Radical Religion in Cromwell's England

A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth

Andrew Bradstock

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857732033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

'The present state of the old world is running up like parchment in the fire.' So declaimed Gerrard Winstanley, charismatic leader of radical religious group the Diggers, in mid-seventeenth century England: one of the most turbulent periods in that country's history. As three civil wars divided and slaughtered families and communities, as failing harvests and land reforms forced many to the edge of starvation, and as longstanding institutions like the House of Lords, the Established Church and even the monarchy were unceremoniously dismantled, so a feverish sense of living on the cusp of a new age gripped the nation."Radical Religion in Cromwell's England" is the first genuinely concise and accessible history of the fascinating ideas and popular movements which emerged during this volatile period. Names like the 'Ranters', 'Seekers', 'Diggers', 'Muggletonians' and 'Levellers' convey something of the exoticism of these associations, which although loose-knit, and in some cases short-lived, impacted on every stratum of society.
Andrew Bradstock critically appraises each group and its ideas, taking into account the context in which they emerged, the factors which influenced them, and their significance at the time and subsequently. The role of political, religious, economic and military factors in shaping radical opinion is explored in full, as is the neglected contribution of women to these movements. Drawing on the author's long study of the topic, "Radical Religion in Cromwell's England" brings a remarkable era to vivid and colourful life.

CHAPTER ONE

Baptists

BAPTISTS ARE ONE of the few dissenting movements which flourished during the civil war years to have survived to the present day. Now very much a mainstream ‘free’ church, they are chiefly characterized by a non-liturgical form of worship with a strong emphasis on preaching, and a conviction that baptism – usually by full immersion in water – is to be administered only to people consciously professing faith, and not, therefore, to infants. In adhering to these practices they demonstrate a historical continuity with their forebears in the seventeenth century; but while today Baptist beliefs and practices are hardly likely to provoke social unrest – indeed, in the USA, the term ‘Baptist’ is almost a synonym for political conservatism – the movement’s founders were regularly denounced as heretical and subversive, a threat to good order and the stability of both church and state.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the terms ‘Baptist’ and ‘Anabaptist’ were bandied about in much the same way as ‘Communist’ was in the USA in the 1950s. In 1646 the influential Scottish divine Robert Baillie published a tract describing ‘Anabaptism’ as ‘the true fountain’ of what he believed to be all the heretical groups then in evidence, ‘and most of the other errors which for the time do trouble the Church of England’. For Baillie, these believers were a danger to ‘the whole fabric of our churches and kingdoms’, and he was not alone in his concerns about this small but fiercely independent movement.

It was the ready association their detractors made with the continental Anabaptists of the previous century that made life hard for the early Baptists in England. It was not just that ‘Anabaptism’ had become a byword for subversion, on account of its adherents’ strong insistence that true believers should separate entirely from the world and reject all civil governments and a state church; its reputation had been tarnished by a notorious episode in 1534 when an extreme tendency of the movement, foregoing their principles of pacifism and separatism, took control of the city of Münster and tried to establish, by force, the ‘new Jerusalem’ founded on proto-communist principles. Inspired by the charismatic Jan Bockelson (John of Leiden), the group survived a siege of the city by local princes for over a year until they were finally overcome and put to the sword. Even a hundred years later simply the evocation of the term ‘Münster’ was enough to send shivers down the spines of good upright people in England, and the Baptists’ detractors used it to good effect. As a preacher at St Bartholomew in the City opined in 1632, ‘then are the Anabaptists mad, who would reject all law, and make the whole world level; denying obedience to laws and lawful magistrates, a disease begun in the distempered heads of John of Leiden, and the mad men of Münster, opposed by the holy zeal of Luther, whose doctrine of reformation was dangerously mistaken by those fanatics.’

