Church Life: Pastors, Congregations,

and the Experience of Dissent in

Seventeenth-Century England Michael
Davies
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CHURCH LIFE
 Church Life
Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience
of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England

Edited by
M IC HA E L DAV I E S ,
A N N E DU NA N - PAG E ,
and
J O E L HA L C OM B

1
 1
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 Acknowledgements

The origins of this volume lie in a one-day conference, ‘Church Life: Pastors &
their Congregations’, held at Dr Williams’s Library, London, on 9 November
2013. With the assistance of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, the
Institut Universitaire de France, and Aix-Marseille Université, it was organized
as part of the ‘Dissenting Experience’ project: an initiative established in 2012
to explore and promote the history and literature of early Baptist, Congregational,
and Presbyterian churches in Britain and Ireland, particularly through their
manuscript records (for further information see https://dissent.hypotheses.
org). We would like to thank all of those who participated and attended on this
occasion, but especially Isabel Rivers, James Vigus, and David Wykes for their
invaluable help, advice, and support in making possible an event one substan-
tial outcome of which is this collection. We are grateful to this volume’s con-
tributors not only for their scholarship and erudition but also for responding so
generously to our requests and suggestions, and suffering so patiently our edi-
torial interventions. We would like to acknowledge the generous assistance of
the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia in bearing
the costs of the cover image for this volume. Last, but in no way least, we are
deeply indebted to Tom Perridge and Karen Raith at Oxford University Press
for their encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and serenity in seeing this book
into print, both for and with us.
MD, ADP, & JH
 List of Figures

3.1 Undated plan of St. Paul’s Cathedral before the fire of 1666. 74
9.1 Portrait of John Bunyan by Thomas Sadler (1684). 179
9.2 Portrait of Ebenezer Chandler (artist and date unknown). 180
 List of Abbreviations

Full publication details of any work not included in the list below are given in the first
reference cited within any chapter, with subsequent references appearing in short-form
style. All pre-1800 works are published in London, unless otherwise indicated, and
details of publishers are not usually included.

BARS Bedfordshire Archives and Record Service

BDBR Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the
Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert
Zaller, 3 vols (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982–4)
BL British Library
BQ Baptist Quarterly
Brachlow Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical
Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988)
BS Bunyan Studies
CCAL Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library
CCRB N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Calendar of the
Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 2 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991): reference is to letters by number
CH Church History
CL Congregational Library, London
CR A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1934)
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic series
Durston & Eales Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The
Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996)
Durston & Maltby Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds.), Religion
in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2006)
DWL Dr Williams’s Library, London
EHR English Historical Review
English Presbyterians C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short, and Roger
Thomas, The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan
Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1968)
xii List of Abbreviations

Entring Book Mark Goldie (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice,
7 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007–9)
Firth & Rait C. H. Firth and S. R. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of
the Interregnum 1642–1660, 3 vols (London: His Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1911)
Goldie, Morrice Mark Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The
Entring Book, 1677–1691 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016)
Halcomb, ‘Congregational’ Joel Halcomb, ‘A Social History of Congregational
Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution’
(unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2009)
HJ Historical Journal
Inventory Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page,
and Joel Halcomb, An Inventory of Puritan and
Dissenting Records, 1640–1714 (2016), available online at:
http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/online-
publications/dissenting-records
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JURCHS Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
Minutes H. G. Tibbutt (ed.), The Minutes of The First Independent
Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford 1656–1766,
PBHRS, 55 (1976)
MPWA Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.), The Minutes and Papers of the
Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012)
NRO Norfolk Record Office
Nuttall & Chadwick Geoffrey F. Nuttall and Owen Chadwick (eds.), From
Uniformity to Unity 1662–1962 (London: S.P.C.K., 1962)
Nuttall, Visible Saints Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way
1640–1660, 2nd edn (Weston Rhyn: Quinta Press, 2001)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed.
H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004); now online at: http://
www.oxforddnb.com/
OED Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, prepared by
J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); now online at:
http://www.oed.com/
OHA Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism,
Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c.1520–1662 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017)
PBHRS Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society
 List of Abbreviations xiii

PP Past & Present

Rel. Bax. Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (1696):
reference is to part, page, and, where appropriate,
section number plus, in brackets, any point enumerated
in a section, e.g., Rel. Bax., i. 20, §30; Rel. Bax., iii. 193,
§79 (II: 3)
RPCO Angus Library and Archive, Regent’s Park College, Oxford
Shaw William A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during
the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth 1640–1660,
2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1900)
SRO Suffolk Record Office
TCHS Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society
TNA The National Archives, Kew
Tolmie, Triumph Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate
Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977)
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Watts M. R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the
French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
White, Baptists B. R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth
Century, 2nd edn (Didcot: The Baptist Historical
Society, 1996)
 Notes on Contributors

Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool,

and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting Experience’ project.
Among his publications is Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the
Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002). He is co-editor (with
W. R. Owens) of The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford University
Press, 2018). 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
(LERMA, E.A. 853), and one of the founding members of the ‘Dissenting
Experience’ project. Her books include Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan,
‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Peter Lang, 2006),
The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge University Press, 2010),
Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture (Ashgate, 2008, with
Beth Lynch), and L’Expérience puritaine. Vies et récits de dissidents, XVIIe–XVIIIe
siècle (Cerf, 2017). She is currently co-editing the correspondence of Sir Thomas
Browne for a new edition of his Complete Works (forthcoming, Oxford
University Press).
Crawford Gribben is Professor of Early Modern British History at Queen’s
University Belfast. He has research interests in the literary cultures of
puritanism and evangelicalism. He is the author of a number of books in this
area, including God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland
(Oxford University Press, 2007) and John Owen and English Puritanism:
Experiences of Defeat (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Polly Ha is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia.
She is the author of English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford University
Press, 2011), and (with Patrick Collinson) co-editor of The Reception of
Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2010), and chief
editor of The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press, 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 is currently completing
another critical edition of late Elizabethan puritan sources for Oxford
University Press and working on Independence in the English Revolution,
and conspiracy and innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
xvi Notes on Contributors

Joel Halcomb is 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 (Oxford
University Press, 2012) and, with Patrick Little and David Smith, is co-editing
volume three of The Writing and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (forthcoming,
Oxford University Press). He is also preparing for publication a monograph
on the Congregational movement during the British Civil Wars.
Ann Hughes is Professor Emerita at Keele University where she served as
Professor of Early Modern History from 1995–2014. She is the author of many
articles and books on religion, culture, and politics in the seventeenth century,
including Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford
University Press, 2004) and Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge,
2011). With Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, she has edited The
Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her
current projects focus on Parliamentarian preaching in the 1640s and 1650s,
and on the career and religious manuscripts of the London Presbyterian
merchant, Walter Boothby.
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 (Clarendon Press, 1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later
Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester University Press, 1987), The Restoration:
England in the 1660s (Blackwell, 2002), and, with Geoffrey F. Nuttall, a two-
volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Clarendon Press,
1991). He has edited four collections of original essays, texts by John Bunyan,
Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, and, with
John Coffey, Tim Cooper, and Thomas Charlton, Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae
Baxterianae (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Kathleen Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Her research has focused on
seventeenth-century devotional texts as they were shaped by the twinned
regulations of religion and the book trade. She is currently examining the idea
of ‘visible saints’ as a contested keyword, taking the term as an opening to
performative, or embodied, aspects of godliness within Nonconformist worship
in London after the Restoration. Her book, Protestant Autobiography in the
Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford University Press, 2012), was
awarded the Richard L. Greaves Prize by the International John Bunyan
Society in 2013.
 Notes on Contributors xvii

Chad Van Dixhoorn is Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological

Seminary in Philadelphia. His research interests centre on post-Reformation
theology and the Westminster Assembly. He is author of God’s Ambassadors: The
Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of Preaching in England, 1643–1653
(Reformation Heritage Books, 2017) and Confessing the Faith: A Reader’s
Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Banner of Truth, 2014), and
editor of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652
(Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing for publication with
Oxford University Press a major monograph on the Westminster Assembly.
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 on the
London Presbyterian movement during the 1640s and 1650s, he is editor
(with Philip Baker) of The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the
Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and
(with Hunter Powell) Church Polity in the British Atlantic World, c.1636–89
(forthcoming, Manchester University Press).
 Introduction
Gathered Church Life and the Experience of Dissent

Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

At a full assembly of the Church at Bedford the 21th of the 10th moneth.
After much seeking God by prayer, and sober conference formerly had,
the congregation did at this meeting with joynt consent (signifyed by
solemne lifting up of their hands) call forth and appoint our brother John
Bunyan to the pastorall office or eldership. And he accepting therof gave
up himself to serve Christ and his church in that charge, and received of
the elders the right hand of fellowship.
The same time also, the congregation having had long experience of the
faithfulnes of brother John Fenne in his care for the poor, did after the
same manner solemnly choose him to the honourable office of a deacon,
and committed their poor and purse to him, and he accepted thereof and
gave up himself to the Lord and them in that service.
The same time and after the same manner, the Church did solemnely
approove of the gifts of, (and called to the worke of the ministery) these
brethren:—John Fenne, Oliver Scott, Luke Astwood, Thomas Cooper,
Edward Dent, Edward Isaac, Nehemiah Coxe, for the furtherance of the
worke of God, and carrying on thereof, in the meetings usually maintained
by this congregation as occasion and opportunity shall by providence be
ministred to them. [. . .]
The congregation did also determine to keep the 26th of this instant as
a day of fasting and prayer, both here, and at Hanes, and at Gamlinghay,
solemnely to recommend to the grace of God, brother Bunyan, brother
Fenne and the rest of the brethren, and to intreat his gracious assistance
and presence with them in their respective worke whereunto he hath
called them.1

1 Minutes, 71–2.

Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb, Introduction: Gathered Church Life and the
Experience of Dissent. In: Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in
Seventeenth-Century England. Edited by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb,
Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198753193.003.0001
2 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

The significance of this brief record of a meeting held somewhere in Bedford

on 21 December 1671 has not been lost on historians of seventeenth-century
Dissent. For it was here that the great Nonconformist preacher and writer John
Bunyan was elected to the ‘eldership’ of the Congregational church at Bedford.
A member since the early 1650s, Bunyan would now serve his congregation
as minister until his death in 1688, some seventeen years later. In terms of Bunyan’s
life and career, then, this was a momentous occasion. Yet, as the other decisions
agreed at this meeting indicate—the confirmation of the Bedford hatter John
Fenne as deacon, responsible for the church’s ‘purse’ and oversight of its ‘poor’,
alongside several others ‘called to the worke of the ministery’ whose daily pro-
fessions ranged from shoemaker to brick-kiln worker—it also marked a crucial
turning point in the administration of the church and the organization of its
leadership. What we are witnessing here, in fact, is the structural regrouping of
a Dissenting congregation. After eleven years of loss, harassment, and persecu-
tion following the return of Charles II in 1660, the Bedford church was now
being ‘rebooted’. The point of doing so, moreover, was strategic: to ensure its
future survival through what Richard Greaves has described as the coordinated
reorganization of Nonconformity across Bedfordshire and its adjacent counties
at the beginning of the 1670s. This was Restoration Dissent being rebooted too,
on a regional level.2
What, though, of ‘church life’? And what of an ‘experience of Dissent’ that
might be defined and understood in terms other than those of either religious
persecution or the individual careers of well-known Nonconformist leaders?
How, for example, should we understand the importance of this moment not
just for John Bunyan but for his congregation? What motivated those unnamed
brothers and sisters who met in Bedford on 21 December 1671 to raise their
hands in acts of unified assent? And what can this tell us about the experience
of ‘gathered’ church life in seventeenth-century England more generally? To
answer these questions we are obliged, if only briefly here, to look again at
the details supplied in the account of the meeting cited above. For what we
notice about church life as it is being conducted here is that it is, above all else,
­collective and collectively empowering. At Bedford, as in similar churches
established in the 1640s and 1650s, the pastor and other officers were appointed
through the ‘joynt consent’ of the membership in a ‘solemne lifting up of [. . .]
hands’: not by any bishop, patron, or other intermediary, but (as the repetition
of these words makes clear) by ‘the congregation’. Far from signalling any dan-
gerous drift towards direct democracy, however, in electing its own elders,
deacons, and preaching ministry the church was following not only examples

2 See Richard Greaves, ‘The Organizational Response of Nonconformity to Repression and

Indulgence: The Case of Bedfordshire’, in John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London:
Hambledon Press, 1992), 71–87; Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 286–9.
 Introduction3

set by mid-century proponents of ‘the Congregational way’ and, of course, by

earlier English Separatists, but also, and primarily, Acts 14:23 (the ordination
‘by election’ of Paul and Barnabas as elders), with the Geneva text’s gloss on this
process evidently in mind: ‘the consent of the people’ being required ‘by putting
vp ye ha[n]ds’.3
This was church life situated within a distinct Dissenting tradition, then, but
it was determined first and foremost by the gospel as the sole rule and guide in
all matters of worship and ecclesial government: sola scriptura in action.4 As
such, the decisions reached by ‘the congregation’ at Bedford indicate how
power—the wielding of ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 16:19;
18:18)—could, in effect, be shared across the church, ‘by joynt consent’. They
signal too an important instance of communal piety. In setting apart its pastor
and other officers, the Bedford church was submitting ‘solemnly’ to the will of
God who ‘hath called them’: hence the importance of ‘seeking God by prayer’
first.5 It was only then that Bunyan would be entrusted to serve in the ‘pastorall
office’, empowered to administer the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s
Supper, having had confirmed within him the qualities and attributes expected
of a minister chosen by Christ to lead a true church.6 In these terms, Bunyan’s
pastoral election was not so much an administrative decision as a congregational

