI, 1996), Part II, pp. 504–8;
Stephen Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 75–110; Ian Birch,
To Follow the Lambe Wheresoever he Goeth: The Ecclesial Polity of the English Calvinistic Baptists
1640–1660 (Eugene, OR, 2017), pp. 32–48, 129–36.
32 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646 [first edn, Wing E228/ESTC R9639]), I,
pp. 92, 94.
418 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

life, not by Word, Sacraments, Prayer and other Ordinances, but by the
experience of the spirit in a mans self ’; ‘there ought to be in these times no
making or building of Churches, nor use of Church-ordinances, as ministering
of the Word, Sacraments, but . . . wait for the coming of the Spirit, as the Apostles
did’.33 Experiments in the war-torn 1640s paved the way for fresh patterns in
the 1650s. Many Quakers, who abandoned external forms to wait in silence for
the Spirit, came from the ranks of General Baptists.34
Against this backdrop of evolving diversity, the Westminster Assembly ham-
mered out the detail of the Directory over months of debate in 1644.35
Parliament had appointed the Assembly to advise on religious reform, with a
membership of around 120 ministers, 30 lay assessors (10 from the House of
Lords, 20 from the House of Commons), and a handful of ministers and laity
representing the Church of Scotland.36 It contained a complex mix of opinions:
an emerging English Presbyterian party, with both moderates and radicals;
Scottish commissioners, keen to promote a Presbyterian settlement but div-
ided on details and strategy; and a small but feisty group of English
Congregationalists (‘Independents’) who shared Separatist concerns but want-
ed to play a strong role in national religious reform.37 These competing out-
looks show in the Directory’s preface—a narrative of recent history agreed on
after much argument. It spoke darkly of the ‘endangering of many Thousand
Souls’ in recent times, when ‘Prelates and their Faction’ had promoted the
Prayer Book ‘as if there were no other . . . way of Worship of God amongst us’.
Yet it held back from condemning the Book of Common Prayer outright: its
advent had caused ‘many Godly and Learned men to rejoyce’; now, the
Directory took a step of ‘further Reformation’ that would have been heartily
welcomed by the Prayer Book’s original authors—‘were they now alive, they
would joyne with us in this work’.38
The climate in which the Directory took shape gave it a distinctive ethos.
Under the Solemn League and Covenant, the parties had vowed ‘the neerest
conjunction and Uniformity in religion’. The Assembly needed to resolve how
tightly this promise should bind: common practice tied to a prescribed liturgy,
or a looser bond of common guidelines? Significantly for the eventual character

33 Edwards, Gangraena, pp. 18–36, quotations from items 104, 124, 50, 97.
34 Davies, Worship and Theology, Part II, pp. 492–8; Rosemary Moore, ‘Seventeenth Century
Context and Quaker Beginnings’, in Stephen W. Marshall and Pink Dandelion, eds, The Oxford
Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford, 2013), pp. 16–18.
35 Debates and drafts appear in Chad van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the
Westminster Assembly 1643–1652 [MPWA], 5 vols (Oxford, 2012), III (1644–6).
36 Chad van Dixhoorn, ‘The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of the 1640s’, Oxford
History of Anglicanism, pp. 430–43; Chad van Dixhoorn, ‘Members of the Westminster Assembly
and Scottish Commissioners (1643–1652)’, ODNB.
37 Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution,
1638–44 (Manchester, 2015).
38 Directory, pp. 2, 3.
 Worship and Sacraments 419

of the Directory, half the members of the committee appointed to work

on the reform of worship were opposed to ‘stinted’ prayer: the English
Congregationalists Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye (allies of John Cotton in
New England); the English Presbyterian Charles Herle; and the Scottish com-
missioners Samuel Rutherford and George Gillespie.39 Their views reflected
the antagonism to set prayer stirred up by Laudian policies, though many at the
Assembly still believed a revised service book—duly Reformed—would be
viable. Early on, the convener of the worship committee reported that all its
members agreed the Prayer Book should go, but were in a quandary over what
should replace it: ‘formed prayers or only a directory to reach those’? On one
hand, it might cause problems to impose a fresh variety of set prayer: ‘better
nothing at all’, since any set liturgy ‘would leave the same pinch that the con-
sciences of many be under now’, and might create a larger Separatist schism
from the national Church. On the other hand, a free-for-all of extempore prayer
was undesirable: ‘if noe formed prayers made but every one left to his owne
will, [there are] soe many raw and inexperienced ministers as would make the
ordinances of God ridiculous’. To negotiate these difficulties, the committee
proposed—and the Assembly agreed—to steer a path between too little regula-
tion and too much: to ‘set downe the heads of things, but soe largdly as that
with the altering of here and there a word, a man may mold it into a prayer’.40
When the Directory finally appeared, its preface claimed it that it intended to
give ‘onely . . . the sense and scope of the Prayers and other parts of Publique
Worship’. The intensifying ‘only’ was added to placate the Congregationalists in
the Assembly, who opposed set prayer because it meant one church imposed
prayers on another. So the Directory gave enough guidance to preserve consistent
standards—‘soundnesse in Doctrine and Prayer’—but offered no set prayers,
in case ministers became ‘slothfull and negligent in stirring up the gifts of
Christ’ (effectively ‘a type of spiritual fitness regime for the clergy’).41
To walk the tightrope of providing a clear template for worship without a set
liturgy, the compilers of the Directory struck a tone that was didactic rather
than devotional. Two features of this are particularly striking. First, the
Directory contained not a word of address to God, and barely put a word of
direct speech into the mouth of the minister. The text, a running commentary
about what ‘the minister’ (and very occasionally ‘the people’) should say or do,
delivered its imperatives and advice in the third person, in an inevitably convo-
luted style. A comparison between the Directory and the earlier Reformed
liturgy of Scotland’s Book of Common Order will illustrate this. Common
­

Order suggested, as an opening prayer, ‘O Eternal God and most merciful

Father, we confesse, & acknowledge here before thy divine maiestie, that we are

39 Spinks, ‘Antipathy to Liturgical Forms’, pp. 78–9.

40 Session 226, 24 May 1644: MPWA, III, pp. 122–3.
41 Directory, p. 4; MPWA, III, pp. 460–1; Maltby, ‘ “Extravagancies” ’, p. 236.
420 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

miserable sinners . . . ’.42 The Directory covered the same ground by instructing
the minister ‘to begin with Prayer; In all Reverence and Humility acknowledging
the incomprehensible Greatnesse and Majesty of the Lord . . . and their own
vilenesse and unworthinesse to approach so near him . . . ’.43 At two moments
only—at baptism and communion—the Directory printed words of direct
address for the minister to use, paraphrasing words of Jesus: ‘I baptise thee . . .’
(Matthew 28:19); ‘Take ye, eat ye, This is the Body of Christ which is broken
for you . . .’ (1 Corinthians 11:23–5).44 The Directory’s aversion to addressing
God in print helps to explain why some Dissenters resolved to sing only met-
rical psalms, which equated to Scripture, and refused to adopt newfangled
‘human’ hymns.45
Second, the Directory framed its instructions carefully, to lay down essen-
tials but also to make clear where there was room for manoeuvre. For example,
the Directory specified where prayers should punctuate worship, and devoted
a remarkable amount of text to suggesting the content of these prayers, but
always with a caveat that the minister should pray ‘to this or the like effect’. (In
this way, it provided something that ‘raw and inexperienced’ ministers could,
‘with altering here and there a word’, make use of in worship.) Also, the
Directory judged ‘it is convenient that ordinarily, one Chapter of each Testament
be read at every meeting’ (giving a pattern for reading over the Scriptures in
order, a complete departure from the Prayer Book’s lectionary), but reckoned
the length of readings could safely be ‘left to the wisdom of the Minister’. The
Directory declared that communion should be celebrated ‘frequently’, but ‘how
often, may be considered and determined by the Ministers and other Church
Governours of each Congregation, as they shall finde most convenient for the
comfort and edification of the people committed to their charge’.46 Occasionally,
to keep peace among factions at the Assembly, the agreed text of the Directory
was deliberately ambiguous. The most contentious issue turned out to be where
and how people should receive communion: in the pews or at the communion
table? Staying in pews to receive, which Congregationalists strongly favoured,
stressed the unity of the Church by allowing everyone to consume the bread
and wine simultaneously, but arguably failed to gather the congregation ‘at the
Lord’s table’. Sitting around the table was strongly advocated by the Scots: north
of the border, the practice was to use a long table or tables, even at outdoor
communions.47 But this meant large congregations could only receive in

42 The Forme of Prayers . . . used in the English Church at Geneva, approved and received by the
Churche of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1564), p. 21.
43 Directory, pp. 5–6. 44 Directory, pp. 22, 26.
45 Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy in the Seventeenth Century’, in Isabel
Rivers and David Wykes, eds, Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and
Wales (Oxford, 2011), pp. 13–32.
46 Directory, p. 23.
47 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (Grand
Rapids, MI, 2001), pp. 32–4; George B. Burnet, The Holy Communion in the Reformed Church of
Scotland (Edinburgh and London, 1960), pp. 102–5, 126–8.
 Worship and Sacraments 421

sequence, which some thought was not close enough to the model of the Last
Supper. After almost three weeks of argument, with no one giving way, the
Assembly ruled that the table should be ‘so conveniently placed, that the
Communicants may orderly sit about it, or at it’. The Assembly also sat on
the fence about whether a minister should distribute the bread and wine to all,
or whether communicants could pass the elements to one another: the Directory
instructed only that ‘the Minister is to begin the action’.48 (The Church of
Scotland removed all ambiguity by accepting the Directory only with the pro-
viso that communicants must receive at table and pass the elements among
themselves.49) On the Lord’s Prayer, the Directory picked a way through the
minefield of whether it justified set prayer, by recommending its use as ‘not
only a Patern of Prayer, but it self a most comprehensive Prayer’.50 Overall, the
Directory’s squeamishness about printing direct speech to God, and the delib-
erate nuance of its instructions, shows a determination to avoid ‘stinted’ liturgy,
while the level of detail, particularly in the suggested content for prayers, shows
a determination to give clear guidance.
As the Directory set out to cover all parts of ‘the Publique Worship of God,
Ordinary and Extraordinary’, what it included and omitted is significant.
­Step-by-step instructions were given for the weekly preaching service, and for
administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.51 Then
came guidelines for Sabbath observance, marriage, visitation of the sick, burial,
fasts and thanksgivings, and the duty of psalm-singing.52 A short appendix
explained that ‘there is no Day commanded in Scripture to be kept holy under
the Gospel, but the Lords-day’; also that no place could be polluted by ‘any
superstition formerly used and laid aside’, ‘so . . . the places for publique assem-
bling for worship among us, should be continued and imployed to that use’.53
The Directory covered similar territory to Scotland’s Book of Common Order,
reflecting the Scottish commissioners’ influence, but without a confession of
faith (addressed by Westminster Confession of 1646 and Larger and Shorter
Catechisms of 1647), without reference to church discipline (addressed by the
Assembly’s Directory of Church Government, 1645) and without the Apostles’
Creed and Ten Commandments (the Creed owed too much to tradition, read-
ing the Decalogue seemed too much like set liturgy). The Directory revised the
worship offered at milestone life events, and in the process made changes that
had been on the Puritan agenda for decades. Baptism should be by pouring or
sprinkling water on the face, ‘without . . . any other ceremony’: no sign of the
cross. Lay and private baptism were outlawed. The churching of women after
childbirth was conspicuous by its absence. Marriage, after the minister prayed

48 Directory, p. 24; Sessions 243–53 (20 June–9 July 1644), MPWA, III, pp. 154–97.
49 Church of Scotland, Two Letters of Great Concernment (1645), p. 12; Burnet, Holy
Communion, pp. 108–11.
50 Directory, pp. 18–19. 51 Directory, pp. 5–26.
52 Directory, pp. 26–40. 53 Directory, p. 40.
422 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

for a blessing, was contracted by an exchange of promises, ‘without any further

Ceremony’: no exchange of rings. Burial should be immediate, ‘without
any Ceremony’: no praying, reading, or singing beside the corpse, at home, on
the way to burial, or at the graveside; these practices brought no benefit to the
dead and were in ‘many wayes hurtfull to the living’. The Directory provided no
funeral service, and referred ‘the Corps’ or ‘dead body’, to mark the divide from
those who lived on. A small concession was made to Puritan interest in funeral
sermons (which went against the Scottish practice of silence): mourners could
‘apply themselves to meditations, and conferences suitable to the occasion’,
aided by the minister, ‘if present’.54 Thus—by what was kept in and what was left
out—the Westminster Assembly crafted the Directory to conform to what it
regarded as the pattern of worship in ‘the best Reformed Churches’.
In one significant area—after being overruled by parliament at an important
intersection of worship and church discipline—the Directory fell short of
the Assembly’s aspirations. The final text stated that ‘the Ignorant and the
Scandalous are not fit to receive this Sacrament of the Lords Supper’. The
­ori­gin­al had been more specific. For a year after the Directory’s publication,
Assembly and parliament wrangled over what sins might prevent participation
and—especially—whose remit it was to ‘fence the table’. In the end, parliament
accepted the role of elders in discipline, but gave the final say to parliamentary
commissioners.55
What was the status and impact of the Directory in the years following 1645,
when its guidance had legal standing? Historical opinion is divided.
As a measure for national reform, it can be argued that the Directory was
usually (to quote Hamlet) ‘more honor’d in the breach than the observance’. In
1645, parliament set fines for speaking or writing against it, escalating to
imprisonment for a third offence, but there is no evidence to show these
penalties were ever invoked, despite assaults on it in print.56 The chaos of Civil
War allowed clandestine use of the Book of Common Prayer, and little evi-
dence survives in churchwardens’ accounts (even in the godly heartland of East
Anglia) to show that parishes bought the Directory.57 In the 1650s, Cromwell’s
support for religious toleration allowed radical experiments. Quakers wor-
shipped by ‘silent waiting upon the Lord’, and anyone—female or male—could

54 Directory, pp. 19, 22, 30, 35.

55 MPWA, 5, pp. 176–7, 183–5, 200–2, 232–48, 257–8, 300–2, 304; C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, eds,
Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London, 1911), pp. 789–97, 833–8, 852–5;
Milton, ‘Unsettled Reformations’, p. 78.
56 MPWA, I, p. 28; Durston, ‘By the book’, pp. 61–6.
57 John Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in John Morrill, ed., Reactions to the English
Civil War 1642–1649 (London, 1982), pp. 93, 104–8; Durston, ‘By the Book’, pp. 67–9; Maltby,
‘ “Extravagencies” ’, pp. 229–30; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Identity,
1640–1662’, in Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, pp. 472–4; Bernard Capp, England’s
Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012),
pp. 119–21.
 Worship and Sacraments 423

be moved by the Spirit to speak. Richard Davies, a leading Welsh Quaker,

­contrasted the dry formal prayers he heard in the ‘steeple-house’ (although
‘there was no common-prayer read then to the people’) with his experience in
1657 of a Quaker meeting: ‘though it was silent from words, yet the word of the
Lord was among us, it was a hammer and a fire, it was sharper than any two-
edged sword, it pierced through our inward parts, it melted and brought us into
tears, that there was scarcely a dry eye among us’.58 Sacraments were abandoned
for inner experience: ‘true Baptism’ came from the Spirit; ‘true Communion’
was union with Christ.59 ‘Quaker’ started as a derisory term, but was soon
adopted by the movement: ‘Quaking and Trembling at the Word of the Lord, by
the servants of the Lord, we do own’.60
In light of these diverse patterns of worship, it might seem the Directory had
little impact. But to argue the other side of the case, even if the original inten-
tion of the Directory as a uniform pattern for national worship was frustrated,
it had influence. Its character—a guide that ministers might buy, rather than a
prayer book for congregational use—might explain why purchases went unre-
corded in parish accounts. The fact that at least eighteen editions appeared,
1645–60, suggests a market for it (five editions in thirty years has been reckoned
as the benchmark for a steady seller).61 The religious environment in this period
was complex: ‘the patchwork religious life of the Interregnum saw passionate
commitment and indifference, with both on a scale greater than at any time
since the Reformation’.62 Among those passionately committed to reform of
parish worship, the Directory acted as a rallying point. In 1658, Philip Henry—
known as ‘Heavenly Henry’—secured agreement from a local voluntary asso-
ciation of ministers to conduct worship with ‘a special Eye to the Directory’.63
Such Interregnum networks became the backbone of Restoration Dissent. In
the mid-1650s, Cromwell renewed the drive to eject ‘scandalous’ clergy—a
­def­in­ition which included those who used Prayer Book services—but the small
number thrown out suggests that by this time ‘the great majority . . . were, out-
wardly at least, conforming to the liturgical . . . precepts laid down by Cromwell’s
government’.64 It is likely some were making covert use of the Prayer Book,
slipping its words into the framework of Directory worship, but there is also

58 Richard Davies, An Account of the Convincement, Exercises, and Travels of . . . Richard Davies
(Philadelphia, PA, 1832), pp. 34, 35–6.
59 David L. Johns, ‘Worship and Sacraments’, Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, pp. 261–3;
Davies, Worship and Theology, Part II, pp. 511–21; George Fox, The Woman Learning in Silence
(London, 1656); Edward Burrough, A Warning from the Lord (London, 1654), pp. 5–6.
60 Edward Burrough, A Standard Lifted Up (London, 1657), p. 34.
61 English Short Title Catalogue; Ian Green, Print and Protestantism (Oxford, 2000), p. 173.
62 Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 131.
63 Matthew Henry, An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. Philip Henry (London, 1698), pp. 56,
61. On voluntary associations: Glen J. Segger, Richard Baxter’s ‘Reformed Liturgy’: A Puritan
Alternative to the Book of Common Prayer (Farnham, 2014), pp. 32–9.
64 Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government During the English
Revolution (Manchester, 2001), p. 161.
424 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

evidence to show that it had been dropping out of use: at the Restoration of
Charles II, some reported difficulty in locating copies; also, worshippers’
­confusion, ‘not knowing what they were supposed to say or do’.65
The Directory’s legal status ended, on both sides of the Scottish border, at the
Restoration. In Scotland this turned out to be temporary: initially, although
episcopacy was reinstated, worship reverted to the Book of Common Order
rather than a Prayer Book; in 1690, the Directory’s authority was renewed when
Presbyterianism gained official standing, and it has a privileged place in the
Kirk’s constitution to this day.66 In England and Wales, the Directory was
erased from the statute book by the Act of Uniformity (1662). For a time, in the
flux of politics that surrounded the Restoration, hopes ran high—at least
among those who supported the ethos of the Directory—that it might be pos-
sible to negotiate a reformed liturgy for the Established Church. In October
1660, Charles II issued the Worcester House Declaration.67 This appointed a
commission of Presbyterians and episcopalians to review the Book of Common
Prayer, with power also to propose ‘some additional Forms (in the Scripture
Phrase, as near as may be), suited unto the Nature of the several Parts of
Worship’; it would be ‘left to the Minister’s Choice, to use one or other at his
Discretion’.68 To nascent Dissenters, this sounded hopeful, and the Worcester
House Declaration has been called the ‘highwater-mark of plans for compre-
hension for the Church of England between the Reformation and the present
day’.69 Less auspiciously, however, it took a hard line on ceremonies: the nation-
al Church, with royal authority, had a right to introduce edifying ceremonies
for the people; although a ceremony might in itself be indifferent, it ceased to
be indifferent once established by law. When the Savoy Conference met in 1661
to discuss liturgical reform, the episcopalians refused to discuss any alteration
to the Prayer Book until all objections had been lodged in writing. This dis-
tracted the Presbyterians into listing the Prayer Book’s faults; apart from
Richard Baxter, who at great speed produced a new ‘Reformed Liturgy’, built on
the Directory and Prayer Book.70 To Baxter’s frustration, the episcopalians
then endlessly disputed the Presbyterian list of faults: his alternative liturgy got
no attention. For Presbyterians, the Savoy Conference was a fiasco. Worse still,
by the end of 1661 the tide was turning away from any toleration of dissent. The
‘Cavalier Parliament’ passed the first Act in what became known as the

65 Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 121.

66 Burnet, Holy Communion, pp. 136–7; ‘Articles Declaratory of the Constitution of the Church
of Scotland’, Article II, http://www.churchofscotland.org.uk/about_us/church_law/church_
constitution.
67 Barry Till, ‘The Worcester House Declaration and the Restoration of the Church of England’,
Historical Research, 70 (1997), 203–30.
68 ‘The King’s Declaration concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs’, 25 October 1660, Journal of the
House of Lords: Volume 11, 1660–1666 (London: HMSO, 1767–1830), pp. 181–8. British History
Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol11/pp178-182.
69 Till, ‘Worcester House Declaration’, 215–16. 70 Segger, Baxter’s ‘Reformed Liturgy’.
 Worship and Sacraments 425

‘Clarendon Code’: the Corporation Act (1661), which made taking communion
using the Book of Common Prayer a requirement for public office. The Act of
Uniformity (1662) required all clergy to declare ‘unfeigned acceptance’ of the
Prayer Book, with the result that around 2,000 ministers left or lost their liv-
ings; the Conventicle Act (1664) forbade unauthorized gatherings for worship
by five people from more than one household; the Five-Mile Act (1665) separ-
ated Dissenting ministers from their former parishes. By controlling worship,
the authorities aimed to cut the ground from under dissent.
In this climate, all but the most radical English Dissenters took part in parish
worship as far as conscience would allow, but also gathered in private for
psalm-singing, preaching, and prayer. Worship followed the pattern estab-
lished by the Directory, with no set form of prayer. Early Dissenters met in
houses, barns, warehouses, in remote chapels, out in the open. Secrecy led to
ingenious arrangements. At Thomas Jollie’s farmhouse, the door between the
sitting room and stairs was cut, so the upper half folded down into the room at
a right-angle, to make a pulpit desk. Jollie preached from the stairs: if informers
were spotted, he could quickly reinstate the door and disappear upstairs,
leaving no sign of worship.71 The pressure lifted briefly in the mid-1670s after
Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence of 1672; then again in 1687 after James II’s
Religious Indulgence, arguably a more decisive turning point for freedom of
worship than the Toleration Act of 1689, introduced once the Bloodless
Revolution of 1688 replaced the Catholic James with Protestants William
and Mary. Thousands of Dissenting places of worship were now registered.
Two of the earliest surviving purpose-built structures are the Quaker Meeting
House at Jordans, Buckinghamshire (1688), and the Norwich Old Meeting
(Congregational, 1693).72 The Directory dismissed the idea of consecrated
buildings as sacred ground, declaring ‘no place is capable of any holiness’.73
English Dissent adopted the language of ‘meeting house’, coined by New
England Puritans in the 1630s. This dovetailed with the authorities’ require-
ments: ‘church’ was reserved for parishes of the national Church; as the
Declaration of Indulgence (1672) put it, nonconformists could have ‘places . . . to
meet and assemble’.74
When the Scots minister Robert Kirk visited London in 1689, he described
services held by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, and Baptists. In
Kirk’s meticulous record, the details vary: whether psalms were sung, what the

71 Richard Slate, Select Nonconformists’ Remains (London, 1814), p. 211.

72 David L. Wykes, ‘James II’s Religious Indulgence of 1687 and the Early Organisation of
Dissent: The Building of the First Nonconformist Meeting-House in Birmingham’, Midland
History, 16 (1991), 86–102; Christopher Wakeling, Nonconformist Places of Worship, ed. Paul
Stamper (London, 2016), pp. 1, 3.
73 Directory, p. 40.
74 Oxford English Dictionary [OED], ‘meeting house, n.’; G. Lyon Turner, Original Records of
Early Nonconformity under Persecution and Indulgence, 3 vols (London, 1911), III, p. 157.
426 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

preacher prayed for, whether men were ‘discoverd’ (took their hats off) to hear
the Word of God, whether people knelt or stood to pray. Kirk gave a robust
critique of what grated on his episcopalian sensibilities. At a Quaker meeting,
‘a Tradsman Quaker’ amassed ‘a huddle of incoherent Scriptures’, and the
­people grunted to themselves, ‘as if they were humming over the tune of some
song’. A Baptist gathering listened to a preacher ‘who had been a Millionar
[milliner] or seller of Hoods, Gloves & Smal ware . . . never in orders’. Kirk
­concluded ‘The Quakers had neither Sense, Reason, nor Sound Religion. The
Baptist had sense, but no Rational Coherence . . . Therfor at 4 a clock in the
afternoon I went to hear some principal presbyterian preachers’. Even in that
quarter he observed inconsistency: ‘not Any two presbyterian preachers do
I find to keep one way’.75 Nonetheless, the common elements in what Kirk
observed, especially the avoidance of set prayer, show how the ethos promoted
by the Directory had been absorbed into the bloodstream of English Dissenting
traditions.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WORSHIP IN

ENGLISH DISSENTING TRADITIONS

The distinctive character of worship in English Dissent (also in the Church of

Scotland and the Scottish Presbyterian diaspora) can be traced back to the
decision to make the Directory a template for worship, without set prayers.
This diverged from forms of prayer used earlier in the Reformed tradition, on
the Continent and in Scotland. Some have judged this negatively: ‘Sadly, the
Directory set the pattern for Scottish and English Free church worship for two
centuries. The liturgical heritage of Bucer, Calvin and Knox was well and truly
lost.’76 Rightly or wrongly, this paints a harsh gloss—and invites a more em­path­
et­ic assessment of worship in the English Dissenting traditions.
After 1660, in pockets here and there, Dissenters achieved what they had
once hoped to achieve nationally. The setting might be simple, but they believed
they were at one with the saints in heaven. John Bunyan evoked this with the
image of a well-ordered household: ‘we are below stairs, they above; . . . remember,
the Temple of God is but one, though divided, as one may say, into Kitchin and
Hall’.77 Dissenters like Bunyan thought above all of people as the Temple of God.

75 Robert Kirk, ‘Sermons, Conferences, Opinions of the late Transactions, with a Description
of London, anno 1689’, University of Edinburgh, Centre for Research Collections, MS LA.III.545,
fols 55r, 56r–v, 57r. Louis Stott, ‘Kirk, Robert’, ODNB.
76 David Kornick, ‘Looking Back: A Historical Overview of Reformed Worship’, in Julian
Templeton and Keith Riglin, eds, Reforming Worship: English Reformed Principles and Practice
(Eugene, OR, 2012), p. 32.
77 John Bunyan, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualiz’d (London, 1688), pp. 157–8.
 Worship and Sacraments 427

Starting from that assumption, it mattered deeply how worship was offered: to
be genuine, it must be heartfelt. As the Directory had put it, when people met
together, they must ‘with one heart solemnly joyn together in all parts of the
publique worship’.78 But how could the heart be kept engaged? In The Holy War,
Bunyan pictured the human soul as a walled town, ‘Mansoul’, with Heart Castle
at its centre. The only way to reach Heart Castle was through gates in the town
wall: Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, and Feel-gate. Literally or
metaphorically, it was necessary to storm the senses to win the heart for God.79
Dissenting worship was not a sensory desert (as is often assumed), but used the
senses—and imagery that drew on the senses—to cultivate an intensity that
imbued everything with sacred meaning.
Worship had to be framed by a proper sense of time. In this world, as an
influential Reformed confession put it, ‘religion is not bound to time, yet it
cannot be cultivated and exercised without a proper distribution and arrange-
ment of time’.80 The Directory recommended days of fasting and thanksgiving
as a duty, but specified ‘there is no Day commanded in Scripture to be kept holy
under the Gospel, but the Lords-day, which is the Christian Sabbath’.81 On this
day, it was vital to meet ‘so timely for publique worship, that the whole
Congregation may be present at the beginning’.82 Worship leaders must be
aware of the time, ‘that neither Preaching or other Ordinance be straitned, or
rendred tedious’.83 By the 1680s clocks were being installed in public places, and
Dissenters seem to have followed the trend: in London, Robert Kirk observed
‘In every meeting house is a large mounter that showes & strikes the howres’.84
Beyond keeping earth-bound patterns of time, the vast sweep of sacred time
fired up the religious imagination. Equating the ‘Lords-day’ to ‘the Christian
Sabbath’ drew on a powerful strand in Reformed tradition that stressed the
unity of the Old and New Covenant. With this lens, the Hebrew Scriptures were
read typologically, foreshadowing Christ and life in the Church.85 Worship
under the New Covenant—prayer, singing psalms, reading, preaching, hearing
the Word, celebrating the sacraments—had a precursor in the sacrifices of the
Old. This style of Bible-reading gave rich pickings for interpreting worship.
Morning and evening prayer, for example, rested on the command to offer a
lamb twice daily (Exodus 29:39), rather than tradition. The Hebrew Scriptures
provided a key to the right attitude: ‘the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a
broken and a contrite heart’ (Psalm 51:17). Sacrifice must be offered with fire:
for Christians, this meant zeal. The significance of this strand of Biblical
im­agery was heightened by Paul’s appeal to Christians to present themselves to

78 Directory, p. 27. 79 Bunyan, Holy War, p. 4.

80 The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), XXIV, http://www.ccel.org/creeds/helvetic.htm.
81 Directory, p. 40. 82 Directory, p. 27. 83 Directory, p. 7.
84 Kirk MS, fol. 69r. OED ‘munter, n.1’: in old Scots a watch, but here more likely a clock.
85 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill (London, 1961), 2.10–11.
428 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

God as ‘a living sacrifice’ (Romans 12:1).86 So worship took place in a proper

rhythm of earthly time, and in the bent-around structure of sacred time.
Worship demanded rapt attention, expressed in physical posture, from the
moment people came in: ‘Let all enter the Assembly . . . in a grave and seemly
manner, taking their seates or places without Adoration, or Bowing themselves
towards one place or other.’ Once worship began, ‘the people are wholly to
attend upon it; forbearing to reade any thing, except what the Minister is then
reading or citing’. As for sleeping, ‘hell was made for Sermon sleep[e]rs’.87
Prayer might be accompanied by looking up to heaven with hands outstretched.
Such gestures, which had Scriptural precedent, were distinctive enough to be
caricatured by hostile observers: ‘A Shee-Precise Hypocrite’ in ‘Ruffe of Geneva
Print’ showed devotion ‘in the turning up of her eye’; when a congregational
church entered into covenant, this was done ‘with lifted up eyes, and spreading
of hands’.88 Richard Baxter spelt out his own preferences for ‘what gestures are
fittest in all the publick Worship’: kneel for prayer and confession (unless the
room is too crowded to allow this); stand to praise God in psalms and hymns;
sit to hear the Word read and preached; ‘Had I my choice, I would receive the
Lords Supper sitting: But where I have not, I will use the gesture which the
Church useth.’89
Worship centred on hearing the Word of God, but ministers worked through
‘Eye-gate’ almost as much as ‘Ear-gate’. Seeing was regarded as the highest sense
of perception, even if ‘hearing contributed most to the acquisition of knowl­
edge’.90 So although listening was the key to learning, sight reinforced it. Early
seventeenth-century preachers achieved near-mythical status for a style that
packed more punch than words alone. John Rogers of Dedham, Essex, appar-
ently riveted his congregation by ‘roaring hideously, to represent the torments
of the damned’. Not that this went down well in all quarters: what the congregation
saw must not distract from the message. After 1660, pulpit theatrics were reined
in by most Dissenting preachers, in part to avoid being tarred as ‘enthusiasts’
after the radical religious excesses of the Interregnum.91 Nonetheless, pulpits
still placed ministers as the visual centre of attention. Pulpit cushions, on which
the Bible rested, contributed a splash of colour. (One critic of ‘enthusiasm’
­suggested these cushions protected tub-thumping preachers, by preventing

86 Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Sacrifice in Puritan Typology’, in Stephen Sykes, ed., Sacrifice and
Redemption (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 188–9.
87 Directory pp. 5, 6; John Angier, An Helpe to Better Hearts for Better Times (London, 1647),
p. 537. Such instructions long pre-dated the Directory: Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English
Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 67–72.
88 John Earle, Micro-cosmographie (London, 1628), section 45; Anon., Judas Hanging Himselfe
(1658), in The Diary of Thomas Larkham, ed. Susan Hardman Moore (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 363;
John Craig, ‘Bodies at Prayer in Early Modern England’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, eds,
Worship and the Parish Church, pp. 184–7.
89 Richard Baxter, Christian Directory (1673), p. 859. 90 Hunt, Art of Hearing, p. 23.
91 Hunt, Art of Hearing, pp. 84–9, 93.
 Worship and Sacraments 429

damage ‘When the fierce Priest his Doctrine hard unbuckles,/That in the
­passion he should hurt his knuckles.’92) Pulpit cushions were a feature that
Robert Kirk noticed, ubiquitous in parish churches and nonconformist meet-
ings: among Presbyterians, Kirk observed ‘a litl green pulpit with a red flowerd
velvet cushion on’, ‘a red velvet cushion embroydred with flowers’, and a cushion
of ‘purple velvet, embroydered with all variety of sewings’; Baptists had ‘formal
pulpits with a brown velvet fringed cushion; preachers in querco [oak]’.93
The sense of sight was particularly called on at communion, to enhance
devotion. Once they had the freedom to do so, many Dissenters celebrated the
Lord’s Supper monthly (although, ironically, in a tract devoted to ‘monthly
preparations’ Richard Baxter argued that communion should be celebrated
every Lord’s Day).94 Communion set Christ before believer’s eyes. Here, Calvin
struck an important note for worship in the Reformed tradition: he rejected
images in church, except for ‘those living and symbolic ones which the Lord
has consecrated by his Word . . . I mean Baptism and the Lord’s Supper together
with other rites by which our eyes must be too intensely gripped and too sharp-
ly affected to seek other images forged by human ingenuity’.95 The Presbyterian
nonconformist Thomas Watson picked up this theme: ‘A sacrament is a visible
Sermon . . . Things taken in by the eye, do more work upon us, than things taken
in by the Ear.’ Seeing Christ broken in the bread, ‘and as it were Crucified before
us’, could affect the heart more strongly than ‘bare preaching of the Cross’. This
was not to devalue the Word, but (following Calvin) to allow the sign to con-
firm the Word: ‘The Lord condescends to our weakness: Were we all made up
all of Spirit, there were no need of Bread and Wine; but we are compounded
creatures, therefore God to help our Faith, doth not only give us an audible
Word, but a visible Sign.’96 The Quakers might abandon all conventions of
Word and Sacrament—‘going naked as a sign’97—but for other streams of
English Dissent, including Baptists, ‘audible Word’ and ‘visible Sign’ worked
together. The Directory gave only a bare outline of the communion service, but
a glimpse of the vivid language that reinforced the signs of bread and wine
comes from Richard Baxter’s liturgy: ‘see here Christ dying in this holy
Representation. Behold the sacrificed Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of
the world. It is his will to be thus frequently crucified before your eyes.’98 The
use of sensory images had a hinterland in literature read to prepare for commu-

92 John Phillips, A Satyr against Hypocrites (London, 1655), p. 9.

93 Kirk MS, fols 50v, 55r, 69r.
94 Richard Baxter, Monthly Preparations for the Holy Communion (London, 1696), pp. 17–18.
95 Calvin, Institutes, 1.11.13.
96 Thomas Watson, The Holy Eucharist: or, the Mystery of the Lords Supper Briefly Explain’d
(1665), sigs A5r–A6r, pp. 2–3.
97 Kenneth L. Carroll, ‘Early Quakers and “Going Naked as a Sign” ’, Quaker History, 67 (1978),
69–87.
98 Segger, Baxter’s ‘Reformed Liturgy’, p. 235.
430 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

nion and in passion meditations.99 One of the divines who contributed to the
Directory, Edward Reynolds, used metaphors of seeing, clinging, grasping,
sucking: the bread and wine are ‘pledges of our Salvation, that wee might at this
spirituall Altar see Christ as it were crucified before our eyes, clinge unto his
Crosse, and graspe it in our armes, sucke in his Blood, and with it salvation’.100
Late in the seventeenth century, the same sensory language emerged in the new
com­mu­nion hymns of Dissent, which stirred devotion by inviting worshippers
to see, hear, taste, and touch Christ.101
So, it appears, the Dissenting traditions created an ethos of voluntary and
heartfelt worship. This was cultivated with an intensity that allowed devout
imaginations to take flight, caught up by a metaphorical engagement of the
senses.
On the other hand, did Dissenting worship rob the laity of their voice?
Although the theological emphasis might be on the gathered saints, only the
minister spoke. Arguably, this muzzled the very mouths the Prayer Book had
opened: Dissent (except for Quakers) ‘so elevated clerical extempore prayers
that the voices of the laity were silenced, while the contentious use of forms
succeeded in cementing lay voices in prayer’.102 At the Savoy Conference, the
Presbyterians seemed to privilege the role of the cleric: ‘Scripture . . . makes the
minister the mouth of the people to God in prayer’; ‘the people’s part in public
prayer [is] to be only with silence and reverence to attend thereunto, and to
declare their consent at the close, by saying Amen’. But this, as the episcopalians
at the Conference pointed out, was not entirely true. The people’s voice was not
only to be heard in ‘Amen’, ‘for they directly practise the contrary in one of their
principal parts of worship, singing of psalms, where the people bear as great a
part as the minister’. The irony of Dissenters using the metrical psalter of
Sternhold and Hopkins as a kind of ‘set prayer’ was not lost on the episcopalians:
‘If . . . in Hopkins, why not in David’s Psalms; if in metre, why not in prose; if in
a psalm, why not in a litany?’103
Congregational psalm-singing was indeed most obvious place where
Dissenting laity found their voice. Its origins were embedded in the common
Protestant tradition that Dissenters shared with the establishment. For the