Thus the great scourge of all heretics in the 1640s, Thomas Edwards, after a diatribe against the ‘errors, blasphemies and practices of the sectaries’ in his infamous volume Gangraena, spoke of England having become ‘already in many places a chaos, a Babel, another Amsterdam, yea, worse; we are beyond that, and in the highway to Münster’. A few years earlier a tract had appeared with a similar sentiment in its title: A Warning for England especially for London in the Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists. In the 1650s, a pamphlet issued by the government to justify a disturbance caused by some soldiers at the funeral of a Baptist pastor in a small Oxfordshire town bore the title ‘Münster and Abingdon’! Perhaps, as J. F. McGregor has put it, in the fevered atmosphere generated by ‘the emergence of popular agitation supporting the parliamentary cause ... the fear that London might become another Münster did not seem too fanciful’,¹ but it exposed the Baptists to more hostility and suspicion than they perhaps warranted. It is easy to understand the frustration of Leveller leader Richard Overton, himself a Baptist, when, in 1646, he wondered, ‘Who writ the history of the Anabaptists but their enemies?’

The irony was that the English Baptists of the seventeenth century neither accepted the label ‘Anabaptist’ nor had their roots in that tradition. Their reason for eschewing the term ‘Anabaptist’ was straightforward: it meant, after all, re-baptizer, and Baptists held that when they baptized believers they were not administering a second baptism but a first, the ritual performed on infants being no baptism at all. The term was thus at best misleading and at worst downright offensive, and, until their nomenclature became more widely respected, they preferred themselves to be described in terms such as ‘the group of baptized believers meeting at...’. To what extent their lineage might be traced back to the continental Anabaptists of the previous century has been a matter of scholarly debate for some years, but the consensus view now is that the links made at the time by their opponents were a result of wishful thinking and not historically grounded. As respected Baptist historian B. R. White wrote in 1996, even the most ‘careful studies ... seeking to estimate the influence of Anabaptism upon both General and Calvinistic Baptist origins found no significant influence could be decisively proved’.²

Those who have argued that the roots of the English Baptist tradition do lie in the soil of continental Anabaptism place great emphasis on the fact that the first of its churches was formed in Holland. Thus Mervyn Himbury in his British Baptists: A Short History suggests that it is not without significance that the group of English separatists who first openly formed themselves into what we would now recognize as a Baptist church only did so once they had left these shores (to escape persecution) and ‘settled in a country (Holland) where the baptizers’ movement (Anabaptist) had been active for more than seventy years’.³ But what is interesting is that the leader of that fellowship, the former Anglican clergyman John Smyth, deliberately distanced himself from the Dutch Anabaptists, choosing to baptize himself – once he had come to the view that baptism should be for believers only – rather than request them to baptize him. Indeed, he explicitly stated at that time that ‘that there was no church to whom we [his group of English exiles] could join with a good conscience to have baptism from them.’

That Smyth took this decision consciously, rather than in ignorance of the existence of a Mennonite community in Holland, has been persuasively argued by Stephen Wright, who cites evidence of Smyth’s group having contact with local Mennonites (or Waterlanders) but disagreeing with them on certain doctrinal questions.⁴ Smyth’s decision not to request a Mennonite baptism did not, however, prevent his critics identifying his act of self-baptism (sometimes known as ‘se-baptism’) as ‘Anabaptist’, one, Henry Ainsworth, noting that ‘Mr Smyth anabaptised himself with water, he and his followers having dischurched themselves and dissolved their communion; yet he in that state, preached, and anabaptised himself and then anabaptised others.’ Ainsworth also linked Smyth’s ‘Anabaptism’ with the influence of ‘the Devil’.

It is also clear that Smyth’s church could not have drawn upon any English Anabaptist tradition, there being no Anabaptist communities in England in the decades leading up to Smyth’s decampment to Holland in 1608. While Anabaptist ideas probably reached England from the continent during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, there is little evidence to suggest that they were adopted by native English people, and none to suggest that Anabaptist congregations existed in England during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The last Anabaptist group of that century for which any records exist was disbanded in 1575, some of its congregation – all of whom were Dutch – being executed.

Whatever their detractors may have said, the first English Baptists were inheritors, not of any Anabaptist tradition, but of the puritan and separatist movements within their native country. The English separatist movement, associated particularly with Robert Browne and often referred to as ‘Brownist’, originated just as Anabaptism disappeared, and there is no evidence that the one influenced the other or that the movements had common origins. Certainly in the case of Smyth, he spent the years immediately before his exile struggling to survive as a member of the church into which he had been ordained, and saw his own difficulties, and his decision finally to separate from the church, within the context of an ongoing tension between the Archbishop of Canterbury and that minority of clergy which refused to conform.