3 See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969), Acts 14:23, marginal note i. For further accounts of election ‘by lifting up of the hand’,
see B. R. White (ed.), Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales and Ireland to
1660, 3 parts (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1971–4), III, 171; Roger Hayden (ed.), The Records
of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687, Bristol Record Society’s Publications, 27 (1974), 132, 210.
See also B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 63–4;
Brachlow, 160–8, 196–7; Nuttall, Visible Saints, 81–7; Watts, 315–19; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’,
63–9, 76.
4 See further Horton Davies, The Worship of the English Puritans (London: Dacre Press, 1948),
3–5, 8, 49–51; White, English Separatist Tradition, 1–2; White, Baptists, 12–13; James F. Cooper,
Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14–15; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 56–7, 117–18.
5 See further John Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church (1689), in William H. Goold
(ed.), The Works of John Owen, 24 vols (London and Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–5;
repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965–8), XVI, 67–8; Stephen Ford, A Gospel-Church (1675), 128.
6 See further John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock,
13 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94), VI, 285–89; Owen, True Nature, 47–96; T. G. Crippen
(ed.), ‘Dr Watts’s Church-Book’, TCHS, 1 (1901–4), 26–38 (esp. 34–8). Richard Baxter’s treatise on
the ‘Reformed Pastor’, Gildas Salvianus (1656), is given extensive contextual treatment in
J. William Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor (Milton
Keynes: Paternoster, 2004). On the pastoral ministry in Protestant thought and practice, see
John T. McNeill, ‘The Doctrine of the Ministry in Reformed Theology’, CH, 12 (1943), 77–97;
Patrick Collinson, ‘Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-
Reformation England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), The Ministry: Clerical and Lay
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 185–220; David Cornick, ‘The Reformation Crisis in Pastoral Care’, in
G. R. Evans (ed.), A History of Pastoral Care (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), 223–51;
R. Emmet McLaughlin, ‘The Making of the Protestant Pastor: The Theological Foundations of a
Clerical Estate’, in C. Scott-Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte (eds.), The Protestant Clergy of Early
Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60–78; Eamon Duffy, ‘The Reformed
Pastor in English Puritanism’, Dutch Review of Church History, 83 (2003), 216–34.
4 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

act of faith: one that required a further day of ‘fasting and prayer’ to be kept at
three of the church’s separate meetings—at Haynes (Bedfordshire), Gamlingay
(Cambridgeshire), and Bedford—five days later (a notably festive date for folk
less ‘puritan’ than Bunyan’s people).
Yet, for as rooted in devotion and the gospel as this process would be, its
revolutionary dimensions remain hard to overlook. After all, the pastor being
appointed here was no university educated clergyman, as Church of England
and indeed many other Dissenting ministers were, but, like his predecessors at
Bedford (including Samuel Fenne, his then co-pastor), a man without any for-
mal training in divinity. With a rudimentary education, having by his own
confession been ‘put [. . .] to School, to learn both to Read and Write’, but not
much more, Bunyan was qualified to officiate through his gifts in the Spirit:
something that, among other features, placed the Bedford church firmly on the
‘left wing’ of seventeenth-century Congregationalism, as Geoffrey Nuttall has
described it.7 The decision to ordain Bunyan was, moreover, for the church to
make autonomously: a principle of ecclesial independence given particular
emphasis on this occasion by the notable, perhaps even unusual, absence of any
other ministers in attendance. The Bedford church alone would determine who
held the pastoral (and any other) office: it alone was empowered to ordain.8
One notable result of such an ordering of church life would be a blurring of
the traditional distinction between ‘clergy’ and ‘laity’. For, with ministers, deacons,
and preachers who were by profession not clergymen but braziers, blacksmiths,
and hatters, who could say now who is ‘lay’?9 A hierarchy would certainly exist
in the ‘mixed’ polity of such churches, but it would be ministerial rather than
sacerdotal. Officers would be ‘set apart’ to perform their distinct duties, includ-
ing preaching the Word and administering the ordinances: ‘shepherds’ were
necessarily distinct from their flocks in this respect.10 But, as the account from
Bedford cited above indicates, the ‘eldership’ would serve ‘Christ and the church’,

7 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), 5; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Relations Between Presbyterians and Congregation­
alists in England’, in Studies in the Puritan Tradition (Chelmsford: The Tindal Press, 1964), 1–7.
8 See further Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 243; Nuttall, Visible Saints; White,
English Separatist Tradition, 82–3; Brachlow, 203–29; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 55, 76–7. It was
not unusual for other pastors to attend an ordination, though Dissenting practice varied. See
Nuttall, Visible Saints, 87–96, and ‘The Early Congregational Concept of the Church’, TCHS, 14
(1949), 197–205 (200); Watts, 315–19; Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 222–31; Chad Van
Dixhoorn, God’s Ambassadors: The Westminster Assembly and the Reformation of the English
Pulpit (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 44–50, 73–87.
9 According to English Separatist Henry Barrow, members of a true church were ‘ecclesiastic-
al and spiritual’, not ‘lay’: ‘We know not what you mean by your old popish term of laymen’, cited
in Nuttall, ‘Early Congregational Concept’, 201. The Scottish Presbyterian minister George
Gillespie likewise rejected ‘as “popish” the distinction of clergy and laity suggested by the expression
“lay elder”’: see McNeill, ‘Doctrine of the Ministry’, 94–5. See also Francis J. Bremer, Lay
Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
10 See further G. R. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Evans (ed.), History of Pastoral Care, 1–11 (6);
Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 78–80.
 Introduction5

ruling with, rather than over, the fellowship. Indeed, ‘the vital tasks’ of a reformed
minister ‘could only be realized by living as one of the ruled’, and the range of
metaphors and analogies used to describe the Dissenting pastor communicates
this concept quite clearly: as servant-shepherd, steward and porter, physician and
nurse, watchman and cook; pilot of the ship, not the tyrannical captain.11
There are in the passage cited above deeper marks to be discerned yet of the
nature of this kind of church life. To whom, for instance, did the hands held
aloft at this meeting belong? Female members must surely have joined their
brethren on this occasion. As Joel Halcomb’s chapter in this volume illustrates,
women had always been particularly active participants in Dissenting church
life, and especially so at Bedford.12 It would be impossible to imagine them not
casting their votes at this key meeting. Yet this was a congregation mixed in
other ways. Members of the ‘lower sort’ (from labourers to the indigent) would
have raised their hands alongside those of the ‘middling sort’ (artisan tradesmen
and retailers as well as substantial businessmen, such as the cooper Anthony
Harrington) and of the ‘better sort’ (such as William Whitbread, a member of
Bedfordshire’s landed gentry).13 As ‘visible saints’ pursuing ‘the Congregational
way’, moreover, they may well have held (and were, of course, required to tolerate)
differing opinions on the ‘external’ or ‘circumstantial’ matters of worship and
practice, including the administration of baptism. Some members, then, would
have undergone believer’s baptism at Bedford, but not necessarily all.14 Because
‘the Gospellary way’ also demanded that ‘a Union of hearts rather then a vicinity
of Houses, is to make up a Congregation according to the New Testament’, these
saints were as disparate geographically as they may have been theologically,
having been ‘gathered’ from numerous parishes not just in and about Bedford
but also county wide.15 As a result, many of those attending the meeting at which
Bunyan was ordained pastor could only have done so by traversing considerable
distances, either on foot or by horse. For members at Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire,
this would have involved a return journey of well over twenty miles: a consid-
erable commitment on a cold winter’s day.
Although the rubbing of so many different kinds of shoulders could produce
friction within Dissenting congregations, nevertheless in their dealings with

11 C. Scott-Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte, ‘Introduction’, in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte (eds.),

Protestant Clergy, 1–38 (37). See further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 85–7, and ‘Early Congregational
Concept’, 198–200; White, English Separatist Tradition, 76–8, 82–3, 142; Brachlow, 3, 157–202
(and esp. 160–8, 175–80, 201); Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 78–9.
12 See further Chapter 1 in this volume.
13 On Whitbread and Harrington, one of the original members to ‘embody’ the Bedford
church, as well as its earliest leaders, see further Michael Davies, ‘The Silencing of God’s Dear
Ministers: John Bunyan and His Church in 1662’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), ‘Settling the Peace of the
Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–113.
14 See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 118–22; White, Baptists, 10–11; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 161–3,
and also 47, 72–3, 95, 144–67. See also Chapter 9 in this volume.
15 John Cook, What the Independents Would Have (1647), 5, 7; and see further Nuttall, Visible
Saints, 52–5, 71–3, 104–9.
6 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

one another, members would strive for spiritual egalitarianism, addressing one
another, as in the extract above, not by title or profession but simply by their
sanctified familial identity in Christ: as ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’.16 The kinds of dis-
tinction in social status preserved in parish life, through special seating
arrangements, for example, would be abolished at Bedford. Members of Bunyan’s
church were under strict instruction from its first pastor, John Gifford, not ‘to
be offering places or seates, when those who are rich come in’, for there should
be ‘no respect of persons’ ‘in your comings together [. . .] as a Church’.17 This was
also a people, it should be noted, who were expected to mark their time together
as a congregation of Christ according to a reformed calendar: one that avoided
not only festive holidays but also pagan names for months and weekdays,
replacing them with their Bible-based numerical equivalents. When Bunyan
was elected pastor, then, it was at a meeting held not on 21 December 1671 but
notably on ‘the 21th of 10th moneth’ (a Thursday, in fact, or, as the Bedford
church book would describe it, the ‘fifth day’, the ‘first day’ of the week being the
Lord’s day).18
Such were the terms of gathered church life as experienced at Bedford, and
elsewhere: a life to which the visible saints joined themselves voluntarily, as a
matter of individual choice, but which required (often through subscription to
a formal covenant) a commitment to upholding the collective well-being and
unity as well as the reputation, discipline, and orderly walking of the fellowship
as a whole.19 The experience of living a Dissenting life in this uniquely c­ orporate
way could, no doubt, be liberating. As members of Dissenting congregations,
ordinary men and women would attend not just sermons and services but partici-
pate fully in the making of church decisions. But it could also prove demanding.
How, for example, were members who, in their worship and communion, sep-
arated themselves from the world—being ‘gathered’ out from it—supposed
to maintain their Dissenting identities as ‘visible saints’ while still functioning
in the world, whether as servants, artisans, and shopkeepers, or as wives,
husbands, and parents, or even (in some cases) as holders of civic office? How

16 See further White, Association Records, I, 25–6; Daniel C. Beaver, Parish Communities and
Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590–1690 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998), 239–40.
17 Minutes, 20. On how seating arrangements in parish churches reflected status within the
local hierarchy see: Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society,
1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 141; Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society:
Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 137–44;
and Christopher Marsh’s ‘The View from the Pew’ essays: ‘“Common Prayer” in England 1560–
1640’, PP, 171 (2001), 66–94; ‘Sacred Space in England, 1560–1640’, JEH, 53 (2002), 286–311; and
‘Order and Place in England, 1580–1640’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 3–26.
18 See further Michael Davies, ‘When Was Bunyan Elected Pastor? Fixing a Date in the Bedford
Church Book’, BS, 18 (2014), 7–41.
19 See further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 70–130; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 116–42; Anne Dunan-
Page, ‘Bunyan and the Bedford Congregation’, in Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 53–68.
 Introduction7

might the requirements of godliness be balanced with those of good fellowship,

as conducted socially and commercially (and often festively) in taverns and
alehouses, shops, marketplaces, and fairs? Given that Dissenters would always
play integral roles in their local societies, as workers and employers, neighbours
and customers—as producers and consumers of daily life, that is—all with
demanding lives to lead both within and without their congregations, how did
they manage to strike a workable ‘church/life’ balance?20 And how would striv-
ing to maintain such a balance inform a very different sense for us of what
constitutes the ‘experience of Dissent’ in this period, for pastors and congrega-
tions alike?
*
It is the purpose of this volume to address such questions through a series of
chapters which, perhaps uniquely in the study of seventeenth-century Dissent
so far, focuses exclusively on the issues and dilemmas that inform the Dissenting
experience of ‘church life’ within what would eventually become known as the
‘Three Denominations’: Congregationalist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. As such,
these studies target a number of subjects: from the ministerial deliberations of
the Westminster Assembly and the pastoral careers of some notable Dissenting
ministers, including John Owen and Richard Baxter, to the volatile histories of
specific meetings and the disputes, conflicts, and developments that moulded
them. To do so, these essays draw upon a diverse array of sources: from the
voluminous minutes and documents produced by the Westminster Assembly
to the printed works of leading Presbyterian and Congregational pastors; from
ministerial diaries to the notebooks of devoted sermon-goers; and from the
manuscript church books kept by Baptist and Congregational meetings to a
little-known treatise by an anonymous Presbyterian elder defending a decision
made in the mid-to-late 1640s to rent a room within the grounds of St. Paul’s
Cathedral to a group of Baptists led by William Kiffin (and arguing for religious
toleration in the process).
Though covering a wide range of ecclesiological positions and principles,
these essays nevertheless find a shared point of origin in the kinds of enquiry
that Dissenting pastors and their congregations faced, posed, debated, and
pursued when shaping, negotiating, and delivering a church life defined by the
Scriptures, on the one hand, and against their ecclesial rivals on the other: from

20 See further Chapter 10 in this volume. On the social integration of Dissenters see: William
Stevenson, ‘Sectarian Integration and Social Cohesion, 1640–1725’, in E. S. Leedham-Green (ed.),
Religious Dissent in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1991), 69–86, and
‘The Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The
World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 360–87;
Beaver, Parish Communities, 267–81; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 88–115; Michael Davies,
‘Bunyan’s Brothers: John and Samuel Fenne of the Bedford Congregation, 1656–1705’, BS, 20
(2016), 76–110.
8 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

the episcopal Church of England to the Quakers. As Polly Ha’s essay explores,
one such issue concerns how a Dissenting commitment to voluntary ­association
was tested by church members who came to dissent from their congregations’
convictions and beliefs. How free were covenanted saints to establish their own
meetings, or to join other fellowships and societies? How were the limits of
‘liberty’ to be negotiated and defined in Dissenting church life? The chapters by
Anne Dunan-Page, Joel Halcomb, and Michael Davies similarly reflect on
problems for gathered churches arising from non-attendance and the need to
uphold ecclesial respectability to the fraught business of pastoral succession,
and the friction and unease that such matters could easily generate. It is with
questions of reformed ecclesial government in mind that Elliot Vernon traces
key developments within London’s Presbyterian parishes during the English
Revolution, highlighting the complex processes of decision-making negotiated
by the pastors, elders, and vestries at their centre. Kathleen Lynch stays in
Revolutionary London in order to highlight very different anxieties about the
spaces in which Dissenting church life could operate. What would it mean,
following the disestablishment of the episcopal church, she asks, for radical
Separatists to rent a room for meetings and worship in what had been, until
quite recently, the bishop of London’s palace?
At stake in such questions lie matters not only of ecclesiological order and
cohesion but also of the formation and transformation of Dissenting identities,
as churches sought to define themselves and then to uphold (as well as to test)
that sense of definition in the face of dissent, disruption, and disorder. Other
chapters approach these subjects by focusing on the ministerial side of the
pastor–congregation divide. Chad Van Dixhoorn examines the place afforded
to pastors within the Westminster Assembly’s deliberations in the 1640s over
how best to reform the Church of England. What would the duties of ministers
be within the life of the reformed parish, as envisioned by the Assembly’s mem-
bers (almost all of whom were themselves active and experienced pastors),
when it came to visiting the sick? To what would the nation’s reformed ministry
be expected to apply its expertise: the care of the body, or cure of the soul?
Others address the experiences of individual ministers, both Congregational
and Presbyterian. Where John Owen’s life as a leading Congregationalist is
reviewed by Crawford Gribben within the contexts of Owen’s ministerial
­activities during the English Revolution and the Restoration, Neil Keeble and
Ann Hughes address problems facing Presbyterian pastors across this same
period. For Richard Baxter, and many others like him, the key predicament of
the Restoration would remain, in the face of the 1662 Act of Uniformity,
whether to stay with one’s congregation and continue ministering to it by con-
forming, or to embrace the ‘civil death’ of ejection and abandon it?21 If the latter,