99 Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161 (1998),
57–60; Jessica Martin, ‘English Reformed Responses to the Passion’, in Jessica Martin and Alec
Ryrie, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, (Farnham, 2012), pp. 115–34.
100 Cited by Bryan D. Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies and the Stuart Divines (Aldershot,
2002), p. 157, from Edward Reynolds, Meditations on the Holy Sacrament of the Lords Last Supper
(London, 1638), p. 111.
101 John Coffey, ‘Between Puritanism and Evangelicalism: “Heart-Work” in Dissenting
Communion Hymns, 1693–1709’, in John Coffey, ed., Heart Religion: Evangelical Piety in England
and Ireland, 1690–1850 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 29–49.
102 Craig, ‘Bodies at Prayer’, p. 184.
103 Edward Cardwell, A History of Conferences connected with the Revision of the Book of
Common Prayer, from the year 1558 to the year 1690 (Oxford, 1849), pp. 305–6, 339. Ministers as
‘mouthes of the people’, Directory, p. 37.
 Worship and Sacraments 431

English Reformation as a whole, ‘congregational psalmody was perhaps its

greatest success, and certainly its loudest’.104 In England, as in Scotland, ‘com-
munal psalm-singing provided a vital element of interactivity and in many
liturgical contexts represented the congregation leading themselves in
prayer’.105 Richard Baxter explained that, originally, set responses were intend-
ed to give the people ‘a share in Gods worship, & be not wholly silent in Gods
public service’, but this was ‘when the Musick of Psalms was not so known
and ­frequent as now’.106
Dissenters had views on how psalms should be used in worship. From the
1570s, Puritans had attacked the practice of reading verses alternately: ‘they
tosse the Psalmes in most places like tennice balles’. Baxter and his fellow dis-
senters made a similar (if more diplomatic) appeal at the Savoy Conference in
1661.107 To be edifying, psalms must be sung in unison. The Directory evoked
this communal principle when it required everyone to ‘with one heart solemnly
joyn together in all parts of the publique worship’, but it also acknowledged that
‘for the present, where many in the Congregation cannot read, it is convenient
that the Minister, or some other fit person . . . doe read the Psalme, line by line,
before the singing thereof ’.108 The nickname ‘Geneva jigs’ for psalms may have
been coined sarcastically because ‘lining out’ was anything but lively.109 The
words always had priority over the music, because ‘the chief care must be, to
sing with understanding, and with Grace in the heart, making melody unto
God’.110 Calvin had argued (citing Augustine on Psalm 81) that singing with
understanding was a distinctively human quality: ‘a linnet, a nightingale or a
popinjay will sing well . . . but man’s proper gift is to sing, knowing what he says;
after understanding follow the heart and the affection’.111 Sporadically, disputes
broke out about whether psalms should be sung at all. Quakers allowed Spirit-
inspired solos, but not congregational psalm-singing.112 Robert Kirk noted, on
his tour of London churches in 1689, how a Baptist preacher ‘for 4 days sung
psalms, but many of his people fors[a]king him for it, becaus the Scriptures
Command it not, he desisted from it’.113 A furious row broke out between
Particular Baptists in the 1690s: on one side, the preacher Benjamin Keach
(who not only advocated singing psalms but also hymns); on the other, Isaac
Marlow, a jeweller. Marlow viewed singing psalms as a spiritual gift restricted
to New Testament times; also, mixed singing by women and men put the sexes

104 Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010), p. 452.
105 Jane Dawson, ‘Patterns of Worship in Reformation Scotland’, in Duncan B. Forrester and
Doug Gay, eds, Worship and Liturgy in Context (London, 2009), p. 143.
106 Kirk MS, fol. 37v: notes of a sermon by Baxter, 10 November 1689.
107 Frere & Douglas, Puritan Manifestoes, p. 29; Cardwell, Conferences, p. 305.
108 Directory, pp. 27, 40. 109 Davies, Worship and Theology, Part II, 520.
110 Directory, p. 40.
111 Calvin, ‘The Form of Prayers and Songs of the Church, 1542: Letter to the Reader’, trans-
lated F.L. Battles, Calvin Theological Journal, 15 (1980), 164.
112 Marsh, Music and Society, pp. 393–4. 113 Kirk MS, fol. 57r.
432 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

on an equal footing in worship, and broke the rule that women should be silent
in church.114 But across the spectrum, Dissenters as well as the established
Church came down on the side of singing, in line with early modern music
theory that it intensified emotion.115 Richard Baxter called ‘plain intelligible
Church-musick . . . a natural help to the minds alacrity. . . As it is lawful to use
the comfortable helps of spectacles to reading the bible, so it is of Musick to
exhilarate the soul towards God.’116 In the late seventeenth century, the power
of music to promote ‘heart-work’ encouraged Dissenters to cross the bridge
from psalm-singing to hymns.117
Beyond psalm-singing, where else might lay voices be found in worship?
Traces of evidence suggest people sometimes wrote prayer requests, for the
minister to use in extempore intercessions. Slips of paper survive from the early
eighteenth-century ministry of Jonathan Edwards in New England. On these
scraps (which survive only because Edwards re-used the paper) are his congre-
gation’s prayer requests. Robert Kirk’s observation of Richard Baxter leading a
service in 1689 suggests something similar: ‘the Minister reading the papers of
the sick or troubled in minde, or intending a journey & c - he prayed’.118
Perhaps, finally, it is worth undermining the premise that voices need to be
audible if they are to count. The Dissenting traditions wanted worship to be the
‘sacrifice of a broken heart’; not the empty sound of prayers, mere ‘lip-labour’.119
A reverent silence until the ‘Amen’ need not mean disengagement (and the
soundscape of Dissenting worship no doubt featured sighs and groans).120 The
Directory urged ministers to get themselves and their hearers ‘rightly affected
with their sins, that they may all mourn in sense thereof before the Lord, and
hunger and thirst after the Grace of God in Jesus Christ’. Ministers should
‘speak from their hearts . . . that both themselves and their people may be much
affected, and even melted thereby.’121 The aim must be to stir up emotion, and a
good preacher led the way by displaying his own: Thomas Jollie noted ‘I seldom

114 Clarke, ‘Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy’, pp. 24–5; J.L. Garnett, Baptist Theology (Macon,
GA, 2009), pp. 87–8.
115 Marsh, Music and Society, pp. 392–3; see also Calvin, ‘Form of Prayers and Songs of the
Church’, p. 163.
116 Baxter, Christian Directory, p. 885.
117 Coffey, ‘Between Puritanism and Evangelicalism’.
118 Kirk MS, fol. 36v; Stephen J. Stein, ‘ “For their Spiritual Good”: The Northampton,
Massachusetts, Prayer Bids of the 1730s and 1740s’, William and Mary Quarterly, 37 (1980), 261–85.
Davies, Worship & Theology, Part II, p. 457 states Baxter gathered papers on a ‘slotted stick’, but
Kirk makes no reference to a stick.
119 Psalm 51:17; OED ‘lip-labour’, n.
120 John Craig, ‘Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the English
Parish Church, 1547–1642’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds, Sacred Space in Early Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 104–23.
121 Directory, pp. 8, 37.
 Worship and Sacraments 433

exercised solemnly (as I remember) for above 30 yeares together but I wett two
hand-kercheifs at once as if they had been in the washing’.122
In conclusion, the complex pre-history of Dissent, especially the
­free-but-ordered style of the Directory, took English Dissenting traditions
down a distinctive path. In worship, Dissenters matched an aesthetic of out-
ward simplicity with the cultivation of inward intensity. To capture the heart for
God, the senses had to be engaged, literally and metaphorically. Richard Baxter,
commenting on the power of music in worship, wrote that one could not know
what it is to be human ‘if you know not that God hath made all the senses, to be
the inlets of objects, and so of holy pleasure into the soul. . . It is therefore a
foolish pretence of spirituality, to dream of acting without our senses.’ Baxter
believed ‘if anything on Earth be like to Heaven, it is to have our Delight in
God’.123 This was the goal of worship—and life—in the English Dissenting
traditions.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Clarke, Elizabeth, ‘Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy in the Seventeenth Century’, in
Isabel Rivers and David Wykes, eds, Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the
Hymn in England and Wales (Oxford, 2011), pp. 13–32.
Coffey, John, ‘Between Puritanism and Evangelicalism: “Heart-Work” in Dissenting
Communion Hymns, 1693–1709’, in John Coffey, ed., Heart Religion: Evangelical
Piety in England and Ireland, 1690–1850 (Oxford, 2016), pp. 30–48.
Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967).
Craig, John, ‘Psalms, Groans and Dogwhippers: The Soundscape of Worship in the
English Parish Church, 1547–1642’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer, eds, Sacred
Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 104–23.
Craig, John, ‘Bodies at Prayer in Early Modern England’, in Natalie Mears and Alec
Ryrie, eds, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2013),
pp. 173–96.
Davies, Horton, Worship and Theology in England: From Cranmer to Baxter and Foxe
(Grand Rapids, MI, 1996).
Dawson, Jane, John Knox (New Haven, CT, and London, 2015).
Durston, Christopher, ‘By the Book or with the Spirit: The Debate over Liturgical Prayer
during the English Revolution’, Historical Research, 79 (2006), pp. 50–73.
Hunt, Arnold, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 161
(1998), pp. 38–83.
Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640
(Cambridge, 2010).

122 The Notebook of the Rev. Thomas Jolly, ed. Henry Fishwick (Manchester, 1894), p. 57; Hunt,
Art of Hearing, pp. 81–94; Dawson, ‘Patterns of Worship’, p. 144.
123 Baxter, Christian Directory, p. 884.
434 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Johns, David L., ‘Worship and Sacraments’, in Stephen W. Marshall and Pink Dandelion,
eds, The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford, 2013), pp. 260–74.
Maltby, Judith, ‘ “Extravagancies and Impertinencies”: Set Forms, Conceived and
Extempore Prayer in Revolutionary England’, in Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie,
eds, Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2013),
pp. 221–44.
Martin, Jessica, ‘English Reformed Responses to the Passion’, in Jessica Martin and Alec
Ryrie, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2012),
pp. 115–34.
Milton, Anthony, ‘Unsettled Reformations, 1603–1662’, in A. Milton, ed., The Oxford
History of Anglicanism: Volume 1: Reformation and Identity (Oxford, 2017), pp. 63–82.
Segger, Glen J., Richard Baxter’s ‘Reformed Liturgy’: A Puritan Alternative to the Book of
Common Prayer (Farnham, 2014).
Spinks, Bryan D., From the Lord and ‘the Best Reformed Churches’: A Study of the
Eucharistic Liturgy in the English Puritan and Separatist Traditions, 1550–1633 (Rome,
1984).
Spinks, Bryan D., ‘The Origins of the Antipathy to Set Liturgical Forms in the English-
Speaking Reformed Tradition’, in Lukas Vischer, ed., Christian Worship in Reformed
Churches Past and Present (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), pp. 66–82.
Spinks, Bryan D., ‘Liturgy and Worship’, in A. Milton, ed., The Oxford History of
Anglicanism: Volume 1: Reformation and Identity (Oxford, 2017), pp. 148–67.
Spurr, John, English Puritanism: 1603–1689 (London, 1998).
Van Dixhoorn, Chad, ‘The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of the 1640s’, in
A. Milton, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Volume 1: Reformation and Identity
(Oxford, 2017), pp. 430–42.
Wakeling, Christopher, ed. Paul Stamper, Nonconformist Places of Worship (London,
2016).
Wright, Stephen, The Early English Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006).
Wykes, David L., ‘James II’s Religious Indulgence of 1687 and the Early Organisation of
Dissent: The Building of the First Nonconformist Meeting-House in Birmingham’,
Midland History, 16 (1991), pp. 86–102.
 19

Sermons and Preaching

David J. Appleby

Preaching has always been central to the English Protestant Dissenting trad­ition,
and sermons have proved a rich source of information for those attempting
to map the genome of that tradition—so much so that the history of Dissent
has largely been constructed around a pantheon of celebrated preachers. John
Coffey has observed in this volume that in the past both Anglicans and
­nonconformists found it advantageous to fashion a polarized metanarrative of
the origins of organized Dissent. Influenced by such stark demarcation lines,
literary scholars were predisposed to believe that Puritan preaching could be
distinguished by its ‘plain style’.1 Much has changed in recent decades: historians
now emphasize that many dissenters persisted in their efforts to reform the
Church of England from within, whilst Mary Morrissey has rightly warned
against too readily associating rhetorical styles with preaching philosophies.2
Stereotypes did exist at the time. In 1656 Abraham Wright expressed confidence
that his readers would easily discern ‘the vast difference betwixt the shop-board
breeding’ of Puritan preachers and the graceful erudition of Episcopalians.3
Even Samuel Pepys, although critical of Wright’s assertions, thought that a
Presbyterian preacher could be recognized by his ‘lazy’ style.4 Puritans were
often crudely caricatured, therefore, but there was clearly something distinctive
about their preaching.

1 W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (London, 1932), pp. 103,
112–14, 258, 308–9, 371; J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Centuries (Oxford, 1964), pp. 87, 113; John F. Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament (Princeton, NJ, 1969),
p. 138.
2 Mary Morrissey, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, The Historical
Journal, 42 (1999), 1120–1; see also Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 82–3.
3 Abraham Wright, Five Sermons in Five Several Styles, or Waies of Preaching (London, 1656),
sig. A4r.
4 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds R. Latham and W. Matthews (10 vols, London,
1970), IX, p. 300; II, p. 75.

David J. Appleby, Sermons and Preaching In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0020
436 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES

Protestants, like Catholics, cited the Church Fathers when justifying their
­exe­gesis. William Perkins declared that his preaching manual was distilled
from their writings.5 Richard Bernard was more cautious, stressing that the
Fathers should be followed only insofar as their teaching was consistent with
Scripture.6 The Fathers became less visible in Puritan exegesis during the civil
wars, and after the Restoration were appropriated by the enemies of Dissent.7
Nonetheless, godly preachers continued to draw inspiration from the structure
of Augustine’s preaching and his ‘anti-rhetorical rhetoric’, whilst Paul’s fearless
evangelizing inspired them during the persecutions of the later seventeenth
century.8
Educated preachers shared a Classical heritage. Perkins’ directive that Latin
and Greek should not be intermingled in the sermon has sometimes been
taken as evidence that Puritans rejected the language of Rome. Certainly, James
I believed that Puritans eschewed Classical learning.9 In actuality Perkins’
manual emphasized that preachers should be competent in Latin, Greek, and
ideally Hebrew, in order to interpret the Scriptures, and study logic and
rhetoric.10
Protestant preachers naturally benefitted from the legacy of Calvin and Beza.
Calvin, an enthusiastic advocate of preaching, had urged that congregations
not simply be educated but moved to take action in order to affirm their
­membership of God’s elect. Luther’s colleague Melanchthon was admired for
his painstaking dissection of doctrine, and the way in which he applied that
ana­lysis to the needs of the moment. The doctrine-use structure that came to
dominate early modern English preaching owes much to Melanchthon, and
also to the Huguenot logician Petrus Ramus, whose treatise The Logic (1555)
was translated into English in 1574. Ramist logic helped preachers to develop
their arguments from general principles to specific practical applications. It also
enabled them to organize their exegesis into headings, a useful aide-memoire
for those choosing to deliver extempore sermons. Through such methods hear-
ers were brought to a clearer understanding of the Word, and how to evangelize
themselves, their households, and their communities. As a Dissenting minister
would later emphasize, ‘Not the hearers, but doers of the Word shall be blessed

5 William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying (London, 1607), [sig. A5r].

6 Richard Bernard, The Faithful Shepheard (London, 1607), p. 41.
7 Kafrin Ettenhuber, ‘The Preachers and Patristics’, in Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington,
and Emma Rhatigan, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011),
pp. 45, 50–1.
8 Greg Kneidel, ‘Ars Praedicandi’, in McCullough et al. Oxford Handbook, pp. 4–5, 12.
9 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, p. 135; Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical
Policy of James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 195.
10 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, pp. 88–9, 96–7.
 Sermons and Preaching 437

in the deed.’11 It was this ideal to which godly preachers aspired when deliver-
ing ‘quickening’ sermons, and which would so often alarm ecclesiastical and pol-
itical regimes over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
English nonconformity is generally taken to originate with those who
­dissented from the Elizabethan Church Settlement of 1559. These ‘hotter’
Protestants (who would soon become known as ‘Puritans’) believed that the
Church of England remained too tainted by Catholicism to complete the task
of reformation. Such views were not always confined to the margins. The
departure of large numbers of senior Catholics had left a vacuum in Church
government that Elizabeth had been obliged to fill with Calvinists newly
returned from exile. Their influence was evident in 1571, when Convocation
ordered that a copy of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563) be placed in
every church. Foxe’s work was much more than a hagiography of the Marian
martyrs, although the ‘paradigm of heroic martyrdom’ it created had obvious
attractions for dissenting Protestants.12 Over the following decades Foxe’s
­writings would help reinforce the self-image of the godly as an embattled and
persecuted elect.

PREACHING UNDER ELIZABETH I

The authors of the 1559 Act of Uniformity knew that the new Protestant state
needed to attract a wide spectrum of popular acquiescence in order to survive.
The Act’s emphasis on ritual and the sacraments matched Elizabeth’s own
­religious preferences. To the consternation of those hoping to transform the
Church into a second Geneva, the queen proved averse to sermon-centred
worship. Elizabeth considered three or four licensed preachers sufficient to
service most counties, opining that curates could deputize by reading aloud
officially approved homilies.13 These prepared sermons were contained in
state-sponsored volumes compiled by Thomas Cranmer in 1547 and John Jewel
in 1563, both appearing in numerous editions thereafter.14 A temporary ban on
preaching had been imposed soon after Elizabeth’s accession, ostensibly to
silence Catholic clergy who had responded to the prospect of a heretic queen
by delivering contentious sermons and disturbing the peace.15 At the same

11 Thomas Bladon, in England’s Remembrancer (1663), p. 380, citing James 1:22–5.

12 Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), p. 19.
13 G.R. Elton, ed., The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1960), p. 444.
14 Thomas Cranmer, Certain Sermons, or Homilies Appoynted by the Kynges Maiestie (London,
1547); Thomas Cranmer (posthumous), Certayne Sermons Appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie
(London, 1559); John Jewel, The Seconde Tome of Homelyes of such Matters as were Promised and
Intituled in the Former Part of Homelyes (London, 1563).
15 Arnold Hunt, ‘Preaching the Elizabethan Settlement’, in McCullough et al., Oxford
Handbook, p. 369.
438 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

time, there was a risk that Puritan preachers might spark the kind of sectarian
divisions that had destabilized France. For this reason Elizabeth was more con-
cerned by dissent than by empty pulpits, and by the mid-1560s was urging her
bishops to crack down. The two issues came to a head over the matter of
‘prophesyings’.
These preaching workshops, modelled on Zurich’s prophezei, had been
established to help train young preachers. A panel of senior clergy, operating
under the auspices of the relevant diocese, selected the candidates and the text
on which they were to preach. The audiences consisted of local clergy and laity,
the latter departing after the sermons in order to allow clerics to confer.
Prophesyings were not exclusively Puritan affairs, but they tended to be held in
locations dominated by godly magistrates.16 Elizabeth was alarmed to hear of
people ‘gadding’ from other parishes to attend, and became convinced that the
gatherings were fostering nonconformity.17 In 1574 she ordered them banned.
Matthew Parker, the ailing Archbishop of Canterbury, procrastinated. His
­successor, Edmund Grindal, not only refused to comply but presumed to lec-
ture the queen on the merits of prophesying and the limits of royal power over
the Church.18 Grindal was suspended, and a royal decree issued prohibiting
prophesyings in his province.19
Despite this setback preachers were still able to attend ‘exercises’. Whilst
some exercises were little more than clerical seminars, others differed from
prophesyings only in that they featured one public sermon per meeting. Clergy
could also subscribe to ‘lectures by combination’. These were preached at regular
intervals, usually on market day, by a rota of lecturers approved by the diocese.
Participating preachers were expected to attend each lecture, after which they
would retire to confer over a meal. At least eighty-five combinations operated
in twenty-two counties.20 A disproportionate number of the participants of
these activities were of a Puritan disposition; a significant factor given that both
offered obvious opportunities for networking.
Grindal was succeeded in 1583 by John Whitgift. Described as a conscien-
tious preacher with a plain style, Whitgift was nevertheless implacably opposed
to nonconformity, and determined to control the pulpits in his province.21

16 Peter Clark, ‘The Prophesying Movement in Kentish Towns during the 1570s’, Archaeologia
Cantiana, 93 (1977), 82–3.
17 Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformation (Harlow, 2009), p. 271.
18 Edmund Grindal to Queen Elizabeth, 20 December 1576, in Elton, Tudor Constitution,
p. 442.
19 Patrick Collison, Godly People (London, 1983), p. 59; Elton, Tudor Constitution, p. 444.
20 Conferences and Combination Lectures in the Elizabethan Church, eds Patrick Collinson,
John Craig, and Brett Usher (Woodbridge, 2003), p. xxvii.
21 George Paule, The Life of the Most Reuerend and Religious Prelate Iohn Whitgift, Lord
Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1612), p. 66. See Whitgift’s dispute with Thomas Cartwright,
and the publication An Answere to a Certen Libel intitled, an Admonition to the Parliament
(London, 1572).
 Sermons and Preaching 439

Together with Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, Whitgift organized exercises

to promote conformity within the Church.22 Puritans were disparaged from
the public pulpit at Paul’s Cross, beginning with Whitgift himself in November
1583.23 Bancroft’s sermon there in February 1589 signalled a step-change from
incidental invective to the kind of sustained confutation that had traditionally
been reserved for denouncing Catholicism.24 Despite such harassment, Puritan
clergy continued to preach in the provinces, the more controversial practi-
tioners providing profitable copy for London stationers.25
There had always been enthusiasm for further religious reform among MPs,
magistrates, and other gentry. Cambridge especially was priming gentlemen’s
sons to support the godly clergy it was training for the English Church.26 With
their wealth and political connections, the Puritan gentry offered a counterbal-
ance to the bishops. They were able to install godly incumbents in many livings,
and were active in founding town lectureships in London and elsewhere.
Conformists deprecated the multiplication of lectureships, fearing that town
lecturers would answer to their lay patrons rather than the ecclesiastical
authorities. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign most lectureships were widely
regarded as bastions of Puritanism.27

PREACHING UNDER THE EARLY STUARTS

The accession of James VI of Scotland in 1603 gave hope to those agitating for
further reformation. James had impeccable Calvinist credentials, and was a
knowledgeable and attentive student of sermons. It was soon clear, however,
that there would be no seismic changes in Church liturgy or governance. It has
been argued that following the Hampton Court Conference the Puritan move-
ment lost momentum, and when leadership of the Church passed from Whitgift
(d. 1604) and Bancroft (d. 1610) to the more avuncular George Abbott religious
differences were largely subsumed within a broad Calvinist consensus.28
Distaste for religious radicals certainly pushed the more conservative godly

22 Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘The Latitude of the Church of England’, in Kenneth Fincham and
Peter Lake, eds, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 56.
23 John Whitgift, A Most Godly and Learned Sermon . . . (London, 1589).
24 Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 208–10.
25 Laurence Chaderton, A Fruitful Sermon . . . (London, 1584); Miles Mosse, The Arraignment
and Conviction of Usurie (London, 1585).
26 Ryrie, Age of Reformation, p. 277; Ian Green, ‘Teaching the Reformation’, in C. Scott Dixon
and Louise Schorn-Shütte, eds, The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2003),
p. 160; Jacqueline Eales, ‘A Road to Revolution’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds,
The Culture of English Puritanism (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 190–2; J.T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry
(1984), chapters 5 and 9.
27 Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships (Stanford, CA, 1970), pp. 95, 115.
28 See Peter Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Fincham and Lake, Religious Politics, p. 6.
440 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

towards their conformist colleagues. William Crashaw’s Paul’s Cross sermon in

1607, for example, used the trope of the Gunpowder Plot to attack both
Catholics and Brownists, and the Plot was still being invoked by Puritans two
decades later to imbue religious nonconformity with political loyalty.29 Despite
this, James’ policy of ‘government by polemic’ was hardly conducive to consen-
sus: a wide range of clergy was invited to preach at Court, but the king favoured
sermons that excoriated those calling for further reform.30 It was very easy for
dissenters to overstep the mark, as John Burges discovered in 1604, when he
was imprisoned for a court sermon that had demonstrated his distaste for
orthodox liturgy too bluntly for James’ liking.31
More research needs to be undertaken to ascertain what was happening in
the provinces.32 The numbers of sermons printed by stationers during this
period indicate a widespread enthusiasm for preaching. The most influential
treatises on preaching published during James’ reign were authored by minis-
ters of a godly disposition. Apart from Perkins’ Arte of Prophecying (1607) and
Bernard’s The Faithfull Shepheard (1607), Samuel Hieron produced The
Preacher’s Plea (1604) and The Dignity of Preaching (1615, second edn 1616).
Perkins’ manual made no distinction between rich and poor hearers.33 Hieron
went further, commenting that,
. . . in the new Testament we finde this Prophecying, not so much to signifie a
revealing beforehand, by divine inspirement, what touching States and Common-
wealths, and particular persons shall ensue, as an expounding the Scriptures in
such sort as might best advance the common benefit. Me thinkes I finde in Paul an
exact definition of a Prophecying; It is a speaking to men, to edifying, to ex­hort­ation,
to comfort. It is even the very same which we terme, Preaching.34
This urge to edify and exhort, to concentrate people’s minds on the question of
salvation in order to advance the common benefit was by now a recognizable
trait of Puritan preaching. Such unsettling evangelism was unwelcome to a
Jacobean regime struggling with unprecedented demographic and economic
pressures, and plagued by growing social unrest. More problematic still was the
readiness of godly preachers to relate this evangelism to current affairs. James’
ineffectual response to the expulsion of his Protestant son-in-law from
Bohemia, his reluctance to intervene militarily in the Thirty Years’ War, and his
efforts to secure a marriage alliance with Spain were seen by many as a betrayal

29 William Crashaw, The Sermon Preached at the Crosse, Feb xiii. 1607 (London, 1609); Samuel
Ward, A Peace Offring to God (London, 1624).
30 Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic (Stanford, CA, 1998), pp. 9, 11.
31 Hunt, Art of Hearing, pp. 148, 296–7; John Burges, A Sermon Preached before the Late King
James (London, 1642).
32 See Ian Green, ‘Preaching in the parishes’, in McCullough et al., eds, Oxford Handbook,
p. 137.
33 Kneidel, ‘Ars Praedicandi’, p. 8; Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, pp. 102–22.
34 Samuel Hieron, The Dignitie of Preaching (London, 1615), p. 3.
 Sermons and Preaching 441

of the Protestant cause. Godly preachers said as much in the pulpit, and
many were imprisoned as a result.35 James became increasingly insistent that
­preachers impress upon congregations their duty to obey Authority and respect
social convention. These instructions were codified in the king’s Directions to
Preachers (1622), which prohibited clerics of any rank from examining the
nature of royal authority, and discouraged unseemly invective against Catholics
and Puritans.36
James deprecated the spread of ‘unsound, seditious and dangerous doctrines’,
which he considered threatening to both Church and state, and which he asso-
ciated with Puritanism.37 The Directions reflected anxiety regarding ‘the deep
points of predestination, election, reprobation, [and] the universality, efficacy,
resistibility or irresistibility, of God’s grace’, all of which were deemed unsuit-
able for public auditory.38 The authorities doubted the laity’s ability to compre-
hend Calvinist doctrine, and feared the consequences. It has usually been
assumed that these anxieties proceeded from concerns that the populace would
perceive predestination, particularly in its extreme supralapsarian form, as a
doctrine of despair; that upon being made aware that they were helpless to
achieve salvation through their own efforts the common people might become
demoralized and unpredictable. John Spurr has argued that even Puritan min-
isters ‘knew that in practice they had to preach and teach as if human free will
existed and mattered’.39 The infralapsarian view of predestination (which held
that whilst election would come through God’s grace alone, humans could by
their own wilfulness consign themselves to reprobation) might be seen in this
light. There was, however, a disturbing alternative for the authorities.
It was widely accepted that God would gather the elect by an ‘effectual
call’. Hotter Protestants believed that sermons were the instruments of that
call; ‘without preaching’, insisted Samuel Hieron, ‘we have no assurance of
salvation’.40 According to Perkins the purpose of preaching was to ‘collect the
Church and to accomplish the number of the Elect’.41 This would hardly be
possible if any were left in ignorance as to the nature of their salvation. The
Jacobean authorities believed that national harmony relied upon preachers
leaving certain things unsaid; by contrast, Calvinist ministers had a duty to

35 Fincham and Lake, ‘Ecclesiastical Policy’, 199.

36 Directions to Preachers (1622), Directions IV and V, in J.P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution
(Cambridge, 1966), p. 146.
37 James I to George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, 4 August 1622, in Kenyon, ed., Stuart
Constitution, p. 145.
38 See particularly Direction III, in Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, p. 146.
39 John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (London, 1998), pp. 169–70.
40 Hieron, Dignitie of Preaching (London, 1615), pp. 3, 7. For a recent discussion of the ‘effectual
call’ in Puritan preaching, see Clifford B. Boone, Puritan Evangelism (Milton Keynes, 2013),
especially pp. 11–31.
41 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, [sig. A4v]; Hieron, Dignitie of Preaching (London, 1615), p. 7.
442 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

preach doctrine to as wide an audience as possible.42 Sometimes they could be

too successful: hundreds of people regularly gadded from neighbouring
­parishes to hear ‘Thundering John’ Rogers preach at Dedham; meanwhile
Rogers himself grumbled at the general belief among his hearers that ‘all shall
be saved’.43 Listeners who became persuaded that they were predestined for
salvation might habitually demonstrate their election through industrious and
sober behaviour, but in order to remain true to the Word they had to be pre-
pared to resist human authority if necessary. In other words, an evangelized
population had the potential to be far more troublesome than a demoralized
one. Archbishop Abbott, typically, professed to believe that James’ instructions
were intended merely to encourage seemly preaching, and accused some
­colleagues (Spurr names Andrewes, Neile, and Laud) of having sinister motives
in interpreting them as an absolute ban on predestinarian preaching.44
Despite such attitudes the ban does not seem to have resulted in many
­pro­secu­tions. Godly preachers continued to discuss doctrine, particularly
where they were protected by powerful patrons. Turf wars between patrons and
­bishops were nothing new: in 1610 MPs had attempted to undermine the eccle-
siastical authorities by requesting that royal dispensation be given to ministers
silenced for nonconformity, in order that the people might once again benefit
from their preaching.45 James had even less sympathy for the Puritan ministry
at the end of his reign than he had shown in 1610; indeed, he began to appoint
anti-Calvinists to influential positions within the Church, finding their
­the­ology more compatible with his views on foreign policy and the Divine
Right of Kings.
Charles I continued in a similar vein after succeeding his father in 1625,
showing favour to the anti-Calvinist coterie centred on Bishop Neile’s London
residence, Durham House. It fell to a prominent member of this circle to adum-
brate the new ecclesiastical landscape in two bellicose sermons preached at the
state openings of parliament in 1625 and 1626. Calvinist theology, William
Laud informed the assembled Members, made God appear ‘the most unrea-
sonable tyrant in the world’. He accused reformists of causing division, hinting
that their desire to abolish episcopacy posed a threat to the monarchy.46 The
growing alarm of the Commons was expressed in the Heads of Articles (1629),
wherein members linked unpopular royal policies with the ‘extraordinary
growth of popery at home’, and listed doctrinal differences between ‘the
Arminians’ (by which they meant Laud and his allies) and ‘us’ (by which they

42 See Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, pp. 102–21.

43 Quoted in Hunt, Art of Hearing, p. 368.
44 John Spurr, The Post-Reformation, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006), pp. 56–7.
45 Commons’ petition on religion, July 1610, in Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, p. 144.
46 Laud, Works, I, p. 71; VI, pp. 11–12, quoted in Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism
c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), p. 215; Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, p. 153.
 Sermons and Preaching 443

meant Calvinists).47 Charles dissolved parliament, intending never to recall it.

Laud, by now Bishop of London, was free to impose an authoritarian anti-
Calvinist prelacy that sought to promote altar-worship and ritual over sermons.
Knowing that his opponents would use the pulpits to resist him, Laud set out to
bring the preaching ministry to heel.
His first target was an association of godly clergy and laity known as the
Feoffees for Impropriations. Its executive committee used members’ money
to purchase impropriations and avowsons in order to channel the resulting
income into virtuous causes. Laud alleged that their real objective was to install
a network of preachers disaffected to the discipline and doctrine of the
Church.48 In 1633 the Court of Exchequer dissolved the organization and con-
fiscated its ecclesiastical possessions. That same year, Laud succeeded George
Abbott as Archbishop of Canterbury. The Jacobean Directions to Preachers
were swiftly supplemented by further instructions designed to bring preaching
under closer control.49 Lectureships were seen as a particular obstacle to the
establishment of uniformity, but even at the height of Laud’s power forty-six
Puritan lectureships remained active within London alone.50
The instructions of 1633 also abolished Sunday afternoon sermons and
ordered that clergy devote the time to catechizing. The reissue of the Jacobean
Book of Sports further undermined godly efforts to preserve the Sabbath for
preaching and reflection. Laud ordered his bishops to monitor parochial
preaching, prosecuting offenders in the Court of High Commission and Star
Chamber. Lawrence Stone has argued that such policies were ineffective, but
the mood of the Commons, when Charles was finally forced to recall parliament,
suggests otherwise.51 The authors of the Root and Branch petition of December
1640 claimed that godly clergy had been prevented from preaching ‘the Truth
of God’, having been forbidden to discuss predestination, promote the sanctity
of the Sabbath, or criticize innovations in worship. MPs complained that many
communities had been deprived of excellent ministers because they would not
submit to such restrictions, and ‘sometimes for no other cause but for their zeal
in preaching or great auditories’.52 Weakened by the disastrous Bishops’ Wars of
1639–40, Charles was forced to dismantle the Court of High Commission and
Star Chamber. After 1641, with press censorship removed, the ecclesiastical
authorities in disarray, and godly preachers able to speak freely, preaching
became more prominent, and more contentious, than ever.

47 Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, p. 157.

48 Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, p. 121.
49 Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, pp. 159–60.
50 Bodl. MS Tanner 68, fol. 2; Wilson, Pulpit in Parliament, p. 32; Seaver, Puritan Lectureships,
p. 254.
51 Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (London, 1972), p. 121.
52 Kenyon, ed., Stuart Constitution, p. 172.
444 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

PREACHING DURING THE CIVIL WARS

AND COMMONWEALTH

A combination of factors fuelled the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century,

but as John Morrill has famously stated, it was ‘religion that drove minorities to
fight, and forced majorities to make reluctant choices’.53 The sermons of clergy
who chose to side with parliament would reflect the drift from discontent to war,
and then to revolution—with the concomitant fragmentation of Puritanism.
In 1640 parliament ordered a number of public fasts in order to lead the
nation in repentance and seek divine guidance. These coalesced into a regular
monthly fixture, with additional fasting to mark significant triumphs and
defeats. The events were supplemented by sermons delivered by invited minis-
ters, many of whom associated the perennial spectre of Catholicism with the
nefarious activities of royal counsellors and the repression of godly preach-
ing.54 Religious justifications for resisting royal authority began to be rehearsed
even before the outbreak of hostilities. By the end of 1642 many parliamentary
preachers were presenting the conflict as a holy war against the forces of the
Antichrist, although most were careful not to traduce the king himself.55
Scripture, as Kevin Killeen has observed, provided educated preachers with
‘a nuanced and adaptable language’.56 This mutability allowed them con­sid­er­able
room for manoeuvre, but such rhetoric was difficult to control. Some preachers
might refer to good or bad Old Testament kings merely to inform general
­comments against the times, but there were many others who intended more
specific analogies. Listeners and readers drew their own inferences. The prob-
lem was compounded by the fact that the collapse of episcopal authority and
press censorship had led to an exponential growth in radical lay preaching. Lay
preachers tended to be far less restrained, and some, such as the cobbler Samuel
How, had begun to appear in print.57 Royalists were quick to exploit the malleable
rhetoric of respectable Presbyterian and Independent preachers in order to
portray them as bedfellows of extreme antinomians.58 This was one reason why
orthodox clerics resented the intrusion of ‘mechanicks’ into their domain.