Before Smyth died in 1612 he had second thoughts about the validity of the baptism he had administered to himself and his flock, and decided to seek membership with the Waterlanders he had originally shunned. This, perhaps, involved yet another baptism. Smyth’s adoption of a view of salvation more akin to the Mennonites’ own Arminian beliefs might also have precipitated this move. But not all Smyth’s members shared his disquiet about their baptisms, and, following a split, a group under the leadership of Nottinghamshire gentleman Thomas Helwys returned home to set up the first Baptist church on English soil in Spitalfields, London, in 1612. Helwys was deeply upset by Smyth’s decision to seek union with the Waterlanders, and rejected their claim that only their baptism was valid and that only they could ordain elders. Although a layman, Helwys excommunicated Smyth and those who supported him, returning home with a small fraction of the congregation.

Helwys had already seen his considerable estate at Broxtowe confiscated by the Crown during his exile, but he immediately signalled his intent not to lie low by writing to James I to request him to tolerate his and others’ separatist beliefs. This appeal was sent with a copy of a tract entitled A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, and in it Helwys resisted any attempt to win over the king by flattery, reminding him bluntly that he was ‘a mortal man, and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects’. Helwys acknowledged that, by returning to England, he and his followers risked persecution: indeed, they had come ‘to lay down their lives in their own country for Christ and his truth’.

Helwys’ tone in this tract should not hide the fact that he was deeply patriotic, believing that all the king’s subjects should pay allegiance to his majesty’s person, crown and dignity. His real bugbear was the bishops of the church and their tendency to arrogate to themselves powers that rightly belonged to the civil magistrate. In fact, Helwys’ respect for magistrates (which was rooted perhaps in his own training as a lawyer) was matched only by his loathing of their ecclesiastical counterparts, and he even went so far as to suggest that the king do away with all bishops, confiscate their lands and wealth, and thereby save himself the trouble of collecting taxes!

Together with his colleague John Murton, who returned to England with him, Helwys spent time in Newgate prison, possibly dying there in 1616. Other Baptist leaders also appear to have been interned in those early years. Archbishop Bancroft’s commitment to enforcing subscription to the church and its articles made life difficult for all dissenting groups, and during the 25 years following Helwys’ death his followers were forced to endure a somewhat perilous, underground existence in their native England. Yet the movement grew and spread, such that by 1626 there were congregations as far afield as Tiverton in Devon, Sarum in Wiltshire, Lincoln and Coventry as well as London, with a total membership of around 150 souls.

Something of the flavour of Baptist worship in the earliest days may be gleaned from a letter written by two members of John Smyth’s church in Amsterdam, Anne and Hugh Bromhead, in 1609. The letter is a reply to one from a contact in London dated 13 July, so it describes the church subsequent to Smyth’s ‘re-baptisms’.

The order of the worship and government of our church is:

1. We begin with a prayer, after read some one or two chapters of the Bible, give the sense thereof and confer upon the same; that done, we lay aside our books and after a solemn prayer made by the first speaker he propoundeth some text out of the scripture and prophesieth out of the same by the space of one hour or three quarters of an hour. After him standeth up a second speaker and prophesieth out of the said text the like time and space, sometimes more, sometimes less. After him, the third, the fourth, the fifth etc, as the time will give leave. Then the first speaker concludeth with prayer as he began with prayer, with an exhortation to contribution to the poor, which collection being made is also concluded with prayer. This morning exercise begins at eight of the clock and continueth unto twelve of the clock. The like course of exercise is observed in the afternoon from two of the clock to five or six of the clock. Last of all the execution of the government of the Church is handled.