21 See further David J. Appleby, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration
Nonconformity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11–12, 100, and Chapter 8 in
this volume.
 Introduction9

how might a nonconforming Presbyterian pastor maintain his ministry, and all
that that would entail, without a congregation to lead? What would ‘church life’
now mean to such ministers who would have preferred not to be experiencing
Dissent at all, if only their comprehension within the restored Church of
England were possible?
These essays reflect something of the range of debates, tensions, and conflicts
that informed Dissenting church life in seventeenth-century England. Still,
they can hardly claim to be exhaustive. For this reason, one aim of this volume
is to invite further exploration of the kinds of issues and experiences addressed
in these chapters, particularly through the more concerted examination of the
manuscript sources that reveal them, yet which often remain overlooked and
underused: Dissenting church books, records, and registers.22 Doing so, more-
over, is vital. For what can hardly have escaped notice is that these studies all
concentrate on matters of Dissenting church life and pastor–congregation rela-
tions at crucial moments in seventeenth-century history and at key turning
points in the religious life of the nation: the disestablishment and the re-­
establishment of the episcopal Church of England; the creation and demise of
the Westminster Assembly; the rise and collapse of Cromwell’s Protectorate; the
passing of the 1662 Act of Uniformity and the great ejectment that would fol-
low; the arrival of Toleration in 1689, and the subsequent inclusion of Presby­
terians as a permanent fixture within English Nonconformity.
The study of church life naturally requires an interior focus: an inward-facing
examination of how Dissenters organized themselves in worship, order, and
discipline at the local level of the individual congregation. Yet, for both Dissenters
and their conforming neighbours alike, in this period church life was also lived
within the compass of momentous changes and upheavals, from well before the
English Revolution to long after the Glorious Revolution. It is precisely because
Dissenting congregations were far from isolated and introspective bodies that
church life can be witnessed as something experienced by their members as
dynamic and dynamically engaged, not just theologically and ecclesiologically
but socially and politically.23 There is, in other words, much more to be said yet
about the history of seventeenth-century Dissent through forms of ‘church life’
that deserve to command our attention. The essays in this volume mark, we
hope, a further step towards a more detailed historical understanding of what
it meant to be a Dissenter, and what that experience could be like not just for
those ministers and leaders whose names we easily recognize, but also for the

22 See further Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Writing “things ecclesiastical”: The Literary Acts of the
Gathered Churches’, Études Épistémè, 21 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/417
(last accessed 22 August 2018); Mark Burden and Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans, Dissenters, and
their Church Books: Recording and Representing Experience’, BS, 20 (2016), 14–32; and Michael
Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, ‘Being a Dissenter: Lay Experience in the Gathered
Churches’, in John Coffey (ed.), The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I:
The Post-Reformation Era, c.1559–1689 (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
23 See, for example, Chapters 1, 2, and 5 in this volume.
10 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

more anonymous women and men—the unknown Dissenters—who comprised

their congregations.

*
Such are the aims of this volume, and indeed of the wider ‘Dissenting Experience’
project from which it has emerged.24 It remains for this ‘Introduction’ to say
something about the key terms of this book’s title. For if we are to examine the
tenets of Dissenting church life in seventeenth-century England, then the con-
cept of ‘church’ itself needs to be unpacked a little, especially when its varied
connotations would shape ‘church life’ in markedly different ways for those
both within and beyond the Dissenting groups addressed here. A focus on
pastors and congregations, ‘the bond’ between which has been described as ‘the
firmest of all ecclesiastical ties’ (but also, one might add, the most fraught and
troublesome in some instances) perhaps requires little further clarification at
this point.25 By contrast, what we describe as the ‘experience of Dissent’ does
need some explanation, not only as something distinct from other (usually
individual) kinds of religious experience examined in this period but also
because anything that involves that notoriously difficult concept, ‘experience’,
demands some careful hedging—as does, to a degree, that ­historically complex
term ‘Dissent’.26 It is, then, to ‘church’, ‘life’, and ‘experience’ that our attention
must now turn.
It goes without saying that different concepts of ‘church’ produced distinct
experiences of ‘church life’ in seventeenth-century England, whether in the
parishes of the Established Church or the meetings of radical groups (including
Quakers, who, as members of a ‘society’, rejected entirely the traditional con-
cept of ‘church’).27 But how was ‘church’ conceived and understood, in theory
and in practice, within the Dissenting tradition represented by the Baptists,
Congregationalists, and Presbyterians? At the heart of any answer to this question

24 See further http://dissent.hypotheses.org.

25 Patrick Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding of the Dissenting Tradition’, in
C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), 3–38 (16–17).
26 ‘Dissent’ here signals the larger tradition, within which the groups considered in this volume
(Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians) stood, of ‘those Protestants who worshipped
outside of the established church’ and, more specifically, who either sought to reform or rejected
outright the polity and liturgy of an episcopal Church of England: Watts, 1–5 (1–2). On the porous
relationship between Dissent and the Established Church, and on how Dissent ‘became the estab-
lishment’ between 1640 and 1660, see John Coffey, ‘Church and State, 1550–1750: The Emergence
of Dissent’, in Robert Pope (ed.), T&T Clark Companion to Nonconformity (London: Bloomsbury,
2013), 47–74 (56).
27 See further T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-
Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5,
82–100; Andrew Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2000), 11–34, 75–81, 101–7, 119–21. On the terms ‘church’ and ‘society’ see Nuttall, Visible Saints,
71–4; John Bossy, ‘Elementary Forms of Durkheim’, PP, 95 (1982), 3–18.
 Introduction11

must lie a recognition of the simplicity of the gospel’s definition of a church as

a gathering of the faithful, as provided by that locus classicus of Dissenting
ecclesiology, Matthew 18:20: ‘For where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there am I in the midst of them’—‘and where Christ is’, as Paul Avis
notes of the Protestant tradition, ‘there is the Church’.28 It was this more ­intimate,
domestic notion of ‘church’ as a voluntary association of true believers—a
communion of saints rather than an institution of state—that would empower
ordinary women and men in the 1640s and 1650s to pursue alternative, often
self-determining, forms of ecclesial order and government, based on the
examples set not only in the Gospels but also by the Acts of the Apostles and
the Pauline epistles.29 A true church of Christ could do no other.30 Alongside
this gospel-centred approach, however, lies a reformed understanding of the
New Testament Greek word ekklesia. William Tyndale realized all too well that
if this term (meaning a ‘gathering’ or ‘assembly’ specifically ‘called out’) were
translated into English not as ‘church’ but as ‘congregation’, a complex and
powerful series of shifts could be effected, conceptually and politically: away
from ‘church’ as just a building or place of worship (for it would be a gathering
of the faithful, wherever they met), and, more crucially, as something other
than an organization governed by an elite hierarchy of learned professionals
(for the church was the people, not the administrative structure surrounding
and external to them).31 As David Daniell puts it, ‘congregation’ communicates
a profoundly ‘inward’ rather than an ‘outward’ concept of ‘church’: one that
­redefines its polity, practices, and purposes.32
Such a radical redirection of emphasis would, of course, have a significant
bearing on that principal project shared by both the pioneering Reformers and
later English Dissenters: ‘to reshape the corporate forms of religion’.33 Only by
returning to the principles and practices of Primitive Christianity could some-
thing of the original sense of ekklesia be restored, with some notably practical
and political consequences for the laity. Traditional hierarchies (whether

28 Paul D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall Morgan &
Scott, 1981), 3, 221.
29 See Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 3–5, 49–56; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 117–18;
Bremer, Lay Empowerment, 56–8, 105–26, 144–56.
30 For conceptions of a true church among early Protestant theologians and Dissenters, see
John T. McNeill, ‘The Church in Sixteenth-Century Reformed Theology’, Journal of Religion, 22
(1942), 251–69 (251), and ‘The Church in Post-Reformation Theology’, Journal of Religion, 24
(1944), 96–107; Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 1–77; Nuttall, Visible Saints,
53–5, 71–5, 107–10; White, English Separatist Tradition; Brachlow, 114–49 (esp. 118–19, 136–7);
Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–1640 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011),
47–73, 118; Bremer, Lay Empowerment, 5–26.
31 See OED, ‘congregation, n.’, 6., 6a, and 6b; ‘ecclesia, n.’; and ‘church, n.1 and adj.’; Paul Avis,
‘Church’, in The Encyclopedia of Protestantism, 3 vols (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), I,
416–19. On Tyndale’s controversy with Thomas More over the translation of ekklesia, see David
Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 250–80.
32 Daniell, William Tyndale, 279–80.
33 McNeill, ‘Church in Sixteenth-Century Reformed Theology’, 251.
12 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

papal or episcopal) could be swept away by the revolutionary potential of that

all-important concept of the priesthood of all believers: of a laity, that is, accessing
the Bible in the vernacular and appointing its own ministers and church o ­ fficers.34
Yet, this revolution also resulted in questions upon which Protestants would
never be able to agree when it came to establishing settled forms of church life.
Could unlearned men and women be trusted to lead their own congregations,
for example, or to interpret the Bible for themselves? How far would a trained
ministry be required to guide them in both? Who should be admitted to a
congregation, and on what basis? Should believers separate from anything other
than a ‘true’ church (including, if necessary, a Protestant national one)? Yet,
what exactly constituted a ‘true’ church?
Given that such questions were of central importance to the earliest Protestant
theologians, it is hardly surprising to find English Dissenters debating these
issues throughout the seventeenth century. ‘The true marks of a Church’, for
early English Separatists and later (mainstream) Dissenters alike, might remain
fundamentally consistent: ‘preaching of the Word, the administration of the
Gospel Sacraments, and the practice of Church Discipline’.35 Yet the groups
considered in this volume, not to mention those to both their left and their
right—Quakers and Episcopalians—all interpreted differently the scriptural
demands for the ordering of a ‘true’ church, with significant consequences for
the ‘church life’ experienced by their members. Where membership of the prel-
atical Church of England entailed the recognition of the monarch as its leader,
to Protestant Dissenters this was anathema: Christ alone was the head of a true
church. Likewise, where the parish had provided the basic arena for church life,
this would no longer be the case for Congregationalists and Baptists (and,
eventually, Presbyterians). The key difference lay not simply in the non-
parochial nature of gathered church life per se but in the principles of liberty it
sought to incorporate and promote: freedom, that is, from the legal compulsion
to attend parish services (and indeed to be considered, from birth, a member of
the national church) and also from the requirement to worship within a mixed
or promiscuous communion of the converted and unconverted, the godly and
the profane. Only a church that admitted its members on a voluntary basis,
entering that fellowship freely and by their own choice, having demonstrated
their fitness to do so through holy living and a conviction of true faith, was
able to preserve the liberty of the ‘visible saints’ in communion.36 Such was a true
congregation of Christ for many Dissenters, Bunyan among them.

34 See Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, 94–108; Carl R. Trueman, ‘Reformers,
Puritans and Evangelicals: The Lay Connection’, in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The Rise of the
Laity in Evangelical Protestantism (London: Routledge, 2002), 17–35. See further Claire Cross,
Church and People, 1450–1660: The Triumph of the Laity in the English Church, 2nd edn (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999); Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties; Peter Iver Kaufman, Thinking of the Laity in
Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); Bremer, Lay
Empowerment.
35 Davies, Worship of the English Puritans, 53. 36 See Nuttall, Visible Saints, 101–30.
 Introduction13

As Patrick Collinson once considered, it may seem obvious that this kind of
church—Bunyan’s kind, among others—would be the logical outcome of the
Reformation and its shaping of ‘voluntary’ modes of religious practice. Yet the
notion that ‘the preaching and assimilation of the primary protestant doctrines’
espoused by the early Reformers ‘set up processes which were calculated to
divide and even to dissolve the parish as the essential unit of ecclesiastical
organisation’ in ways that would tend ‘inevitably [. . .] towards congregational
independency’ was not obvious to the godly of seventeenth-century England.37
Distinct denominational identities would eventually come to be distinguished
precisely upon differences in church government and order, doctrine and
principle. Not only would parishes survive the 1640s and 1650s largely intact,
Presbyterians seeking to reform them and Cromwell refusing to dismantle
them within the Protectorate’s ‘state’ church, but the godly, both before, during,
and after the English Revolution, would also continue to dispute fiercely what
forms of ecclesiastical organization were best to pursue.38 Would baptism, for
example, be required for admission, and if so, of what kind: infant, or believer’s?
What level of faith, knowledge, or experience would one need to demonstrate
prior to joining a godly meeting? To whom would a pastor administer the sac-
raments: those formerly comprising the parish, or the communion of saints
only? What qualifications would a minister require? What form of ordination
should he undergo? And how should he be maintained financially?39
As much as Quakers and other radical groups, Presbyterians, Congregation­
alists, and Baptists offered markedly different responses to such fundamental
questions of ‘church life’ as these, with alternative positions being adopted
amongst and between them: positions that would determine the extent of min-
isterial power and the involvement of the people, as well as the administration
of the gospel ordinances, along with other practices that may or may not be
permitted (such as singing, for example).40 For those outside the Dissenting
tradition, moreover, these mid-century revolutions in church life would have
equally profound effects. While many clergy would find themselves ejected
from their livings during the English Revolution, the experience of Dissent for
their loyal parishioners could be equally distressing, not just because they

37 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism’, in his Godly People: Essays
on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 1–17 (2–3, 9, 13–17;
but see also his ‘Note’, on 18). See also Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding’, 7–8, 15–16.
38 See further Claire Cross, ‘The Church in England 1646–1660’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The
Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), 99–120; Ann Hughes, ‘ “The
public profession of these nations”: The National Church in Interregnum England’, in Durston &
Maltby, 93–114; ‘The Cromwellian Church’, in OHA, 444–56.
39 On such questions see Anne Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine. Vies et récits de dissidents,
XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2017).
40 See further Watts, 28–32, 56–62, 84–94, 315–46; Nuttall, ‘Relations’; English Presbyterians,
54–6, 93–4; Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Andrews to Baxter and Fox,
1603–1690 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 329–521; Ha, English Presbyterianism,
42–3, 58, 77–9, 100–3, 107–11; J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Durston & Maltby.
14 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

would now be expected to worship without the Book of Common Prayer and
to go without Christmas but also because, with a Congregationalist or even a
Baptist as their parish incumbent, they could be denied access to the sacra-
ments and, in effect, unchurched, sometimes with dramatic consequences for
the minister involved.41
What, though, characterized the experience for those godly men and women
determined to take advantage of this brave new world of ecclesial deregulation?
As is clear from the church books kept by Congregational and Baptist meet-
ings, participation in the life of a gathered congregation would prove to be both
extensive, encompassing the entire covenanted membership, and intensive:
involving individual members in everything from the admission of new mem-
bers to the approval of correspondence. They were also required to watch over
and support one another materially and spiritually. Members would keep the
deacon’s purse supplied with funds sufficient to finance the ministry and assist
the poor, but they would also visit the sick, infirm, and troubled in spirit. The
duty of ‘mutual watchfulness’ also extended to matters of discipline. While
admonitions and excommunications would be issued on behalf of the gathered
church, with its consent, rather than by the pastor alone, members of the con-
gregation, both collectively and individually, would be expected to be on guard
at all times for any ‘disorderly walking’ (and talking) among them.42
This kind of church life was dynamic not just morally and socially but also
intellectually, involving a restless questioning among members, particularly
over matters that the Scriptures failed to illuminate unambiguously. As the
records of both individual churches and associational meetings illustrate,
seventeenth-century Dissenters were nothing if not a conscientiously question-
ing lot, especially when it came church life. While certain enquiries evidently
revolved continually within the consciences of the Dissenting godly—under
what circumstances, for example, were women allowed to speak in church; what
was the right way to administer baptism; who was permitted to preach?—others
reflect issues that had to be managed carefully on both sides of the ‘church/life’

41 See further Nuttall, Visible Saints, 134–40, 159–61, and ‘Congregational Commonwealth
Incumbents’, TCHS, 14 (1949), 155–67; Watts, 151–68; Cross, ‘Church in England’, 112–20, and
Church and People, 175–95; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 101–15; Bernard Capp, England’s Culture
Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 110–31; J. F. Merritt, ‘Religion and the English Parish’, in OHA, 122–47
(142–5); Susan Hardman Moore (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Larkham 1647–1669 (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2011), 14–24. On the experience of ‘Prayer Book Protestants’ during the 1640s and 1650s,
see John Morrill, ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English
Civil War 1642–1649 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 89–114; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of
England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–28; Judith Maltby, ‘Suffering
and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Formation of “Anglicanism”, 1642–60’,
in Durston & Maltby, 158–80; Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Identity,
1640–1662’, in OHA, 457–82.
42 See further Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 130–42; Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, ‘Being a
Dissenter’. See also Ha, English Presbyterianism, 155–77.
 Introduction15

divide. Was a covenanted saint, for example, permitted to marry ‘a visible

unbeliever’? Was it permissible to attend a godly sermon, though d ­ elivered by
a Church of England minister in ‘public’ worship? How were relationships
between godly parents and their unconverted children or servants rightly to
be conducted? Must a church relieve a brother in debt? Was ‘the wearing of
gold, pearls and costly array’ contrary to the Scriptures ‘and a sin’? Was ‘astrology
in matters of physick [. . .] lawfull’? May a man ‘lawfully strike’ his wife? Or
lawfully marry either his buried wife’s sister, or indeed his deceased wife’s
sister’s daughter?43
As B. R. White has noted, these kinds of enquiry, all taken from various types
of seventeenth-century Dissenting church records, are ‘characteristic’ of the
world from which they arise: ‘over and over again’, White notes, these ‘queries
raise questions concerned with internal church life and discipleship on the one
hand and forms of ministry upon the other’.44 As such, they reveal how human,
dynamic, and engaging Dissenting church life could be. Principles and ­procedures
would evolve and develop in congregations to reflect changes in local and
national politics, or in light of momentous turning points in history. But they
would do so too with the changing ‘light’ of individual members’ consciences,
brought about through dialogue and debate with one another, being ‘worked
out on the spot, after close study of Scripture’, as Nuttall puts it.45 As a result,
practices and doctrinal positions—even Dissenting identities—could transform
over time as a consequence of the queries raised and debated not just by pastors
and ministers but by ordinary (and also extraordinary) church members.
The surviving records that evidence these aspects of the Dissenting ­experience
reveal other facets of seventeenth-century gathered church life that likewise
contributed to its vitality, but in ways that both pastors and their congregations
would no doubt have preferred to avoid. Controversy and scandal could easily be
generated, for instance, when ‘visible saints’ comported themselves in a fashion
that was usually visible but not always saintly, with minutes of meetings regu-
larly noting disciplinary cases along with the measures taken by congregations
to resolve them. While some church books document the dramatic splitting of
congregations, often through a breakdown in the pastor–congregation rela-
tionship, others might record the slandering of a pastor or equally (though rarely)
the excommunication of a culpable one.46 The majority of disciplinary cases,

43 White, Association Records, I, 22, 25, 26, 28–9, 32–3; II, 57, 64, 65, 69; III, 140–1, 146; Alan
Brockett (ed.), The Exeter Assembly: The Minutes of the Assemblies of the United Brethren of Devon
and Cornwall, 1691–1717, Devon & Cornwall Record Society, n.s. 6 (1963), 25, 52, 57–8. On marriages
within the gathered churches, see Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine, 249–67.
44 White, Association Records, I, 18. On the types of enquiry raised by ‘ordinary church members
who often remain anonymous’, see G. F. Nuttall, ‘Association Records of the Particular Baptists’,
BQ, 26 (1975/76), 14–25 (21, 24), and ‘The Baptist Western Association 1653–1658’, JEH, 11 (1960),
213–18 (214–15).
45 Nuttall, ‘Association Records’, 24.
46 See further Chapter 9 in this volume. On the sensational case of David Crosley, the excom-
municated pastor of the Baptist church at Cripplegate, see Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Letters and
16 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

however, reflect more commonplace problems to do with ‘church/life’ balance.

As Anne Dunan-Page’s chapter in this volume illustrates, the pressures on a
Dissenting life led outside the church reveal absences from weekly worship and
monthly meetings to be humanly e­ xplicable, due to everything from illness and
bad weather to marital problems and depression. Other common misdemean-
ours prove similarly to be all too human: from the lesser crimes of drinking,
flirting with boys at fairs, and playing football to the darker business of adul-
tery, bastardy, fraud, theft, and domestic abuse. There is, then, as much ‘life’ as
there is ‘church’ to consider in these forms of Dissenting ­experience, and in the
records that document them.
*
The fact that Dissenting church life inevitably involved the godly falling into
some unfortunate, occasionally sensational, but otherwise quite common
predicaments—getting into debt, having affairs, behaving badly—certainly helps
to create a more fully realized, because more fully human, picture of Dissent.
Those hard-line ‘puritans’ who took the radical step of joining England’s seven-
teenth-century Dissenting churches evidently led complex social lives that were
neither as tightly belted nor as insular as we might otherwise have assumed of
the ‘saints’. Yet this picture also helps to clarify what is meant here by the ‘experi-
ence of Dissent’. It will have become obvious by now that as a subject of enquiry
‘Dissenting experience’ requires both a wider angle of approach and a narrower
focus of concentration than might usually be found within a study of seventeenth-
century religious history. For what the experience of Dissent concerns here is
early modern religious life conducted at the local level: in the day-to-day work-
ings of the church, that is, and in ways specific to individual congregations and
their members.
One advantage of this approach is that it can prise the story of seventeenth-
century Dissent from its more familiar topics and grander narratives: the debates
around, say, persecution and toleration, on the one hand, or landmark political
and historical events on the other. Without ever ignoring such matters, neverthe-
less ‘Dissenting experience’ can provide a more sharply defined view of Dissent
as practised at the ground level of the individual meeting. If accounts of
Dissenting history tend to be dominated too by those names which, colossus-like,
straddle the era—Jacob and Jessey, Owen and Baxter, Bunyan and Fox—then
‘Dissenting experience’ seeks to recognize that larger body of anonymous
Dissenters whose names were recorded in their churches’ registers and minute-
books but of whom (aside from some notable exceptions) we will otherwise
never have heard. It is their often overlooked experiences that demand our

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: Springer, 2013), 69–87.
 Introduction17

attention. By foregrounding the corporate lives and identities as well as the

actions and contributions of otherwise unacknowledged members, Dissent can
be perceived as something experienced within what Daniel Beaver terms ‘the
structures of everyday life’, through issues that raised voices and hands in
church meetings, not just controversies in print or debates in Parliament.47
If one of the imperatives in pursuing this ‘experience of Dissent’ is to bring to
the fore the corporate and collective character of seventeenth-century Dissent
as it was embodied at the level of the individual church, then this also bears a
further obvious revisionary purpose. For when we think of seventeenth-century
religious experience, conversion may naturally spring to mind, and not simply
because it was at this time that Protestant spiritual autobiography emerged as
a distinct genre.48 For this period also saw the ‘experience’ itself appear as a
unique kind of narrative, whether of startling change or of something more
subtle and less dramatic, but always testifying ‘experimentally’ to the saving
faith and convictions of ordinary men and women, especially among Calvinist
gathered churches where conversion would be linked, as was the case for
Bunyan, to a clear ordo salutis, or order of salvation.49 With so many ­scholars of
seventeenth-century history having addressed this kind of ‘experience’ as a fun­
damental building-block of early modern Dissenting identity, it has become
commonplace to read the ‘lay experience’ of seventeenth-century Protestants
as in some sense defined by and synonymous with the ‘puritan conversion nar-
rative’: the narrative of interior revolution unique to each believer while also,
paradoxically, conforming to some evidently shared and codified patterns
within an expected ‘morphology’.50

47 Beaver, Parish Communities, 116. Beaver considers Puritanism and Dissent in terms of ‘sig-
nificant local variation’ and as a ‘phenomenon’ of ‘social life and neighbourhood’, rather than just
as ‘an intellectual phenomenon’ determined by the printed sermon and treatise: see Parish
Communities, 9–11, 13, 22, 156–7. For similarly comprehensive, localized studies see Eamon Duffy,
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001); Samuel S. Thomas, Creating Communities in Restoration England: Parish
and Congregation in Oliver Heywood’s Halifax (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
48 See especially Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1972); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy:
Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, HJ, 39 (1996), 33–56; Michael
Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-
Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
49 See further Dewey D. Wallace, Jr, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant
Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), and ‘Bunyan’s
Theology’, in Davies and Owens (eds.), Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, 69–85.
50 See further Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New
York University Press, 1963), 67–73; Watkins, Puritan Experience; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion
Narrative; Baird Tipson, ‘How Can the Religious Experience of the Past Be Recovered? The
Examples of Puritanism and Pietism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 43 (1975),
695–707; Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
18 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

As has become clear from this ‘Introduction’, however, there is more to the
‘Dissenting experience’ than just individual conversion or an arrival at a personal
conviction of faith. While it is worth remembering that the narrative of puritan
‘experience’ was rooted in ‘church life’—being the account usually required
upon admission to certain gathered congregations, and acting therefore as a
crucial interface between the individual and the group—nevertheless it is hardly
this ‘experience’ alone that can define and encompass the ‘Dissenting experi-
ence’ in its wider and indeed more dynamic social and ecclesial sense.51 Far
from being for the godly the principal medium of their involvement in the
church, such ‘experience’ can be seen as an initial step into an equally profound
series of experiences undergone at a communal level: experiences that a long-
standing focus on the ‘puritan conversion narrative’ tends to obscure. ‘Dissenting
experience’, then, is what happens after ‘conversion’: through an engagement
with church life centred in shared forms of activity and participation, in mutual
vigilance and support, and in consensus as well as in conflict and debate.
Where this kind of ‘experience’ can be encountered is in a literary genre that
stands counter to the individuated spiritual autobiography or conversion narra-
tive: the Dissenting church book, the significance of which cannot be overstated.
For, as a formal record of the communal ‘acts’ of a godly fellowship, a church
book would perform a number of crucial functions. It would serve, in a practical
sense, to manage the ‘business’ or the ‘transactions’ of the church, becoming a
repository to be consulted in order to foster unity and to prevent dispute and
division. Its upkeep also represented a clear desire to be a formal, ordered, and
respectable religious institution equal in status to the parish church, and to
consolidate its identity as such.52 The maintenance of these books of ‘acts’ also
marked for Dissenters their continuation of the Acts of the Apostles in records
of the ‘inner life’ of their congregations: a means of witnessing and memorial-
izing their providential history.53 As a profoundly spiritual document, then, a
church book did not only minute the administration of a godly congregation, it
became a manifestation of the Book of Life itself: ‘that Book wherein is recorded
the Rules and Bounds of visible Church-Communion’, as Bunyan puts it in The
Holy City (1665), and ‘in which the Lord Jesus hath all recorded that are visible

51 Studies of the seventeenth-century ‘experience’ or ‘relation’ submitted prior to admission to

a gathered church are extensive, for both England and New England. See further, however, Nuttall,
Visible Saints, 112–15; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative, 81–116; Cohen, God’s Caress, 137–61;
Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties, 33–6, 76–7, 225 n.41, 228–9 n.38; Brachlow, 124–34; Crawford
Gribben, ‘Lay Conversion and Calvinist Doctrine during the English Commonwealth’, in
Lovegrove (ed.), Rise of the Laity, 36–46; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 121–3; Lynch, Protestant
Autobiography, 121–78; Dunan-Page, L’Expérience puritaine.
52 See further Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 11, 18–19; Burden and Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans,
Dissenters, and their Church Books’; Davies, Dunan-Page, and Halcomb, ‘Being a Dissenter’. On
the comparable significance of the parish ‘church book’ kept at Morebath, Devon, from 1520–74,
see Duffy, Voices of Morebath, 22–4, 32–64.
53 See further Dunan-Page, ‘Writing “things ecclesiastical” ’.
 Introduction19

Saints by calling’. For, like ‘the Lambs Book of Life’ (Revelation 21:27), such a
document ‘is capable of receiving in a man at one time, and of blotting him out
again, as occasion doth require, at another’, while archiving too the ‘Records
and Rules of a rightly constituted visible Church’ founded on ‘Christs New-
Testament’ and ‘Gospel-Truth’.54
Some key methodological implications, then, activate the term ‘Dissenting
experience’, as it is being employed here. On one level, it demands a refocusing
not just on what it means to experience Dissent in the seventeenth century, and
for whom, but also on recovering those sources that evidence that experience:
the manuscript records of Dissenting church life. The opening of these church
books to a much wider audience has been, so far, one of the key aims of the
‘Dissenting Experience’ project.55 Yet, to approach the experience of Dissent in
this way also demands a significant adjustment of what we might typically
understand the Protestant religious experience to encompass. The shadow cast
across this particular field of enquiry by the early twentieth-century psycholo-
gist William James is important to acknowledge here, given that for James,
famously, examining ‘varieties’ of ‘religious experience’ would involve ignoring
‘the institutional branch entirely’ while saying ‘nothing’ of either ‘ecclesiastical
organization’ or ‘systematic theology’. James would ‘confine’ himself instead, he
would declare, ‘to personal religion pure and simple’: to, that is, ‘the feelings,
acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’.56
Forasmuch as this stance reinforces an enduring myth of the Reformation—
that individual believers were left to struggle alone, like Christian at the very start
of The Pilgrim’s Progress, with the twin burdens of reading the Bible and under-
going conversion, all in painful isolation—the Dissenting experience is, as we
have been pointing out, more complex than this, being rooted in the communal
not the unaccompanied life, and in solidarity rather than solitariness.57 As The
Pilgrim’s Progress itself goes on to illuminate, ‘Saints fellowship’ rather than

54 Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works, III, 175–8.

55 See further ‘Introduction: Showing Dissenting Hands’, BS, 20 (2016), 7–13; Inventory; and
http://dissent.hypotheses.org (last accessed 31 August 2018).
56 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Matthew Bradley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 31–2. For responses to this approach see Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions:
Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 261–91; Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 22–9; Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and
European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005),
102–10. See also Robert H. Sharf, ‘Experience’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious
Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 94–116; David D. Hall, ‘What is the Place
of “Experience” in Religious History?’, Religion and American Culture, 13 (2003), 241–50; Marianne
Rankin, An Introduction to Religious and Spiritual Experience (London: Continuum, 2008), 1–17.
57 See further Michael Davies, ‘Spirit in the Letters: John Bunyan’s Congregational Epistles’, The
Seventeenth Century, 24 (2009), 323–60, and ‘The Wilderness of the Word: John Bunyan and the
Book in Christian’s Hand’, BS, 15 (2011), 26–52.
20 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

lonesome travail becomes paramount, and in ways that help to redefine the place
individual ‘experience’ occupied in Dissenting church life. In the Congregational
meeting at Canterbury, for example, the ‘necessity & b ­ enefit of christians com-
municating experiences’ with each other in quarterly meetings was stipulated
as early as 1647, with members being expected to share ‘the incomes of Jesus
christ’ and ‘their growth in grace’ as well as ‘the temptations, & corruptions which
they wrastle with’. The devotional aim of this ­collective practice was to ensure
that ‘God may have the glory of all his incomes’. But the pragmatic effect would
be to reinforce community: to ensure that ‘members severaly have more acquaint­
ance with their owne hearts & one with an other’, so that ‘the whole body may
bee the better inabled to sympathize with & pray on for an other’.58 As Bunyan’s
Christian and Hopeful would understand, through ‘Saints fellowship’, conversion
would never be very far from conversation, nor private experience from shared
exposition.59
Our starting point for understanding the experience of Dissent in this wider,
more communally-based sense is, then, perhaps more Durkheimian than
Jamesian in spirit, at least to the degree that it recognizes ‘religion’, in Émile
Durkheim’s terms, not only as a personal and individual phenomenon but also
as something ‘eminently collective’: as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things, [. . .] that unite its adherents in a single moral community
called a church’.60 On this basis, ‘church life’ becomes by far the more important
type of religious experience for us to study simply because it constitutes its
most fundamental and also widespread variety. Few Dissenters would undergo
the spectacular trials of conversion or visionary prophecy faced by the type of
‘cranky person’ that fascinated William James, and even fewer would commit
them to print. But they would all experience church life, in a number of ways,
as something profoundly ‘religious’ and transformative.61
The experience of Dissent should be understood, then, not only in terms of
individual encounters with the divine but also of mutual participation within a
collective body of believers in ‘fellowship’. As such, this approach has some-
thing in common with the sociological or anthropological concepts that have
coalesced recently under the banner of ‘lived religion’, the focus of which, as
Meredith McGuire notes, turns on ‘religion as expressed and experienced in
the lives of individuals’: that is, in Robert Orsi’s terms, on both the multifarious

58 CCAL: U37, ‘Canterbury Congregational Church, Watling Street, Canterbury, Church

Book’, fol. 10r. See also Hayden (ed.), Records, 100–1; Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 126.
59 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 131.
60 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman, abridged
with intro. and notes by Mark S. Cladis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46, and further
42–5, 302–3, 309, 314, 320. See also Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The
Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–3, 74;
Bossy, ‘Elementary Forms’; Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 276–78; Taylor, Varieties.
61 James, Varieties, 26; Taylor, Varieties, 28–9.
 Introduction21

interactions between believers and religious authorities, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the way that men and women are constantly engaged in interpreting,
practising, but also narrating religious experiences as ‘social agents/actors
themselves’.62 Dissenting experience, whether or not we choose to call it ‘lived
religion’, thus focuses on the Protestant self of the ‘empowered’ lay man and
woman construed as a full participant and creative agent in personal kinds of
belief and devotion, and in collective forms of action.63
It will have become clear by now that any exploration of the Dissenting
­experience champions too the scholarship of a number of historians whose work
has always focused, in one way or another, upon how Protestantism and the
Dissenting tradition were organized and experienced on a collective level, from
G. F. Nuttall and B. R. White to, more recently, Daniel Beaver, Samuel S. Thomas,
and Francis Bremer. One historian, however, whose work has long examined the
‘lived religion’ of early modern Protestants across its breadth, including a wide
range of activities to do with ‘church life’ both within and without the parish, is
Patrick Collinson. Prioritizing the ‘social study’ of early ‘godly’ Protestants, par-
ticularly by focusing on their ‘external corporate structures’ and activities, from
‘gadding’ and conferencing to gathering for fasts and thanksgiving, Collinson
recognized in the pious habits of early ‘voluntary Christians’ the blueprint for the
later Dissenting tradition formulated through the concept of the independent,
‘ordered, disciplined life of the Church’.64 It is Collinson, moreover, who appears
to have first identified the ‘puritan or dissenting experience’ as something that
demands exploration not just ‘among personal and literary sources’ but also in
‘the context of family and community relations’, and through the disciplines of
‘literature and anthropology’, alongside those of theology and economics.65

62 Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 3; Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in
Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 3rd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), xxxvii. The term
‘lived religion’, as opposed to ‘legal religion’, was originally used by French sociologist Gabriel Le
Bras when researching Catholic France in the 1930s. See Henri Desroche and Gabriel Le Bras,
‘Religion légale et religion vécue [Entretien avec Gabriel Le Bras]’, Archives de Sociologie des
Religions, 29 (1970), 15–20.
63 Historians of early modern Britain have considered the ways in which religion was ‘lived’ or
‘experienced’ in ‘the lives of the ordinary people’ without referring directly to ‘lived religion’: see,
for instance, Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 2; Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century:
Living Spirituality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Historians of colonial
America, ancien régime France, and Northern Europe have more readily adopted the term: see
David D. Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Towards a History of Practice (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Laurence Croq and David Garrioch (eds.), La Religion vécue.
Les laïcs dans l’europe moderne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013); Sari Katajala-
Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo (eds.), Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern
Europe c.1300–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
64 Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding’, 15, and further 11–16, 21–4; ‘The Godly’;
Religion of Protestants, 242–83; and ‘The English Conventicle’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood
(eds.), Voluntary Religion (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 223–59.
65 Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding’, 22–6 (22, 24).
22 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

Having coined the phrase ‘dissenting experience’ as early as 1975, it may seem
surprising that Collinson’s call for a renewed historical understanding of Dissent
in these terms has not been followed more comprehensively before now. This
situation may be explained, on one level, by the fact that the source materials
that would serve to inform such an approach—manuscript church books and
records—have remained largely overlooked, sitting ‘relatively underutilised’, as
one scholar has put it, in libraries, archives, and chapels, the potential of their
contents still waiting to be unlocked.66 Yet, on another, it could also reflect an
understandable wariness over the philosophical and methodological problems
that the word ‘experience’ brings with it. After all, Collinson appears to have been
inspired to pursue the ‘puritan or dissenting experience’ by E. P. Thompson: the
Marxist historian whose classic account of The Making of the English Working
Class (first published in 1963) proposed to examine ‘class’ as neither a ‘structure’
nor a ‘category’ but as ‘a historical phenomenon’ that ‘happens [. . .] in human
relationships’, ‘in the raw material of experience’, and in the ‘consciousness’
of ordinary men and women through their ‘common experiences’.67 Given
the simple fact that human beings ‘consume their lives in the form of experi-
ence’, Thompson notes in the review article to which Collinson points when
formulating his notion of the ‘puritan or dissenting experience’, historians are duty-
bound ‘to be interested in understanding how past generations experienced
their own existence’.68
Although Thompson would go on to restate his commitment as a historian
to the importance of ‘experience’ and, later, ‘lived experience’, as that by which
‘structure is transmuted into process’ and ‘imposed’ forms of ‘consciousness’
are contested and resisted so that ‘the subject re-enters history again’, it is obvious
why this approach would remain open to criticism.69 Given that ‘­experience’ is
notoriously resistant even to the most basic of definitions, how could it form
the basis of our understanding of the past? How can something typically
considered so interior and ‘privatized’ be recovered and analysed historically?70

66 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 132.
See also Burden and Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans, Dissenters, and their Church Books’; and Inventory.
67 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1991), 8–9.
68 E. P. Thompson, ‘Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Midland History, 1
(1972), 41–55 (49); Collinson, ‘Towards a Broader Understanding’, 22, 36 n.118.
69 E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 362–3;
‘The Politics of Theory’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 396–408 (405–6).
70 See further Raymond Williams, ‘Experience’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society, rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1988), 126–9; Jay, Songs of Experience, 1–23; Joan W. Scott, ‘The
Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 773–97; Michael Pickering, History, Experience
and Cultural Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 91–4; Sharf, ‘Experience’; Hall, ‘Place of
“Experience”’; Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, 173–8; Nick Davis, Early Modern Writing and the
Privatisation of Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–33. For responses to Thompson’s use of
‘experience’ see: William H. Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s
Theory of Working-Class Formation’, in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.),
E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 50–77; Scott, ‘Evidence of
 Introduction23

Is any attempt to examine ‘experience’ doomed from the outset to offer no more
than an ‘epistemologically naive’ form of ‘resurrectionism’ that assumes access
to forms of ‘consciousness’ that must remain permanently unavailable?71 On
this basis, it may seem impossible to proceed with a project that seeks to focus
on the ‘Dissenting experience’ of seventeenth-century church members whose
words and actions are recoverable only second-hand through often incomplete
and fragmentary congregational records, registers, and minute-books usually
kept and compiled on their behalf often by ministers or senior church officers,
and who evidently redacted them, perhaps heavily.72 How can we say anything
with confidence, then, about the lives and experiences of ‘visible saints’ who
appear before us as barely visible ghosts?
Yet, we can, and we must. If we bear in mind the caveats and correctives that
helpfully adjust and redirect rather than abandon ‘experience’ as a concept
valuable for historical enquiry, it seems clear that this endeavour is worth the
pursuit, though with an awareness too of the pitfalls and problems it involves.
For if the experience of Dissenting church life is to be examined it must be,
admittedly, through a glass darkly, with the events and transactions reported in
church books, journals, and registers coming to us not only imperfect but also via
the hands of scribes who, forasmuch as their duty was to record church business
truthfully and factually, may not have been entirely disinterested or impartial.
The ‘experience of Dissent’ afforded by such sources must be acknowledged
and understood, then, as ‘construed’, never raw or unmediated: as something to
be ‘historicized’, as Joan Scott puts it, never taken for granted.73 Yet, for all their
problems, it is only through such documents that we are able to begin to per-
ceive what the Dissenting experience was like as actually lived. Although they
leave us inevitably at some remove from the members whose names and actions
they record, nevertheless Dissenting church books still allow us to hear their
reported voices, to assess their choice of words, to recognize their roles, and to
witness their actions in ways that remain vivid and compellingly realized. The
hands raised at Bedford to confirm Brother Bunyan as pastor on 21 December
1671, to return to the example with which this ‘Introduction’ opened, attests
amply to this fact, and to the historical value too of the unique source in which
such ‘experience’ is documented: a Dissenting church book.

Experience’, 784–6; Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 172–97; Craig Ireland,
‘The Appeal to Experience and its Consequences: Variations on a Persistent Thompsonian Theme’,
Cultural Critique, 52 (2002), 86–107; Jay, Songs of Experience, 190–215.
71 Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 173.
72 See further Burden and Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans, Dissenters, and their Church Books’, 25–7.
73 Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made’, 64; Scott, ‘Evidence of Experience’, 781–2, 790–7. See further
Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies, 32, 42–5, 176, 205–6, 210, 241–3. See also
‘Introduction’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in
Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 1–9 (7–8).
24 Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb

To echo E. P. Thompson, ‘experience’ remains ‘a category which, however

imperfect it may be, is indispensable to the historian’, and particularly to the
historian of Dissent. It can lead us ‘to re-examine all those dense, complex and
elaborated systems’ by which church life is structured and through which the
‘social consciousness’ of Dissent could be said to find ‘realisation and expression’:
in ‘kinship, custom, the invisible and visible rules of social regulation, hegem-
ony and deference, symbolic forms of domination and of resistance’; in ‘manners’
as much as in ‘institutions and ideologies’. Although Thompson is describing
these as specific examples of the ‘complex and elaborated systems’ that gave rise
to the ‘distinctive class experiences’ of ordinary men and women, it is not hard
to see that they also ‘comprise the “genetics”’ of what we are describing here as
the ‘experience of Dissent’.74 It is to understanding more fully that experience as
it finds ‘realisation and expression’ in the kinds of church life being negotiated
and determined by Dissenting pastors and congregations in the seventeenth
century that the essays in this volume are dedicated.

74 Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 199, 362.

 1

Godly Order and the Trumpet of Defiance

The Politics of Congregational Church Life
during the English Revolution
Joel Halcomb

‘God is the God of order’. Few other phrases appear more frequently in early
modern discussions of politics, society, and religion. However, the biblical text
underpinning it (1 Corinthians 14:33) is formulated slightly differently: ‘For
God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.’
Though often coupled with the more positive tenor of 1 Corinthians 14:40 (‘Let
all things be done decently and in order’), such a negative construction reso-
nated well in the confusing circumstances of the English Revolution: could
God possibly be the author of civil war, regicide, and a world turned upside
down? Of course, the main concern of Paul’s first epistle to the Christians at
Corinth was church life, and in this respect its message had now come into its
own. For throughout the 1640s disorder and confusion were the cornerstones
of polemical attacks on the new ‘gathered churches’ being established by the
various Congregational, Baptist, and Separatist movements that emerged at the
start of the Civil War. If toleration were granted to these groups, some feared,
‘the whole Church of England in short time will be swallowed up with dis-
traction and confusion’.1 Their members were ‘all of mean quality’, it was
alleged, a ‘rabble of poore mechanicks & silly women’ whose self-governance
was deemed dangerously democratic.2 The enthusiasms of ‘weake, ignorant men

I would like to thank participants of both the Early Modern History Seminar at the University of
East Anglia and the British History in the 17th Century Seminar at the Institute for Historical
Research, London, for their comments on the research that informs this chapter, and especially
Michael Davies, Elliot Vernon, Emily Cockayne, Geoffrey Plank, Claire Jowitt, and Ben Nicholson.
1 A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London [. . .] against Toleration (1646), 4.
2 An Hue-and-Cry after Vox Populi (1646), 11; and see Rosemary Diane Bradley, ‘ “Jacob and
Esau struggling in the wombe”: A Study of Presbyterian and Independent Religious Conflicts,
1640–1648’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent, 1975), 624–5.
Joel Halcomb, Godly Order and the Trumpet of Defiance: The Politics of Congregational Church Life
during the English Revolution. In: Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of
Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England. Edited by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and
Joel Halcomb, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198753193.003.0002
26 Joel Halcomb

and women, youths and maids’ were said to have gone unchecked in these
‘Independent’ congregations that existed outside the corrective oversight of the
national church.3
The idea of independence was especially concerning. Indeed, ‘Independent’
became the pejorative title for Congregationalists in particular and gathered
church politics more generally, being regarded as ‘if not the naturall mother, yet
such a tender Nurse and Patronesse to hereticall opinions of all kinds, that to it
we may (for a great part) ascribe the luxuriant growth and spreading of errors,
heresies, &c. so far over this Kingdome’.4 This brand of polemic was so powerful
that the ‘proud and insolent title of Independencie’ was purported to convey ‘to
all mens apprehensions’ an ‘exemption [. . .] from all subjection and depend-
ance’, being nothing less, it seems, than ‘a trumpet of defiance against what ever
Power, Spirituall or Civill’.5 If God was the God of order then He could hardly be
the author of these disruptive churches, the internal confusions of which made
a mockery of their claims to be true churches of Christ.
Gathered church life was therefore deeply political, especially in the conten-
tious, open ‘religious marketplace’ of the English Revolution.6 Beliefs, practices,
and personal behaviour all came under close public scrutiny. Historians have
long recognized the political importance of the Revolution’s new religious
movements, particularly their contribution to the growth of religious toler-
ation and the troubled matter of church settlement.7 Yet, the institutional life of
gathered churches has remained somewhat neglected.8 Christopher Hill,
among other notable historians, has questioned whether it is possible to ascribe
anything like a meaningful institutional life to these groups, given that organized
denominational churches were, as he has proposed, a much later development.9

3 Thomas Edwards, Antapologia, or, A Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration (1644), 253.
4 An Attestation to the Testimony of our Reverend Brethren of the Province of London [. . .]
Resolved on by the Ministers of Cheshire (1648), 13.
5 Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge,
An Apologeticall Narration (1644), 23.
6 Ann Hughes, ‘The Pulpit Guarded: Confrontations between Orthodox and Radicals in
Revolutionary England’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (eds.), John Bunyan and
his England, 1628–88 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 31–50, and ‘Religious Diversity in
Revolutionary London’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics,
Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 111–28. See also
Bernard Capp, ‘The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum
England’, EHR, 129:536 (2014), 47–78.
7 See, for example, Shaw; George Yule, The Independents in the English Civil War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1958); Tolmie, Triumph; John Coffey, ‘The Toleration Controversy
during the English Revolution’, in Durston & Maltby, 42–68.
8 See, however, John Browne, The History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches
in Norfolk and Suffolk (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1877); White, Baptists; Nuttall, Visible Saints;
and Halcomb, ‘Congregational’, 22–86.
9 See Christopher Hill, ‘History and Denominational History’, BQ, 22 (1967), 65–71. See also
William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1955), 203; Claire Cross, ‘The Church in England, 1646–1660’, in G. E. Aylmer
(ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972),
 Congregational Church Life during the English Revolution 27

Gathered churches experienced ‘rapid development and transformation’, Hill

notes, and with ‘[s]ermon tasters’ and ‘seekers’ passing through ‘from congre-
gation to congregation’, their membership, beliefs, and practices were ever
changing: ‘[i]t was long indeed before clear-cut lines of sectarian divisions were
imposed’ on this fluidity, he argues.10 As a result, Hill’s famous account of
radical religion during the English Revolution focuses on individuals whose
remarkable creativity resulted from the breakdown of religious and political
institutions rather than their establishment. The institutional churches of the
mid seventeenth century were deemed too amorphous and unsettled to have
had a significant impact on an individual level, the real interest of the period
lying in any case with personalities and with radical ideas and experiences, not
the more mundane strictures and structures of ‘church life’.11
This chapter takes a different view. As early moderns knew all too well,
church life did matter. Ecclesial order and authority were crucial issues, for
religious confusion was seen by opponents of gathered churches as offensive to
God and ‘destructive to the Majestracy and Ministery, of the Church and
Common-wealth of England’.12 As a consequence, gathered churches had to
work hard to define and defend their practices and beliefs in order to justify
their legitimacy. For ‘visible saints’, this was a distinctly collective process, with
poor men and women participating alongside their wealthier neighbours and
educated ministers in building new forms of church life. The gathered church
was therefore a forum for politics.13 Through worship services, meetings, and
the more informal experiences of communal life, gathered church members
created their denominational identity and grappled with the revolutionary
challenges of radicalism and respectability.
To explore these questions and the tensions that they provoked, this chapter
considers the politics of church life in one group of gathered churches during
the 1640s and 1650s: Congregationalists. Congregationalists stood on the
boundaries of puritan orthodoxy during the English Revolution. Though they
espoused a radically Independent style of church polity and tolerated a remark-
able range of theological views and positions, nonetheless they were, in many
cases, keen to be seen as moderate, orthodox Calvinist churches. Their strong
ties to the Parliamentary regimes of the period ensured that they were at the
forefront of puritan Parliamentarianism, despite promoting a progressive

99–120 (118). For a critique of this argument, see Joel Halcomb, ‘Congregational Church Books
and Denominational Formation in the English Revolution’, BS, 20 (2016), 51–75.
10 Hill, ‘Denominational History’, 66, 68.
11 See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). See also Michael Braddick, ‘Introduction:
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, Revisited’, Prose Studies, 36 (2014), 175–84 (176).
12 Tub-Preachers Overturn’d or Independency to be Abandon’d and Abhor’d (1647), title-page.
13 This is a deliberate echo of Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern
England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in
Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 10–46 (11).
28 Joel Halcomb

platform of religious reform.14 Yet, their often troubled relationship with more
radical movements and individuals is also well known.15 Congregationalists
provide, therefore, an ideal opportunity to see how radicalism and respectabil-
ity were negotiated in the everyday politics of Revolutionary church life.
The entry point for analysing structures of authority, practice, and both
collective and individual decision-making within the Congregational churches
lies in the surviving records.16 Congregational ‘church books’ provide ample
evidence of the status, gender, reputations, beliefs, and transactions (both
social and ecclesial) of the ‘visible saints’. Recent work on the politics and
micropolitics of the parish has also given us frameworks for understanding
collective politics at this level.17 Like the parish, gathered congregations too
were replete with ‘social relations in motion’.18 Men and women from a range of
backgrounds debated policies and beliefs, elected officers, financed the church,
and disciplined errant members, all of which involved the negotiation and
exercise of power. Yet, as we shall see, what perhaps separate these congrega-
tional politics from the politics of the parish are the intense theological con-
victions that governed these churches and their practices, revealing an inner
life wrought from the struggle to establish and uphold godly order.
*
As formal institutions, the internal politics of Congregational church life were
shaped by structures of authority, both ecclesiastical and cultural. Church officers
were constituted with specific powers; church covenants (to which all members
had to subscribe) bound members to certain behaviours; and gender, wealth,
and godly reputation affected how members interacted with each other.
According to their own theorists, Congregational practices were ideally ordered

14 See Sarah Gibbard Cook, ‘The Congregational Independents and the Cromwellian
Constitutions’, CH, 46 (1977), 335–57; Jeffrey Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’,
History, 87:285 (2002), 28–40; Hunter Powell, ‘The Last Confession: A Background Study of the
Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order’ (unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008).
15 See Tolmie, Triumph; Carolyn Polizzotto, ‘The Campaign against “The Humble Proposals”
of 1652’, JEH, 38 (1987), 569–81.
16 For the most comprehensive list to date of extant church books and related records, see
Inventory. On understanding ‘church books’ see Mark Burden and Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Puritans,
Dissenters, and their Church Books: Recording and Representing Experience’, BS, 20 (2016),
14–32; Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Writing “things ecclesiastical”: The Literary Acts of the Gathered
Churches’, Études Épistémè, 21 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/417 (last accessed
22 August 2018); James F. Cooper, Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial
Massachusetts (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8–10.
17 See Wrightson, ‘Politics of the Parish’; Steve Hindle, On the Parish?: The Micro-Politics of
Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Andy
Wood, ‘ “Poore men woll speke one daye”: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in
England, c.1520–1640’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2001), 67–98.
18 W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 123, cited in Wrightson, ‘Politics of the Parish’, 12.
 Congregational Church Life during the English Revolution 29

for peaceful, godly church government. Richard Mather, the New England
minister, cites verbatim the formulation employed by the Elizabethan puritan
Thomas Cartwright in order to describe Congregational church government as
a ‘mixt form’:
which the Philosophers that write of the best Common-wealths affirme to be the
best. For in respect of Christ the head, it is a Monarchy, and in respect of the
Ancients [lay elders] and Pastors that Governe in Common, and with like
Authority among themselves, it is an Aristocracy, or rule of the best men; in
respect that the people are not secluded, but have their interest in Church matters,
it is a Democracy, or Popular State.19
In 1643, this appeal to Aristotelian forms of ‘mixt’ government was a defensive
strategy. On the eve of the Westminster Assembly’s gathering to advise the
Long Parliament on church reform, Mather was publishing his discussion of
Congregational order to defend Congregationalists against accusations by
Presbyterians that the power they gave to the laity resulted in unbridled and
anarchic democracy.20 Mather’s use of a ‘mixt form’ of church polity was, then,
distinctly polemical. In practice, however, Congregational government was
both more organic and democratic than he implied, though the defined authority
of Christ (through Scripture), the elders, and the congregation all had a role to
play in everyday practice. It is worthwhile deliberating briefly on each of these
aspects in turn.
According to Mather’s model, Congregational churches were organized
around foundational covenants that reflected, first and foremost, the monar-
chical authority of Christ as their head. These covenants invariably required
members to adhere strictly to Christ’s teachings in Scripture as the sole rule of
faith and practice: the doctrine of sola scriptura. Just as the Dissenting Brethren
of the Westminster Assembly claimed that the Scriptures contained ‘a compleat
sufficiencie, as to make the man of God perfect, so also to make the Churches of
God perfect’, so too would members of the Great Yarmouth church covenant to
‘alwayes endeavour through the grace of God assisting us to walke in all his
wayes & ordinances according to his written word which is the onely sufficient
Rule of good life for every man’.21 Sola scriptura was, however, anything but
static. The most sacred ecclesiastical law to the Dissenting Brethren, which the

19 Richard Mather, Church-Government and Church-Covenant Discussed (1643), 51, quoting

Thomas Cartwright, A Replye to an Answere Made of M. Doctor Whitgifte (1573), 51. For other
early uses of this model see Brachlow, 160, 179–80.
20 Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American
Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 147–8.
21 Apologeticall Narration, 9; NRO: FC 31/1, ‘Great Yarmouth, Middlegate Congregational
Church Book, 1643–1855’ (hereafter ‘Yarmouth CB’), 28 June 1643. See also the confession of the
church at Bury St. Edmunds: SRO (Bury St. Edmunds): FK3 502/1, ‘Bury St. Edmunds, Whiting
Street Congregational Church Book’ (hereafter ‘Bury CB’), fol. 11r; and NRO: FC 19/1, ‘Norwich
Old Meeting Congregational Church Book’ (hereafter ‘Norwich CB’), 10 June 1644.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
—a former disconsolate admirer, writing from the East to upbraid you
with your perfidy?”
“Nonsense, Geoff; how can you talk such utter rubbish? I’m sure I
don’t know who it can be from,” turning the letter over. “Cheetapore! I
know no one there.”
“Well, look sharp and open it, and you’ll soon see. Most likely a bill
of Reginald’s. I thought he was a ready-money man,” said Geoffrey
austerely.
Alice cut the envelope cautiously, and drew out a thin note and a
long slip of paper. The note ran as follows:
“Madam,
“The enclosed will show you that Sir Reginald Fairfax is not
your husband. He has deceived you as he has deceived
others. His quiet exterior conceals his real disposition. He is a
wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“One who knows him well.”
Greatly bewildered, and with trembling hands, Alice unfolded the
enclosure, and gazed at it for some time before she exactly
understood what she was looking at.
Copy of Certificate of Marriage, All Saints’ Church,
Cheetapore.
Reginald Mostyn Fairfax, Bachelor—Fanny Cole, Spinster.
Hugh Parry, Clerk.
Marie Fox and John Fox, Witnesses.
White as a sheet, and trembling like a leaf, Alice handed this,
along with the letter, to Miss Fane.
“What does it mean, Miss Fane?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
Miss Fane, having adjusted her pince-nez carefully, took both and
read them, and as she read her countenance changed from purple to
yellow, from yellow to purple, Alice meanwhile devouring her with her
eyes.
 “I cannot make it out,” she said at last. “It seems to be a perfectly
correct copy of a certificate of marriage, does it not, Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey stretched out a ready hand for the letter and certificate;
but the first glance at the letter had the same appalling effect on him
as on the two ladies. After a dead silence, during which the ticking of
the clock and falling of the cinders were distinctly audible, he plucked
up courage to say:
“A hoax, of course.”
“How are we to know that?” asked Miss Fane, drawing herself up.
“I’ll take it up to London and show it to some first-rate solicitor and
ask his opinion; it’s only four hours by rail. Will that do?” pushing
back his chair and looking at Alice interrogatively.
“Yes, do, my dear Geoff; and go at once,” she cried eagerly; “for
though I know it is a ridiculous mistake, still I feel quite odd and
frightened. But perhaps,” she added, after a moment’s pause, “we
should wait till Reginald comes home the day after to-morrow; he will
clear it up. Yes, second thoughts are best; we will wait, thank you,
Geoff, all the same.”
“No, no, my dear!” said Miss Fane, emphatically, “the sooner the
matter is cleared up the better. I must beg you to take my advice on
the subject as a person much older and more experienced than
either of you. Geoffrey can easily catch the ten-o’clock train. It is
now,” looking at the clock, “a quarter-past nine.”
After a short discussion, during which the elder lady carried all
before her, it was settled that Geoffrey was to start at once; so he
quickly bolted his breakfast, and within half-an-hour was speeding up
to London as fast as an express could take him. Thinking it better to
consult some older head, he drove from Waterloo Station to Wessex
Gardens, where Mr. and Mrs. Mayhew, Sir Reginald’s first cousins,
lived. The Honorable Mark and his wife were at luncheon when
Geoffrey entered, and without any beating about the bush bluntly
told his errand. They examined the certificate with the greatest
incredulity, and laughed at the idea of “Rex” of all people committing
bigamy, “he so upright, so honourable, a man of stainless character,
who had never been known to make a love affair in his life till he met
Alice,” they chimed alternately. “The idea was really too absurd; they
wondered Geoffrey could lend himself to such a wild-goose chase.”
Nevertheless there was the certificate, “and just to show that it is a
forgery and to relieve Miss Fane’s mind, you and Geoff will take it to
some respectable solicitors and quietly ask their opinion,” said Mr.
Mayhew. So they took it to Bagge and Keepe, an intensely correct
firm; and Mr. Bagge, after carefully scrutinising the certificate for
some seconds, unhesitatingly pronounced it to be a genuine copy,
and swore to the handwriting of the Rev. Hugh Parry, who had been
one of their clients for years. “I can show you any number of his
letters, and you can judge for yourselves, gentlemen,” he added,
preparing to open a brown japanned box, on which “R. and H. Parry”
was emblazoned in large white characters.
The little hatchet-faced lawyer, with his penetrating gray eyes and
mutton-chop whiskers, seemed so perfectly confident of the identity
of the signature and the truth of the certificate, that Mr. Mayhew’s
breath was, metaphorically speaking, quite taken away, and he
gazed from him to Geoffrey—whose visage had visibly lengthened—
with an air of utter stupefaction. His moral equilibrium was
completely shaken, as he glanced from Mr. Bagge to the deed-box,
from the deed-box to Geoffrey, from Geoffrey to the long slip of white
paper—the cause of all the mischief—that lay on the green baize
table before his eyes. He pushed his hat well to the back of his head,
scratched his grizzly locks, and obviously obtained some kind of
mental inspiration, for at last he found words:
“It is of no consequence at present, Mr. Bagge. I’m much obliged
to you all the same. And—a—you are quite certain of this”—
flourishing the certificate—“being Mr. Parry’s signature?”
“Quite certain. You can compare it yourself. Hancock,”—to a clerk
—“just reach down——”
“Never mind—not to-day—another time. Thank you; a—good
morning. Come along, Geoffrey,” said the Honorable Mark, backing
himself through a swing-door, and effecting his exit with
extraordinary promptitude, leaving Mr. Bagge under an impression
that he had been visited by a gentleman who ought to be carefully
looked after by his friends, if not immediately consigned to a lunatic
asylum.
“It is a queer business, Geoff,” exclaimed Mr. Mayhew, once they
found themselves in the street, “a very queer business!” striding
along at a tremendous pace, and looking very red in the face; “but
Reginald’s sure to make it all right, you may take your oath of that.
Just leave it to him to settle. He’ll be back in a couple of days. Mind
you don’t miss the train—it’s now a quarter-past five. Here’s a
hansom. Hop in, or you’ll be late. Give Alice my love, and tell her it’s
all right; it will be all cleared up when Rex comes home. Waterloo,” to
the driver.
“All very fine,” muttered Geoffrey to himself as he was rattled over
the pavement; “I wish he had to face Miss Fane, with Bagge’s
opinion, instead of me. She’ll get it out of me before she sleeps to-
night, so I suppose I had better make a virtue of necessity and tell
the truth at once. Won’t she just make a row!”
Alice having despatched Geoffrey, and seen him fairly off to the
station, as fast as the fastest harness hack could take him, went up
to her own room, and there read her husband’s letter, from which her
attention had been so rudely diverted. It was a nice letter for a young
wife to get—not a spooney, love-lorn effusion, but a good, rational,
amusing letter, that had evidently given as much pleasure to the
writer to write as to Alice to receive, and that, without fulsome
extravagance, breathed a spirit of true, proud, tender love from the
first page to the last. Till now, yesterday’s had been to Alice the best
and most precious of letters; now to-day’s came to put it aside, and
would in turn give place to to-morrow’s, for the last was always the
most prized.
Having read and re-read her letter, Alice felt a double reliance on
her husband and a sovereign contempt for the marriage certificate,
which must be either someone else’s or intended for a shameful
hoax. Much emboldened and encouraged by these reflections, Alice
ran downstairs in search of Miss Fane, whom she found knitting in
the morning-room, with an ominous purse on her lips and a frown on
her brow.
She was sitting in the window, and merely raised her eyes for a
second as Alice entered. Alice approached her, and, leaning against
the window—with one hand in her pocket surreptitiously grasping her
precious letter—plunged boldly into conversation.
“Miss Fane, I want to talk to you about this dreadful certificate.
What do you think about it? For my own part, I most certainly will
never believe that Reginald was ever married to anyone but me. It is
some excessively bad joke that he and I will be laughing over
together before the end of the week. Don’t you think so?”
“My dear, if you have fully made up your mind, why ask me?”
returned Miss Fane coldly.
“Because I have no one else to talk to about it. You are his aunt—
his mother’s sister. You would not believe such a thing of him, I
know.”
Miss Fane drew in her lips and knitted faster and more fiercely
than ever.
Alice, kneeling beside her, softly laid her hand on her arm and
said: “You know I have no mother to advise me, or think for me; and I
am so dreadfully young, and foolish, even for my age. Don’t you
think, if my mother were alive, she would say, ‘Trust your husband?’
In my heart I do sincerely trust him. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” replied Miss Fane; and then, after a pause, added: “That is
to say, as much as any young man can be trusted. His mother was
certainly my sister, but we were very little together, as I lived chiefly
at my grandfather’s. She was a handsome headstrong girl. Reginald
has his mother’s eyes and his mother’s temper, or I am much
mistaken. You would not have found her very easy to get on with,
had she been spared,” observed Miss Fane charitably; “but she died,
poor thing, when she was two-and-twenty. My brother-in-law was
inconsolable; he adored her, and spoiled her, and did the same for
her son.”
 “Do not say that, Miss Fane. If Reginald had been spoiled he could
never have grown up as he has done—so good, so honourable, so
——”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Miss Fane irritably. “All brides of two or
three months say the same.”
“There are very few like Reginald, nevertheless,” said Alice
warmly. “I know him, of course, better than anyone now.”
“Or you think you do,” interrupted Miss Fane, “which comes to the
same thing.”
“I know I do! I don’t believe he has a thought that I might not
share; he is true, upright, unselfish. Self he never thinks of; I am his
first thought in everything. He loves me far too dearly to bring any
such dreadful grief near me as this certificate hints at. I will put all
thoughts of it out of my head till he comes home. Don’t you think I
am wise?” she asked earnestly.
“Yes; in a certain sense you are; but if it is not cleared up you will
be all the more unprepared to receive the shock. My motto is,
‘Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and take what comes.’ This
is a very serious matter, and requires serious thought. I have been
turning it over in my mind for the last hour. Shall I tell you what I
think?” gazing solemnly over her glasses at Alice, who was still
kneeling at her side.
“Oh yes, of course. Please do,” she replied eagerly.
“I think that you are by no means the first girl Reginald was in love
with, or that was in love with him.”
“Oh, but I know I was,” cried Alice with assured confidence; “he
told me so, over and over again,” she added with a lovely blush.
“Stuff!” replied Miss Fane, viciously spearing her ball of worsted
with a knitting-needle. “And you believed him, you little goose! Do
you think,” she proceeded in a cool ironical tone, “that an extremely
handsome young man like him has lived seven years in the army
without as many love affairs to match? I tell you—and I am an
experienced old woman—I tell you no, ten thousand times no. I can’t
say that I ever heard of any special affair. I did hear a whisper that
when he joined he was one of the wildest of wild boys; but I believe,
thanks to his father, he soon steadied down. But take my word for it,
young men in the cavalry are a wild, bad lot.”
“Do you mean—that—Reginald——?” cried Alice, struggling to
rise.
“No, no, no,” replied Miss Fane, keeping her down by laying her
hand heavily on her shoulder. “Be patient, and hear what I have to
say. I only mean taking them generally—no one in particular.
Reginald,” she resumed, “has spent a great deal of time abroad.
Who knows,” she proceeded mysteriously, and dropping her voice to
a whisper, “but he may in some mad moment have married a half-
caste girl; and then, tired of her, and ashamed of his folly, have
bribed her to silence and left her in India; and she, finding his second
marriage too much for her fortitude, has sent you this certificate!
What do you think of that idea?”
“Think of it!” cried Alice, jumping to her feet, and almost
inarticulate with passion. “I think it a very wicked, horrible idea to
entertain of your own nephew, and you ought to be ashamed of it!”
“So I will if this certificate proves a false one; but if not, have you
thought, my poor girl, since I must speak plainly, of the position in
which it places you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if Reginald was married more than two years ago, as
shown by the certificate, you are not his wife; you are nothing but
Miss Saville once more, with your name and fame for ever blighted.”
“How dare you say so?” cried Alice, crimson to the roots of her
hair. “How cruel, how unkind of you to talk to me like this! I will never,
never speak to you again as long as I live. You have a bad
uncharitable heart,” she added, moving rapidly towards the door.
“What you say never, never could be true.”
“Stay, stay,” cried Miss Fane, following her briskly; “I would not
have said all this if I had not—if I did not love you, and if I had not
altogether your good at heart. You surely do not think it can be
pleasant for me to doubt my own nephew?”—but it was very
pleasant—“I only want to open your eyes, my poor dear child, in
case of the worst. There is no one to perform this very disagreeable,
thankless duty, except myself. I mean all for the best, I do indeed,”
taking Alice into her bony embrace and kissing her effusively. Alice,
on the verge of hysterics, her brain reeling, gladly escaped upstairs,
to lock herself into her own room for the remainder of the day, where
she had ample leisure to digest and understand Miss Fane’s ideas.

Miss Fane, as we have already seen, had no love for her nephew,
and, as far as the certificate was concerned, he was already tried,
found guilty, and condemned, in her opinion. A domestic tragedy,
such as this promised to be, was her glory and delight. Slander and
gossip of all kinds were as the breath of her nostrils; her letters,
thoughts, and conversation all turned in that direction; and she was
an adept at serving up the most delicate dish of scandal,
accompanied by sauce piquante, and followed by entrées of her own
suggestions. She had the worst opinion of the world and everybody
in general, an opinion she prudently kept to herself. An affair in her
own little circle, such as this was likely to be, would afford her
materials for conversation and letters for an indefinite time. It would
give her a certain importance, too, to say: “I was in the house at the
time when it all happened; I saw and heard everything with my own
eyes and ears.”
She had no respect for her nephew’s name—she was not a
Fairfax—no pity for his young wife. The excitement of a cause
célèbre in her family caused her neither shame nor horror; quite the
reverse. She knitted the heel of a stocking; made an excellent lunch
off fish cutlets, curried fowl, tarts, and cream; took an airing in the
pony-carriage; and awaited Geoffrey’s return with imperturbable
mien.
“Alice would return to live with her,” she reflected, “if this turned out
as she imagined; and she would make her a handsome allowance,
say three thousand pounds a-year, as before. Brighton or
Cheltenham would suit her best; she loathed the country, and would
be able to give nice little dinners, card-parties, and suppers, and
keep a brougham and pair—bays or grays—iron-grays looked
dashing; mulberry livery and silver buttons, and of course a cockade
—it looked so smart. Perhaps a victoria, too, for summer.”
Here her castle-building was interrupted by the entrance of Alice,
watch in hand—Alice, who had not tasted a morsel all day. She had
spent hours alternately pacing the room and reading her husband’s
letter; at one moment revived with hope, at another sickening with
despair, according as her own convictions or Miss Fane’s came
uppermost. Pale, but composed, she drew near the fire, and
mechanically spread her hands towards the blaze. “Have you dined
yet, Miss Fane? I am very sorry to have left you alone, but really my
head ached so badly there was no use in coming down. Geoffrey will
be here in ten minutes if the train is punctual.”
“Then in ten minutes you will know your fate,” said Miss Fane,
laying her knitting down and looking at the clock.
“Oh, it’s sure to be all right,” replied Alice bravely, but white as
ashes to the very lips; as steadying herself by the mantelpiece, she
kept her eyes fixed on the door.
Miss Fane’s favourite motto, “Hope for the best, prepare for the
worst,” was suddenly curtailed by sounds in the hall.
Geoffrey’s face, as he entered with a would-be cheerful look,
spoke volumes, quite sufficient for Alice, who knew every expression
of his familiar features. Her dry lips tried to form a question, but no
sound came from them.
“Alice!” he abruptly blundered forth, “they say it’s a correct copy,
and all that sort of thing. There is no use concealing the truth. Mark
and I are certain that Reginald will clear it all up; it’s some frightful
mistake, but nothing more. I swear it is not,” he said, taking her icy
cold hand. “Don’t you fret yourself about it,” he added earnestly, for
Alice’s white face and stony fixed expression alarmed him not a little.
“A correct copy did you say?” screamed Miss Fane. “Good
heavens, what an unprincipled wretch Reginald must be! It’s well his
father and mother are in their graves. My worst fears are confirmed.
“Alice, my poor child,” turning towards her with outstretched
hands, “you will always have a friend and guardian in me.” But her
future ward did not hear her; Alice was lying at Geoffrey’s feet
insensible.

Next morning Alice had a long interview with Miss Fane, who
came to condole and reason with her. She was in bed, and utterly at
Miss Fane’s mercy. All her hopes were speedily nipped in the bud.
Every loophole of excuse that during the night her busy brain had
conjured up was speedily scattered to the winds by Miss Fane’s
common sense.
“There is no doubt about it now,” she urged; “none whatever. You
must brace up your courage, and prepare to act as a girl of spirit. No
doubt you have a terribly hard task before you, and you have been
cruelly deceived; but for the honour of your sex—not to speak of
your own good name—be firm. He will declare the whole thing a lie
from first to last, and will try to soothe you down with fond words and
caresses, so as to gain time to act; for doubtless this certificate will
give him a very unpleasant surprise. He will spare no money, you
may rest assured, to silence the other person—Fanny Cole, in short.
I daresay he would bribe her with half his income, so as to keep you
as his wife; but do not listen to him. Be firm; in fact it will be best for
you not to see him, but to leave the house before he arrives. You
and I can live together as before. At first we will go to some quiet
spot until this dreadful affair has blown over, as I suppose you will
not wish to take any legal steps against him?”
“Oh, Miss Fane!” said Alice—who had not heard a quarter of what
Miss Fane had been saying—suddenly sitting up in bed and pushing
back her hair behind her ears, “is it not a bad dream? Have I been a
little off my head? It can’t be true. It is a dream!” she said,
administering a severe pinch to her round white arm, from which she
had pulled back the lace-ruffled sleeve. But as she watched the vivid
red mark slowly dying away, she fell back on her pillow with a
gesture of despair. “No dream—no dream,” she said half to herself;
nevertheless, Miss Fane heard it.
“I am sorry to say it is no dream, but a very sad reality. If you will
take my advice, Alice”—and here Miss Fane paused—“Yes?”
“You will leave this to-day, and not await your hus—I mean,”
correcting herself, “Sir Reginald’s return.”
“Oh, I can’t, I won’t. I must see him once more!” cried Alice
excitedly. “He is so clever, so clear-headed, he is sure to be able to
unravel this horrible mystery.”
“Humph!” said Miss Fane, with a scornful sniff, “it will take a
cleverer man than I take him to be to do that. A marriage certificate
is not to be explained away, or what would be the good of one?”
“But someone else may have forged his name,” persisted Alice;
“may have been married in his name two years ago.”
“They could hardly do that, as the chaplain must have known him
by sight. And look at the chaplain’s own signature, recognised and
sworn to by his solicitors.”
“A forgery perhaps.”
“Nonsense. What could be anyone’s object? What would they
gain? If you will persist in shutting your eyes to plain facts, I cannot
help you. I am certain he will declare the whole thing a falsehood,
and talk you over, in which case I must warn you that all respectable
society will drop your acquaintance. This is by no means the first
event of the kind in my experience. The same terrible scandal
occurred in the Loftus family only two years ago. Mr. Rupert Loftus
married one of the Darling girls, and shortly after the marriage
another wife, married in Jersey years before, came on the scene.
Quite a parallel case to yours. I must say I gave you credit for more
self-respect than to imagine you would cling to a man who is another
woman’s husband.”
A crimson blush dyed Alice’s throat, face, and ears; indignant
tears started to her eyes; she tried to speak, but no words came,
and, turning her head, she buried her face in the pillow, motioning
her tormentor away with her hand. Miss Fane, finding it impossible to
carry on conversation with the back of a small shapely head and a
huge coil of golden-brown plaits, took her knitting and her departure.
She went, but she left a shaft behind her that rankled deeply.
“Another woman’s husband!” The thought was maddening! Not
hers? Nothing to her any more; and he who had told her over and
over again that he had never loved anyone but her! “You little witch,”
he had said, “you made me break all my resolutions, for I had not
meant to marry for years and years, and, thanks to you, find myself
at five-and-twenty a married man, with the prettiest little wife in
England.” How could he—how dared he talk like this, and he already
married?
Towards the afternoon Alice submitted to be dressed, and took
some tea and toast, but remained all day in her own room. She
spent a long time sitting in one of the windows, with her hands
listlessly crossed in her lap, and thinking profoundly. As she watched
the gray rain drifting across the park, uppermost in her thoughts was
Miss Fane’s parting speech.
Over and over again her lips framed the unspoken words,
“Another woman’s husband.”
She paced the room restlessly from end to end. Suddenly a
thought struck her as she arrested herself at the door of her
husband’s dressing-room. She had never been in it. She slowly
turned the lock of the door and entered. It corresponded in size to
her own; but oh, how different to that luxurious apartment! It had a
cold unoccupied feel, and she walked across to the dressing-table
on tiptoe, for some mysterious reason she could not have explained.
There was a small photo of herself in a stand occupying a post of
honour; a large old-fashioned prayer-book, which she opened
—“Greville Fairfax, from his wife,” was written in a faded delicate
Italian hand, on the first leaf; a familiar breast-pin was sticking in the
pin-cushion; a familiar coat was hanging on a peg. How near he
seemed to her now!
 Her eyes, roving round the room, took in every detail. Two old-
fashioned wardrobes, a battalion of boots, a bear-skin and two tiger-
skins spread on the floor, a couch, a small brass-bound chest of
drawers, and a few chairs. Over the chimney-piece hung his sabre,
surmounting a fantastic arrangement of whips and pipes; the
chimney-board itself bristled with spurs. Above the sabre, spurs, and
whips was a small half-height portrait of his mother, evidently copied
from one in the dining-room—a lovely dark-eyed girl, in a white satin
dress and fur cloak. Alice stood before the picture for a long time.
Reginald had his mother’s eyes, only that his had not such a soft
expression. Yes, certainly his eyes were like his mother’s.
“And what is it to me?” she thought with a sudden pang. “What
would his mother think of him if she could but know?” she said half
aloud, fixing her eyes on the picture as if expecting an answer from
those sweet red lips. “What would my mother think if she knew all?”
she said, burying her face in her hands. Then suddenly raising her
eyes, she looked once more round the room and walked to the door.
“Good-bye,” she said aloud. “Good-bye, the Reginald Fairfax I
loved, that was everything to me in the wide world. Good-bye,” she
repeated, softly shutting the door. “As for the man who is coming to-
morrow, he is nothing to me; he is—oh, shameful, shameful thought!
—another woman’s husband!” and throwing herself on her knees
beside her bed, she sobbed as if her heart would break.
After a while she rose more composed, dried her eyes, stifled her
long-drawn sobs with an enormous effort, and said to herself aloud:
“I have done with tears; I have done with weakness; I have done
with Alice Fairfax!”
 CHAPTER VI.
“A WELCOME HOME.”

Endued in a decent semblance of composure, but pale and

hollow-eyed, Alice came downstairs the following evening in time to
receive her husband. She, and Miss Fane, and Geoffrey were sitting
in the drawing-room, silent and constrained: Miss Fane bolt upright
and knitting aggressively; Geoffrey making a feint of reading The
Field, but in fact merely turning over the paper aimlessly from page
to page, and surreptitiously watching Alice above its margin; Alice,
with her hands clasped listlessly before her, making no pretence of
any employment, but staring intently into the fire with a hard, defiant
expression on her face. Suddenly a loud ring, and a sound of
footsteps and cheerful voices in the hall, announced the return of the
master of the house.
Sir Reginald entered, looking radiant. “You hardly expected me so
soon, did you?” he said, greeting his relations in turn. “I travelled
straight through without stopping, except for a couple of hours in
Paris. I have brought you the most lovely Christmas-box you ever
saw!” he said, turning to Alice.
“Why, what have you been doing to yourself, my dear girl?” he
exclaimed suddenly, struck by her altered appearance. “Have you
been ill?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she returned shortly.
“Then what is the matter?” he proceeded with a smile, inwardly
amazed at his wife’s strange manner, and at the tepid reception she
had accorded him.
“Has the cook, our priceless treasure, given warning?”
“Something dreadful has happened, Reginald,” replied Alice. “I
don’t know how to tell you,” she added in a low voice.
 “I know!” he returned cheerfully, nodding his head towards
Geoffrey. “He has killed one, if not two, of my best hunters?”
“Something far worse than that,” she rejoined, staring glassily at
her husband.
“Can you not guess what it is?” put in Miss Fane with venomous
empressement, having hitherto restrained herself by an enormous
effort. “I wonder the roof has not fallen on you,” she continued,
invoking the chandelier with a supplicatory gesture, and casting up
her flint-gray eyes.
“Please leave us, Aunt Harriet,” interrupted Alice, struggling hard
for composure. “I must speak to—to—Reginald alone.” And turning
her back to the company to conceal her emotion, she moved
towards the fire.
Sir Reginald gazed from one to the other in speechless
amazement, then walking to the door he flung it open for Miss Fane,
who left the room with ill-disguised though stately reluctance,
throwing a warning but wholly unnoticed glance towards the figure in
front of the fire.
Geoffrey, as he passed out, significantly whispered: “Mind, my
dear fellow, I don’t believe a word of it; I stand by you, through thick
and thin.”
“Stand by me in what?” muttered Sir Reginald to himself as he
closed the door. “Have they all gone mad?”
“Well, Alice, my darling,” approaching his wife, “what is all this
about?” putting his arm round her waist and drawing her towards
him.
“Don’t dare to touch me!” she cried fiercely, pushing him away with
both hands.
“Are you rehearsing for private theatricals?” he said with a laugh;
“and am I to be the villain of the piece?” Then continuing more
seriously, taking his wife’s hands in his and looking straight into her
eyes: “Alice, tell me at once—what is the meaning of this?”
 “I’ll tell you,” she replied hysterically, snatching her hands away
and searching in her pocket with nervous haste.
“What is the meaning of this?” producing the anonymous letter. “It
came three days ago.”
He read it slowly, frowned, crushed it into a ball, and flung it into
the fire.
“There! that is my opinion of it,” he said, turning towards her. “You
would not wish me to believe that you could be influenced by an
anonymous letter, written by some crawling reptile too cowardly to
attempt to substantiate his lies. I hold the writer of such a production”
(pointing to the blackened fragments now lazily sailing up the
chimney) “no better than an assassin who stabs in the dark.”
“This, at any rate, is not anonymous,” replied Alice, pushing the
certificate towards him.
He took it up, read it, turned it over, and read it again. She
observed that his face was a shade paler, but otherwise he was
perfectly composed, as he said: “This is a most infamous forgery. I
know no one of the name of Fanny Cole, and I need hardly say I
never was married before.”
“And is this all you have to say?” inquired his wife.
“All! Good heavens, Alice! what more can I say? I assure you most
solemnly I was never married to anyone but you; you know it as well
as I do myself. I never met a woman I cared to speak to twice till I
saw you that evening at Malta. What is the good of repeating the
same old story over again—just now, at all events—when we have
such heaps of things to say to each other? As to this infamous
certificate, I will take good care to have it thoroughly investigated,
and the whole thing cleared up, you may rely on that. It is my affair
altogether; do not trouble your little head any more about it.” Drawing
her towards him—“Come, are you not very glad to see me? Have
you no better welcome for me than this? Do you know that I have
been counting the very milestones till I reached home; and now I am
here, won’t you say you are glad to see me, my dearest?”
 Alice leant her head against his shoulder; she was weak, she
knew it; he was talking her over, as Miss Fane predicted; every word
he uttered found an echo in her heart—her heart that was beating
suffocatingly. She trembled from head to foot. On one hand was love
and everything that made life dear to her; on the other, honour, duty,
pride. She must make her choice between right and wrong.
“Speak, Alice!” interrupted her husband, getting a little out of
patience at last.
“Yes, I’ll speak,” she returned in a hard mechanical voice, abruptly
releasing herself and standing before him. “Do you know,” she
continued, with slow distinct utterance, “that that certificate” (pointing
to where it lay on the table) “has been shown to a firm of solicitors?”
“Indeed!” replied Sir Reginald, in a tone of much surprise. “At
whose suggestion?”
“Miss Fane advised me. Geoffrey and Mr. Mayhew took it to a firm
they could rely on.”
“Well, I really think you might all have waited for my return before
taking such an important step,” said Sir Reginald with some
indignation. “I wonder you allowed it, Alice. It did not show much
confidence in me, I must confess. And what did the solicitors say?”
he proceeded, in a cool displeased tone.
“They said——” and she paused; then continued with an effort
—“they said it was a true copy!” raising her eyes to his.
“A true copy!” he echoed. “I never heard such nonsense in all my
life—never!” he exclaimed emphatically. “When there is no original,
how can there be a copy?”
“I am not clever enough to argue with you, Reginald; you must ask
the solicitors, they will explain. At any rate, they swore to the
clergyman’s signature; he was a client of theirs, and they knew his
writing well.”
“Mr. Parry’s writing is it?” said her husband, again taking up the
certificate and critically scanning it. “So it is!—an admirable forgery.
Poor old fellow, he was garrison chaplain at Cheetapore. I knew him
well; he has been dead these two years.”
“Probably,” persisted Alice, “the fact of his being dead does not
refute that,” pointing to the paper in her husband’s hand. “According
to its testimony it is nearly three years since you were married.”
“Three months, you mean,” he exclaimed with a laugh, making a
desperate effort to throw off a horrible suspicion that was stealing
over him and turning every vein to ice.
“Someone has forged Mr. Parry’s name, that is evident,” he
exclaimed; “but why or wherefore I am at a loss to understand. I wish
I had been here when this precious document arrived,” he continued,
pacing about the room. “It must have given you rather a start getting
it in my absence. No wonder you look pale, my poor little wife,” he
said, pausing opposite her and looking at her steadfastly.
“No wonder, indeed!” she replied significantly.
Something in her look and tone confirmed his former conviction.
Gazing at her fixedly for some seconds, he said:
“It is not possible that you doubt me, Alice?”
Dead silence.
“Answer me at once,” he demanded sternly, as she stood dumb
before him. “Do you hear me, Lady Fairfax?” he persisted,
exasperated by her silence.
“You can hardly expect Lady Fairfax to hear you,” she replied in a
cool, chilly voice. “She is not here.”
“You will drive me mad, Alice,” he cried vehemently; “you could not
in your heart believe this monstrous invention. I solemnly swear to
you—you alone are my wife; you know it is the truth. Why do you
torture me like this? If I thought you really doubted me, as sure as
you are Alice Fairfax I would never forgive you!”
“Then you are taking a very weak oath; for it seems to most
people who have seen that paper that I am not Alice Fairfax. Show it
to whom you will, they will say that I am not your wife.”
 “Is that your opinion?” he asked sharply.
“It is,” she replied boldly; “I have no other alternative. I have been
thinking a great deal the last two days—thinking more than I ever did
in all my life before, and I can come to no other conclusion than that
you were married to that woman. Your aunt entertains no doubt of
your infamy, neither do I.”
“Alice, am I mad? am I dreaming? or do I really hear you distinctly
tell me that you are no longer my wife, and that you entertain no
doubt of my infamy? Am I out of my mind, or are you? Am I still
asleep in the train, or am I in my waking senses?” he said, looking at
her fixedly with his keen dark eyes.
“Whether you are mad or not I cannot say,” she retorted scornfully.
“I hope you are sane enough to understand that I leave this house
to-morrow, never to return. For the future, you and I are strangers.”
“This is mere childish folly,” returned her husband angrily; “you
don’t know what you are saying. Because Miss Fane has been
wicked enough to put all manner of hideous ideas into your foolish
head, you are ready to run away like the orthodox heroine of a three-
volume novel.
“Do you suppose?” he continued very gravely, “that I shall permit
you to take the law into your own hands like this, or suffer you—a girl
in your teens, a three-months’ wife—to leave your home in such a
manner? Is this the way you keep your wedding vows——”
“Wedding vows!” interrupted Alice, hastily pulling off her ring and
tossing it on the table, where it spun for a second, and then
collapsed into silence. “Wedding vows! I’ve none to keep! I am free!
Show that certificate to whom you will, even to the most ignorant,
and they will say, that whoever may be your wife—I am not——” She
paused for a moment, half choked. “And not being your wife, you can
scarcely expect my father’s daughter to remain here. You are a
hypocrite,” she continued, speaking rapidly and trembling with
excitement. “A hypocrite! for you appeared to be all that was good;
and I know you to be all that is bad——It was bad, wicked,
shameful,” stamping her foot, “to deceive an orphan confided to your
care.”
She paused again, breathless.
“Pray go on, madam—do not spare me,” said her husband
hoarsely. He was leaning one elbow on the chimney-piece.
Indignation, horror, and scorn were chasing each other in his eyes.
“You married me,” resumed Alice, “or rather pretended to marry
me, because I was your ward. It was an easy way to solve that
problem, which must otherwise have been a trouble and a bore. I
was young, rich, and, if you were to be believed, exceedingly pretty
—nothing could be more suitable; but why did you forget that you
had a wife in India? Had you not better bring her home? Her position
may not be properly understood at Cheetapore,” with withering
contempt.
Smash went a valuable, a priceless old chimney ornament, thanks
to Sir Reginald’s restless elbow.
“I shall go away to-morrow, say what you will, and never see you
again as long as I live. You may hush the matter up; you may say
that I am dead. You have nothing to fear from me. I have neither
father nor brother. In years to come I may forget you, and I may
forgive you; but should I live to be a hundred, I will never see you or
speak to you again.”
She stopped abruptly, and looked at her husband with glowing
angry eyes. She had relieved the pent-up feelings of her heart in a
perfect torrent of reproach. Her utterance was so rapid as to be
almost inarticulate, and the tide of her passion carried all before it.
With a motion to Sir Reginald to permit her to pass, she was
preparing to leave the room.
He by this time was as white as a sheet, otherwise a vein down
the centre of his forehead alone betrayed emotion.
Whilst Alice was shaking with excitement, he was perfectly cool
and self-possessed; but a kind of repressed sound in his voice when
he spoke would have told a bystander that his temper was now