53 John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, Fifth Series, 34 (1984), 157.
54 For example, the fast sermons of Cornelius Burgess and Stephen Marshall, 17 November
1640; the content of both is well summarized in Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the
Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London, 1993), pp. 85–6.
55 For example, Matthew Newcomen, The Craft and Cruelty of the Churches Adversaries
(London, 1643), pp. 3, 37–8; Henry Hall, Heaven Ravished (London, 1644), p. 29.
56 Kevin Killeen, ‘Chastising with Scorpions’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010), 493.
57 Samuel How, The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching (Amsterdam, 1640). This work was
reprinted in various London editions from 1644 onwards.
58 For example, John Taylor, New Preachers New (London, 1641); idem. The Brownists
Conventicle (London, 1641); idem. An Apology for Private Preaching (London, 1642).
 Sermons and Preaching 445

Women preachers were a particular bête noir.59 Presbyterians feared the

eschatological consequences of error and heresy, although hysterical ex­posés
such as Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena may well have given lay ­preachers more
prominence than they might otherwise have had.
Presbyterian MPs became concerned that the growth of lay preaching would
alienate their more conservative supporters.60 In July 1643 parliament estab-
lished a new body, the Westminster Assembly, to regulate worship in the areas
under its control. Presbyterians provided the majority of delegates to the
Assembly, and so largely dictated the content of the Directory for Publique
Worship (1645). The fine line trodden by Presbyterian clergy in terms of the
practical application of their exegesis is evident in clauses that cautioned
preachers to respect societal conventions, but also fearlessly to criticize social
superiors and embrace the poorer sort.61 Further legislation appeared in
October 1644 to regulate ordination. Central to the selection process was an
examination of each candidate’s preaching.62 In April 1645, alarmed that many
soldiers had taken to preaching to their comrades, parliament passed an
Ordinance prohibiting lay preaching.63 The Ordinance was ignored by Baptists
and others who had found ready audiences in the independent gathered
churches that had sprung up around the country. Within the recently created
New Model Army the response to the ban was encapsulated in a publication
entitled The Cleere Sense (1645), which disputed the need for ordination and
questioned parliament’s definition of preaching.
The religiosity of parliamentarian troops has sometimes been overstated but
it would be rash to discount it. Although it is likely that many soldiers did not
value sermons as much the letters of Nehemiah Wharton might suggest, there
is ample evidence to indicate that many did, particularly within the New Model
officer corps.64 Richard Baxter claimed (not entirely accurately) that whilst
orthodox Calvinist views prevailed among provincial parliamentarian armies
and garrisons throughout the First Civil War of 1642–6, parliament’s main field
army under the Earl of Essex was unduly influenced by firebrand preachers.
After the ousting of Lord Essex and the inception of the New Model in early

59 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), Part I, pp. 120–1; Part II, pp. 10–11.
60 David Cressy, England on Edge (Oxford, 2006), p. 236. Nevertheless, lay preachers called
before parliament continued to receive lenient treatment: BL Harl. MS 163, fols 662, 669, cited in
Morrill, ‘Religious Context’, p. 167.
61 A Directory for the Publique Worship of God throughout the Three Kingdoms (London, 1645),
pp. 34–5.
62 An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament. . . for the Ordination of
Ministers (London, 1644), pp. 6–8.
63 Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, eds C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, 3 vols (London, 1911),
I, p. 677; Lords’ Journal, VII, p. 337.
64 Barbara Donagan, ‘Did Ministers Matter? War and Religion in England 1642–1649’, Journal
of British Studies, 33 (London, 1994), 124; SP 16/492 fol. 49 (Nehemiah Wharton to George
Willingham, 13 September 1642); Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and
Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 87–119.
446 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

1645, Baxter considered that religious radicalism among the soldiers grew to
such a pitch that it constituted a threat to the organized Church and civil gov-
ernment. He was, however, contemptuous of the lay preaching that ac­com­pan­ied
it.65 Besides facilitating the propagation of radical ideas, lay preaching appears
to have been instrumental in reducing plebeian respect for the clerical profession.
Disruption of church sermons, and the usurpation of pulpits by self-evangelized
soldiers had become commonplace by the end of the 1640s.66
It is difficult to assess the extent to which lay preaching contributed to the
hardening of attitudes after the Second Civil War, as few details have survived
of sermons delivered by soldiers. What is certain is that much of the blame for
the renewed fighting fell on Charles I, and the loudest calls for justice against
‘the man of blood’ came from within the New Model. Charles’ execution on
30 January 1649 stunned most Presbyterians. A number of condemnatory
­sermons circulated soon after the regicide, yet these came from royalists.
Presbyterian ministers do not seem to have had the heart to publish protests to
match even Thomas Fuller’s heavily disguised The Just Man’s Funeral (1649).
In fairness, the regicide also appears to have overawed most Independent
­preachers. The unenviable task of preaching to the Commons the day after the
king’s execution fell to John Cardell and John Owen. Cardell tiptoed warily
around the subject in order to meditate on the nature of Providence, whilst
Owen deployed texts from the Old Testament to justify the regicide without
referring to it directly.67 Most mainstream Puritan preachers would draw a dis-
creet veil over the episode thereafter.
The failure to reform manners during the Commonwealth and Protectorate
has been ascribed to widespread antipathy arising from nostalgia for traditional
customs and practices. Internal divisions among the godly made it difficult to
present the populace with a clear and coherent alternative. One of the reasons
why Puritans failed to establish a stable godly ‘establishment’ during this period
was that even the views that emanated from mainstream pulpits were frequently
at odds with the political centre. For every assize sermon that commended the
Engagement, for example, there were sermons (particularly funeral sermons)
that disparaged it.68 Other sermons sparked furious public arguments between
divines.69 Many continued to spend time in the pulpit excoriating sectaries and
lay preachers. Nancy Matthews has argued that these attacks intensified when

65 Richard Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. M. Sylvester (London, 1696), pp. 50–3.
66 Gentles, New Model Army, p. 102.
67 John Cardell, God’s Wisdom Justified and Man’s Folly Condemned (London, 1648/9); John
Owen, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1649), pp. 3, 5, 6.
68 Richard Saunders, Plenary Possession makes a Lawful Power (London, 1651), p. 21; Thomas
Case, Asarkokaukema (London, 1655), p. 73; Thomas Jacombe, Enoch’s Walk (London, 1656), sig.
[Av]; Christopher Love, The True and Perfect Speech of Mr Christopher Love on the Scaffold
(London, 1651), pp. 3–4.
69 For example, Christopher Love, Short and Plaine Animadversions upon Some Passages in
Mr Del’s Sermon (London, 1646).
 Sermons and Preaching 447

the partial disbanding of the New Model after 1651 released scores of preaching
soldiers into civilian communities.70 In many cases ministers’ attitudes had
hardened after having their sermons repeatedly disrupted by Quakers and
other sects.71 Few preachers among the Baptists or the more marginal groups
had undergone formal clerical training; many, indeed, made a virtue of the fact.
By contrast, Presbyterians such as Thomas Hall emphasized their learning by
composing their rebuttals of lay preaching partly or wholly in Latin.72 At the
same time, some divines hesitated to condemn lay preachers: John Ferriby
declared that he would encourage the smallest spark and not put out the greatest
flame, although he ‘would have them both burn within the Chimney’.73 There
are indications in Ferriby’s treatise to suggest that the urge to confront lay
preaching encouraged many conservative ministers to overcome their mistrust
of the printed word.74
The Westminster Assembly had shrivelled into insignificance long before it
was formally dissolved in 1652. Following Cromwell’s installation as Lord
Protector its role in vetting candidates for parish livings and ejecting unfit
incumbents was given to a new body of ‘Triers’ and ‘Ejectors’. These inspectors
were a reasonably representative mix of Presbyterians and Independents, but
they had no jurisdiction over gathered churches or lay preachers (both of
whom continued to receive support from sections of the press and army).75
During the Protectorate, and particularly after Cromwell’s death in 1658, many
feared that the liberty that he had extended to most Protestant denominations
would lead to religious anarchy. Preaching had produced not a clear trumpet
call but a discordant cacophony that had confused and unsettled the popula-
tion. By 1660 the restoration of the monarchy was increasingly seen—not least
by Presbyterians—as the surest means to restore order.

PREACHING AFTER THE RESTORATION

Presbyterians were pivotal in bringing back Charles II, but the trauma of the
regicide was too deeply burned into the Cavalier psyche for royalists to respect
tender consciences. The politicized sermons of the 1640s had not been forgot-
ten or forgiven: just as the Marquess of Newcastle had once exclaimed that
Charles I had been preached out of his kingdoms, so the Act for the Safety and
Preservation of His Majesties Person and Government (1661) declared that

70 Nancy Matthews, William Sheppard, Cromwell’s Law Reformer (Cambridge, 1984), p. 30.
71 Edwards, Gangraena, pt I, pp. 111; Thomas Hall, The Pulpit Guarded (London, 1650), sig. A2.
72 Hall, Pulpit Guarded, sig. A2–[A4v]; George Griffiths, A Bold Challenge of an Itinerant
Preacher (London, 1652).
73 John Ferriby, The Lawful Preacher (London, 1653), pp. 24–5.
74 Ferriby, Lawful Preacher, sig. B. 75 John Martin, The Preacher Sent (London, 1657).
448 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

seditious preaching had ‘in very great measure’ caused ‘the late rebellion’.76 It
was largely for this reason that the regime had already made an example of
Hugh Peter, with a particularly sadistic execution in October 1660.
Some Presbyterian ministers offered sermons to acclaim Charles II’s return,
but their enthusiasm was not reciprocated. Instead, Puritan clergy were
­harassed and threatened.77 This hostility was nourished by the burgeoning cult
of King Charles the Martyr: the institution of annual services to commemorate
the regicide and Charles II’s restoration enabled Cavalier-Anglican preachers
to demonize Puritans in general and Presbyterians in particular.78 Despite this,
thousands continued to gather in London and elsewhere to hear the sermons of
godly ministers. In January 1661 the Privy Council sought to suppress such
gatherings by banning gadding, a practice that had long since been recognized
as a catalyst for godly solidarity and popular evangelism.79
Following the removal of almost 700 ministers between 1660 and 1661, the
Act of Uniformity (1662) was designed to flush the last vestiges of dissent from
the Church of England. Hundreds of godly clergy refused to comply with the
Act, and, anticipating ejection from their livings, delivered farewell sermons in
the months leading up to ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’. The valedictions that
found their way into print contained trenchant criticisms of the Cavalier-
Anglican establishment, albeit carefully couched in Scripture. This was not
intended to conceal the message but to avoid prosecution. Clarendon accused
the nonconformists of preaching mutiny, ‘in words which could not be brought
within the penalty of the law, though their meaning was well understood’,
whilst Samuel Parker called for legislation to prohibit such tactics.80 Some
choices of Scripture were deliberately provocative, as when Thomas Lye used
Joshua 10:24 to urge his congregation to set their feet upon the necks of kings.81
A number of the departing ministers even reverted to the rhetoric of the 1640s
by highlighting the primacy of ‘King Jesus’. This emphasized the underlying
precept of the farewell sermons that, if forced to choose, the godly were obliged
to follow the Word rather than man’s law.82

76 Newcastle quoted in Donagan, ‘Did Ministers Matter?’, 123; 13 Car. II st. 1, cap. 1.
77 For example, Richard Eedes, Great Britain’s Resurrection (London, 1660); Henry Newcombe,
Usurpation Defeated and David Restored (London, 1660); Calamy, Account, II, p. 215; Essex Record
Office D/B5, SB2/9, fols 17, 116v.
78 See Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003); David J. Appleby,
Black Bartholomew’s Day (Manchester, 2007), ch. 5.
79 CSPD 1660–1, pp. 538–9; Privy Council Register 2/55, fols 48–50, quoted in John Miller,
After the Civil Wars (Harlow, 2000), p. 183; Durston and Eales, eds, Culture of English Puritanism,
p. 20; Hunt, Art of Hearing, p. 190.
80 E. Hyde, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 2 vols (Oxford, 1857), I, p. 571; Samuel Parker,
A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1671), pp. 74–5, quoted in Lana Cable, ‘Licensing
Metaphor’, in Jenifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Books and Readers in Early Modern
England (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), p. 244; Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day, pp. 93, 201.
81 Thomas Lye, The Fixed Saint Held Forth (London, 1662), p. 19.
82 Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day, pp. 108–9.
 Sermons and Preaching 449

Presbyterians and Congregationalists resented being associated with avowed

Separatists, but would now lead a similar existence, preaching at illegal
­‘conventicles’. Such activities were initially prosecuted under Elizabethan
le­gis­la­tion, but growing Presbyterian militancy motivated Archbishop Sheldon
and his allies to sponsor the Conventicle Act (1664). This imposed restrictions
on non-Anglican gatherings commensurate with those already placed on
Quakers. The policy of incarcerating recalcitrant preachers proved counter-
productive, however: ministers simply took turns to preach to fellow prison-
ers, and listeners gathered outside the bars. Hundreds flocked to hear these
prison sermons, despite threats from the authorities. Joseph Alleine urged
his fellow inmates in Ilchester Gaol to ‘Feed and feast your Faith upon
Prison-Experiences’.83 The Bishop of Salisbury, Seth Ward realized that Dissent
could thrive in such circumstances; for when insisting that Richard Binmore be
prosecuted for de­liver­ing a funeral sermon he warned that the preacher would
only be enriched if sent to prison.84
Sharon Achinstein has drawn attention to the political significance of
­nonconformist funerals, describing them as ‘performances of survival’.85
Nonconformists exploited magistrates’ uncertainty over the legal status of
funeral sermons, although the ecclesiastical authorities considered them
­subversive because they were so obviously an advertisement for Dissent. The
prominence of funerals in Restoration nonconformist culture might conceiv-
ably have had an influence on preaching style. Bremer and Rydell have argued
that the loud theatricality which had been a hallmark of Puritan preaching in
former years became unfashionable during this period because Presbyterians
and Congregationalists wished to distance themselves from the antics of
­rad­icals.86 However, it surely also reflects the transition from public pulpits to
the more intimate acoustics of private houses and rented rooms, and the fact
that melodramatic performances were inappropriate for funerals.
Ironically, the Great Plague that devastated London in 1665 propelled ejected
ministers back onto the public stage for a short time. Numerous London pul-
pits left vacant by the death or flight of their incumbents were appropriated by
nonconformists. Albemarle and Sheldon remained in charge of the capital, but
did not remove the interlopers. Given the overriding need to keep order among
the population, moderate nonconformist preachers were preferable to empty
pulpits. Pamphleteers poked fun at the establishment’s dilemma, but the fact
that parliament, sitting in Oxford, passed the Five Mile Act in October 1665

83 Theodosia Alleine, The Life and Death of Mr Joseph Alleine (London, 1672), pp. 69, 71, 73.
84 A.G. Matthews, ed., Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1988 edn), p. 56.
85 Sharon Achenstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 3, 9,
30, 31.
86 Francis Bremer and Ellen Rydell, ‘Performance Art? Puritans in the Pulpit’, History Today,
45, 9 (September, 1995), 54.
450 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

was coincidental.87 Popularly known as the ‘Oxford Act’ this prohibited

­nonconformist ministers from living within five miles of large conurbations, or
any parish where they had previously ministered. These restrictions caused
hardship for some, but they were soon being openly flouted by bolder spirits.88
As with previous legislation, the Oxford Act and a renewed Conventicle Act
(1670) were rigorously enforced in some areas but not in places where noncon-
formist gentry had regained local influence.
Charles II was aware of this lay support when he issued the Declaration
of Indulgence (1672)—that and his secret negotiations with Louis XIV.
Nevertheless, the Declaration did reflect his personal inclinations, and argu-
ments within government that the penal legislation was harming the national
economy.89 Some 1,434 Dissenters accepted the invitation to apply for preaching
licences, registering variously as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists,
and ‘nonconformists’. Quakers refused to participate, on the grounds that they
needed no human authority to preach. The Indulgence also enabled preachers
such as John Bunyan to be released from prison.
Charles was forced by a new parliament to rescind his Declaration. After
this, nonconformist support for the Earl of Shaftesbury’s circle during the Test
Act (1673) and the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81) soured relations with the crown.
Godly ministers became the focus of a Tory backlash, articulated from Anglican
pulpits.90 The ferocity of the persecution appears to have suppressed the publi-
cation of nonconformist sermons, except for funeral sermons, which con­tinued
to be published by stationers such as the redoubtable Thomas Parkhurst.91
Repeated raids stimulated ingenious innovations in nonconformist architecture:
for example, the preaching house of the Surrey minister Nathaniel Vincent had
multiple escape hatches for listeners, and spyholes in all exterior doors.92
London’s Livery Companies were an invaluable source of support for noncon-
formists during this time, several lending their halls to renowned preachers
such as Edmund Calamy and Thomas Jacombe.93 Spies’ reports list thirty
preaching venues in London, but the prevalence of lay preachers is harder to
estimate: the likes of Thomas Markwick, a shopkeeper prosecuted for preach-
ing in Dover appear only intermittently in official records.94
Governmental attitudes towards Dissent gradually relaxed after the acces-
sion of James II in 1685, despite the fact that several nonconformist ministers
were implicated in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion. James issued two
Declarations of Indulgence, suspending legislation against Dissenters and

87 For example, J. W., A Friendly Letter to the Flying Clergy (London, 1665); Anon., A Pulpit to
be Let (London, 1665).
88 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, III, p. 19. 89 CSPD 1671, p. 496.
90 Gilbert Burnett, The History of My Own Time, ed. Oswald Airy, 2 vols (Oxford, 1900), II,
p. 290.
91 For example, Samuel Slater, Vincentius Redivivus (London, 1679).
92 SP29/418, fol. 200. 93 SP29/417, fol. 312; SP29/421/2 fol. 177; SP28/428, fol. 148.
94 SP29/429, fol. 43.
 Sermons and Preaching 451

Catholics. It became possible for nonconformist ministers to preach openly

once more, and for congregations to establish permanent meeting houses.95 Given
this new-found freedom it is surprising that relatively few nonconformist ser-
mon texts have survived from this period. Those that are known indicate deep
divisions over the morality of supporting a toleration policy which brought
with it fears of arbitrary government and resurgent Catholicism. Sermons by
John Bunyan and the old Presbyterian John Fairfax carried veiled warnings
along these lines.96 By contrast, William Penn had no doubts, and acted as a
preaching cheerleader when James toured the Midlands in 1687. The king was
in the congregation to hear Penn preach in Chester, but when the Quaker
attempted a repeat performance in Shrewsbury he was loudly heckled.97
If nonconformist preachers were wary of provoking public controversy
­during James’s reign the scarcity of nonconformist sermon texts following the
Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 is even more puzzling. Warren Johnston has
utilized many Anglican sermons to demonstrate that Anglicans viewed William
and Mary’s coup d’état in apocalyptic terms. Nonconformist literature of the
period certainly suggests that such rhetoric was also current within Dissenting
communities.98 With only a handful of sermons available for survey, however,
it is difficult to say whether Matthew Mead’s apocalyptic The Vision of the
Wheels (1689) is typical of nonconformist preaching at this time; published
sermons by John Oakes and John Flavel, for example, do not follow an apoca-
lyptic theme.99 For other ministers to prove reticent at this pivotal moment in
their history might at first seem incongruous—they were, after all, heirs to a
tradition of fearless ministry in the face of adversity—but nonconformist exe­
gesis had acquired a considerable amount of political baggage, which, past
experience had shown, could easily trigger a hostile reaction from Anglicans.
By 1688 most nonconformist preachers had seemingly learnt to be cautious.

CONCLUSION

Divisions within English Protestantism could be found most clearly in differ-

ing ideas regarding the purpose and application of preaching. Early modern
pulpits were an important means of communication between rulers and ruled,
and as the Church of England was a state institution it was inevitable that the

95 Victoria County History (VCH), A History of the County of Chester, vol. 5, pt 2 (2005), p. 165;
SP44/337 fol. 313.
96 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, citing John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of
John Bunyan, ed. R. Sharrock, 13 vols (Oxford, 1976–94), XIII, p. 343, and Dr Williams’s Library
MS 24.13, fol. 35r.
97 VCH, Chester, vol. 5, pt 2, p. 165; John Miller, James II (rev. edn 1989), p. 173.
98 Warren Johnston, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–1689’, Historical Journal, 48
(2005), 384–5.
99 John Oakes, The Last Sermon (London, 1689); John Flavel, Mount Pisgah (London, 1689).
452 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

activities of dissenting preachers had political as well as religious implications.

Royal diktats and state homilies made it clear that preachers were expected to
train the laity to obey lawful Authority, and to trust higher Authority to inter-
pret God’s Will. Experimentation, debate, and popular agency had no place in
such a scheme. These, however, were the very things fostered by Puritan exe­
gesis: ministers saw their sermons as instruments of the effectual call but could
not presume to know whom God intended to save. Even Presbyterians had
to concede that ‘We are not Lords over your faith, but Helpers of your Joy’.100
At the same time, there were intellectual tensions within Puritan preaching
as conservative ministers (particularly Presbyterians) shared conformists’
­concerns that overly democratic soteriology might lead to religious and social
anarchy. Such fears became acute during the civil wars as parliament struggled
to control the growth of lay preaching and religious experimentation.
After the Restoration, Cavalier-Anglicans placed the blame for England’s
troubled past very largely on rabble-rousing Puritan exegesis. Their penal
­le­gis­la­tion was therefore predicated on controlling Church pulpits and silencing
Dissent. This merely criminalized moderate Presbyterians and Congregationalists,
and in refusing to be silenced their preachers caused the Establishment far
more problems than Baptists or Quakers. Ironically, it was not until the de facto
toleration of James II that nonconformist preaching could finally be described
as quietist. Successive generations of Puritan preachers had wrestled with the
English state, and there was no guarantee that things would change with the
Protestant ascendancy of 1689. The prospect of a Toleration Act was therefore
greeted not with a resounding roar but a hopeful whisper.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Achinstein, Sharon, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003).
Appleby, David J., Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration
Nonconformity (Manchester, 2007).
Boone, Clifford B., Puritan Evangelism: Preaching for Conversion in Late Seventeenth-
Century English Puritanism (Milton Keynes, 2013).
Bremer, Francis and Rydell, Ellen, ‘Performance Art? Puritans in the Pulpit’, History
Today, 45, 9 (September, 1995), 50–4.
Clark, Peter, ‘The Prophesying Movement in Kentish Towns during the 1570s’,
Archaeologia Cantiana, 93 (1977), 82–3.
Cliffe, J.T., The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England
(London, 1984).
Collinson, Patrick, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism
(London, 1983).

100 Matthew Newcomen, Ultimum Vale (London, 1663), p. 14; 2 Corinthians 1:24.
 Sermons and Preaching 453

Collinson, Patrick, Craig, John, and Usher, Brett, eds, Conferences and Combination
Lectures in the Elizabethan Church (Woodbridge, 2003).
Cressy, David, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006).
Donagan, Barbara, ‘Did Ministers Matter? War and Religion in England, 1642–1649’,
Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 119–56.
Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism
(Basingstoke, 1996).
Ferrell, Lori Anne, Government by Polemic (Stanford, CA, 1998).
Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I’, Journal of
British Studies, 24 (1985), 169–207.
Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, eds, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England:
Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006).
Hill, Christopher, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London,
1993).
Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640
(Cambridge, 2010).
Johnston, Warren, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–1689’, Historical Journal, 48
(2005), 351–89.
Killeen, Kevin, ‘Chastising with Scorpions: Reading the Old Testament in Early Modern
England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2010), 491–506.
Lacey, Andrew, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, 2003).
Matthews, A.G., ed., Calamy Revised (1934; Oxford, 1988).
McCullough, Peter, Adlington, Hugh, and Rhatigan, Emma, eds, The Oxford Handbook
of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011).
Morrill, John, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transcriptions of the
Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 34 (1984), 155–78.
Morrissey, Mary, ‘Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons’, The
Historical Journal, 62 (1999), 1111–23.
Ryrie, Alec, The Age of Reformation (Harlow, 2009).
Seaver, Paul, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662s
(Stanford, CA, 1970).
Spurr, John, English Puritanism, 1603–1689 (London, 1998).
Spurr, John, The Post-Reformation, 1603–1714 (Harlow, 2006).
Tyacke, Nicholas, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001).
Wilson, John F., Pulpit in Parliament: Puritans during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1648
(Princeton, NJ, 1969).
 20

Women and Gender*

Rachel Adcock

Historians of seventeenth-century nonconformity have long acknowledged

that the importance such groups placed on the individual believer’s relation-
ship with God, combined with the pressure exerted on Dissenters during times
of persecution, led to increased opportunities for women to step outside of
traditional feminine roles. Following Keith Thomas’s ground-breaking study
of women in the Civil War ‘sects’, a growing feminist interest in the position of
women in seventeenth-century Dissent began to foreground the prominent
role of women in radical 1640s and 50s sectarian groups, including the
Independents, Baptists, and most especially the Quakers.1 Scholars from this
period were concerned with examining the anxieties surrounding the writings
and utterances of female prophets and travellers, as well as women’s part in
early political activism.2 Succeeding scholarship has further contextualized this

* I would like to record a debt of thanks to Elizabeth Clarke for numerous thought-provoking
discussions and comments that have informed the following work, and Catie Gill, who generously
advised on Quaker women.
1 Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62. Although
women were involved in English Separatism in the century before the start of the Civil Wars, this
chapter will focus on their participation in post-1630 Dissent for reasons of space. For women’s
early Dissenting activities, see Patricia Crawford who provides an overview of women’s activities
in Separatist conventicles in the period 1558–1640 and notes that a high proportion of early con-
venticlers were women (Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993), pp. 119–23).
Where evidence is available, more focused studies observe the continued centrality of female
conduct in debates about the lawfulness of separatism. For instance, the five-year controversy
(1594–9) that took place in Francis Johnson’s London–Amsterdam congregation over Johnson’s
wife Thomasine’s extravagant dress is an indication of anxieties surrounding Dissenters’ attempts
to ‘isolate themselves from the world and its corrupt luxuries’ and build ‘communities of visible
saints’ (Martha L. Finch, ‘ “Fashions of Worldly Dames”: Separatist Discourses of Dress in Early
Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony’, Church History, 74 (2005), 494–533 (506)).
Women’s behaviour here, as later, provoked anxieties within and without separatist groups.
2 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–1688 (Ann Arbor, MI,
1988); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England
(Berkeley, CA, 1994); Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian
Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester, 1996); Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent

Rachel Adcock, Women and Gender In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by:
John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0021
 Women and Gender 455

work by extending studies of women’s involvement in these groups beyond the

Restoration and by considering women’s changing roles in these communities.3
Scholars have also heeded Claire Cross’s 1972 warning to give more attention
to moderate dissenting women, the ‘sober protestant matrons’, rather than
focusing solely on early female radicalism.4 Women’s domestic roles and pri-
vate devotions are now also being recognized as important sites for the study of
dissenting opposition.5
A common argument employed by scholars of pre-1689 female Dissent in
England, is that women’s roles and voices were drastically curtailed after the
Restoration, combined with more localized restrictions placed on women
depending on their denomination.6 Such a proliferation of unorthodox roles
for women in the 1640s and 50s, as well as the contemporary perception of the
sects’ rebelliousness against both state-controlled worship and the family, led
many sensational pamphlets to focus on sectarian women’s exploits as symp­
tom­at­ic of the breakdown of established religion and authority. Consequently,
many non-sectarian Puritans were concerned that women taking part in any
evangelical activities might provoke criticism; for instance, the Presbyterian

in the Seventeenth Century: English Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2003);
Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution
(Newark, DE, 2006); Carme Font, Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain
(Abingdon, 2017).
3 Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of
Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot, 2005); Rachel Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings in
Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 (Farnham, 2015).
4 Claire Cross, ‘ “He-goats before the Flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by Women in the
Founding of Some Civil War Churches’, Studies in Church History, 8 (1972), 195–202 (195). See also
Crawford, Women and Religion in England; Alison Searle, ‘Women, Marriage and Agency in
Restoration Dissent’, in Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith, eds, Women and Religion in Britain:
c.1660–1760 (Farnham, 2014), pp. 23–40; Elizabeth Clarke, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs
in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 2011).
5 See, especially, Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds, The Intellectual Culture of
Puritan Women, 1558–1680 (Basingstoke, 2011).
6 See, for instance, Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-
Century Quaker Community, pp. 171–82, 186; Adcock, Baptist Women’s Writings, pp. 78–89. This
chapter will focus predominantly on the development of English Dissenting women’s roles for
reasons of space. For studies on women’s roles in Irish and Welsh Dissent, see Christine Trevett,
Quaker Women Prophets in England and Wales (New York, 2000); Richard C. Allen, Quaker
Communities in Early Modern Wales (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 157–76; Anne Laurence, ‘Real and
Imagined Communities in the Lives of Women in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Identity and
Gender’, in Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin, eds, Women, Identities, and Communities in
Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 13–27. In comparison to the few studies dedicated to
Welsh and Irish Dissent, a wealth of criticism has been published on women’s dissenting activities
in New England. See Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of
Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley, CA, 1987); Amanda E. Herbert, ‘Companions
in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
Century British Atlantic World’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9 (2011),
73–113; Martha L. Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (Cambridge,
2012); Elizabeth Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World,
1640–1730 (Cambridge, 2015).
456 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

John Collinges displayed anxiety that Mary Simpson, whose deathbed testimony
he published in 1649, would be labelled a disruptive female preacher because
she gave spiritual counsel to those who visited her bedside. He wrote: ‘I meane
not that she was a Pulpit-preacher, No, God had taught her to be wise to sobri-
ety, [. . .], as Priscilla & Aquila, by privately instructing others in the wayes of
God [Acts 18:26]’.7 Here, Collinges clearly differentiates between the visible,
public role of the female preacher, and the private instruction a woman could
dispense in her own home. Given anxieties over women’s public roles, it is
perhaps unsurprising that when more radical Dissenting groups began to
move towards institutionalization, after their initial resistance to the state, it
was partly towards the position of women that they turned.8 Moves by the
Independents, Baptists, and Quakers to curtail women’s more authoritative
roles as teachers or prophets usually accompanied periods of (comparative)
toleration, and times where movements were seeking to establish a more uni-
form organizational structure. Evidence for Independents and Baptists re­defin­
ing and limiting women’s roles is more prevalent in the 1650s, and the younger
Quaker movement began to limit prophetic voices (which were mostly wom-
en’s) in the early 1670s. However, despite the tremendous constraints that were
placed upon Dissenting women’s voices pre-1689, both by the state and by
congregations, women continued to display extraordinary opposition to the
state Church. Even during the Restoration, Dissent continued to offer women
space to negotiate their traditional roles even while persecution raged, though
often the evidence for this is more difficult to access: the most valuable evidence
we have of Dissenting women’s experiences is their published writings, of
which fewer were published post-1660.9 When women’s activities were me­mor­
ial­ized by later male writers, authoritative roles, reminiscent of earlier female
preachers and prophets, could also be obscured. My contention in this chapter,
therefore, is that contrary to some narratives of seventeenth-century Dissenting
women that have implied the period 1640–60 was a brief window of opportun-
ity for women that had little to no influence on women’s later engagement in
public debate, Dissenting women’s voices declaring opposition to state uni-

7 Mary Simpson and John Collinges, Faith and Experience (London, 1649), p. 67.
8 This accords with Max Weber’s well-known account of the ‘routinization’ of charismatic
movements, where, upon institutionalization, ‘a reaction takes place against pneumatic mani­fest­
ations among women, which come to be regarded as dishonorable’ (The Sociology of Religion,
intro. Talcott Parsons (Boston, MA, 1963), p. 104).
9 Patricia Crawford’s calculations of women’s publications 1600–1700 show that the overall
number of female-authored first editions fell from 121 in the period 1651–1660 (55 of which were
Quaker publications), to 72 in 1661–1670 (38 of which were Quaker publications). The differ-
ence in the numbers of non-Quaker, first edition, prophetic works in these decades (1651–60: 16
publications; 1661–70: 3 publications) is particularly significant, as the genre of prophecy was
an im­port­ant mode for the expression of dissent and opposition. See ‘Women’s Published
Writings, 1600–1700’, in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (New York, 1985),
pp. 265–74.
 Women and Gender 457

formity did not disappear after 1660.10 Despite the curtailment of sectarian
women’s roles following institutionalization, they established a precedent for
all female Dissenters, as well as women more generally, to continue to intervene
in religio-political debates into the eighteenth century.

‘NOT BY THE TRADITIONS OF MEN’: WOMEN

AND DISSENTING BEGINNINGS

Heresiographers writing in the 1640s noted with horror how women flocked in
great numbers to join congregations that were flourishing following the fall of
Archbishop Laud. One pamphlet explained that the reason for this attraction
was that their ministers were indulging the ambitions of women, seeking their
monetary support:
puffed up with pride, diverse of them have lately advanced themselves with vain-
glorious arrogance, to preach in mixt Congregations of men and women, in an
insolent way, so usurping authority over men, and assuming a calling unwarranted
by the word of God for women to use.11
Despite the frequent occurrence of this kind of account, it is very difficult to
ascertain how numerically prominent women were in early Dissenting con-
gregations: Bernard Capp examined Fifth Monarchist congregation lists and
observed that ‘women easily outnumbered men’, Clive D. Field calculated that
women made up 61.5 per cent of Congregational and 62.3 per cent of Baptist
churches between 1651 and 1700, whereas J.F. McGregor argued that the
‘assumption that women tended to be attracted in greater numbers than men to
sectarian movements [. . .] is not supported by Baptist evidence’.12 Nevertheless,
for female Separatists of various doctrinal beliefs, the chance to make a con-
tribution to forming a congregation based on the primitive New Testament
churches, as well as the reduced distinction made between ministers and lay
members, must have been attractive enough to risk persecution and commu-
nity disdain.
As well as eagerly joining new sectarian groups, there is much evidence to
suggest that women contributed to important debates surrounding controver-
sial doctrines and practices in this period, the most contested of which was the

10 This is Thomas’s argument in ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, which has been questioned
by, among others, Patricia Crawford (Women and Religion in England, p. 5), and Sarah Apetrei and
Hannah Smith (Women and Religion in Britain, pp. 3–5).
11 A Spirit Moving in the Women-Preachers (London, 1645), p. 3.
12 Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London, 1972), p. 82; Clive D. Field, ‘Adam and Eve:
Gender in the English Free Church Constituency’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993),
63–79 (66); J.F. McGregor, ‘The Baptists: Fount of all Heresy’, in Radical Religion in the English
Revolution (Oxford, 1984), pp. 23–63 (p. 47).
458 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

scriptural validity of infant baptism. For instance, in 1645, while pregnant with
her second daughter, Lucy Hutchinson also began to have doubts about the
practice and ‘communicated her doubts to her husband’, causing him to be ‘sat-
isfied against it’.13 After her confinement, John Hutchinson invited several min-
isters to dinner, he and his wife ‘professing themselves unsatisfied in the
practice’, and resolved afterwards not to baptize the infant because they could
not find satisfactory evidence.14 However, the couple faced the derision of their
immediate community. There is no evidence to suggest that the Hutchinsons
joined a separatist group like the Baptists, but they were labelled shameful ‘fan-
atics’ and ‘Anabaptists’, and were ‘glanced’ at during the ‘public sermons’.15
Community pressure could have been part of the reason why Barbara Lambe,
a former General Baptist, addressed a letter to Richard Baxter in August 1658
asking him to resolve the doubts her husband was experiencing: he was consid-
ering seceding from the Lothbury church where he was an elder because he
had begun to doubt the lawfulness of rejecting the practice of infant baptism.
Barbara, having recently read (and been convinced by) Baxter’s The Right
Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience, and Spiritual Comfort (1653), which
advised that the greatest part of Christian duty was a ‘Thankful and Chearful
Obedience to his Will’ and asked the Lord to ‘compose the Disquieted spirits of
thy People, and the tumultuous, disjoynted state of thy Churches’, secretly identi-
fied its author as the person who could help her to advise her troubled husband
to reject separation: she explained, ‘I do not acquaint him with this, but your
Advice I know I shall be able to help him by’.16 Her letter indicates an intimate
knowledge of her husband’s difficulties of conscience, calling the case ‘mine
only, as it is the Case of one who is my self in the dear Relation of a Husband’:
Baxter replied to each of her queries, later referring to her as an ‘extraordinary
intelligent woman’, whose questions caused Thomas Lambe to become ‘more
zealous than other Men against Independency and Separation’.17
Dissent, therefore, involved women taking part in theological debates,
employing various means to encourage their husbands to share their resolu-
tions, but if husband and wife did not agree, or the husband was perceived to
fall short of following God fully, women frequently asserted that they would
obey their heavenly husband instead.18 Most Dissenting women, however, con-
tinued to live with their husbands, but for all spiritual matters they would
examine Scriptures, pray and write in their closets, and consult their ministers.

13 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N.H. Keeble (London,
2000), p. 210.
14 Hutchinson, p. 211. 15 Hutchinson, p. 211.
16 Baxter, The Right Method for a Settled Peace of Conscience (London, 1653), p. 523, p. 539;
Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), appendix, p. 53.
17 Baxter, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, appendix, p. 53; Part I, pp. 180–1.
18 For the implications of this in the works of dissenting women, see Clarke, Politics, Religion,
and the Song of Songs, chapter 5.
 Women and Gender 459

Such was the case with Rose Thurgood. In March 1636/7, addressing her distant
mother and family, and perhaps a wider circle of friends, Thurgood wrote
‘A Lecture on Repentance’ detailing her slide into poverty because of a ‘bad
husband’, and the family’s reliance on an income gained by her skill in
needlework.19 Unlike her husband, who behaved worse as his situation declined,
Thurgood claims that her poverty has caused her to repent of her previous life
at the king’s court and has enabled her to speak with new authority. She urges
her family not to be ‘Carried away with your owne Conceits, nor the opinions
of other mens Judgments, unlesse their Judgments agree with Gods word’, par-
ticularly those tenets associated with Laudianism.20 Though she concedes that
she is ‘a weake woman’ with ‘noe Schollership in mee neither in writing nor
Inditing, so [her readers] may scorne to be Catechised of mee’, her work is
written ‘out of mine owne Experience, which the Lord hath wrought in mee by
his holy spirit, and not by the Traditions of men’.21 Her previous pride in dress-
ing and company is linked to her former hypocritical zeal, which has been
replaced by an inward spiritual reformation. Her husband, hardly mentioned
in her narrative, has clearly not repented his sins and continues to represent the
followers of the morally and spiritually deficient traditions of men, leaving
Thurgood to take on the role of teacher unchallenged.
Thurgood’s work is amongst the first examples of English spiritual autobiog-
raphies, declaring her assurance of election from evidence she had gathered,
by which she challenged the increasingly Arminian beliefs of the ecclesiastical
authorities opposing the prominence of Puritan preaching in Colchester.22
But by the late 1640s, women’s testimonies of various kinds had become more
common means by which to challenge more conservative or more radical
religio-political views, strengthen existing groups of Dissenters, and evangelize
new as well as existing believers. For instance, the experiences and visions
of fifteen-year-old Sarah Wight, identified by Kathleen Lynch as probably
‘the most successful of the women visionaries who were just beginning to
emerge as a force in the second half of the [1640s]’, were prepared for publica-
tion by the Baptist Henry Jessey and appeared in at least seven editions from
1647 to 1666.23 Wight’s experiences worked to unite members of the gathered
churches, Independent, Baptist, and Presbyterian, who came to visit her cham-
ber. At a time when the saints were vulnerable, ‘Wight’s embodiment of passive,
patient receptivity throughout a time of spiritual trials’, as well as her near
miraculous survival of various suicide attempts and starvation while in her

19 Rose Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, in Scripture Women, ed. Naomi Baker

(Nottingham, 2005), pp. 1–27 (p. 2).
20 Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, p. 19.
21 Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, pp. 18, 20.
22 Baker, ‘Introduction’, in Scripture Women, p. xii.
23 Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World
(Oxford, 2012), p. 89.
460 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

trances, was evidence that such trials could be overcome.24 After this point,
and well into the 1650s, dissenting groups published the spiritual testimonies
of pious women, revealing the importance of female experience to emerging
or vulnerable groups. In 1649, for instance, the Presbyterian minister John
Collinges, published the deathbed testimony of Mary Simpson, a poor woman
of his Norwich parish. He addressed the work to the daughter of Lady Frances
Hobart, to whom he was chaplain, as an example of a godly life and death in a
place where Independency was in the ascendant.25 Subscribing to the articles of
the recent Westminster Confession, Simpson’s dying message discredits the
Independent practice of entering into church fellowship by covenant by exam-
ining scriptural precedents: the last words of her testimony (the implication
being that these were her last words before her death) are to advise those cov-
enanters that while they are too eager to look over all who join their churches,
‘they be not negligent in watching over themselves’.26 On the other side of the
debate, the closet writings of Anne Venn (daughter of the regicide John Venn),
found after her death by her stepfather Thomas Weld, were published for the
failing Independent cause in 1658, bearing the words of Psalms 85:8: ‘let them
not turn again to folly’. Venn’s writings attest to the ways her heart was ‘deceived’
by Presbyterianism and includes her responses to godly sermons preached in
the early 1650s.27 The signatures of Anne Dunch and her family of Hursley,
Hampshire (related by marriage to the Cromwells), are testament to the use
made of women’s experiences by vulnerable Dissenting groups during moments
of increased anxiety between 1630 and 1660.28

A ‘COMPANY OF WOMEN PREACHERS’? WOMEN’S

ROLES IN 1640S AND 50S DISSENTING GROUPS

Women clearly played important roles in the founding of gathered churches,

took an equal part in their sufferings, and their writings and experiences were
valuable contributions in dissenting thought. However, greater toleration in
the 1650s led to a renewed desire for respectability and right organization
amongst the gathered churches and in turn led to increasing restrictions on
women’s participation: as congregations established themselves more formally

24 Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, p. 85.

25 Afraid that Presbyterians would be prevented from meeting publicly, Lady Hobart ‘convert-
ed some of her lower rooms to make a chapel seating 200’ (Elizabeth Allen, ‘Hobart [née Egerton],
Lady Frances (1603–64)’, ODNB).
26 Simpson and Collinges, Faith and Experience, p. 51.
27 Anne Venn, A Wise Virgins Lamp Burning (London, 1658), p. 12.
28 See Rachel Adcock, ‘Anne Venn’s A Wise Virgin’s Lamp Burning (1658) in the Household of
Anne Dunch, Sister-in-law to Richard Cromwell’, Notes & Queries, 57 (2010), 501–3.
 Women and Gender 461

as ‘churches’ rather than groups gathered in rooms and chambers, St Paul’s

precedent from 1 Corinthians 14:34–5 (‘Let your women keep silence in the
churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak . . . ’), became more rele-
vant, and tighter organization led to the instigation of disciplinary procedures.
Heresiographers throughout the 1640s and 50s also displayed particular anx-
ieties about women taking over the role of minister or teaching, disrupting
normal hierarchical roles. The first volume of Thomas Edwards’s bestseller,
Gangraena (1646), was particularly hostile to women’s sectarian activities: he
listed amongst his catalogue of heresies, ‘that ’tis lawful for women to preach,
and why should they not, having gifts as well as men?’29 In response to these
kinds of opinions, John Rogers, a minister of an Independent congregation in
Dublin, devoted a chapter of his treatise on church discipline, Ohel or Beth-
shemesh (1653), to advocating that women were to be ‘equal members’ of his
congregation so that the sexes would not ‘contend and differ’ and distract
themselves from their godly purpose, but he was also careful to advise women
not to invoke the ire of the ‘Furies and Harpies’ outside the congregation.30
Rogers’ argument for something approaching equal congregational roles for
men and women, however, was far from usual.
Women’s continual participation in the gathered churches from the early
1640s onwards appears, therefore, to have been very much dependent on the
individual minister, or the ruling of an association of churches to which the
minister’s church belonged. However, a Weberian pattern of institutionaliza-
tion leading to a clearer definition of church offices, resulting in the curtailment
of women’s roles, appears to have been the norm. This led many women to
speak out in opposition. In 1659 Susanna Parr published a vindication addressed
to the minister of the Independent congregation worshipping in Exeter
Cathedral where she had been a member, explaining that
as for women speaking, it was usually practiced amongst us by the rest of my sex.
And it is well known that the power was pretended at first to be in the body of the
people, in the multitude, so that everyone had the liberty of assenting or dissent-
ing, of arguing and debating any matter proposed, whether men or women.31
As time went on, however, she was told that her speech needed to be relayed ‘by
a Brother; [. . .], promising likewise if I did speak by him, to deliver my words in
the same manner as I spake them’.32 Parr subsequently left the church, and was
excommunicated. Similar debates occurred in the Quaker movement, despite
their belief that the ‘inner light’ was manifested equally in men and women.
The actions of women surrounding one particular controversy, the re-enactment
of Christ’s entry to Jerusalem by the Quaker leader James Nayler, tested the

29 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), p. 26.

30 John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh (London, 1653), p. 463.
31 Susanna Parr, Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders ([Oxford], 1659), p. 76.
32 Parr, Susanna’s Apologie, p. 13.
462 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Quaker notion that believers were not subject to external disciplinary and
organizational structures because they were guided by the inner light.33 In 1655,
Martha Simmonds, wife of Quaker bookseller Thomas Simmonds, began
behaving in an unorthodox manner, amongst other things speaking and sing-
ing in meetings, provoking anxious Quaker leaders to instruct her that she had
lost ‘ye true power of God’: by this point, George Fox had come to believe that
‘it was better if women spoke in meetings only when there were no qualified
men present’.34 However, Simmonds convinced Nayler of the power of her
words and organized his entrance into Bristol, despite Fox warning Nayler that
Simmonds had ‘denied that that was head in me’.35 Later, in February 1657, at the
regular Quaker meeting at the Bull and Mouth tavern, Simmonds read a psalm
and a chapter of Ezekiel from the Bible, formalism which her co-religionists
saw as contrary to the Quaker practice of speaking extemporarily. Whereas she
maintained that God had called for the texts to be read, leading Quaker Richard
Hubberthorne disagreed and prevented her.36 Such tensions are indicative of
the difficulties faced by those women who opposed the restriction of their roles
and disagreed with everyday congregational practices.
Women’s preaching was, however, much more widespread in the Quaker
movement and in general faced much less opposition from its leaders in the
movement’s early days. George Fox and Richard Farnworth, as well as Margaret
Fell, wrote defences of women’s preaching. However, because the practice of
many Quaker women was to travel round the country (and abroad) to preach
publicly, disrupting other ministers’ congregations in the process, an authority
not generally claimed by women in the gathered churches, they were frequently
imprisoned. Published in 1655, the relation of Margaret Vivers, who was
‘moved’ to confront a minister in Banbury before the congregation hauled her
down to the gaol with much ‘rudeness and wildness’, is concerned with defend-
ing the only action she was found guilty of, that she spoke in the church.37 The
writer, probably Vivers, argues that ‘steeplehouses’ are not the churches meant
by St Paul, but instead that ‘the Church is the body of which Christ is the head’
(Ephesians 5:23), aligning this with the temple spoken of in 1 Corinthians 16
(Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth
in you?), and then highlighting that the spirit speaks through both men and
women: ‘For in Christ Jesus the spirit of God in male and female is both one’
(Galatians 3:28). Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole also defended Quaker wom-
en’s preaching in a treatise of the same year, penned after they were imprisoned
in Exeter Gaol also for interrupting a church service. Responding to the Pauline
precept that a woman ‘may not prophesie with her head uncovered, lest she

33 Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community, p. 36.

34 Crawford, Women and Religion in England, p. 173.
35 Ra[lph] Farmer, Sathan Inthron’d (London, 1657), p. 10.
36 Crawford, Women and Religion in England, pp. 178–9.
37 The Saints Testimony Finishing through Sufferings (London, 1655), pp. 14–15.
 Women and Gender 463

dishonour her head’ (1 Corinthians 11:5; the latter ‘head’ often interpreted as
‘male superior’), the women argue that the meaning is rather that if a woman
prophesy and not uncover Christ (‘who is true head’), then Christ (not man) is
dishonoured.38 Reinterpreting the passage in this way denies women’s subjec-
tion to anyone other than Christ, vindicating their right to speak.
The ‘light within’, a phrase used by Quakers to describe their unity with God
and therefore their ability to speak as prophets or apostles, allowed women
‘the scope to deliver radical judgements on behalf of themselves, and the
movement’.39 Despite the belief that the prophet was nothing more than a
conduit for the word of God, this power enabled them to speak out in an
extraordinarily authoritative manner and challenge orthodoxies and hierarch-
ies. However, by the mid- to late 1650s, the gathered churches, and Baptists in
particular, were viewing female prophecy more cautiously. Even the West
Country Baptist Association, whose members were more accepting of radical
millenarian voices, debated the practice in their March 1654 meeting, ruling
that women were ‘not permitted at all to speak in the church, neither by way of
praying, prophecying nor enquiring, [. . .], but if any have a gift, we judge they
may exercise it in private, observing the rule mentioned, 1 Cor. 11.5’.40 Generally,
the Fifth Monarchists (several of whom were members of West Country Baptist
congregations) were more sympathetic to women prophets because of their
millenarian beliefs: they cited Joel’s prophecy that in the last days, ‘your sons
and your daughters will prophesy’ (2:28). Anna Trapnel, a shipwright’s daugh-
ter from Stepney and a frequenter of Allhallows the Great, London (the hub of
much Fifth Monarchist activity in the 1650s), was one prophet who attracted
attention in 1654, falling into a trance in an inn outside Whitehall where the
trial of the Independent minister Vavasor Powell was taking place. Confined to
her bed for eleven days and twelve nights between 6 and 17 January, she seldom
moved except to prophesy in ‘Prayers and Spiritual Songs, by an Inspiration
extraordinary, and full of wonder’.41 Her verses foresaw divine retribution for
Cromwell’s recent acceptance of the title Lord Protector, depicting him as the
fourth horn foretold in Revelation ‘which shall be more Terror to the Saints then
the others that went before’.42 Trapnel continued to attract attention until at least
1658–9 when a 990-page folio of verse prophecies given during a nine-month
trance in 1657–8, her last surviving work, was published.
Female prophecy remained a controversial mode after the Restoration, asso-
ciated either with the then underground Fifth Monarchists (a radical splinter
group of which had mounted an insurrection in 1661), or with the Quakers.

38 Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, To the Priests and People of England (London, 1655), p. 7.
39 Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community, p. 114.
40 Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales, and Ireland to 1660, ed.
B.R. White, 3 vols (London, 1971–4), II, p. 55.
41 Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone (London, 1654), title page.
42 Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, p. 14.
464 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Prophetic discourse, the predominant literary mode used by Dissenting women

pre-Restoration, became a reminder of the disordered Commonwealth period
and was discredited as dangerous, seditious, and a sign of madness. The
Quakers, unlike other sects, did not immediately respond to such aspersions by
routinizing women’s roles, but by the early 1670s attempts were made to control
and revise publications, particularly women’s works in the prophetic strain.
The (Second Day’s) Morning Meeting, minuted from 1673 and attended by the
male Quaker leaders, met to read all potential publications by Quakers and
respond to anti-Quaker writings: essentially the group’s aims were to preserve
the movement’s outward appearance, especially during moves for toleration.
From the minutes of these meetings it is clear how the role of the prophet
that had been central to Quakerism, and particularly for women because it
was scripturally condoned, was restricted: as Christine Trevett notes, ‘Quakers
were thus discouraging the individualism which had both enlivened and
dogged its early decades and this went in parallel with the channelling of
Quaker women’s service into more conventional spheres’.43 Margaret Fell’s The
Daughter of Zion Awakened was considered in a meeting on 23 August 1677
where ‘severall heads in it being objected against’ it was required to be altered.44
Another female prophet, Judith Boulbie, submitted ‘A Lamentation’ in 1689,
but in the meeting of 7 February it was rejected because of ‘several severe
ancient Prophecys applyed to England too general & absolute’. A letter addressed
to Boulbie in July 1689, following the Toleration Act, indicated that her proph­
ecies addressed ‘to the Magistrates we judge it not a fitt time to print much
upon yt Acc[ou]nt in this time of peace and quietness’.45 Even deathbed testi-
monies could be subject to criticism: in 1677 Joan Whitrowe’s relation of her
daughter’s death received the recommendation that ‘what is chiefly to her owne
praise be left out’. As Gill writes, ‘having criticised Joan’s foregrounding of
herself, the censors make a revealing statement about writing in the post-
Restoration period. They assert that writers must accept the intervention of the
censorial body to “leave out what they see not of Service to the Truth” .’46
Some writers still continued to defend women’s right to prophesy, however:
in 1663, from the comparative safety of Rotterdam, the Particular Baptist and
Fifth Monarchist minister Hanserd Knollys published the spiritual experiences
and prophecies of Katherine Sutton, who had also fled overseas, as a rallying
call to the saints in exile; the Quaker Anne Docwra wrote several such treatises
on this topic and on toleration between 1682 and 1700, though not in the

43 Christine Trevett, ‘ “Not Fit to be Printed”: The Welsh, the Women and the Second Day’s
Morning Meeting’, Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 59 (2004), 115–44 (116).
44 23 August 1677, Friends’ House (Friends), Minutes of the Second Day’s Morning Meeting,
1673–92, SR 104.
45 Morning Meeting, 7 February 1688, 18 July 1690.
46 Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community, p. 173, citing Morning Meeting,
23 August 1677.
 Women and Gender 465

prophetic strain. The Baptist, Anne Wentworth, also employed prophetic

discourse in works published in 1676–9 to oppose those in authority, though
in her case her apocalyptic language was directed at her abusive husband and
his Baptist congregation that had taken his side in a marital dispute over reli-
gion. When she was instructed by God to declare her experience publicly,
recovering her physical and spiritual liberty, her husband stole the writings,
causing the Baptists to ‘fall upon me’ because they ‘could not bear the truth to
be spoke of their Brother’.47 The Baptists were similarly concerned with their
public image. But if the Dissenters had abandoned female prophecy as an
embarrassing reminder of the heady days of revolution, despite its aptitude
for female protest, it is worth dwelling upon the words of a later Scottish
writer who had bound the only known copy of Wentworth’s Englands Spiritual
Pill (1679) with two of Anna Trapnel’s works, The Cry of a Stone (1654) and
Report and Plea (1654), in 1689, or soon after. Linking the works by their
attempts ‘To Intimat to all the severall sects of Christianity in England how
that God is heighlie provoked with their formalities in religion without the lyff
and power theirof ’, the compiler praises the work of both women in foretelling
the fall of those that had become ‘degenerat from their first sincere love to the
gospell’, a rebuke to persecutors of Dissenters up until the passing of the 1689
Toleration Act, and a clear acknowledgement of the female prophet’s role in
their co-religionists’ survival.48

HOLDING OUT IN THE NARROW WAY:

WOMEN WRITE THE RESTORATION

While there is much evidence to suggest that authoritative roles for women
in Independent, Baptist, and Quaker congregations were curtailed when the
prospects of toleration became brighter, it would be a mistake to conclude that
women more generally ended up ‘being banished into domesticity’, as David
Norbrook has also argued: he concludes that while narratives of ‘women’s dis­
appear­ing into a private sphere do draw our attention to important constraints’
they also ‘run the risk of patronizing a period of extraordinary energy and
cre­ativ­ity—and of making us a little too satisfied that the work is now done’.49
Undoubtedly Dissenting women faced growing constraints following increased

47 Anne Wentworth, Englands Spiritual Pill (London, [1679]), p. 6.

48 ‘A “Memorandum” to the reidar of this book’, University of Edinburgh Library (Edin.),
*z.8.1/1. The manuscript is transcribed in Natasha Simonova, ‘New Evidence for the Reading of
Sectarian Women’s Prophecies’, Notes & Queries, 60 (2013), 66–70 (69–70).
49 David Norbrook, ‘Women, Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth
Century’, Criticism, 46 (2004), 223–40 (224, 235). See also Searle, ‘Women, Marriage, and Agency’,
p. 24.
466 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

persecution after the Restoration: they were excluded from public roles both in
terms of religious affiliation and in terms of gender. However, new scholarship
has made us more aware of women’s adaptation to their changing, perhaps
more restricted, roles and how these were negotiated, notably the involvement
of women in Whig Dissent.50 There is even evidence to suggest that the effects
of the Act of Uniformity caused some Presbyterian women to thrive ‘in an
environment of persecution and political oppression’, as Alison Searle writes of
Margaret Charlton, wife of Richard Baxter.51 Charlton facilitated her husband’s
ministry utilizing the wealth she brought to her marriage, hiring and organiz-
ing the building of venues for Baxter to preach in, funded other preachers
and set up schools. Her husband praised her in her biography: ‘Except in
cases that require Learning, and skill in Theological difficulties, she was better
at resolving a case of conscience than most Divines ever I knew in all my life’.52
This observation also indicates that women had an important role to play in
Dissenting homes, as wives and mothers, and this role became even more
important when Dissenting ministers were ejected from their livings and were
themselves restricted to preaching in domestic spaces: families became congre-
gations, ministers travelling between homes and wives fulfilling similar roles in
their absence. Such fluidity between the public and private functions of the
home allowed women to negotiate important roles in Restoration Dissent,
though the authoritative position of public preacher or prophet was for the
most part left behind.
A major role, admittedly only for wealthier women, was as a patron or facili-
tator of Dissenting worship, and as influential petitioners for imprisoned
conventiclers. Ejected ministers lost their subsistence and means by which to
spread the Gospel, those who continued to minister were imprisoned, and
after the Declaration of Indulgence (1672) funds were needed to build meeting
houses for Dissenters. At least two women who were subjects of Samuel Clarke’s
bestselling 1683 collection of biographies of pious nonconformists gave
char­it­able donations: Lady Mary Rich, gave money to ministers of several
de­nom­in­ations, and Lady Mary Armine gave Edmund Calamy £500 for distri-
bution to families of ejected ministers who were most in need, and employed
the Presbyterian Thomas Cawton as her chaplain, enabling him to gather a
church in Westminster in 1665.53 Rich’s sister, Katherine Jones, Viscountess

50 See, for instance, Melinda Zook, ‘Nursing Sedition: Women, Dissent, and the Whig Struggle’,
in Jason McElligott, ed., Fear, Exclusion, and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s
(Aldershot, 2006), pp. 189–203.
51 Searle, ‘Women, Marriage, and Agency’, p. 25.
52 Richard Baxter, A Breviate of the Life of Margaret [. . .] Baxter (London, 1681), p. 67. Baxter
intended to include a substantial section on his wife in his autobiography but they were left out by
the editors of Reliquiæ Baxterianæ. The passages are now lost.
53 Samuel Clarke, The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age (London, 1683), II,
p. 194; The ‘Centuries’ of Julia Palmer, eds Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Clarke (Nottingham,
2001), p. viii.
 Women and Gender 467

Ranelagh, known for her ‘unswerving allegiance to religious toleration for

all Protestant sects’, was moved to intercede for twelve General Baptist men
and women from Aylesbury who in 1664 had been sentenced to death under
the Elizabethan Act against Conventicles for refusing to take the oaths of
Supremacy and Allegiance.54 After speaking with the Baptist minister William
Kiffin, whose position and wealth allowed him influence with Charles, Ranelagh
wrote to the Earl of Clarendon of the ‘sad story of a sentence of death [. . .] for
but the suspition of <their> having mett at a Conventicle’ and secured their
reprieve.55 Wealth and influence were invaluable to persecuted Dissenters:
the Quaker leader Margaret Fell and her first husband Thomas, politician
and judge, welcomed itinerant preachers into their home, affording Quakers
a reprieve from persecution (until Thomas’s death in 1658) and the use of
Swarthmoor Hall to hold their meetings. Swarthmoor became the centre
for Quaker organization, and from here Fell petitioned both Cromwell and
Charles II that the Quakers were a peaceable movement, pleading that
imprisoned Quakers should be released.
Dissenters’ wives were also valuable supporters of their husband’s ministries,
and there is evidence to suggest that women assisted their husbands in certain
ministerial duties. As well as accompanying her husband ‘cheerfully’ to prison,
bringing her best bed, Margaret Charlton used her considerable dowry, that
her husband was anxious to ensure remained in her control, to facilitate his
activities: she encouraged him to move to London to preach after the Declaration
of Indulgence, hiring a large room in St James’s for him to do so.56 Because of
this, Charlton faced opposition that she was not living ‘privately and quietly’.57
Similar anxieties over women’s more public activities surface in the republica-
tion of Theodosia Alleine’s biography of her husband Joseph Alleine in Clarke’s
Lives. Baxter had originally published Alleine’s biography in 1672 as part of a
composite work of many accounts of her husband’s pastoral devotion under
persecution by the Act of Uniformity. Her narrative reveals resilience akin to
Charlton’s: she sold off her goods ‘preparing for a Gaol, or Banishment’ where
she willingly accompanied her husband for twelve months, and devoted herself
to caring for him when he was left incapacitated after his release in 1663.58
When he lost the use of his arms Alleine became his amanuensis: she recounted
that he could not ‘write either his Notes, or any Letters, but as I wrote for him,
as he dictated to me’, and that she helped him to advise his flock, writing that he

54 Ruth Connelly, ‘ “A Wise and Godly Sybilla”: Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of
International Protestantism’, in Sylvia Brown, ed., Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early
Modern Europe (Leiden, 2007), pp. 285–306 (p. 285).
55 Autograph Letter from Lady Ranelagh to the Earl of Clarendon, Yale Med. MS 1236, John
Farquhar Fulton Papers. My thanks to Ruth Connolly for sending me a transcript of this letter.
56 Baxter, Breviate, pp. 54–5. 57 Baxter, Breviate, p. 64.
58 Richard Baxter, Theodosia Alleine et al., The Life and Death of Mr. Joseph Alleine (London,
1672), p. 53.
468 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

would not ‘Manage any Affair almost without Conversing with me, concealing
nothing from me’.59 More so even than Charlton, Alleine took on an authori-
tative, even ministerial, role in 1660s Dissent, a role practised through her
responsibility for a boarding school of around seventy students that she and
her husband ran from 1657. Even writing a biography was a task required
of (male) ministers who wrote and published funeral sermons. By the 1680s,
however, Theodosia Alleine’s biography of her husband had been republished,
removing indications that she had engaged in evangelical work. Part of Clarke’s
purpose was to produce a set of exemplary lives, and while he included the
(male-authored) lives of other godly women that included extracts from their
private closet writings, he removed all evidence for Theodosia’s writing on her
husband’s behalf: in one instance, a phrase, ‘I always wrote for him, for he could
not by reason of his Weakness Write a Line’, is left out of the corresponding
paragraph in Clarke.60 The systematic deletion of any female activity that could
be construed as disruptive, as stepping outside a conventionally feminine
role, is a striking example of the ways that later constructions of Dissenting
experience could curtail women’s roles.
It is to manuscript women’s writings post-1660 that more recent scholarship
has turned to examine Presbyterian women’s part in later seventeenth-century
Dissent. Closet writings bear witness to women’s experiences of the fall from
respectability to being despised and ostracized by their communities and
female support networks, their roles in the worship and education taking
part in their homes, and their individual spiritual anxieties. Sarah Savage,
daughter of the ejected minister Philip Henry who ran a Dissenting Academy
from his home at Broad Oak, Flintshire, recorded in her first spiritual diary on
24 October 1686 that when she and her family attended the public assembly,
‘instead of bread stones were cast at us & bitter reflections on ym yt pretend to
ye spt of Prayer & ye like counted factious & seditious’.61 She found consolation
in the words of Nehemiah 4:4 (‘Hear, O our God; for we are despised: and turn
their reproach upon their own head, and give them for a prey in the land of
captivity’), directed at the Jews’ enemies who scoff at their attempts to build a
fortifying wall to keep out the ungodly. Savage’s diary is an example of how her
family life, first as part of her father’s house, and then her husband’s, is read
through this kind of typological framework: she records being much refreshed
a week after an earthquake on 21 November by reading of the ‘slaying & reviv-
ing of ye two witnesses’ in Revelation 11, where an earthquake signals the rising
of the murdered prophets and the destruction of their persecutors. Tellingly,
her father’s discourse at dinner that night was that ‘hee believed some of us

59 Theodosia Alleine, The Life and Death, p. 65, p. 93.

60 Alleine, The Life and Death, p. 87; Clarke, Lives, II, p. 155.
61 Diary of Sarah Savage, 1686–7, 6v, Cheshire Record Office (CRO), D/Bastan/8.
 Women and Gender 469

young ones might live to see ye Antxt fall, for he thinks tis not far off ’.62
According to a later diary of Savage’s, her writings were intended to help her
children, and perhaps a wider spiritual community, ‘hold out in ye narrow way’
as much as they were a record of her own spiritual experiences.63 Similarly,
Lucy Hutchinson, then widowed, wrote a complex theological treatise in the
1670s addressed to her daughter Barbara Orgill (posthumously published as
On the Principles of the Christian Religion) advising her against backsliding
from Calvinism and joining a sect.64 More ‘private’ works of devotion, therefore,
were important sites of opposition for Dissenters: the poet Julia Palmer, writing
c.1671–3, compared herself to ‘a banisht prince [. . .] in uncouth places’, meeting
with ‘usage, bad’, but who still could not ‘stoop to actions low | To darken his
renown’ (namely conformity) and prevent her inheritance of the crown of
heaven.65 Palmer’s ostracism as part of a godly minority had made her feel a
‘stranger’ in the world: her poems were probably intended to be sung as hymns,
an important expression of community suffering and resistance.
Dissenting women could also make their homes spaces for even more
rad­ical opposition, particularly when seeking to promote the Whig cause on
behalf of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth
against the Charles’s Catholic successor, James, Duke of York. In the early 1680s
up until the Monmouth Rebellion, many women opened their homes to the
Protestant rebels, both in London and in Holland. After Anne Smith became a
wealthy widow she used her fortune to help fund Monmouth and Lord Argyle’s
rebellions and the Baptist, Constance Ward was a courier of messages as
well as hiding rebels. Although Whig historiography has made a martyr of the
Baptist Elizabeth Gaunt, convicted for sheltering James Burton, a well-known
radical who had fled Monmouth’s army, new scholarship has revaluated why
she was burnt alive at Tyburn on 23 October 1685 when Burton turned king’s
evidence against her to obtain a pardon. Zook makes the compelling case that
this harshest of sentences was enacted against Gaunt (rather than her husband)
because she was suspected of much more widespread radical activity: as well as
sheltering many Whig radicals at her home in Wapping, in the lead up to the
Monmouth rebellion she had been back and forth to Amsterdam, carrying
messages between Whigs and Dissenters in preparation for the invasion, and
knew much more than her husband about these networks.66 When arrested,
others involved in the plot named names (including the Lord Argyle), but
despite the prospect of the worst possible punishment, Gaunt revealed nothing

62 Diary of Sarah Savage, 1686–7, 9r.

63 Diary of Sarah Savage, 1714–23, p. 172, Bodleian (Bod.) MS Eng. Misc. e 331.
64 Lucy Hutchinson, On the Principles of the Christian Religion (London, 1817). For a modern
edition, see Elizabeth Clarke, David Norbrook, and Jane Stevenson, eds, The Works of Lucy
Hutchinson, Volume II: Theological Writings and Translations (Oxford, 2018).
65 Palmer, ‘The Weary Pilgrim’, in ‘Centuries’, p. 29.
66 Zook, ‘Nursing Sedition’, pp. 200–1.
470 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

incriminating. Instead she wrote a powerful dying speech defending her actions
done ‘in the service of my Lord & M[aste]r. C. Jesus’, which was published and
republished for years after the Revolution.67 She did not regret the ‘securing &
succouring of any of his poor sufferers, that have shewed favour, as I thought,
to his righteous cause, which cause, tho it be now faln & trampled on, [. . .] yet
it shall revive’.68 As Zook highlights, Gaunt’s speech is the only surviving
testimony of a woman involved in sheltering Whig radicals, justifying her
fight for the Protestant cause against the popish threat of a Catholic monarch.
These ‘nursing mothers’ of radicals and nonconformists are another example of
how Dissent facilitated and encouraged women to take up authoritative roles
other than the prophetic activities of their sectarian foremothers.
How great a role, then, did pre-1689 Dissent play in the history of women’s
public opposition to oppression? Certainly, extending the study of radical and
Dissenting women beyond the period 1640–60 complicates Keith Thomas’s
assertion that ‘as regards the place of women, the long-term effects of sep­ar­at­
ism were probably small’.69 New studies of Dissenting women’s participation in
Whig politics and a renewed attention to women’s manuscript works post-1660,
combined with more detailed explorations of Royalist and Tory women’s roles,
reveals that the oppositional activities of sectarian women were ‘in fact decisive
in transforming women’s self-understanding as participants in public religious
debate and reform’.70 Newer discoveries of women’s manuscript writings
complicate the notion that Dissenting women lost their voices post-1660,
though the fact remains that more authoritative ministerial roles for women
of all Dissenting denominations were curtailed in response to the call for
public respectability and the possibility of toleration. Nevertheless, women
found other important ways to express their dissatisfaction and opposition,
though in less public and in some cases more secretive ways. Instability in
public authority and worship certainly aided an unprecedented flourishing of
women’s voices in this period that established a pattern of Dissenting women
writers and patrons that continued into the eighteenth century.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
Adcock, Rachel, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680
(Farnham, 2015).
Allen, Richard C., Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales (Cardiff, 2007).
Apetrei, Sarah and Smith, Hannah, eds, Religion and Women in Britain, c.1660–1760
(Farnham, 2014).

67 Mrs Elizabeth Gaunt’s Last Speech (1685). 68 Mrs Elizabeth Gaunt’s Last Speech.
69 Crawford, Women and Religion in England, p. 5.
70 Apetrei and Smith, Women and Religion in Britain, p. 3. Apetrei and Smith establish a con-
nection between earlier Dissenters and the Anglican apologists Elinor James and Mary Astell,
who, while writing from the opposite perspective, nevertheless wrote in support of women’s role
in religio-political debate.
 Women and Gender 471

Bouldin, Elizabeth, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic
World, 1640–1730 (Cambridge, 2015).
Brown, Sylvia, ed., Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe
(Leiden, 2007).
Clarke, Elizabeth, Politics, Religion, and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century
England (Basingstoke, 2011).
Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993).
Cross, Claire, ‘ “He-goats before the Flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by Women in
the Founding of Some Civil War Churches’, Studies in Church History, 8 (1972),
195–202.
Feroli, Teresa, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution
(Newark, DE, 2006).
Finch, Martha L., Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (Cambridge,
2012).
Font, Carme, Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Abingdon,
2017).
Gill, Catie, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of
Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Aldershot, 2005).
Gillespie, Katharine, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English
Women’s Writing and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2003).
Harris, Johanna and Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth, eds, The Intellectual Culture of Puritan
Women, 1558–1680 (Basingstoke, 2011).
Herbert, Amanda E., ‘Companions in Preaching and Suffering: Itinerant Female
Quakers in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World’, Early
American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 9 (2011), 73–113.
Hinds, Hilary, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and
Feminist Criticism (Manchester, 1996).
Laurence, Anne, ‘Real and Imagined Communities in the Lives of Women in
Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Identity and Gender’, in Susan Broomhall and
Stephanie Tarbin, eds, Women, Identities, and Communities in Early Modern Europe
(Aldershot, 2008), pp. 13–27.
Lynch, Kathleen, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone
World (Oxford, 2012).
Mack, Phyllis, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England
(Berkeley, CA, 1994).
Schrager Lang, Amy, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in
the Literature of New England (Berkeley, CA, 1987).
Thomas, Keith, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42–62.
Trevett, Christine, Quaker Women Prophets in England and Wales (New York, 2000).
Zook, Melinda, ‘Nursing Sedition: Women, Dissent, and the Whig Struggle’, in Jason
McElligott, ed., Fear, Exclusion, and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the
1680s (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 189–203.
 21

Being a Dissenter
Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches

Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

In May 1665, following a visit by two messengers from his Baptist church in
Devonshire Square, London, the printer Henry Hills was summoned to answer
the charge of absenteeism. Far from showing proper repentance, Hills decided
instead to declare his understanding of his involvement with, and r­ elationship
to, the congregation in these terms:
he did looke upon his station in ye Church to be an Act of his will rather then by
way of Injunction either to keepe among them or leaue them when he thought
good and further said that Churches were rather kept together and Gouerned by
Rules of Poillicie then Matter of Nessesity with much more to this Effect.1
After ‘considering’ this answer, and the evil of Hills’s rather liberal ‘principles
and practise’, the church called him to attend another meeting, two weeks later,
in order to admonish him. Failing to appear, the church agreed to withdraw
communion until God showed him repentance. Some eighteen months later, in
November 1666, one Brother Bailie had to answer a quite different charge
before this same congregation: that of ‘lascivious cariage towards his nurse’.
Having lost his mother, father, wife, and children all to the plague in the great
outbreak of 1665–6, and having been ‘visited’ by it himself, it seems that Bailie
had persuaded his young carer to share his bed with him for two days, not (he
claimed) with malicious intent but only to keep warm in the cold season. The
girl was interrogated and the conclusion was reached that if no sexual inter-
course had occurred this was not because Bailie had been restrained by the

1 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA): CLC/179/MS20228/001A, no title (here­after

‘Devonshire Square’), fol. [4]r. On this congregation, see Murdina D. MacDonald, ‘London
Calvinistic Baptists 1689–1729: Tensions within a Community Under Toleration’ (DPhil thesis,
University of Oxford, 1982), pp. 179–203. On Hills, see I. Gadd, ‘Hills, Henry, senior (c. 1625–1688/9),
printer’, ODNB. Michael Durrant’s monograph on Hills is forthcoming.

Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches
In: The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I. Edited by: John Coffey, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0022
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 473

‘force and power of grace’, as he averred, but rather because he was too weak to
perform the deed. He was duly excommunicated.2
These two cases reveal very different personal experiences of being a
Dissenter in late seventeenth-century England. Hills’s dispute involved not just
the question of attendance and how far he might be free to absent himself from
a church joined voluntarily but also how to define the meaning of a true ‘church’
as a body of believers: something distinct, that is, from just the regular attend-
ants and church officers. Despite the spiritually egalitarian stance of Dissenting
societies in which all stood equally as brothers and sisters in Christ, Brother
Hills evidently objected to a religious elite that had come to impose on
the whole congregation a set of rules and expectations demanding not only
punctuality but also attendance at all weekly services and monthly meetings,
and more besides.3 Hills no doubt would have agreed with Locke’s later critique
of Independent congregations as bird cages, ‘the happynesse of the birds’ not
being ‘the businese of these bird keepers’.4 Bailie’s sexual misdemeanour, by
contrast, was of a private nature. Unlike Hills’s absences, Bailie’s conduct
could have remained undetected. That it came to light reveals the efficiency of
godly surveillance within Dissenting meetings, mutual watchfulness being
a cov­en­ant­ed duty within ‘gathered’ churches: one undertaken even more
intensely, no doubt, in times of national calamity and strife, whether of plague
or persecution, in order to protect the souls of the congregants and the reputa-
tions of their congregations.
We start with the trials of Hills and Bailie, and the troubles that their offences
brought to the church at Devonshire Square, because, as just two examples,
they illustrate something of the extraordinary variety that lies at the heart of the
lay experience of Dissent in early modern Britain. On one level, this was an
experience centred in a revolutionary mode of church life radically different
from that of the traditional parish in the episcopal Church of England, not just
in terms of polity, organization, and worship, but also in the rigorous applica-
tion of discipline and mutual watchfulness when it came to upholding visible
godliness. As is clear in the cases of Hills and Bailie, ‘gathered’ churches, following
Scripture as their sole rule and guide, ensured that a proper procedure for
­dealing with ‘disorderly walkers’ was in place, through a formal system of
admonitions, withdrawal of communion, and, if necessary, excommunication,

2 LMA: ‘Devonshire Square’, fols [6]v–[7]v.

3 On the question of various ‘circles’ of lay participation in a Dissenting meeting, see John
Triffit, ‘Believing and Belonging: Church Behaviour in Plymouth and Dartmouth, 1710–1730’, in
S. J. Wright, ed., Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750 (London,
1988), pp. 179–202; Euan Cameron, ‘ “The Godly Community” in the Theory and Practice of the
European Reformation’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, eds, Voluntary Religion (Oxford, 1986),
pp. 131–53; Samuel S. Thomas, Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish and
Congregation in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax (Leiden, 2013), pp. 156–62.
4 Quoted by John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge,
1994), pp. 110–11. We are grateful to Professor Marshall for this point.
474 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

as appropriate for public and private offences alike. As a spiritual tribunal, a

Dissenting congregation exercised for and by itself the ‘power of the keys’
(Matthew 16:19 and 18:18) as a ‘true’ church of Christ. Typical of such churches,
the congregation at Devonshire Square would decide independently and
­collectively who to admit, who to discipline, and who to eject.
In these terms, the lay experience of Dissent was, first and foremost, pro-
foundly one of empowerment. Ordinary members of the Dissenting churches
would participate in appointing their own officers (pastors, elders, and dea-
cons) as well as in making church decisions. In Baptist and Congregational
churches, untrained and unlearned members might also exercise their ‘gifts’ in
preaching, only the approval of the congregation being required, with Quakers,
famously, extending this controversial practice to women.5 In a way that can be
registered on a sliding scale across the spectrum of seventeenth-century
­Dissent—Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, and Quaker—the lay experience
could thus be seen as one in which the traditional categories of ‘laity’ and
‘clergy’ were radically renegotiated and, in some cases, completely abandoned.
For a meeting empowered to appoint its own pastor and officers (or, in the case
of Quakers, to do away with these roles entirely, having set aside the ordinances
of baptism and the Lord’s Supper), and in which these offices could, for some
groups, be occupied by ‘lay’ members who were by trade craftsmen, shop­keepers,
and ‘mechanicals’ rather than university-educated divines, the question arose:
who or what was the ‘laity’ now? It was certainly no longer a body passively
receiving the injunctions of a professional clergy.6 It is on this basis, then, that
the traditional concern of church history with the regulating role of institutions
and clerical elites, and the ‘long struggle’ and ‘triumph’ of the laity, has shifted
in recent years to focus on the forms of lay involvement that helped to shape
­post-Reformation beliefs, rituals, and practices.7 Historians now recognize a
dynamic ‘lay-clerical interchange’ that was not merely a collaboration between

5 See Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London, 1993), pp. 160–6;
T.L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 5, 82–100; Catie Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-
Century Quaker Community: A Literary Study of Political Identities, 1650–1700 (Farnham, 2005);
Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill, eds, New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800
(Oxford, 2018).
6 As the early English Separatist Henry Barrow put it, as believers in a true church were both
‘ecclesiastical and spiritual’, ‘We know not what you mean by your old popish term of laymen.’
See F.J. Powicke, Henry Barrow (London, 1900), p. 99, cited in G.F. Nuttall, ‘The Early
Congregational Concept of the Church’, TCHS, 14 (1949), 197–205 (201).
7 In addition to Claire Cross, Church and People, 1450–1660: The Triumph of the Laity in the
English Church, second edn (Oxford, 1999), p. 40, see also: Peter Iver Kaufman, Thinking of the
Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, IN, 2004); Francis J. Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the
Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke and New York, 2015); James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their
Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York and Oxford, 1999);
Deryck W. Lovegrove, ed., The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism (London and
New York, 2002); Abram C. Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early
New England (Oxford, 2015).
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 475

ministers and magistrates to sustain godly order, promote reformation, and

oppose popery.8 It was also part of the deeply held common faith, shared cul-
tures, and agendas that united pastor and people on a more equal basis within
churches, defining the ‘true’ congregation as something much more akin to
Luther’s priesthood of all believers, not just in theory but also in practice.9
As the cases of Hills and Bailie demonstrate, however, none of this prevented
the experience of ordinary members of Dissenting churches from being diffi-
cult, vexed, or problematic. Aside from internal disputes and disciplinary
­problems ranging from drunkenness and fornication to domestic abuse, as we
shall explore in more detail below, Dissenters also experienced various kinds of
external strife not least, from 1660 onwards especially, religious persecution.
Moreover, as Bailie’s case at Devonshire Square exemplifies, the lay experience
of Dissent would remain one in which other factors external and internal to the
church had to be kept in balance for both individual members and congrega-
tions. The personal experience of bereavement and illness caused by the plague,
not to mention some cold winter nights, may have driven Brother Bailie,
understandably, to set aside his sense of sexual propriety in order to seek the
human warmth and solace of a companionable bedfellow. Or was he just seiz-
ing an opportunity to be lascivious? The ‘experience’ here, for both church and
individual member, is one of deep dilemma: to discipline weakness or to
sympathize with frailty? To deliver condemnation or to offer compassion?
What would a lay Dissenter do when faced with this particular set of circum-
stances in the church, and asked to pronounce a verdict upon them?
With the title of this chapter consciously echoing Alec Ryrie’s Being Protestant
in Reformation England, the discussion that follows takes as its starting point the
crucial meaning of this kind of ‘lived’ experience for early modern Dissenters
and their churches.10 The aim, however, is not to approach the ex­peri­ence of
being a Dissenter through the lens of specific devotional practices or the

8 Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, p. 7; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The
Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 141–88.
9 Nuanced differences in belief could, however, prove powerful catalysts for conflict between
churches and denominations, the subtlest analysis of which arguably remains Geoffrey F. Nuttall,
The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, second edn with an introduction by Peter Lake
(Chicago, IL, 1992). See also, Hunter Powell, The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in
the Puritan Revolution, 1638–1644 (Manchester, 2015); Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of
Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge
University, 2009), chs 5–8.
10 Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1–14. The term ‘lived
religion’ has been readily used by American and continental scholars but is still not widely
employed by historians of early modern Britain. The standard work remains Robert A. Orsi, The
Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, second edn (New
Haven, CT, 2010). See also, Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday
Life (Oxford, 2008); David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Towards a History of Practice
(Princeton, NJ, 1997); Laurence Croq and David Garrioch, eds, La Religion vécue. Les laïcs dans
l’Europe moderne (Rennes, 2013); Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo, eds, Lived
Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe c.1300–1700 (Leiden, 2016); and Laurence
476 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

­ articular issues of church polity and ecclesiology to which different groups

p
and denominations were committed. Rather, it is to consider Dissent through
the individual and corporate experiences of ordinary church members, both
men and women, who, as Hills’s case indicates, were constantly engaged in
defining what a ‘true’ church was, as well as those who, like Bailie, failed for
whatever reason to conduct themselves in a way deemed acceptable to a con-
gregation of Christ. For it was in terms of these kinds of experience, as much as
in the contexts of religious persecution and political upheaval, that being a
‘Dissenter’ came to be determined and defined in the seventeenth century.
To focus on the ‘lived’ experience of lay Dissenters is all the more important
because, by and large, it is still something that has yet to be given full scholarly
attention. While the contribution of dissent to the religious, political, and liter-
ary cultures of the Civil War and Restoration culture has been the subject of
numerous major studies over the past few decades, typically with an emphasis
on key Dissenting ministers and nonconformist leaders and writers,11 by
comparison, the collective experiences of ordinary church members, as
­
opposed to their more famous (because often published) pastors, as well as
their inter­actions with the worlds both within and beyond their churches, have
been largely neglected. This chapter seeks to redress this imbalance, in part by
addressing some of the key sources that allow us to uncover the lived religious
experiences of the unknown Dissenter: archival sources, that is, the wealth and
extent of which have been largely ignored by modern scholars. Concentrating
on the manuscript records produced by gathered churches first established
between the early 1640s to the Toleration Act of 1689, mainly Calvinistic—
Congregational and Particular Baptist—but with some Arminian churches
(General Baptists) also included, it is to these vital but also overlooked and
underused resources, and what they reveal about the lay experience of Dissent,
that we now turn.12

Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth-Century: Living Spirituality

(Manchester, 2017).
11 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (Hardmondsworth, 1972); N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later
Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987); Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and
Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989); Michael Davies, Graceful
Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford, 2002); Sharon Achinstein,
Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge, 2003); Gary S. de Krey, London and the
Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2015); Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the
English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution:
Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2006); Mark
Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The Entring Book, 1677–1691 (Woodbridge, 2016);
Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: The Experience of Defeat (Oxford, 2016);
Isabel Rivers, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary
Culture in England 1720–1800 (Oxford, 2018).
12 The evidence for non-parochial Presbyterianism prior to 1689 tends to take the form of
registers. See for instance J. Charles Cox, ed., ‘Minute Book of the Wirksworth Classis, 1651–1658’,
Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2 (1880), 135–222;
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 477

CHURCH B O OKS AND CHURCH RECORDS

The exemplary though far from unique cases of Hills and Bailie with which this
chapter began can be encountered only by opening the pages of a manuscript
now held at the London Metropolitan Archives. It is by no means a readily
identifiable document. Belonging to the congregation originally gathered by
the London merchant, politician, and Baptist controversialist William Kiffin, who
ministered until his death in 1701,13 it started as a book recording dis­cip­lin­ary
cases only. Following a fourteen-year hiatus, however, it was resumed as a more
replete ‘church book’ employed to record the minutes of the congregation’s
meetings (a document distinct, that is, from registers of members and financial
account books).14 Despite the eminence of their ministers and, on occasion,
some of their common members, such as Devonshire Square’s not­able printer,
Henry Hills, the church books and records of many Dissenting congregations
have remained undervalued and understudied, lying largely unexamined in
local archives and libraries. They are, however, now beginning to be redis-
covered and reappraised, alongside similar American and Continental manu-
scripts that document the way early modern Dissenters lived their lives and
practised their faith.
Why has this material and the wealth of evidence it contains been ignored
for so long? One reason is, quite simply, to do with accessibility. Around only a
dozen of the surviving records have been widely and regularly examined or
employed by historians and scholars, in the main because these are the manu-
scripts that have been published.15 As a result, very few studies have attempted
to take the range, variety, and specificity of church books into full account.16

William A. Shaw, ed., Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis, 2 parts (Manchester, 1890;
1891); William A. Shaw, ed., Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, 1647–1657 (Manchester,
1896–8); C.E. Surman, The Register-Booke of the Fourth Classis in the Province of London (London,
1952–3).
13 For Kiffin, see Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin, ed. Stephen Orme (London,
1823); B.R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century, second edn (Didcot, 1996);
Michael A.G. Haykin, ‘Kiffin, William, 1616–1701’, ODNB; Larry J. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and his
World, 6 vols to date (Oxford, 2010–).
14 LMA: CLC/179/MS20230, CLC/179/MS20235, CLC/179/MS20236.
15 See Edward Bean Underhill, ed., Records of the Churches of Christ, Gathered at Fenstanton,
Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–1720 (London, 1854); H.G. Tibbutt, ed., Some Early Nonconformist
Church Books, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 51 (Bedford, 1972);
Roger Hayden, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ Meeting in Bristol, 1640–1687, Bristol Record
Society’s Publications, 27 (1974), hereafter ‘Bristol’; H.G. Tibbutt, ed., The Minutes of the First
Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford, 1656–1766, Publications of the Bedfordshire
Historical Record Society, 55 (Bedford, 1976), hereafter ‘Bedford’; B.G. Owens, ed., The Ilston
Book: Earliest Register of Welsh Baptists (Aberystwyth, 1996); R.B. Wordsworth, ed., The
Cockermouth Congregational Church Book (1651–c.1765), Cumberland and Westmorland
Antiquarian and Archaeological Society Record Series, 21 (2012), hereafter ‘Cockermouth’.
16 Notable exceptions are Halcomb, ‘Congregational Religious Practice’; Michael Davies, Anne
Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, eds, Dissenting Hands, Special Issue of Bunyan Studies, 20 (2016);
Anne Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine. Vies et récits de dissidents, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
478 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Until recently, in fact, it was impossible to gauge how many such manuscripts
had survived, let alone to determine patterns of survival. Some documents,
sadly, have not survived the ravages of time, notably those that are now known
only from transcripts by nineteenth-century scholars, pastors, or amateur his-
torians who borrowed the original documents from libraries and archives
where (in some cases) they can no longer be found.17 Others have perished
completely, while those that survive, when examined carefully, reveal many
kinds of breakage and disjunction, some deliberate. When scandals and con-
troversies hit a particular congregation, for instance, the scribes often faced a
choice between recording the details of the quarrel or ‘obliterating’ any docu-
ments pertaining to it.18
Another reason that might explain why church records have been left under-
exploited is their heterogeneity, defeating attempts to draw a clear distinction
between church records in general and church books in particular.19 Some
‘books’ are, in effect, a posteriori accounts of the foundation and history of a
church, such as the Bristol (Broadmead) records, compiled by Edward Terrill.20
Such accounts focus on a selection of key moments in the spiritual and com-
munal maturation of small groups of parishioners, from Jacobean conferences
to full-blown gathered churches in the 1640s. Others, such the first half of the
Devonshire Square manuscript, or the early records of Cripplegate,21 were
discipline books, recording almost exclusively disciplinary cases that were
heard at monthly meetings. In fact, a church might have had as many as four
books that it used for purposes other than minuting meetings or noting
­disciplinary cases, such as keeping congregational correspondence, maintaining

2017); and Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties. For studies that employ extensively Dissenting
church books, see Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660, second
edn (Weston Rhyn, 2001); White, English Baptists; Crawford, Women and Religion;
Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978).
17 An example is the manuscript of the Fenstanton and Caxton churches, edited in 1854 by
Edward Bean Underhill from ‘384 quarto pages well and neatly written’, which cannot be located
today; see Underhill, ed., Records, xxiii.
18 An example of the first instance is the dispute between the London Cripplegate church and
one of its ministers, David Crosley, whereas at Bromsgrove the papers relating to the dispute
between John Eckells and the church were destroyed. See Angus Library and Archive, Regent’s
Park College, Oxford (hereafter RPCO): ‘Barbican, Cripplegate (London) church book, 1689–1723’
(hereafter ‘Cripplegate’), and ‘Bromsgrove (Worcestershire) church book, 1672–1725’ (here­after
‘Bromsgrove’).
19 For a presentation of the nature and contents of early modern church books, see
Mark Burden and Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans, Dissenters, and their Church Books: Recording
and Representing Experience’, in Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, eds, Dissenting Hands,
pp. 14–32.
20 See ‘Bristol’. For a similar example, see K.W.H. Howard, ed., The Axminster Ecclesiastica,
1660–1698 (Sheffield, 1976).
21 RPCO: ‘Cripplegate’.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 479

church finances, or registering members’ names, all separate too from a

­minister’s diary or journal.22
Some manuscript church books are redacted fair copies of the minutes of the
meetings, and very often the church ‘book’ was understood in that sense only.
For the most part, however, the documents that have survived do not contain
the notes of meetings taken in situ but rather provide a transcription of the
debates (in varying degrees of detail, and no doubt often heavily redacted) that
led to the decisions reached.23 Some manuscripts thus distinguish between the
church ‘book’ and the ‘draft papers’ that were nevertheless preserved because
they contained the original signatures of the members, but no such bundles of
unredacted notes seem to have survived.24 In some cases, such as the
Cockermouth church book, internal evidence reveals when and how a church
reorganized itself and its records, often from previous ‘loose papers’.25 The vast
majority of the manuscripts, then, are hybrid documents whose contents
­varied both throughout the decades and according to their different scribes
and the way that they envisaged their mission as record keepers.
The Warboys book, for instance, included ‘Records [. . .] since the time of thir
first gathering together with their procedings & order of times—and other
memorrealls’, showing how the history of the church was interwoven with pro-
ceedings and the narrative of special events.26 Some manuscripts contained
much else besides: the covenant, confession of faith, or articles of the church,27
some important letters (especially when a reply required the assent of the con-
gregation), and records of external or internal controversies. We can also find
occasional elegies marking the death of a beloved pastor, biographies of key
ministerial figures or prominent members, deacons’ accounts, and the occa-
sional register of members. Given the generic complexity of such multipurpose
documents it can be difficult at times to distinguish ‘church books’ from
other kinds of record, since they clearly served multiple and complementary
functions.

22 See for instance Congregational Library, London (hereafter CL): II.a.12, ‘Records of a
Church at Altham, Lancashire, from 13 June 1651 to May 1726 [. . .]’, undated transcript. For
Dissenting letters, see Michael Davies, ‘Spirit in the Letters: John Bunyan’s Congregational
Epistles’, The Seventeenth Century, 24 (2009), 323–60.
23 For the question in Continental records, see Judith Pollmann, ‘Off the Record: Problems in
the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 33 (2002), 423–38.
24 Dr Williams’s Library, London (hereafter DWL): 38.78, ‘The church book, anno 1717’,
Canterbury Particular Baptist Church, fol. 39; and ‘Bristol’, 223, 224.
25 ‘Cockermouth’, 3–4. See also, Halcomb, ‘Congregational Religious Practice’, pp. 19, 68–9.
26 RPCO: ‘Fenstanton, Warbois & St Ives (Cambridgeshire) church book, 1643–1824’, opposite
fol. 1.
27 See examples held in Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London: W/
SMH/A/1/1, ‘A booke for Church Affaires att Stepney’, fol. 1; Suffolk Record Office, Bury St
Edmunds: FK3519, ‘Wattisfield Church Book’, fol. 6; RPCO: ‘Bromsgrove’, fols 6–8; RPCO:
‘London, Maze Pond 1/1’, 1691–1708, fols 1–9.
480 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

Church books were often used to record the origins of the church and its
covenant, to keep track for future reference of key decisions, debates, and
­disputes undertaken by the congregation, to check the spiritual records of
members who sought to transfer to another meeting elsewhere, requiring a
letter of dismission from the church to do so, and more generally to keep the
church’s affairs in order. In this sense, for all their diversity, church books con-
tain almost uniformly features that indicate the formalization of institutional
church life. The upkeep of such documents may have been necessary in a prac-
tical sense to manage the ‘business’ or the ‘transactions’ of the church, but they
also represented a clear desire to be a formal, ordered, and respectable religious
institution of equal status to the parish church and to consolidate its identity as
such. This was particularly important for ‘gathered’ churches, which drew
membership from a wide geographical area, dissolving the traditional parish
bound­ar­ies through which believers might otherwise have derived their sense
of social, historical, and communal rootedness. The sense of belonging to a new
society and a new history, as part both of one’s congregation and of a constella-
tion of similar churches, each autonomous and yet sharing the same principles,
was an essential part of being a Dissenter. This identity was made stronger by
the keeping of corporate records, especially during the Restoration, when
gathered churches (as well as Presbyterians and Quakers) routinely suffered
persecution and were forced to worship clandestinely.
As Patrick Collinson has illustrated, the gathered churches of the seventeenth
century were at least partly born out of the Puritan tradition of ‘conferencing’:
meeting in small groups, that is, to discuss the Bible or sermon notes and to
share table fellowship.28 As part of the Puritan tradition of ‘voluntary religion’,
their worship was particularly suited to such informal meetings, which helps to
explain how they survived the Restoration. These Dissenting churches mod-
elled their government upon what they believed to be ‘the Primitive patterne
and example of the churches erected by the Apostles’,29 as presented in the Book
of Acts and the New Testament epistles. The Acts of the Apostles, and the letters
of Paul, with their frequent references to house churches, provided a scriptural
model for the domesticity of Dissenting culture and for the resilience of
churches under the Cross. It is no surprise, therefore, that church books were
in themselves considered as key ‘acts’ of the Dissenting congregations: communal

28 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism’, in his Godly People: Essays
on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 1–17 (but see his ‘Note’ on p. 18);
Patrick Collinson, ‘The English Conventicle’, in Sheils and Wood, eds, Voluntary Religion,
pp. 223–59; Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Dissenting Tradition’, in
C.R. Cole and M.E. Moody, eds, The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson (Athens,
OH, 1975), pp. 3–38.
29 Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge,
An Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644), pp. 3–4, 9–10.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 481

acts of faith, that is, in which a providential history of Dissent could be

­witnessed, and upon which that history could built in faith.30

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, LAY EXPERIENCE

Perhaps because of an early association between spiritual experiences and the

recounting of them that was a compulsory requirement for anyone seeking to
join a gathered church on either side of the Atlantic, the early modern lay
ex­peri­ence of Dissent has often been considered a largely personal and individual
phenomenon. More often than not it is viewed as a radical religious experience,
linked to conversion, personal inspiration, or even prophecy, and therefore to
the spread of a type of ‘enthusiasm’ in potential conflict with religious author-
ities both without and occasionally within the Dissenting churches from which
they arose.31 The printed narratives of ‘experience’ collected in the mid-1650s
by the likes of John Rogers, Samuel Petto, and Henry Walker, as well as John
Eliot for the Massachusetts Amerindians,32 have therefore been closely scrutinized
by scholars and linked to the rise of Protestant autobiography, the emergence of
the ‘individualist self ’, and the history of religious emotions.33 Lay experience
has also been approached through domestic and private devotion, introducing
fresh approaches that have initiated a shift in focus from public ritual to the
more intimate devotional practices of early modern Protestants: the way they

30 See Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Writing “things ecclesiastical”: The Literary Acts of the Gathered
Churches’, Études Épistémè, 21 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/417.
31 See, for example, Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ, 1999).
32 John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh. A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653); Samuel Petto,
Roses from Sharon, appended to his A Voice of the Spirit (London, 1654); [Henry Walker], Spirituall
Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1653); [John Eliot] and [Thomas Mayhew], Tears of Repentance:
Or, A Further Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New-England (London,
1653).
33 See especially Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London, 1972); Patricia Caldwell,
The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge, 1983);
Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern
Spirituality’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 33–56; Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist
Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791, (Cambridge, 1997); Robert C. Roberts,
‘Emotions Research and Religious Experience’, in John Corrigan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Religion and Emotion (Oxford, 2008), 490–506; Raymond Gillespie, ‘The Crisis of Reform,
1625–60’, in Kenneth Milne, ed., Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin: A History (Dublin, 2000),
pp. 195–217; Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in
Early Modern England (2005; Oxford, 2007); Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological
Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford, 2007), pp. 55–78; Kathleen Lynch, Protestant
Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford, 2012).
482 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

prayed, the objects they used, the songs they sang and the places where they
exercised their piety.34
The religious experience of Protestants, then, has so far been approached
essentially through spirituality and devotion, conversion and the ‘inner’ life. As
a result, the emphasis has been put on individual relationships to the divine, the
materiality of such experiences, and the emotions of the believers, as well as on
their self-expression in narratives and other cultural and literary artefacts, the
material worlds in which they lived, and the domestic environments where
they practised their devotion. The focus has been placed, in other words, on the
Protestant ‘self ’ of the ‘empowered’ layman or laywoman construed as a full
participant in and an autonomous, creative agent of personal forms of religion.
The problem with such an approach, however, is that it can restrict the ‘lived’
experience of Dissent to a sum of individual practices: one that tells us more
about personal spiritual experience than about the role of religious commu-
nities in shaping such individual trajectories, and more about supposedly
popular deviance than normative behaviours.35 As David Hall has observed,
we must keep in mind that ‘lurking in the wings’ of any investigation into ‘reli-
gious experience’ is ‘a concept of popular religion as signifying forms of experi-
ence that lie outside the range of normal expectations or practice’.36
Seventeenth-century church books help to enrich and nuance such approaches
to the religious experiences of Dissenters both by shifting the focus away from
traditional concerns over individual devotional practices and personal trans-
formation and by redefining ‘the range of normal expectations or practice’ in
which we can situate the experiences of ordinary men and women. They
help to recreate, at least partially, the way that people from a broad social
spectrum—from the ‘middling sort’ to the much poorer, including those in
need of the church’s financial assistance—interacted, day after day, year after
year, both with their fellow Dissenters in the church and with their neighbouring
parishioners outside it.37 It is in these terms that, in the past decade, British
Dissenting church records, alongside documents of a similar nature from colo-
nial America and the Continent, have begun to emerge as central to a fresh
examination of the history of Protestant laity and lived religion, with much
recent scholarship being concentrated on locating, editing, and assessing the
manuscript records. The ‘New England’s Hidden Histories’ project, based at the
Congregational Library in Boston, has, for example, made public photographic

34 See Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern
Britain (Farnham, 2012); Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-
Reformation Britain (New Haven, CT, 2010); Ryrie, Being Protestant.
35 For the various meanings of Dissenting ‘experience’, see Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page,
and Joel Halcomb, ‘Introduction’, Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of
Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2019).
36 David Hall, ‘What is the Place of “Experience” in Religious History?’, Religion and American
Culture, 13 (2003), 241–50 (244).
37 See Margaret Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge, 1995).
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 483

reproductions of hundreds of New England Congregational documents,

including church books, and is crowdsourcing their transcription; Raymond
Mentzer has completed a contextualized inventory of the registers of the French
consistories; and the first inventory of Dissenting records in England, Wales,
and Scotland (1640–1714) is now available.38 Alongside such scholarly endeav-
ours, studies largely based on such archival records extant throughout Europe
and America have also started to emerge, addressing the discipline of contin-
ental and Scottish churches, gender history in Languedoc, church life in
England and New England, as well as shorter studies of particular Dissenting
congregations.39

EXERCISING DISCIPLINE, EXPERIENCING DISSENT

The Congregational and Baptist meetings whose records and church books
stand at the centre of so much of this renewed scholarly interest in the Protestant
lay experience defined themselves, quite simply, as a ‘competent number of
visible Saints joined together by mutual consent to worship God according to
his own appointment’.40 As we have seen, to such autonomous meetings
belonged the right of self-government and the power to elect ministers and
officers, admit and cast out members, and adjudicate all the church’s affairs in
public meetings open to all members as visible saints. It is through this church
order that the lay Dissenter was expected to participate fully and communally
in a congregational life that was, in polity, ‘mixed’: at once monarchical (Christ
alone being the head of the church), aristocratic (pastors being set apart to lead
and manage the church, with elders and deacons, and also to administer the
ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper), and democratic (the membership

38 See http://www.congregationallibrary.org/nehh/main; Raymond Mentzer, ed., Les Registres

des consistoires des Églises réformées de France—XVIe–XVIIe siècles. Un inventaire (Geneva, 2014);
Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, An Inventory of Puritan
and Dissenting Records, 1640–1714 (2016), http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/online-
publications/Dissenting-records.
39 See Philippe Chareyre and Raymond Mentzer, eds, La Mesure du Fait Religieux: L’Approche
Méthodologique des Registres Consistoriaux, Bulletin de la Société de L’Histoire du Protestantisme
Français, 153 (October–December 2007), 457–711; Raymond Mentzer, Françoise Moreil, and
Philippe Chareyre, eds, Dire L’Interdit: The Vocabulary of Censure and Exclusion in the Early
Modern Reformed Tradition (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2010); Michael F. Graham, The Uses of
Reform: ‘Godly Discipline’ and Popular Behavior in Scotland and Beyond, 1560–1610 (Leiden, 1996);
Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, CT, 2002);
Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven,
CT, 2002); Suzannah Lipscomb, Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation
Languedoc (Oxford, 2019).
40 John Williams, The Divine Institution, Order and Government of a Visible Church of Christ
(London, 1701), p. 4.
484 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

deciding collectively on all key matters, through debate and consensus,

­concluding typically through a show of hands).41
It is, however, in the exercise of church discipline that the lay experience of
such an order can be witnessed most clearly as something individually and
collectively participatory and indeed ‘lived’. For it is in cases that required dis­
cip­lin­ary action from a church, as the examples of Hills and Bailie at Devonshire
Square presented at the start of this chapter both illustrate, that a number of
factors in the lay experience of Dissent can be seen coming to the fore. On the
one hand, transgressions by individuals or even groups of church members
could send shockwaves through a congregation, testing its principles and
indeed challenging its identity as a church of Christ.42 On another, the exercise
of discipline in itself presents a form of religious experience very different from
that of the more familiar examples of, say, conversion or persecution, both for
the individual church member under investigation and for the congregation
expected to deliver its judgement. For what disciplinary cases often lay bare, as
the church books bring to light, is a complex nexus of tensions that exist not
only between an individual church member and the congregation but also
between the exacting demands of Dissenting church life and those of the world
that existed outside the congregation. When a visible saint either failed to attend
services, for example, or to behave in a way that was no longer visibly godly, the
disciplinary process that followed often reveals something crucial about the
complicated lives and identities of Dissenters.43 After all, Dissent was ex­peri­
enced by church members not just as visible saints with covenanted duties to
fulfil but also as wives, husbands, parents, and neighbours, and as labourers,
craftsmen, shopkeepers, and merchants with livings to make and debts to pay,
as well as gamblers, drinkers, fraudsters, and adulterers: as wholly participatory
members, that is, of a social world that was local but also dynamic and
demanding. As a meeting-point between the worlds of church and of everyday
life, disciplinary cases have a great deal to tell us, about the lay experience
of Dissent.
Although the exercise of discipline still awaits a full-length study as a central
aspect of Dissenting church life,44 the discussion that follows, taking examples

41 On uses of this model by early Dissenters see Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints:
Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 160, 179–80.
42 See, for example, Joel Halcomb, ‘Godly Order and the Trumpet of Defiance: The Politics of
Congregational Church Life during the English Revolution’, in Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb,
eds, Church Life, ch. 1.
43 See, for example, Anne Dunan-Page, ‘ “Not Keeping One’s Place in the Church”: The
Disaffected Dissenters’, in Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, eds, Church Life, ch. 10.
44 On Dissenting discipline, see Halcomb ‘Congregational Religious Practice’, pp. 116–42,
Mark Burden, ‘The Church Records of White’s Alley, London (2) Disciplinary cases’, https://dis-
sent.hypotheses.org/blog/9-the-church-records-of-whites-alley-london-2-disciplinary-cases-
mark-burden, and ‘The Church Records of White’s Alley, London (3) Appendix: Table of
Disciplinary Cases’, https://dissent.hypotheses.org/blog/10-the-church-records-of-whites-alley-
london-3-appendix-table-of-disciplinary-cases-mark-burden.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 485

from a variety of Dissenting church books (including one of the most

­well-known: that of John Bunyan’s Congregational meeting at Bedford), will
consider the types of offence that typically troubled Dissenting churches, and
which they judged serious enough to record for posterity, as well as the careful
procedures that they followed in order to maintain order, stability, and visible
saintliness in the face of various kinds of ‘disorderly walking’.
Although Dissenting congregations appear not to have developed, at least
during the seventeenth century, much by way of a reliable or systematic way of
indexing decisions regarding their members’ spiritual status, or of even keeping
track of church members so widely dispersed around them, nevertheless
­certain features regarding the exercise of discipline do still emerge as consistent
in the church books. Disciplinary cases were, for example, generally heard at
the monthly meetings of the church, at the same time that new members’
­narratives of experiences were delivered. This could be on a Sunday, after the
departure of hearers (i.e. attending non-members), or on a week day, depend-
ing on the organizational practices of each church. All members would be
expected to be present at a given meeting: young and old, men and women, rich
and poor, whatever their standing in the church. Moreover, it was understood
that the church’s disciplinary procedure should remain within the congregation.
Burwell church, for instance, insisted that their members should ‘not discouer
the secreats of the church, but endeuour to keep up before the world, & each
other, the Reputation of each other’.45
If we compare the disciplinary entries of Dissenting church books with what
we know about other Calvinistic records, offences within the Reformed
churches seem fairly uniform even when national specificities are taken into
account.46 For example, the ‘neglect’ of covenanted duties was a key source of
contention for Dissenters, often raised alongside condemnations of rival
denominations (such as the national Church or more radical groups, like the
Quakers, which might attract members away from Dissenting churches).
Members were likewise regularly admonished for failing to give others the
attention or the advice they required (for instance, in the form of visits to the
sick, the poor, or the spiritually dejected, such duties being far from the domain
solely of the pastor), and for failing to attend communion or church meetings.
Other faults concerned practices and beliefs that Dissenters aimed to discour-
age, from conjuring and astrology to not keeping the Sabbath. We also find sins
of a moral nature being committed that were clearly incompatible with the

45 CL: I. f. 36, ‘The Church Book of Burwell, Cambridgeshire [. . .]’, fol. 79. Thomas Larkham
played on such anxieties when he very imprudently threatened to reveal the proceedings against
former members of his Exeter church. See Susan Hardman Moore, ‘ “Pure Folkes” and The Parish:
Thomas Larkham in Cockermouth and Tavistock’, in Diana Wood, ed., Life and Thought in the
Northern Church c.1100–c.1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 489–509
(502).
46 See further Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, pp. 474–82.
486 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

requirements of ‘visible’ sainthood: sins that not only endangered the soul of
the offender but also the reputation of the whole church (such as theft, fraud,
sexual misconduct, drunkenness, and gambling).
Throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century, Bunyan’s church at
Bedford was certainly concerned with transgressions related to the breach of
covenantal duties, church ordinances, and church order—for instance, when
receiving members from other congregations or dismissing them elsewhere.
Perhaps because the church book spans the troubled years of the Restoration,
questions of membership, and the role of members in keeping together the
‘fellowship’ of believers, came to assume vital importance. At least in the
first decades of its existence, the Bedford church did not seem particularly
­concerned about superstitious practices, whereas in London or in Kent, the
use of charms, almanacs, and forbidden arts was regularly condemned.47 In
Hampshire, in February 1679, the Baptist John Croone stood accused of having
consulted ‘a certain neigbour’ who advised him to put a spear through a dead
horse’s heart to stop unexplained deaths among his cattle.48 In Warwickshire, a
pastor like Julius Saunders had to condemn coscinomancy (the art of div­in­ation
using a sieve and a pair of shears) among other lingering superstitious beliefs,
such as touching the seventh child of a family to be cured of some illness.49
Although Bedford appears to have identified no such practices among its
members (it did not record such cases in its church book, at any rate), the
nearby congregation of Stevington, Bedfordshire, mentions the case of Mary
Chamberlain who was ‘commonly reported to be a witch’, behaving ‘like a
­distracted body’, and disturbing the church as ‘a railer’.50
Dissenting churches were always anxious to follow the rules for discipline
outlined by Christ in Matthew 18, which was frequently invoked to justify the
practice of treating private offences in private and public offences in public
(that is, before the whole church), although the distinction was, in practice, not
often maintained, especially in cases of misconduct that could endanger the
reputation of the whole church. In theory, any wrongdoing involving two par-
ties had first to be treated privately. If no satisfaction were given, the injured
party was advised to find one or two witnesses, and if the matter could still not
be settled, then (and only then) could the transgression be brought to the atten-
tion of the whole church. As in church courts, an accusation could be brought
forward at this stage either by a private person (and that included women) or

47 DWL: 5333.B.1, ‘Mill-Yard Minutes being the Church Book of the Seventh Day General
Baptist Congregation 1673–1840, with Registers and Records’, fols 58, 86, 93; DWL: 38.81,
‘Canterbury (General) Baptist Church Book 1663–1695’, fol. 10; Kenneth A.C. Parsons, ed., The
Church Book of the Independent Church (now Pound Lane Baptist) Isleham, 1693–1805 (Cambridge,
1984), p. 38.
48 RPCO: Broughton Church, 1/1, ‘Porton and Broughton Church Book, 1655–1687’, fol. 45.
49 Warwickshire County Record Office: ‘Julius Saunders’ Diary being the diary or minute book
of the Bedworth Congregational Church’, fols 77, 81.
50 Tibbutt, ed., Some Early Nonconformist Church Books, p. 36.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 487

by the church as a whole. Provided this system was followed, the disciplinary
cases that we find recorded in the Dissenting manuscripts would have been
only those that could not be resolved in private, and may represent, therefore,
only a portion of the cases that actually arose.
Sanctions were purely spiritual and tended to be gradual. At Bedford, for
example, at least two admonitions were required before the church proceeded
to the next stage of the disciplinary process: the suspension of communion. In
theory, this would last for seven consecutive Sundays (i.e. seven months): in
practice, it could be much longer, though not all churches were this prescrip-
tive. During withdrawals the church officers, or indeed any other members,
were permitted to approach the offenders, to exhort them to repentance, and
encourage them to follow the church’s activities. Withdrawal by the community
of saints was meant to ‘shame’ a member51 not only for repeated misconduct
but also for having failed to listen to the church: the church thus multiplied
meetings, exhortations, and letters to bring about repentance. If all of this were
unsuccessful, however, a sentence of excommunication was then passed. If the
person showed proper repentance, excommunication could be reversed.52
Indeed, cases could be reopened and re-examined—months, years, or some-
times decades later—even though church members were not supposed to have
any interaction with the excommunicated party for the duration of the sen-
tence. Excommunication, which involved handing an unrepentant offender
over to Satan, was no light matter, hence some churches preferred the sanction
of withdrawing from members, especially when theological differences were
at issue.53
Admonitions were generally notified to an offender by two or three visiting
brothers (or sometimes by sisters, in cases involving women: a practice at
Bedford not often observed elsewhere) who were appointed by the church to
undertake this duty. The admonition delivered by the Bedford church to
William Whitbread, read to the church at a meeting in December 1669, presents
a formal exposition of covenantal duties that, according to the church,
Whitbread had ignored for seven years.54 Despite the duly respectful tone that
was adopted given Whitbread’s long standing in the church and his social sta-
tus as one of the ‘better sort’ (i.e. landed gentry), the letter presents a numbered
list of five charges of which Whitbread was guilty, reminding us of the legal
nature of an admonition by the church acting as a spiritual tribunal. Whatever the
nature of the offence, it was expected that the charges should be communicated
as clearly as possible, either verbally or, as in this case, in writing, so that the

51 ‘Bedford’, 83. 52 See case of Thomas Rudd in ‘Cockermouth’, 55–6, 68.

53 Norwich Record Office: FC 19/1, ‘Norwich Old Meeting Congregational Church Book’, entry
for 27 December 1649; FC 31/1, ‘Great Yarmouth, Middlegate Congregational Church Book,
1643–1855’, entry for 1 May 1649; ‘Cockermouth’, 10.
54 See ‘Bedford’, 43–4, and the further exchanges between Whitbread and the congregation,
45–51; see also Davies, ‘Spirit in the Letters’.
488 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

admonished member would, in turn, have a chance to answer them with the
same degree of precision: vagueness and ambiguity were to be avoided at all
cost in such matters.
An admonition by the church, then, was not simply an exhortation to repent
or a general warning: it served to draw up precise charges and required the
church member in question to answer them before the church. Given that such
a public appearance seems to have caused some members great distress and
difficulty, the ordeal of a public ‘humiliation’ should not be underestimated. As
a result, a member might agree to come in person to face the charges and repent
but then fail to attend, forcing the church to renew its entreaties or to deputize
members once again to request such a meeting. But such an appearance was
evidently crucial. Without a verbal in presentia act of public repentance, a dis­
cip­lin­ary case had little chance to come to a successful close, especially since
reintegration meant considering repentant members ‘as though [they] had not
sinned’.55 Exceptions, then, were rarely granted, as in the case, again at Bedford,
of one ‘sister Chamberlain’ who could not come to a disciplinary meeting in
person, the church book notes, because of her ‘bodily weakenes’, the church
deciding to send brothers to her instead to receive ‘a more full account’.56 As for
Oliver Dicks—who, in the winter of 1656/7, had inadvertently taken a sheep
that did not belong to him and sold its fleece—it took a full year to bring him
back into the Bedford church, despite having been cleared of theft by the
civil authorities, providing due restitution to the sheep’s rightful owner (who
declared himself satisfied), and expressing his repentance in private. The
church would only renew communion with him, in fact, after he had given
‘evidence of the truth of his repentance’ in public; that is, through a personal
testimony that ‘manifested’ heartfelt contrition at a general assembly of the
whole congregation.57
Depending on the nature and gravity of the offence, a church might decide
to suspend communion without issuing any admonitions as warnings, and
might even excommunicate a member summarily. This happened at Bedford,
for instance, on 25 April 1673:
At a full assembly of the congregation was with joynt consent of the whole body, cast
out of the Church, John Rush of Bedford for being drunke after a very beastly and
filthy maner, that is above the ordinery rate of drunkenness for he could not be
carried home from the Swan to his own house without the help of no less then
three persons, who when they had brought him home could not present him as
one alive to his family, he was so dead—.58
It looks as if, in this instance, the congregation did recognize an ‘ordinery rate’
of drunkenness that might either have been frowned upon but tolerated or

55 ‘Bedford’, 72. 56 ‘Bedford’, 70–1. 57 ‘Bedford’, 25–9.

58 ‘Bedford’, 75. The word missing from the manuscript here is presumably ‘drunk’, i.e. ‘dead
drunk’.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 489

subject to admonition. On this occasion, however, it was forced to take the

extreme measure of instant ejection given the extraordinary, and also unavoidably
public, nature of Rush’s ‘beastly and filthy’ condition. To proceed like this
­without any preceding admonitions was, however, comparatively rare and, in
general, Dissenting churches, including Bunyan’s, preferred to give their mem-
bers several chances to repent, withdrawal typically being notified only after
‘impenitent persisting’ in a misdemeanour, including, in the case of one Sister
Bar of Blunham in the 1690s, repeated prophetic outbursts predicting the rend-
ing of the Bedford church under its new pastor, Bunyan’s successor, Ebenezer
Chandler.59
While the sin of drunkenness, often related to Sabbath-breaking, appears at
regular intervals in Dissenting church books, sexual misconduct likewise was
routinely investigated, with most cases addressing pre-nuptial fornication
rather than outright adultery or bigamy.60 At Bedford, for example, the spring
of 1674 proved especially fraught in terms of policing its younger female mem-
bers. In April that year, Elizabeth Bisbie was ‘openly rebuked for an immodest
lieing in a chamber several nights wherein also lay a young man, no body being
in the house but them two’. A month later, Elizabeth Burntwood was admon-
ished ‘for her immodest company keeping with carnal and light young fellows
at Elstow faire’, the church book notes, and ‘also for that there hath gon of her a
common report of infamie and scandall upon many accounts’.61 Church books
certainly betray, then, a good deal of anxiety about the sexual lives of godly
sisters, particularly given that women traditionally dominated Dissenting
churches numerically, at times overwhelmingly so.62 The reputations of such
churches, especially during difficult periods of persecution, were written, it can
be assumed, on the bodies of their female members.
Yet there is no clear evidence that Dissenters were actually more anxious in
that regard than they were in relation to young men. The church books reveal
that men and women alike were hauled before their churches for what was
deemed sexual misconduct. At Bedford, in fact, it was neither Elizabeth Bisbie
nor Elizabeth Burntwood who ‘exposed’ the church ‘to great reproach and
infamye’, nor even those women who married unconverted or ‘carnall’ men

59 ‘Bedford’, 77; 111–12; and see further Michael Davies, ‘Life After Bunyan: Ebenezer Chandler
and the Bedford Congregation, 1689–1710’, in Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, eds, Church
Life, ch. 9.
60 For marriages and sexual misconduct in the gathered churches, see Dunan-Page,
L’Expérience puritaine, pp. 249–85.
61 ‘Bedford’, 76–7.
62 See further Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past & Present, 13 (1958), 42–62;
Claire Cross, ‘ “He-goats before the flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by Women in the Founding
of Some Civil War Churches’, in G.J. Cuming and Derek Baker, eds, Popular Belief and Practice
(Cambridge, 1972), pp. 195–202; Patricia Crawford, ‘Historians, Women, and the Civil War Sects,
1640–1660’, Parergon, 6 (1988), 19–32, and Women and Religion, pp. 119–59; Ann Hughes, Gender
and the English Revolution (London, 2012), pp. 71–89.
490 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

against the advice of both their families and the church, but William Man: one
of the ‘principall brethren’ in the church, who, like John Rush, was abruptly
‘cast [. . .] out of the Church, and deliver[ed] [. . .] up to Satan’ without warning
on 6 May 1678, having been ‘convicted by his owne confesion’ just two months
earlier ‘of scandalous sines’ with ‘a woman as lived in Sheford’ and subsequently
found ‘guilty of commiting fornication and uncleanese with serveral [sic] by
his owne confesion, to the great reproach of the Gospell and people of God’.63
For the Baptist congregation at Cripplegate, London, it was not one of the lay
brethren but the pastor himself, David Crosley, who would bring shame upon
his church through a remarkable series of (often drunken) instances of what we
would now term inappropriate sexual behaviour.64
Such cases remind us that Dissenting churches were always extraordinarily
sensitive to the spectre of any scandal or hypocrisy arising in their midst and
that would need to be carefully exorcized by strict discipline in order to uphold
their reputations as godly societies. Regulation of church members’ behaviour
thus stretched to policing not only the sexual proclivities of the saints but also
marital and domestic relationships. In August 1669, George Skelton was
admonished by the Bedford congregation for a second time ‘for his inhumane
carriage towards his wife and children, and other evills which he stands guilty
of ’.65 Likewise, in March 1679, John Stanton was charged before the church
with ‘his evill in abuseing his wife, and beateing hir often for very light maters’.
Although he promised ‘reformation and semed sory for his fault’ no proper
repentance ever came and, Stanton ‘persevearing still in his sine’, he was excom-
municated a few months later.66 The church book cannot tell, of course, what
befell his wife, who appears not to have been a member of the congregation,
once the remonstrances of the church had ended.
Not all scandals, however, were sexual in nature, or had to do with ugly cases
of drunkenness, theft, or domestic violence. Any number of activities deemed
ungodly might be brought to the attention of a Dissenting church, from the
financial mismanagement of debt to playing cards and dancing around
­maypoles, making the exercise of discipline arguably the most extensive and
intensive, and certainly time-consuming, aspect of the lay experience of Dissent
within any congregation. While flirting at fairs or falling drunkenly out of ale-
houses were quite public crimes, moreover, Dissenting churches were equally
vigilant when it came to rumours, gossip, and unproven scandals. In July 1678,
for example, one Mary Fosket ‘(after privat admonition given her before) was
publikly admonished’ at Bedford ‘for receiveing and privatly whispering of an

63 ‘Bedford’, 83.
64 On this case, see especially Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Letters and Records of the Dissenting
Congregations: David Crosley, Cripplegate and Baptist Church Life’, in Anne Dunan-Page and
Clotilde Prunier, eds, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800
(New York and London, 2013), pp. 69–87.
65 ‘Bedford’, 40. 66 ‘Bedford’, 84.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 491

horrible scandal (without culler of truth) against our brother Honylove’. Fosket
seems to have kept such rumours ‘private’, hence the first admonition, but it
seems that they had spread, forcing the church to investigate the matter further.
She was received back into communion over six years later, though, as was
often the case in Dissenting church practice, in the interim she may have
­continued to attend services as a non-communicating ‘hearer’.67 A different
case emerged in November 1680 when one John Wildman was withdrawn for
‘slandering the congregation and brethren’ at Bedford, and ‘in perticular our
beloved and honnored brother Bunyan’. In this instance, the church rallied
behind its pastor, the entry mentioning the joint response of the congregation,
‘not one so much as makeing the least sticke at it’, whereas Wildman was found
‘extriordinary guilty of a kind of railery and very great passion’. This case, not
unusually in Dissenting churches, rattled on for years, remaining unresolved
even at the point of Bunyan’s untimely death in August 1688, much to Wildman’s
further disgrace and opprobrium.68

CONCLUSION

Focusing on such disciplinary cases, even in such a brief way as this, opens a
window not only onto the type of offences that both disturbed and typified
church life for early modern Dissenters but also, crucially, into the daily lives
and experiences of the visible saints. These ordinary and, at times, quite extra-
ordinary people were faced with the challenge of standing in faith alongside
their fellow church members in times of persecution and tribulation. Yet, in an
equally demanding way, they also had to balance their identities as godly
Dissenters with their roles in the worlds beyond the church: local, political,
familial, social, festive, conformist, commercial. It is not to be supposed, then,
that because mutual watchfulness was a covenantal duty of all church members
that the Dissenting congregations exercised obsessive scrutiny and imposed
entirely unrealistic standards of living on their members who had little choice

67 ‘Bedford’, 84, 89. See, for example, Joseph Hussey, pastor of the Congregational church at
Cambridge, who noted in his diary that Jacob Plasket ‘discontinued Fellowship in the year 1696.
but kept the Meetings: and Febr. 14. 1705, was taken into the Church again, after he made a
Confession of his sin’, while Mrs Potter ‘discontinued Fellowship from the Breach[,] but constantly
with her Husband attended at the Place: And after Both her sons were converted, she was farther
wrought on, & her Prejudices taken off till she return’d into Fellowship, July 17th, in the year 1707.’
Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies: R107/109, ‘Joseph Hussey’s Church Book’, n. fol. The
proportion of non-communicating ‘hearers’ attending a Dissenting meeting’s services is impos-
sible to estimate. Church books and registers, by and large, recorded the names of full members
only. Nonetheless, see Michael Davies, ‘Bunyan’s Brothers: John and Samuel Fenne of the Bedford
Congregation, 1656–1705’, in Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, eds, Dissenting Hands, 76–110
(87–8, 95, and n. 71, 108).
68 ‘Bedford’, 85, 86, 88–90.
492 The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I

but to submit or be excommunicated. Most offences, particularly those

­concerning domestic disputes, sexual misconduct, public drunkenness, fraud,
or slander, were, after all, common to Church of England parishioners and
Dissenters alike, the pastor and church members intervening in private
­disputes as any parish incumbent or neighbours would have done. Socially,
then, the saints of the Dissenting churches were far from exceptional, segregated,
or isolated. They set themselves apart from the world in worship and com-
munion, but little else.69
Although, on the whole, the Bedford church book—our key source of
ex­amples here—might seem less concerned than other surviving records with
policing drunken feasts and dances at weddings or with counting the number
of days between a suspicious marriage and the birth of a first child, this does
not mean the lay Dissenters at Bedford were immune to the sort of temptations
that plagued Dissenting communities elsewhere. As we have seen, this is far
from the case. Yet the Congregational heritage of the church’s first pastor, John
Gifford, the troubled years of the Restoration, the pastorate of such a prom­in­ent
figure as John Bunyan, and its church book’s careful preservation of a rich array
of epistolary materials may all help to explain why the image we retain of the
Bedford congregation from the mid-1650s to the Toleration Act of 1689 is one
of a community whose prime focus was cohesion, love, and charity, alongside
the respect of covenanted duties necessary to bind together a strong—and
­lasting—fellowship of believers. The survival of this meeting throughout the
centuries, and the renown of its first church book, one of the best documents
we possess for the period, are perhaps the direct results of such choices.
As this chapter has made clear, however, Bedford offers just one instance
illustrating the profound value of church records as a prime source of enquiry
into the lives, beliefs, and experiences of early modern Dissenters. However
concisely, we have attempted here to provide examples of what church records
can reveal not just about the social and cultural worlds of lay Dissenters and
their lived religion, but also about their corporate experiences as communities
of believers: believers whose Dissenting identities, as we have witnessed, were
always in a complex state of negotiation and adjustment, individually and col-
lectively, both within and without their churches. It should be evident too that
far more could be said about the lay experience of Dissent than we have been
able to address here, especially with reference to the many church records yet
to be viewed and utilized by scholars. By connecting their findings with sources
of inner religious experience and devotion, on the one hand, and with new

69 See further William Stevenson, ‘Sectarian Integration and Social Cohesion, 1640–1725’, in
E. S. Leedham-Green, ed., Religious Dissent in East Anglia (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 69–86, and ‘The
Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Spufford, ed., World of Rural
Dissenters, pp. 360–87.
 Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered Churches 493

approaches to lay–ministerial relations and the social integration of Dissenters

on the other, old and familiar subjects within the history of early modern
Dissent can be granted a renewed and refocused life through a significantly
expanded foundation. Here, that foundation presents itself in the ‘acts’ of
­seventeenth-century gathered churches: the manuscript records of the congre-
gations of Christ that reveal, often in the most beautiful and powerful terms,
what being a Dissenter really meant.

SE L E C T B I B L IO G R A P H Y
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(New Haven, CT, 2002).
Brachlow, Stephen, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist
Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford, 1988).
Bremer, Francis J., Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke
and New York, 2015).
Burden, Mark, Davies, Michael, Dunan-Page, Anne, and Halcomb, Joel, An Inventory
of Puritan and Dissenting Records, 1640–1714 (2016), available online at: http://www.
qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/online-publications/dissenting-records.
Collinson, Patrick, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Dissenting Tradition’, in
C.R. Cole and M.E. Moody, eds, The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson
(Athens, OH, 1975), pp. 3–38.
Cooper, James F., Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial
Massachusetts (New York and Oxford, 1999).
Davies, Michael, ‘Spirit in the Letters: John Bunyan’s Congregational Epistles’, The
Seventeenth Century, 24 (2009), 323–60.
Davies, Michael, Dunan-Page, Anne, and Halcomb, Joel, eds, Church Life: Pastors,
Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England
(Oxford, 2019).
Davies, Michael, Dunan-Page, Anne, and Halcomb, Joel, eds, Dissenting Hands, Special
Issue of Bunyan Studies, 20 (2016).
Dunan-Page, Anne, L’Expérience puritaine. Vies et récits de dissidents, XVIIe–XVIIIe
siècle (Paris, 2017).
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Kreitzer, Larry J., William Kiffen and his World, 6 vols to date (Oxford, 2010–).
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(Weston Rhyn, 2001).
Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013).
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Congregation in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2013).
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 Index
Abbot(t), George 379, 439, 442, 443
Abbott, Richard 172–3
Aberdeen Doctors 188, 190
Aberdeen Independents 194
Abernethy, John 190
Achinstein, Sharon 449
acts of parliament (Irish)
Act of Supremacy (1537) 204
Act of Uniformity (1665) 205
Toleration Act (1719) 206
acts of parliament (Scottish)
Black Acts (1584) 183–4
Golden Act (1592) 184
Act of Classes (1649) 193
Act Recissory (1661) 196
Act of Union (1707) 201
Toleration Act (1712) 201–2
acts of parliament (English)
Act of Uniformity (1549) 4
Act of Uniformity (1552) 4, 314, 322
Act of Uniformity (1559) 2, 41, 314, 317, 322,
340, 437
Conventicle Act (1593) 299
Adultery Act (1650) 347
Blasphemy Act (1650) 348, 398
Propagation Act (1650) 231–2, 346
Toleration Act (1650) 344
Corporation Act (1661) 306, 425
Uniformity Act (1662) 7, 76, 167, 169, 172,
314, 424–5, 448, 466, 467
Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670) 7, 306, 318,
322, 324, 425, 449, 450
Five Mile Act (1665) 80, 449–50
Act of Toleration (1689) 2, 7, 9, 18, 83, 84,
109, 135, 205–6, 222–3, 240, 289, 310, 311,
401, 425, 452, 464, 465, 476, 492
Act of Union (1706)
Adams, Elizabeth 157
Adams, John 309
Adamson, Patrick 183
Adcock, Rachel 19, 31
adiaphora 4, 41, 44, 122, 315, 376, 414, 424
Admonition to the Parliament (1572) 46, 50,
326, 353, 413
Africans 33
Agreement of the People 37
Aikenhead, Thomas 314
Ainsworth, Henry 164, 209, 357, 380–1, 386
Aldam, Thomas 157
Aldermanbury Accord (1641) 57–8, 99
Algonquians, see Native Americans
Alleine, Joseph 79, 354, 449, 467–8
Alleine, Theodosia 467–8
Allen, James 264
Alsop, Benjamin 369, 370
Alsop, Vincent 83–4, 358, 363
Ambrose, Alice 279–80
Ames, William 92–3, 177, 390, 393
Amsterdam 150, 164–5, 166, 168, 169, 172, 174,
176, 368, 397, 469
Baptists in 119, 304
Quakers in 149, 165, 260, 382
Separatists in 117–18, 119, 164, 209, 245,
298, 301, 454n
Anabaptists
European 9, 35, 121, 128, 141, 145, 205,
257–8, 390, 394, 397, 406, 407
Baptists labelled 7, 26–7, 28, 127, 128, 148,
185, 251, 259, 458
Anderson, David 174, 175
Andrewes, Lancelot 392, 395, 442
Anglicanism
American 279–82
historiography of 3, 8, 11–17, 388–9, 435
and Puritanism 4, 11–14, 452
Restoration 79–80, 82–6, 108, 131, 132, 173,
305, 329, 351, 448
theology of 388–9, 402
Welsh 225, 239, 240
see also Book of Common Prayer;
episcopacy; episcopalians; Thirty-Nine
Articles
Anglo-Dutch Wars 168, 170–1, 174, 176, 178–9
Anne, Queen 201
anointing with oil 417
Antichrist 58, 89, 90, 92, 96, 122, 155, 209,
229, 364–7, 392, 444
Pope as 145, 210, 403
anticlericalism 44, 45, 139, 153, 154
anti-formalism 17, 69, 234, 267, 272, 355, 398,
405, 462
Antigua 261–2, 282
Antinomian Controversy 253–5, 256, 397
antinomianism 20, 22, 109, 132, 151, 217, 234,
301–2, 328, 357, 395–8, 401, 444
anti-popery 43, 45, 58, 83, 140, 148, 171, 198,
217, 310, 313, 325, 348, 365, 368, 412, 442
see also Antichrist; Catholics; Papacy
496 Index
anti-sacramentalism 23–4, 25, 139, 141, 148, mode of adult 24, 35–6, 126, 145, 214, 259, 304
153, 155, 216, 256, 398, 405, 406, 407, 423 private 184
Apocrypha 139, 142, 155–6, 378–9, 383, 407 Quaker denial of 148, 153, 155, 260, 423
Appleby, David 15 self- 120–1
Archdale, John 280 Baptists 118–37
Archer, Isaac 306 in America 255–9, 264, 274, 277, 405
Arianism 391, 393 congregational life of 472–3, 474, 476, 477,
Aristotelianism 389 483, 486, 490
Armine, Lady Mary 466 and Congregationalists 17–18, 22
Arminianism Cromwellian 16
Baptist 1, 24, 121, 136, 417, 476 ecclesiology of 403–5
Dutch 121, 390 and the English Revolution 341, 346
English 22, 69, 109, 392–3, 394–6, 399–400 General 118–22, 136–7, 153, 304, 368, 380,
Laudian 123, 296, 357, 442, 459 394, 395, 402, 407, 417, 418, 476
neo- 401, 402 historiography 8–11
Arminius, Jacob 121, 395 and hymnody 431–2
Armitage, David 268 Irish 207, 214, 217, 219
Articles of Perth 184, 189 modern 26, 33, 34, 36, 225
Ashe, Simeon 57, 59, 70 naming of 27
Association movement 21, 69, 105, 350, 423 numerical size 1–2, 7, 103
assurance of salvation 271, 356, 394, 441, 459 organization 23
Aston, Sir Thomas 336–7 as parish ministers 339
astrology 485 Particular 122–29, 304, 308, 401–2, 406,
Attaway, Mrs 30 417, 476
Augustine of Hippo 146, 316, 394, 404, persecution of 130–3
431, 436 preaching of 426, 429, 447, 450
Augustinianism 64, 92, 315, 390, 394 and print culture 356, 358, 366, 368, 369
Austin, Ann 270 and Quakers 140–2, 145, 147, 153, 305, 310,
Australia 35 400–01, 407, 418
autobiography 26, 356, 365, 459, 481 and religious liberty 37
Aylmer, Brabazon 369–70 Scottish 195–6
Seventh Day 129–30
Bacon, Sir Nicholas 44 theology of 127–9, 133–7, 391, 393, 395, 397
Bailie, Brother 473–4, 475, 477, 484 toleration of 6, 8, 264, 310, 326, 330, 450
Baillie, Robert 58, 100, 188–9, 191–2, 193, Welsh 225, 234, 235, 237, 238, 242
194, 337 women 19, 456, 457–8, 463, 464–5, 467, 469
Bale, John 4, 294, 367, 403 see also Anabaptists
Ball, John 56–7, 354 Barbados 221, 260, 267, 270, 273, 281–2, 287
Baltimore, Lord 275 Barclay, Abraham Rawlinson 142
Bampfield, Francis 132 Barclay, Robert 150, 152, 196, 359, 399–400
Bampfield, Col. Joseph 178 in New Jersey 200, 284, 285
Bancroft, Richard 50, 439 Barcroft, Thomas 151
banishment Barebone, Praise-God 125
from England 164, 317, 357, 361, 467 Barebones Parliament, see parliament
from Frankfurt 414 Barkely, Thomas 177
from Massachusetts 248, 252, 254, 255, Barnes, Robert 403
257–63, 267, 270–73, 277 Barrow, Henry 89–90, 116, 117, 298, 380,
from the Netherlands 170, 179 415, 474n
from New Netherland 277, 278 Barrow, Isaac 369
from Scotland 171, 179, 184, 193, 200 Bastwick, John 335
from Virginia 279, 280 Bates, William 369
baptism Batt, Jasper 287
believers’ 23–4, 35–6, 145, 255–9, 406, 417 Baxter (nee Charlton), Margaret 466, 467–8
in Westminster Directory 420, 421 Baxter, Richard
infant 23–4, 35, 98, 255–9, 406, 417, 429 and ‘Anglicanism’ 17, 86
irregular 201, 202 and Association movement 21, 105–6, 350
 Index497
autodidacticism of 380 scholarship 380–82
and Baptists 417, 458 sola scriptura 375–6
on Calvinism and Arminianism 396 translations 209, 378, 387
censorship and licensing of 361–4 Welsh 226–7, 228, 239, 240, 387
on the Church of England 13 see also Apocrypha; Book of Revelation;
and comprehension 83 Septuagint
on confessions of faith 393 Biddle, John 391–2
correspondence of 30 Bi(y)lling(e), Edward 156, 283
and early Stuart Puritanism 300 Bisbie, Elizabeth 489
and John Owen 111, 366, 393 Bishop, John 309
Kidderminster ministry 66 bishops
practical divinity of 354, 355, 356, 359–61 abolition of 52, 58, 140, 188–90
and Presbyterianism 18, 56, 62, 70 and Anglicanism 14
on the Puritan Revolution 334, 337–8, anti-Puritan 50, 245
445–6 ‘Baxter for…’ 366
against Quakers 148, 151, 153 early Stuart 186–7, 442, 443
Reliquiae Baxterianae 30, 85, 356, 365, 370 Elizabethan 5, 43, 46, 50, 375–6, 390, 438
and Restoration nonconformity 78, 79, 81, in the English Revolution 335–8, 340, 350
85, 306, 358, 366, 466, 467 and the Glorious Revolution 201
at the Savoy Conference (1661) 75, 424, 431 Interregnum 69
theology of 18, 24–5, 32, 33, 69, 130, 358, Irish 205, 210, 211–12
381, 382, 393, 396, 399, 406 and the magistrate 92, 183, 329, 439
on worship and sacraments 428, 429, 431, medieval 321
432, 433 and nonconformity 186, 211, 295–6
see also Margaret Baxter opposition to 60, 80, 93, 115, 230, 326, 363,
Bayle, Pierre 176, 314, 327 375, 413
Bayl(e)y, Lewis 359 ‘popes bastards’ 90
Bayley, Thomas 60 Reformation 4, 302, 314
Beckett, J.C. 207 Restoration 107, 196–7
Beckmann, Christian 148 Scottish 6, 184, 186–7, 188–90, 196–7
Bedford 133, 134–5, 307–8, 356, 485, Welsh 227, 230
486–91, 492 see also episcopacy; episcopalians;
Bedfordshire 132, 133, 308, 309 Root and Branch
Behmenism 18, 148 Bishops’ Wars 211, 212, 443
Bellenden, Adam 190 Blacklock, Mr 126
Bellingham, Richard 262, 270 Blair, James 199
Bennett, Gervase 144 Blair, Robert 186–7
Berkeley, Governor William 279 Blake, William 20
Bermuda 51 blasphemy 155, 275, 347
Bernard , Richard 436, 440 Blasphemy Ordinance (1648) 22, 348
Berry, Mrs 125 Blunt, Richard 126–7
Bertie, Katherine (duchess of Suffolk) 113–14 Boehme, Jacob 140, 148, 235
Besse, Joseph 8, 319, 331 Bonner, Edmund 45
Beza, Theodore 5, 45, 58, 368, 379, 388, Book of Common Order (Scottish) 414, 416,
404, 436 419, 421, 424
Bible 375–87 Book of Common Prayer 409–16
authority 274 (1549) 4, 411
canon 142, 155–6, 378–9, 392, 412 (1552) 4, 411
circulation 217–8, 382–3 (1559) 5, 379, 411
and ecclesiology 41, 90, 125, 144, 375–6, (1662) 76, 379, 411, 424–5
403–6 banning of 303
Geneva 42, 367, 378, 387, 414 clandestine use of 14, 16, 216, 219, 334,
Indian 379, 387 343–4, 345, 349, 422, 423
King James 355, 378 and clerical dress 43
Lollard 294, 300 conformity to 48, 107, 119, 212, 410
reading of 359–60, 383–7, 412 congregational participation in 430
498 Index
Book of Common Prayer (cont.) Browne, Samuel 251
criticism of 13, 75, 97, 118, 124, 230, 251, Brownists 21, 185, 187, 191, 296–7, 301, 357, 440
295, 298, 317, 326, 409–16, 418, 424, 440 Bucer, Martin 43, 388, 426
French translation of 222 Buckroyd, Julia 197
replacement by Directory 338 Bulkeley, Peter 390
Scottish 6, 187, 335, 416, 424 Bull, George 401
theology of 402 Bullinger, Heinrich 5, 388, 394
Welsh translation of 226, 228 Bunyan, John 20, 30, 31, 32, 35, 130, 132, 359,
worldwide distribution of 355 360, 366, 380, 426–7, 451
Books of Discipline (Scottish) 49, 50, 191, 193 and the Apocrypha 379
Book of Sports 229, 336, 443 Bedford congregation of 133, 135, 307–8,
books, licensing of 26, 361–8 485, 487–91, 492
books of sufferings, Quaker 8, 25, 158, 269, and the Bible 386
280, 309, 319 Grace Abounding 132, 356
see also martyrology Holy War 367, 370, 409
booksellers 16, 79, 150, 298, 361, 363, 364, 366, imprisonment of 132, 307, 357, 365, 450
367–70, 462 and the Koran 382
Boorstin, Daniel 260 and open communion 132, 134
Booth, Sir George 74 Pilgrim’s Progress 35, 354–5, 356–7
Boston, Massachusetts 96, 178, 247, 248, 251, and Quakers 153
257, 264, 416 Burges(s), Cornelius 57, 60
Antinomian Controversy in 253–5 Burges, John 440
Quakers in 260, 261, 267, 270–3, 280 Burnet, Gilbert 73, 176
see also Congregational Library Burntwood, Elizabeth 489
Boulbie, Judith 464 Burnyeat, John 272–3, 274, 276
Bowen, Lloyd 16 Burrough, Edward 141, 399
bowing at the altar 428, 443 Burroughes, Jeremiah 57, 98, 177
Bradford, William 251, 259 Burton, Henry 335
Bradley, Rosemary 65 Burton, James 469
Bradshaw, William 91–2, 354 Burton, Robert 353
Bradstreet, Anne 31, 251, 384 Butler, James (Duke of Ormond) 217
Bradstreet, Simon 262 Butler, Samuel 25
Brailsford, Henry 151 Byfield, Richard 60
Braithwaite, William 141, 149, 150, 152
Bramhall, John 212, 364 Cadbury, Henry 142, 155
Brazil 34 Caffyn, Matthew 136
Bre(a)r(e)ley, Roger 150–1, 301–2 Calamy, Edmund 55, 57, 58, 70, 78, 99, 336,
Bremer, Francis 16, 449 385, 450, 466
Brend, William 271 Calamy III, Edmund 8, 10, 331
Brewster, Ann 368, 369 Calderwood, David 186
Brewster, Thomas 368, 369 Calvert, Elizabeth 369
Brewster, William 89, 95, 301 Calvert, Giles 150, 368, 369
Bridge, William 98–9, 108, 177 Calvert, Jane 284, 285
Brightman, Thomas 404 Calvin, John 4, 5, 43, 45, 53, 89, 368, 378
Brinsley, John 354 on worship 414, 426, 429, 431
Brinsley, Robert 173 writings of 60, 119, 146, 189, 386, 388, 390,
Bristol 1, 300, 302, 311, 337 394, 436
Baptists in 9, 132–3, 135, 299, 478 Calvinism 387–91
Quakers in 141, 143, 348, 399, 462 ‘Anglican’ 12–13, 210, 388–89, 437, 439, 441–3
and Welsh dissent 230, 237, 241 Baptist 1, 24, 121, 124, 128, 136, 391, 401, 417
Brodie, Alexander 198 Congregational 245, 265, 390–1, 401, 469
Brooke, Thomas 354 European 5, 35, 46, 60, 64, 128, 148, 180,
Browne, John 251 205, 209, 297, 403, 485
Browne, Robert 21, 89, 113, 115–16, 183, 296–7, Presbyterians and 64, 69, 396, 401, 445
380, 390 Puritan 113
 Index499
Quaker critique of 398–400 persecution by 22, 47
see also Arminianism; John Calvin; persecution of 275, 316–17, 318, 320–1, 324,
Huguenots; Reformed Protestantism 326–7, 348–9
Cambridge, Masschusetts 250, 254, 258, 387 recusant 2, 145, 318
see also Harvard College theology of 376, 385, 389–90, 396, 406,
Cambridge Platform (1648) 23, 404 407, 411, 436
Cambridge Platonists 148–9, 400 and toleration 70, 163, 180, 199, 200–1,
Cambridgeshire 300, 309, 310 252–3, 314, 328, 350, 450–1
Cambridge University see also James II; Mary Tudor
Christ’s College 164, 177, 301, 400 Caton, William 142
ejected ministers and 166, 173, 175 Cawton, Thomas 177, 466
in the English Revolution 339 Cecil, William (Lord Burghley)
and printing 368 censorship 47, 79, 140, 142, 303, 361–7, 417,
and Puritanism 43, 45, 50, 124, 259, 439 443, 444
Separatist graduates of 115, 118, 164, 227, census, religious (1851) 8
301, 380 ceremonies 5, 13, 41, 43, 45, 188, 197, 263, 330,
Cameron, Richard 199–200 345, 375, 412, 421–22, 424
Campbell, Alexander 189 see also bowing; kneeling; marriage
Campbell, Neil 190 Chamberlain, Mary 486
Canada 10, 35, 117 Chandler, Ebenezer 489
canon law 89 Chandler, John 153
canons 13, 328 Chapman, Livewell 368
(1604) 301, 412 Charles I
(1640) 57, 321 and Catholics 348
Canterbury and the Civil Wars 67, 101, 340, 416, 446
archbishop of 6, 43, 49, 123, 140, 245, 330, and Laudianism 5–6, 96, 228, 245, 335–6,
438, 443 389, 442–3
diocese of 302 as martyr 318
Capp, Bernard 15, 24, 457 and Scotland 187–8
Cardell, John 446 see also regicide
Cardiff 227, 229, 232, 241 Charles II
Caribbean 1, 33, 281–2 in Civil Wars 80, 193
see Antigua; Bermuda; Barbados and Irish Dissent 207
Carolinas 1, 280 plots against 109, 131, 170, 171
Carstares, William 171, 174, 180 and Restoration settlement 7, 76, 107, 220,
Caryl, Joseph 381 411, 424, 447–8
Carteret, Sir George 282 and Scotland 68, 193, 369
Cartwright, Thomas 43–4, 45–7, 50, 60, 89, and toleration 75, 81, 131, 132, 222, 261, 272,
326, 379, 390 273, 350, 425, 450, 467
Casaubon, Isaac 379 see also James Scott (Duke of Monmouth);
Case, Thomas 59 Rye House Plot
casuistry 145, 355 Charlton, Margaret 466, 467–8
catechising 6, 35, 47, 69, 341, 344, 354, 360, Charnock, Stephen 370
388, 391, 396, 399, 409, 421, 443, 459 Chauncy, Charles 259
cathedrals 5, 103, 338, 342, 461 Cheare, Abraham 130–1
Catholics Cheshire 68, 74, 103, 164, 336
church papists 296 Cheynell, Francis 393
conspiracies of 47, 49, 84, 322, 324, 348, 440 Chidley, Katherine 30, 384
convert 201 Christenson, Wenlock 272
and the Elizabethan settlement 437 Christmas 339, 343, 347–8
European 7, 205, 388 church books 23, 31, 32, 410, 477–93
evangelising 25 churching of women 345, 421
Irish 1, 16, 204–6, 208–10, 212, 215, 217, church membership 22, 23, 123, 194, 218, 234,
220, 221 249, 264, 307–8, 480, 483–4
Maryland 275 closed vs open 134, 135, 406
500
church papists 296
churchwardens 320, 321, 322, 323, 344
accounts 410, 422
Clapham, Henoch 164, 174
Clarendon Code 76, 131, 220, 237, 306, 425
Clark, Mary 270
Clarke, John 256
Clarke, Sampson 133
Clarke, Samuel 466, 467, 468
Clarkson, Robert 275
classical learning 61, 436
Claus, Jacob 150
clericalist ecclesiology 17, 60, 63, 405
clocks in pulpits 427
Clotworthy, Sir John 186
Coale, Josiah 270, 275–6
Cockenoe 387
Cockerill, Thomas 369–70
Coddington, William 96, 262–3, 273–5
coffeehouses 78
Coffey, John 185, 435
Cole, Alan 142
Cole, Mary 462–3
Coleman, Thomas 63
Collegiants 126
Collinges, John 456, 460
Collinson, Patrick 11–12, 16–17, 19, 21, 43, 50,
382, 480
Comber, Thomas 150
communion
administered by church officers or
clergy 205, 222, 483
admission to 24, 62–3, 65, 98, 179, 343
Baptists and 22, 24, 134
as boundary marker 23–4
and Book of Common Prayer 411–12,
414, 425
Congregationalists and 24, 98, 134
a converting ordinance? 62–3
devotional ethos of 429–30
in the Directory 339, 420–1, 422
Erastianism and 63
‘gadding to’ 295
‘love feasts’ before 417
monthly celebration of 429
occasional conformity and 24, 296
open vs. closed 22, 24, 134–5, 406
partial conformity and 24, 78
Presbyterians and 24, 62–3, 65–6, 78, 366
private 184
Quaker rejection of 148, 155, 406, 423, 474
as requirement for civic office 425
in Scotland 184–6, 198
sermons 385
sitting for 296, 411, 428
suspension from 338, 422, 472–3, 487–8, 491
Index
suspension of 66
tables 336
theology of 406
see also kneeling; sacraments
community of goods 145, 152
Como, David 150
comprehension 15, 18, 77–8, 80, 82–4, 85, 111,
314, 315, 326, 330, 424
bills 7, 21, 26, 83, 108, 109, 331
Compton Census 323
Conder, Richard 299–300
confessionalization 206, 208, 209, 211
confession (of sin) 385, 428
confessional state 64, 65, 208, 209, 211, 325–6
see also multiconfessionalism
confessions of faith 5, 13, 24, 58, 69, 95, 105, 106,
166, 388–91, 392, 393–4, 404, 407, 427, 479
Baptist 127–9, 134–6, 304, 401
in Ireland 206, 210, 218–19, 221
and Quakers 398–9
see also Irish Articles; Savoy Confession;
subscription; Thirty-Nine Articles;
Westminster Confession
conformists
avant-garde 12
Calvinist 389
Elizabethan 4, 52, 379, 439
high church 398
occasional 15
Stuart 219, 329, 402, 439–40
Congregationalists (Independents)
and antinomianism 253–5
and baptism 23, 406
and Baptists 17–18, 22, 35, 255–9
church books of 32, 477–81, 492
church discipline among 461, 484–91
and communion 24, 406
and confessions of faith 105, 106, 391,
392, 407
and congregational autonomy 59
conversion narratives of 214, 218, 356, 481
and the Covenanters 100, 194–6
and the Cromwellian establishment 7, 16,
102, 104–7, 263, 340–1, 447
and Declaration of Indulgence 28, 307,
310, 450
English 1, 6, 7–8, 88–94, 98–111
erudition of 365, 380–2, 383, 405
and the Glorious Revolution 109, 265
historiography of 8–10, 15, 88, 224–5, 331
on ‘independence’ 24, 52–3, 94
as ‘Independents’ 26–7, 29, 52
Irish 207, 214, 216, 218, 219
Locke on Congregationalist ‘bird
cages’ 473
magisterial 64
 Index501
meeting houses of 425 constitutionalism, parliamentary 326
millenarianism of 404 conventicles
mission to Indians 33, 387 Elizabethan and early Stuart 296–7, 299,
mixed polity of 383–4 301, 330–1
modern 34, 35, 36, 224–5 Restoration nonconformist 7, 18, 23, 78, 81,
on national churches 13 349, 356, 449
in the Netherlands 163, 170, 177–8 in Scotland 185, 198–9
New England 6, 94–98, 110, 244–65 in Wales 237
and New Model Army 101 women and 466–7
numerical size of 1, 76–7, 103 see also Conventicle Acts
organization of 23 conversion 98, 214, 218, 316, 355–6, 397, 402,
parochial 69, 103–4, 339 481–2, 484
persecution of 132, 449, 452 Convocation 326, 437
on the power of the keys 56–7, 405, 474 Irish 209–10, 212
and Presbyterians 17, 21–2, 29–30, 49, 52–3, Conway, Anne 149, 400
57, 59–60, 61, 63–5, 69, 77, 79, 85, 99–102, Cook, Sir Anthony 44
105–8, 304–5, 337, 344, 401–2 Cooper, Anthony Ashley (Earl of
and Quakers 18, 141, 155, 260–3, 267, Shaftesbury) 7, 450
270–3, 400–1 Cooper, James F. 96–7
and Reformed orthodoxy 24–5, 390–1, 392–3 Cooper, Tim 15, 21, 69
and regicide 446 Cope, Anthony 49
in the Restoration 18, 107–9, 263–4, 306–7 Cope, Richard 309
in Scotland 194–6 Copeland, John 271, 280
and Scripture 89, 381–2 Coppe, Abiezer 348, 380, 398
and Separatism 88–98, 101–2, 110 Corbet, John 363
against set prayer 419 Cosin, Richard 50
on toleration 101–2, 330 Costello, Walter 219
Trinitarianism of 392–3 Cotter, Cory 18
unlicensed printing 26, 366 Cotton, John 30, 96, 104, 247, 252, 253–5, 258,
voluntary principle of 13, 96, 407 262, 263, 270, 390, 397, 404, 416, 419
at Westminster Assembly, see Dissenting Cotton, Priscilla 462–3
Brethren councils, ecumenical 42, 363, 376, 388, 392,
Welsh 224–5, 231–2, 234–5, 236–8, 241 393, 407
women’s role among 19, 26, 253–5, 384–5, see also creeds
454, 456, 457, 459–60, 461, 463, 465 Covenanters (Scottish) 6, 57, 59, 60, 63, 68,
see also Independents; Henry Jacob; John 179, 187–94, 197–202
Owen; Savoy Confession in England 337
Congregational Library 9, 282–3 in Ireland 212–13, 217, 220
Connecticut 258, 261, 262, 273 covenant of grace 62, 406
Connould, John 133, 137 covenants, see Covenanters; National
conscience 327–8, 376 Covenant; Solemn League and Covenant
cases of 355, 466 covenants, church 94, 95, 103, 115, 116, 249,
and nonconformity 21, 34, 36, 43, 75, 80, 81, 297, 298, 428, 460, 479, 480
84, 116, 117, 178, 186, 219, 244, 259, 358, 425 covenanted duties 486, 487, 491, 492
liberty of 33, 36–7, 44, 64, 75, 131, 158, Coventry 108, 122, 306–7, 337, 351
252–3, 280, 282, 284, 286, 289, 304, 314, Cox, Richard 4, 414
326, 330, 341, 350, 355, 393 Coxe, Nehemiah 134
Constantine 116, 183, 325, 326, 392, 405 Cradock, Walter 228–32, 235
constitution Cranmer, Thomas 4, 294, 389, 402, 411, 413, 437
of Massachusetts 96 Cranston, John 274
mixed constitution 61 Crashaw, William 440
of Pennsylvania 37, 287 creeds 390, 392, 393–4, 407
Scotland’s 187–8 Apostles 388, 389, 421
see also Agreement of the People; Athanasian 389
Instrument of Government; Humble Nicene 389
Petition and Advice see also confessions of faith
502 Index
creolization 289 Diggers 6, 17, 18, 20, 25, 36, 140, 145, 147, 152,
Crisp, Tobias 401 153–4
Cromwell, Henry 218 Directions to Preachers (1622) 441, 443
Cromwell, Oliver 6, 30, 101, 104, 105, 157, 283, Directory of Worship, see Westminster
326, 340, 460 Assembly
as army commander 337–8 discipline
and Ireland 218, 348–9 in gathered churches 91, 94, 96, 105, 106,
as Lord Protector 102, 105, 263, 341, 342, 119, 234, 249, 311, 410, 461, 472–4, 478,
392, 447, 463 483–91
personal religion of 29, 378, 405 parochial 296, 320
and Scotland 193, 194 Presbyterian 42, 46, 48, 60, 63, 66, 70, 167,
and toleration 6–7, 35, 314, 342, 348–51, 197, 337, 442
422–3, 467 Quaker 143, 159, 268, 270, 272, 274, 276,
and Wales 233, 235, 239 278, 280, 309
Cromwell, Richard 70, 74, 106–7, 220 see also Books of Discipline; reformation
Croone, John 486 of manners
Crosby, Thomas 8 disestablishment 225, 241, 328, 329
Crosley, David 490 dissent/Dissent
Cross, Claire 455 1642 as the birth of Irish Dissent 213, 215
Cross, Walter 179 1662 as the birth of English Dissent 107–8
Crosse, Francis 173 Church and 11–19, 84–6, 313, 389
Custis, Edmund 170 in contemporary usage 18, 28, 99, 135,
191–2
Darby, Joan 368, 369 contingency of 3
Darby, John 368, 369 defined 2, 28, 245, 302–3, 305, 313, 410, 437
Davenant, John 395 diffusion of 33–7
Davenport, John 98, 164, 177, 247, 257, 258, empowered 334–51
260, 261 evangelical 407
Davies, Michael 23 historiography 3, 8–10, 29–33, 224–5,
Davies, Richard 423 293–4, 331, 435
Davis, Colin 17 and identity formation 19–29, 331
Davis, Nicholas 261 in Ireland 204–23
Davis, Richard 109, 401 in New England 244–65, 270–3
Davison, William 47 and nonconformity 2, 28, 211, 245, 302–3,
Declaration of Breda 75, 131, 350 305, 437
Declaration of Indulgence 85, 326 opposition to imposed set prayer a
(1662) 330 hallmark of 416
(1672) 7, 18, 23, 81–3, 108, 132, 236, 307, 310, origins of 114
322, 330, 425, 450, 466, 467 parochial 293–311
(1687) 84, 132, 206, 221, 223, 330, 450–1 Presbyterian 41, 53, 55, 77
(1688) 450–1 Rational 407
Defoe, Daniel 15–16 rise of 3–8
Delaune, Thomas 132 in Scotland 182
Denison, Stephen 150 in Wales 224–42
denominational history 3, 8–11, 17, 19–21, 31, Whig 466, 469–70
32, 140–43, 224–5, 242, 313–14, 331, 388–9 Dissenting academies 32, 380
denominationalisation 19–29, 84–85, Dissenting Brethren 17, 28, 99–101, 104, 108,
109–11, 206 177, 192, 334
Dent, Arthur 359 Dissenting Experience Project 23, 32
Derbyshire 66 disputations, public 24, 141, 401
Desborough, John 170 Docwra, Anne 464–5
Descartes, René 400 Dod, John 119
Devon 108, 177 Donatists 92, 316
diaries 365, 402, 410, 468–9, 479 Doolittle, Thomas 354
Dicks, Oliver 488 Dorset 133, 178
Dickson, David 385–6 Downing, Ambassador 178
 Index503
Downing, George 259 Edwards, Thomas 24, 64, 65, 99, 146, 348,
Drake, John 174 382, 389, 397, 417, 445, 461
Drake, Roger 62 elders 17, 405
dreams 276–7, 399, 401 in gathered churches 91, 115, 116, 119, 122,
dress 25 238, 249, 250, 253, 474, 483
clerical 43, 184 Presbyterian 42, 52, 56, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67,
Quaker 25, 269 183, 186, 193, 197, 338, 341, 343, 422
women’s 117, 454n, 459 Reformed 165, 168, 174
see also hat honour elections
Dring, Robert 150 of magistrates 251, 255, 274
drunkenness 153, 338, 347, 398, 475, 486, of church officers 42, 45, 61, 65, 67,
488–9, 490, 492 95, 175
Dublin 209, 210, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, Eliot, John 33, 360, 387, 481
285, 461 Elizabeth I 1–2, 44, 46–7, 113, 297, 324, 368,
Dudley, Robert (Earl of Leicester) 44, 50 377, 391
Dudley, Thomas 251 denunciation of 325
Dunch, Anne 460 and Puritanism 48, 78–79, 330, 351
Dunster, Henry 35, 258, 259 religious attitudes of 437–8
Dunton, Thomas 369–70 see also Elizabethan settlement
Durham 43, 307, 346 Elizabethan settlement 5, 42–3, 113–14, 294,
Durie, Robert 171 295, 336
Durston, Christopher 347 Emden 42, 89, 149
Dutch Reformed Church 166 Emett, Dorothy 218
in London 46 Endecott, John 245–6, 249, 251–2
in New Netherland 277, 278 Engagement Crisis (1648) 192–3
see also Netherlands Engagement Oath 68, 446
Dutch Revolt 47 English Revolution, the 334–51
Dyer, Mary 248, 255, 261, 267, 271–2 Baptists in 125–30
Dyer, William 255 Congregationalists in 98–107
and the parishes 303–6
East Anglia 2, 48, 108, 136, 259, 422 preaching in 444–7
see also Cambridgeshire; Essex; Norfolk; Presbyterians in 55–71
Suffolk Quakers in 139–59
Easter 185, 339, 343 reform of worship in 416–23
Easton, John 274 and Wales 229–36
Easton, Nicholas 273 women in 460–5
Eaton, Anne 256–7 see also Oliver Cromwell; Parliament;
Eaton, Samuel 123, 125, 126, 298 Pride’s Purge; regicide
Eaton, Theophilus 256 Enlightenment 71, 176, 370, 407
Eccles, Solomon 157 episcopacy
ecclesiology 316–17, 403–6 abolition of Scottish (1638) 188–91
democratic 358 abolition of English (1646) 6, 44, 140,
in England 296–7 216, 303
in Ireland 209–10, 212, 214, 215, 217, 219, 222 abolition of Scottish (1689) 201
Scottish 183, 189, 202 Congregationalist critique of 13, 91–4
and soteriology 389, 390 defences of 52, 69–70
Edinburgh 59, 103, 174, 184–5, 190, 194, 195, Dissenter rejection of 407
200, 201 hierarchy of 5, 13, 45, 52, 89
Edmundson, William 274, 280, 282 jure divino 57–8, 183, 202
education monarchy and 75, 89, 119, 442
see Dissenting academies; schoolteachers; and ordination 76
universities Presbyterian critique of 44–50, 52–3,
Edward VI 4, 5, 42, 46, 302, 317, 391, 411, 413 56–9, 60
Edwards, Charles 239 primitive/reduced/limited 13, 56, 57–8, 60,
Edwards, Jonathan 432 64, 69, 75, 80, 212
Edwards, John 389 re-established in England (1660/1) 7, 70
504 Index
episcopacy (cont.) Fairfax, John 451
re-established in Scotland (1661) 196–8, 424 Fairlie, James 190
Scottish 182–4, 188–91, 196–9, 201 Familism 18, 149–50, 300
Separatist critique of 296–7 Farnworth, Richard 462
Tyndale’s critique of 4, 403 fasting 48, 157, 250, 254, 255, 415, 421,
Westminster Confession and 390 427, 444
see also bishops; episcopalians Fathers, Church, see patristics
episcopalians Featl(e)y, Daniel 60, 128
American 26, 279–82 Fell, Henry 281
in the Association movement 69 Fell, Margaret 30, 141, 147, 152–3, 285, 358–9,
and censorship 361 384, 462, 464, 467
as dissenters 1, 8, 14, 15, 190–1, 303, 339, 341, Fell, Thomas 467
349, 350 Fenwick, John 283
and the Glorious Revolution 451 Feoffees for Impropriations 443
high church 8, 12, 331, 395, 398, 406 Ferguson, Robert 179–80, 368
Irish 186, 205, 209–12, 214 Ferrendail, Othro 191
as persecutors of Dissent 8, 80, 82, 84–5, Ferriby, John 447
131–3, 163 Field, Clive D. 457
and preaching 435, 437–43 Field, John 46, 49, 413
and Presbyterians 60, 64, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, Fifth Monarchists 17, 36, 131, 168, 176, 195,
84–5, 424 305, 341, 344, 348, 369
Scottish 1, 14, 16, 183, 184, 190, 197–202, Rising (1661) 143, 325
425–6, 430 in Wales 230, 235
theology of 12–13, 388–9, 401, 402, 404 women 384, 457, 463, 464
and toleration 37, 329 finances
at the Westminster Assembly 60 congregational 300, 477, 482
Erasmus, Desiderius 379, 394 fund-raising 264
Erastians 60, 63, 201 ministerial 109, 169, 171, 175, 264, 343, 346
Erastus, Thomas 63 Quaker 146, 159, 269, 283
Erbery, William 228–30, 231, 234–5, 241 patrons 466
Essex 93, 102, 104, 171, 172, 209, 300, 302, see also Feoffees; fines; regium donum;
308–09, 323, 335, 339, 351, 428 tithes
Eucharist, see communion fines 317–18, 319
Exclusion Crisis (1678–81) 7, 237, 369, 450 in early Stuart England 93, 245
excommunication in the English Revolution 347, 422
from gathered churches 96, 118, 249, 255, for New England Baptists 256
257, 461, 473, 487–8, 490, 492 for publishers 361
from the state Church 21, 65, 66, 189, 191, for Quakers 267, 269, 270, 271, 273, 276,
296, 297, 322, 323, 329 279, 281, 283
power of 90, 91, 97, 316 in Restoration England 7, 22, 108, 324
see also discipline; Erastianism Firmin, Thomas 392
Exeter 169, 172, 344, 350, 461, 462 Fisher, Jack 377
exile 23, 33, 117, 184, 303, 311, 391, 464 Fisher, John 309
and Bible translation 378 Fisher, Mary 270, 281, 289
Dutch 18, 93, 117, 163–81, 199, 200, 298, Fisher, Samuel 156, 380, 382
304, 390, 404, 415 Fitz, Richard 113
in Ireland 200 Flavel, John 354, 360, 451
Marian 47, 49, 113–14, 294–5, 297, 319, 367, Fleetwood, Charles 218, 236
413–4, 437, 442–3 Fletcher, Anthony 347
from Massachusetts 160, 397 Fleming, Daniel 324
New England 6, 37, 98, 415 Fleming Jr, Robert 171, 179
as legal penalty 117, 319 Flushing Remonstrance 277–8
royalist 68 foot-washing 417
from Scotland 163–4, 166, 168, 171, 172, Forbes, John 190
174–5, 179, 180, 184, 199, 200 Forbes, Patrick 165, 166
see also Stranger Churches Ford, Alan 209
 Index505
Forrest, Ian 321 Glasites 202
Fosket, Mary 490–1 Glorious Revolution 7–8, 83, 84, 85, 109,
Fowler, Edward 369–70 131–2, 171, 425, 451
Fox, George 18, 141, 143, 149, 150, 157, 159, 165, in Ireland 207, 222–3
305, 366, 380, 400 in New England 265
in America 268, 269, 273, 274, 275–6, 278, in Scotland 201
280, 287, 401 Gloucestershire 300, 307
in the Caribbean 281–2 Glover, John 319
influences on 149–56, 398 Goldie, Mark 17, 28, 30, 31, 85, 107–8
Journal 25, 31, 142, 144, 147 Goodwin, John 383, 392, 395
in the Netherlands 176, 289 Goodwin, Thomas 105, 264, 404
organisational reforms 272–3 in Netherlands 98–9
and Penn 284, 285, 289 at Westminster Assembly 177, 419
and Wales 235, 238 Goodyear, Hugh 171
on women’s preaching 462 Gordon, Gilbert 191
Fox, Margaret, see Fell, Margaret Gouge, Thomas 239, 241, 354, 359–60
Foxe, John 3–4, 294, 318–19, 325, 437 Graham, George 190
France 22, 46, 83, 141, 176, 207, 221 Grantham, Thomas 130, 133, 136–7,
religious wars in 46–7, 297, 438 380, 395
see also Huguenots Great Ejection (1662) 7, 76, 381, 411, 448
Frankfurt 4, 413–14 in Wales 224, 236, 241
Freewillers 4, 394 see also acts of parliament (Uniformity
French Revolution 20 Act (1662))
Frost, J. William 285 Great Fire (1666) 83, 142, 264
Fuller, Thomas 446 Great Migration 6, 263
Fuller, William 275 see also exile
Fullwood, Francis 315 Great Plague (1665) 83, 449
funerals 137, 345, 422, 449 Great Yarmouth 108, 299, 344
sermons 177, 446, 449, 450, 468 Green, Ian 339
Furly, Benjamin 176 Green, J.R. 377
Green, John 127
Gale, Theophilus 381–2 Greenham, Richard 115
gambling 486, 490 Greenshields, James 201–2
Gardiner, Stephen 45 Greenwood, John 89, 116, 117, 298
Gardner, Ginny 163 Greer, Allan 288
Gaunt, Elizabeth 469–70 Gribben, Crawford 2, 16
Gellibrand, Samuel 79 Gribius, Petrus 174
General Assembly (Scottish) 59, 184, 188–9, Griffith, Alexander 233
190, 195, 202 Griffith, John 235
Geneva 4, 5, 12, 49, 60, 89, 114, 298, 388, 428, Grigg, Thomas 362, 366
431, 437 Grimstone, Sir Harbottle 74
British exiles in 42, 45, 46, 295, 297, 367, Grindal, Edmund 43, 46, 48, 78, 330,
378, 413–14 375–6, 438
gesture, symbolic 25, 142, 144, 157, 158, 428 Grindletonians 140, 150–1, 301–2
see also bowing; hat honour; kneeling Grove, Robert 362
Gibbons, John 68 Guiton, Gerrard 143
Gibbons, Sarah 260 Gunther, Karl 403
Gifford, Andrew 133 Gura, Philip 248
Gifford, John 360, 492 Guthrie, James 196
Gill, Catie 464 Guthrie, John 190
Gillespie, George 17, 57, 60, 61, 100, 192, 419 Gwyn, Douglas 143, 151
Gillespie, Patrick 194 Gwyn, Thomas 238
Glasgow 103, 179, 200
bishop of 190, 196 Ha, Polly 15, 20–30, 89, 94
Glasgow General Assembly (1638) 188–9, 197 Hacket(t), William 50, 296, 325
Glasgow University 188, 194, 221 hagiography 199, 224, 269, 318, 437
506 Index
Haigh, Christopher 14 High Commission, Court of 50, 228–9,
Halcomb, Joel 23, 27, 102–3 323–4, 375, 443
Half-Way Covenant 24, 264 Hill, Christopher 11, 20, 142–3, 151, 377
Halkett, Lady Anne 345 Hill, Joseph 172, 174, 175–6, 177, 178–9, 180
Hall, David 482 Hills, Henry 472–3, 475, 476, 477, 484
Hall, Joseph 57 Hills, John 323, 327
Hall, Thomas 447 Hirst, Derek 347
Hallywell, Henry 149 historiography
Hamilton, Lady Margaret 195 see denominational history; Marxist
Hamm, Thomas 285 history; Whig history
Hammond, Henry 14, 69–70 Hobart, Lady Frances 460
Hampshire 343, 460, 486 Hobart, Peter 249
Hampton Court Conference (1604) 91, 378, Hobbes, Thomas 382, 400
412, 439 Hodge, Alexander 165, 166, 169, 172, 180
Happy Union 22, 109, 265, 401 Hodgson, Robert 277, 278
Hardcastle, Thomas 135 Holder, Christopher 271
Hardmeat, Tobias 309 Holifield, Brooks 390
Harley, Sir Edward 365 Holles, Denzil 7, 15, 74
Harley, Sir Robert 228–30, 241 Holme, Thomas 235
Harris, Elizabeth 275 Holmes, Andrew 206, 223
Harrison, James 285 Holy Spirit
Harrison, Robert 89, 115–16 in the believer 120, 122, 136, 235, 358, 392,
Harrison, Thomas 231, 232 459, 462
Harvard College 35, 177, 178, 258, 259, 261, and extemporary prayer 416
380, 390 and Quakers 144, 150, 155, 261, 262, 272,
hat honour 25, 141, 267, 272, 278 384, 398–9, 400, 418, 423, 431
Hathorne, William 262 and Scripture 116, 130, 133–4, 360
Haykin, Michael 24, 89 see also Spiritualism
Hazzard, Dorothy 135 Honyman, Andrew 197
hell, doctrine of 348, 387, 399 Hoog, Thomas 166
Henchman, Humphrey 362 Hooke, William 247
Henderson, Alexander 57, 187 Hooker, Richard 2, 52, 86
Henry VIII 4, 89, 317, 367, 378, 403 Hooker, Thomas 164, 247, 354, 390
Henry, Matthew 386 Hooton, Elizabeth 141, 273
Henry, Philip 81, 235, 365, 386, 423, 468 Horne, Robert 43
heresiography 24, 64, 348, 382, 383, 388, 397, Hotman, François 46
417, 445 How, Samuel 383, 397, 444
and Quakers 144, 145, 146, 148 Howe, John 179, 180, 370
and women 457, 461 Howgill, Francis 141, 235
heresy 58, 64, 191, 298, 302, 391–401 Hsueh, Vicki 288
executions for 4, 22, 222, 378 Hubberthorne, Richard 157, 462
and the state 293, 315, 316, 317, 320, 321 Hudson, Samuel 61–2
see also Trinity Hughes, Ann 31, 146, 342
Herle, Charles 419 Hughes, Stephen 237, 239–40, 241
Hering, Julius 165, 166 Huguenots 22, 310, 314, 436
Hermeticism 141, 156 Hull 344
Hertfordshire 299, 309, 335 Hull, John 261
Hessayon, Ariel 18, 379 Hulse, Edward 173
Hewling, Benjamin 133 humanist scholarship 379, 381–2, 386, 389–90
Hewling, William 133 Humble Petition and Advice (1657) 105, 106,
Heyrick, Richard 68 341, 391
Heywood, Oliver 70, 306, 307, 310, 366 Humble Proposals (1652) 105, 106, 219
Hickman, Henry 170–1, 172, 174, 180 Humphrey, John 63
Hickock, Richard 149–50 Hungarian Reformed Church 210
Hieron, Samuel 440, 441 Hutchinson, Anne 96, 244, 253–5, 257, 261,
Higginson, Francis 95, 251 262, 263, 277, 384, 397
 Index507
Hutchinson, John 458 Jacombe, Thomas 450
Hutchinson, Lucy 30, 35, 384–5, 458, 469 Jaffray, Alexander 194
Hutton, Ronald 347 James VI and I 5, 89, 93, 119, 122, 163, 296,
Hyde, Edward (Earl of Clarendon) 73, 178, 330, 411, 412, 436, 439–42
448, 467 and Scotland, 183–6, 196
hymnody 386, 401–2, 420, 430, 431–2, 469 see also Bible (Authorised Version)
hypothetical universalism 395 James VII and II 7, 51, 84, 109, 132–3, 171,
200–1, 205–6, 208, 221, 223, 283, 425,
iconoclasm 5, 335–6 450–1, 452, 469
Ignatius of Antioch 69, 70 Jekyll, John 81
imprisonment 7, 21, 132, 311 Jenkyn, William 68
of Baptists 122, 131 Jerome 58
of bishops 335, 413 Jessey, Henry 17, 122–6, 134, 369,
and Blasphemy Act (1648) 22 405, 459
Bunyan’s 132, 134, 307, 357, 365, 450 Jesuits 145, 147, 157, 201
of Congregationalists 108 Jewel, John 228, 437
of Covenanters 200 Jews 22, 25, 142, 145, 146, 275 382, 468
for critics of the Directory 452 eschatological role of 404
of early Stuart Puritans 440, 441 toleration of 37, 163, 205, 252, 314, 350
for morals offences 347 see also Apocrypha
of Presbyterians 68, 171, 174, 179, 296, 306, John, John ap 235
466, 467 Johnson, Francis 89, 93, 117–18, 119, 123, 164,
and prison sermons 449 357, 380
of publishers 361, 369, 379 Johnson, George 117–18
of Quakers in America 260, 269, 270, 271, Johnson, John 50
273, 276, 277–8, 279–80, 281, 283–4 Johnston of Wariston, Sir Archibald 187
of Quakers in England 25, 142, 159, 165, Johnston, Warren 451
309, 366, 399, 462, 467 Jollie, Thomas 264, 425, 432–3
of Quakers in Ireland 222 Jones, John 231
of royalists 140 Jones, Katherine (Viscountess
of Scottish Episcopalians 201 Ranelagh) 466–7
of Separatists 93, 116–17, 125, 164, 191, 227, Jones, Col. Philip 235
245, 297, 298, 299, 301, 366–7 Jones, Rufus 141, 149, 150, 152, 225
Independents Jones, R. Tudur 10
as label for Congregationalists 26–7, Jones, William 238
52, 85 Josselin, Ralph 15, 351
political 6, 405 justification by faith 25, 136, 358, 396–7, 400,
see also Aberdeen Independents; 401, 402–3, 406
Congregationalists
Instrument of Government 341, 344 Kaplan, Benjamin 315
Ireland 204–23 Keach, Benjamin 31, 354, 359, 366, 431–2
Baptists in 207, 214, 217, 219 Keeble, N.H. 16, 26, 31
Congregationalists in 207, 214, 216, 218, 219 Keith, George 149, 156, 270, 289
Presbyterians in 205–7, 209, 210–15, Keithian Schism 22, 268, 289
216–23 Kelly, Thomas 222
Quakers in 207, 214, 216, 217, 222 Kelsey, Thomas 170
see also Irish Articles; Irish Rebellion; Kent 103, 294, 302, 303, 305, 307, 486
regium donum Kidderminster 66, 105, 299, 350
Irenaeus 146 Kiffen, William 10–11, 26, 124–6, 127, 129, 133,
Irish Articles (1615) 210, 211 134, 383, 467, 477
Irish Rebellion (1641) 208, 348 Kilcop, Thomas 126
Italy 141, 391 Killeen, Kevin 444
Killing Times 199–200
Jacob, Henry 29–30, 52–3, 93–4, 122–4, 177, King Philip’s War 274–5
298, 304 King, William 220
Jacobites 206 Kirk, Robert 425–6, 427, 429, 431, 432
508 Index
kneeling for communion 75, 184–6, 328, 411–12 Lawrence, Richard 178
Knollys, Sir Francis 44 Lawrie, Gawen 284
Knollys, Hanserd 464 Leask, John 174
Knox, Andrew 186, 211 Le Clerc, Jean 379
Knox, John 4, 182, 189, 411–12, 414, 426 lectionary 379, 420
Koran 382 lectureships, Puritan 164, 171, 172, 298–9, 343,
Kreitzer, Larry 10–11 439, 443
Kyffin, Maurice 228 Led(d)ra, William 261, 267, 271–2
Lee, Edward Donne 227
Laccher, Petrus 175 Lee, Samuel 264
laity, the 31–2, 472–93 Legate, Bartholomew 391
apprehensions about 441 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 400
and the Bible 377–8, 382–4 Leighton, Robert 197
books for 386 L’Estrange, Roger 76, 363–4, 367, 368–9
clerical-lay distinction 62, 398, 405, 474 Levellers 3, 17, 18, 37, 102, 351, 367, 368, 383–4
and clerical vestments 43 and Baptists 130
in dissenting worship 430–1 and Quakers 140, 145, 151–2
as Feoffees 443 Levitin, Dmitri 381
in gathered churches 96, 257 Lewis, John 231
as godly magistrates 321, 324 liberalism, political 19–20, 34, 314
participation of 474–5 Liberal Party 225
as patrons 5, 26, 30, 43–4, 45, 47, 50, 67, 101, Liberation Society 225
102, 104, 241, 307, 342, 392, 439, 442, 466–7 Lilburne, John 20, 152, 367–8, 383
penalties against lay nonconformists 317 Limborch, Philipp van 176
Presbyterian 67–8, 77 Lincolnshire 118–19, 122, 136, 164, 301
and the prophesyings 438 Lindsay, David 186, 190
in Scotland 198 Lindsey, Alexander 190
in Westminster Assembly 418 Lindsey, Patrick 190
see also preaching (lay); women literacy 239, 359, 382, 383
Lake, Peter 13, 92 Livingstone, John 186–7, 211
Lambe, Barbara 458 Lloyd, William 237
Lambe, Thomas (merchant) 458 Llwyd, Morgan 229, 231–2, 234, 235, 241, 346
Lambe, Thomas (soapboiler) 395, 397, 417 Locke, John 7, 37, 176, 314, 316, 329, 473
Lambeth Articles 210 theology of 391, 401
Lamont, William 67 Lockyer, Nicholas 178, 194
Lancashire 103, 150, 154, 299, 301, 306, 309, Lollardy 3–4, 15, 293–4, 296, 300, 302, 308,
311, 322–3, 338 321, 378
Presbyterianism in 66, 68, 69, 70, 341 London
Lane, Josias 173 antinomianism 253, 397
Laney, Benjamin 84 Baptists 27, 122, 217, 219, 257, 304, 395, 417,
Langford, Jonas 262 472, 477, 490
Larkham, Thomas 105, 485n Catholics 349
Lasco, John à 45 as centre of dissent 2, 108, 282, 297–8, 300
Lathrop, John 122–6, 128 Civil War sequestrations in 339
Laud, William 6, 123, 172, 177, 245, 319, 335, Congregationalists 99, 103, 106, 108, 109,
338, 395, 415–16, 442–3, 457 122–9, 130, 131, 132, 134–5, 177, 365, 401–2
Laudianism 5–6, 12, 14, 52, 57, 339, 389, 395, Dissenters in 1689 425–6, 427, 431
415–16, 419, 459 Dissenting publishers 368–70
anti-Puritanism of 96, 98, 163, 295–6, 297, Durham House 442
299, 304 Elizabethan Puritans 439
dismantling of 335–6 Fifth Monarchists 463
in Ireland 206, 211 iconoclasm 335
in Scotland 187 Interregnum episcopalians 349
in Wales 228–30 lectureships 443
Lawrence, Henry 35 Livery Companies 450
Lawrence, John 369–70 Lollards 293
 Index509
Marian Protestants 294 marriage
Muggletonians 146 in the Cromwellian era 345–6
nonconformity 43 in the Directory 421–2
Presbyterians 16, 26, 48, 49, 57–9, 65–71, in Ireland 206
78, 109, 337, 338, 341, 344, 448, 450, 467 Quaker 274, 286, 308
Quakers 143–4, 149, 150, 165, 270, 272, 280, ring in 412
282, 284 in Scotland 201, 202
Ranters 398 and Plumbers’ Hall congregation 376
Restoration Dissent 310, 449 Marshall, Peter 3, 28–9
Root and Branch petitioners 336 Marshall, Stephen 57, 343
Seekers 151 Martindale, Adam 306
Separatists 2, 113, 117, 164, 209, 297–8, 301, Maryland 319–20
375–6, 383, 414 Martinich, A.P. 55–6
Socinians 392 martyrdom 221, 267, 270, 275–7, 279, 319–20
Southwark 52, 94, 297 Catholic 349
as Vanity Fair 365 of Charles I 448
Whig conspirators in 469–70 Quaker 158, 159, 268, 269, 271–2
see also Savoy Confession; Savoy and Restoration nonconformists 220
Conference; Stranger churches; Tower of revolutionary 319, 364, 369, 469
London; Westminster Assembly Separatist 227
Long, George 173 of Tudor Reformers 4, 294, 375, 437
Lord’s Prayer 148, 155, 339, 388, 415, 421 martyrology 3, 8, 140, 270, 271, 318–19, 331
Lord’s Supper, see communion Marvell, Andrew 30, 31, 354, 358, 361–2, 363,
Louis XIV 83, 310, 450 365, 367, 368
Love, Christopher 68 Marxist history 20–1, 377
love feasts 417 Mary II 109, 201, 425, 451
Loyola, Ignatius 157 Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) 47, 49, 324
Lucar, Mark 127 Mary Tudor (Mary I) 4, 42, 294, 317, 318, 367,
Lucy, William 237 376, 411, 413
Lumbrozo, Jacob 275 Maryland 275–7, 279, 319–20
Luther, Martin 146, 353, 375–6, 388, 394, 396, Mascall, Robert 264
436, 475 Massachusetts Bay Colony 23, 37, 95–6, 177,
Lutheranism 2, 4, 12, 35, 205, 388–9, 390, 178, 186–7, 238, 246–65, 270–3, 378, 380,
403, 406 384, 387, 397, 404, 416, 481
Lye, Thomas 448 Mather, Cotton 270, 289, 381
Lyford, John 95 Mather, Increase 263, 264, 270
Lynch, Katherine 459 Mather, Nathaniel 177, 270
Mather, Richard 270, 390
McCall, Fiona 339 Mathieson, Walter 189, 192
McCrie, Thomas 199 Matthew, Tobie 296
MacCulloch, Diarmaid 17, 86 Matthews, Nancy 446
McGregor, J.F. 151, 457 Maurice, Henry 236, 237–8
MacLachlan, Alastair 21 Maxwell, John 190
MacWard, Robert 179 maypoles 336, 490
Maden Jr., Richard 179 Mead, Matthew 179, 180, 451
Maitland, John 197, 199 Mede, Joseph 404
Maitland, William 182 medicine
Major-Generals, Cromwellian 342 as metaphor 316
Makemie, Francis 221 pastors and 168, 169–70, 172, 256
Man, William 490 reform of 140
Mandelbrote, Scott 386 meeting houses 8, 425
Manton, Thomas 370 Melanchthon, Philip 388, 436
Markwick, Thomas 450 Melville, Andrew 47, 60, 183–4
Marlow, Isaac 431–2 Mennonites 121, 126, 385, 407
Marprelate tracts 49–50, 227, 326, 366, see also Collegiants; Waterlanders
367–8, 379 Mentzer, Raymond 483
510 Index
Menzies, John 194 Native Americans 33, 267, 275–7, 280,
Methodism 8, 10, 26, 33, 34, 36, 240–1, 377, 402 287–8, 387
Primitive 398 Nayler, James 22, 141, 143, 149, 154, 155–9, 348,
Miles, John 234, 237, 238 399, 461–2
millenarianism 20, 27, 131, 155, 168, 174, 305, Neal, Daniel 8, 10, 11, 73, 331
336, 350, 403–5, 463 Negative Confession (1581) 182, 187, 188
in Wales 231, 232, 233, 235 Neile, Gervase 301
see also Fifth Monarchists Neile, Richard 295–6, 324, 395, 442
Millenary Petition (1603) 93, 412 Nesutan, Job 387
Miller, Perry 19 Netherlands
Milling, John 171 Delft 165–9, 172
Milton, Anthony 12–13, 14 Haarlem 165, 168, 169–71
Milton, John 6, 20, 29, 30, 31, 35, 75, 354, 355, Leiden 165, 168, 171–4
398, 406 Middleburg 93, 94, 174–76
Areopagitica 362 Rotterdam 98–9, 165, 168, 176–80, 464
De Doctrina Christiana 365, 393 see also Amsterdam; Arminius; Collegiants;
and toleration 222, 304 Dutch Reformed Church; Dutch Revolt;
Mirabello, Mark 198–9 exiles; Mennonites
miracles Nevis 282
and Catholicism 411 New Amsterdam 260, 277, 278
Quaker 139, 157 see also New York
Mitchelson, Margaret 384 Newcomen, Hannah 172
Monck, George 74 Newcomen, Matthew 57, 170–4
Monmouth Rebellion (1685) 133, 179, 221, New England 244–65, 270–3
450, 469 antinomians in 253–5
Montagu, Matthew 395 Baptists in 255–9
Moody, Lady Deborah 256, 277–8 ‘as a City upon a Hill’ 98, 246
Moore, R.I. 320 Quakers in 260–3, 270–3
Moore, Susan Hardman 15, 98, 103, 406 settling 245–7
More, Henry 148–9, 400 see also Congregationalists; Connecticut;
Morgan, Densil 16 New Haven; Massachusetts Bay;
Morgan, William 240 Plymouth; Rhode Island
Morice, Secretary 362 New England Company 245–6
Morrice, Roger 30, 73, 82, 84, 365 New Haven Colony 256–7, 258, 260–1
Morrill, John 30, 67, 216, 444 New Jersey 1, 25, 200, 268, 282–4
Morris, Samuel 173 Newman, Dorman 369–70
Morrissey, Mary 435 New Model Army 6, 67–8, 101, 159, 215–16,
Morton, Charles 264, 365 230, 305, 337, 340, 445–6, 447
Mostyn, Ambrose 231–2 Newton, Isaac 391
Muggleton, Lodowick 146, 148, 153, 156 New York 278, 283
Muggletonians 6–7, 25, 36, 141, 142, 153, 305–6 see also New Amsterdam
Muhammad 146 Niclaes, Hendri(c)k 140, 149–50, 300
Mullan, David 189 Nicodemites 149, 300
Muller, Richard 32 Niebuhr, Richard 26
multiconfessionalism 2 nonconformity
Münster Anabaptists 258 conformity and 4–5, 296–7
Murphy, Andrew 16, 33 and the Declaration of Indulgence 18, 450
music, church 412, 431–2, 433 and ‘Dissent’ 2, 28, 211, 245, 302–3, 305, 437
see also hymnody; psalm-singing early Stuart 56–7
Muslims 25, 252 Elizabethan 44, 48–9
see also Koran; Muhammad evangelical 33
Myddleton, Sir Thomas 231 in Ireland 204–13
and New England 246
naming (denominating) 26–9, 151, 319–20, 342 Nonconformist historiography 8–10,
National Covenant (1638) 182, 187–8, 189, 190, 224–5, 293–4, 331, 435
191, 197, 212, 384 print culture of 353–70
 Index511
Puritan 5, 7, 8 Oxford
and Quakers 279 bishop of 78
Restoration 76, 79–81, 107, 132, 143, Cavalier Parliament sits at 449–50
171, 180 Oxford Oath 80
in Scotland 182, 185–7, 196–7, 200 Oxford University
and the state 316–17 John Owen as Vice-Chancellor 104, 106,
in Wales 224–42 380, 392
Norbrook, David 465 John Wycliff and 3
Norfolk 93, 103, 108, 178, 339 printing at 368
see also Norwich Puritan purge of 339
Norton, Humphrey 260, 263 Puritanism at 43, 227
Norton, John 260–1, 263, 390 Regent’s Park College 9, 10
Norwich 133, 141, 460 Restoration ejections from 172, 173
Tudor 43, 113, 115–16, 294, 298–9 royalist 60
early Stuart 164, 177 William Penn at 283
Cromwellian 342
later Stuart 306, 307, 425 pacifism 25, 142–3, 154, 274–5
Nottingham, Samuel 309 Paget, John 57, 164–5
Nottinghamshire 118, 119, 301 Paget, Thomas 57, 67, 165
Noyse, James 249 Painter, Thomas 257
Nuttall, Geoffrey 10, 19, 88, 141, 142, 149, 150 Palatinate 206, 207, 221
Nye, Philip 98–9, 105, 177, 419 Palmer, Herbert 61
Palmer, Julia 469
Oakes, John 451 Papacy 349, 376, 389
Oath of Abjuration 349 as Antichrist 89, 90, 91, 145, 210, 403
oaths 68, 211, 251, 335, 389 see also anti-popery
of allegiance 170, 200, 201, 467 Paracelsians 148
casual 347, 348 parishes 293–311
clerical 50, 197 Park, Robert 165, 177
Quaker refusal of 25, 141, 149, 269, 276, Parker, Matthew 438
279, 308, 309, 318 Parker, Robert 93, 177
Test Oath 199 Parker, Samuel 361–2, 364, 448
see also Engagement Oath; Oxford Oath; Parker, Thomas 249
Protestation Oath Parkhurst, John 43
Ockford, James 129 Parkhurst, Thomas 16, 369–70
Oliver, Robert W. 135 parliament, English 13, 111, 157, 158, 218–19
Oostrum, Adriaan 165 Elizabethan 46, 49–50, 227, 299, 326, 353,
ordinances 417 413, 414–5
see also anointing; baptism; communion; early Stuart 326, 442–3
foot-washing; love feasts; sacraments Short (1640) 6, 335
ordination 47, 62, 63, 66, 69, 76, 79, 90, 186, Long (1640–53) 6, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63,
197, 249, 278, 338, 405, 445 64, 65, 71, 101, 230, 304, 326, 335–40,
Orgill, Barbara 469 348, 362, 390, 410, 416–18, 422, 443,
Origen 400, 401 444, 445
Ottoman Empire 141 Rump (1648–53) 68, 101, 104, 105, 231–2,
Overton, Richard 368, 383 340–1, 346, 348
Owen, John 69, 108–9, 194, 218, 264, 362, 366, Nominated (1653) 340–1, 345
380, 401, 405, 446 First Protectorate (1654–5) 105, 350
and Cromwellian settlement 104–6 Second Protectorate (1656–8) 105, 345,
on ‘the Church of England’ 13 347–8, 349, 399
and New England 264 Restored Rump (1659–60) 74
and Presbyterians 110–11 Convention (1660) 74
theological writings 32, 35, 130, 360, 381–2, Cavalier (1661–79) 15, 76, 80, 83, 107, 108,
392–4, 399, 404 131, 306, 424–5, 449–50
Owens, W.R. 386 Exclusion (1679–81) 132
Oxenbridge, John 172, 264 Parr, Susannah 461
512 Index
pastors perseverance, doctrine of 136, 394, 400
Baptist 10, 124–5, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135, 395 Peter, Hugh 164, 177, 448
in Baptist ecclesiology 405, 474, 483 Peters, Kate 158
in Baxter’s ecclesiology 70 Petrie Jr, Alexander 165–6, 168–9
Congregational 94, 98, 122–3, 177, 229, Petto, Samuel 481
248, 249, 254–5, 257, 360, 387, 401–2, Petty, Sir William 220
486, 489, 492 Phillip, George 248
in Congregational ecclesiology 91, 474, 483 Phillips, Henry 280
elegies for 479 Pietism 407
lay 10, 383 Puritanism as the first Protestant 397
Mennonite 385 pilgrimage
misbehaving 490 medieval 385, 389
Presbyterian 164–5, 167, 169, 171–7, 179 as a dissenting theme 356, 376
Separatist 95, 117, 164 see also Pilgrim’s Progress
in Separatist ecclesiology 116, 119 Pilgrims, Mayflower 164, 171, 245, 415
Patrick, Simon 69 Pilgrim’s Progress 35, 239, 354–5, 357, 365, 366
patristics 6, 12, 318, 392, 407, 436 Pilkington, James 43
see also Augustine; Ignatius; Irenaeus; Pinners’ Hall lectures 109
Jerome; Origen plain style
patronage 5, 26, 30, 43–4, 45, 47, 50, 67, 101, preaching 15, 436, 438
102, 104, 241, 307, 342, 392, 439, 442, Quaker 148, 269
466–7 Plumbers’ Hall congregation 113, 297–98, 375,
Paul, the Apostle 63, 146, 356, 357, 386, 394, 403, 414
396, 398, 402, 404, 427–8, 436, 440, Plymouth Brethren 213, 222
462–3, 480 Plymouth Colony 94–5, 120, 245, 246, 247,
Pauw, Petrus 167 251, 258–9, 261, 275
Payne, Ernest 10, 113 Ponet, John 319
Peace of Augsburg 204–5 Poole, Matthew 78, 370, 381
Pencak, William A. 288 Porter, John 279
Penn, William Potts, Thomas 165
in America 37, 165, 267–8, 282–9, 407 Powell, Hunter 100, 110
in England 26, 165, 366, 400, 451 Powell, Vasavor 463
imprisonment of 366 and Wales 230, 231, 232–3, 235, 236,
and James II 451 238, 346
in the Netherlands 165, 176 practical divinity 354–5, 392, 397
writings of 18, 149, 176, 328, 366 prayer 409–33
Penney, Norman 9, 142 clerical vs. lay 430, 432
Pennington Jr, Isaac 380, 398 in conventicles 185, 186
Pennsylvania 1, 16, 25, 37, 165, 238, 268, 269, extemporary vs. set 339, 344, 418–21
270, 282, 283, 284–9, 407 in the prophesyings 47
Penry, John 116–7, 226–8, 380 to the saints 293, 385, 389
Pentecostalism 26, 34 see also Book of Common Prayer;
Pepys, Samuel 436 Lord’s Prayer
Perkins, William 388, 436, 440, 441 preaching 342, 435–52
Perrot, John 22, 272, 281 Elizabethan and early Stuart 45, 48, 330,
persecution, justifications of 64–5, 76, 315–17, 437–43
363–4 in the English Revolution 444–7
persecution, forms of 22, 271, 317 field 133
assault 125, 132, 281 itinerant 23, 141, 158, 217, 231, 233, 238, 276,
capital punishment 4, 22, 222, 268, 269, 302, 305
271–2, 378 lay 25, 62, 131, 154, 155, 256, 383, 384, 398,
flogging 260, 272–3, 276, 277, 279–80, 305, 405, 417, 426, 444–7, 450, 452
335, 348, 399 ‘legal’ 254, 397
mutilation 260, 271, 280, 348, 399 legislation on 279, 317, 346, 349, 414
see also banishment; fines; imprisonment; parliamentary 104, 336
martyrdom Presbyterians and 69, 78, 81, 305, 306
 Index513
from prison 277 print culture 353–70
Puritan and Anglican 5, 15 see also books; booksellers; censorship
Restoration era 447–51 Proast, Jonas 316
seditious 173–4 prophets 20, 50, 217, 262, 302, 325, 376, 384,
silenced 132, 356, 357 398, 481, 489
theatrical 428–9 false 122, 146, 156–7, 263
in Wales 227, 228, 230, 233 preachers as 115
see also prophets; pulpits; women Quaker 25, 142, 144, 157, 158, 268, 276
predestination 4, 121, 184, 377, 394–6, 399, women 19, 25, 26, 384, 398, 401
401, 402, 406, 441–2, 443 prophesyings 47, 78–9, 177, 251, 256, 330, 417,
Presbyterians 438, 440, 455, 456, 462–5, 470
1689 and denominationalisation 28, 84 Protectorate, the Cromwellian 7, 68–9, 102,
Baxter and 18, 56, 62, 70 140, 341
and Calvinist soteriology 64, 69, 396, fall of 70, 106–7
401, 445 legitimacy of 235, 463
and communion 24, 62–3, 65–6, 78, 366 New England and 263
and Congregationalists 17, 21–22, 29–30, Quakers and 157, 159
49, 52–3, 57, 59–60, 61, 63–5, 69, 77, 79, and religious settlement 105, 218–9, 341–2,
85, 99–102, 105–8, 304–5, 337, 344, 401–2 392, 447
and discipline 42, 46, 48, 60, 63, 66, 70, Protestation Oath 335
167, 197, 337, 442 Protesters (Scottish) 193–4
early Stuart 51–3 Prynne, William 63, 141, 147, 148, 329, 335
Elizabethan 41–52 Prytherch, Lewis 238
in the English Revolution 55–71 psalm-singing 5, 47, 295, 339, 344, 412, 414–15,
on episcopacy 44–50, 52–3, 56–9, 60 420, 421, 425, 428, 430–2
and episcopalians 60, 64, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, pulpits 133, 425, 428–9
84–5, 424 purgatory 389
imprisonment of 68, 171, 174, 179, 296, 306, Puritanism
466, 467 and America 19
in Ireland 205–7, 209, 210–15, 216–23 Anglicanism and 4, 11–14, 15, 452
jure divino 18, 60, 67, 183, 219 anti- 50, 123, 131, 441, 448
later Stuart 73–86 and baptism 35
numerical size of 1, 76 and Cambridge University 43, 45, 50, 118,
and preaching 69, 78, 81, 305, 306 124, 259, 439
and ordination 79 and the Church of Ireland 210, 218
and Savoy Conference (1660) 75, 424, conformable 299
430, 434 and conscience 111
and synods 42, 48, 50, 53, 58, 61, 65, 89, 92 contrasted with Scottish
and toleration 64–5, 70, 77, 81, 83, 84, 108, Presbyterianism 183
111, 201 defining 244–5, 412
in Wales 69, 225, 227, 231, 234, 235 and education 383
see also comprehension; Covenanters; and establishment 15–17, 71, 264–5, 303–4,
Scotland; Westminster Assembly 313, 325–6, 329, 334, 353, 446
Preston, John 395 and exile 37, 96, 98, 163, 210
Price, William 60, 165 historiography of 8, 11–14, 19–21, 73, 110
Prichard, Rees 239 and liberty 20, 36–7
Pride’s Purge (1648) 74, 101, 340 and literature 31
Pride, Thomas 101 moderate/conservative 55–6, 69, 79, 94,
Primitive Methodists 34, 398 298, 337, 350, 452
primitivism 403–4, 480 piety 385–6, 397
anti-Trinitarian 391–2 preaching 435–6, 449
Baptist 27, 133–4, 136, 400 Presbyterian 42, 330
Congregational/Separatist 90, 457 Puritan Dissenters 264
episcopal 13, 57–8, 60 and Quakers 114, 115, 260–3, 270–3, 398
Presbyterian 45 radical 20, 91, 94, 114, 115, 398, 401, 405
Quaker 139, 145, 400, 405 and Restoration conformity 306
514 Index
Puritanism (cont.) Ranters 6, 17, 18, 20, 25, 31, 36, 348, 369, 380,
as source of Dissent 2, 4–7, 36, 107, 114, 115, 395, 398
125, 141, 155, 299–301, 302–3, 398, 407, 480 and Quakers 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148,
as a term 28–9, 295 149–50, 152–3, 260, 274
and theology 253, 389 Rathband, William 57
Welsh reception of 226–8, 230, 233, 342, 346 Reay, Barry 139, 142, 145, 152
in the Westminster Assembly 60, 99–100 Rees, Thomas 224–5
women 30–1, 384–5 Reeve, John 146, 305
Puritan Revolution, the 24, 102, 263, 334–51 Reformation
see also English Revolution Counter- 83
Puritan Whigs 7, 15 Cromwellian 218
English 3–5, 12, 41–2, 89, 113, 294, 325,
Quakers 139–59, 267–90 378, 431
anti-sacramentalism of 25, 148, 149, 153, European 35, 45
155, 268, 398 further 13, 46–50, 52, 55, 57, 58, 65, 67,
Baptists and 140–2, 145, 147, 153, 305, 310, 71, 73, 188, 313, 324, 326, 334–46, 418,
400–1, 407, 418 437, 439
books of sufferings 8, 25, 158, 269, 280, Irish 204, 206, 207–9
309, 319 long 5
campaign against tithes 139, 140, 141, 142, magisterial 12, 23, 35, 316, 320–21, 405,
155, 222, 280, 305, 308, 309, 346 406–7
in the Caribbean 281–2 parochial 105
Congregationalists and 18, 141, 155, 260–3, post- 5, 64, 389, 390
267, 270–3, 400–1 Quaker threat to 141, 144, 147, 148, 398–400
in Ireland 214, 216–17, 222 Radical 20, 35, 397, 406–7
and Levellers 140, 145, 151–2 Scottish 182, 202
and marriage 274, 286, 308 Separatist 114–18
as martyrs 159, 268, 269, 271–2 theology 375–6, 394, 396, 402
and miracles 139, 157 Welsh 226–8
in New England 260–3 see also Anabaptists; Calvinism;
numerical size of 1, 7, 139 Lutheranism
and oaths 25, 141, 149, 269, 276, 279, 308, reformation of manners 51, 327, 347–51
309, 318 Reformed orthodoxy 32, 377, 381, 387–93,
primitivism of 139, 145, 400, 405 395, 396, 398–402
and prophecy 25, 142, 144, 157, 158, 268, 276 Reformed Protestantism
in Scotland 195–6, 199, 200–1 ‘the best Reformed Churches’ 337, 422
and the Spirit 144, 150, 155, 261, 262, 272, and the Church of England 4–5, 12, 43, 62,
384, 398–9, 400, 418, 423, 431 65, 83, 335, 389–90
theology of 398–401 and Congregationalism 53
in Virginia and Maryland 279–80 Dutch Reformed in America 277, 278
in Wales 234–8 European 4, 12, 23, 42, 46, 47, 55, 58, 71, 93,
women 142, 144, 165, 260–3, 270, 271–3, 114, 116, 166, 180, 188, 207, 337, 380, 414,
279–80, 305, 309, 358–9, 398, 405 415, 485
see also hat honour; New Jersey; expatriate English Reformed churches 164,
Pennsylvania; speech styles; women 166, 169, 171, 174, 177, 180
Quantin, Jean-Louis 381 Irish 208, 210
Quick, John 174–5, 176 modern 34
Scottish 183, 184, 185, 187–8
radicalism 17, 179, 271, 298, 302, 337–8, 340, worship in 409–33
346, 348, 350, 351, 406, 469–70 see also Calvinism; Stranger churches
historiography 20, 143, 248, 455 regicide 6, 68, 101, 104, 141, 318, 446, 447,
see also Baptists; Quakers; Separatists 448, 460
Raffe, Alasdair 198 regicides 68, 231, 364, 369, 460
Rainolds, John 378 regium donum 207
Ramus, Petrus 436 regulative principle 414
Ranew, Nathaniel 369 see also sola scriptura
 Index515
Remonstrants, Dutch 400 Rush, John 488, 490
republicanism 319 Russel, Francis (Earl of Bedford) 44
ecclesiastical 42 Rust, George 401
godly 130, 233, 236, 365 Rutherford, Samuel 17, 60, 100, 185, 187,
Renaissance 324 193, 419
republic, English 340 Ruthven Raid 183
Resolutioners (Scottish) 68, 193–4 Rydell, Ellen 449
Restoration settlement, see acts of parliament Rye House Plot (1683) 109, 171, 179, 221
(1661–65); Savoy Conference Ryrie, Alec 475
Revelation, Book of 58, 146, 154, 376, 384,
403–4, 405, 463, 468 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 46, 47
see also Antichrist; millenarianism St Paul’s Cathedral 342
Reyner, John 178 sabbatarianism 336, 347, 397, 421, 427, 443,
Reynolds, Edward 430 485, 489
rhetoric 365–7, 435–6, 444 Seventh-day 24, 129–30, 302
Rhineland 42, 89, 176 sacraments 410–33
Rhode Island 37, 252, 255, 256, 257, 260–62, administered by clergy or church
268, 269, 273–5, 277, 279, 282 401 officers 95, 119, 167
Rich, Lady Mary 466 in the English Revolution 343
Rich, Robert (2nd Earl of Warwick) 57 exclusion from 95–6
Richards, Thomas 225, 234 hallmark of a true church 375
Richardson (nee Hering), Dorcas 166 as identity markers 23–4
Richardson, Edward 165–8, 169–71, 173–4, or ‘ordinances’ 407, 417
178–9 Quaker rejection of 25, 148, 149, 153, 155,
Richardson, Samuel 127 268, 398
Richter, Daniel K. 288 theology of 404–6
Ridley, Nicholas 294 in the Thirty-Nine Articles 389
Riggs, Edward 178 see also baptism; communion
Ritor, Andrew 257 Salter’s Hall 394
Rivers, Isabel 32 Sampson, Henry 173
Roberts, Stephen 231 Sandys, Edwin 43
Robeson, Andrew 200 Sassamon, John 387
Robinson, John 89, 93, 95, 119–20, 123, 164, Saunders, Julius 486
177, 301, 380 Savage, Sarah 468–9
Robinson, Jonathan 369–70 Savoy Conference (1661) 75, 424, 430, 434
Robinson, William 261, 268, 271, 279 Savoy Confession/Declaration (1658) 106,
Rogers of Dedham, John 428, 442 219, 325, 358, 391, 392, 404
Rogers, John (Independent) 218, 461, 481 Scaliger, Joseph 379
Rogers, Richard 415 Scambler, Edmund 295
Rogers, William 369 Schneider, Carol 57–8
Root and Branch petition 44, 52, 230, 326, scholasticism 381, 389–90, 393, 399, 407
336, 443 scribal publication 30, 52, 158
Rose, Jacqueline 2, 15, 22 Scripture, see Bible
Rothe, Sir Johannes 168 schoolteachers 205, 349
Rous, John 271, 281 Scobell, Henry 106
Rous, Thomas 281 Scotland 182–202
Row, John 194 and national Church ideal 183–4
Row, William 186, 188 see also Acts of Parliament; Covenanters;
royal supremacy 5, 41, 46, 52, 58, 65, 92, 188, General Assembly; Protesters;
199, 205, 361 Resolutioners
see also Act of Supremacy Scott, James (Duke of Monmouth) 133,
Rudyard, Thomas 284 450, 469
Rule, Gilbert 173 see also Monmouth’s Rebellion
Rulice, Johannes 165 Scott, Jonathan 17
Rump Parliament 68, 74, 231–2 Scott, Sir Walter 195
rural dissent 231, 299–303, 305, 307–11 Scottish Prayer Book (1637) 6, 187, 416
516 Index
Scribner, R.W. 320 Smolenski, John 288, 289
Seaman, Lazarus 61 Smyth, John 118–22, 164, 301, 304
Searle, Alison 466 social status of dissenters
Searle, Governor David 281 aristocracy 5, 26, 466–7
Second Civil War (1648) 101, 446 artisans 146, 154, 307–8, 380, 383–4
Seekers 22, 26, 36, 234, 382, 405 farming community 154, 299–301, 308, 309
and Quakers 18, 140, 141, 148, 151, 152, 155 gentry 5, 26, 31, 44, 225, 227, 235, 237, 239,
Selden, John 63, 379 295, 304, 330, 439, 450, 487
Sell, Alan 10 merchants 10, 26, 149, 151, 166, 170, 176, 261,
Separatists 11, 21 262, 271, 298, 383, 392, 477, 484
and Congregationalism 88–98, 101–02, middling sort 300, 303, 305–9, 383, 482
418, 449 poorer sort 154, 274, 284, 300, 303, 305–6,
Elizabethan 2, 5, 22, 49, 113–18, 183, 296–7, 359, 386, 445, 459, 460, 482, 485
298, 375–6, 380, 390, 403, 414–15 Socinianism 69, 265, 357, 390, 391–2, 393,
early Stuart 6, 118–25, 298, 301, 310, 335 406–7
English Revolution era 62, 335, 340, 344, Socinus, Faustus 391
383, 384 Soderlund, Jean 288
in exile 163–64, 171 Solemn League and Covenant 59, 68, 192, 214,
in Ireland 209 337, 416, 418
in New England 245–6 in Restoration era 70–71, 76, 369
Restoration 108–09, 307, 350, 366 Somerset 133
in Scotland 186, 187, 194 Southcombe, George 17, 31
in Wales 229 South Korea 34, 35
women 384, 457, 458 Southworth, John 349
Septuagint 155, 378–9 Sowle, Andrew 369
Servetus, Michael 4 Sowle, Jane 369
Sewel, William 141 Sowle, Tace 369
sexual behaviour 128, 145, 146–7, 338, 347, Spademan, John 177
472–3, 475, 486, 489–90, 492 Spain 22, 47, 141, 208, 440
see also discipline; reformation of manners Spalding, John 191
Sharp, Anthony 285 Spang, William 174–5
Sharp, James 197, 199 Spang Jr, William 174
Shattock, Samuel 272 speech styles 25, 26, 141, 142, 158, 159, 378
Shaw, W.A. 51, 56 Spencer, John 127
Shawe, John 306 Spilsbury, John 124–8
Sheils, Bill 15, 32 Spinoza, Benedict 382, 400
Sheldon, Archbishop 361, 449 Spiritualism 141, 397, 406–7
Shepard, Thomas 250, 254, 258, 354, 390 Spottiswood, John 190
Shepheard, Nicholas 174 Spufford, Margaret 31–2
Sherlock, William 363, 401 Sprunger, Keith 166
Shropshire 67, 232, 300 Spurlock, Scott 16
Simmonds, Martha 462 Spurr, John 84, 441, 442
Simmonds, Thomas 462 Spurstowe, William 57
Simmons, Nevill 364 Staffordshire 79, 150, 306
Simpson, James 171 Stanton, John 490
Simpson, Mary 456, 460 Star Chamber 50, 296, 443
Simpson, Sidrach 98, 105, 177 Staresmore, Sabine 298
Sinclair, John 166 Steele, Richard 365
Sippell, Theodore 150 Stennett, Edward 129–30
Skelton, George 490 Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter 430
Skelton, Samuel 95–6, 251 Stevenson, David 192, 193
Smith, Anne 469 Stevenson, Marmaduke 261, 263
Smith, Francis 369 Stewart, James 199
Smith, George 200 Stewart, James (Earl of Arran) 183
Smith, John 380 Stillingfleet, Edward 363
Smith, Nigel 31 Stone, Lawrence 443
 Index517
Stone, Samuel 249 toleration 314–15, 325–31
Strang, John 188 Anglican critics of 315–17, 363
‘Stranger’ churches 222, 298, 329, 413, 414 Congregationalists and 101–2, 104, 108, 111
Strasbourg 4, 413–14 Cromwellian 6–7, 101–2, 340, 422, 460
Strype, John 73 Dutch 116, 176
Stubbs, John 274 in Ireland 205–6, 221, 222
Stuyvesant, Peter 277–8 in New England 252, 264, 274, 282
subscription 24, 166, 206, 393, 407 Presbyterians and 64–5, 70, 77, 81, 83, 84,
to Book of Common Prayer 107, 212 108, 111, 201
to Scottish Covenants 182, 188–9, 190 in Scotland 14, 194–6, 199, 200, 201–2
to Thirty-Nine Articles 212, 401 theorists of 222, 252, 256, 285, 304, 314,
to Westminster Confession 35, 64–5, 329, 464, 467
394, 460 Toleration Act (1689) 83, 452, 465
Suffolk 93, 103, 108, 113, 173, 300, 302, 306 effects of 8, 18, 84, 135, 180, 205, 223, 240,
surplice 43, 328, 336 310, 311, 425
see also vestments limits of 2, 7, 109, 401
Surrey 60, 175, 342, 450 Tombes, John 17, 405
Sutton, Katherine 464 Tomkins, John 129
Swarthmoor Hall 235, 467 Tomkins, Thomas 362
Swinton, John 195 Tompkins, Mary 279–80
Symonds, Joseph 177 Tories 8, 450
Symonds, Richard 231 Tory, Robert 174–5
Sydserff, Thomas 186, 187, 190 Tower of London 165, 335, 338, 366
synods transubstantiation 411
Congregational 23, 24, 255, 264 Trapnell, Anna 30, 384, 463, 465
Presbyterian 42, 48, 50, 53, 58, 61, 65, Traske, John 302
89, 92 Travers, Walter 43–50, 52
Scottish 191, 197, 201 Trevett, Christine 464
Synod of Dort 390, 394, 395, 406 Triers and Ejectors 17, 68, 105, 219, 341, 342, 447
Trinity, doctrine of 60, 136, 212, 215, 275, 360,
Taylor, Christopher 286 377, 389, 391–4, 399, 401, 402
Taylor, Edward 31, 264, 385 see also Arianism; Socinianism; Unitarians
Taylor, Jeremy 16, 216, 219, 222 Trinity College Dublin 209, 210
Taylor, John 345 Turner, Robert 268
Teate, Faithful 219 Turner, William 43, 44–5
Teellinck, Johannes 174 Twyn, John 365
Temple, Thomas 261 Tyacke, Nicholas 12
Ten Commandments 130, 388, 396, 421 Tyndale, William 4, 29, 367, 378, 379, 383, 403
Terrill, Edward 147, 478 Tyton, Francis 79
thanksgiving, days of 250, 415, 421, 427
theatres 310, 347 Ulster 186–7, 191, 208, 211–16, 220–1
Thirty-Nine Articles 5, 119, 135, 210, 212, 379, Underwood, A.C. 135
388–89, 390, 401 Unitarians 9, 205, 392
Thirty Years War 440–1 universities see Cambridge, Edinburgh,
Thomas, Sir Keith 30, 454, 470 Oxford, St Andrews, Trinity College
Thomas, Robert 173 Dublin
Thomason, George 354 Upcher, Thomas 302
Thompson, E.P. 20 Ussher, James 14, 60, 69–70, 75, 80, 186, 212, 395
Thompson, Joshua 135
Throckmorton, Job 227 van Barrefelt, Jansen 149
Thorne, George 178 Van Dixhoorn, Chad 30, 99
Thurgood, Rose 459 van Schie, Wilhelm 166
tithes 232, 340–41, 342, 343 Vane Jr, Sir Henry 378, 393
Baptists against 341, 346, 405 execution of 318–19
Quakers against 139, 140, 141, 142, 155, 222, in Massachusetts 253, 254, 397
280, 305, 308, 309, 346 as Seeker 405
518 Index
Venn, Anne 460 Wentworth, Thomas 187, 206, 211–12
Venn, John 460 Wesley, John 402
Venner, Thomas 131, 143, 325 Wesleyans 9
Vermigli, Peter Martyr 388 West, Benjamin 288
Vernon, Elliot 15, 101 West Indies, see Caribbean
vestments, clerical 5, 25, 44–5, 113, 336, Westminster Assembly, the 6, 14, 30, 59–63,
342, 376 337, 338, 358
Vincent, Nathaniel 450 Annotations 381
Virginia 1, 94, 123, 199, 221, 279–80, 288 and antinomianism 396
Vivers, Margaret 462 Catechism 35, 409
Vokins, Joan 278–9 Confession 23, 35, 64–5, 106, 214–15,
voluntarism 13, 18, 95, 96, 331, 407, 480 218–19, 379, 390–1, 393–4, 404, 460
critics of 368
Wade, Robert 286 Directory 64–5, 410, 416–26, 445
Wadsworth, Thomas 70 and divine right Presbyterianism 60–3, 70
Waldegrave, Robert 367 and Ireland 214–15
Wales 1, 2, 8, 16, 225–42 and New England 247
Baptists in 129, 225, 234, 235, 237, 238, 242 and ordination 445, 447
Congregationalists in 106, 224–5, 231–2, party alignments in 17, 28, 59–63, 99–101,
234–5, 236–8, 241 177, 405, 406
Dissenting historiography in 224–6 and Scotland 59–60, 192, 201
Presbyterians in 69, 225, 227, 231, 234, 235 and Wales 225
Propagation Commission 231–5, 346 see also Dissenting Brethren
Puritan weakness in 226–8, 230, 233, Westmorland 154, 339
342, 346 Wharton, Nehemiah 445
Quakers in 234–8 Wheelwright, John 254–5, 263
Separatists in 227 Whig history 3, 33, 225, 284, 469
Welsh Bible 226–7, 228, 239, 240 Whigs 85, 132, 369, 466, 469–70
Welsh Trust 239–40, 359–60, 387 Puritan 7, 15
see also Cardiff; Wrexham Whitaker, William 78
Walker, Henry 481 Whitbread, William 487
Walker, John 8 White, B. R. 114, 125, 128, 129, 135
Wallington, Nehemiah 26 White, John 385
Wallis, Ralph 31, 358, 366–7, 368 Whitefield, George 402
Walsingham, Sir Francis 50 Whitehead, George 141
Walter, Henry 231 Whitford, Walter 190
Walwyn, William 102, 383–4 Whitgift, John 46, 48–9, 302, 326, 379, 438–9
Ward, Constance 469 Whitrowe, Joan 464
Ward, John 152, 177 Whitsun 339, 343, 411
Warsaw Confederation 205 Whittingham, William 42, 378
Warwickshire 49, 136, 173, 486 Wiburn, Percival 295–6
Waterlanders 121 Wight, Sarah 459–60
Watson, Thomas 429 Wightman, Edward 391
Watson, William 190–1 Wilcox, Thomas 46
Watts, Isaac 386, 401–2 Wild, Robert 31, 79–80, 81–2, 358
Watts, Michael 9–10, 12, 16, 29, 30, 31, 33, 76–7 Wildman, John 491
Waugh, Dorothy 260, 277 Wilkinson, John 173
Weber, Max 23, 383, 461 Willard, Samuel 249
Webster, Tom 55, 57 William III 109, 135, 201, 207, 425, 451
Wedderburn, James 190 Williams, David 238
weddings, see marriage Williams, Henry 238–9
Weimer, Adrian 16, 33 Williams, Roger 20, 26, 30, 222, 274, 383,
Weir, George 195 401, 405
Weld(e), Thomas 164, 254–5, 460 in New England 37, 246, 247, 248, 250–3,
Welford, Robert 296–7 256, 314
Wentworth, Anne 465 against Quakers 150, 274, 401
 Index519
Williamson, Sir Joseph 77 as patrons 26, 466–7
Wilson, George 279 persecution of 125, 132, 200
Wilson, John (minister) 254–5, 261 as petitioners 196
Wilson, John (playwright) 222 poor 386, 459
Wilson, Thomas 124 as preachers/prophets 19, 25, 26, 165,
Wiltshire 59–60, 322 253–5, 384, 398, 401, 474
Winship, Michael 79, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 107, Quaker 142, 144, 165, 260–3, 270, 271–3,
110, 125, 253 279–80, 305, 309, 358–9, 398, 405
Winstanley, Gerrard 20, 30, 153–4 in the Restoration era 19, 455–7,
Winthrop, John 95–6, 209, 246–8, 251–2, 465–70
253–5, 256, 261, 270, 378, 416 Separatist 384, 457, 458
Winthrop Jr, John 262, 273 singing in church 431–2
Winthrop, Margaret 261 as wives 118, 135, 172, 173, 175, 234, 255, 257,
Winthrop, Samuel 261–2, 263, 273 286, 359, 368–9, 384, 385, 458–9, 462,
Winthrop, Stephen 259 466, 490
witchcraft 198, 486 Woodcock, Thomas 179
Quakers accused of 144 Woodforde, James 402
Wither, George 31, 358 Woodward, Richard 165
Witherhead, Mary 277 Worcester House Declaration (1660) 75, 424
Witter, William 257 Worcestershire Association 105
Wodrow, Robert 199 Worden, Blair 74
Wolseley, Charles 329 Wrexham 227, 229, 231, 232, 235, 238, 240
women 454–70 Wright, Abraham 436
as authors 30, 358–9, 384–5 Writer, Clement 382
Baptist 19, 128, 145, 256–7, 456, 457–8, 463, Wroth, William 225, 228–30
464–5, 467, 469 Wycliffe, John 3–4, 378
and church discipline 489
as church members 307, 457, 489 York 168, 308, 346
Congregationalist 19, 26, 253–5, 384–5, archbishop of 43, 295–6, 301
454, 456, 457, 459–60, 461, 463, 465 Yorkshire 20, 103, 108, 150, 154, 167, 284,
and dress 117, 251, 454n, 459 301–2, 306, 307, 311, 339
in the English Revolution 460–5 Young, Thomas 57, 171n
Fifth Monarchist 384, 457, 463, 464 Yount, David 288
as founders of congregations 135
heresiographers on 127, 417, 445, 457, 461 Zambia 34
historiography 30–1, 454–7 Zook, Melinda 469, 470
as martyrs 261, 267, 271–2 Zurich 4, 5, 413, 438
Meetings of 25, 272–3, 276, 281, 286, 308 Zwingli, Ulrich 5, 63