Apart from the length of the services – four hours in the morning and between three and four hours in the afternoon – and the apparent lack of singing or any variation from the pattern of reading, prayer and exposition, two features stand out, both of which demonstrate the radical hue of these meetings. First, the preaching is conducted not by a learned, university-educated divine, but by ordinary members who appear not to have any special status (either from each other or from the congregation as a whole). One speaker – perhaps the first – may have been the pastor, John Smyth, but, if so, the Bromheads did not think that significant enough to mention. And second, sermons with a reliance upon book-learning and scholarship are clearly eschewed in favour of allowing the Spirit to speak through the preacher: books must be ‘laid aside’, not only so that any temptation to obfuscate the plain meaning of the text by indulging in sophisticated scriptural interpretation is avoided, but so that the preacher’s experience rather than his or her erudition takes precedence. Several decades later this emphasis was still strong in Baptist circles, the Calvinistic Baptist leader William Kiffin recording in the 1630s that his group spent time together ‘in prayer, and in communicating to each other what experience we had received from the Lord’ and subsequently ‘read some portion of Scripture, and spake from it what it pleased God to enable us’. John Bunyan records in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners that he ‘preached what he did feel, what he smartingly did feel’.

In an echo of the Bromheads’ comments Helwys himself once remarked that ‘all books, even the originals themselves, must be laid aside in the time of spiritual worship’. Like his fellow Baptists, Helwys was clear that the ordinary believer had no need of a learned priest in order to enjoy a knowledge of God: ‘the most simplest soul that seeks the truth in sincerity may attain unto the knowledge of salvation contained in the Word of God’, he declared. It was therefore not an issue for Baptists that Helwys, a layperson, should lead and pioneer a church, nor that unordained members of the congregation should preach and baptize.

While Baptists shared a conviction that the true, visible church of Christ comprised ‘intentional’ gathered congregations of baptized believers, a range of views over issues relating to church organization and points of doctrine existed from the earliest days. Among the group which returned from Amsterdam in 1609, for example, were some who found Helwys’ anti-clericalism too extreme, and opinions also varied within the group as to who had the right to administer baptism and whether believers should be pacifists. The issue of ‘separation’ was also interpreted in different ways, and while a number of Baptist leaders defined the Church of England as a ‘false church’ and required their congregations to remain absolutely apart from it, other Baptist groups continued to meet with those who shared their Puritan convictions but had chosen to stay within the church’s ranks. One such was a Calvinist congregation founded by Henry Jacob, who had returned from exile on the continent to found a church in London in 1616. Jacob had in fact signalled his position as early as 1605 when he wrote to the king expressing a wish to meet for worship outside the jurisdiction of the bishops, while also promising to ‘keep brotherly communion with the rest of our English churches as they are now established’.

By the middle of the seventeenth century two separate movements were apparent within the English Baptist churches: the ‘General’ or ‘Arminian Baptists’, who took their steer from the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, and who believed that Christ had died generally for all people; and the ‘Particular’ or ‘Calvinistic Baptists’, who held that Christ came to save a particular body of souls, the ‘elect’. While the General Baptists could trace their roots back to the exiled church of Smyth and Helwys in Amsterdam, the Particular Baptists emerged in the 1630s from among the independent congregations in London, some of which had links to Jacob, becoming self-consciously a distinct grouping with the publication of a Confession, signed by their seven churches, in 1644. However, the temptation to see this division within the Baptists in clear-cut terms should be avoided: not all churches within one movement necessarily agreed on, for example, whether baptism should be administered to infants, and there was some transfer of churches and leaders between the two movements, particularly from the General Baptist side to the Particulars. One might also find General Baptists going into print in defence of particular redemption.

While the two movements agreed on many cardinal doctrines, there appears to have been a degree of rivalry between them, or at least between certain of their members. Hanserd Knollys, a former Anglican clergyman who had been instrumental in forming a Calvinistic Baptist church, was particularly outspoken in his condemnation of General Baptists: ‘notwithstanding all this profession of general redemption, they themselves are the servants of corruptions’ he wrote in the 1640s. Knollys was also noted for his preaching ‘with all fierceness’ against those of whom he disap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Dedication and Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Baptists
• Chapter Two Levellers
• Chapter Three Diggers
• Chapter Four Ranters
• Chapter Five Quakers
• Chapter Six Fifth Monarchists
• Chapter Seven Muggletonians
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading