Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution 9780190912376, 9780190912383, 9780190912390, 9780190912369, 0190912375

Table of contents :
Cover
Series
Orthodox Radicals
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Introduction
1. The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity
2. Baptists Along the Congregational Way
3. “Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists”: Reframing Sacramentology in Light of Ecclesiology
4. “Opposite to the Honour of God” No Longer: Rehabilitating “Anabaptism” in Cromwellian England
5. “Years of Freedome, by God’s Blessing Restored”: Baptistic Self-​Identity during the Interregnum
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Orthodox Radicals

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OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor Richard A. Muller, Calvin Theological Seminary Founding Editor David C. Steinmetz † Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-​Wilhelms-​Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–​1620 Arnoud S. Q. Visser SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–​1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON Timothy Bellamah, OP Miracles and the Protestant Imagination The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany Ronald K. Rittgers CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis Michael Cameron MYSTERY UNVEILED The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England Paul C. H. Lim GOING DUTCH IN THE MODERN AGE Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands John Halsey Wood Jr. CALVIN’S COMPANY OF PASTORS Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–​1609 Scott M. Manetsch THE SOTERIOLOGY OF JAMES USSHER The Act and Object of Saving Faith Richard Snoddy HARTFORD PURITANISM Thomas Hooker, Samuel Stone, and Their Terrifying God Baird Tipson

AUGUSTINE, THE TRINITY, AND THE CHURCH A Reading of the Anti-​Donatist Sermons Adam Ployd AUGUSTINE’S EARLY THEOLOGY OF IMAGE A Study in the Development of Pro-​Nicene Theology Gerald Boersma PATRON SAINT AND PROPHET Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations Phillip N. Haberkern JOHN OWEN AND ENGLISH PURITANISM Experiences of Defeat Crawford Gribben MORALITY AFTER CALVIN Theodore Beza’s Christian Censor and Reformed Ethics Kirk M. Summers THE PAPACY AND THE CHRISTIAN EAST A History of Reception and Rejection Edward Siecienski RICHARD BAXTER AND THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHERS David S. Sytsma DEBATING PERSEVERANCE The Augustinian Heritage in Post-​Reformation England Jay T. Collier THE REFORMATION OF PROPHECY Early Modern Interpretations of the Prophet & Old Testament Prophecy G. Sujin Pak ANTOINE de CHANDIEU The Silver Horn of Geneva’s Reformed Triumvirate Theodore Van Raalte ORTHODOX RADICALS Baptist Identity in the English Revolution Matthew C. Bingham

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Orthodox Radicals Baptist Identity in the English Revolution

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MATTHEW C. BINGHAM

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bingham, Matthew C., 1983– author. Title: Orthodox radicals : Baptist identity in the English revolution / Matthew C. Bingham. Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2018016553 (print) | LCCN 2018041640 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190912376 (updf ) | ISBN 9780190912383 (epub) | ISBN 9780190912390 (online content) | ISBN 9780190912369 (cloth : acid-free paper) | Subjects: LCSH: Baptists—Great Britain—History—17th century. | Great Britain—History—Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. | Great Britain—Church history—17th century. | Identification (Religion) Classification: LCC BX6276 (ebook) | LCC BX6276.B56 2019 (print) | DDC 286/.14209032—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016553 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

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For Shelley

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Abbreviations Used in the Notes

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Introduction

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1. The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity

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2. Baptists Along the Congregational Way

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3. “Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists”: Reframing Sacramentology in Light of Ecclesiology

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4. “Opposite to the Honour of God” No Longer: Rehabilitating “Anabaptism” in Cromwellian England

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5. “Years of Freedome, by God’s Blessing Restored”: Baptistic Self-​Identity during the Interregnum

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Conclusion

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

It is a great joy to be able to thank the many individuals and institutions that have made the completion of this book possible. Pride of place must go to Crawford Gribben, a superlative doctoral adviser and a continual source of guidance and encouragement. For his generous investment of time, expertise, and enthusiasm, I am deeply appreciative. I am also most grateful to Alec Ryrie and Chris Marsh, for their perceptive observations on the work’s argument and scope. Likewise, I  am grateful to the anonymous readers commissioned by Oxford University Press for their insightful feedback on the manuscript. For their incisive comments on portions of the text, I  would like to thank Scott Dixon, Ian Campbell, Andrew Holmes, Jim Davison, Daniel Ritchie, Colin Armstrong, and Sam Manning. My thinking has also been stimulated and sharpened through conversations with Larry Kreitzer, Joel Halcomb, Jim Renihan, Sam Renihan, Michael Haykin, Ariel Hessayon, Robert Strivens, Austin Walker, Alan Argent, Robert Oliver, Kathleen Lynch, Jeremy Walker, Scott Spurlock, Tim Somers, Reagan Marsh, Harrison Perkins, David Whitla, and Todd Rester. I am grateful to Queen’s University Belfast and the School of History, Anthropology, Politics and Philosophy for both helping to fund the research that led to this monograph and providing an intellectual atmosphere congenial to its completion. For their generous assistance, I am grateful to the staff at the Angus Library, Dr.  Williams’s Library, the McClay Library, the library of the Irish Baptist College, and the Gamble Library. Many thanks are also due to Cynthia Read, Drew Anderla, and all at OUP who have supported this book and have helped bring it to fruition. Finally, I would like to thank the many colleagues, friends, and family members whose encouragement and warmth has ensured that the years spent working on this project will be remembered with fondness. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in #11 University Square for their fun and good humor, and to Gareth Burke for his unflagging support and wisdom. An incalculable debt is owed to my

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parents, Gordon and Lisa Bingham, for a lifetime of love and nurture. It is also with great affection that I thank for their support my sister Jamie Gleason, my father and mother-​in-​law, Gary and Nancy Campbell, and, of course, my children, Amelia, John, and James. But above all others, I am grateful to my wife, Shelley, whose company is a delight and to whom this book is dedicated.

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Abbreviations Used in the Notes

NB: Unless otherwise indicated, the place of publication is London, and biblical references correspond to the Authorized Version of 1611. BHH BQ CH CJ CSPD DWL EED EHR HJ HLQ JEH LJ ODNB P&P RSTC TBHS Wing

Baptist History and Heritage Baptist Quarterly Church History Commons’ Journals Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Dr Williams’s Library, London Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–​1641) (2 vols., Cambridge, 1912) English Historical Review Historical Journal Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of Ecclesiastical History Lords’ Journals H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) Past & Present W. A. Jackson, J. F. Ferguson, and F. F. Pantzer, eds., A Short-​Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–​1640 (2nd ed., 1986–​1991) Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society Donald G.  Wing, ed., Short-​title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America  .  .  .  1641–​ 1700 (2nd ed., 5 vols., New York, 1972–​1994)

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Mid-​s eventeenth-​c entury England was a theological hothouse. As rapidly escalating political and religious tension during the early 1640s weakened and eventually collapsed the protective bulwarks of episcopacy and print censorship, a host of innovators seized upon the opportunity to introduce new religious ideas and movements. Many of these novelties died along with the revolutionary fervor out of which they grew. But some of the new groups persisted, and of those more hearty species, arguably the most successful has been the Baptists. In 2009, for instance, an international gathering of self-​identified Baptists involved representatives from 214 organizations spread across 120 nations.1 According to one recent estimate, the United States alone boasts some 37 million people claiming membership in Baptist churches.2 This impressive international expansion contrasts sharply with many of the other religious groups that developed out of the same mid-​seventeenth-​century English milieu but withered rapidly thereafter. And yet, it would seem that this very success has obscured key aspects of the group’s early modern origins: for by enduring and expanding, Baptists were able to write their own history and to control and shape their historiographical legacy in a way that more ephemeral early modern contemporaries were not. Diggers, Muggletonians, and Ranters still await their denominational champions, but self-​ conscious Baptist-​historians, by contrast, have been writing their own story for some three hundred years. As a result, historians whose ostensible aim is to better understand seventeenth-​century England have often been unduly and unknowingly influenced by a legacy of denominational historians whose desire to tell their own “Baptist story” has sometimes been pursued at the expense of fidelity to the early modern record. Historical accounts of early English Baptists have thus struggled to accurately locate their subjects within the wider cultural and religious landscape of revolutionary England. This book will clarify this confusion

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and reconfigure our understanding of both early modern English Baptists and the multilayered seventeenth-​century contexts out of which they emerged. For when such careful attention is paid to interpreting early English Baptists in their own historical context, rather than that of later denominational writers, one finds that the seventeenth-​century “Baptist story” is not nearly as neat and tidy as some authors would suggest. Indeed, Baptist identity during the mid-​seventeenth century was contested, confused, and deeply vexed, a contention perhaps best introduced through an incident that occurred late in 1645. On December 3, 1645, a “Publike Dispute” was scheduled to take place at the St. Mary Aldermanbury parish church in London. Several months before, a prominent local merchant had begun to have “some doubts  .  .  .  arise in his minde” regarding the “different doctrines and Administrations of Baptisme” then being “publickely held forth both in preaching and practice,” finding himself torn between the long-​standing orthodox opinion that baptism could rightly be administered to infants, and the new idea then being spread that the sacrament should be reserved exclusively for “believers, who made profession of faith, and manifest the fruits of repentance.” Which view, he wondered, was “more agreeable to the Scriptures?” For the merchant, the question was freighted with a sense of personal urgency—​his wife was “great with childe” and the couple would soon need to decide whether to present the infant at the parish font.3 The fact that the merchant was able to consider this question reflected wider cultural and political changes that had swept across the entire nation. Before the 1640s, almost no one in his position would have asked such questions, and had the odd eccentric managed to do so, he would have been forcefully and even violently suppressed.4 But the merchant’s world had dramatically changed. By the mid-​1640s, the established church had effectively collapsed and the state was riven by civil war. One consequence was the transformation of London’s once well-​ordered religious life into a “jungle of Protestant exotica.”5 It was a space in which laypeople could challenge clerical authority in unprecedented ways, and in which many aspects of the old religious order were abruptly made subject to renegotiation and change. To the self-​perceived guardians of orthodoxy, such developments were deeply menacing. Contemporary chroniclers of heresy and error described the “very miserable times” in which they lived, times in which “so many of all conditions” were “given over to beleeve lies” and “to be inveigled with the hypocrisie of seducing spirits.”6 But for the London merchant, and others like him, the new opportunity for laypeople to question received dogma was justified by the divinely ordained mandate “to try all things, and hold fast that which is good.”7 So, like the noble Bereans, he “searched the Scriptures daily,” looking for an answer to his question about baptism.8 After reaching the end of his own resources, “he earnestly desired,

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and at length . . . obtained a conference and private disputation” between a group of paedobaptist presbyterian ministers led by Edmund Callamy and a group of three baptistic ministers, Benjamin Coxe, William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys. During the private meeting, the two sides discussed the issue “at the Merchants own house” for some time, but he did not “receiv[e]‌satisfaction touching the lawfulnesse of baptizing the Infants of Believers.” This led to the scheduling of another, more formal confrontation, now at the parish church, in which the presbyterians were to publicly debate the three baptistic ministers.9 As it happens, concern over potentially unruly crowds ensured that the debate never actually took place. But despite the cancellation, the incident captures a sense of the possibility and vitality with which the religious milieu of revolutionary England had been rapidly infused. As formal constraints were lifted, theological experimentation proliferated and the result was a growing number of individuals who became public champions of novel ideas and movements. The baptistic participants in the Aldermanbury debate, Benjamin Coxe, William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys, were three such individuals. Their involvement in the disputation both reflected and furthered an ongoing public re-​evaluation of baptism, and subsequent historians have been quick to cite the incident as an example of “Baptists” promoting their distinctive views. When scholars mention the debate, the unstated assumption is that Coxe, Kiffen, and Knollys represented an imagined community of “Baptists”—​that is to say, a group of religious fellow-​travelers who would have identified one another as such on the basis of a shared set of distinctive beliefs and practices.10 But this standard interpretation is not convincing. For despite the ubiquitous assertion that the participants were clearly “Baptists,” it is not at all clear that Kiffen, Knollys, and Coxe would have self-​identified as being included within this category. Instead, the three men struggled to settle on a consistent, coherent self-​descriptor. In the Declaration, the three “Baptists” never referred to themselves by that or any other name, but instead defined themselves only in terms of what they were not, as in as “we (who are falsely called Anabaptists)” or “us, and our Brethren, called Anabaptists.” Although they vehemently rejected the “Anabaptist” label as a scurrilous term of abuse foisted upon them by their opponents, they apparently felt compelled to use it, again and again, perhaps worrying that if they failed to do so, they would not be recognized at all. Kiffen, Coxe, and Knollys believed they had rediscovered important truths and were eager to “to publish [their ideas] to the view of the world,” but they were far less sure about how, exactly, to describe them.11 Such linguistic ambiguity reflected an inherently tenuous, contested, awkward sense of self-​identity among the group that historians have recognized as mid-​ seventeenth-​century “Particular Baptists.” In the early 1640s, and for some time

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thereafter, members of this group did not know what to call themselves because they were not quite sure what they were. Yet, much of the secondary literature that purports to describe and explain this group expresses no such diffidence. The relevant historiography portrays those attacking paedobaptism at the disputation unambiguously as “Baptists.” These Baptists and the churches they represented are often viewed reflexively as links in a denominational chain, stretching back to at least the early seventeenth-​century and winding its way forward into the present day. This book challenges that understanding by presenting a significant reinterpretation of the group known by historians as Particular or Calvinistic Baptists during the English Revolution and the Interregnum. As we explore their origins, ideas, and development, I will argue that many of those presently described in the literature as “Baptists” were actually far closer in their theological affinities and relational networks to the more mainstream paedobaptistic congregationalists or independents. The label “Baptist,” as we shall see, is unhelpful and obscures rather than clarifies. “We have repeatedly been warned against the dangers and potential anachronism of denominational labeling,” cautions J. C. Davis, “but we find it hard to give the practice up.”12 He is correct, and nowhere more so than with respect to early English Baptists. As the proceeding chapters will demonstrate, by projecting later denominational categories on to early modern actors, we distort our understanding of both the individuals we study and the period as a whole. This book will both consider the ways in which these distortions have unfolded and point toward a more helpful interpretation of Baptists during the mid-​seventeenth century. Along the way, it will contribute not only to the historiography of early modern “Baptists,” but also to the literature documenting religious and cultural change during England’s calamitous mid-​seventeenth century.

I The historiography of religion during England’s Revolution and Interregnum is vast. This abundance of scholarly output reflects the striking degree to which religious ideas and practices both permeated the whole of early modern society and catalyzed the mid-​seventeenth century’s larger political and social changes.13 “The English Revolution,” writes John Coffey, “was a theological crisis, a struggle over the identity of British Protestantism.”14 Thus, in addition to the work of scholars directly studying religious expression, the student of Stuart history quickly discovers that the interpenetration of religion, culture, and politics during this period was so thoroughgoing that whatever subject one examines, doctrine and piety are always close at hand. Indeed, just as Peter Lake has said that “to review the historiography of Puritanism is to review the history of early modern England,” surely the reverse is true as well: one cannot grasp the historiography

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of early modern England without also taking hold of England’s religion along the way.15 Yet, amid this historiographical profusion, seventeenth-​ century Baptist groups—​that is, those dissenting sects operating outside of the established Church of England and practicing believer’s baptism—​have not received the attention one might expect. In 1984, Barry Reay and J. F. McGregor observed that despite the “considerable literature” on so-​called radical religion16 in revolutionary England, Baptists remained “a group curiously neglected by historians.”17 Two decades later, David Como offered a remarkably similar assessment, listing controversy over infant baptism as an area “of intra-​puritan conflict” that has “not been properly explored in the existing literature.”18 In the decade following Como’s evaluation, some historians have begun to investigate that territory, but vast swathes remain uncharted.19 For much of the modern period, those looking for sustained historical analysis of seventeenth-​century English Baptists had to content themselves with either broader studies of radical religion or narrative histories that spoke on behalf of the tradition they described. This latter method has been termed denominational history, and its first practitioner among Baptist writers was the London historian and Baptist deacon Thomas Crosby (d. in or after 1749).20 In his four-​volume History of the English Baptists (1738–​1740), Crosby self-​consciously positioned himself as both an heir to and a guardian of the theological tradition about which he wrote. As a result, he often presented apologetic readings of historical events and hagiographical treatments of major figures.21 Crosby’s successors adopted a similar posture and deliberately used their historical labors to encourage their contemporary ecclesiastical communities. Joseph Ivimey, for example, began his own History of the English Baptists (1811) by declaring his desire to be “useful to the denomination to which he considers it an honor to belong, by exciting them to a zealous imitation of the virtues of their ancestors.”22 Beyond such denominational histories, early and mid-​twentieth-​century scholarship often considered seventeenth-​century Baptists only insofar as they impinged upon broader narratives of early modern English dissent. A common thread linking such studies is their willingness to amalgamate under a single conceptual category all religious expression that stood outside of the national church. By using generic labels such as “dissent,” “separatism,” and “radical religion,” a variety of different movements, congregations, and individuals can be treated in aggregate as a coherent object of historical inquiry.23 More recent work has considered English Baptists directly, and scholars such as Murray Tolmie, Michael Watts, J.  F. McGregor, and B.  R. White have provided helpful, although sometimes derivative, narrative histories of Baptist activity during the 1640s and 1650s.24 But the most important contribution to the

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field has easily been Stephen Wright’s study of The Early English Baptists, 1603–​ 49 (2006).25 The historiographic significance of Wright’s work is twofold. First, over the past three decades, Wright’s has been the only substantial, critical, overarching, monograph-​length account to focus exclusively on seventeenth-​century English Baptists. Second, Wright’s analysis challenges longstanding assumptions regarding the relationship between the Calvinistic Particular Baptists and the Arminian-​influenced General Baptists. Historians prior to Wright had largely maintained that “General Baptists had no sense of common purpose with the Particular Baptists and their Calvinist predestinarian orthodoxy.”26 Yet, Wright argues that Particular and General Baptists did not, in fact, begin as separate and distinct groups, but rather grew apart in response to political circumstances beyond their control. In advancing this argument, Wright calls into question many of the most basic interpretive assumptions that had framed the earlier accounts of Tolmie, McGregor, and White. The first chapter of this book will examine key aspects of Wright’s work in greater depth, but for our present purpose, we must simply note that despite the significance of Wright’s research, he has still left many relevant areas unexplored. First, Wright’s challenge to previous historiography only affects how Particular Baptist self-​identity ought to be understood prior to the 1644 confession. He affirms that after the document’s publication “the seven London churches emerged as a self-​conscious Particular Baptist denomination,” leaving to future historians the analysis of that “self-​conscious” group. Second, the narrative history presented in The Early English Baptists concerns itself far more with diachronic progression than with any sort of holistic, theologically, and culturally nuanced analysis of the Particular Baptists as such. And third, Wright ends his narrative in 1649, leaving unaddressed Particular Baptist activity and identity during the Interregnum. But beyond those areas that Wright left unexplored, it is also significant that no subsequent scholarship has yet attempted to critique or challenge Wright’s provocative thesis, a silence which the present volume intends to fill.

III Given its important place within the relevant historiography, it is surprising that Wright’s book has gone almost completely unanswered and unchallenged.27 This lack of substantive interaction reflects, in part, the fact that most scholarly attention given to seventeenth-​century English Baptists, both before and after the publication of Wright’s book, has been directed toward quite specific studies rather than overarching, holistic analysis. Much recent work has been organized thematically, investigating either individual personalities or

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specific cultural and theological issues. Examples in the first category include significant biographies of the Particular Baptists Hanserd Knollys28, Benjamin Keach,29 and Hercules Collins,30 the General Baptist Thomas Grantham,31 and the more well-​known, but less easily categorized, John Bunyan.32 Other works more overtly blend biography and historical theology by researching an individual’s thought and influence on specific doctrinal debates.33 In his innovative five-​volume project entitled William Kiffen and His World (2010–​ 2015), Larry Kreitzer offers close-​readings and critical editions of key primary sources relating to the life of the Particular Baptist leader William Kiffen.34 In addition to these more extensive projects, numerous articles and shorter pieces have examined the history of seventeenth-​century Baptists through a biographical lens.35 While these often rigorously researched studies do provide useful insights into larger questions of group identity, their central preoccupation with specific lives necessarily limits and qualifies their contribution to that debate. Other studies of seventeenth-​century Baptists have been organized thematically rather than biographically. The role of women in Baptist churches, for example, has received significant attention, most notably from Rachel Adcock in her historical and literary analysis of Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–​1680 (2015).36 Many of these thematic studies have focused on specific doctrinal issues and theological controversies, and during the past two decades, historians have examined how Baptists approached worship,37 Christology,38 ecclesiology,39 covenantal theology,40 and eschatology41. T.  L. Underwood’s Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War (1997) exemplifies this doctrinal approach through an innovative analysis of mid-​seventeenth-​ century doctrinal debates between Baptists and Quakers.42 Thus, despite this wide-​ranging research, there is still no holistic, theologically sensitive yet historically rigorous study of mid-​seventeenth-​century Particular Baptists. Although aspects of their history and thought have been treated, the overarching question of their theological and religious self-​identity in regards to other contemporary religious groups has not been subject to sustained, critical inquiry. Existing scholarship disproportionately attends to events prior to the Interregnum and dilutes the corporate-​focus on Particular Baptists by either splitting attention among various other separatist groups, or looking so closely at specific personalities and controversies that one can no longer appreciate the entire picture. Furthermore, much work done on English Baptists suffers from a failure to balance historical and theological concern and a tendency to conflate and thus distort the distinct identities of various baptistic groups operating in seventeenth-​century England. The present volume will challenge long-​standing assumptions within Baptist historiography and offer a major reinterpretation of

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Particular or Calvinistic Baptist self-​identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum.

IV This book explores the lives and ideas of English Calvinistic Baptists through a series of interlocking, thematic studies. And although I have not attempted a traditional narrative history of early modern English Baptists, the chapters do progress, roughly, in chronological order, beginning in the first three chapters with the origins of Baptist groups during the 1630s and 1640s, and then proceeding in ­chapters 4 and 5 to examine how those same groups responded to the rather different political and cultural environment of the 1650s. In this way, I hope to have conveyed a sense of change and development over time despite having eschewed a standard, diachronic narrative account. These structural decisions reflect my judgment that a coherent narrative of English Baptists as such during the mid-​ seventeenth century is neither possible nor desirable, and that any attempt to tell such a story will inevitably distort both the individuals under investigation and the wider historical context in which they lived. Chapter 1 introduces the men and women commonly described in standard histories as “Particular Baptists,” surveying their origins, formation, and early attempts at ecclesiastical organization. But, more importantly, the chapter also examines in some depth the development of Baptist historiography and the ways in which the deliberate distortions of early Baptist historians continue to influence present scholarship. While helpful in many respects, much of this early historiography was written, to paraphrase Herbert Butterfield, with one eye very much fixed upon the present.43 The result was the construction of an unhelpful historiographical paradigm that continues to surreptitiously function as the normative framework within which early modern English Baptists are considered. After deconstructing this rarely examined history of Baptist history, c­ hapter 2 will advance a more helpful way of viewing the subject. It suggests that so-​called Particular Baptists during the mid-​seventeenth century can be more helpfully regarded as a baptistic variation on the more mainstream congregational movement then developing on both sides of the Atlantic. To this end, the chapter introduces the term “baptistic congregationalists,” a neologism that serves both to avoid anachronistic projection and to more closely connect “Baptists” during the English Revolution with the congregational religious culture out of which they emerged. The chapter will substantiate this link by demonstrating the manifold relational ties that bound baptistic congregationalists to their mainstream paedobaptistic counterparts.

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All of this, however, leaves a fundamental question unaddressed:  why did so many congregationalists begin to reject paedobaptism during the late 1630s and early 1640s? Chapter 3 addresses this question directly. Most standard accounts of English Baptists either dismiss this inquiry as unhelpful speculation or as a question that finds an obvious and rather uninteresting answer in an appeal to Baptist biblicism. But ­chapter 3 argues that while such explanations contain elements of truth, they are superficial and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead, one must reconstruct the shifting ideological context in which the rejection of paedobaptism rather abruptly became intellectually plausible for many otherwise orthodox puritan-​types, and, in so doing, provide a more nuanced explanation of why these changes occurred when and how they did. The chapter will root the rejection of paedobaptism in the prior embrace of a congregational ecclesiology, thus serving to both explain the emergence of baptistic congregationalists while also reinforcing the historical connection drawn in c­ hapter 2 between “Baptists” and more mainstream congregationalists. Chapter 4 begins the second major movement of this book and thus represents a shift in both chronology and thematic emphasis. Chronologically, our study moves, broadly, from the 1640s to the 1650s—​from Revolution to Interregnum. Thematically, the latter two chapters attempt to take the interpretive framework developed in the first three and use it as a lens through which to better understand historical developments during the Interregnum. In other words, ­chapters 1 to 3 function as a unit, the purpose of which is to explain and defend the decision to reclassify mid-​seventeenth-​century “Particular Baptists” as “baptistic congregationalists.” Chapters 4 and 5 then assume the legitimacy of that reclassification project and test its validity by applying its insights to baptistic activity during the 1650s. Chapter 4 serves this end by re-​examining the position of Baptists in relation to the Cromwellian regime. Historians often note that Cromwell extended religious liberty to Baptists, but, I argue, the significance of this fact has been obscured by an unacknowledged sense of denominational teleology. By recognizing this and viewing Baptists within the more nuanced framework developed in ­chapters  1 through 3, we are able to better understand both the extent of religious liberty under Cromwell and why it took the particular shape that it did. If c­ hapter 4 is concerned, broadly, with how baptistic congregationalists were viewed from without—​that is, how they were understood by the Cromwellian regime—​then ­chapter  5 considers, broadly, how baptistic congregationalists during the same period were viewed from within—​that is, how they understood themselves. The 1650s provided space for baptistic congregationalists to pursue their ecclesiastical agenda relatively free from the state persecution that had trailed them prior to the Interregnum. Although standard histories portray 1650s

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“Particular Baptists” as a more-​or-​less unified movement, ­chapter 5 will demonstrate that the reality was far more complicated, and that so-​called Particular Baptists were actually evolving along two rather divergent, mutually exclusive paths. Such reflections both complicate our understanding of Interregnum religion and further undermine the too-​hasty application of denominational labels during the period. Finally, a brief concluding section will consider how the book’s central argument might impinge more broadly upon the widespread historiographical assumption that one can appropriately and coherently describe a distinctive “Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum. Many readers will perhaps be surprised that this book does not contain a chapter devoted to the so-​called General Baptists. These Arminian-​influenced baptistic separatists also developed and grew during the English Revolution and it would seem eminently reasonable for a book like Orthodox Radicals to consider them in some detail. But while the present volume does closely analyze the relationship between soteriology and baptistic identity, it does not contain an extended treatment of the “General Baptists” as such. This omission is intentional. First, to adequately locate the “General Baptists” within their social, relational, and theological contexts would require a far longer book and rather different book.44 But second, and more importantly, to consider “General Baptists” alongside “Particular Baptists” would be incongruent with the basic argument presented in this book. One of the primary tasks of Orthodox Radicals is to discourage the reflexive assumption that a book on mid-​seventeenth century “Baptists” should naturally contain descriptions of all the various “kinds of Baptists”—​much in the way that a book on cake should be sure to treat carrot, sponge, and Lemon Chiffon. This book does not treat the various “kinds of Baptists” during the English Revolution because, as I  argue throughout what follows, at that time, there were not any “kinds of Baptists.” The very category “Baptist” was an eighteenth-​century development and to impose it upon the mid-​seventeenth century is to think anachronistically about the past. The habit of describing any and all who reject paedobaptism as “Baptists” may or may not be a coherent way to taxonomize believers in later periods, but, as this book will demonstrate, it does not help us to better understand debates over baptism during the English Revolution. Were the present volume to include a chapter on the “General Baptists,” it would thus serve only to undermine the work’s overarching thesis by implying that so-​called General and Particular Baptists were really just two species of the same genus. The labels with which we describe the past inevitably presuppose and proj­ ect an interpretation of that past. But these embedded interpretations are almost always implicit rather than explicit and often inherited from historiographical

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Introduction

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predecessors rather than chosen with intention and care. “Religious labels,” as Alec Ryrie has observed, can create especially acute difficulties, “because they imply the coherence or even existence of a particular group when that may not be obvious.”45 It is not at all obvious that the labels affixed to mid-​seventeenth-​ century “Baptists” have helped to clarify the self-​identity of the men and women they purport to describe. This book will explain how this mislabeling occurred, how it has skewed our understanding of the period, and how we might begin to think differently.

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1

The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity

Upon entering the House of Commons on January 29, 1646, Members of Parliament were greeted by an unwelcome surprise. Two men, Samuel Richardson and Benjamin Cox, stood outside the door, accosting entrants and handing each one a small pamphlet. Inside the assembly room, after morning prayers were said and thanks offered for two sermons recently delivered, the disrupting pamphleteers were brought to the attention of the house. The Sergeant at Arms was called upon to arrest Richardson and Cox and state censors were ordered to “take diligent Care to suppress” the little book distributed earlier that morning.1 The cause of the uproar was titled “A Confession of Faith of Seven Congregations or Churches of Christ in London, Which Are Commonly, but Unjustly, Called Anabaptists.”2 This confession was an explicit act of self-​promotion, its authors keenly aware of their need to “unfainedly declare . . . what wee teach” so as to rebut the “many hainous accusations unjustly and falsly laid against us.”3 Indeed, the pages distributed in January 1646 represented a “corrected and enlarged” edition of a confession published two years earlier under a similar name.4 Revisions had been made, at least in part, in an attempt to impress the more zealous defenders of religious orthodoxy among the Parliament and Assembly of Divines, the hope being that perhaps the confession’s signatories might be tolerated by the establishment if only the reasonableness of their doctrine was more fully known. Reconciliation, however, was not forthcoming. The hard-​ line Presbyterian clergy were not impressed by the document’s attempt to conform to acceptable theological standards, a reception cynically summarized by Daniel Featley: “they cover a little rats-​bane in a great quantity of sugar, that it may not be discerned.”5 The image of Richardson and Cox standing outside the door looking in thus becomes a picture of the movement they represented: the signatories of the “Anabaptist” confession standing outside of a theological

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mainstream from which they felt wrongly excluded, grasping at a legitimacy that was not to be granted. If Richardson and Cox had hoped to win a sympathetic hearing from parliament that morning, they were surely disappointed. But the document they distributed did not go away, nor did the ideas championed within its pages. This chapter will review the events that preceded the initial publication of the 1644  “Anabaptist” confession, and then consider one of the most vexing complications that inevitably surfaces when later interpreters have attempted to explain those events. Namely, this chapter will analyze the self-​identity of the 1644/​1646 signatories by re-​evaluating the most common label affixed to them by historians, “Particular Baptists.” But before arriving there, we must first attend to the events that led to the controversy outside the assembly hall.

I Had a curious member of parliament leafed through the papers thrust into his palm, he might have been struck by a common thread linking several of the more prominent names which appeared at the end of the document: a large number of the signatories were connected with the semi-​separatist London church founded by Henry Jacob in 1616. Under the successive leadership of Jacob (c. 1563–​1624),6 John Lothropp (1584–​1653),7 and Henry Jessey (1601–​1663),8 this church dominated London independency and “appears to have accounted for most of the organized separatist activity in London before the revolution.”9 Given this high profile, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Jacob church was also remarkably fecund, spawning multiple offshoots, including most of London’s leading Calvinistic, baptistic churches.10 Of the thirteen 1644 signatories, at least five—​William Kiffen, John Spilsbery, Thomas Shepherd, Thomas Munden, and Thomas Kilcop—​can be directly connected to the Jacob church and its offshoots.11 To these five, one can add Hanserd Knollys, who had clear links to the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey circle but only signed the revised version of the confession in 1646.12 Given how few traces remain from what was, for much of its history, an illegal movement, the strength of this association becomes both an impressive testimony to the influence of Jacob’s congregation on London separatism, and an important clue as to the theological orientation of the seven London “Anabaptist” churches. Knowledge of the splits and realignments within the Jacob church was preserved through the historical labors of Benjamin Stinton (1676–​1719).13 Stinton was the son-​in-​law of prominent Particular Baptist minister and author Benjamin Keach (1640–​1704).14 After Keach’s death, Stinton succeeded him as minister of the congregation in Horselydown, Southwark, and began in 1711 to assemble

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materials for an eventual history of Baptists in England. Stinton died before he could complete his historical project, but his transcriptions of otherwise unavailable source documents survived him and have become the standard source for reconstructing the key events of the period.15 Three of these documents are relevant to our present purpose. First, a text which has come to be known as the “Jessey Memoranda” describes the origin and growth through 1641 of the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church, an “Antient Congregation of Dissenters from w[hi]ch many of ye Independant & Baptist churches in London took their first rise.”16 Secondly, there is the so-​called Kiffen Manuscript,17 a record that B. R. White has described as “the most important single document now in existence relating to the origins of the English Particular or Calvinistic Baptists.”18 The Kiffen Manuscript briefly narrates how some fifty-​ three members of the Jacob church, by then under the leadership of Henry Jessey, were baptized by immersion. Thirdly, Stinton’s repository contains “An Account of divers Conferences, held in ye Congregation of w[hi]ch Mr Henry Jessey was Pastor, about Infant baptism.” Allegedly transcribed from Henry Jessey’s journal, this document narrates a 1643 debate among members and friends of Jessey’s church, a debate that began with Hanserd Knollys’ hesitation to baptize his own child and ended with Knollys and some thirty-​two others leaving the church to worship in baptistic congregations.19 Largely on the strength of these documents, a generation of historians have reconstructed the emergence of the seven London churches, chronicling how the various divisions and splits within the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church evidenced increasing radicalism and a diminishing appetite for the compromising semi-​ separatist attitude upon which Jacob had founded the church after returning from the Netherlands in 1616.20 Unlike the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean separatists who “separated from puritanism as well as from the Church of England,” Jacob’s church strengthened its position within the London separatist movement by offering disaffected puritans an alternative to the national church that was relatively untainted by the more colorful and heretical elements of English radical religion.21 This mediating stance between radical separatism and full capitulation to the demands of an increasingly aggressive national church was an ecclesial innovation which helped Jacob’s church avoid the isolation that beset a previous generation of English separatists and in time became “the model for the Independent gathered churches of the future,” including the seven London churches of 1644.22 As elucidated in a 1616 confession of faith, Jacob’s new London church was not determined to sever all links with the parish churches and their ministers. Instead, Jacob drew a clear distinction between the national church as such and the individual congregations operating within it. By distinguishing the whole

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from its constituent parts, Jacob and his followers could condemn the unbiblical nature of the former while recognizing the essential legitimacy of the latter. With respect to the idea of the national church, or indeed any national church considered as such, Jacob and his followers were clear that “no such church . . . is found in all the new Testament.” And yet, the people worshipping within the parish structure were “true visible Christians with us” and their assemblies were “true visible politicall [i.e. institutional] Churches in some respect and degree.”23 This grant of legitimacy flowed from Jacob’s recognition that although local parish churches were embedded within an overarching episcopal framework that he repudiated, many of them often operated to a large extent according to the congregational principles that Jacob identified as biblically normative. Insofar as the local parish church could be considered as an individual entity, conceptually separated from the overarching parish structure, these local congregations met Jacob’s definition of a true church: Wee believe that the nature & essence of Christs true visible (that is, politicall) Church under the Gospell is a free congregation of Christians for the service of God, or a true spirituall bodie politike coteyning no more ordinary Congregations but one, and that independent.24 The parish churches did not, of course, meet this definition in every respect—​ hence, in part, the need for separating from them in the first place—​and yet, they were not so far removed from what Jacob identified as the biblical pattern as to require a complete repudiation.25 To completely break from what remained essentially true churches was neither required nor desirable, and those who did so would be guilty of sinful schism. In this way, by refusing to completely deny ecclesial validity to the parish churches, Jacob created the possibility and even the obligation for his followers to “communicate also with them on occasion,” the understood caveat being that “in such communicating wee countenance out no evill thing in them.”26 By the time of the English revolution, some were using the term “semi-​separatism” to describe the various attempts at reaching a via media between complete separation and full parish communion.27 This novel descriptor can help explain both Jacob’s hostile reception among more zealous dissenters, and the otherwise confusing preface to Jacob’s 1616 confession of faith which described the document, even as it outlined twenty-​eight objections to remaining within the Church of England, as intending to free his congregation “from the slaunder of Schisme, and Noveltie, and also of Separation.”28 Jacob’s arrangement was attractive to many, but it proved to be inherently unstable. As time progressed, Laudian reforms made some parish churches repugnant to puritan sensibilities, and Jacob’s semi-​separatism became less and less

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tenable. By the early 1630s, cracks began to appear in the foundation Jacob had so labored to build, the first fissure coming in 1630, while John Lothropp was minister. A group led by John Dupper became “grieved against” another member of the congregation because the offending member took his child to be baptized within a parish church. Although this decision did not necessarily conflict with either the letter or spirit of the Jacob church’s 1616 confession of faith,29 we can infer from the strong objections it raised that by 1630, the congregation—​or at least an influential segment of it—​had been reconsidering precisely where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable participation within the national church. Dupper pressed the leaders of the church to codify those shifting boundaries, calling for a renewal of the church covenant and a more forceful, formal renunciation of all communion with the parish churches. And although conciliatory moves were made “for peace Sake,” these proved insufficient, and Dupper’s rigorist faction “joyned togeather to be a Church.”30 Rather than an isolated incident, this break seems indicative of a broader trend toward radicalism within Jacob’s fellowship. Dupper’s exit was only the first in a string of secessions, with each departing group seeking a more thorough separation from the parish structure. The cause of stricter-​separatism may have been strengthened by a mass arrest of forty-​two church members in April 1632, as the church divided again not long after the incident.31 Samuel Eaton and others “desired dismission that they might become an Entire Church,” a request granted on September 12, 1633. Just as with Dupper’s faction before them, the Eaton group was “dissatisfyed wth ye Churches owning of English Parishes to be true Churches.”32 This split indicated not just a changing perception of the national church, but also, for the first time among the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey circle, a changing perception of the national church’s baptism:  “Mr Eaton wth Some others receiving a further Baptism.”33 Eaton likely rejected his baptism as a way of more fully rejecting the church in which he had received it, as nothing in this all-​too-​brief diary entry suggests dissatisfaction with infant baptism per se. But, that being said, it is nonetheless notable that by 1633, questions about baptism had been raised within the Jessey circle, and some influential members were prepared to radically depart from long-​settled understandings of how the sacrament was to be administered. In June 1638, that process of communal reassessment took another decisive step in a baptistic direction when a small group left to join a church led by John Spilsbery. These six were drawn to Spilsbery’s fellowship because they had become “convinced that Baptism was not for Infants, but professed Beleivers.”34 Although the origin of Spilsbery’s church remains obscure, Murray Tolmie has plausibly argued that the congregation was originally part of John Dupper’s group and split with them over the issue of rebaptism.35 If this is correct, it

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The Jessey Circle and the Invention of Baptist Identity

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furthers the impression that a growing number of those connected with the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church were not content simply to meet apart from the parish churches, but instead continued to press the logic of congregational polity, a path that led a growing number to believer’s baptism. Three years later in 1641, this point was made in dramatic fashion when some fifty-​two members of Jacob’s church were rebaptized by Richard Blunt and Samuel Blacklock. The ceremony was distinguished not only by the relatively large numbers involved, but also by the manner in which it was carried out:  unlike the sprinkling of the forehead which the participants would have received in infancy, those rebaptized by Blunt and Blacklock were fully immersed, “resembling Burial & riseing again.” 36 With this climactic mass baptism, the Kiffen Manuscript draws to a close, but not before suggesting that the participants and those in their orbit went on to form the core of the congregations associated with the 1644 confession: “Those that ware so minded had com[m]‌union togeather were become Seven Churches in London.”37

II The preceding narrative, broadly considered, has been largely undisputed over the past hundred years of Baptist historiography. A high level of scholarly agreement should not surprise us, given the degree to which the standard reconstructions of these events all so heavily depend on a common primary source in the Stinton Repository. That being said, the widely accepted picture of Baptist beginnings in seventeenth-​century England still contains a significant tension that remains unresolved: the problem of terminology and identity. Assigning descriptive labels to early modern religious groups is fraught with difficulty,38 as any student of the name “puritan” can attest.39 But the dynamic swirl of events in mid-​seventeenth-​ century England further complicates an inherently difficult issue because of the sheer numbers involved—​sects proliferated at such an alarming rate that cataloguing and denouncing them became something of a popular pastime for heresy hunters like Ephraim Pagget, Thomas Edwards, and Robert Baillie.40 Any attempt, then, to address radical religion during this period must grapple with the labels assigned to the men and women under investigation and the group identities which those labels denote. Up until this point, I have described my subjects in terms of the labels most commonly applied by Baptist historians:  “early English Baptists” divide into “General Baptists” and “Particular Baptists.” This arrangement presents an overarching religious identity, Baptist, which then houses within its walls two distinct subgroups, these being separated by disagreements about soteriology—​that is, the cluster of interrelated theological concepts that explains how sinners might

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be reconciled to a holy God. The terms “General” and “Particular” refer to how each group understood that reconciliation, and more specifically, the extent of Christ’s atonement:  did the dying savior bear the sins of all people generally, or only those of a particular people, God’s elect? And while the “General” and “Particular” labels, strictly speaking, refer only to the extent of the atonement, they also serve as shorthand for the series of interlocking doctrinal positions collectively grouped under the headings “Arminianism” and “Calvinism.” As outlined above, the Particular Baptists are widely understood to have emerged from within the Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church circle, while the General Baptists are usually traced back to the English exile John Smyth and the English congregation founded by Smyth’s associate Thomas Helwys upon the latter’s return from the Netherlands in 1612.41 Confessional statements published by baptistic separatists during the mid-​seventeenth century clearly demonstrate the existence of both Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic congregations, and so, to that extent, the labels General and Particular are helpful.42 Yet, as convenient as they may be, we must also keep in mind that during the English Revolution and Interregnum, neither group used these or similar labels to describe themselves.43 Although that fact alone is not necessarily problematic, it should give us pause and prompt reflection on how the imposition of anachronistic labels might prejudice our reading of the historical materials. “There are,” as Peter Marshall observes, “particular dangers in careless or unreflective use of religious and confessional labels.” When historians inappropriately label historically situated religious groups they “create teleological presumptions about patterns of development, sanitizing conditions of disorder or uncertainty, and obscuring pointers to paths not taken.”44 By too casually adopting the General and Particular Baptist schema and then reading the evidence in that light, we risk misunderstanding the actual religious bodies to which those labels are meant to refer. Most pressingly, by assuming a priori that the baptistic separatists emerging from the Jessey circle fit comfortably under the label “Particular Baptists,” we inappropriately unite them with so-​called General Baptists. For to speak of General and Particular Baptists assumes some sort of overarching “Baptist” identity that can meaningfully be applied to both groups, but the historical record does not support this supposition. The evidence does not reflect any sustained, meaningful interaction between seventeenth-​century General and Particular Baptists, nor does it suggest that baptistic separatists during this time would have understood the exclusive practice of believer’s baptism to be a sufficient basis upon which to build a common “Baptist” identity. There is simply no positive case to be made for any meaningful dialogue, interaction, partnership, or even debate among mid-​seventeenth-​century baptistic separatists of differing soteriological persuasions. The period’s efflorescence of

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print seems to have produced only one significant piece of writing coauthored by prominent Particular and General Baptists and this exceptional case did not emerge until 1660/​1661. Moreover, the coauthored document was written in direct response to a failed coup led by Thomas Venner and was clearly prompted by political necessity rather than any authentic desire for theological or ecclesiastical concord.45 Other attempts to demonstrate collaboration between “Particular” and “General Baptists” during the mid-​seventeenth century prove, upon closer inspection, similarly unconvincing. William Lumpkin, for example, has suggested that the 1656 Somerset Confession “represents the earliest important effort at bringing Particular and General Baptists into agreement and union.”46 Yet, the confession in question clearly articulates both unconditional election47 and limited atonement,48 and the only evidence produced in support of Lumpkin’s claim is the fact that some members of what has come to be called the Particular Baptist Western Association endorsed, at a single meeting, a somewhat softer form of predestinarian theology than did many of their contemporaries.49 To conclude from this that the confession’s signatories were making a deliberate and “important effort” to bring “Particular and General Baptists into agreement and union” is unwarranted. To appreciate the improbability of any alleged collaboration between Particular and General Baptists during the mid-​ seventeenth century, one must first appreciate the degree to which Arminianism was vilified within the Calvinistic puritan milieu out of which mid-​seventeenth-​century Particular Baptists emerged. Although some would qualify the claim that post-​Reformation England enjoyed an unambiguous “Calvinist consensus” in 1603, few would deny outright that the early Stuart church and England’s wider religious culture was meaningfully oriented toward Geneva.50 For many leading Stuart divines, both the Protestant religion and national identity more generally, were inextricably bound to Calvinistic theological convictions. In 1606, for instance, when Anthony Rudd delivered A Sermon Preached before the Kings Maieste, the Bishop of St. David’s imagined the would-​be assassins of the recently failed Gunpowder Plot saying to one another, “Come let us cutte them of[f ]‌from being a Nation, and let the name of Calvinists bee noe more in remembraunce.”51 Thus, defenders of Calvinist orthodoxy were quick to identify any deviation from their preferred soteriology as a crypto-​popish return to Rome; the rhetorical conjunction of “Popish & Arminian Errors” being a commonplace in their polemical writings.52 The alignment of Roman Catholicism and Arminianism can be clearly seen in John Warre’s popular handbook The Touchstone of Truth (1624), in which the author thematically arranged scripture references so that even those of “the meanest capacitie . . . may bee able to argue with any Papist and confute him by Scripture.” The doctrinal heads covered included both obvious points of Catholic-​Protestant

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discord (for example, whether “Purgatory is a meere Fiction”), but also points germane to Arminian soteriology such as the “infallible certainty of our salvation” and “Mans free will after his Fall.”53 Indeed, Arminian ideas were often portrayed as even worse than anything that the pope might endorse, as when Anthony Wotton described Arminians as “[f ]ar exceeding the limits of the Councell of Trent” and teaching “grosse points which” even “the Church of Rome durst not Patronize.”54 For many, then, Calvinistic soteriology was definitional not just to puritanism, but to England’s identity as a nation set in opposition to the anti-​Christian errors of Rome. There were, of course, exceptions—​consider, for instance, John Coffey’s persuasive argument that the independent minister John Goodwin “remained the model of an orthodox, godly divine” despite his ardent Arminianism—​but, in a meaningful sense, puritan divinity and Calvinistic soteriology were inseparably joined during the mid-​seventeenth century.55 “For many Puritans,” observes Crawford Gribben, “the rise of the Arminians could mean nothing less than the dismantling of the Reformation.”56 At a minimum, these observations suggest that those who did embrace Arminianism would not have done so lightly, and that such a countercultural move would likely have become a constitutive part of one’s religious self-​identity. And when we examine how mid-​seventeenth-​century Baptists thought about these issues, this is precisely what we find. From their earliest writings, Particular Baptists consistently worked to disassociate themselves from Arminian doctrine. As was already noted, they incorporated anti-​Arminian polemic into their 1644 Confession of Faith as part of an ineffectual attempt to curry favor with the mostly Presbyterian divines then debating the nation’s religious future at the Westminster Assembly. They wrote in large part because they were “being much spoken against as unsound in Doctrine as if they ware Armenians,” and when reciting a list of the many “calumnies cast upon” them, they gave pride of place to the “notoriously untrue” accusations that they endorsed “Free-​will, Falling away from grace” and “denying Originall Sinne,” all doctrines associated with Arminianism.57 Likewise, when Samuel Richardson, one of the 1644 confession’s signatories, wrote to defend the document in 1645, he raged against critics who still had the audacity to accuse Particular Baptists of teaching Arminian doctrine. Citing a slew of anti-​Calvinist theological positions including “free will,” election based upon “foreseen faith and repentance,” an atonement in which “Christ died indifferently alike for all,” and “such like stuffe which we utterly abhorre and detest,” Richardson described Arminian teaching as “poyson . . . drawn out of the impure fountaine of divers Heretickes.”58 Predictably in light of such rhetoric, when the signatories of the Confession reissued a revised version of their statement in 1646, many of the emendations explicitly strengthened the document’s distinctively Calvinistic points.59

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Individual baptistic authors likewise produced a steady stream of anti-​ Arminian polemic throughout the 1640s and 1650s. In one of the earliest published treatises on believer’s baptism, John Spilsbery described the doctrine of “Christs dying for all persons universally” and other characteristically Arminian positions as “doctrine from beneath, and not from above,” and he described those teaching such positions as “teachers . . . from Satan, and not from God.” Spilsbery’s comments are especially significant because they represented a deliberate attempt by Spilsbery to distance himself from those who, as he put it, “seem to be of my judgment about Baptism.”60 In other words, Spilsbery explicitly highlighted the fact that any agreement over baptism among baptistic separatists was easily overshadowed by the more significant disagreement over soteriology. After leaving the Church of England to lead a baptistic congregation, Benjamin Coxe responded to allegations of “time-​serving” and “self-​seeking” during his parish ministry by recounting how he would “preac[h]‌constantly against the Arminian error, notwithstanding the Kings Directions to the contrary.”61 Among Particular Baptists, the significance of Calvinist soteriology relative to other doctrines can perhaps be seen most clearly within congregational and regional association records produced during the 1650s. For it is within such records, rather than the pages of published polemic, where one most clearly observes how the quotidian exigencies of church life forced congregational leaders to define acceptable and unacceptable doctrine and practice; when confronted by the pressures of shared life together, their religious communities were forced to identify and distinguish between central and peripheral aspects of their shared group identity. Thus, at a September 1654 meeting among congregations in the West of England, the question was raised “[w]‌hether a member varying from the faith . . . as in respect of free will, general redemption, and falling from grace” would be need to be excommunicated “without some other occasion.” Surely prompted by an actual case within one of the participating congregations, the question required its respondents to weigh the significance of Calvinist orthodoxy relative to other shared communal values and to determine whether the bare commitment to believer’s baptism was a sufficient basis upon which to build an ecclesiastical identity. The answer given by the assembled church leaders was an unequivocal negative: “a person holding general redemption, free will, and falling from grace . . . after due admonition, is to be rejected.” To underscore the seriousness of the issue, the association then cited the biblical exhortation to “reject him that is an heretic” and urged all “ministering brethren” to “be much in holding forth such truths as may strike against such errors.”62 Other Particular Baptists responded to the perceived Arminian error in like fashion. At a June 1656 meeting of Midlands churches, for example, the association sternly forbade their members

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from comingling with any “baptised persons” who were “not sounde in the faith,” a categorisation, which, they quickly added, aptly described “those that are called free willers.”63 Among Particular Baptists, this intransigent hostility to Arminianism was evident even among more ecumenically minded baptistic ministers who were perfectly willing to commune with paedobaptistic congregationalists. In a 1654 letter from the Particular Baptist congregation at Hexham, church leaders explained their rationale for maintaining communion with “godly preachers and congregations” who were “unbaptized” and yet true “ministers and churches of Christ.” Immediately after doing so, the letter expresses the congregation’s gratitude to God who “through grace hath kept us sound in the faith, not any of us tainted with that Arminian poison that hath so sadly infected other baptized churches.”64 This conjunction of themes is significant. By moving from an endorsement of paedobaptistic Calvinists to a severe denunciation of Arminian Baptists, the letter illuminates a clear hierarchy of error within the minds of even the most irenic Particular Baptists. Paedobaptism could be tolerated, but the “Arminian poison” could not. Notice, also, the description of so-​called General Baptists—​here, they are not characterized as a rival denomination or movement with clearly defined boundaries, but simply in terms of independent baptistic churches that have embraced what the letter’s author believed to be a dangerous heresy. Such a mentality excludes the possibility of an overarching sense of pan-​ Baptist identity during the period, and suggests instead a far more complex religious landscape in which multiple doctrinal issues intersected within particular congregations to produce a diverse range of theological alignments. A final example comes from the records of the Particular Baptist church at Broadmead, Bristol. In a revealing passage, the author muses upon the degree to which the “bare holding of believer’s baptism” can be considered constitutive of a group’s religious identity. There are “many thousands in England,” he explains, with whom he would “not hold communion . . . though they do own and practise believer’s baptism.” The reason given for withholding fellowship is that “they hold with it [i.e. along with believer’s baptism] free will and falling from grace, &c.,” errors which were “unsound and heretical.” The author compares such individuals to “those people in Germany” who “did hold that truth [i.e. believer’s baptism] and many errors with it.” He and his church do not identify with these fellow “Baptists,” but rather only with those who accept the “sound truth” of believer’s baptism along with “all other sound principles of Christian religion equally with the godly, called presbyterians and independents.” Here, we find no shared religious identity among those whom later historians will label “Baptists,” and yet a strong sense of shared religious identity among “godly” Calvinist puritans of varying ecclesiological and sacramental persuasions.65 By fiercely defending

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a sense of Calvinistic identity—​elevating it in importance above even their baptistic convictions—​the Broadmead church demonstrated its affinity with a wider puritan culture that produced a steady stream of anti-​Arminian polemic during the 1650s.66 General Baptists, for their part, were equally if not more hostile to Calvinist doctrine, and they likewise emphasized soteriological correctness over and above the rejection of paedobaptism. In 1646, the Particular Baptist Benjamin Coxe complained about Arminian baptistic separatists who were so strongly opposed to Calvinistic doctrine that they issued blanket anathemas against any who affirmed it, even if such individuals also promoted believer’s baptism. They “so oppose us,” wrote Coxe, “that they deny us to preach any Gospel, to hold forth any true faith, or to administer any true Baptisme; who have openly called us The gates of hell, their common enemie, &c.”67 Similarly, Luke Howard, who fled the “dark Stuff ” taught by Particular Baptists to join a Quaker congregation in 1655, recalled how “them that held the General”—​that is, “General Baptists”—​ refused to “receive such as held the Particular into Fellowship, until such were Re-​baptised.” Calvinist teaching on election and the atonement was declared to be “a wrong Faith” and “another Gospel”—​in other words, a theological breach which no amount of baptismal concord could ever hope to repair.68 And though Howard’s testimony is that of a hostile witness, church and association records from the 1650s corroborate his report on General Baptist intransigence. General Baptist congregations did not hesitate to discipline those members who were believed to have compromised on vital soteriological points. In July 1655, for example, John Matthews, a member of the Fenstanton church was “exhorted to repent” by several church leaders because he “affirmed . . . [t]‌hat Christ died only for his elect” and that “God hath from the beginning chosen a certain number of persons to himself.” When he “resist[ed] stubbornly in his opinion,” the leadership resolved to proceed with formal church discipline, calling him to account “in the presence of the congregation.”69 Whatever Matthews might have thought about his treatment by the Fenstanton congregation, his coming under discipline for professing Calvinistic views should not have taken him by surprise. For two years earlier, in December 1653, Fenstanton church leaders had produced a summary statement outlining “the great differences about religion” that separated the believers at Fenstanton from their “adversaries.” By drafting such a document and having “a copy thereof delivered to every part of the congregation,” the leadership hoped to “acquain[t]‌ the saints with the objections of our adversaries  .  .  .  so they may not come upon us unawares.” In preparing such “spiritual weapons,” the group chose five of “the greatest controversies” for inclusion. At the top of the list was the extent of the atonement, and a full three out of the five issues pertained to related

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soteriological questions—​the other two named “controversies” being baptism and a question about right worship. Both the content of this document and the fact that it was produced with a deliberate eye toward educating the congregation suggest that church leaders understood Arminian soteriology as constitutive of their self-​identity and at least as important to it as their collective rejection of paedobaptism.70 General Baptists thus understood their soteriological convictions to be definitional aspects of their religious identity. To deny foundational Arminian doctrines such as Christ’s universal atonement was, as the General Baptist William Jeffrey put it, to make “the Gospel . . . the tender of a lie, which is blasphemy to affirme.”71 Particular Baptists, in turn, also placed unity on soteriological points ahead of unity on baptism. Many Particular Baptists who would not hesitate to ally themselves in a variety of contexts with paedobaptistic congregationalists, would nonetheless recoil from promoters of Arminianism, whether baptistic or not. Arminianism was an “opinion [which] much oppresseth and disturbs the godly” and its champions were those “who under pretence of seeking truth, doe by cunning and craftie enquiries undermine the same, and . . . overthrow the faith of some.”72 Although many people in mid-​seventeenth-​century England were drawing similar conclusions about baptism, this agreement was dwarfed by disagreement over soteriology. Sacramental concord did not necessarily create a sense of collective identity or unite them all in an imagined Baptist community, and these conclusions should caution against the use of any linguistic formulation that would imply as much. Unfortunately, however, such caution has not always been shown, and the anachronistic use of the denominational label “Baptist” has created a curious phenomenon within the historiography:  scholars simultaneously speak of seventeenth-​century Baptists as though they were a coherent entity, while at the same time recognizing that in practice, the General Baptists and Particular Baptists had no more interaction than any other two randomly selected English sects. There is basic agreement that, at a minimum, by 1644, the General and Particular Baptists were wholly distinct movements. B.  R. White explains that “they consistently organized separately, differed in their views of inter-​ congregational relationships and the ministry, and, on the whole, flourished in different parts of the country.”73 Likewise, Ian Birch notes helpfully that “the two groups developed separately and independently throughout the period” and “had little to do with each other.”74 And yet, despite this widespread recognition, authors will continue to speak of a common “Baptist cause,” reference the “Baptist position” on doctrinal controversies, and generally muddle two movements that, by common consent, were almost entirely distinct.75 Much of this stems from the problematic nature

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of the labels themselves. When the terms “Particular” and “General Baptist” are imposed onto mid-​seventeenth-​century baptistic separatists, the impression is conveyed, whether intentionally or not, that arguments over soteriology were actively dividing what would have otherwise been a natural union of likeminded Baptists. The ubiquitous application of the “General” and “Particular” labels quite naturally conveys the impression that a “section of the Baptists had . . . broken with Calvinism and embraced Arminianism, as early as the second decade of the seventeenth century.”76 Such formulations begin with an imagined community of “Baptists” and then divide it along soteriological lines, implying a unified whole that has been fractured by soteriological disagreement, rather than two wholly disparate groups which happened to reach similar conclusions regarding baptism. One account of Particular Baptists explains that they would sometimes draw the boundaries of communion so narrowly “as to exclude the possibility of fellowship even with General Baptists on account of their doctrine of Free Will.”77 The use of the intensifier “even” implies that any lack of warm interaction between Particular and General Baptists represented a surprising disruption to an otherwise friendly coalition of self-​identified “Baptists.” Elsewhere, one reads that General Baptists were “[l]‌argely isolated by doctrinal differences from the radical Calvinist coalition” within the “Baptist” movement.78 To speak this way is to suggest, at least implicitly, that debate over Arminianism and Calvinism had disrupted a putative pan-​Baptist communion. But the evidence does not support such a reading, and this tendency toward Baptist conflation distorts our understanding of all baptistic groups and the period’s wider religious culture.

III To better understand this phenomenon, one must trace the stream back to its source, that being the first recognized “Baptist historian,” Thomas Crosby (d. 1749).79 Crosby did not initially set out to inaugurate Baptist historiography. Instead, the opportunity came to him unexpectedly when Benjamin Stinton died in 1719 and bequeathed to Crosby the contents of his “repository of divers historical matters relating to the English Antipedobaptists.” Recognizing the historical value of what he had received, Crosby wrote to the historian Daniel Neal (1678–​ 1743), who was then working on his own History of the Puritans (1732).80 Crosby hoped that Neal would incorporate Stinton’s materials into his larger narrative, finally giving a fair hearing to the baptistic wing of English puritanism. But this was not to be. Upon the publication of The History of the Puritans, Crosby was instead “surprised to see the ill use Mr. Neal made of these materials,” complaining that Neal had condensed the entire story into a mere five pages, “and that too with very great partiality.”81 Infuriated by the slight, Crosby set out to complete

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the project cut short for Stinton and rejected by Neal: a thorough and sympathetic History of the English Baptists.82 Crosby finished the four-​volume work in 1740, and with it set a course that would influence all subsequent historians of English Baptists. Despite its significant impact on later Baptist historiography, Crosby’s scholarship has been widely criticized for its haphazard arrangement of materials and overtly tendentious argumentation. With respect to the latter, B. R. White has suggested that Crosby’s apologetic burden can be best understood in terms of three main arguments. First, Crosby wanted to “show that the English Baptists were a quiet, orderly and harmless people.” Secondly, he supplemented his historical narrative with theological arguments in favor of believer’s baptism. Thirdly, “he took considerable pains to refute the common contemporary opinion that Baptist ministers were ignorant and ill-​educated.”83 These three concerns indeed dominate Crosby’s narrative, but, curiously, White does not list a fourth apologetic thrust that, while less overtly evident, arguably played a more decisive role in distorting Crosby’s history. Namely, Crosby intentionally and systematically conflated General and Particular Baptists in order to establish a singular “Baptist identity” that would draw together any and all who rejected paedobaptism.84 His very title, The History of the English Baptists, presupposes such a coherent, pan-​Baptist identity, but as his text unfolds, Crosby made explicit what his title only implied. The key passage comes some 170 pages into Crosby’s first volume, and reminds us, with a startling frankness, of the historiographic otherness of mid-​eighteenth-​century scholarship. After claiming that English Baptists “ever since the beginning of the reformation” had been divided along Arminian and Calvinist lines, Crosby wrote that he would not “enquire into the reasons for their thus distinguishing themselves, so as to hold distinct communities thereupon.” Whatever reasons the actual seventeenth-​century actors had for drawing the lines of self-​identity as they did were not important because in Crosby’s judgment as an eighteenth-​century churchman, such disputes only distracted from the sort of pan-​Baptist unity that he wished to foster among his English co-​religionists: I am fully persuaded, and clearly of opinion, that this difference in opinion is not a sufficient or reasonable ground of renouncing christian [sic] communion with one another, and therefore have not in the course of this history, lean’d either to one side or the other, but have taken facts as they came to my hands, without regarding to which of the parties they were peculiar. And I know that there are several churches, ministers, and many particular persons, among the English Baptists, who desire not to go under the name either of Generals or Particulars, nor indeed can justly be ranked under either of these heads; because they receive what they

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think to be truth, without regarding with what human schemes it agrees or disagrees.85 In deciding to treat his subjects in this way, Crosby introduced profound distortions that have affected virtually all subsequent Baptist historiography. By conflating General and Particular Baptists, Crosby retroactively connected two unconnected groups, inventing and then forcing upon them an anachronistic pan-​Baptist identity. Crosby’s conflation obscured from view the intense feelings which would have accompanied seventeenth-​century soteriological debate and inflicted further damage by implying that the only issue differentiating General and Particular Baptists was that same soteriological debate he minimized. Instead of recognizing two distinct, unrelated communions with very different priorities, doctrinal platforms, and ecclesial structures, Crosby reduced all distinction to contrasting soteriological schemes. Thomas Crosby’s deliberate confusion of the historical record has left an unfortunate legacy that continues to be felt today. Crosby established the basic pattern for Baptist historiography by calling forth a seventeenth-​century Baptist identity ex nihilo and leaving future historians only to tweak, modify, and revise his basic framework. Subsequent scholars have almost universally treated all baptistic separatists under the common heading “Baptists,” a conflation that yields confusing and sometimes internally contradictory results. This was especially evident among the so-​called denominational historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As was already reviewed in the introduction, these Baptist chroniclers wrote with a clear sense of continuity between themselves and their historical subjects, and the resulting narratives were often skewed as a result. B. R. White, writing from within the Baptist tradition, acknowledges that “from the first, Baptist historians in England have not merely tried to give as adequate a narrative as their sources allow but have seen their task as that of defending their co-​religionists and of influencing denominational policy.”86 Benjamin Evans, author of The Early English Baptists (1864) did not hesitate to confess that within the pages of Baptist history “religious training and sympathy frequently give a color to our opinions.”87 By the early twentieth-​century, this trend was beginning to change. One can sense the new historiographic atmosphere in the comments of George Gould,88 then president of the Baptist Historical Society, as he reviewed Champlin Burrage’s The Early English Dissenters (1912): It may occur to some readers that the passion for primary sources is the only passion our author permits himself to manifest; to him, apparently, it matters not whether his discoveries are to the advantage of Anglican or of

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Separatist: to correct misapprehension and to clear away traditional error is the aim which is pursued inflexibly and without even a momentary deviation towards partisanship. To write in such an impersonal fashion of the period under discussion is an achievement hardly possible for a British scholar.89 Gould admired Burrage’s objectivity, and yet, the evident surprise with which he greeted it conveyed the impression of a discipline in flux, still transitioning between the modern era of impartial assessment and an older one in which denominational representatives eagerly and openly claimed ecclesial and theological continuity with their historical subjects. Similarly, as Burrage and Gould’s contemporary W. T. Whitley was assembling his Baptist Bibliography in 1916, he made sure to note that his work would attempt “for the first time to register everything relevant to Baptist history, whether pro or con,” a comment that pointed toward an emerging standard of objectivity even as its very inclusion betrayed just how far reality was from the envisioned ideal.90 But even as growing numbers of twentieth-​century historians began to downplay the partisan posture which had characterized prior eras, the influence of Thomas Crosby continued to shape Baptist historiography in decidedly unhelpful ways.

IV From the perspective of modern scholarship, the overtly apologetic gestures of denominational historians are problematic, but they are also easily discerned and disregarded. The far more subtle and, consequently, more dangerous historiographic legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth-​ century denominational scholarship has not been its overt partisanship, but rather the way in which it reinforced certain assumptions regarding the ecclesial landscape of early modern dissent and created a starting point for future inquiry that remains largely intact. Denominational historians frequently projected later developments within their own sects back onto mid-​seventeenth-​century actors. And although denominational history was often motivated by openly acknowledged apologetic concerns,91 its practitioners bequeathed a way of thinking about the period that continues to tacitly influence even those later historians who write with very different intentions. Chief among these presumptions is the notion of a seventeenth-​century Baptist identity that conceptually unites all baptistic separatists under a common banner. Consider, for instance, how W. K. Jordan decided to classify “Baptists” as a single ideological unit in his encyclopedic analysis of The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1938). Jordan explained this decision by

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prefacing his conflation of baptistic separatists with a caveat about the wide expanse separating the two groups: Though the division of the Baptist communion into two sharply separated doctrinal groups should engage the close attention of the historian of the sect, it does not appear that this schism extends importantly to Baptist thought in the larger areas of speculation which must be examined by the historian of toleration.92 As with Crosby’s work two centuries earlier, Jordan assumes a united “Baptist communion” and explains that while in practice, this “communion” was divided by doctrinal disputes, these disagreements were sufficiently narrow in scope so as to not impinge upon the historian’s ability to identify a coherent school of “Baptist thought.” But to say that the “Baptist communion” was divided implies argumentation and schism within an already established group. Two groups that never shared any common identity cannot be properly described as “divided” in this sense, and yet this is precisely what Jordan and others have done. Passages like that quoted above convey the sense that seventeenth-​century General and Particular Baptists would have recognized each other as fellow-​travelers, that they would have felt, at least on some level, the significance of a common “Baptist” identity that transcended and superseded any other relatively minor doctrinal differences that might temporarily have come between them. Such rhetoric seems to reflect both the influence of early Baptist historians who sought, like Crosby, to manufacture a pan-​Baptist identity for their own denominational purposes, and a tendency to project upon the seventeenth century, the later denominational realignments that did, in fact, unite the previously disparate baptistic communions.93 More recent literature on the early English “Baptists” has been more sensitive to the danger of denominational teleology and the anachronistic application of labels,94 and yet, the drift toward conflation remains and consistently muddies our understanding of how these men and women would have actually perceived themselves.95 T. L. Underwood’s otherwise excellent comparative analysis of seventeenth-​century Baptists and Quakers illustrates this phenomenon.96 Underwood states that although Particular and General Baptists “agreed on the nature and method of baptism,” they, nonetheless, “remained separate.” This formulation again suggests a pan-​Baptist movement that could “agree” about some things (baptism), while “remain[ing] separate” because of unresolved disagreement in other areas. The problem persists throughout as, for example, when Underwood informs the reader that “in 1644 there were probably only fifty or so Baptist churches,” without any indication of what kind of “Baptist” churches these

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were.97 Later, he describes John Bunyan as “a key spokesperson for the Baptists,”98 and refers without qualification to a generic “Baptist concern.”99 In each of these instances, Underwood’s language implies a common “Baptist” identity. Such analysis is not atypical, and the conflation of baptistic groups into a generic pan-​Baptist conglomerate has become deeply embedded into the way in which historians conceive the period. In Philip Gura’s discussion of seventeenth-​ century baptistic groups, for example, he carefully differentiates between General and Particular Baptists. Yet, even in doing so, he refers to them as the two “wings” of “the baptist movement,” a description which betrays an assumed overarching Baptist identity uniting the General and Particular.100 Likewise, Mark Bell acknowledges the diversity among baptistic separatists—​“the Baptists were never a monolithic movement”—​but then proceeds to identify the “most distinctive mark of the early English Baptists” as a single entity and proffers comment on “Baptist thought during the English Revolution.”101 He refers to General and Particular Baptists as “the predominant branches of English Baptists”—​thus, presupposing a common tree—​and asserts, without evidence, that they “did regard each other as part of the same family of Christians.”102 Elsewhere, writing in an undifferentiated manner about a collective “Baptist” group, Bell argues that these Baptists “began to change the direction of their eschatology from criticizing the establishment to endorsing it” with the result that “those aspects of the Leveller agenda that Baptists had supported became less attractive.”103 This pushes Baptist conflation even further as Bell presents an explanation for historical change that depends for its coherence on a presupposed Baptist unity that Bell himself elsewhere acknowledges did not actually exist. J. F. McGregor’s influential essay “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy” (1984) furnishes one final example of the historiographical trend toward Baptist conflation. Despite initially framing his discussion by sharply distinguishing between the two groups—​“co-​operation, even friendly communication between the two sorts of Baptists, was practically impossible during the Revolution”104—​ McGregor consistently makes broad, unqualified statements explaining “Baptist” practices and “Baptist” views. The following passage, taken from McGregor’s conclusion, is representative: The Baptists’ fundamental weakness was their inability to attract leaders of the quality necessary to resolve the ambiguities in their relations both with the world and with their fellow radicals. Their mentality was shaped in the hostile environment of the late 1630s and early 1640s when submission to collective discipline, rather than imaginative leadership, best served the elementary cause of survival. . . . They lacked the dynamic inspiration of the clerical renegades so influential among their separatist

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precursors. Imaginative talent, lay or clerical, was usually either suppressed or alienated by the sect’s narrow legalism and claustrophobic discipline.105 This analysis immediately raises concerns: if, as McGregor has already asserted, the “two sorts of Baptists” enjoyed no “co-​operation” or “even friendly communication,” it is problematic to then assert that “Baptists,” understood as an inclusive category, had a “fundamental weakness.” Equally problematic is McGregor’s similar assertion that an overarching “Baptist” mentality was “shaped in the hostile environment of the late 1630s and early 1640s,” and that this collective sense was so powerfully developed among Baptists as an undifferentiated mass that it could effectively guide the course of their movement for decades to come. To begin to explain the apparent tension between McGregor’s initial separation of the “two sorts of Baptists” and his subsequent reattaching of the same, one must recognize that McGregor’s essay seems to implicitly rely on modern denominational labels and a concomitant assumption that these modern religious identifiers shed light on seventeenth-​century religious self-​identity. The language used throughout to analyze the relationship between Particular and General Baptists begs the question of broader Baptist identity by presupposing a fundamental inter-​group kinship based on a shared commitment to believer’s baptism. But this connection between Particular and General Baptists emerged only in subsequent centuries and should not be imposed upon the religious radicals of Stuart England. Consider again McGregor’s language: “co-​operation, even friendly communication between the two sorts of Baptists, was practically impossible during the Revolution.”106 By referring to “the two sorts of Baptists,” McGregor unwittingly assumes a stable, coherent category called “Baptist,” within which one finds two subcategories or “sorts.”107 Thus, even as he informs the reader of the expansive gulf separating so-​called Particular and General Baptists, McGregor betrays his unstated presupposition that these two groups, despite all evidence to the contrary, were, in fact, so closely related as to warrant a common appellation. And, in all of this, the intellectual validity of this presupposition as applied to the seventeenth-​century religious landscape is left wholly unexamined. These confusing categorizations have especially deleterious effects because they are then appropriated and repeated by scholars working in tangentially related areas and thus relying to a large degree on secondary literature for their understanding of baptistic English separatists. As the multiplying references in the secondary literature then echo and amplify one another, a consensus grows and the conflation of baptistic groups further entrenches itself into the historiographic consciousness. For example, in his essay on the physician and Particular Baptist Peter Chamberlen, the linguistic historian Michael Adams looks to

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McGregor’s essay on Baptists for background information and suggests, citing McGregor, that Particular Baptists like Chamberlen “regularly interrupted parish priests in mid-​sermon”—​an audacious activity which nicely supports Adams’ characterization of Chamberlen as a man possessing a “naturally confrontational temperament.”108 But does this colorful detail actually apply to the religious activity of so-​called Particular Baptists? Historical documentation for the description of Baptist agitators disrupting parish preachers comes from the Presbyterian heresiographer Thomas Edwards, who, in the passage in question, described the activity of Thomas Lambe and his followers.109 But Lambe was a notorious General Baptist and, as such, had no substantive connection to the Particular Baptists about whom Adams writes. Given his reliance on McGregor, one suspects that Adam’s confusion stems in part from the underlying confusion of baptistic groups found throughout McGregor’s essay. For although McGregor actually does take care to identify Lambe as a General Baptist, the pervasive, essay-​long drift toward Baptist conflation contributes to a sense that all baptistic separatists formed, in a significant sense, a single, coherent group with shared motivations and characteristics. In recent years, the most significant interaction with these unfortunate taxonomic mergers has been Stephen Wright’s The Early English Baptists, 1603–​1649 (2006).110 Throughout his account of English Baptists under the first two Stuart kings, Wright impresses with a fine-​grained analysis of source material and careful attention to detailed, knotty problems. But surely his most important historiographical contribution is his attempt to redress the problematic “General Baptist” and “Particular Baptist” labels that have introduced so much confusion into our understanding of the period. Sensitive to anachronism, Wright accuses previous historians of falling under the distorting spell of “denominational teleology” and thereby misrepresenting the self-​understanding of early English Baptists.111 Wright explains that in an effort to “tidy up Particular Baptist origins,” scholars such as Murray Tolmie and B.  R. White have exhibited a “strong tendency to exaggerate the fixity of divisions” between the General and Particular Baptists of the late 1630s and early 1640s, the two groups being “presented as separate branches of the same genus, like horses and zebras on the tree of denominational evolution.” This arrangement, in Wright’s estimate, “reflects a lack of scientific caution.” In response, he labors to demonstrate ideological and associational fluidity among early Baptists and thus challenge “the traditional view that the Particular and General Baptists had existed from the first as separate and opposed communions.”112 Rather than two distinct communions, each tightly confined to its own denominational compartment, Wright reconstructs an early Baptist community in which Baptists, presumably of varying soteriological persuasions, argued not over the rightness of the Synod of Dort, but rather over the right and

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proper way to run a Baptist church: “in London, the Baptists were indeed divided in the early 1640s, but . . . the lines of division were defined not by theology but by the proper method by which they should form and order their churches.”113 By shifting the center of Baptist identity away from the nature of the atonement and onto the structure of the church, Wright rejects several decades of settled conclusions, and recasts early Baptist alignments as provisional and in flux. In support of his thesis, Wright marshals an impressive array of primary source materials in order to make his case positively and negatively, working both to demonstrate the fluidity of early Baptist identity and to point out the paucity of evidence available to prove otherwise. Wright helpfully recognizes that prior to the 1644 confession the men who signed it and the people they represented almost certainly did not understand themselves as “Particular Baptists.” And Wright’s analysis of Tolmie and White correctly identifies what appears to be an all too neat alignment of Arminian-​leaning General Baptists on the one side and Calvinistic Particular Baptists on the other. This is an important insight. But his interpretation does not go far enough. The standard view of early English Baptists rests on two assumptions: first, the existence of something that can be meaningfully called a “Baptist communion,” and second, that this communion was divided into two parts, General and Particular. Wright quite correctly perceives serious flaws in the second assumption: there is no evidence of Baptists arguing over soteriology and then dividing themselves accordingly during the late 1630s and early 1640s. The problem is that while Wright thus overturns the second assumption, he leaves the first untouched, the logic of his argument serving not to challenge, but to strengthen the assumption that some sort of pan-​Baptist identity existed at this early stage. According to Wright, London Baptists of different soteriological leanings intermingled far more freely during the early 1640s than Tolmie or White would have imagined. While debating the details of an emerging Baptist ecclesiology, they formed “fluid and provisional alignments” that were “based upon divisions not over theology but (in large part) over the proper means of church formation,” and it was only later that “the inter-​congregational relationships of the Baptists were shaken up and recast.”114 When this shakeup finally did occur, Wright argues that the great Baptist separation into Particular and General came largely as the result of the “broader political and theological controversy” then brewing among English parliamentarians, an external controversy which nonetheless “came to influence far more the terms in which the Baptists debated and related to each other.” According to this retelling, then, Calvinistic soteriology was not a pressing issue among “Baptists” prior to the 1644 confession. Instead, a Calvinistic branch of the Baptist tree grew only as part of “a general realignment.” This “general realignment” took place as some more conservative Baptists

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sought to “decisively distanc[e]‌themselves from the extremists” within their own Baptist communion and thus curry favor with the mainstream congregationalists and presbyterians.115 The pressing problem here is that Wright, like his predecessors, unhesitatingly assumes that mid-​seventeenth-​century baptistic separatists would have understood themselves as organically united by a common embrace of believer’s baptism. Where Wright departs from his predecessors is in his challenge to the long-​held view that this pan-​Baptist community was, from an early date, arranged according to a “bi-​polar division between Particular and General Baptists.” But the assumption of a coherent sense of Baptist identity remains intact, and is, in fact, reinforced by Wright’s suggestion that prior to 1644 there was a “natural fellowship of the ranks of the believers’ Baptists” undisturbed by soteriological controversy.116 Wright bases his conclusion upon a lack of early soteriological dispute among the Jessey circle churches that went on to sign the 1644 confession. If, during the late 1630s and early 1640s, the confession’s signatories cannot be shown to have been overly concerned with propping up their Calvinistic orthodoxy, the logic goes, then perhaps the assumption of an early General-​Particular division is unwarranted. This deduction only holds, however, if one continues to presuppose an overarching “Baptist” communion within which there were both Arminian and Calvinistic representatives. If, by contrast, one abandons the anachronistic notion of an early seventeenth-​century “Baptist identity,” and instead recognizes that the so-​called Particular Baptists grew up directly from the Jessey circle of churches and would have, consequently, had no necessary link to the line of Arminian-​influenced “General Baptist” churches that grew out of Thomas Helwy’s congregation, then the lack of soteriological debate among baptistic churches in the Jessey circle is no longer problematic. Wright does attempt to demonstrate links between baptistic members of the Jessey circle and certain figures whom later historians have identified as “General Baptists.” These links, however, are few in number and speculative in nature. Wright attempts, for example, to uncover a connection between Richard Blunt, a member of Jessey’s congregation, and Timothy Batte, an English General Baptist associated with Thomas Lambe. But, the connection between the two men only exists if we assume that the author or transcriber of Stinton manuscript no.  2 misspelled “Timothy Batte” as “Jo Batte,” about which Wright comments:  “It must be conceded that the ‘Jo’ of the putative original is far from ‘Tim.’ ” It is difficult to see how such a slender evidentiary thread can support the magnitude of Wright’s proposed revision.117 Another speculative piece of support adduced to show the intermingling of Calvinistic and Arminian Baptists involves an arrest at Whitechapel in January 1641.118 Wright demonstrates that at least three members of John Spilsbery’s

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Calvinistic church had been arrested on January 15, 1641 at a Whitechapel meeting led by the outspoken “General Baptist” Thomas Lambe. From this, admittedly intriguing, piece of historical data, Wright concludes that we now have evidence for “links between the Lambe and Spilsbury groups,” a fact “sharply at variance with the traditional account of Baptist alignments.” If Wright could demonstrate substantive linkages and affinities between Thomas Lambe and John Spilsbery this would, indeed, be “sharply at variance with the traditional account of Baptist alignments.”119 And yet, in the case of the arrest records, two observations mitigate against this conclusion. First, Wright does not adduce evidence demonstrating that any church leaders from Spilsbery’s group had anything to do with Lambe’s congregation.120 Second, one cannot deduce ideological affinity from attendance at a single meeting. Evidence from the period suggests that attending the preaching of one’s theological opponent was not unusual.121 We have no idea why the members of Spilsbery’s group were present that night. Perhaps they were genuinely interested in Lambe’s ideas (but, of course, which ones?). Perhaps they wanted to better understand positions with which they sharply disagreed. Perhaps they did not know all the details regarding whom they were going to hear. Whatever their reason for visiting Whitechapel that evening, a handful of laypeople attending a meeting led by a colorful and notorious local personality does not demonstrate that Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic separatists had any substantive linkages in 1641. Here and elsewhere, it would seem that Wright’s conclusions are simply not substantiated by the evidence presented. And, even if each of Wright’s suggestions were demonstrably true, they would still have an episodic and idiosyncratic character, and thus fall well short of establishing the sort of thorough going interpenetration between Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic separatists at which his hypothesis seems to hint. As was previously demonstrated, members of the Jessey circle reflected a wider puritan milieu in their reflexive adherence to Calvinistic doctrine and their soteriological commitments functioned as basic boundary markers dividing friend from foe. By projecting an anachronistic sense of “Baptist” identity onto the baptistic separatists in London, particularly those associated with the Jessey circle, we manufacture an historical riddle where one need not exist: the reason that Stephen Wright’s meticulous study could not find evidence of early “intra-​ Baptist” debate over soteriology is not because the questions were unimportant, but rather because, among those who would go on to sign the 1644 confession, the answers were assumed to be long-​settled. Furthermore, if we accept Wright’s vision of a pre-​1644 pan-​Baptist contingent that was relatively unconcerned about maintaining a strict Calvinist orthodoxy, it becomes difficult to explain why the draftees of the 1644 confession produced such an ardently anti-​Arminian document. The confession’s stated purpose was,

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as we have already seen, to vindicate its signatories and their followers against the allegation that they held to “Free-​will, Falling away from grace” and “denying Originall sinne,” all positions which cut against the Calvinist theology then ascendant among the theological taste-​makers in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly.122 The body of the confession made good on this promise, affirming soteriological positions in keeping with those set down at the Synod of Dort and forcing even the Presbyterian polemicist Robert Baillie to concede: “It is true, the late Confession of the seven Churches seem to reject clearly enough all five Articles of the Arminians.”123 When the confession was revised in 1646, many of the emendations were intended to burnish the document’s Calvinistic credentials, deleting text that could potentially be misunderstood, and making explicit what the first edition only implied.124 To assume, as Wright’s argument requires, that this anti-​Arminian apologetic was only issued in response to a tightening political noose seems unlikely. Those responsible for the 1644 confession appear to have been as committed to Calvinist orthodoxy as any other group within the puritan mainstream, and this fact alone seems sufficient to render implausible Wright’s suggestion of a pre-​1644 pan-​Baptist communion open to varying soteriological persuasions. The vehemence with which the 1644 signatories sought to distance themselves from any connection with Arminianism is, in fact, often assumed to lend support for the older view against which Wright sets himself, the view advanced by Tolmie and White that Particular and General Baptists were divided over soteriology from an early date. These two interpretative paths, however, are not the only options available to us. If the traditional view of the early English Baptists assumes first, the existence of a coherent “Baptist” communion, and second, that this communion was divided into two camps, General and Particular, Wright’s weakness is not to be found in his challenge to the second assumption, but rather in his failure to challenge the first. If we abandon the presumption of a pan-​ Baptist identity during the 1630s and 1640s, that is, if we stop presupposing that men and women during this period saw themselves as in some way inherently united with one another based upon their shared commitment to believer’s baptism, then many of the tensions Wright identifies begin to resolve themselves. To recover a more accurate, contextually sensitive understanding of the men and women associated with the 1644 confession, we must recalibrate our historical lens so as to view them not as “Baptists”—​a label nowhere used during the revolutionary period by themselves or their theological opponents—​but as practitioners of the Congregational Way emerging from and associated with the brand of religious dissent pioneered by Henry Jacob in 1616. The fact that some of these congregationalists began to embrace believer’s baptism during the late 1630s and early 1640s did not automatically alter their prior self-​understanding

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and immediately slot them into an imagined “Baptist” communion. A shift in baptismal theology would not have severed the theological and personal ties connecting them to the congregational milieu out of which they emerged, nor would it immediately have thrown them into communion with other, unrelated separatists with whom they had little in common apart from a superficially similar position on baptism. This explains why Wright’s research found that prior to 1644, the signatories of the London confession seemed keen to argue “not over theology but (in large part) over the proper means of church formation”125—​this is not because they were apathetic to soteriology, but because the communities in which they worshiped had no reason to question the established Calvinist orthodoxy, and were instead absorbed in the ecclesiological concerns then driving the adoption of believer’s baptism. By shifting our focus in this manner, we are better positioned to see and understand the theological and personal connections between baptistic congregationalists and the mainstream independent movement. And once these linkages are better appreciated, we can grasp a sense of why the churches signing the 1644 confession began to embrace believer’s baptism when they did: it was understood as a natural and unavoidable consequence of the congregational principles to which they were already devoted.

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Baptists Along the Congregational Way

On June 29, 1645, Henry Jessey was baptized. The man who baptized him was Hanserd Knollys, a fellow London independent who would soon take a prominent position among baptistic congregationalists in London. By this time, many in the city had rejected the baptism they had received in infancy and the confession of the seven London churches “commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists” had been in print for over half-​a-​year.1 But the baptism of Henry Jessey was of special importance in that it signaled a major ideological shift in the life of London’s longest standing and most influential independent congregation.2 Two years earlier, Knollys, then a member of Jessey’s church, balked at presenting his own child for baptism. His refusal apparently resonated widely within the congregation because Knollys’s doubts about the practice occasioned a church-​wide “conference” in which the question of infant baptism “was discussed in all Love for many weeks togeather.” Focusing on the interpretation of God’s dealings with Abraham in Genesis 17, the debate questioned whether or not this passage implied a place for the children of Christian parents within God’s covenant people. One noteworthy participant answering in the negative was William Kiffen (1616–​1701), a London merchant whose name would appear atop the list of signatures on the 1644 London confession later that year.3 As discussion progressed, more and more of Jessey’s church members sided with Knollys, some having “such impressions on their Spirits against Pedobaptisme, as they told ye Elder [i.e. Jessey] upon his enquiry, that he could not but judg there was much of God in it, yet still he then remained in his judgment for it [i.e. paedobaptism].” By March 1644, the debate had become serious enough as to warrant outside intervention. The church sought “ye Advice of ye Elders & Brethren of other Churches” and brought in a collection of counsellors that included Praisegod Barbon (c. 1598–​1679),4 Thomas Goodwin (1600–​1680),5 Phillip Nye (bap. 1595,

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d. 1672),6 Sidrach Simpson (c. 1600–​1655),7 and Jeremiah Burroughes (bap. 1601?, d. 1646).8 This group of leading independent ministers, although not baptistic themselves, nevertheless urged restraint and a conservative, sympathetic approach to the growing number of anti-​paedobaptists among Jessey’s flock: “these. . . advised us. . . not to Excom[m]‌unicate, no, nor admonish,” but instead “[t]o count them still of our Church; & pray, & love them.” For just over a year, the church took this course, until, eventually, the momentum unleashed by Knollys’s scruple overpowered Jessey himself and he “was convinced also” that infant baptism was not proper Christian practice. Jessey soon “was baptized by Mr Knollys, and then by degrees he Baptized many of ye Church.”9 These events and the personalities involved in them raise questions about the history and self-​identity of mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists”—​questions that have too often been obscured by an historiographical agenda set by denominational partisans for whom past and present were inextricably and deleteriously interwoven. The present chapter will excavate afresh the mass of social and religious entanglements between “Baptists” and congregationalists that made possible the theological conferences just described. In doing so, we will reassess the relationship between these groups and come to recognize that the realities of mid-​seventeenth century religious identity were never as straightforward as they have often appeared in retrospect.

I Henry Jessey’s intellectual movement away from a paedobaptistic position encapsulated the spirit of possibility and ecclesial reappraisal then sweeping through London. Contemporaries perceived that God was “beginning to strive in the World, and to doe great things in the World” and a small but growing number of them would surely have welcomed Jessey’s baptism as a happy confirmation of this divine movement.10 In fact, the collection of personalities involved in the Southwark conferences nicely illustrates the shifting borderlines of London separatism as they stood in relation to the question of infant baptism: Jessey’s theological counsellors, Barbon, Goodwin, Nye, Simpson, Burroughes, and others were all staunch paedobaptists and represented churches variously labeled as semi-​ separatist, congregational, or independent; Jessey himself took a middle position, allowing his congregants to practice either believer’s baptism or paedobaptism as their individual consciences saw fit;11 and Hanserd Knollys stood on the other end of the spectrum, representing an exclusively baptistic approach to church membership that would characterize the congregations who signed the 1644 London confession of faith and were later labeled “Particular Baptists.” Despite their obvious differences, these three positions were intrinsically related to one

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another, and, considered together, they occupied a single conceptual region on the mid-​seventeenth-​century ecclesial map, a region held together by an unquestioned adherence to Calvinist orthodoxy and the uncompromising logic of congregational polity. Baptistic separatists standing outside this circle rejected Calvinist orthodoxy, while Calvinists outside its borders rejected congregationalism. And although many of the connections linking these groups are widely recognized, their implications have not been sufficiently explored. As was noted in ­chapter  1, insufficient attention has been paid to the continuities between so-​ called Particular Baptists and congregationalists. Following the eighteenth-​century lead of Thomas Crosby, subsequent historians have maintained a largely unexamined precommitment to the anachronistic notion of an early pan-​Baptist identity, an historiographical imposition that skews our understanding of leaders like Henry Jessey and Hansard Knollys. When we immediately classify as “Baptist” any and all who restricted baptism to professing believers,12 we effectively filter how we then interpret and reflect upon the personal and theological connections between “Baptists” and congregationalists. Because we know how the story ends—​we know that overarching Baptist and congregational identities will eventually prove to be enduring and meaningful denominational demarcations—​we are tempted to view interactions and connections between the seventeenth-​century ancestors of these later groupings as examples of inter-​denominational, ecumenical dialogue. For example, in his analysis of the Jessey conferences just described, Murray Tolmie stresses “their essentially interdenominational character, including Independents, separatists, and Baptists.”13 But when the teleological spectacles are removed, we can see clearly that when Hanserd Knollys, Henry Jessey, and Thomas Goodwin met in 1645 to discuss matters of mutual interest, they did so not as representatives of “the Baptists” and “the Independents,” but instead as three practitioners of the Congregational Way, each with his own vision for how that common commitment to congregational principles might be most consistently and faithfully expressed. I am arguing, then, that mid-​century congregationalists and those commonly regarded as Calvinistic or Particular Baptists ought to be held closer together than historians have been wont to do.14 During their early, formative decades between 1638 and 1660, the men and women long labeled “Particular Baptists” can be better understood as baptistic congregationalists—​a “Baptist” denominational identity would only begin to solidify after the Restoration. In their theological framework, their favored emphases, and even their personal associations, the Particular Baptist leaders and those who followed them were cut from congregational cloth. It is not insignificant that the celebrated phrase, “the Congregational way,” was, in fact, first put to print by the “Particular Baptist” leader William Kiffen.15 And when we combine the manifold affinities

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between congregationalists and “Particular Baptists” with the latter’s evident distaste for the Arminian-​influenced “General Baptists,”16 the usefulness of the baptistic congregationalist label becomes apparent:  by speaking of baptistic-​ congregationalists we simultaneously highlight their continuity with mainstream congregationalists and preserve their discontinuity with other baptistic separatists who did not develop out of the Congregational Way. The standard historiographical practice of referring to “Particular” and “General Baptists” has the opposite effect, obscuring the links between “Particular Baptists” and congregationalists while simultaneously manufacturing a false sense of common purpose among all who rejected paedobaptism. The problem becomes even more evident when we consider the anachronism of the labels “Particular” and “General Baptist.” There is no evidence that members of these churches during the 1640s and 1650s would have used the label “Baptist” to describe themselves, and they certainly would not have used “Particular” and “General” to specify what sort of “Baptists” they were. Perhaps the earliest use of the term “Baptist” comes from William Allen, a member of John Goodwin’s Arminian independent congregation in London who left Goodwin’s church in 1653 to form a baptistic congregation in Lothbury. In his Answer to Mr. J[ohn] G[oodwin] (1653), Allen made several references to “the Baptists,” often directly contrasting them with “the Pedobaptists.”17 But Allen’s usage was not consistent and he deployed the term more to differentiate his own position on the sacrament with those who disagreed than to identify a coherent quasi-​denominational body. Moreover, despite appearing in Allen’s treatise, the “Baptist” label was not adopted more broadly as a stable marker of mid-​ seventeenth-​century self-​identity, and instead was seized upon by Quakers for polemical purposes. As it happens, Allen himself may have been inadvertently responsible for this terminological transmission:  the man who had persuaded Allen to reject paedobaptism was Samuel Fisher, who went on shortly thereafter to become an eminent Quaker polemicist and may well have brought Allen’s favored moniker along with him.18 But, however Quaker authors discovered the “Baptist” label, they deployed it widely during the Interregnum. In a 1654 tract, Truth Cleared of Scandals, the Quaker Richard Farnworth referred to “those people called Baptists,” and in 1655, the Quaker James Parnell likewise described “several meetings betwixt the people called Quakers, and the people called Baptists.”19 During the same period, the founders of the Muggletonians, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, also referred to “Baptists” in their pamphlet Joyful News from Heaven (1658).20 Throughout the remainder of the decade and on into the 1660s, Quaker authors would regularly mention “Baptists” in their published tracts, as in John Perrot’s 1662 “Paper . . . Directed to all Baptists every where.”21

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Yet despite the inception of the term during the 1650s, after the lay person William Allen’s usage in 1653, no separatist minister seems to have applied the term “Baptist” to himself until the “General Baptist” Thomas Grantham did so in his 1663 treatise, The Baptist Against the Papist.22 And even after Grantham began to occasionally deploy the label, one still does not find groups of would-​be “Baptists” taking the term on as their preferred self-​identifier until the eighteenth century.23 As late as 1688, an influential baptistic confession of faith nowhere employed the term “Baptist,” preferring instead the more unwieldy descriptor, “Congregations of Christians (baptized upon Profession of their Faith).”24 Likewise, Mark Burden’s survey of baptistic church books does not find a clear, self-​referential use of the term “Baptist” used until 1691.25 If the use of “Baptist” as a stable, self-​referential descriptor took a long time to develop, the more specific terms “Particular” and “General” took even longer. When Calvinistic baptistic congregationalists produced a catechism in 1695, these “Particular Baptists” were still not using that term to describe themselves, calling themselves only “congregations of Christians, (baptized upon profession of their faith)  .  .  .  owning the doctrine of personal election, and final perseverance.”26 Like the “Baptist” label more generally, the “Particular” and “General” labels seem to have been introduced by the Quakers, their earliest usage coming from the polemicist Luke Howard (1621–​1699).27 Howard was the son of a Dover shoemaker and he embodied the protean nature of religious self-​identity during the English civil wars. Self-​identifying variously during the period as a Brownist, a presbyterian, an independent, a baptist, and then eventually a Quaker, Howard drew on his diverse religious experiences in his tract A Looking-​Glass for Baptists (1672). The work described how its author “was dipped into the Belief and Church of W. Kiffen, who then was of the Opinion commonly called, The particular Election and Reprobation of persons.” Howard then explained that at the time “there was a great contest betwixt those Baptists called, The General, as Lamb, Barber, and those which held the Universal Love of God to all; and Kiffen, Patience, Spillman and Colyer, and those that held the particular Election.”28 Another relatively early example of the terms comes ten years later from a 1682 government spy’s report which informed authorities about the dissenting congregations then operative in London. The report refers to “pirtiler baptises,” “ginarall baptises” and “battiseses of severall Judgments.”29 Here then are relatively early conjunctions of “Baptist” with its modifiers “Particular” and “General,” but these examples do not seem to reflect the self-​ identification of seventeenth-​century baptistic separatists. Instead, particularly as used by Quaker writers like Howard, the classification into two sorts of Baptists seems to have reflected a polemical agenda well served by the conflation of one’s opponents.

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When one examines the published works of baptistic congregationalists during the 1640s, one does not find them adopting labels like “Baptist” and “Particular Baptist,” terms which suggest an identity based upon a distinctive sacramentology. Instead, one finds a group of people seemingly at a loss to determine the most appropriate self-​appellation. Often they defined themselves negatively, as in the full-​title of their 1644 confession: “The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists.”30 Similarly, in July 1645, William Kiffen published A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of Those People Commonly Called Anabaptists. Throughout that discourse, Kiffen refers to himself and the churches with whom he associated variously as “our Congregations,” “our separated Congregations,” and “gatherings of the Saints together,” but he is never able to settle on a consistent, positive self-​ identifier.31 During the Interregnum, the modifier “baptized” came into more frequent use among baptistic believers, as in a 1659 reference to “the baptized people of Bledlow.”32 But even this term was not widely used during the mid-​seventeenth century and was often employed not in the service of constructive identity formation, but only when political exigencies seemed to demand it, as when “the Baptized Christians in Dublin” sent a corporate “Addresse” to the Lord Protector assuring him of their loyalty.33 Indeed, more often than not, the naming of mid-​ seventeenth century baptistic Christians seemed to be a reactive affair, a complex negotiation driven by the needs and expectations of those outside of their ranks rather than initiated from within. The most obvious example of this was the widespread use of the term “Anabaptist,” a label from which, as we have already noted, baptistic congregationalists vigorously but ineffectually attempted to disassociate themselves. Forever linked in the English imagination to the 1534 Anabaptist uprising in Münster, Germany, the term was regularly invoked by seventeenth-​century polemicists in order to discredit the growing interest in believer’s baptism. Church of England minister Immanuel Knutton could explain, for example, that “such as oppose” infant baptism “doe ill; for they follow those pestilent hereticks called Anabaptists in Germany.”34 Chapter 4 will revisit the popular contemporary association between the rejection of paedobaptism and the events in Münster, but for now, it will suffice to note that when men and women in mid-​seventeenth-​century England referred to themselves as those “commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists” and similar self-​designations, they were evidencing more than simply a desire to correct popular misapprehensions: such awkward constructions indicated the difficulty and confusion with which they were attempting to negotiate their own self-​identity during a period of profound religious and cultural fluctuation. For the Calvinistic “Baptists” to whom I  have affixed the label “baptistic congregationalists,” this

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confusion was especially pronounced because the rejection of paedobaptism did not necessarily entail a new positive sense of “Baptist” identity. Rather, they were simply congregationalists who modified one piece of their existing doctrinal framework and, as a result, were left in a liminal state, straddling the boundary between congregationalism and something else that was, as yet, undefined. One might reply, of course, that in proposing the label “baptistic congregationalist” I am simply substituting one anachronism for another. After all, while the historical actors in question did not refer to themselves as “Particular Baptists,” they certainly did not refer to themselves as “baptistic congregationalists” either. The accusation, however, misses the burden of my reclassification project. I am not arguing, as J. C. D. Clark has done,35 that, in principle, the most desirable terms for historical description are those which the original actors chose for themselves. I am making the far less interesting and far less controversial assertion that our chosen historical labels should not actively mislead, and that we should select labels which clarify rather than confuse. Referring to “Particular Baptists” in the 1640s is not to be avoided simply because the label was not adopted by contemporaries. The label should be avoided chiefly because it is insufficiently sensitive to the self-​identity of those which it purports to describe; it distorts our understanding of the period by retroactively uniting seventeenth-​century adversaries while separating seventeenth-​century friends. If the term “baptistic congregationalist” helps to accurately place a specific group of historical actors, highlighting their ideological distinctions in a way that illumines their relationship to other contemporary religious groups, then the term has served its purpose. But to make that case compelling, it must first be demonstrated that baptistic congregationalists did indeed emerge from the relational matrix of English congregationalism, and to do that, in turn, we must begin with the London minister Henry Jessey.

II When Henry Jessey eventually rejected paedobaptism in June 1645, he did so “notwithstanding many conferences wth his honoured & Beloved Brethren, Mr Nye Mr Tho: Goodwin, Mr Burroughs, Mr Greenhill, Mr Cradock, Mr Carter, &c.”36 When reviewing the incident, one might focus attention on Jessey’s doctrinal shift, but at least as interesting, and certainly—​in light of recent Baptist historiography—​more surprising, is the casual manner in which the chronicler of these events listed the names of Jessey’s theological counsellors. All listed were paedobaptistic congregational ministers, and yet nothing would indicate that anyone involved regarded them as outsiders or representatives of some wholly other theological movement. Instead, their easy availability to Jessey for “many

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conferences,” their description as “honoured & Beloved Brethren,” and the lack of surprise or interest with which the Stinton documents treated their presence in and among the Jessey circle all indicate a web of close relationships among the mainstream congregationalist leaders and those then pioneering a movement of baptistic congregationalists. Perhaps most telling of all was the way in which the independent ministers responded to those questioning paedobaptism: Jessey was advised “[t]‌o count them still of our Church; & pray, & love them.”37 Given that presbyterian contemporaries were quick to pounce on any baptistic leanings as sure evidence of an imminent, second Münster—​“it is apparent that as evill and wicked a Devill does rage in the way of Anabaptism this day in England, as of old in Germany”38—​the irenic tone of these leading independents indicates a strong and surprising sense of familiarity and mutual affection among all involved in the Jessey circle debates. But such familiarity should not surprise us. The baptistic congregationalists emerging from the wider Jessey circle were both theologically and relationally intertwined with the congregationally-​minded “puritan diaspora” then spread across England, the Netherlands, and the New England colonies.39 The lively exchange within this triangulation of dissent eventually produced and perfected the congregational vision that became so important in defining the aim and ethos of baptistic congregationalists. Writing in 1646, the presbyterian critic Robert Baillie described how the “seed” of congregationalism “did grow:” Master [ John] Robinson did derive his way to his separate Congregation at Leyden; a part of them did carry it over to Plymouth in New England; here Master [ John] Cotton did take it up, and transmit it from thence to Master Thomas Goodwin, who did help to propagate it to sundry others in Old-​England first, and after to more in Holland, till now by many hands it is sown thick in divers parts of this Kingdom.40 From its inception in 1616, the London Southwark church founded by Henry Jacob was enmeshed in this interconnected, geographically diffuse puritan context. Jacob himself lived in all three of the primary locations, moving from England to the Netherlands and back again between 1610 and 1616, and then leaving England for Virginia in 1623 where he died a year later.41 While in the Netherlands, Jacob “had converse & discoursed much wth Mr Jn.o Robinson late Pastor to ye Church in Leyden & wth others about them,”42 and Richard Browne, a founding member of Jacob’s church, later served as a ruling elder in George Phillips’ congregation at Watertown, New England.43 Theologically, Jacob’s doctrine leaned heavily on that of William Ames. The two men knew each other in

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the Netherlands and it is likely that Jacob’s London congregation had at least some personal contact with Ames as well.44 Jacob’s successor at Southwark, John Lothropp, together with thirty church members, immigrated to New England in 1634, and evidence suggests that well prior to Lothropp’s departure, relationships were already being fostered between his London church and other congregational churches beyond England’s borders. During these years, Lothropp’s congregation dialogued with future New England clergyman John Davenport about the merits of religious separatism, eventually claiming credit for the latter’s embrace of independency: after exchanging views in print with the Southwark group, Davenport “went away when ye Sacrament day came, and afterward preached, publickly & privately for ye truth.”45 Another telling incident was described by John Cotton in a letter dated October 2, 1630, and addressed to Samuel Skelton, then pastor of the congregational church in Salem. At this time, Cotton was not yet the champion of New England congregationalism he would later become, and was instead ministering to the parish church in Boston, Lincolnshire. In his letter to Skelton, Cotton criticized the leadership of the Salem church for denying the Lord’s Supper to several recent arrivals from England. Despite their good standing within the Church of England, the English émigrés were denied access to the Supper because they were not, in Skelton’s judgment, “member[s]‌of any particular reformed Church.” Worse still, after denying communion to those arriving from the parish churches, Skelton “admitted one of Mr. Lathrop’s congregation not only to the Lord’s Supper, but his child to baptism upon sight of his testimony from his Church.” Cotton was angered by the specific incident, but also by the underlying assessment of England’s ecclesial landscape which the incident implied:  “you think that  .  .  .  none of the congregations in England are Particular Reformed Churches but Mr. Lathrop’s and such as his.”46 Not only was the Salem leadership familiar with the independent congregation in Southwark, they also seemed to confer a legitimacy upon Jacob and Lothropp’s congregation that they denied to the ordinary parish churches. Henry Jessey, who succeeded Lothropp as minister at Southwark in 1638, was even more well-​connected than his predecessors with the wider congregational movement then forming throughout the transatlantic world. Although Jessey never immigrated to New England, he considered such a move prior to accepting the pastoral position in London, and his network of friends extended across both ocean and channel.47 During the period, puritan clergy actively sought to cultivate and sustain ministerial friendships, leaning on these relational networks as their controversial opinions increasingly excluded them from many of the networks within the established church. Although informal, such contacts occurred intentionally as like-​minded clergy deliberately attended one another’s sermons, joined for meals afterward, and then filled the gaps between meetings

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with letters of support and encouragement. Although such contact was complicated by the increasing geographic diffusion of the congregationally minded, ministers separated by vast distances worked to maintain friendships with one another, exchanging letters, prayers, and even the occasional visit.48 In his study of clerical friendships in the English Atlantic, Francis Bremer embeds Jessey within a network of ministerial relationships that grew out of Cambridge University during the first three decades of the seventeenth century. While studying at St. John’s College from 1619 to 1624, Jessey was in close proximity to many of the men who would go on to lead the congregational movement in England and abroad, a group which included four of the five future Dissenting Brethren: Thomas Goodwin (elected a fellow at St Catharine’s College in 1620), Jeremiah Burroughes (BA 1621), Sidrach Simpson (BA 1622), and William Bridge (BA 1623). The fifth member of that group, Philip Nye, befriended Jessey several years later while the latter served as chaplain to the family of Brampton Gurdon in Suffolk.49 Jessey’s inclusion within this clerical coterie explains the casual involvement of these and other congregational ministers within the baptismal debates at Jessey’s church in 1645. Such conferences reflected long-​standing relationships and help us to recognize that a change of one’s doctrinal position on baptism did not necessarily entail a wholesale change of one’s personal alliances and broader ecclesial self-​identity. Indeed, Jessey would maintain friendly relations with congregational allies throughout his life. Writing within a decade of Jessey’s death, his biographer Edward Whiston described him as “a main promoter of, and helper in a meeting of some eminent persons, of the Parochial and Congregational way, who in 1651 assembled frequently.” Such meetings, according to Whiston, were motivated by Jessey’s desire to promote “the furtherance of peace and communion of Brethren that differ not fundamentally . . . about Doctrine or Worship.”50 This pattern of involvement in and identity with the larger congregational movement on both sides of the Atlantic was not limited to Henry Jessey. Although Jessey was the most active connector linking baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists, there is evidence to suggest that the lines of communication and identification went beyond just his personal influence. In 1641, for example, the prominent London baptistic leader William Kiffen helped to publish A Glimpse of Sions Glory, which was originally a sermon preached in the Netherlands by Thomas Goodwin.51 The publisher, William Larner, was also responsible for bringing to print Katherine Chidley’s Justification for the Independent Churches of Christ that same year and Kiffen’s own Certaine Observations upon Hosea the next.52 Although Kiffen’s interest in congregational preaching and polity was well documented in his autobiography, any explanation of when or how he came to

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baptistic convictions was curiously absent from the same. While this omission may have had less to do with an ideological choice on Kiffen’s part and more to do with the political context in which the document was written, it is still striking that the autobiography of arguably London’s most famous “Baptist” contains not a word about baptism but much about its author’s congregational affinities. Kiffen recalls how as a young man he “was much helped by hearing” congregationalist ministers such as Jose Glover and Jeremiah Burroughes, and how he soon “joined [him]self to an Independent congregation, with a resolution, as soon as it pleased God to open a way, to go to New England.”53 Although the proposed transatlantic voyage never materialized, Kiffen’s admiration for those operating outside ordinary parochial boundaries increased to the point where by 1641, he could declare the “great truth” that “Christ hath given this Power to his Church, not to a Hierarchy, neither to a Nationall Presbytery, but to a company of Saints in a Congregationall way.” In addition to thus coining the phrase “Congregational Way,” Kiffen also strongly advocated the adoption of the church polity to which his neologism referred, asserting that the tenets of congregationalism “strike directly at Antichrist” and represent “the one true Way of Jesus Christ.”54 While Kiffen expressed enthusiasm for congregationalism and had voiced a desire to travel to the American colonies, several of the other emerging baptistic congregationalists had seen something of the New England way at first hand. At some point during the 1630s, Thomas Patient (d. 1666), whose name appears just underneath Kiffen’s on the 1644 confession, settled his “judgment to the way of New England in faith and order” and decided to join the “many godly Christians” who were then crossing the Atlantic.55 There, Patient remained until his shifting views on baptism led him to return to England in 1643, where he joined Kiffen’s baptistic congregational church. Hanserd Knollys, who baptized Henry Jessey in 1645 and signed his name to the 1646 revision of the 1644 confession, also lived in New England from 1638 to 1641.56 Another prominent London leader and 1644 signatory, John Spilsbery (1593–​c. 1668), also had connections with New England congregationalism, although these links, as we will see, are somewhat more difficult to identify.57

III The unusual circumstances surrounding the 1643 publication of John Spilsbery’s Treatise concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme helpfully illustrate both the transatlantic scope of baptistic congregationalism and the self-​identity of those involved. Spilsbery led a baptistic church in London as early as 1638. During that year, six members of Henry Jessey’s church “being convinced that Baptism was not for Infants, but professed Believers joyned wth Mr Io: Spilsbery, ye Churches

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favour being desired therein.”58 Both the fact that the six departing members knew to go to Spilsbery’s fellowship and that they sought “ye Churches [i.e., presumably, Jessey’s church] favour” in doing so testify to the friendly relationship between the two London congregations. By 1641, Spilsbery was sufficiently well known so as to merit inclusion in John Taylor’s catalogue of London’s most notorious Sectaries and Schismatiques, the Water Poet duly noting that “one Spilsbury rose up of late, (Who doth, or did dwell over Aldersgate).”59 Thus when he published Treatise concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme in 1643, Spilsbery was already looked to as a leader in the burgeoning movement of baptistic congregationalists. Evidence of Spilsbery’s elevated public profile comes from the preface to the treatise, in which Spilsbery explains the circumstances which led him to publish the work: “The occasion that pressed me on chiefly to this worke was by reason of some godly persons, whose consciences were scrupled about the baptizing of children.” When Spilsbery wrote in 1643 on behalf of those “godly persons, whose consciences were scrupled about the baptizing of children,” he did so in response to a developing situation that predated his own involvement and illustrates several of the themes we have been considering. The case revolved around George Phillips (d. 1644), a Cambridge-​educated clergyman who, since July 1630, had been serving as pastor of the congregational church in Watertown, Massachusetts.60 In 1643, prior to the publication of Spilsbery’s Treatise, George Phillips’s opinions on the doctrines of baptism and the nature of the church were subjected to a published critique by the London soap boiler and Arminian-​influenced baptistic preacher Thomas Lambe.61 Lambe argued that by baptizing infants, Phillips and his paedobaptist allies had hollowed out the church, emptying it of authentic, believing saints and filling it up instead with hypocrites who possessed “the Baptisme of Christ in name but not in deed and in truth.” Baptism was only for believers who could make a credible profession of faith, and baptized infants were “Christians in name but not in deed and truth.”62 Such rhetoric was typical of anti-​paedobaptist polemic, but what makes the Phillips-​Lambe exchange noteworthy for our purposes is the manner in which it came to public view. Anyone reading Lambe’s Confutation of Infants Baptism in 1643 would have assumed that its author was replying to the previously published positions of one George Phillips, an assumption seemingly vindicated by the work’s extended subtitle: “Or an Answer, To a Tretice written by Georg Phillips, of Wattertowne in New England.” In a style typical of the period and genre, lengthy passages from Phillips were reproduced verbatim and replied to immediately thereafter by Lambe, furthering the impression of a standard, public, published dialogue. But, these clues notwithstanding, a reader drawing such inferences would have been mistaken. For upon encountering the book in which

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he played a leading role, an astonished George Phillips claimed that he had never heard of Thomas Lambe, nor had he ever “writ one word to him . . . nor to any other in England about this matter.” “It put me into a kinde of wonderment,” continued Phillips, “to see my name put forth in print, and as Author of a Treatise, who never writ any such Treatise, nor even desired or intended the publication of any Discourse upon that, or any other subject.” Clearly nonplussed, Phillips charged Lambe with having “done contrary to just and Christian dealing, in publishing such a thing . . . and making that common which ought first to have been cleared by private dealing.”63 And yet, Phillips knew that Lambe was not entirely deluded, for he could not deny ownership of the words attributed to him. The confusion stemmed from a visitor Phillips had received in Watertown sometime before the publication of Lambe’s treatise. This visitor, Nathaniel Biscoe, had come from England and presented himself to the Reverend Phillips as a man earnestly looking for answers to various ecclesial questions. Chief among Bisocoe’s concerns was the proper subject of baptism. Phillips “yeelded to his request” and granted the stranger “a private conference about those particulars for further light.” Initially, the exchange seemed to go well:  “in my chamber with him alone, [I]‌agitated those two points, both hearing what he could say, and answering unto every objection he made. . . divers hours wee spent in that discourse.” The end result, however, was not what Phillips had expected. After acceding to his visitor’s request that he “pen down those arguments that had passed betwixt us,” George Phillips heard nothing more from Nathaniel Biscoe. Until, that is, he encountered afresh his own arguments, now transmuted from a private conference into a published theological dialogue with Thomas Lambe, baptistic provocateur.64 This information is known to anyone familiar with the writings of either Phillips or Lambe.65 But what has not been recognized is that the Phillips-​Lambe discussion contained a third conversation partner, namely, John Spilsbery. Published in 1643, the same year as Lambe’s reply to Phillips, Spilsbery’s A Treatise Concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme critiqued paedobaptism on exegetical and theological grounds and interacted with several ancillary issues such as the legitimacy of a baptism administered by a false church. In his opening sentences, as Spilsbery elaborated upon his reason for writing, he described a set of circumstances immediately intriguing to those familiar with the Phillips-​ Lambe material. Spilsbery had received a series of letters “from beyond the Seas” written by “[s]‌ome godly persons whose conscienses were scrupled about the baptizing of children before they came to know what they doe in the same.”66 These unnamed New Englanders sent Spilsbery “Letter after Letter” urging him to reply to “certaine Reasons and Arguments, gathered up against them.” Initially, Spilsbery intended to assist them “onely in a private way,” but after reading some

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of the works then being published on the subject of baptism, Spilsbery changed his mind. The published books that were causing Spilsbery such concern came from disputants on both sides of the controversy. Some, evidently writing against the baptistic position, “published their evill affections in a reproachfull manner; casting such unseemly aspersions upon the truth of God, and godly persons . . . to make the same hatefull in the eyes of all men.” Still others, though, seem to have been publishing in support of baptistic views but in a manner that Spilsbery found unacceptable. These unnamed persons wrote “in resemblance of the truth,” but did so “in such a confused ways, both in respect of corrupt doctrine, and as bad order; by reason of which disorder, the blessedness of God, and his holy truth are exposed unto much suffering.” With the doctrine of baptism being thus mishandled by both foe and would-​be friend alike, Spilsbery felt “bound in conscience to come forth to the helpe of the Lord against the mightie” and “to speake a word in the defence of his blessed truth.”67 Although he did not identify anyone by name, Spilsbery referenced four individuals or groups of individuals in explaining his decision to publish:  the “godly persons” in New England who requested Spilsbery’s help; the originator of the “Reasons and Arguments” against believer’s baptism; those in England casting “unseemly aspersions” against baptistic separatists; and, finally, the baptistic separatists publishing in “a confused way.” The “godly persons” allied with Spilsbery remain unknown to us, as do those publishing against believer’s baptism—​although given the volume of polemic published against “Anabaptists” at this time, it is unnecessary to assume that Spilsbery had any specific treatise in mind. It is now clear, however, that the source of the original anti-​Baptist polemic and the “confused” baptistic author are George Phillips and Thomas Lambe respectively. In addition to general similarities in circumstance, the passages extracted and answered by Spilsbery correspond exactly to those extracted and answered by Thomas Lambe.68 Such correspondence virtually assures the identity of Phillips. And while identifying Lambe as the one publishing in favor of believer’s baptism but in “a confused way” is somewhat less assured, it fits the evidence and comports with known doctrinal divisions among baptistic separatists. In his analysis of Spilsbery’s treatise, Stephen Wright identifies those writing in “a confused way,” not as Thomas Lambe and his allies, but rather as “Baptists” who disagreed with Spilsbery regarding the finer points of church order.69 But Wright was not aware of the connection between Spilsbery’s treatise and the Lambe-​Phillips dialogue and his identification ignores both this fact and the transatlantic context in which Spilsbery set his discourse. Furthermore, the recognition that it was Thomas Lambe whom Spilsbery had in view throughout the treatise cuts against Wright’s overarching argument concerning the self-​identity of baptistic separatists during the early 1640s. As discussed in the previous

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chapter, Wright has argued for a more fluid relationship between Calvinistic and Arminian baptistic groups during this time period, downplaying the significance of soteriological differences, and suggesting instead that, prior to 1644, “the lines of division were defined not by theology but by the proper method by which they should form and order their churches.”70 More specifically, having downplayed the importance of soteriology in drawing lines of religious demarcation, Wright then attempts to draw connections between Lambe and Spilsbery, a move which he acknowledges to be “sharply at variance with the traditional account of Baptist alignments.”71 When Lambe’s role in the Spilsbery-​Phillips-​Lambe discourse is recognized, however, it appears increasingly unlikely that Spilsbery and Lambe would have ever considered disagreements over predestination as somehow secondary to their mutual rejection of paedobaptism. The strongest evidence that Spilsbery understood his Calvinistic convictions to be central to his own religious self-​identity, and hence would never have considered the Arminian-​leaning Thomas Lambe to be an ally, comes from the concluding pages of A Treatise concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme. As his argument against paedobaptism draws to a close, Spilsbery offers a comprehensive summation of his own doctrinal positions in an attempt to distinguish himself from those “that seem to be of my judgment about Baptisme.” Not only are his soteriological views thoroughly Calvinistic—​“God . . . did send his Sonne . . . to satisfie his Fathers justice, for the sinnes of all his elect, and them only”—​but he is uncompromising in his denunciation of anyone who would disagree: As for the absence of original sin, and power in the will to receive and refuse grace and salvation being generally offered by the Gospel, and Christs dying for all persons universally, to take away sinne, that stood between them and salvation, and so laid downe his life a ransome for all without exception, and for such as have been once in Gods love, so as approved of by him in Christ for salvation, and in the covenant of grace, and for such to fall as to be damned eternally, and all of the like nature, I  doe believe is a doctrine from beneath, and not from above, and the teachers of it from Satan, and not from God, and to be rejected as such that oppose Christ and his Gospel.72 Most importantly, Spilsbery’s damning anti-​Arminian comments cited here were published a year before Wright’s crucial year of 1644, indicating that even prior to the publication of the 1644 confession, division between various baptistic groups was, pace Wright, very much predicated upon soteriological rather than ecclesiological differences.

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Although the identification of Thomas Lambe and George Phillips as the two primary foils in Spilsbery’s discourse mitigates against Wright’s central argument that soteriological dispute was relatively unimportant among “Baptists” during the early 1640s, this same insight does provide some support for Wright’s intuition that there were “links between the Lambe and Spilsbury groups.”73 As Spilsbery nowhere mentions George Phillips by name, the latter’s role as Spilsbery’s polemical counterpart in the treatise has not been recognized.74 But Spilsbery’s participation in the Phillips-​Lambe exchange is significant, for it offers a glimpse into otherwise obscure baptistic networks. Somehow, George Phillips’ manuscript opposing believer’s baptism made its way into the hands of both Thomas Lambe and John Spilsbery, a distribution which points to the transatlantic context for the theological conversation taking place among those debating believer’s baptism. The fact that the manuscript crossed between followers of the Arminian-​influenced Lambe and the Calvinist Spilsbery also suggests that at least some baptistically inclined lay people were perhaps more flexible in their associations than were their leaders. Many lay people were more interested in the baptismal question itself than they were in attaching themselves to any specific baptistic leader or church. If correct, this would further illustrate the degree to which the impact of baptistic ideas extended beyond the formal membership rolls of baptistic churches and would help to explain the evidentiary traces which convinced Wright that Spilsbery and Lambe were somehow connected. Given his prominence as a baptistic minister and his likely role in the production of the 1644 confession,75 Spilsbery’s strongly worded rejection of those embracing Arminian doctrine—​even if they also happened to agree with him on the baptismal question—​carries considerable weight in shaping our assessment of baptistic identity during the period. But, as important as his testimony is in this regard, it is also worth noting that it was not only baptistic congregationalists like John Spilsbery who, well prior to 1644, were drawing sharp lines of demarcation on the basis of soteriology. Paedobaptistic congregationalists were making the very same judgments, publicly distinguishing between Calvinistic “Anabaptists” with whom they were, to varying degrees, allied, and Arminian-​influenced “Anabaptists” for whom they harbored no affinity. Prominent London congregationalist Praisegod Barbon, for example, made these distinctions in print as early as 1642. In a treatise published that year on baptism, Barbon described those that “are commonly called, by a Nic-​name put upon them, Anabaptists.” “Some of which,” he continued, “are my loving friends and acquaintance, whom I would not displease, but rather please, whom I envy not, but love.”76 Barbon went on to distinguish between various “Anabaptists” on soteriological grounds, observing that:

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summe, they misse it [i.e. the truth] only in the point of baptisme, &c. whereas others, (as by an Honourable Person was lately observed) erre in points of an higher Nature, as namely in holding Free-​will, falling from Grace, conditionall Election, and denying Originall sinne, opinions accounted as destructive to the truth by the Godly.77 Although Barbon made clear that disagreement about baptism represented “one of the greatest differences in outward religion,” he, at least to some degree, held the sacrament to be still just that, “outward religion.” The soteriological points, by contrast, were nonnegotiable, for any compromise on these points was “accounted as destructive to the truth by the Godly.” In distinguishing between these two sorts of Anabaptists, Barbon illuminated the landscape of baptistic separatism in revolutionary London in at least two important ways. First, his comments cast further doubt on Stephen Wright’s thesis that “Baptists” prior to 1644 were divided over church order rather than soteriology. Not only does Barbon explicitly identify issues pertaining to baptism and church order as second-​tier matters of “outward religion” dwarfed in their significance by first-​tier questions of soteriology, he also makes this distinction the basis upon which he is willing to extend or withhold fellowship. Second, Barbon’s testimony reinforces the point that Jessey’s connections with paedobaptist congregationalists were not isolated outliers, but instead represented a wider relational phenomenon. The “loving friends” who err “only in the point of baptisme” were surely the baptistic congregationalists then associated with Henry Jessey and his circle of churches—​recall that Barbon was one of the congregational counsellors summoned to help Jessey negotiate the debates over believer’s baptism then unsettling his Southwark congregation.78 And yet, the number of Barbon’s “loving friends” cannot include Jessey himself for, as we have already seen, Jessey did not embrace believer’s baptism until June 1645, some three years after Barbon’s treatise. That a prominent congregational minister like Barbon would speak so warmly of other Jessey circle “Anabaptists” suggests that the friendly feeling of paedobaptistic congregationalists toward their baptistic counterparts was not limited to Jessey alone. Indeed, Barbon went on to publish an additional treatise on baptism in 1645, this time in direct reply to Spilsbery’s Treatise on the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme (1643). As in his previous writing, Barbon took care to speak kindly of his baptistic opponent, writing of Spilsbery that “I professe as much respect and tender love to him as to any of that way, and therefore desire that nothing may be misconstrued  .  .  .  where I  intend no hurt.”79 Voiced during a period in which rhetorical opprobrium was routinely directed toward, as one parish minister described them, “the monstrous brood of Anabaptists,”80 Barbon’s irenic remarks make a distinct impression

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and highlight a pronounced sympathy between baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists.81 Further testimony to the way in which ministers during the period processed the diverse expressions of religious dissent comes from a short document written by a “reformed and Presbyterian” minister.82 Although the author’s identity remains unknown,83 he described himself “an Elder into the first Classis, usually meeting at the Black-​Fryers, London” and as one committed to the “Consociation and Subordination of Chuches,” that is, some form of presbyterian government.84 In 1647, he publicly defended his decision to let “a Room in London-​House unto certain peaceable Christians, called Anabaptists.” The minister explained that he felt obligated “to seek and endeavour after Union with Brethren, in Faith,” provided that these “hold the Fundamentals of true Christian Religion.” To that end, when the minister received a request “for the accommodation of Mr Jesse, Mr Kiffen, and others” he decided to let them a room in London “which stood voyd, [and] unimproved,” an action which provoked criticism from his ministerial colleagues “upon the question, Whether or no I did not sin in this action.”85 The document raises at least three points germane to our present purpose. First, it highlights the degree to which Jessey, Kiffen, and their associates were embedded in the wider social networks of puritan London—​these were not wholly marginalized, disconnected outsiders, but had, instead, at least some influential, mainstream allies. Second, the author of the document identifies Jessey, Kiffen and company as “truly godly, (but dissenting in the point of baptizing of Infants, and I suppose in the manner of Church-​Government, and it may be in some others).” Just as Praisegod Barbon had readily distinguished between primary and secondary doctrines—​baptism being placed within the second category—​so too this presbyterian minister was willing to publicly advocate toleration for baptistic separatists “whose judgment and practise are in the main answerable to the Fundamentals of Christian Faith and Practise.” Elsewhere, he uses similar language, contrasting “externals and formalities in religion . . . with the essentials.” Third, the minister who let the room to Jessey and Kiffen identifies their cause as inextricably tied to that of the paedobaptistic London independents, suggesting that in denying toleration to the former, the latter were implicitly denied the same: “As my much Reverend Friends have state the question, their conclusion thereupon falls as foul upon our godly Independent Brethren (agreed by themselves to be tolerated) or any other dissenters, as it doth upon these.” These comments suggest a recognition in the eyes of some presbyterian ministers that otherwise orthodox baptistic separatists were far closer to mainstream congregationalists than they were to other baptistic separatists who had abandoned the regnant Calvinistic consensus and other “Fundamentals of the Faith of Jesus Christ.”86

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IV The controversy over the letting of the room reminds us that while kind words in printed pamphlets evidence a general level of goodwill during the 1640s between baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists, one must also look for ways in which such amicable feeling might have been expressed more concretely. There is some evidence to suggest that the two groups worked together to achieve common aims. Namely, both hoped that the ecclesiastical upheavals being effected by the civil wars would usher in a more generous religious settlement, one in which congregations could operate outside of the national parish structure with at least some level of autonomy. And although political circumstances dictated that the more respectable independents publicly downplay their relationships with baptistic congregationalists, the paedobaptistic London independents still managed to offer tangible—​ although often discrete—​support to their baptistic allies. One significant source of this support came from Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, who benefited baptistic congregationalists by using the information to which they were privy as commissioners to the Westminster Assembly.87 Although direct evidence of communication between the Assembly’s so-​called Dissenting Brethren and their baptistic congregational allies outside of the Jerusalem Chamber remains slight, a careful rereading of events and documentation from 1643 and 1644 sheds new light on the relationship between the two groups and the ways in which they collaborated during the period. Specifically, there is reason to believe that the Dissenting Brethren were feeding inside information on the Assembly’s proceedings to baptistic congregationalists on the outside, and that this information then influenced the baptistic congregationalists’ decision to publish their confession of faith in October 1644. In the months leading up to the confession’s publication, the subject of separatists, and baptistic separatists specifically, had been gaining attention among the divines then assembled at Westminster. On August 9, 1644, presbyterian minister Stephen Marshall took the assembly floor to address the increasingly problematic activity of London “Anabaptists”: “we find them to be many and very high & extremely dangerous.” He warned his fellow divines that if there were not “some stop to it we are afraid it will prove soe great a mischefe as none of us shall be able to stand before it.” Marshall identified several Anabaptists as especially troublesome, “particularly one Mr. Knowles, an active man.”88 The man here identified was the baptistic congregationalist Hanserd Knollys, and, in light of recent events, it was not at all surprising that he would have been the object of Marshall’s particular concern.

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Knollys, of course, as we have already examined in some detail, was involved earlier that year in the private conferences with Henry Jessey on the subject of baptism. The conferences began in March 1644, and Knollys not only critiqued paedobaptism, but also persuaded Jessey to join him in rejecting the doctrine. Even more worrisome from Stephen Marshall’s perspective was the fact that these dangerous conferences, as we have seen, involved many of the same leading London independent ministers who now served alongside Marshall in the Westminster Assembly. Additionally, we will recall that Goodwin, Nye, Simpson, and Burroughes responded to Knollys’s retreat from orthodoxy in disturbingly irenic fashion, the independent ministers recommending “not to Excom[m]‌unicate, no, nor admonish” those abandoning paedobaptism, but instead “to count them still of our Church; & pray, & love them.”89 If word of this affair had reached Marshall, then his deliberate mention of Knollys’s heightened “activity” in the presence of the so-​called Dissenting Brethren takes on a new and more threatening shade of meaning. But, whatever messages Marshall may or may not have intended to subtly convey to other assembly members, his warning about the danger of Anabaptist activity was clear and direct. That same day, the assembly implored both houses of Parliament “to prevent the spreading Opinions of Anabaptism and Antinomianism” for “those Men have cast off all Affection, and are so imbitterated, that it is high time to suppress them.”90 Over the ensuing month, the assembly prepared a document offering parliamentary leaders “humble Advise  .  .  .  for preventing the mischiefes that will arise from, & follow upon the divulging the dangerous opinions of Antinomianisme & Anabaptisme.” On September 5, 1644, the day when the report was to be submitted, Phillip Nye requested that he and his congregationally minded colleagues be allowed to append to the report their disagreement with the assembly’s conclusions, a request which prompted London minister Lazarus Seaman to demand that Nye “declare in whose name he speaks.” “I desire to be spared in this,” Nye replied, adding that there is “noe order to compel me to it.” Seaman’s seemingly odd request and Nye’s terse refusal hinted at the growing tension between the main body of presbyterians and Nye’s congregationally-​inclined minority. Indeed, John Lightfoot recalled that the exchange prompted a “large and hot debate,” with the assembly ultimately refusing to allow Nye and company to append their reservations. The report was instead submitted immediately to the “Honourable Committee of Plundered Ministers” without emendation.91 This report—​and Nye’s concern about its content—​sheds new light on the activity of baptistic congregationalists during this period and especially the decision of the seven London churches to publish a formal confessional statement. The Assembly’s report contained seven recommendations as to how the state might

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best stifle the spread of baptistic ideas. And while much of the advice was predictable and straightforward—​“ That no man be permitted to preach or publickly expound the Scriptures, who is not ordained a Minister”—​the document’s fourth recommendation becomes intriguing in light of the baptistic congregationalists’ subsequent activity: That all Ministers who teach or divulge, Baptizing of Infants to be unlawfull . . . bee commanded to bring in the grounds & reasons of their opinions in a brief & compendious manner in writing under their hands unto the Assembly, or such as the Honourable Houses of Parliament shall appoint to be examined according to the Word of God:  & in the meane time be commanded to forbear all teaching, printing, or otherwise divulging of them.92 On October 16, 1644, little more than a month after the Assembly decided upon these words, the London book collector George Thomason purchased a pamphlet entitled “The Confession of Faith, of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists.”93 With the publication of this document, baptistic congregationalists in London were attempting to engage with the Assembly on its own terms, and to participate, however ineffectually, in the ecclesiastical life of the nation. For their confession of faith indeed brought together “the grounds & reasons of their opinions in a brief & compendious manner in writing under their hands;” to this last provision, the confession was endorsed by fifteen signatories—​all lay people—​including John Spilsbery whose earlier transatlantic disputation on baptism we have already examined. The advice given in provision four by the Westminster divines was clearly meant for ordained ministers in the national church—​they were certainly not intending to legitimize wild-​ eyed sectaries through an open call for dialogue. And yet, by submitting their own confession of faith for public evaluation, the seven London churches were declaring that their congregations and ministers were as valid as those established and ordained by the national church. Several lines of evidence lend support to the suggestion that the baptistic congregationalists composed and published their confession in direct response to the Assembly’s request that baptistically inclined ministers clarify their beliefs in writing. The first step must be to establish that those composing the baptistic confession could have had access to the Assembly’s report. Although the report was submitted by the divines to the Committee for Plundered Ministers on September 5, 1644, the House of Commons did not formally take up the matter until November 12 that same year, well after the new confession was published.94 This does not, however, eliminate the possibility that members

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of the seven baptistic churches might have received early word directly from ministers present at the Assembly, the obvious candidates being Stephen Nye, Thomas Goodwin, Sidrach Simpson, and Jeremiah Burroughes. As we have seen throughout the present chapter, the Dissenting Brethren were linked to the baptistic congregationalists, most directly through the aforementioned private conferences, but also through the wider social networks in which Henry Jessey and his baptistic associates were involved. The London Baptist leader William Kiffen, for one, was both actively involved in the conferences and a signatory of the 1644 confession. Another of the conference participants, Hanserd Knollys, did not sign the 1644 confession but did sign its 1646 revision.95 Furthermore, the ecclesiology presented in the 1644 confession was strikingly similar in key respects to that advanced earlier that year by the Dissenting Brethren’s own “Apollogetical Narration.” Both documents sketched an ecclesiastical structure in which individual congregations were vested with autonomous authority while also encouraged to work in close cooperation with one another—​to borrow contemporary language, both documents called for a consociation of churches, without the subordination of churches.96 If, as Ethan Shagan has argued, “Kiffen and his particular baptist allies were close associates of the apologists and they saw their movement as a natural successor to independency,” then it becomes more plausible to suggest that Nye and company were leaking information to their baptistic associates concerning the Assembly’s intentions and perhaps even encouraging them to act accordingly.97 Indeed, on the very same day that Nye found his personal affiliations openly questioned after he objected to the harder line then being adopted against “Anabaptists,” the assembly closed the session by resolving not to allow the Dissenting Brethren extra time to append their objections “because of the great scandal to this Assembly by coppyes that goe from hand to hand of the Advise of this Assembly, which doe misreport the mind of the Assembly.”98 Someone inside the chamber was slipping notes from the proceedings to theological opponents on the outside, and the overt hostility and suspicion directed that morning toward Nye and his congregational colleagues marks them out as the most likely suspects. In addition to the relationship between baptistic congregationalists and the Dissenting Brethren, we find three further clues within the text of the 1644 confession itself that would support a connection between the document’s publication, and the Assembly’s previous instructions that all those advancing baptistic opinions explain themselves in writing. First, the timing is plausible. If we assume that Nye and others leaked the information to their baptistic associates on or soon after September 5, this would allow the 1644 signatories just over one month to compose and publish their confession of faith. Given that the confession’s wording draws heavily upon already extant materials,99 this period of time is long

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enough to allow the production of such a document, yet short enough to reasonably infer a connection between the two events. Second, the wording of the confession’s title-​page echoes the language of the Assembly’s pronouncement. The divines requested written explanations from heterodox teachers so that their ideas might be “examined according to the Word of God” and the baptistic congregationalists responded with a confession “[p]‌resented to the view of all that feare God, to examine by the touchstone of the Word of Truth.”100 Third, the confession’s prefatory epistle elaborates upon its authors’ intentions with reference to “those that thinke themselves much wronged, if they be not looked upon as the chiefe Worthies of the Church of God, and Watchmen of the Citie.” The nod toward the perceived hubris of ecclesiastical authorities who would take as their exclusive prerogative the duty to “reform the Reformation it self ” leads one to suspect that the 1644 signatories wrote deliberately with the Westminster Assembly of Divines in view.101 If correct, this reconstruction of events leading up to the publication of the 1644 confession would be significant for at least three reasons. First, it would further our understanding of why the seven London churches formally united when they did. Many have speculated that the timing of the confession’s publication was influenced by the Assembly’s growing hostility toward separatists, and the argument presented above would confirm and clarify these suspicions.102 Second, the story presented here offers a window into the changing nature of religious authority in early modern England, for here we find a group of lay-​theologians attempting to engage the clergy sitting at Westminster in a manner that the latter could have conceivably found respectable and worthy. All of the initial fifteen signatories on the 1644 confession were laymen—​all lacked formal theological training. And yet, here is a clear example of such lay theologians working alongside and against ordained ministers to contribute their ideas to the nation’s ongoing quest for religious settlement, a scenario unthinkable just a decade earlier. Third and most important for our present purpose, the preceding narrative evidences close cooperation between baptistic congregationalists and their paedobaptistic counterparts, drawing the two groups far closer together than has previously been supposed. If the Dissenting Brethren were indeed feeding useful information to the baptistic congregationalists then this would indicate two groups who saw themselves as sharing at least something of a common purpose, and would cut against a long-​standing historiographical tendency to distance “Baptists” from the mainstream of religious life, classifying them instead among England’s “religious radicals.”103 This chapter’s central contention has been that the “Particular Baptists” and the “Independents” represented two distinct strands of a common congregational tradition and ought to be classified as such. During the mid-​seventeenth

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century, the difference between them was not a difference between “Baptists” and congregationalists, but rather a difference between congregationalists of different kinds, congregationalists with different understandings of baptism. In making this case, we have examined their interconnected relational networks, beginning with Henry Jessey and radiating outward to encompass the seven London churches whose 1644 confession marked the start of something approaching a distinct denominational identity. Additionally, we have considered the importance of soteriology rather than sacramentology as a theological boundary marker, and the willingness of many mainstream congregational and even presbyterian puritans to regard baptismal differences as secondary matters about which unanimity was not a prerequisite for at least certain kinds of fellowship. More provocatively, we examined evidence suggesting that congregational ministers were actively cooperating with baptistic congregationalists to advance their common cause of greater religious toleration. In one sense, these observations significantly recalibrate the historiographical lens:  comments on “Baptists” as a coherent entity are a mainstay of historical writing on the period, a commonplace that this chapter rejects. Yet, in another sense, to recognize that English men and women abandoning paedobaptism did not thereby morph immediately into a fully-​ formed “Baptist” denomination accords with the virtually uncontested notion that religion in revolutionary England was contingent, provisional, and very much in flux. On that view, then, this chapter simply gives robust shape and form to a widely held but often only foggily conceived historical intuition. The so-​ called Particular Baptists of mid-​seventeenth century England were no such thing. They were practitioners of the congregational way who modified their views on baptism without thereby wholly deconstructing the wider theological framework and relational networks that had previously defined them. We would do well to adopt language that reflects and communicates this reality, rather than obscures it. But, in all of this, we have not yet directly addressed what is perhaps the most obvious—​yet most often ignored—​historical puzzle when considering baptistic self-​identity in seventeenth-​century England, a puzzle which we will consider in the next chapter: why did baptistic congregationalists abandon paedobaptism in the first place?

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“Between Us and the Compleat Anabaptists” Reframing Sacramentology in Light of Ecclesiology

During the winter of 1641, “an extreame cold, and frosty time,” Thomas Wynell was uneasy. Wynell, an Oxford-​trained rector then serving the Cranham parish church near Gloucester, had heard a disquieting report about “Anabaptists” in his area creeping out at night to rebaptize “diverse men and women” in the River Severn. As he made inquiries, Wynell’s discontent grew: “I found the face of things much altered, and many strangely leaning to the heresie of the Anabaptists.”1 Although he judged this heresy to be a “wickedness so heinous, so horrible, so full of impiety and hellish cruelty” that he was left without “words to expresse it,” Wynell nonetheless endeavored to refute the baptistic position through a series of sermons delivered at his parish church. In September 1642, he assembled “the summe” of these sermons into a book published under the title, The Covenants Plea for Infants.2 In many respects, the resultant treatise was unremarkable—​ the author expounds the relevant passages of scripture, provides reasons in support of his position, and defends it against objections. But despite the predictable structure, Wynell’s book does surprise the modern reader on at least one critical point: in passing, he comments on the relationship between baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists, drawing attention to the underlying and underexplored theological commitments that united them both. Toward the beginning of his treatise, Wynell draws a distinction between two groups which he labels “Semi-​ Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists”:

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The point between us and the compleat Anabaptists is simply concerning paedo-​baptisme. If my controversy lay with the Semi-​Anabaptists, I would lay my proposition in other termes, but the compleat Anabaptist doth hold, that no child in infancy is baptizable, let his parents be never so holy, and let the administration be never so pure.3 When the author describes “compleat Anabaptists” as those for whom “no child in infancy is baptizable,” he clearly envisions those whom later historians have simply labeled “Baptists.” As for the identity of his “semi-​Anabaptists,” the added qualifying clause, “let his parents be never so holy, and let the administration be never so pure,” reveals them to be congregationalists or independents for whom the salient issue was not the rejection of paedobaptism tout court, but rather the desire to limit the sacrament’s application to the children of parents who were genuine believers or “visible saints.” Here, then, is a striking and significant rhetorical conjunction of baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists. For by employing these terms, Wynell was not merely identifying relational links between the two groups—​although, as the preceding chapter has labored to demonstrate, those links were real and it would not have been surprising had Wynell noticed them. More importantly for the purposes of the present chapter, Wynell was using the labels “Semi-​Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists” to draw a line of logical continuity from the one to the other, suggesting that baptistic conclusions flowed naturally from congregationalist premises and that the roots of actual baptistic practice were sunk deep within the soil of congregational principle. The logical relationship between the theology of the “semi-​Anabaptists” and their “compleat” counterparts did not go unnoticed in Wynell’s day, nor has it entirely escaped the attention of modern historians. For example, while discussing the Half-​Way Covenant crisis among mid-​seventeenth-​century New England congregationalists, Edmund Morgan recognizes that the rejection of paedobaptism represented one possible solution to the practical problems flowing from congregational polity.4 But while scholars like Morgan have recognized these connections, their intuitions have not been sufficiently developed, limited often to passing comments and never fully explored or documented. The present chapter will clarify the logical relationship between Wynell’s “semi” and “compleat Anabaptists” by demonstrating that congregationalists who rejected paedobaptism did so because of, rather than in spite of, their underlying commitment to congregational ecclesiology. If the argument can be maintained, it will not only further illumine the ecclesiological landscape of revolutionary England, but also help explain why baptistic congregationalists abandoned paedobaptism

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when they did, a deceptively simple question which has been too infrequently asked and never sufficiently answered.

I Arguably, the most surprising aspect of mid-​ seventeenth-​ century baptistic congregationalists is that they came to exist at all. The individuals within Henry Jessey’s circle were not fanatical religious zealots. Apart from their embrace of believer’s baptism, there is nothing to suggest that they were eager to abandon a rather ordinary sort of puritan divinity. Rather, as the previous chapter has established, these men and women were practitioners of the Congregational Way—​ well integrated within congregational social networks and reliably Calvinistic in their theological orientation. But this essential orthodoxy and relatively conservative temperament seems at odds with their radical departure from the Christian tradition’s near universal consensus on the appropriateness of infant baptism. That infants were fit subjects for the sacrament was one of the few points upon which all of Christendom could agree. And yet, it is precisely here where baptistic congregationalists in Henry Jessey’s circle chose to part ways with catholicity and chart a new course. Why this departure occurred during the late 1630s and early 1640s, and not before, is a question about which the source materials have been regarded as largely silent. This, in turn, has led historians to gloss over the initial movement from paedobaptism to believer’s baptism with a commensurate silence of their own. B. R. White, for example, notes the paucity of documentary evidence which might explain Samuel Eaton’s defection from Henry Jessey’s congregation, and concludes that, whatever the logic behind the theological shift, “by 1638 it is quite plain that Eaton then believed that baptism should only be administered to those able to profess their own faith.”5 White’s narrative then unfolds on the assumption that baptisically inclined individuals existed among the Jessey circle without further consideration of why they came to exist in the first place. Stephen Wright makes a similar move when he discusses growth among early baptistic groups but curiously elides the more basic questions of motive and timing: “Both within Jessey’s church, and amongst his rigorist former members, some began to question the validity of infant baptism.”6 Like White before him, Wright’s story then proceeds apace without discussing what might have prompted many within Jessey’s circle to question the validity of infant baptism. Elsewhere, Wright—​a scholar obsessively concerned with detail in other areas—​dismisses such an enquiry as the pursuit of an “impenetrable question.”7 Even Murray Tolmie, whose account of early baptistic separatists shows far more theological sensitivity than many, skips lightly over whatever theological concerns might have driven the

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move away from paedobaptism: “believer’s baptism exercised a potent appeal and as a result was adopted spontaneously . . . among radical groups already inclined to separatism or to the limitation of church membership to visible saints.”8 Tolmie gestures toward the answer when he connects believer’s baptism with “the limitation of church membership to visible saints,” and, yet, it remains unclear what precise confluence of historical factors led to a doctrinal shift that contemporaries nearly unanimously regarded as a dangerous departure from received orthodoxy. Historians’ sensitivity to the issue has surely been dulled by their pervasive conflation of all baptistic individuals under the unhelpful label “Baptist.” By uncritically adopting the inherited label, one also adopts unawares an implicit mental framework which then misshapes subsequent reflection. As a result, we are not as startled as we ought to be when we read that a highly influential, well respected, Cambridge-​educated, congregational minister like Henry Jessey rejected paedobaptism and was baptized again by immersion in 1645. For if one’s early modern rubric already includes a prima facie category called “Baptist” into which one may happily slot any and all who questioned paedobaptism, then one will hardly be surprised by baptistic views when one finds them in the primary sources. This is because the uncritical assumption of a pan-​“Baptist” movement with pan-​“Baptist” principles obscures the contingency of the events which led members of the Jessey circle to embrace a baptistic position. The “Baptist” label suggests that believer’s baptism represented an intellectually viable option for English Christians, and that members of the Jessey circle were simply following paths well-​trod by previous generations of “Baptists” before them. But if this narrative is false, if the Jessey circle separatists had no relational or theological continuity with the scattered English anti-​paedobaptists who had arisen from John Smyth onward, and if the Southwark congregationalists had no baptistic precedent within their own puritan theological tradition, then we must immediately re-​examine with renewed skepticism why these men and women abandoned paedobaptism at all and why the movement gathered momentum during the early 1640s and not before. It is significant that the theological current seems to have almost always carried congregationalists, rather than presbyterians, into baptistic churches. This one-​way movement provides a clue as to the growing appeal of believer’s baptism during the late 1630s:  to understand the explosion of baptistic enthusiasm, we must understand it in the context of a wider ecclesiological discussion about the nature of the Christian church. This wider discussion was taking place among the congregationally minded on both sides of the Atlantic, and it involved a cluster of interrelated questions—​questions about the propriety of a national church, about the continuity between Old and New Testaments, about the practice of church discipline, and about the nature of the organized visible church.9 This

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broader conversation preceded, both chronologically and logically, the movement away from paedobaptism and therefore provides a key interpretive context in which that movement must be understood. If one considers believer’s baptism apart from the context of larger ecclesial considerations and treats the question of whom to baptize as an isolated, discrete controversy, the importance of baptism per se becomes exaggerated, an exaggeration which then in turn reinforces the anachronistic sense of an early pan-​Baptist identity. When this approach is taken, rejection of paedobaptism is often understood to have resulted exclusively from a sort of naked biblicism:  because the New Testament does not explicitly command the baptism of infants, the practice should be abandoned. Consider how Philip Gura explains the growing appeal of believer’s baptism: Put most simply, the Baptists asked their critics to accept what they found an unalterable fact:  infant baptism had no scriptural warrant. Because they found no express Biblical injunction for paedobaptism, Baptists insisted that the ordinance was reserved for adults who wished to affirm their membership in the reformed church.10 Murray Tolmie analyzes the situation in similar terms: Sharing fully in the bibliolatry of puritanism, the Baptists argued that believer’s baptism was the only baptism for which there was an express command from Christ in the New Testament . . . They demanded of the defenders of infant baptism an express warrant in the New Testament for the baptism of children or a single explicit example to show that infant baptism was practiced by the primitive Christian communities. . . . The Baptist demand for an express warrant or an explicit example was not met to their satisfaction, and their contention that believer’s baptism alone was justified by “God’s naked truth” won adherents even outside organized Baptist churches.11 Viewed from one perspective, everything that Gura and Tolmie have stated in the preceding passages is absolutely correct: pointing to the lack of explicit New Testament warrant for paedobaptism was perhaps the most potent rhetorical strategy available to baptistic polemicists and was routinely proffered as decisive confirmation of the baptistic position. John Spilsbery, for example, made very clear that “there is neither command nor example for the baptizing of infants in all the new Testament” and similar appeals to New Testament silence can be found in virtually every piece of anti-​paedobaptist writing.12 But while one cannot gainsay

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the assertion that baptistic apologists led early and often with such appeals, this analysis is incomplete. For to suggest that movement away from paedobaptism flowed unambiguously out of a crude biblicism, or “bibliolatry” as Tolmie put it, oversimplifies the internal logic of the baptistic position, particularly as it developed among Calvinistic congregationalists. Moreover, if we explain the rejection of paedobaptism solely or even primarily in terms of biblicism, we have no way of explaining why the shift began to occur only during the late 1630s. Unless one can first connect the logic of believer’s baptism to specific historical developments during the period, one cannot explain why this supposedly simple, back-​to-​the-​ Bible reasoning did not exert its force far sooner, particularly among English men and women long-​animated by the spirit of William Chillingworth’s 1638 declaration that “the Bible only . . . is the Religion of Protestants.”13 To reach a more satisfying explanation for why so many otherwise orthodox congregationalists during this period began to abandon paedobaptism, we must avoid the temptation to isolate the baptismal question from the contiguous questions that contemporaries were also debating. “Change in Christian thought,” observes Edmund Morgan, “has usually been a matter of emphasis, of giving certain ideas a greater weight than was previously accorded them or of carrying one idea to its logical conclusion at the expense of another.”14 New religious innovations, then, do not spontaneously appear, but instead emerge organically as already existing ideas are modified and long-​held notions are creatively rearranged. Applying this insight to the question of baptism, we must attend to the theological debates taking place at this time among congregationally minded puritans. For there we discover intense interest in a series of interlocking ideas which pertained to the nature and structure of the visible church, that is, the church as it appears outwardly and is embodied in actual structures filled with actual worshippers. Although such questions might initially appear far removed from debates about sacramentology, the logical proximity of these domains becomes evident when one considers baptism as an outward sign of entry into and inclusion within this visible church. God’s covenant people were to be outwardly and visibly marked out as such by their having received water baptism in the Triune name (Matt. 28:18–​20), making baptism “a Christians formall matriculation or inrollment amongst the members of the visible church.”15 The baptism debate was, therefore, only superficially about baptism itself. At a more basic level, it was, as William McLoughlin has recognized, about the composition of God’s covenant people: The prooftext argument concerning whether infant baptism could be derived from Scripture was fundamentally an argument about the nature of

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the church—​how it was to be instituted, constituted, and maintained in its purity. The nature of the covenant of God with his people was therefore more central to the quarrel than the specific ordinance of baptism.16 As congregationally minded ministers and lay people debated and gradually rearranged their received notions about the nature of the church, they produced an intellectual environment in which many otherwise orthodox individuals could, for the first time, find the rejection of paedobaptism not only conceptually possible but logically necessary. This is not to deny the likelihood that many people during the period were only interested in “the prooftext argument,” and as baptistic congregationalists gained momentum, the appeal to New Testament silence would have often proved compelling even in isolation from its ecclesiological buttresses. But, the fact remains that the simple baptistic argument from silence—​an argument amounting to little more than an observation—​failed to gain any traction within the mainstream of puritan England until the late 1630s. Any reconstruction of baptistic beginnings must thus explain why believer’s baptism suddenly became plausible among at least a segment of this same, otherwise orthodox puritan milieu. The contention of this chapter is that the solution to the puzzle lies within the logic of congregationalism itself.

II All of the early baptistic congregationalists, without exception, were once paedobaptists. They would have been baptized in infancy themselves, and, presumably, for a time, would have defended the practice as consistent with the testimony of scripture and the tradition of the church. These observations, although not especially interesting in and of themselves, are important because they remind us that the emergence of baptistic congregationalists was a thoroughly contingent event. Despite the sense of inevitability often conferred by later historians, baptistic congregationalists need not have existed at all. And when they did appear, their genesis was historically situated and predicated upon the prior dissolution of a doctrinal platform to which they had long been committed. Thus, to understand them, one must first understand why their long-​standing theological framework finally collapsed. And to understand, in turn, the collapse of their paedobaptistic conviction, one must first appreciate the logic by which it was traditionally upheld. This task, however, is not as straightforward as one might initially suppose. This is because Protestant Christianity generally, and Reformed Protestantism especially, overturned the clear and powerful rationale for paedobaptism which had sustained previous generations of Christians. Namely, the sixteenth-​century

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reformers rejected the Augustinian teaching that baptism effectively removed the guilt of original sin, and they replaced it with a justification for infant baptism that was, if not less convincing, certainly less straightforward.17 During the Reformation, Protestant sacramental logic migrated away from the objective, ex opere operato certainty of medieval scholasticism and instead came to view the sacraments as signs and seals through which divine promises were communicated and the faith of believers strengthened. Thus, baptism could no longer “constitute the magical, physical ‘elimination’ of one little parcel of sin, so much as the sign of its being no longer ‘imputed.’ ”18 John Calvin defined baptism as a “sign of the initiation by which we are received into the society of the church, in order that, engrafted in Christ, we may be reckoned among God’s children.”19 The reformers could still use lofty language to communicate the power and potency of baptism—​Martin Bucer’s 1530 Tetrapolitan Confession, for example, described the sacrament as “the washing of regeneration, that . . . washes away sins and saves us”20—​but such exalted descriptions were still almost always intended to fall short of the objectivity and inherent generative power that characterized the pre-​Reformation doctrine.21 But if baptism was removed from the objective sacramental structure of Roman Catholicism and was no longer believed to contain within itself the power to reliably effect the state of saving grace which it symbolized, then why, exactly, did Protestants continue to administer baptism to infants? The reformation defence of paedobaptism assumed various forms, but, for our present purpose, its most important iteration explained the logic of infant baptism through an appeal to circumcision in ancient Israel.22 Luther suggested this idea as early as January 1522, explaining in a letter to Philip Melanchthon that “circumcision had the same power as baptism” and that the arguments against paedobaptism were clearly false for “[o]‌n the basis of that same sophistry, they could also take away circumcision.”23 It would ultimately, though, be the Reformed rather than Lutheran theologians who would most eagerly seize upon and develop the analogy between circumcision in the Old Testament and baptism in the New.24 Calvin argued that “before baptism was instituted God’s people had circumcision instead” and so “whatever belongs to circumcision pertains likewise to baptism.”25 Of particular importance to Reformed theologians was the covenantal context in which circumcision was prescribed. The rite of circumcision given to Abraham in Genesis 17 visibly and physically marked those who were in covenantal relationship with God, distinguishing them from all those who were not within what Reformed divines would describe as God’s “covenant of grace.” And although the coming of the New Testament changed some of the outward forms, it did not essentially abrogate this covenantal community but rather extended it to include gentiles. “Seeing that the Lord,” wrote Calvin, “immediately after

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making the covenant with Abraham, commanded it to be sealed in infants by an outward sacrament, what excuse will Christians give for not testifying and sealing it in their children today?”26 Likewise, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), affirmed that infants “as well as their parents” were “included in the covenant and belong to the people of God.” Through baptism, infants were “to be incorporated into the Christian church and distinguished from the children of unbelievers.”27 Thus the Reformed basis for infant baptism was less about soteriology and more about ecclesiology; it was a marker of one’s covenantal and ecclesiastical inclusion in this world, not necessarily a confirmation that the one baptized would enjoy salvation in the world to come. Theological doctrines, however, are, at least in theory, meant to form coherent, interlocking systems, and when one piece moves, others will be affected. When the reformers retained the doctrine of infant baptism while altering the doctrinal basis upon which it had previously rested, the shift gave greater prominence to the long-​standing Augustinian idea that the visible New Testament church was an inherently mixed body, that is, one in which true believers worshiped alongside those whose outward profession lacked any corresponding inward spiritual transformation. “In this church,” explained Calvin, “are mingled many hypocrites who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance.”28 Such was the inevitable result of combining a comprehensive, indiscriminate application of baptism with a Reformed predestinarian theology in which God saved from “perdition those whom he . . . has elected and chosen in Jesus Christ . . . without any consideration of their works” while “leaving the others in their ruin and fall.”29 The reformers’ strong doctrine of unconditional election brought the distinction between the sheep and the goats into sharper relief and highlighted the reality that many who outwardly participated in the institutional church would never experience the salvific, inward regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Reformed theologians’ commitment to unconditional election implied that some proportion of those brought into the church through baptism would not, in fact, be numbered among God’s elect.30 As a result, great emphasis was laid upon the mixed character of the church, and the fact that baptized infants were legitimate members of the covenantal community even prior to the emergence of Holy Spirit-​wrought faith. Once joined to the covenant community through water baptism, the hope and expectation was that baptized children would grow in the nurture of the church and one day give evidence of saving grace. But the Reformed reappraisal of baptismal efficacy detached the application of the sacrament from the actualization of that faith toward which it was to point. As a group of Reformed divines at the University of Leiden summarized in 1625, the “efficacy of baptism” was not necessarily “tie[d]‌to the moment at which the body is wet with outward water” but rather at the moment when real “faith and repentance”

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was brought forward. “As seed cast upon the ground does not always germinate at the same moment, but when rain and warmth supervene from heaven,” they continued, “so neither word nor sign of sacrament is always effectual at its first moment, but only at the time when the blessing of the H[oly] Spirit is added.”31 But, of course, if, for some, such blessing never came, the nature of the covenant community as fundamentally mixed ensured that these unregenerate church members could still be happily regarded as genuine Christians in an external, federal sense. By the mid-​seventeenth century, these interrelated Reformation notions had become commonplace for many English Protestants. Infant baptism was understood as a sign of covenantal inclusion corresponding to Old Testament circumcision, and the covenantal community was understood as an inherently mixed body in which the “wheat and the tares” grew up alongside one another (Matt. 13:30). As puritan divines wrestled with the implications of these ideas,32 they further developed this sharp sense of distinction between those who were members of the covenant “internally” and those whose membership was only “external.” One of the distinction’s most complete and clear elucidations can be found in the puritan clergyman John Ball’s (1585–​1640) posthumously published Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (1645).33 Ball explained that “[e]‌xternally this Covenant is made with every member of the Church, even with the Parents and their children.” But within this comprehensive “external covenant” another, necessarily smaller group was included “savingly, effectually, and in speciall manner.” These were the people of God “internally and in truth.” As Ball summarized: . . . for either the Covenant is made extrinsecally, God by some sensible token [i.e. baptism and the Lord’s Supper] gathering the people and the people embracing the condition in the same manner, and so an externall consociation of God and the people is made: or the Covenant is entered after an invisible manner, by the intervention of the Spirit, and that with so great efficacy, that the condition of the Covenant is received after an invisible manner, and so an internall consociation of God and the people is made up.34 And although only those called into covenant internally would ultimately be saved, even external membership was a great privilege, for “we see by experience, that many thousands are excluded from the externall Covenant.”35 Conceptually then, the visible church was divided into two tiers, for “all are not in Covenant after one manner, nor doe all that be in Covenant, equally partake of the same blessings.” Those “that be outwardly in Covenant partake the outward and basest part of the Covenant,” while “they that be truly in Covenant obtaine the

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highest.”36 But, either way, whether comprehended externally or internally, Ball and his contemporaries could count all baptized persons within the nation as legitimate members of the covenant community; all were, at least in an external sense, genuine Christians to whom one could preach and minister without having to worry about who was actually “regenerate” and who was not. Such a distinction merged seamlessly with England’s comprehensive national church in which civic identity and ecclesiastical identity were one and the same. English ministers did not believe that everyone born into the nation was, in fact, a true believer inwardly, but the lack of inward regeneration did nothing to undermine a person’s legitimate claim to be a true, baptized Christian outwardly or federally.37 Under such conditions, the near universal baptism of infants was a natural corollary, as the composition of the church was coterminous with that of the state: Christian parents raised Christian children, all of whom composed a Christian nation.38 Under the guidelines given in the Directory for Publique Worship—​which replaced the Book of Common Prayer in 1645—​parents bringing children forward for baptism were told that babies born to Christian parents “are Christians, and federally holy before Baptism, and therefore are they Baptized.”39 Infant baptism was thus a powerful mechanism through which the sense of a unified Christendom was established and sustained. “Baptism,” as David Cressy explains, “was a social activity as well as a sacrament of the church.”40 And although she uses Calvin’s Geneva as a case study, Karen Spierling could easily be describing post-​Reformation England when she observes that infant baptism effectively reinforced communal consciousness both by officially marking the child as a member of the community and by committing “all the participants in the baptismal ceremony to overseeing, to various degrees, the faithful upbringing and religious education of the baptised child.”41 The comprehensive national church thus complemented a Reformed doctrine of infant baptism, and that same doctrine of infant baptism supported, in turn, the very idea of a national church. Simultaneously reinforcing both of these themes was England’s well-​ documented sense of itself as something of a second Israel, a chosen nation in covenant with God.42 Thomas Blake, for example, argued that since England was assuredly a “Christian Nation” he and his fellow ministers must ‘take order for more carefull catechisticall teaching of youth in the wayes of Christian Religion, that God may not complaine of England as of Israel, My people perish for want of knowledge.”43 Likewise, parish minister Immanuel Knutton could readily affirm that the Church of England was “as true a national church as the Jewish Church was.”44 In addition to supplying the basic analogue upon which Protestant justifications for infant baptism were based, ancient Israel modeled a theocratic state in which civil and ecclesial boundaries were coextensive. Among puritans and others concerned with the direction of the nation’s ecclesiastical life,

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the Old Testament travails of God’s people provided a compelling exemplar of how a “godly remnant” might form an ecclesiola in ecclesia and persevere amidst a national church filled with idolaters and hypocrites. As they strove for further reformation, English puritans could have easily imagined themselves as God’s “seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal” (1 Kings 19:18). Thus, three strands—​the universal baptism of infants, a comprehensive national church into which to baptize them, and a strong sense of analogy with Old Testament Israel—​were woven together by early modern English divines into one coherent, mutually reinforcing picture of the English national church and its role in society. Within this intellectual context, paedobaptism was eminently logical and remained virtually unquestioned by generations of English ministers and lay people alike. And yet, during the first half of the seventeenth century, leaders of an emerging congregational movement began to question, not infant baptism, but key components of the ecclesiology platform by which the practice of paedobaptism was upheld. In doing so, they created a theological context in which believer’s baptism would become a viable intellectual possibility for the first time within mainstream English puritanism.

III Perhaps the most authoritative spokesperson for the Congregational Way during the 1630s and 1640s, was John Cotton (1585–​1652).45 Having declined an invitation to participate directly in the Westminster Assembly, Cotton preferred to influence events in England through a series of publications in which he explained the congregational vision to an eager London audience.46 One such treatise, The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-​England (1645), opened with a concise summary of Cotton’s ecclesiology: . . . the Church which Christ in his Gospell hath instituted, and to which he hath committed the keys of his kingdom, the power of binding and loosing, the tables and seales of the Covenant, the Officers and censures of his Church, the administration of all his publick Worship and Ordinances, is Coetus fidelium, a Communion of Saints, a Combination of faithfull godly men, meeting for that end, by common and joynt consent, into one Congregation; which is commonly called a particular visible Church.47 The passage helpfully encapsulates what were, perhaps, the two defining features of congregational ecclesiology. First, the individual congregation is taken to be the exclusive New Testament expression of the institutionalized “visible church”—​ an assertion which implicitly negates the possibility of a comprehensive national

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church.48 Second, the members of each congregation are, in turn, to be “visible saints”—​that is, men and women assembled “by common and joynt consent” whose lives and professions of faith were able to withstand the spiritual scrutiny of their fellow church members.49 Taken together, these two principles constituted congregationalism’s vital center and encapsulated that which distinguished it from the presbyterian and episcopalian alternatives within the broader puritan movement. Yet, in pursuing their ecclesiological reform project, congregationalists incurred a significant theological cost. For both of these central principles had the unintended consequence of eroding the logic upon which paedobaptism rested. Congregationalists pursued what they regarded as a purer form of the visible church, but the result at which they arrived was an inherently unstable mixture, unprecedented among heirs of the magisterial reformation. One way of resolving the intrinsic tensions created by their theological innovations would have been to abandon the congregational ecclesiology which had created them. But another was to pursue a more radical solution, one which, during the early 1640s, appeared increasingly plausible to many within the congregational movement: the abandonment, not of congregationalism, but of paedobaptism. To understand this properly, we must appreciate how the twin pillars of congregationalism—​the denial of a comprehensive national church and the requirement that all church members be “visible saints”—​called into question the basic reformed distinction between the internal and external members of the covenant community, a consequence of congregational ecclesiology which weakened, in turn, the logical foundation upon which paedobaptism rested. As we have already discussed, the internal/​external distinction was predicated upon the notion that the covenant community was, by God’s good design and intention, always meant to include individuals who possessed only the outward sign of covenantal membership—​that is, baptism—​while lacking any inward, corresponding saving faith. But congregationalists, by insisting that church members be “visible saints,” effectively denied that God had ever intended the New Testament church to include, by design, both the faithful and the unfaithful. In response to a series of thirty-​two questions put to them by curious presbyterians back home, New England ministers formulated their approach to membership in terms of a desire to more closely align the visible church with its invisible, spiritual counterpart: We do believe that all Members of Churches ought to be Saints, and faithfull in Christ Jesus . . . and thereupon we count it our duty to use all lawfull and convenient meanes, whereby God may helpe us to discerne, whether those that offer themselves for Church Members, be persons so

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qualified or no: and therefore first we heare them speake concerning the Gift and Grace of Justifying Faith in their soules, and the manner of Gods dealing with them in working it in their hearts.50 This approach to church membership effectively denied the validity of the distinction between internal and external covenant membership and thus represented a fundamental redefinition of the church.51 The critical point, of course, was not whether the visible church would always, in practice, contain unregenerate members—​on this practical point, none involved in these debates would have disagreed with the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly when they averred that “[a]‌ll visible Churches, which have been, or shall be at any time on earth, consist of persons good and bad, Sheep and Goats, Wheat and Tares, such as walk Christianly and such as walk inordinatly.”52 Rather, the point of disagreement was over the desirability of this mixed multitude, and whether or not purity of membership was even an ideal toward which the visible church should actively strive. Congregationalists argued that the New Testament church was not to be, by design, a mixed body. By design, the church was intended to be composed of those who were inwardly holy, the pure and spotless “bride of Christ” (see Eph. 5:22–​33), and that insofar as “hypocrites” walked among the godly, the latter should make every effort to identify and extirpate the former. During the early seventeenth century, the Leiden congregationalist and spiritual father to the Plymouth pilgrims John Robinson drafted a catechism that included the following exchange: Qu But are not hypocrites mingled with the faithfull in the church? A. None ought to bee by the word of God: and where such are they are not truly added by the Lord to the Church but doe creep in through their owne hypocrisie and not without the Churches sin also, if they may be discerned to be such.53 As congregationalism developed and matured, its advocates remained constant in this conviction that the visible church was not intended to be a mixed body, and that its imperfections were to be regarded with sadness as unfortunate inevitabilities in a fallen world. Consider the description offered by the New England congregational minister Thomas Shepherd of “the diligent and narrow search and trial, Churches here do or should make of all those whom they receive to be fellow-​members with them.” Preaching during the late 1630s, Shepherd explained that ideally the church “should receive in none but such as . . . shall have Communion with Christ at his coming to judge the World”—​that is, elect saints who give evidence in this life of having experienced regeneration by the Holy

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Spirit. Such a project would never be executed perfectly, Shepherd conceded, but the fact that this was not always practically possible should not discourage clergy from pressing toward the ideal: . . . hence if we could be so Eagle-​eyed, as to discern them now that are Hypocrites, we should exclude them now, as Christ will, because they have no right; but that we cannot do, the Lord will therefore do it for his Churches; yet let the Churches learn from this, to do what they can for the Lord now.54 The final exhortation distils the disagreement. All parties believed that the church body, in practice, would be mixed in this life and divinely purified in the life to come. But it was the congregationalists alone who felt obligated “to do what they can for the Lord now.” Closely bound up with this zeal for ecclesial purity was the congregational notion that the visible church ought to be understood exclusively in terms of particular congregations—​that is, local gatherings “consisting onely of so many as may and doe meet together oridinarily in one place, for the publique worship of God, and their edifying.”55 This stood in sharp contrast with the presbyterian system in which the visible church could assume multiple forms. “Our Presbyterian Brethren,” explained Thomas Goodwin, “hold the Institution of Church-​State, to fall upon the whole universal Church, as one great Body by Institution.” This single institution called “the church,” could then be subdivided “into several Subordinations of greater and lesser Bodies,” each of which could then be appropriately labeled “the church.” Goodwin compared this presbyterian idea of the visible church to a body of water in which “every part of [the] water hath the Nature of the whole, so every Integral Church, be it lesser or greater, National, Provincial, Congregational, &c. as they are all Churches.”56 Likewise, the Scottish presbyterian George Gillespie explained that “the congregations in a nation” are “to be subject to a nationall Assembly” in which “many Churches are combined into one, in the very same manner, as many members are combined into one Church.”57 Here, Gillespie can identify both local congregations and the national assembly as “the church.” But for the congregationalist, the visible church was always equated with the local congregation. In so defining the visible church as a single, local body, congregationalists denied the very possibility of a visible church organized along universal, national, or regional lines. In other words, theirs was a repudiation, not simply of the Church of England as they found it, but of the very idea of a comprehensive national church. Tracing the genealogy of this notion reveals that the Congregational Way represented a far more radical ecclesiology than had been previously advocated

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by English separatists. The earlier separatists did not argue against the idea of a comprehensive national church in abstraction, but, rather, launched an unsparing critique of the Church of England as they found it. Critics like Robert Browne (c. 1550–​1633) insisted that the Church of England had become so compromised by its failure to uphold biblical doctrine and discipline that it was left with “no name, nor shewe of the church of Christ remaining.” Such failings perhaps could have been rectified, but Browne and many likeminded others were weary of waiting and called instead for “reformation without tarying for anie.”58 Browne’s sentiment was echoed by contemporaries like John Greenwood (c. 1560–​1593) and Henry Barrow (c. 1550–​1593) who concluded that “the situation of the Church of England . . . was one of total apostasy.”59 Yet, despite such strong denunciations, separatists like Browne, Greenwood, and Barrow did not deny the validity of a national comprehensive church per se.60 That more startling argument was articulated during the early seventeenth century by Henry Jacob. Despite his reputation as a moderate semi-​separatist who not only allowed but required his congregants to remain in partial fellowship with individual parish churches, Jacob’s arguments against any sort of church organized along national lines would ultimately prove far more unsettling to the established order than those of the ostensibly more extreme separatists who disavowed any association with parish churches. This is because Jacob, in arguing as he did, upended the near universal English assumption that the visible church should comprehend the entire nation. “Men esteeme a whole Nation professing the Gospell, to be one visible Church,” Jacob explained, “and they call it a National church.”61 Both reform-​minded puritans and entrenched religious conservatives could agree that every citizen of England was to be a member of her national church. But during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Henry Jacob challenged this fundamental assumption by arguing instead that “Christes [sic] true Ministeriall or Visible Church is but one ordinarie Congregation only . . . and therefore that Christs true Ministerial or Visible Church is not any Diocesan or Provinciall Church.”62 This repudiation of any visible church structure extending beyond the local congregation was categorical—​no national church was acceptable, whatever its polity or its orthodoxy in other respects. In advancing these arguments, Jacob’s advocacy of congregationalism demonstrates that debate over the biblical appropriateness of a nationally comprehensive church long predated the Westminster Assembly’s well-​known clash between independents and presbyterians. As Polly Ha concludes, “the opening decades of the seventeenth century were marked by a dynamism in which ecclesiological definition was in constant motion.” And the congregational argument was made largely by Henry Jacob, whose “church in Southwark (and exposition of congregationalism) amounted to a silent ecclesiastical revolution.”63 But, as revolutionary as

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his ideas were, Jacob represented only the opening phase in congregationalism’s development, as the movement’s more mature expression would be developed, not on the banks of the Thames, but on the shores of New England. For there, across the Atlantic on “these remote Coasts of the earth, whereunto the good hand of God hath brought us,” exiled clergy launched an ecclesiastical experiment without precedent among the heirs of the magisterial reformation. Fully cognizant that their situation presented a sort of tabula rasa—​“seeing now God hath set before us an open doore of libertie”—​the New England ministers were able to actualize on a broad scale the same fundamental ecclesiastical refashioning that had so entranced Henry Jacob, a remaking of the church based on an assertion that the visible church could not, in principle, be anything other than a particular congregation of saints, meeting together in one place.64 Like Jacob before them, they believed that the idea of a national church was not what Christ had intended, and that its adoption in England and elsewhere was an inappropriate extension of Old Testament shadows into the New Testament administration. “The whole Nation of Israel,” wrote John Cotton, “made but one Church and the Officers or Ministers of any one Synagogue (the Priests and Levites) were Ministers in common to the whole house of Israel.” But this ecclesiastical arrangement was intended to be temporary so that “now because the Churches of the new Testament are of another constitution, none of them nationall, as the Church of Israel was, but all of them congregationall.”65 By thus foregoing an overarching national structure, local congregations were freed from an obligation to include all living within a parish boundary, and were instead empowered to craft membership rolls which reflected a purer form of Christian communion. This new approach admitted only “visible saints” and ended the national church’s penchant to “promiscuously” allow any and all into parish fellowship, “not excluding drunkards, whoremongers, prophane swearers, covetous worldlings, Atheists, Papists, and the like.”66 This approach to church membership was built upon the voluntary association of the godly, and was, as a result, intrinsically inimical to a national church model in which all, in practice, were comprehended within the fellowship of the church. But, by so radically altering the nature of Christian communion, the New England ministers had also unwittingly undercut an institution which they had no desire to abandon, namely, the baptism of infants. This is because congregationalists, in certain key ecclesiological respects, were actually far closer to continental Anabaptists than the magisterial reformers. As Scott Dixon has observed, sixteenth-​century Anabaptists “explicitly rejected one of the main foundations of traditional Christian order, the unity of the corpus Christianuum created and confirmed through child baptism, and replaced it with a form of baptism based on an individual and voluntary decision.”67 By defining

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the visible church exclusively in terms of local congregations composed of “visible saints,” congregationalists also exchanged a universal, Constantinian corpus Christianuum for a voluntary model of ecclesiastical identity. And yet, unlike the continental Anabaptists who made baptism the locus of differentiation between church and world, congregationalists continued to baptize infants and made entrance into the local church covenant, rather than baptism, the point at which true Christians were identified and separated. In replying to the suggestion that congregational church covenants were “needless” because “Baptisme makes men members of the Visible Church,” the congregationalist Richard Mather attempted to distance baptism from entry into the visible church, asserting that application of the sacrament “neither makes the Church, nor members of the Church, nor alwayes so much as proves men to be members.”68 By deemphasizing baptism as the entryway to the visible church while continuing to baptize infants, congregationalists created an inherently unstable ecclesiology situated uneasily between the poles of the Radical and Magisterial Reformations. By continuing to recognize the infants of Christian parents as externally or federally holy and baptizing them on that basis alone, congregationalists perpetuated the internal/​ external distinction which their requirement of “visible sainthood” implicitly denied. The difficulties inherent within the attempt to combine infant baptism with congregational ecclesiology were illustrated by disputes in New England over the so-​called Half-​Way covenant. Erupting during the 1650s, the controversy forced New England ministers to confront a generation who were baptized as infants, but subsequently judged unfit for full membership in the church. Baptized into the church yet insufficiently pious to warrant full congregational inclusion, these individuals created a crisis within New England congregationalism when they began to ask that their own children be baptized in turn. In the eyes of many contemporaries, to baptize the children of non-​church members was to betray the basic congregational axiom that the church’s sacramental life must be restricted to visible saints. And yet, to not baptize these children would put the New England clergy into the awkward position of having to deny baptism to the children of parents who were themselves baptized, a stance which would put them at variance with the Reformed tradition to which they claimed to belong. In this way, the Half-​Way covenant controversy highlighted the inherent ambiguities of a system that insisted upon visible sainthood as the defining mark of Christian identity, while also baptizing infants who could not possibly evidence the requisite signs of grace. As the New England congregationalist minister John Allin commented in 1662, the controversy gave “great Advantages to the Antipaedobaptists, which if we be silent, will tend much to their Encouragement and Encrease.”69 All of this arose because the baptismal practices of congregational ministers reinforced

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a distinction between internal and external covenant membership which their church membership practices sought to formally eliminate.70 Congregational theology thus contained a fundamental tension: it affirmed with the Westminster Directory of Public Worship that “children” were “by Baptisme received into the bosome of the visible church,”71 while at the same time also stressing the seemingly contradictory notion that “Visible Saints only are fit Matter appointed by God to make up a visible Church of Christ.”72 While their primary burden was to ensure church membership rolls composed of men and women who had evidenced Christian conversion, they undercut that mission by continuing to include within the church baptized infants incapable of meeting the same standard.

IV The preceding paragraphs have outlined a constellation of ecclesiological ideas which animated the congregational movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Driven by a desire to define the visible church in terms of local congregations filled with visible saints, congregational innovators like Henry Jacob and John Cotton formulated a new, voluntaristic approach to ecclesiology that repudiated a 1,200-​year-​old Constantinian consensus. It was by working with and within this set of ideas that London congregationalists associated with Henry Jessey’s Southwark church began to question paedobaptism during the late 1630s. This congregational discursive context is consistently and strikingly reflected in their published arguments and explains why the rejection of paedobaptism became intellectually plausible at the historical moment when it did. Like their paedobaptist congregational contemporaries, baptistically inclined members of the Jessey circle lamented the great number of people who were included within the parish churches despite their never having given evidence of genuine, saving faith. As congregationalists, they believed that the solution to the problem was to reinstitute the New Testament model of ecclesial governance, a model in which, as their baptistic 1644 confession of faith would put it, the “Church, as it is visible to us, is a company of visible Saints, called & separated from the world, by the word and Spirit of God, to the visible profession of the faith of the Gospel.”73 Yet, as they sought to further perfect the congregational project, many within the Jessey circle pressed the logic of their polity further: if the only fit members of a visible church were visible saints, and baptism was the door through which entrants into the visible church must pass, why then should it be opened to infants who cannot offer the requisite evidence of saving faith? If, as congregationalists insisted, internally regenerate saints were never intended to mingle alongside unconverted hypocrites within the visible church of the

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New Testament, then why should congregational churches continue a practice of paedobaptism that both reinforced and was itself undergirded by the very two-​ tiered internal/​external approach to covenantal membership which they formally repudiated? During the late 1630s and early 1640s, these questions fractured the Jessey circle and produced a new movement of baptistic congregationalists who understood their rejection of paedobaptism as the natural extension of their congregational principles. Treatises published by baptistic congregationalists during the 1640s exhibited a strong concern for the purity of the visible church, and their authors understood infant baptism as the decisive mechanism through which that purity was compromised. By indiscriminately bringing children into the fold of the visible church without knowledge of their future spiritual estate, ministers who baptized infants surely welcomed many who would never evidence saving faith. Of course, if one’s ecclesiological vision comprehended the entire Commonwealth and admitted a robust internal/​external distinction, then this result was not necessarily undesirable; the differentiation between sheep and goat could, at least in theory, at the Lord’s Table.74 But the Congregational Way insisted upon voluntaristic rather than comprehensive membership, with those admitted to membership judged to be converted and thus worthy, in principle, to receive communion. It was with such concerns in mind that baptistic congregationalists warned against the way in which infant baptism “inforceth such matter upon the Church [i.e. unregenerate members], as tends to the destruction of the form of it.” Because the logic of congregationalism was incommensurate with a national church in the strong sense, baptistic congregationalists like Samuel Richardson were quick to point out that infant baptism “tends to a Nationall Church” and “upholds a Nationall Church, as Circumcision did of old.”75 Paul Hobson complained that “the Baptizing of Infants makes them Members of their Church, before they are called of God.” Hobson supported his claim with reference to 1 Corinthians 1:2, a classic congregational proof-​text in that it describes the Corinthian church as composed of “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.”76 Francis Cornewell argued that the widespread “Baptisme of the Infants of Beleivers” was directly responsible for “establishing Nationall Churches, and overthrowing the particular Churches of Jesus Christ, that are called out of the World by the preaching of the Gospell.”77 Most vividly, William Kiffen compared the national church’s comprehensive intake of any and all with a gluttonous “natural body.” Although this body was “greedy to receive in all,” it lacked “power to voide the excrements” and “must needs become a rotten, filthie and unclean body.”78 In each instance, these authors framed their concerns over baptism within the wider discursive context of mid-​seventeenth-​century congregationalism and its critique of a national church structure.

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When the army captain Francis Freeman wrote against paedobaptism in 1647, he began by observing that “there is no command for the baptising of Infants” in the New Testament, but went on to spend the bulk of his energy describing the deleterious effect which infant baptism has had upon the national church. Freeman complained that “your Nationall Church doth grasp in all sorts of people” only because “they were all baptised when they were Infants, and made members of Christ by Baptisme, and therefore visible members of the Church.”79 This indiscriminate admission included “Atheists and Cavaliers” and other “open enemies to God himself,” all of whom “must have admittance into your Nationall Church, upon no other grounds, but because they were sprinkled in their infancie.”80 In a forceful passage, Freeman accuses all paedobaptists of complicity in the perpetuation of a national lie: . . . consider with me, and you shall find how the whole Nation was taught to lie, when they learn’d the old Catechisme. Q.  What is your name? An. C. Who gave you that name? My Godfathers &c. in my Baptisme, wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, &c. And were not these grosse lies? Now your National Church hath not yet forgot this old Catechism, and that is the reason why you have so many rotten members in it.81 Freeman’s solution to this proliferation of “rotten members” was, essentially, the congregational solution:  to restrict membership to “visible Saints, such as are able to manifest faith, repentance, and turning unto God.” All of these evidences were to be required of individuals “before they can be admitted into our Independent Churches (as you call it) to participate in any of our church ordinances.”82 Restricting full membership to such “visible Saints” was textbook congregationalism, severing the link between civil and ecclesiastical membership and dismissing the assumption that the people of God were intended, by biblical design, to be a mixed body. But, unlike mainstream congregationalists, Freeman pressed the position further, all the way to what he perceived to be its logical conclusion: the elimination of infant baptism. Many of these connections between congregationalism and believer’s baptism were brought together nicely in Christopher Blackwood’s 1644 treatise The Storming of Antichrist. When Blackwood rejected paedobaptism he was the rector of Staplehurst, Kent. But, he was also connected to the Jessey circle, having served from 1640 to 1642 as the minister of the congregational church at Scituate in the Plymouth Colony, a church long pastored by Jessey’s predecessor at Southwark, John Lothropp.83 Thus, despite Blackwood’s ministry within the national church, his ecclesiological vision was decidedly congregational, a fact which is evident

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throughout his treatise on baptism. In describing the visible church, Blackwood gives the standard congregational definition of a “particular church” as “a company of Saints in profession, explicitly or implicitely consenting together.” Of first importance to the church’s composition is that it be composed of “a right matter, viz. visible saints.” On this point, Blackwood notes that “we are beholding for the recovery of this truth, to our brethren (nick-​named Independants;) which is as precious a truth about church order, as ever was recovered from the spoiles of Antichrist.”84 Crucially, Blackwood connects this emphasis on visible saints with the dangers of baptizing infants into a comprehensive national church and accuses the magisterial Reformers—​“Luther, Calvin, &c”—​of having erred at this crucial point: Their mistake in the matter of the church, for so many hundred yeers, taking mixt multitudes for the matter thereof, when the Scripture makes Saints in profession the matter thereof. Baptisme being appointed of Christ, for differencing the matter of the church from all other socieities, surely a right baptisime failing, in respect of the subject, a right matter must needs fail; these two errors like Hypocrates Twins, were borne at the same time and will dye together.85 By identifying the magisterial reformers basic error as “taking mixt multitudes for the matter” of the church rather than visible saints, Blackwood rejected the validity of the distinction between internal and external membership in the covenant community, a distinction reinforced by paedobaptism, a practice which “upholds a national church as Circumcision did.”86 In doing so, Blackwood followed the congregationalist impulse, but then went further to identify infant baptism as a practice at odds with that same congregational principle:  “under the maske of infants baptisme all sorts of evill and wicked men creep in to partake of the Supper in sundry congregations.”87 In these passages, Blackwood suggests that congregationalism’s most pressing question—​that is, how to fill the church with “visible saints”—​was to be answered by rejecting paedobaptism. At one point, he even refers explicitly to the New England congregationalism with which he would have been acquainted from his days pastoring at Scituate, noting that “profession [of faith] is required in New England before any person is admitted as a member.” With this, Blackwood agrees, but, he observes that “infants baptisme utterly destroyes this note, being they are members already.”88 His fundamental concerns with the comprehensive national church and its unbelieving members were the basic concerns of congregationalism, but his solution was to take what he understood to be the next logical step: restricting baptism to those professing faith.

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As soon as one stops anachronistically reading these authors as “Baptists”—​a term which they did not use and would not have readily understood—​and begins instead to see them as congregationalists who changed their position on a particular doctrinal point, one’s ear becomes attuned to hear the congregational timbres reverberating throughout these published pieces. This perceptual shift also allows one to identify and appreciate the instances in which baptistic congregationalists identified themselves as members of the wider congregationalist cause. One can better understand, for example, a passage in Blackwood’s baptistic treatise in which he casually and without explanation groups “the Independent” together with the “antipaedobaptist,” holding these two as an amalgamated conceptual unit so that he might contrast them with those “from the Presbyteriall judgment.”89 If one’s seventeenth-​ century religious typology contains separate boxes for congregationalists and “Baptists,” then Blackwood’s conjunction of the two seems strange and idiosyncratic. But if one understands baptistic congregationalists to be a group emerging from and still, in crucial ways, joined to the larger congregational movement, then his pairing makes immediate sense. When “Baptists” are recategorized as “baptistic congregationalists” we can understand why Richard Baxter, in 1652, would describe the ecclesiological landscape of England in terms of only “4 differing p[ar]tyes (Episcopall, Presbyterian, Independent and Erastian),” with “Anabaptists” said to differ only “in p[ar]t of worship.”90 Likewise, by reconfiguring our mental nomenclature, we are unsurprised to find a 1647 petition titled “A Declaration by Congregationall Societies in, and about the City of London; as well as those commonly called Anabaptists.” In 1651, this same group of ministers published a similar document under the title, “A Declaration of Divers Elders and Brethren of Congregationall Societies, in and about the City of London.” This latter declaration dropped the addendum about “those commonly called Anabaptists” and classified all the signatories as individuals belonging to “Congregationall Societies.” And yet, the declaration was signed by congregationalists like Thomas Brooks and William Greenhill, along with baptistic congregationalists like Henry Jessey, Hanserd Knollys, William Kiffen, and Thomas Harrison. That these signatories would comingle under the common appellation “Congregationall societies” cuts against certain established historiographical trends, but should not surprise those who have begun to read the period in terms of baptistic congregationalists rather than “Baptists.”91 One observes the same phenomenon in passing comments made by the polemicist Daniel Taylor, who, when urging the Rump Parliament to pursue further reform, made reference to “the Party commonly called Congregational Churches, such as Mr. Sidrack Simpson, and Mr. John Simpson, Mr. Thomas Goodwin, Mr. John Goodwin, Mr. Feak, Mr. Jacy [i.e. Jessey], and Mr. Kiffen, &c. are Officers in.”92 Here again, we find “Baptists” like Jessey and Kiffen, grouped alongside

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congregationalists like Thomas Goodwin and Sidrach Simpson, all under the banner of “Congregational Churches.” This arrangement cuts sharply against the dominant historiographic narrative, but makes sense once our taxonomy of mid-​ seventeenth century religion shifts to include baptistic congregationalists rather than a homogeneous group of “Baptists.” To this end, one might also consider the fact that when one of the most prominent leaders within the baptistic congregational movement, William Kiffen, was challenged by a presbyterian interlocutor to defend his separation from the national church, he pointed to the long-​standing nature of the movement with which he identified, an unbroken line of self-​identity which long predated Kiffen’s rejection of paedobaptism: It is well knowne to many, especially to ourselves; that our Congregations were erected and framed as now they are, according to the Rule of Christ, before we heard of any Reformation, even at that time when Episcopacie was in the height of its vanishing glory  .  .  .  even when they were plotting and threatning the ruine of all which opposed it, and wee hope you will not say, wee sinned in separating from them, whose errors you now condemne.93 Writing in the summer of 1645, Kiffen’s reference to “Episcopacie . . . in the height of its vanishing glory” likely alludes to the rise of Laudianism during the “personal rule” of Charles I, a period well before Kiffen would have adopted a baptistic position.94 Kiffen can thus unapologetically incorporate his congregation’s self-​ identity during the mid-​1640s into a much older tradition of English congregationalism. That he would do this suggests that the rejection of paedobaptism was by no means the exclusive point of definitional departure for his baptistic church. He gives no suggestion that by rejecting paedobaptism, he and his fellow travelers were inaugurating a new religious identity. What one sees, instead, is a congregational, separatist minister who, in embracing believer’s baptism, had modified one aspect of his doctrinal platform without thereby scuttling his more foundational self-​identification with the English congregational movement. During that same summer of 1645, the baptistic congregationalist Hanserd Knollys published A Moderate Answer to Dr. Bastwick’s Book.95 The book in question was John Bastwick’s Independency Not Gods Ordinance, a furious denunciation of congregational polity.96 Writing against the five congregational ministers or “dissenting brethren” at the Westminster Assembly, Bastwick judged “the whole negotiation of the Independents in the Reverend Assembly” to be a calculated attempt “to hinder the work of reformation.”97 When Knollys penned his reply, he had already been baptized as a believer while a member in Henry

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Jessey’s church, and yet, remarkably, Knollys nowhere mentions the baptismal question, choosing instead to write simply as an advocate of congregationalism. Throughout his treatise, Knollys writes as an insider speaking on behalf of the congregationalist cause, as when, for instance, he indicates that a particular point “is not denied by the Brethren.”98 One would never know from reading A Moderate Answer that Knollys was a “Baptist,” but would instead assume him to be a part of the congregational movement on behalf of which he seemingly felt authorized to speak. Clearly, Knollys—​who would go on to sign the 1646 reissue of the baptistic congregationalists’ confession of faith—​did not understand his position on baptism to be wholly constitutive of his religious self-​identity in the way that the casual use of the descriptor “Baptist” might otherwise suggest.

V The burden of this chapter has been to analyze in some detail the lines of intellectual continuity between congregational ecclesiology and baptistic sacramentology. It began with Thomas Wynell’s reference to “semi” and “compleat Anabaptists,” and it can conclude by observing that Wynell’s insight was by no means unique or idiosyncratic. Contemporary writers hostile to both congregationalists and “Anabaptists” saw the connection between the two groups, and, the concurrent testimony of both episcopalians and presbyterians adds credibility to this chapter’s conclusion that the rejection of paedobaptism only became intellectually plausible within the conceptual context of congregationalism. Even when one takes into consideration the distorting tendencies of early modern polemic, the combined weight of so many diverse voices is not easily ignored.99 Such voices included that of Thomas Blake, a Church of England minister whose parish church at Tamworth straddled the border between Staffordshire and Warwickshire.100 In Blake’s published defence of infant baptism, he identified some who practiced “a middle way, as betweene rigid Brownists and Presbyterians, so between Anabaptists and (as I may say) Paedo-​baptists.” These compromisers were advocates of the “Congregationall way;” they were those who would baptize some infants, “yet . . . will not have all promiscuously received.” But their “middle way” was, for Blake, “a step out of the way”—​that is, a step toward “Anabaptism.” In what followed, Blake deployed against congregationalists many of the same arguments more commonly used against “Anabaptists” (for example, appeals to a putative “federal holiness” in 1 Corinthians 7:14 and the baptism of the eventual apostate Simon Magus in Acts 8 as proof that the visible church was intended to be a mixed body). Blake defended the widest possible admission to the baptismal font, faulting congregationalists on the grounds that “[a]‌ny solid reason which will lye against” the baptism of any particular infant “may be a ground of the

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challenge of all.”101 In other words, Blake identifies congregational practice as a halfway house on the road to the rejection of paedobaptism. Presbyterian opponents of both congregationalists and “Anabaptists” also suggested a logical link between the two groups. In 1644, the presbyterian Alexander Forbes, for example, noted “the defection of some of their [i.e. congregationalists] members to Anabaptisme” and lamented that congregationalists were unusually “apt . . . to be made a prey therein by any of that Sect [i.e. Anabaptists] that seek to come along to seek Proselites, more than the members of other Reformed Churches.” In this connection, Forbes even alleged a “late instance” in which some baptistic converts testified that “Mr. Sympsons principles have made them Anabaptists.” “Have we not here,” Forbes concluded, “their own Warrant to judge them by these wayes?”102 The “Mr. Sympson” in question was Sidrach Simpson (1600–​1655), one of the five “Dissenting Brethren” then agitating on behalf of congregational principle within the Westminster Assembly, and one of the “counsellors” recruited to help Henry Jessey’s church navigate its own controversy over infant baptism.103 In his reply to Forbes’ allegations, Simpson, not surprisingly, denied that congregational polity tended toward believer’s baptism, but he also conceded that at least one individual had, indeed, publicly averred that it was Simpson’s teaching that led him to reject paedobaptism, just as Forbes had alleged. Simpson also observed that churches “under Presbiteriall governemnt” in “the Low Countries” had witnessed both “Ministers and people . . . turn’d Arminians, Papists, Socinians,” doctrinal shifts which represented “Greater errours then the denial of Paedobaptism.” This final comment is another reminder that paedobaptistic congregationalists were eager to differentiate between errors of greater and lesser severity, with “the denial of Paedobaptism” placed decidedly within the latter group.104 That same year, another presbyterian, the Scottish covenanter and controversialist Adam Steuart, levelled similar allegations against congregationalists. Steuart charged that “the Anabaptists here in London for the most part agree with” the London congregationalists “in almost all things, save only in delaying Baptisme till the time that the parties to be baptized be of age sufficient to give an account of their faith.” Steuart went on to suggest that the “Independents also hold them [i.e. the Anabaptists] for very good men, as they declare to the people in their Sermons, what ever they write to the contrary.” Even more interestingly, Steuart also saw the two positions as theologically interconnected: Many of them [i.e. congregationalists] also hold the Anabaptists errour very tolerable, which is (it may be) the cause that so many daily fall away from Independency to Anabaptisme; and that not without just cause: for if the Independents stand to their own principles, and hold no men to

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be Members of Christs Church, or visible Christians, till they be able to give account of their faith, and of the motions of grace that they feele within themselves, what need they to Christen those that are not visible Christians? Wherefore delay they not Baptisme as the Anabaptists? And that so much the more, since they refuse it to some of the children of those of their own Sect.105 To Steuart’s testimony, one can add that of the Westminster Assembly commissioner Robert Baillie, another Scottish presbyterian. Baillie warned English congregationalists that their close relationships with Anabaptists betrayed a foolish and naïve pride: .  .  .  but the Independents will be wiser then their Fathers, Anabaptism to them is so small a peccadillo that it deserves no censure at all, they are most willing to retain the Anabaptists in their bosom; but here the pity, no caresses can keep most of Anabaptists in the Independent Congregations, so soon as they begin to weigh their own principles they finde their infant baptism a clear nullity, and so a necessity laid upon them to be rebaptized; The Independents denying to them this Sacrament, they cannot choose but go out to the avowed Anabaptists, who by this means embodies them in their churches.106 Baillie saw what other contemporaries saw: the conceptual connection between consistent congregationalism and the renunciation of paedobaptism. Whatever the polemical excesses or distortions of Baillie, Steuart, and Forbes,107 their insight into the logical relationship between these two positions was corroborated by others during the period and supports the larger case which this chapter has labored to make. If we are to understand why so many of the more respectable English congregationalists began to reject infant baptism during the mid-​seventeenth century, we must press beyond an overly simplistic appeal to biblicism. It is true, of course, that for seventeenth-​century men and women, infant baptism’s lack of explicit New Testament warrant was, in some ways, surely, the most compelling argument against the practice. But this silence was insufficient to prompt the sacramental revolution witnessed during the early 1640s. Biblicism was not unique to “Baptists” but was promoted instead by Protestantism generally and English puritanism in particular. English puritans, all of whom were zealous for the recovery of apostolically sanctioned, “primitive” church practice, had been pressing their agenda for decades without seeing the need to restrict baptism to believers. Those more radical English separatists who, like the exiled John Smyth,

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did reject infant baptism prior to the late 1630s, were caught up in a larger doctrinal reappraisal which also saw them abandon a host of other doctrines central to the puritan project.108 Thus, it was not until the late 1630s that large numbers of otherwise doctrinally orthodox puritans began to find the baptistic position intellectually viable. The conceptual context which made the shift possible was furnished by the logic of congregationalism itself. As the Congregational Way was refined and nuanced by theologians working on both sides of the Atlantic, it developed to the point where many of its devotees began to see the move to baptistic congregationalism as not only intellectually possible, but theologically necessary. To make such a claim is not, of course, to suggest that other factors—​political and social—​were not also at play during the period. The collapse of an authoritative episcopate and the rise of a democratized print culture played decisive roles in furnishing a context conducive to major doctrinal reassessment of every kind.109 But any effort to excavate the immediate intellectual antecedents of believer’s baptism will be incomplete without also looking to congregational precedent and the need to reframe sacramentology in light of ecclesiology.

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“Opposite to the Honour of God” No Longer Rehabilitating “Anabaptism” in Cromwellian England

In 1646, the Scottish presbyterian and Westminster Assembly commissioner Robert Baillie decried “Anabaptism” as the “true fountaine” from which all other heresy inevitably flowed. As the source of “Independency, Antinomy, Brownisme, Familisme, and the most of the other Errours, which for the time doe trouble the Church of England,” the “Anabaptists both here and over Sea, both of the present & the former times” were clearly, in Baillie’s judgment, ruled by a “malign . . . spirit,” “a spirit as much opposite to the honour of God, and to the salvation of men, as any that ever troubled the Church since its first foundation.” Anabaptists were dangerous to church and state, guilty of “the greatest errours and the grossest vices that ever any who were called Christians have stumbled upon.”1 Baillie’s rhetoric was unsparing, his condemnation unequivocal. Anabaptists were not simply one heretical sect among others, but were, in fact, the source and ground of the religious chaos then engulfing Stuart England. Fifteen years later, however, in a 1661 letter to his cousin William Spang, Baillie made a passing remark about “Anabaptists,” which cast them in a rather different, more nuanced light. Commenting upon current political-​ ecclesiastical alignments, Baillie observed that recent events “have moved some wise Presbyterians, Independents, and more sober Anabaptists, to syncretisme against their danger.” For readers familiar with Baillie’s furious denunciations of “Anabaptism” during the 1640s, it is surprising indeed to discover this same irascible divine not only acknowledging some Anabaptists as “more sober,” but also conceptually linking them with mainstream independents and even his own party of “wise presbyterians.” Baillie’s report that these three groups had been

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lately moved to closer union in the face of an aggressive Cavalier Parliament represents a striking repudiation of the staunch anti-​Anabaptist stance adopted by Baillie and his presbyterian allies during the 1640s.2 If Anabaptists were, in fact, controlled by “a spirit as much opposite to the honour of God, and to the salvation of men, as any that ever troubled the Church,” it seems odd to describe any of them as “sober,” and it is difficult to imagine conditions in which “wise Presbyterians” would be justified in allying with them. Moreover, examination of the period reveals that Baillie was in no way idiosyncratic in his softening toward Anabaptists. Throughout the 1650s, the once universal antipathy toward Anabaptists began to evaporate and their long-​sullied reputation enjoyed a remarkable rehabilitation. The political, cultural, and religious landscape somehow shifted so dramatically that a sect once commonly believed to foster “the greatest errours and the grossest vices,” came not only to enjoy toleration, but to participate in the official structures and decision-​making processes of the Cromwellian national church. This dramatic movement from stigmatization to legitimation was not enjoyed by any other mid-​seventeenth-​century religious group. The present chapter will document the changing fortunes of English “Anabaptists” during the 1650s, explain how this change took place, and demonstrate its significance for the period more generally. But before turning to these issues directly, it will be helpful to consider where we have been. The previous three chapters were each directed toward a common goal: to analyze the origins and self-​identity of a group I have labeled “baptistic congregationalists.” By speaking of baptistic congregationalists rather than “Baptists” we are able to clarify mid-​seventeenth-​century alignments, guard against anachronism, and remind ourselves that the rejection of paedobaptism was a discrete doctrinal move which did not, on its own, create an abiding pan-​Baptist identity ex nihilo. Furthermore, the term draws into its taxonomic orbit both the seven London churches who produced the influential baptistic confession of faith in 1644 and other crucially important figures like Henry Jessey. While historians are quick to identify the former group as “Baptists” or “Particular Baptists,” they sometimes hesitate to apply the “Baptist” label to Jessey and others who were not formally associated with the seven London churches, a trend which both reflects and furthers the tendency to project eighteenth-​century denominational boundaries onto mid-​seventeenth-​century actors.3 The following two chapters build on this foundation by viewing baptistic congregationalists from two different perspectives. Speaking broadly, the present chapter considers how baptistic congregationalists were viewed by those outside of their movement during the Interregnum, and c­ hapter  5 then examines how baptistic congregationalists viewed themselves during the same period. By using our recalibrated reading of mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists” to analyze the

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Cromwellian religious landscape, this chapter will be able to offer a fresh interpretation of the relationship between church and state in Interregnum England and the place of “Anabaptists” within it. One of the most vexing questions for those studying Cromwellian England has been the precise nature of religious toleration during the 1650s. The Commonwealth and Protectorate undoubtedly saw an unprecedented expansion of religious freedom. And yet, how that freedom ought to be understood has been the subject of intense debate. While previous generations of scholars were quick to cast Interregnum England as the fountainhead of modern religious pluralism,4 recent historians have been far more cautious.5 Jeffery Collins, for instance, has stressed “quasi-​Erastian” aspects of Cromwell’s national church and the congregationalists who dominated it: “The church settlement of 1654 cannot be comprehended unless this tradition of ‘Imperial Puritanism’ is kept in the foreground” and one avoids “[a]‌n anachronistic focus” on Cromwell’s concern for religious liberty.6 The present chapter reconsiders the problem of Cromwellian toleration by giving special attention to the period’s remarkably swift change in attitude toward those who rejected paedobaptism. To this end, we will first examine Anabaptism’s reputation among England’s religious tastemakers prior to 1649. Second, we will establish that the theological and social standing of at least some baptistic separatists had dramatically changed by the mid-​1650s. And finally, drawing on the category “baptistic congregationalist” as established across the first three chapters, we will attempt to explain why Anabaptism’s reputation was rehabilitated in England and what this might mean for our broader understanding of the Cromwellian state.

I If we hope to appreciate Anabaptism’s rehabilitation in England during the 1650s, we must first appreciate the ignominious depths out of which it arose. It would be difficult to overstate the antipathy with which leaders of the Magisterial Reformation viewed the Anabaptist error and the men and women by whom it was spread. Writing against the Anabaptists during the mid-​ sixteenth century, John Calvin decried their “bottomless pit” of “false opinions & errours,” warning readers that such persons were far more dangerous than other false teachers: For this canker differeth in thys thinge from al other sectes of heretikes, yt she hath not erred only in certain points: but she hath ingendered a hole sea, as it were, of folish & false opinions . . . So yt if we would plucke out, or rehearse al their wicked doctrines, we should never make an end.7

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Within the symbolic world of early modern Protestantism, “Anabaptism” was shorthand for theological disaster, civil discord, and the potential dissolution of the entire Protestant project. And although these imaginative connections were often wildly exaggerated, concerned Protestants looking to confirm their worst fears did not have far to look. Real events associated with the “Radical Reformation” provided ample fuel for the persistent association between Anabaptism and anarchy.8 Among such events, the most notorious by far was the 1534 Anabaptist uprising in Münster, Germany. Led by the prophet and self-​styled messianic “king of righteousness” Jan Beukelsz—​or, as he has come to be known, John of Leiden—​a group of Anabaptists captured the city of Münster in 1534 and installed a millennial theocracy, complete with the radical collectivization of property, forced polygamy, and the swift execution of all who dared dissent. Although this apocalyptic kingdom was confined to a single Westphalian city and violently ended by besieging armies, the events in Münster reverberated throughout the continent and cast a long shadow over the early modern mind.9 During the decades following Münster, Anabaptists were savagely pursued and persecuted across the newly Protestant principalities, and the sixteenth-​century Reformed and Lutheran confessions found unanimous agreement on at least this point: “we do detest the errour of the Anabaptists.”10 England seems to have worried about Anabaptist influence since at least the 1530s. In June 1535, Eustace Chapuys reported that “a score of Dutch Anabaptists” had been arrested, “of whom 13 have been condemned to the fire, and will be burnt in different parts of the kingdom.”11 Similar royal actions took place throughout Henry VIII’s reign and showed no signs of slowing under that of his son Edward VI. Carrie Euler has analyzed some eleven “identifiably anti-​ Anabaptist books” published in England under Edward VI’s rule (1547–​1553).12 The English fear of Anabaptism was thus well established by 1563, when John Foxe published the first edition of his Acts and Monuments, a book which did more to shape the Elizabethan imagination than perhaps any other single volume, save the Bible.13 Foxe’s massive work tellingly assumed a readership familiar with and horrified by the ever-​present Anabaptist danger. Sprinkled throughout the text, one finds stories in which enemies of the Protestant cause wrongly conflate godly Protestant piety with Anabaptist sympathy. After describing the Catholic Bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner as Satan’s “organ,” Foxe evidenced the charge by reminding his readers that Gardiner, “proceeding still in his craftes and wyles,” had sought “to exterminate al[l]‌good books and faithful professours of Gods word” by indiscriminately slandering them “under the name of heresies, sectes, [and] Anabaptists.”14 Likewise, Foxe tells the story of a “noughtye man” who falsely accused “a godly Matrone named Gertrude Crokhay” of “anabaptistrye, which

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shee there utterly denyed, & detested the error, declaring before him . . . her fayth boldly, without any feare.”15 We read elsewhere of another “good matrone, the very servant and handmayd of Christ” who was falsely imprisoned under Mary’s reign and subjected to “threatninges, tauntes, and scornes, called an anabaptist, a madde woman, a drunkard, a whoore, a runnagate.” Despite these persecutions, she remained steadfast, “a rare ensample of constancy to all professors of Christes holy Gospell,” and “at the last, when they perceived” that they could not “win her to their vanities and superstitious doinges, then they cryed out, An anabaptist, an anabaptist” as she was “led to the place of execution . . . to bee burned with flames.”16 Contextualized within Foxe’s larger effort to construct a Manichean divide between godly Protestantism and anti-​Christian “Popery,” the Anabaptist error represented an internal threat to Protestant unity. If tolerated, the spread of Anabaptism could validate Catholic charges that the logic of sola scriptura would inevitably lead to theological and moral chaos. “From the very outset of the Reformation,” observes Brad Gregory, “the shared commitment to sola scriptura entailed a hermeneutical heterogeneity that proved doctrinally contentious, socially divisive, and sometimes . . . politically subversive.”17 Foxe’s recurring trope in which the faithful were falsely accused of harboring Anabaptist sentiment suggests a world in which the idea of Anabaptism functioned less as a concrete doctrinal position to be rationally refuted and more as a blank space upon which the godly could project a nebulous but very real fear that the Protestant proj­ ect might be undone at any moment by its own internal theological divisions. Anabaptism was portrayed as a menacing and inexplicable cuckoo within the Protestant nest as later authors continued to puzzle over precisely how the “Sun shine” of the Reformation could have simultaneously “dispelled the darke night of Popery” and “raised the soule mist of Anabaptism; which sinister effect must not be ascribed to the nature of the Truth, but to the indisposition of the severall subjects not capable to receive it.”18 Such rhetoric reinforced the constructed division between acceptable and unacceptable Protestant religion, “a distinction drawn,” as Alec Ryrie has put it, “not to describe a theological gulf whose existence was self-​evident, but to create an artificial firebreak in what looked like dangerously undifferentiated theological terrain.”19 By the mid-​seventeenth century, these inchoate anxieties were given new objects upon which to fixate, as the twin collapse of episcopacy and effective print censorship during the early 1640s unleashed a “swarme of sectaries and schismatiques” headed, in many cases, by real-​life “Anabaptists”—​or, at least, real-​ life individuals who questioned paedobaptism.20 The diversification of English religion was, of course, only one part of a much broader social and political unravelling in which Parliament and people, Church and Crown, all experienced

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what David Cressy has described as “an earthquake of cosmic proportions.”21 One of the most startling—​and highly visible—​results of this “earthquake” was the way in which it allowed religious minorities the opportunity to present their heterodox views publicly. Through print, pulpit, and public disputation, English dissenters who had heretofore operated only as part of a shadowy “Puritan underground”22 were quite suddenly given space to operate openly and in full view of a curious public.23 For leaders of marginalized religious groups, the collapse of longstanding institutions suggested that a divine movement was imminent, that “God [was] beginning to stirre in the World, and to doe great things in the World.”24 But for those less enamored with new religious innovation, the changes appeared far more sinister. Thus the burgeoning religious marketplace generated an ever-​expanding list of new sects along with an accompanying cadre of heresy hunters dedicated to cataloging and refuting them.25 And to many champions of orthodoxy, it was plainly evident that “[o]‌f all Heretiques and Schismatiques the Anabaptist . . . ought to be most carefully looked unto, and severely punished.”26 Given their unsavory historical associations, it is not surprising that so-​called Anabaptists would attract a disproportionate share of rhetorical attention. For although it is now quite clear that the English baptistic groups emerging during the mid-​seventeenth century were “essentially a product of native English Puritanism,”27 this did not prevent contemporary critics from invariably drawing a clear line of continuity between the baleful memory of Münster in the past and anyone questioning paedobaptism in the present.28 Immanuel Knutton, a parish priest in Nottinghamshire, wrote that the Anabaptists then troubling the Church of England “doe ill, for they follow those pestilent hereticks called Anabaptists in Germany, who sprung up there . . . not very long since, about Luthers time.”29 The Westminster Assembly commissioner Daniel Featley attempted to demonstrate the continuity between continental Anabaptists and baptistic groups in London by prefacing his theological critiques of the latter with a lurid historical account of the former. To this end, his “Remarkable Histories of the Anabaptists” was filled with stories of continental radicals enacting the violence and sexual perversity which Featley believed would necessarily follow whenever and wherever infant baptism was rejected: for despite “all their often washing,” the Anabaptists could “neither cleanse their conscience from the guilt, nor their reputation from the staine of carnall impurity.”30 Even when the legacy of Münster was not explicitly mentioned, heresiographers still gestured toward John of Leiden’s doomed project by invoking its potent combination of carnal indulgence and an imagined millennial kingdom. It was suggested that the supposed sexual immorality of English Anabaptists was only a foretaste of a scandalous thousand-​year golden age, which they believed

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themselves to be inaugurating. In Ephraim Pagitt’s encyclopedic Heresiography (1645), the author first associates millenarian enthusiasm with Anabaptists and then describes their longed-​for millennial kingdom as one in which they “should enjoy all pleasures of the flesh.” They believe, Pagitt explained, that “after the resurrection Christs kingdome should be upon earth, and corporail; and that men should live in carnall concupiscence and lust for one thousand years.”31 Likewise, Daniel Featley connected eschatological hopes with sexual immorality by rhetorically paralleling the Baptist penchant to “defile our rivers with their impure washings” alongside Anabaptist “false prophecies and phanaticall enthusiasmes.”32 Another vivid illustration comes from Thomas Edwards, whose 1646 catalog of error, Gangraena, made him the most notorious of all the mid-​seventeenth-​ century heresy hunters. Throughout the work, Edwards devotes much attention to Anabaptists, displaying, as Ann Hughes has put it, “an unhealthy fascination with the dipping of naked women.”33 At several points, this sexualized critique of Anabaptist practice overlaps with the group’s putative millennial views. Consider the following description of the lay-​preacher Thomas Collier: There is one Collier, a great Sectarie in the West of England, a mechanicall fellow, and a great Emissarie, a Dipper, who goes about Surrey, Hampshire, and those Counties thereabouts, preaching and dipping; About a fortnight ago on the Lords day he preached at Guilford in the meeting-​ place . . . and the people came from the Towns about to heare him: This fellow, in his circuit, at an exercise where he was preaching to many women for rebaptization and dipping, made use of that Scripture to that purpose (as it is reported) Isa. 4.2. And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, Wee will eat our owne bread, and weare our owne apparell: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach. And truly, it is a sad thing there should be such Emissaries (so like the Devill their Master, compassing the earth, and going about seeking whom they may devoure).34 Here, Edwards associates baptistic perversity with the preaching of an Isaianic prophetic oracle which, in its original context, represented the eschatological judgment of God. The choice of Isaiah is significant for the book famously contains some of scripture’s most vivid and well-​known millennial descriptions, including, for instance, the image of wolves dwelling with lambs.35 And yet here, in the Anabaptist preacher’s chosen text, Isaiah is describing not a coming paradise, but rather a horrifying, apocalyptic “day of the Lord” in which “seven women shall take hold of one man.” Contemporaries interpreted this prophetic vision as a

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manifestation of divine “vengeance”—​God’s wrath has so thoroughly decimated the nation’s male warriors that desperate women are forced into polygamy.36 Thus, in Edwards’s portrayal of baptist preaching, we see a complete inversion of the traditional Christian eschatological hope:  Isaiah’s apocalyptic description of hell on earth becomes the Anabaptist minister’s description of an anti-​millennium of which he eagerly desires, and the arrival of which he seeks to hasten. Furthermore, given early modern English theologians’ identification of England with national Israel, Edwards’s citation of an Isaianic judgment oracle against Jerusalem suggests that Edwards saw the very presence of Anabaptist preachers to be a sign of divine judgment against England. In Edwards’s retelling, the Anabaptist Thomas Collier is literally enacting that which Isaiah had foretold, an immanentization of divine eschatological judgment designed to prompt a frightened and repentant response on the part of Edwards’s readership. The further description of the Anabaptists as “Emmissaries” of “the Devill their Master” confirms the interpretation:  angry with England, God had brought forth the judgments prophesied in Isaiah 4, namely Anabaptist preachers, portrayed as hyper-​sexualized agents of anti-​Christ seeking to establish an inverted millennium of transgressive sexual anarchy. Although salacious accounts of Anabaptist activity surely made for compelling early modern reading, such works were “marred by an abundance of polemical vigor and an absence of intellectual rigor” and “struck many readers as rambling hate lists.”37 As Christopher Marsh has concluded with regard to similar accusations made against so-​called Familists, “it is clearly unwise to assume that behind this historical smoke there burns the wild fire of sexual deviance.”38 Thomas Edwards’s description of Thomas Collier preaching from Isaiah 4:2, for example, is absurd on its face and almost certainly false. To acknowledge this, however, is not to suggest that Anabaptism was taken lightly by more sober voices within the mid-​seventeenth-​century religious establishment. Among respectable members of the established clergy, the rising profile of English Anabaptists was deeply unsettling, threatening both civil establishment and theological orthodoxy. As baptistic groups grew in numbers and influence, educated clergy gestured in vain toward the well-​ordered lay-​clerical relations of past decades, routinely denouncing Anabaptists and their books as so foolish and wrongheaded as to be unworthy of reply.39 “I confesse,” one wrote, “considering the grosse and manifest errours, the fantasticall conceits . . . the evident absurdities, where with the Booke is stuffed . . . it may seeme unworthy an answer.”40 And yet, this dismissive attitude was belied by the sheer volume of print which those same ministers devoted to the refutation of these arguments. Between 1642 and 1649, Church of England clergy published no fewer than fifteen treatises directly refuting Anabaptist errors. This tally includes neither pieces written by other

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separatists or semi-​separatists (for example, Samuel Chidley’s A Christian plea for infants baptisme, 1643), nor the sprawling works of heresiography which we have just discussed.41 It was this profusion of published critique which led an exasperated Robert Baillie to wonder over the obstinacy of people who persisted in error despite having been corrected “over and over publickly in print.”42 Within the pages of the more serious theological treatises, we find fewer prurient anecdotes, but no corresponding diminution of anxiety in response to baptistic ideas. One of the most influential of these theological critiques was Stephen Marshall’s Sermon of the Baptizing of Infants, in which the author aimed to “give some light to that which is now made a great controversy” and “reclaime some deceived Soules, or prevent the deceiving of others.” Published in August 1644, the piece was originally part of an ongoing lecture series delivered in Westminster Abbey before the House of Commons, a series through which the Westminster divines sought “to instruct our Auditors in all the necessary Truths of that Doctrine, which is according to godlinesse.” Speaking, in this way, on behalf of the entire assembly, Marshall’s lecture carried considerably more weight than an ordinary parish sermon, and thus serves as a helpful benchmark of mid-​ 1640s presbyterian attitudes toward the Anabaptist error.43 In keeping with the same Reformed theological tradition we examined in ­chapter 3, Marshall offered a defense of paedobaptism which presupposed a fundamental sense of continuity between the people of God across the Old and New Testaments. Whether Jewish saints in ancient Israel or Christian saints in contemporary England, those with whom God had entered into a covenantal relationship—​the “Covenant of Grace”—​were to be distinguished from all others by a specific covenantal sign: circumcision under the Old Testament administration, baptism under the New. In both cases, the sign was to be conferred not just upon the faithful, but also upon their children, a logic of covenantal inclusion that was first revealed to Abraham (Gen. 17:17), and nowhere abrogated by Christ or his apostles. The argument, of course, was not unique to Marshall, but the lucidity and concision with which he expressed it was: The Lord hath appointed and ordained a Sacrament or seale of initiation to be administred unto them who enter into Covenant with him, Circumcision for the time of that administration which was before Christs incarnation, Baptisme since the time of his incarnation; both of them the same Sarament for the spirituall part, though differing in the outward Elements; both appointed to be distinguishing signes, betwixt Gods people and the devils people; both of them the way and means of solemene entrance and admission into the Church; both of them to be administred but once, and none might be received into the Communion

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of the Church of the Jewes, until they were circumcised, nor into the Communion of the Church of the Christians until they be Baptized.44 By denying paedobaptism, Anabaptists were excluding their children from the covenantal community, denying them their rightful place among the people of God. It was this perceived act of spiritual filicide which injected such unrivalled emotional energy into what might have otherwise been a staid dispute over biblical hermeneutics. One polemical tract excoriated the “monstrous brood of Anabaptists” for their attempts “to beat back poore, helplesse, and harmlesse infants from being consecrated into Gods peculiar by baptisme.”45 For his part, Marshall suggested that in this respect, the cruelties of the Anabaptists might outpace even those perpetuated by Roman emperors who persecuted the early church; for although the Romans had committed crimes against Christian bodies, “how much more cruell is it to deny to the souls of Infants the just priviledge and benefit of the Covenant of Grace?”46 Quite unlike Edwards in Gangraena, Marshall focused the bulk of his remarks on precisely this sort of exegetical and theological defense of infant baptism, rather than the cultural hysteria over Anabaptism more generally. Yet, even in this relatively elevated context, Marshall still took time to recall the sixteenth-​century continental Anabaptists, a group which “soone proved a dangerous and turbulent Sect against that Reformation, not onely working a world of mischief about Münster and other parts of Germany, but have with this opinion, drunk in abundance of other dangerous Heresies and Blasphemies.”47 Quick to connect these past sins with England’s present trouble, Marshall averred that “this Opinion, and divers others which depend upon it” was beginning “unhappily to take place and spread among ourselves in this Kingdom” with the result that “the work of Reformation” was “likely to bee much hindered.”48 While preaching before the Westminster Assembly in 1646, Sampson Bond, a minister from Maidenhead, reminded his listeners that “all are not Blessed as Martyrs, that suffer,” but only “they that are persecuted for righteousness-​sake.” Bond proceeded to illustrate his point by contrasting worthy Christian martyrs with three odious counter-​ examples, hypothetical heretics whose executions would be, presumably, well deserved: If a Jew be scourged to death, for the abrogated rites of the ceremoniall Law:  or a Jesuited Papist hanged, drawne and quartered, according to the penall statutes of this Kingdome, for treason against the State, in the Popes quarrell: or if an Anabaptist be burnt to ashes, for his fanaticall and fantasticall revelations; hee is the Popes or his owne sacrifice, hee dyeth the Popes, or his owne Martyr, not Christs.49

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Bond’s passing, apparently uncontroversial reference to “an Anabaptist . . . burnt to ashes” and Marshall’s casual invocation of the Münsterite legacy, demonstrate that even sophisticated commentators were quite willing to connect baptistic English separatists with continental Anabaptists and to regard both groups with unmitigated contempt. During the mid-​1640s, this anti-​Anabaptist sentiment became codified as presbyterians used the power of Parliament to pursue a national church settlement in which Anabaptists would have no place. When expounding the doctrine of baptism in their 1646 confession of faith, the Westminster Assembly felt compelled to remind readers that “it be a great sin to contemn or neglect this ordinance,” an admonition which likely had English Anabaptists in view.50 In December 1647, a group of London ministers included several “Errours against the Sacrament of Baptisme” within a larger joint statement which condemned the “abominable Errours, damnable Heresies, and Horrid Blasphemies . . . which in these wicked and licentious times, are broached and maintained amongst us here in England.”51 Like so many others before it, the document invoked the specter of the continental Anabaptists, decrying “sundry odious heretikes” who dare to “vent their poisonous opinions amongst us, as if they intended to make England a common Receptacle of all the sinfull dregs of foreign Countreys, as well as of former ages.”52 At the same time, divines from the assembly had been repeatedly warning Parliament that “the dangerous Opinions of Antinomianism, and Anabaptism” were spreading unchecked and required immediate action.53 The House of Commons, having been “moved with sundry complaints of the growth and spreading of Heresies,” introduced a Blasphemy Ordinance on September 2, 1646, which was finally passed on May 2, 1648.54 The ordinance divided theological error into two tiers. First-​tier offenses included denying the existence of God, the Trinity, and Christ’s vicarious atonement; anyone propagating these errors, whether through “Preaching, Teaching, Printing, or Writing” was consigned to “suffer the pains of death.” The list of second-​tier offenses, or “other errours,” was longer and contained tenets basic to Arminianism (“that man by nature hath free will to turn to God”), Roman Catholicism (“that the soul of any man after death goeth neither to Heaven or Hell, but to Purgatory”), and the variety of religious enthusiasts who taught “that Revelations or the workings of the Spirit are a rule of Faith or Christian life, though diverse from or contrary to the written Word of God.” A person guilty of these lesser heterodoxies was given opportunity “to renounce his said Errors in the publique Congregation.” If the requisite recantation was withheld, the guilty party would then “be committed to prison” until the authorities were satisfied “that he shall not publish or maintain the said errour or errours any more.” It was into this second tier of error which the Parliament

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placed the teaching “that the baptizing of Infants is unlawfull.”55 Passage of the Blasphemy Ordinance was thoroughly in keeping with more than a century’s worth of anti-​Anabaptist rhetoric and represented the high-​water mark of the presbyterian crusade against sectarian heresy. Yet, this victory would prove short-​ lived; for even as the legislation worked its way through Parliament, wider political and cultural movements were coalescing to bring about significant changes for many of those long-​maligned as “Anabaptists.”

II As it happened, the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 was never effectively enforced. The passage of the law inspired many angry pamphlets, but few authoritative actions.56 Anabaptists, Arminians, and Roman Catholics were not arrested en masse, and even notorious anti-​Trinitarians like John Biddle managed to escape the period with their lives intact. But despite failing to make good on its promise of persecution, the Blasphemy Act did point toward England’s religious future in at least two significant ways. First, the legislation’s impotence revealed a waning enthusiasm for the sort of hard-​edged religious persecution that had characterized former eras and foreshadowed the turn toward a limited religious toleration under Oliver Cromwell. Second, the ordinance pointed the way forward by establishing two tiers of theological offenses, an approach through which the presbyterians drafting the legislation attempted to formally codify distinctions among various heresies—​some endangered the fundamentals of Christian faith, whereas others did not.57 At least in this respect, then, the ordinance’s underlying approach to religious error differed sharply from the practice of heresiographers like Thomas Edwards, who had regularly conflated religious minorities in order to better discredit them. During the 1650s, the quest to define fundamental points of doctrine and to distinguish them from those secondary issues over which godly people might disagree would be taken up with unprecedented zeal. These two senses in which the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance prefigured later developments are well appreciated by students of the period. What seems less well appreciated, however, is the striking fact that of the many errors delineated in 1648, the denial of infant baptism was the only heretical notion to be fundamentally rehabilitated under the new regime and incorporated into its religious settlement. All of the 1648 ordinance’s first-​ tier, capital offenses remained proscribed during the 1650s. And while many of the errors formerly condemned as second-​tier, noncapital offenses were tolerated, only the denial of paedobaptism was allowed to flourish openly at the highest levels of the national church—​a fact which continually fails to provoke adequate surprise and

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comment among historians of the period.58 Scholarly accounts of religion during the 1650s often include casual references to the Cromwellian triptych of religious legitimacy: “Independents, Presbyterians, and Baptists.” We are told—​usually in passing—​that these three groups enjoyed highly favored status under Cromwell’s regime, but we are not told how we might reconcile this fact with Anabaptism’s long history as Protestantism’s principal bête noire.59 For out of all the errors proscribed during previous decades, “Anabaptism” appears, on the surface, a highly surprising candidate for promotion to mainstream status. In addition to its unsavory historical associations, the denial of paedobaptism represented an existential threat to the Constantinian corupus Christianum.60 Indeed, one could plausibly argue that the baptistic position was far more disruptive to early modern theological currents than, say, Arminianism. As John Coffey has noted in his analysis of the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance, there had always been a “deep division of opinion about free will and grace in the Christian theological tradition;” “Arminianism had a good claim to be consonant with the theology of the pre-​Augustinian Fathers, and no one dared to suggest that Irenaeus or Justin Martyr was worthy of the gallows or the stake.”61 The baptistic position, however, enjoyed none of this patristic precedent and was, instead, explicitly and universally rejected by the Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, and Orthodox alike. To deny the validity of infant baptism was to stand against the united opinion of all Christendom, a dubious position which baptistic groups during the 1650s shared only with Socinians and Quakers. And yet, unlike Socinians and Quakers, baptistic congregationalists enjoyed unprecedented positions of prominence under the Cromwellian protectorate. Perhaps the lack of attention which this point has received stems from the fact that this is largely a story of silence—​what surprises is not so much positive support expressed for the baptistic position, but rather the lack of concern over the denial of infant baptism and the indifference with which “Anabaptists” were ushered into positions of political and ecclesiastical power. Such conspicuous silence is most evident when one examines the structural principles which undergird the Cromwellian national church. After dissolving the Rump Parliament in April 1653, Oliver Cromwell announced his intention to accomplish what that body evidently could not, namely “to give the people the harvest of all their labour, blood, and treasure, and to settle a due liberty both in reference to civil and spiritual things.” His vision of national spiritual renewal promised that “the fruits of a just and righteous reformation, so long prayed and wished for,” might “be in due time obtained, to the refreshing of all those good hearts who have been panting after those things.”62 The words convey a sense of frustration which must have been felt acutely by all involved in the quest for some sort of puritan religious settlement. Ten years

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had now passed since the dissolution of episcopacy. At that time, Parliament had called for an “assembly of learned and godly divines” who would help effect a “further, and more perfect Reformation than as yet hath been attained.”63 Yet, despite the intervening decade, no national church settlement had taken root; the reformation remained incomplete; and a string of stalled negotiations and stillborn proposals between 1648 and 1653 testified to the inherent difficulty of national church reform.64 What finally did emerge during the first two years of the protectorate was an ecclesiastical settlement which historians have variously celebrated as “almost certainly the most significant institutional achievement of the Interregnum regimes,” and disparaged as “an ill-​judged and badly executed” scheme “sustained through the zeal and often vindictiveness of local puritan cliques.”65 But however one assesses the effectiveness of the Cromwellian Church, one need not wonder as to its basic structure.66 Cromwell and his advisors essentially retained the already extant framework of state-​funded parish churches, but altered the nation’s religious life in three significant ways. First, they propounded a loose definition of Christian orthodoxy to which all were expected to adhere. Cromwell’s written constitution, The Instrument of Government (1653), required “[t]‌hat the Christian religion, as contained in the Scriptures, be held forth and recommended as the public profession of these nations,” a frustratingly imprecise formulation which was subject to a continuous and ultimately ineffectual process of clarification and augmentation.67 Second, Cromwell established a system of ministerial oversight in which bodies of “triers” and “ejectors” would determine who stood behind the nation’s pulpits. Third, the Cromwellian settlement granted legitimacy to gathered churches meeting outside of the ordinary parish structure. In this respect, the Protectorate simply preserved the space for non-​parochial religious life that had already been officially opened in 1650—​the year in which the Rump Parliament repealed the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity.68 Although, in practice, most people continued to worship within the parochial framework, in principle, they were no longer required to do so.69 When considered as a unity, these distinctive aspects of the Cromwellian Church effectively established three tiers of escalating legitimacy under which any particular religious expression might be classified. The lowest tier contained religious opinions that were expressly prohibited. Even the broad language of the Instrument did not allow the sort of unchecked religious freedom advocated by those whom John Coffey has described as “radical tolerationists.”70 Instead, the document specified that its provision for religious liberty was not to be “extended to Popery or Prelacy,” or to antinomians seeking to “practise licentiousness.” Nor did the Instrument promise to protect any for whom the “exercise of their religion” led “to the civil injury of others and to the actual disturbance of the public

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peace.”71 Furthermore, we must remember that the Instrument’s generous language was never intended to be the regime’s final word, and subsequent efforts to clarify the “public profession of these nations” almost always pressed to narrow the range of acceptable religious expression. Cromwell himself was adamant that “blasphemous opinions contrary to the fundamentall verities of religion” must be suppressed by the state.72 As the exiling of John Biddle and the branding of James Nayler would demonstrate, the Protectorate’s unprecedented extension of religious liberty was by no means absolute.73 The Cromwellian settlement’s middle tier contained those religious opinions which were to be neither encouraged nor suppressed but simply tolerated. Article 37 of the Instrument made provision for those who “profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgment from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth).” And although the Instrument did not define exactly who was in view, the broader point is that here the church settlement had established, in theory, a middle tier of Christians who did not agree with “the doctrine, worship, or discipline publicly held forth” and yet also, unlike those in the lower tier, were not to “be restrained from . . . the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion.”74 The imprecise wording practically ensured that the makeup of this middle tier would be perpetually in flux. Part of the problem stemmed from the unsettled status of the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance. For despite the Instrument’s seemingly unambiguous promise that “all laws, statutes and ordinances . . . contrary of the aforesaid liberty, shall be esteemed as null and void,” the enumeration of error set down in 1648 was still occasionally invoked.75 When John Biddle’s allies pleaded that the Instrument’s religious liberty clause must surely trump the older legislation, Cromwell is said to have replied “that the Instrument was never intended to maintaine and protect blasphemers from the punishment of the lawes in force against them [and] neither would hee.”76 The Quakers offer an example of a religious minority which stood in a particularly ambiguous relationship to the state. With the charismatic George Fox leading an aggressive evangelistic campaign, the Quakers enjoyed impressive growth during the 1650s and their numbers swelled to somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000 by the decade’s end.77 And yet, in spite of—​or perhaps because of—​their impressive numerical gains, Quakers were regularly harassed, marginalized, and persecuted by a state that might have, based upon the letter of the law, allowed the “exercise of their religion.”78 This highlights the degree to which the particulars of a broad, theoretical religious liberty were, in practice, decided at the local level. For “local magistrates were more likely to oppose the Quakers than support them, and the de facto toleration of the Cromwellian regime was dependent on the whims of such men.”79 Thus the composition of the

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Cromwellian middle tier was intrinsically fluid, and left many religious minorities in a precarious position in regards to the state church. But if the Cromwellian settlement was to tolerate some dissenters while suppressing others, the very language of dissent would seem to require an established, publicly promulgated theological standard from which dissent would be possible. This hypothetical, state-​sponsored statement of orthodoxy represented the top tier of Cromwellian religious legitimacy; it was, as the Instrument put it, “the public profession of these nations.” In touting a “public profession,” the Instrument implied a positive articulation of doctrine that necessarily went beyond the simple “faith in God by Jesus Christ” required of those in the Cromwellian second tier—​if the “public profession” did not encompass a more fulsome articulation of orthodoxy than did “faith in God by Jesus Christ” then the state would not need to offer legal protection for those diverging from the former while holding to the latter. Although the Instrument itself did not explicitly name any specific doctrinal issues, contemporary observers recognized that its wording clearly “intimated or implied, that there is a Publick profession intended to be held forth by the Magistrate” which “shall extend both to Doctrine, and Worship or Discipline.”80 In other words, the Cromwellian settlement envisioned a theological platform which would receive some level of magisterial recognition and yet, would not include all the various alternative theological positions to which the regime would extend religious liberty. The baptistic position—​the insistence that only professing believers are fit subjects for baptism—​was located here within this top-​tier of Cromwellian theological legitimacy. Under Cromwell, a theological position almost universally condemned throughout Christendom and pronounced illegal in England by the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance was not simply tolerated, but actually elevated to highly favored status. As we have already noted, the promotion of believers-​only baptism is largely a story of silence—​what is striking is the absence of the very sort of denunciations that the past 150 years of English history would have led us to expect. Yet, positive support for the claim that the Cromwellian Church gave its blessing to baptistic sacramentology can be found along at least three main lines of evidence. First, on August 24, 1653, the Commonwealth had already created legal space for baptistic practice when the Barebones Parliament passed “An Act touching Marriages . . . and also touching Births.” This legislation required that civil, rather than ecclesiastical, authorities keep “a true and just accompt [i.e. account] . . . of all such Marriages, and also of the Births of Children . . . within this Commonwealth.” The effect was to decouple the birth records kept by the state and the baptismal records kept by the church. Unbaptized infants would be recognized by the state in precisely the same manner as their baptized

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counterparts, and the decision to baptize an infant was, at least as far as the law was concerned, transformed into a purely elective affair. And although, in practice, the 1653 legislation may have promoted general confusion regarding the sacrament’s necessity and its role in public life, in theory, the measure represented a major ideological victory for baptistic congregationalists.81 With a single stroke, Parliament both legitimized the decision not to baptize one’s infant and severed the long-​standing Christendom-​connection between one’s entrance into the state and one’s entrance into the church.82 Second, as leading congregational and presbyterian divines advanced proposals for uniting the godly and clarifying the “public profession of these nations,” they never condemned the Anabaptist error or insisted upon paedobaptism. The attempt to specify a doctrinal platform for Interregnum England had begun in earnest in March 1652 when a group of ministers appointed by the Rump Parliament—​almost all of them paedobaptists—​published The Humble Proposals. While this document outlined a national church structure, a second edition published in December 1652 included sixteen theological propositions framed as Some Principles of Christian Religion, without the Beliefe of Which . . . Salvation Is Not to Be Obtained.83 Despite defining orthodoxy only in terms of a broad Trinitarian Protestantism, these documents provoked loud protest from Roger Williams and others for whom any coercion of conscience was a step too far.84 Yet, under the Protectorate and its Instrument of Government, the ministers involved moved not toward, but away from religious liberty, as successive attempts to articulate the “public profession of these nations” constricted the circle of acceptable doctrine. Early in 1654, a coalition of congregational and presbyterian divines attempted to revise the previous list of fundamental doctrines, the result being circulated among MPs under the title A New Confession of Faith, or the First Principles of the Christian Religion. Unlike the earlier attempt to define national orthodoxy, this document narrowed its soteriological scope, insisting, contra Arminian teaching, that human “nature is wholly corrupted, disabled to all that is spiritually good, in bondage to sin, at enmity with God, prone to all that is evil.”85 On December 7, 1654, the House of Commons took an even more aggressive posture by resolving “That the True Reformed, Protestant, Christian Religion  .  .  .  and no other, shall be asserted and maintained, as the publick Profession of these Nations.”86 The “publick profession” was thus to be specifically “Reformed” Christianity rather than the previously stipulated generic “true Christian religion.” Yet, at no time in any of these debates did anyone suggest that the “publick profession” ought to include a denial of baptistic sacramentology nor even an affirmation of paedobaptism. In light of the claim to represent “the True Reformed, Protestant Religion,” this omission is startling. For despite their

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apparent claim to the contrary, by tacitly endorsing the baptistic position, the Cromwellian divines had put themselves at odds with every major Reformed confession yet published.87 Indeed, without exception, every document cited within the 1643 Harmony of the Confessions of the Faith of the Christian and Reformed Churches explicitly endorsed paedobaptism. By failing to do the same while claiming for itself the “Reformed Protestant” label, the Cromwellian Church made an unprecedented break with the tradition in which it claimed to stand.88 Third, the panel of “triers” and “ejectors” established to enforce orthodoxy throughout the nations’ pulpits included baptistic ministers and laypeople among its ranks. The Instrument of Government had demanded a national church led by “able and painful teachers, for instructing the people, and for discovery and confutation of error, heresy and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine.”89 In response to this need for competent clergy, two ordinances were passed in March and August of 1654, which, when taken together, represented a slightly modified version of a scheme originally proposed in The Humble Proposals of 1652. The first ordinance established a centralized, London-​based committee of thirty-​eight triers, a group tasked with approving “able and faithful Preachers throughout this Nation.” The second complemented the first by creating local committees of ejectors who were empowered to remove “Scandalous, Ignorant, and insufficient ministers” from their benefices. Men of baptistic conviction were appointed to both of these ecclesiastical bodies. Henry Jessey, John Tombes, Edward Cresset, Daniel Dyke,90 and William Packer served as triers, while Henry Lawrence, Hanserd Knollys, and Robert Lilburne served as ejectors for Cambridge, Lincoln, and the northern counties respectively.91 By allowing “Anabaptists” to serve on these committees, those responsible for the Cromwellian Church unequivocally signaled that it would be perfectly acceptable for state-​funded ministers within the national church to deny paedobaptism and to teach the same to their parishioners. For whatever “the public profession of these nations” might have entailed in theory, in practice, the triers and ejectors would have to determine the boundaries of “error, heresy and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine.” By appointing prominent baptistic congregationalists to participate in this endeavor, the state gave its most explicit approbation to both the baptistic position and those holding to it.92

III With its bold, sweeping language, the Instrument of Government promised an expansive church settlement that would unite the godly into a cohesive Reformed, Protestant whole. And although the desired religious clarity was never actually achieved in practice, this should not distract us from the surprising way in which the theoretical national church formally rehabilitated the Anabaptist error,

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allowing—​and even encouraging—​a once universally reviled heresy to flourish uncensored. For well over one hundred years, from the beginning of England’s sixteenth-​century reformation through to the passage of the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance, to reject paedobaptism was to reject any place within the mainstream of England’s collective religious life. For generations of English Protestants, “Anabaptists” were “stout Champions for Hell” and no one “but a stupid dolt, and perverse wrangler” could possibly “conclude, that infants of Christian parents should bee debarred from the Sacrament of Baptisme in their infancy.”93 Yet, this century-​long course changed dramatically and suddenly during the 1650s, as baptistic views were not simply tolerated, but actually incorporated into official ecclesiastical structures and given preferred status within the top tier of Cromwellian religious legitimacy. The most obvious explanation for this change is that the period saw an overarching relaxation of religious persecution more generally, and a rising tide of toleration naturally lifted all boats. If we accept this as our starting point, it is this wider expansion of religious liberty which requires explanation, not the fact that “Anabaptists” were included in it. All of this, of course, is perfectly true and probably explains the nonchalance with which historians refer to the inclusion of “Baptists” under the Cromwellian religious settlement. Upon closer inspection, however, while it is true to say that “Anabaptists” enjoyed greater religious liberty because everyone was enjoying greater religious liberty, this simple explanation is incomplete and unsatisfying. To understand why, we must bear in mind that the movement toward state-​ sanctioned religious liberty never seriously considered allowing any and all forms of religious expression. Historians have been endlessly fascinated by Cromwell’s idiosyncratic approach to religion, and clearly the force of his personality had an outsized impact on changing religious attitudes during the 1650s. In turn, Cromwell’s sensitivity to the religious needs of tender consciences was shaped by a military context in which the exigencies of war inevitably and awkwardly pressed together men of seemingly incompatible religious dispositions.94 And yet, as Blair Worden and others have noted, Cromwell was not nearly the enlightened champion of religious liberty that earlier scholarship sometimes made him out to be: “Repeatedly in the 1650s his words suggest that ‘God’s peculiar’ were to be found exclusively, or almost exclusively, within three groups: Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists.”95 And as we have already observed, at every stage of the national toleration debate, there were lines drawn to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable, the orthodox from the heterodox, the legal from the illegal. Most religious ideas that were considered heterodox during the 1640s remained so during the 1650s. Thus, to understand the movement of any given idea from heretical to acceptable

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requires one to take seriously both that idea’s particular genealogy and the possibility that things might have turned out differently—​the possibility that perhaps, as the Cromwellian Church progressed, the “Anabaptist” error might have remained proscribed and persecuted alongside Socinianism, “Popery,” and “Prelacy.” To do otherwise is to risk lapsing into what Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant have called “present-​centredness:” for while it may seem obvious in retrospect that the denial of paedobaptism was a lesser error destined for toleration, such a conclusion would have been decidedly less obvious to the men and women reading Edwards’s Gangraena during the mid-​1640s.96 So, while it is certainly true that the 1650s witnessed a general move away from religious persecution which would have indiscriminately benefited everyone along the heretical spectrum, the fact that the state never endorsed a blanket toleration for all religious belief renders such an observation insufficient to explain why any particular error was prescribed, proscribed, or merely tolerated. Moreover, after an initial burst of enthusiasm for religious liberty,97 the trajectory during the 1650s bent consistently toward an ever-​narrower definition of acceptable theological opinion. As the national doctrinal debate took its course, the various errors proscribed during the 1640s experienced different fates during the 1650s. Thus, while understanding the general movement toward enlarged religious liberty is necessary, it cannot sufficiently explain why the state church continued to resist certain heretical notions while promoting others to mainstream status. One helpful way forward, then, would be to shift one’s investigative emphasis away from a consideration of religious liberty per se and focus instead on how specific doctrines were received differently over time.98 Such an approach yields fruit, for example, when one compares the very different receptions given during the period to Anabaptism and Arminianism. Throughout the 1650s, congregational and presbyterian ministers within the national church worked to suppress Arminian doctrine and harass Arminian preachers. The updated Fundamentals in 1654 included specifically anti-​Arminian language, and during the decade’s first five years, leading divines published numerous polemical works excoriating Arminian theology.99 By contrast, John Owen, arguably the most influential theologian of the period and a blistering critic of Arminianism, “never attacked Baptists in print.”100 Perceived anti-​Arminian bias led men such as John Goodwin and John Price to become vocal critics of the Cromwellian Triers, fearing that this body “would prevent godly Arminians from entering the public ministry.”101 In his Triers  .  .  .  Tried and Cast (1657), Goodwin contended that no minister who believed that Christ “gave himself as a ransome for all men” or “that God reprobated no man . . . from eternity” could ever receive state approval: “is not (I say) the professing and owning of these most worthy truths (with others

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confederate with them) a bar against all spirituall or ecclesiastick promotion in the course and processe of their consistory?” Indeed, Goodwin caustically remarked that “thieves and murderers” were more likely to receive approval than would a convinced Arminian.102 For such rhetoric, Goodwin earned the scorn and condemnation of the Cromwellian state church, a verdict captured in Marchamont Needham’s dismissal of Goodwin as “but a mere Brat of Arminius.”103 Baptistic congregationalists, by contrast, suffered no such prejudice and instead occupied choice seats among both the Triers and Ejectors. The markedly different fates of Arminianism and “Anabaptism” become even more pronounced when we consider how the former, but conspicuously not the latter, was deliberately conflated with the rising Socinian menace. As Sarah Mortimer has shown, from 1654 onward, theological tastemakers led by John Owen “wanted to exclude Remonstrant and Arminian views from the public church” and “the best way to promote a strictly Calvinist settlement  .  .  .  was to link all versions of Remonstrant-​style theology to Socinianism and to anti-​ Trinitarian heresy.”104 Socinianism was regarded as a particularly flagrant violation of Christian orthodoxy, and thus to the degree that it overlapped with Arminianism, Owen and company could use odium attached to the former to more thoroughly discredit the latter. But this raises questions as to why the denial of infant baptism was not treated in a similar manner. For in addition to Anabaptism’s long history of disrepute among magisterial Protestants, the denial of infant baptism was at least as closely intertwined with Socinianism as anything taught by the Arminian Remonstrants. Faustus Socinus and his followers were adamantly baptistic. Socinus regarded “the practice of Infant Baptism as a great and hurtful error,” and taught that nothing “could be more plain, and evident from reason and Scripture, than that . . . the baptised person should be a believer.”105 The sixteenth-​century Racovian Catechism was likewise unequivocal in answering the question posed by paedobaptism: Q. Do Infants belong to that Rite [i.e. baptism]? A. By no means, for neither have we in the Scripture either precept, or example thereof; nor can they, as the thing it self sheweth, acknowledge Christ for their Lord.106 When an English translation of the Racovian Catechism was published, Parliament appointed a group of influential divines led by John Owen to investigate the document’s “principal blasphemous Errors.” Upon receiving the committee’s report on April 2, 1652, Parliament summarily ordered “all the printed Copies of the Book . . . be burnt.” The chief objection, of course, was to the catechism’s anti-​ trinitarianism, but the divines also cited “many other gross Errors concerning

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Predestination, the Fall of Man, Christ adding to the Commandments, Free-​will, the Priesthood and Sacrifice of Christ, Faith, Justification,” and, most significantly for our present purpose, “Baptism.”107 As the search for a religious settlement unspooled across the 1650s, almost all of the errors enumerated here were pursued and persecuted by leading ministers within the Cromwellian Church, the dual campaigns against Socinianism and Arminianism intertwining and overlapping as polemicists saw fit. And yet, the most authoritative voices within the national church never attacked the Anabaptist error nor attempted to suppress it, all despite anti-​paedobaptism’s strong association with the very Socinian platform being then used as a pretense to suppress Arminianism. Rather than being persecuted by national authorities, many proponents of believer’s baptism were appeased and courted. On July 7, 1653, for example, baptistic congregationalists William Kiffen and William Packer were named by the Council of State along with several others as ministers whose “gifts and abilities” were determined to be “of great use in the Church.” Because the baptistic ministers were “eminent for godliness” they were to be given “free use of any pulpits to preach in, as the Lord gives opportunity.”108 What is clear, then, is that the various heterodoxies of the 1640s were not uniformly maligned during the 1650s—​authorities continued to condemn Socinian and Arminian ideas, but no longer censured the denial of paedobaptism. Less clear, however, is why this happened and why it took on the particular shape that it did. One plausible answer is that the outsized presence of baptistic ideas within the army forced the regime’s hand. The disproportionately high numbers of “Baptists” in the New Model Army has been well documented.109 This trend was especially pronounced in Ireland, where soldiers and officers holding baptistic views established themselves in garrison towns such as Dublin, Waterford, Clonmel, Cork, Kinsale, Limerick, and Galway.110 One could argue that Cromwell had little choice but to placate a movement that was so thoroughly entrenched within his own military structures. The accommodation of a growing baptistic movement was thus more an acknowledgment of reality than an expression of a wider ecumenical vision. All of this is surely correct as far it goes, and the proliferation of baptistic voices within the army certainly smoothed their path to religious respectability. But, while the role of the army ought not to be overlooked, this alone cannot fully account for the rehabilitation of Anabaptism during the 1650s. First, the regime could have begrudgingly permitted baptistic views without elevating their leading representatives to positions of ecclesiastical influence. As we have already seen, within the Cromwellian settlement’s implicit three-​tier framework of religious legitimacy, baptistic congregationalists operated within the top tier, helping to steer the nation’s religious course, rather than being merely tolerated.

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And second, if we explain the rehabilitation of the Anabaptist error exclusively in terms of realpolitik concessions to a powerful contingent within the army, then we leave unaddressed the more fundamental question of why so many highly placed individuals within the army were repudiating paedobaptism in the first place. In other words, to argue that “Baptists” enjoyed toleration because military men like, say, Colonel John Hutchinson had embraced baptistic views by the mid-​1640s,111 does nothing to explain the shifting intellectual and social contexts that would have made Hutchinson’s baptistic conversion a viable intellectual and social possibility. Thus, while the well-​established baptistic presence within the army undoubtedly played a role, a more complete explanation of Anabaptism’s Interregnum rehabilitation must lay greater stress on the network of personal relationships in which baptistic congregationalists had been securely embedded since the late 1630s. As the first three chapters of the book have demonstrated, there simply was no single religious group in mid-​seventeenth-​century England to which one might coherently apply the label “Baptists.” This term emerged slowly, initially deployed by Quaker polemicists in the 1650s and only gradually becoming a meaningful self-​identifier as it was appropriated by eighteenth-​century Baptist churchmen looking to solidify their denomination as a collective home for any and all who denied paedobaptism irrespective of disagreement over many other issues. But during the English Revolution, no such denomination existed. Disagreement over paedobaptism was but one discrete doctrinal controversy, and to deny the legitimacy of the practice did not immediately imbue one with a new sense of pan-​Baptist identity. Instead, we see that many rejecting paedobaptism were practitioners of the Congregational Way and that they understood their new sacramentology as the only consistent outworking of their congregational ecclesiology. When one uses the above reconstruction as a lens through which to evaluate the changing reception of anti-​paedobaptism during the 1650s, that piece of the puzzle missing in traditional accounts of Cromwellian religious liberty comes into focus:  baptistic congregationalists were a part of the new religious settlement because, as we established in ­chapters 2 and 3, they had always been theologically and personally allied with the now regnant congregational divines. Henry Jessey and his circle of baptistic congregationalists relied upon a well-​ established sense of personal and theological affinity as they took up places in the new church settlement alongside leading congregational ministers and long-​ standing friends, a group which included Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, and Praisegod Barbon. Once we abandon the anachronistic notion that to embrace believer’s baptism was to simultaneously embrace a corresponding sense of pan-​Baptist identity, we can grasp why the congregational capture of

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Cromwell’s Church inevitably entailed a softening of anti-​Anabaptist sentiment: congregationalists had been accustomed to debates over believer’s baptism within their ranks since at least the early 1640s, and congregationalists had always counted Calvinistic, otherwise orthodox “Baptists” as fellow travelers and ecclesiastical allies. This helps explain why Cromwell, in March 1654, could describe his newly appointed ministerial Triers as “persons, both of the Presbyterian and Independent judgments, men of as known ability, piety, and integrity, as I believe any this nation hath.”112 Cromwell understood the Triers to be composed of two groups, presbyterians and independents. And yet, as we have seen, because the Triers included several high-​profile baptistic members, historians have preferred to talk about the Cromwellian Church in terms of three groups: presbyterians, independents, and “Baptists.” Cromwell’s conflation of baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists under the single heading “Independent” is explicable only when we recognize that departure from paedobaptism was a discrete doctrinal shift embraced by many congregationalists and not, in and of itself, constitutive of a new ecclesiastical identity. Thus, to talk about the Cromwellian Church tolerating “Baptists” is misleading. “Baptists” as a group were not tolerated, because “Baptists” as a coherent group did not exist during the mid-​seventeenth century. Instead, it is more helpful to say that the Cromwellian Church tolerated the denial of paedobaptism. Arminian doctrine, which was surely just as central to many “Baptist” churches as was their sacramentology, was not tolerated in the same way, and neither were the “Baptist” churches in which Arminian doctrine was taught. The “Baptists” who enjoyed prominence and power under Cromwell were those Calvinistic, baptistic congregationalists who had always been allied with and, in many cases, evolved directly from the wider congregationalist movement. The Cromwellian Church was dominated by congregationalists and these ministers naturally included their baptistic congregationalist allies in the religious settlement which they were busy constructing. Many of the chief architects of the emerging settlement—​men like Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Sidrach Simpson—​had worked with baptistic congregationalists through the 1640s and their two movements were often inextricably interwoven. The highest placed baptistic congregationalist within the new government was the Lord President of Cromwell’s Council of State, Henry Lawrence. Lawrence nicely illustrates both the surprising prominence of anti-​paedobaptists during the Interregnum and the underlying relationship between baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists which made that prominence inevitable after 1649. For Lawrence had served from the late 1630s to the early 1640s as an elder in the Arnhem congregational church pastored by Thomas Goodwin. Just before returning to England in 1646, Lawrence published a treatise Of Baptisme

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in which he defended believers-​only baptism. During the 1640s, then, Lawrence and Goodwin served together in congregational ministry, while during the 1650s, they served together to build a more godly church and state.113 As the mid-​seventeenth century progressed, Lawrence and Goodwin followed a similar path, rising together and working toward their common goal of building a national church organized according to Reformed, puritan, and congregational principles—​whether the individual congregations were baptistic, paedobaptistic, or some mixture of the two, was a matter of relative indifference. This explains why the rehabilitation of the Anabaptist error seems, in retrospect, like such a tacit affair. The ecclesiastical authorities never released a pronouncement declaring the legitimacy of believer’s baptism. Instead, the issue just seemed to quietly disappear from the ledger of offending views as congregationalists took control of the national church and brought their baptistic allies along with them. Peter Lake has drawn our attention to the way in which the lines demarcating orthodoxy and heterodoxy among early modern puritans often had less to do with concrete positions and more to do with “a sense of ideological and emotional affinity, of being on the right and, indeed, on the same side—​of being, in some fundamental sense, in agreement.” It was this more nebulous sense of who was included and excluded, Lake argues, that “allowed particular disagreements, even on quite central doctrines like justification, to be organized under the sign of doctrinally peripheral or, in Whitgift’s priceless phrase, the inherently “disputable” and hence managed and controlled.”114 A similar dynamic was at work during the 1650s, as the denial of paedobaptism was contextualized within the long-​standing theological affinities linking baptistic congregationalists with their mainstream congregational allies. Such a context fostered Lake’s “sense of ideological and emotional affinity,” which then allowed baptistic disagreements to be reclassified as adiaphora. The rise of congregationalism during the 1650s helps explain the rehabilitation of the Anabaptist error in another, more subtle way. As the leaders of the Interregnum church made clear that England’s ecclesiastical future was to be congregational, the consequences of denying paedobaptism naturally grew less dire. This is because, as c­hapter  3 argued, paedobaptism naturally reinforced and was, in turn, reinforced by a comprehensive, compulsory, national church. From the beginning of the Reformation, “the founders of protestantism held that the Church must be a comprehensive society, embracing and supervising both the elect and the reprobate, the zealous and the sluggish.”115 Such an arrangement complemented universal paedobaptism perfectly, and thus to embrace the Anabaptist error and its concomitant ecclesiastical voluntarism was to endanger both civic and ecclesiastical order. But because the Congregational Way had already uncoupled membership in the church from membership in the state, the

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practical consequences of denying paedobaptism were greatly reduced. Obviously, congregationalists still wanted an overarching national church structure in the sense of doctrinal uniformity and financial support, but on the more fundamental underlying point of a Constantinian corpus Christianum in which all citizens were covenantally bound to God and one another, the Congregational Way marked a stunning and unprecedented ideological rupture with the Magisterial Reformation. This discontinuity created a context in which one might plausibly deny the validity of paedobaptism without simultaneously denying the validity of the nation-​state itself. For the first time, one could conceptualize disagreement over the proper subject of baptism as one discrete piece of doctrine upon which Christians of goodwill might legitimately disagree.

IV Although it has generated relatively little scholarly attention, the rehabilitation of “Anabaptism” during the English Revolution represented a significant break with Europe’s religious and cultural past. A national church which did not merely allow but actually promoted, albeit in a limited way, the denial of paedobaptism was unprecedented within Christendom. For centuries, as David F. Wright has observed, “invariable paedobaptism was essential to the preservation of the unified Christian community” for this provided “the minimum basis for treating the whole population as a single, Christian, community.”116 Prior to Cromwellian England, no Christian kingdom had explicitly severed the link between infant baptism and one’s participation in the civil-​ecclesiastical order. That this startling fact has been so often passed over without comment suggests again the subtle power of privileging the present while explaining the past. A world in which the baptism of children represented a matter of pressing cultural and political significance seems hopelessly distant. Yet, the world prior to Cromwell’s rise was precisely such a place, and thus the lack of official opprobrium with which the Anabaptist error was received under his rule cries out for analysis and explanation. This chapter has attempted to begin that task by sketching Anabaptism’s fall-​and-​rise story in its English context, documenting both the hostility with which the denial of infant baptism was received prior to the 1650s, and the surprising respect it commanded during the interregnum. The implications of this analysis are farther reaching than they might initially appear, and our reassessment of baptism during the period opens up several directions for further study. First, the preceding analysis reminds us that early modern theological disputes were always highly dependent upon the contexts in which they occurred and students of religious and intellectual history must guard against the temptation to reimagine religious development as a series of disembodied ideas clashing

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against one another. Personalities and politics, accidents and contingencies, were often as decisive in determining theological outcomes as were careful exegesis and rigorous logic.117 In the case of Anabaptism’s changing reputation during the 1650s, we find a case study in how extra-​theological factors can affect theological conclusions. Acceptance of the Anabaptist error did not spread by means of sustained doctrinal debate, but through personal alliances and new political arrangements. Second, the preceding analysis helps us to better understand the nature of religious liberty under Cromwell by highlighting just how limited it actually was. For when one first appreciates the degree to which baptistic congregationalists enjoyed religious liberty largely because of their long-​standing association and conceptual mingling with mainstream congregationalists, one is then in a position to appreciate the degree to which the supposedly generous religious lib­ erty extended under Cromwell was something of a mirage. Of all the errors proscribed by the 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance, only the notion “that the baptizing of Infants is unlawfull” was to be fundamentally rehabilitated and incorporated into the national “public profession” under Cromwell.118 Anti-​trinitarian theology remained anathema; antinomianism was still condemned; seditious religion was still suppressed; Arminianism was perpetually under pressure from ecclesiastical elites; and Roman Catholicism was regarded as still being as dangerous as ever to church and state alike. Only the Anabaptist error was formally vindicated, and this rehabilitation of anti-​paedobaptism was the major doctrinal change separating the puritan program during the 1640s and its counterpart during the 1650s. The feud between congregationalists and presbyterians had concluded and the independents had won. They quickly made peace with their former antagonists—​John Owen dismissed their disagreements “about Church society” as “minute differences”119—​with presbyterians having to relax their anti-​ Anabaptist stance as a part of the terms of surrender. When viewed from this perspective, the Interregnum’s vaunted religious liberty seems far less impressive than it did when one was allowed to imagine toleration being extended wholesale to a theologically diverse group of sectarian “Baptists.” Third and finally, we are reminded again that congregationalists and baptistic congregationalists were far closer during the mid-​seventeenth century than the historiography would suggest. As congregationalists steadily rose to power during the Interregnum, baptistic congregationalists rose along with them. By the 1650s, it becomes increasingly problematic to group baptistic congregationalists among the “sects” and “radicals” as historians have long been wont to do. On the contrary, men like Henry Jessey, Hanserd Knollys, Henry Lawrence, and William Kiffen took leading roles in the nation’s ecclesiastical-​ political life and baptistic congregationalists were firmly ensconced within

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the Protectorate’s top-​tier of religious legitimacy. Yet, of course, at the same time, many baptistic churches believed fervently in the very sort of Arminian doctrine that Cromwellian divines like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin were keen to condemn. These churches—​often labeled “General Baptist”—​ were developing along a distinctive theological trajectory and were only superficially similar to the baptistic congregationalists then taking part in the effort to construct a nationwide religious settlement. This, in turn, points back to the inadequacy of “Baptist” as a generic label for any and all denying paedobaptism. Baptistic congregationalists, Quakers, Socinians, and so-​called General Baptists all eschewed paedobaptism during the 1650s. Yet, all of these groups experienced very different fates during the Interregnum, with only Calvinistic, baptistic congregationalists being prominently incorporated into the state church. Our histories of the period must therefore strive to listen more sensitively to the distinctive theological timbres which differentiated the various groups opposed to paedobaptism so that we might better appreciate the period as a whole.

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“Years of Freedome, by God’s Blessing Restored” Baptistic Self-​Identity during the Interregnum

On January 6, 1649, just two days after the English Parliament had declared “[t]‌hat the People are, under God, the Original of all just Power,” the House of Commons ordered the creation of a new Great Seal to formally acknowledge the occasion. The seal upon which they eventually settled declared that 1649 was the “First Year of Freedome by Gods Blessing Restored,” a provocative claim that would soon be underwritten by an even more provocative act in the execution of Charles I.1 And yet, beyond the seal’s rhetorical bombast, the connection between the new political regime and a new sense of God-​ordained freedom would have seemed very real to religious dissenters who had long operated under the threat of state persecution. For baptistic congregationalists, the new era promised the hope of relief from the May 1648 Blasphemy Ordinance that had criminalized the promulgation of baptistic doctrine, and, more ambitiously, the possibility that baptistic congregations and their leaders might have a role to play in the construction of a new religious settlement. Securing such a role would, however, require tact and political maneuvering; it would require those baptistic congregationalists inclined toward respectability to continue distancing themselves from the more disruptive elements of religious radicalism, and to present themselves as peaceable, sober, and godly. And even as that heady “First Year of Freedome” was still in its infancy, a prominent group of baptistic congregationalists in London was given a chance to do just that. On the morning of Sunday, March 25, 1649, congregational worship services across the capital were unexpectedly interrupted by members of a radical political movement, a group known by the term of abuse, “Levellers.”2 Upon entering the meeting halls, Leveller provocateurs proceeded to read aloud their latest

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egalitarian manifesto, a lively assault upon the ascendant political regime generally and the leadership of the New Model Army specifically. The controversial petition, The Second Part of Englands New-​Chains Discovered, was already publicly available in print, but Leveller leaders were now marketing their intellectual wares directly to what they had hoped would be a sympathetic audience.3 But they were mistaken. Shortly afterwards, on April 1, a group of baptistic congregationalists led by William Kiffen presented a petition of their own before the House of Commons, a document entitled “The humble Petition and Representation of several Churches of God in London, commonly, though falsly, called Anabaptists.” Speaking before the assembled Parliament, Kiffen explained that the Leveller propaganda had been “brought to our Congregations, and publickly read in some of our publick Meetings, without our Consent or Approbation.” And far from welcoming the intrusion, Kiffen insisted that he and his co-​religionists had “openly opposed” the document, feeling bound “in Conscience of our Duty to God and you . . . to disown and disavow it.”4 After considering Kiffen’s appeal and the petition he carried, the Speaker lavished praise upon the “Anabaptists.” He extolled their “good Affection to the Parliament and Publick,” their “Disposition to live peaceably, and in Submission to Civil Magistracy,” and their most pleasing “Expressions” which, in the estimation of the House, were “very christian, and seasonable.” The Speaker concluded by promising Kiffen, his associates, “and other Christians, walking answerable to such Professions as, in this Petition” that they would be “assure[ed] . . . of Liberty and Protection . . . in all things consistent with Godliness, Honesty, and the Civil Peace.”5 Some historians have presented this exchange as a major turning point in the history of English “Baptists,” and perhaps also independent and dissenting churches more generally. For Murray Tolmie, the incident stands as something of a synecdoche for the larger Triumph of the Saints which his monograph describes. The formal repudiation of radicalism and the public commendation from Parliament “suggests” to Tolmie “that at this critical period these churches had found a unity and a sense of purpose,” and that “[f ]‌or the Baptists a long campaign was over, the stigma of ‘Anabaptism’ removed, and they rested securely in the bosom of the new Commonwealth.”6 He is surely right to invest the moment with a sense of significance, to see it as the beginning of something new. Indeed, the burden of the previous chapter was to advance an argument that was, in many respects, similar—​although not identical—​to Tolmie’s. The key difference arises from the fact that, as was discussed in c­ hapter 4, the 1650s did not actually deliver religious freedom to all who sought it, nor even to all “Baptists.” The “Baptists” involved in the Interregnum ecclesiastical settlement were invariably those of the Calvinistic variety that I have described as baptistic congregationalists; other baptistically inclined separatists were left on the outside

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looking in. As Calvinistic baptistic congregationalists like Henry Jessey, Henry Lawrence, and William Kiffen were serving the Cromwellian regime in various official capacities, Arminian “General Baptists” like Thomas Grantham were complaining of persecution under “Cromwell’s usurpation.”7 Thus, the transition from kingdom to commonwealth conferred a new respectability, not on “Anabaptists” per se, but rather on Anabaptism’s eponymous error: it was the rejection of paedobaptism that was tolerated, not necessarily all who advocated on its behalf. Thus, 1649 brought not so much the Triumph of the Saints, as the triumph of those otherwise orthodox puritan congregationalists who wished to forgo infant baptism within their own assemblies. The new regime opened up the possibility for a baptistic form of congregational practice, but did not extend a blanket toleration to all “Anabaptists.” This insight undercuts the often unquestioned historiographical assumption that one can meaningfully speak of a “Baptist” movement during the mid-​seventeenth century, and suggests instead that debate over infant baptism was a discrete point of doctrinal controversy, one more issue over which English Protestants were divided. Those who came to similar conclusions about baptism did not necessarily perceive one another as allies, nor were they necessarily regarded as such by others. The previous chapter advanced this argument by examining how the Interregnum state viewed baptistic congregationalists. This chapter will analyze how baptistic congregationalists viewed themselves during the same period—​ a turn from perception to self-​perception. At almost any previous point in England’s history, the “Anabaptist” William Kiffen’s warm reception before Parliament would have been unthinkable, and the incident underscored the new political context in which baptistic congregationalists found themselves in 1649. For them, it truly was, in a meaningful sense, the “First Year of Freedome by Gods Blessing Restored,” and this chapter will explore the uses to which that new freedom was put. Building upon the interpretative framework developed over the previous four chapters, this chapter will argue that the rejection of paedobaptism did not create anything approaching a unified “Baptist” identity or movement during the 1650s, but, rather, generated a series of interlocking intellectual and practical challenges with which baptistic congregationalists were forced to grapple. Different baptistic churches responded in very different ways, and, as a result, by the middle of the decade, baptistic congregationalists were divided into two diverging streams: one was open, irenic, and ecumenical, the other narrow, combative, and sectarian; the first stream looked to solidify its connection to mainstream congregationalism, while the second began to seek distance from it.8 This split began during the late 1640s, but accelerated rapidly after 1649. Historians have often struggled to adequately account for this diversity in practice

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and attitude, at times flattening distinctions to present a misleadingly uniform picture of a coherent “Baptist” movement, while at other times making too much of the distinctions and effectively excluding the more ecumenical baptistic congregationalists from inclusion within the “Baptist” camp. An example of the latter tendency is furnished by Henry Jessey’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in which the thoroughly-​baptistic Jessey is described as a generic “nonconformist minister.”9 Counterintuitively, both of these seemingly incompatible errors actually work to reinforce one another. This is because both are predicated upon the assumption that one can meaningfully and helpfully describe the ideas, actions, and associations of “the Baptists” in mid-​seventeenth-​ century England: to exclude from the “Baptist” camp those who do not fit one’s preconceived “Baptist” mold, and to flatten distinctions among those who do, are, in effect, simply the negative and positive aspects of a single intellectual move. This chapter seeks to recover a sense of contingency and fluidity among baptistic congregationalists during the Interregnum period. Some moved further away from the mainstream of English religious life and toward a more well-​defined sense of baptistic identity, one in which believer’s baptism became ever more deeply entrenched as the sine qua non of fellowship. Simultaneously, others maintained a keen sense that the disagreement over baptism was an in-​house debate among otherwise like-​minded congregationalists. Baptistic congregationalists who adopted this latter posture were able to cultivate connections with both paedobaptistic puritans and the official ecclesiastical institutions of the Cromwellian regime, while those inclined toward the former found themselves increasingly isolated and radicalized. The resultant picture of Interregnum baptistic congregationalists will be shown to be far more variegated and complex than previous studies have suggested. And this conclusion, in turn, further undermines the historiographical utility of making any reference to an overarching “Baptist movement” in mid-​ seventeenth-​century England. For baptistic congregationalists, then, the period was indeed a time of tremendous “freedom, by God’s blessing restored,” but, as we will soon see, different representatives of the movement put the same liberty to rather different uses.

I The events of the late 1640s—​Pride’s Purge, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of a new Commonwealth—​opened up an unprecedented space in which practitioners of the Congregational Way, among others, could pursue ecclesiological agendas of their own design. And given this environment in which “a virtually endless range of permutations came to govern religious practice,”10 it should not surprise us that the underlying differences dividing baptistic

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congregationalists became increasingly pronounced. During the 1650s, two quite opposite tendencies manifested themselves among baptistically inclined congregationalists, and this ideological rupture became instantiated in an opposed set of leaders, congregations, and ecclesiastical associations. One group embraced the Cromwellian regime, encouraged fellowship among otherwise like-​ minded congregationalists who disagreed on the question of baptism, and understood themselves as a godly variant on the mainstream puritan divinity then in the ascendant. The other group, by contrast, eschewed all of these impulses and instead resisted the state ecclesiastical apparatus, repudiated all who disagreed with their stance on baptism, and understood themselves as strangers and exiles in a new Babylon. This growing tension among baptistic congregationalists at mid-​century can be glimpsed in the publication of Henry Jessey’s A Storehouse of Provision. Completed on May 8, 1650, the volume was the longest work ever published under Jessey’s name and represented more than just another doctrinal treatise. Containing a miscellany of documents including letters and personal testimonies alongside more traditional polemical sections, Storehouse was concerned almost entirely with practical matters, and thus the book functioned as a sort of anthology of pastoral counsel intended to resolve various “questions now in dispute.” Jessey wrote to offer “[a]‌ntidotes against the poyson of these times,” and to warn his baptistic co-​religionists that all was not well among them. He likened their present trouble to “distempers in a family” and cautioned that “a storme ariseth within, if not without also.”11 And although the book addressed a wide variety of specific concerns, a common thread linking many of them together was the worry that some of the baptistic congregationalists with whom Jessey was associated had become far too concerned with peripheral issues. Too often within their churches, Jessey lamented, the “Babe, or weak Believer, or one that . . . hath most need of Milk” was not pursuing “the first Principles of the Oracles of God,” but was instead chasing after unhelpful spiritual tangents:  “through his (or her) owne sinfull curiosity, and through temptings and hurryings of Satan” the immature believer “is frequently most inquisitive, after things lesse pertinent, and not so suitable.” Even worse, Jessey observed that this “sinfull curiosity” was often encouraged by more mature believers who, presumably, should have known better: they “that are growne up . . . will be tempting them . . . doting upon Questions, in being taken up with them beyond due bounds.”12 By thus exchanging fundamental “first Principles” for “things lesse pertinent,” Jesse worried that baptistic congregationalists were stirring up needless controversy and jeopardizing their common aims. The book’s publication in 1650 illustrated the difficulties which religious liberty was creating for many of those upon whom it had been bestowed.

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“Beware,” he warned, “least you judge, or condemne any persons, that are servants of Jesus Christ, and walk holily, righteously, and conscientiously because of their weaknesse in Judgment, if they hold the Head and only foundation.”13 Storehouse both revealed that a rift was growing among baptistic congregationalists and signaled that Jessey himself was staunchly aligned with the movement’s more ecumenical faction. Indeed, Jessey stood as the quintessential representative and promoter of baptistic congregationalism’s ecumenical, irenic strain. In previous chapters, we have surveyed Jessey’s wide-​ranging network of congregational contacts, his leadership of London’s longest-​standing independent church, and his participation in the development of a Cromwellian religious settlement. Given his background, it is perhaps not surprising that he would become something of a figurehead for congregationalists who were attracted to both believers-​only baptism and the pursuit of greater mainstream respectability. After Jessey’s own transition from paedobaptistic congregationalism to its baptistic variant in 1645, his networks remained intact, and his fluid engagement across a wide spectrum of English puritanism allowed him to enjoy substantial influence and build informal associations of like-​minded churches across the country. Much of the organization among the ecumenical faction was directly linked to the personality and influence of Henry Jessey. Consider, for instance, a letter which he sent from his London church to a baptistic congregationalist church in Hexham near Newcastle in October 1653. The missive portrayed Jessey as an elder statesman eager “to further love, amongst all that love the Lord Jesus” and to bring the geographically remote Hexham congregation into contact with “the churches nearer us than you, in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk.” Jessey counselled the Hexham church to “show forth teachableness and peaceableness” toward those who disagree with the congregation’s endorsement of believers-​only baptism—​“we dare not exclude such from the visible kingdom of God, merely for weakness sake.” Jessey then recommended that the Hexham leaders consult his own “book called A Storehouse,” in which “[s]‌ome scripture grounds for such practice are laid down.” Further cementing his role as a relational-​connector and facilitator of inter-​church communion, Jessey went so far as to suggest that he would personally deliver letters from the Hexham congregation to other like-​ minded churches, a “service of love” which he was eager to offer.14 Earlier that year, in the summer of 1653, “he was sent by divers churches to visit about thirty-​ six congregations in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, [and] Middlesex.”15 Likewise, a similar pattern of leadership emerges from the documents assembled in A Storehouse of Provision, a collection which portrays Jessey and his London cohort as leaders in an emerging movement, eager to answer the various “questions sent up to London out of the country.”16

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Many of Jessey’s activities evidenced both his ideological flexibility and the long-​standing relationships which he had cultivated over time. When, for example, congregationally inclined ministers in Wales attempted to establish churches “according to the New England way” in 1639, they looked to Jessey for assistance.17 Then, when many associated with these same churches began to reject paedobaptism during the early 1650s, those seeking believer’s baptism were often sent, again, to Henry Jessey, who, of course, by that time had embraced believer’s baptism himself: “the church advised brother Cattle to be baptized in London” and “gave him a letter to one Mr. Henry Jessey, a gracious, holy, baptized minister, in London, desiring him to baptize their said member.”18 Here, Jessey is seen to operate over two decades among congregationalists of varying baptismal persuasions. Too few in number and diffuse in their geographic scope to effect any sort of overarching ecclesiastical superstructure, relationships among these congregations were informal and ad hoc, knit together through the exchange of encouraging letters and practical help as needs arose. The records of such exchanges from the Hexham church, near Newcastle, illustrate how like-​minded baptistic congregations identified and assisted one another. In December 1651, the London minister Thomas Tillam was sent “by the encouragement of the commissioners authorised by the parliament for propagating the gospel in the four northern counties” to take up a preaching lectureship in Hexham. While in Hexham, Tillam made the acquaintance of the baptistic congregation gathered there, and soon became “eminently instrumental in carrying on the Lord’s work amongst” them. As the Hexham church continued on with this “dearly beloved brother in the Lord,” they soon thought it appropriate to initiate a relationship with Tillam’s home-​congregation, which was then led by Hanserd Knollys in Coleman Street, London.19 In a letter dated December 1652, the Hexham congregation wrote to the Coleman Street church, requesting “that you would own us in the Lord, and reach out unto us the right hand of fellowship.” The friendly overture was soon reciprocated when “the elders and brethren, with the whole church” at Coleman Street church informed Hexham that “we . . . do own you in the Lord . . . And, hereupon, we do give unto you the right hand of fellowship, in token of our communion with you in the faith and order of the gospel.”20 The exchange provides a glimpse into what inter-​church communion might have looked like among loosely organized and geographically diffuse baptistic congregationalists. And whatever this quasi-​formal declaration of “communion” might have actually meant in practice, the incident reveals men and women highly motivated to maintain relationships despite being separated by great distances. Under the new political realities of the Interregnum, Jessey drew on his well-​ cultivated ecclesiastical networks to become “a main promoter of . . . peace and

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communion of Brethren that differ not fundamentally,” arranging meetings among ministers of “the Parochial [i.e. proponents of a comprehensive national church] and Congregational way, who in 1651 assembled frequently, sometimes at his own lodgings, and sometimes elsewhere.”21 No baptistic congregationalist was more involved in the quest for a Cromwellian religious settlement than Jessey,22 and his soft-​spoken disposition surely did much to dispel fears that “Anabaptist” ministers were uniformly disruptive. Marchamont Needham once contrasted Jessey with the “Sons of Thunder” introduced in Mark’s gospel (Mark 3:17), remarking that Jessey and an associate were “no Boanerges, as you know.” Rather, Needham continued, “Jessey spoke softly,” so that “I could not hear him.”23 Jessey’s wide-​ranging influence on the nation’s religious life was reflected through, among other things, his commission to produce a new translation of the Bible alongside John Owen, John Row, and Thomas Goodwin in 1652,24 his appointment as an ecclesiastical trier in 1654,25 and his participation in the Whitehall Conference on the readmission of Jews into England in 1655.26 Aligned with Jessey in the promotion of baptistic congregationalism’s ecumenical strain was a loose association of churches and their members which spread across the country—​from Bristol and the Welsh congregations in the west, to London, Sussex, and Essex in the southeast, to East Anglia and the Midlands, and Lincoln and Newcastle in the north.27 Through the efforts of Jessey and other influential leaders like John Tombes, these like-​minded churches became increasingly aware of one another during the early 1650s and increasingly integrated into the nation’s mainstream religious culture. Not all baptistic congregationalists were as enthusiastic about the possibilities of pan-​puritan cooperation in the post-​1649 world. For many, the freedom afforded by the dissolution of monarchy was used to move in exactly the opposite direction, as the early 1650s witnessed large numbers of baptistic congregationalists forming ecclesiastical associations that were explicitly designed to foster uniformity among their member churches while discouraging participation with those outside their circles. At least five such associations were founded during the first five years of the new regime,28 beginning in November 1650, when baptistic churches in South Wales gathered for a “general meeting” with the intention that “questionings and disputeings may be silenced and ended among us that should be of one mind and of one heart searvinge our God.”29 In October 1652, a similar network formed under the leadership of Benjamin Coxe.30 The so-​ called Abingdon association drew in churches spreading west from London and included congregations at Abingdon, Reading, Kensworth, and Henley.31 This was followed in November 1653 by the formation of a third ecclesiastical association led largely by Thomas Collier32 and encompassed congregations in the western counties from Gloucestershire to Cornwall.33 Finally, baptistic churches

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in the Midlands held their first association meeting in Warwick on May 2, 1655.34 In addition to these, Cromwell’s army spread baptistic ideas across Ireland and Scotland, with churches forming in Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Leith, Perth, and elsewhere.35 The associations operated mostly independently of one another, but all were marked by a sense of suspicion toward and isolation from other religious groups. Debates at association meetings often focused upon cases of church discipline and the degree to which their members might participate with those outside their circles. Whereas those allied with Henry Jessey and the ecumenists bemoaned the lack of unity and cooperation among a broad range of puritan ministers, more sectarian baptistic congregationalists often moved in the opposite direction, pressing the need for greater purity, holiness, and separation. Intensely pietistic,36 they would meet to delight together in “such sweet and lively and soule-​ravishing manifestations of God’s gracious presence, as they could not sufficiently expresse,” and they would lament the “dead, carnall, lukewarme, sleepie, worldlie spirit” that they feared had “allmost overcome most of the churches.”37 As the decade wore on, the existing records evidence a growing sectarian spirit and an increasing unwillingness to interact with those who did not share their views on baptism. In October 1655, for example, churches in the western association were debating “[w]‌hether it be lawfull for baptized believers to hear a person in the exercise of his gift preaching as a parochial or national minister.” The association determined that such mixing was “unlawfull” because there was “an appearance of evil in it, in conforming to the worship of those men which we are commanded to separate from.”38 Such a stance contrasted starkly with the attitudes of baptistic congregationalists like Henry Jessey, Hanserd Knollys, and Daniel Dyke, all of whom were willing not only to hear “national ministers” preach, but also to participate in the state’s triers-​and-​ejectors scheme for national ministerial oversight.39 Yet, as rigid as the western association’s stance was in 1655, in subsequent years, they tightened their cords of communion even further. In April 1657, the association forbade even “communion in prayer . . . with unbaptized” persons. At the same meeting the association decreed that it was unlawful for their members to hear the preaching of any “unbaptized” person, even if the person in question was a man of “holy and grave conversation” who was “denying wholy the world’s waies,” and who “though not yet baptized” was “yet so far from opposing that ordinance that he is earnestly longing and diligently” considering whether or not to embrace it himself.40 In other words, no one outside of their circles, no matter how godly or qualified in other respects, could be considered an acceptable partner in ecclesiastical work.

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Likewise, the Abingdon association began in 1652, but waited until December 1656 to formally propose that it was “not lawfull for saints to joyne with the national church assemblyes or the national church ministers.” In May 1656, even as baptistic ministers like Henry Jessey, John Tombes, William Kiffen, and Hanserd Knollys were working with and within the Cromwellian religious settlement, the Abingdon association dismissed the Protectorate’s religious reforms as “a manifest part of the whore of Babilon” and “a new sute being put into their national places by nationall Tryers never appointed by the Lord Jesus to such a work.”41 By May 1657, some churches within the association were advocating for an even stricter approach, going so far as to wonder whether a “baptized Gospell preacher” who had previously practiced “mixt communion of beleevers baptized and unbaptized” might “upon a hearty returne from this errour, be received into full communion with a true church of Christ without renewing their baptisme; or whether they ought to be baptized againe before they be so received.”42 Although the association ultimately decided against requiring such ministers to be rebaptized, the fact that one of their member churches would have even proposed such a measure indicated the degree to which some baptistic congregationalists were, in exchange for a perceived ecclesiological purity, willing to isolate themselves from the mainstream of English religious life.

II The rift between an ecumenical and a more sectarian strain among baptistic congregationalists has only been partially acknowledged by current scholarship. The division is typically interpreted almost exclusively in terms of a controversy over “open” and “closed” communion—​that is, a controversy between churches which did and did not allow unbaptized persons to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.43 Historians are correct, of course, to identify access to the communion table as a pressing and divisive issue among baptistic congregationalists. For at least three reasons, however, such analysis alone does not adequately account for the complexity of the situation. First, to focus exclusively on the “communion controversy” is to ignore the fact that differences between the baptistic factions extended well beyond disputes over the Lord’s Table. While it is perhaps true that different policies on communion access initiated the rift and then continued to function as a conveniently objective marker by which the two groups might easily identify one another, it is also true that during the 1650s, the two parties developed increasingly divergent attitudes toward, among other things, eschatology, church discipline, and church-​state relations. Moreover, beyond these concrete disagreements, the two

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sides were also demarcated by a softer set of diverging sensibilities, attitudes, and postures, which, although not conducive to quick, high-​contrast categorization, were nonetheless very real. Second, to reduce all disputes among baptistic congregationalists to a single dispute over communion access obscures the way in which hostility between the opposing factions intensified over time. Prominent baptistic congregationalists in London were practicing so-​called closed communion at least as early as 1646,44 but this was well before the hardening of ideological lines which, during the 1650s, led to the establishment of exclusively closed-​communion ecclesiastical associations. Third, the standard emphasis placed on closed-​communion as the line of demarcation among baptistic congregationalists cannot easily account for those individuals and churches who agreed that communion be limited to those first baptized as believers, but also eschewed many of the isolationist and sectarian tendencies which increasingly characterized a majority of closed-​communion baptistic churches. Consider that one of the most important baptistic leaders during the period, William Kiffen, ministered in “closed communion” churches, yet  also worked closely with Henry Jessey, Hanserd Knollys, and the wider Cromwellian regime. On June 10, 1653, churches from the sectarian, closed-​ communion, Abingdon association sent a letter to “our brethren John Spilisberie and William Kiffen” in which they described Kiffen and his church as “agreeing” with them “in principles and constitutions accordingly holding communion with the same.”45 And yet, the very next month, Kiffen was identified by Cromwell’s Council of State as a minister “of great use in the [national] church” who was to be given “free use of any pulpits to preach in, as the Lord gives opportunity.”46 The juxtaposition of Kiffen’s interactions becomes more jarring when we recall that the Abingdon association would later denounce “those that preach and pray as men authorised to act as ministers of the national church” as “antichristian and Babilonish.”47 Kiffen endorsed closed-​communion, but otherwise—​in his wide-​ranging associations, mainstream respectability, and willingness to work with the state church—​he stands far closer to Henry Jessey than the closed-​communion baptistic associations with which the historiography has been too quick to categorize him. To classify Kiffen simply as a “closed-​communion Baptist” obscures both his wide-​ranging connections across theological boundaries and the complexity of baptistic identity during the period. A more fruitful approach to understanding baptistic self-​identity and the growing rift between the ecumenical and sectarian strains must begin by appreciating with greater nuance how the rejection of paedobaptism functioned within their wider theological-​eschatological schema, a subject to which we now turn.

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III Prominent among the besetting sins of Baptist historiography has been the failure to adequately account for the cultural, political, and theological contexts out of which the seventeenth-​century rejection of paedobaptism emerged. As the story has often been told, “Baptist” churches began with the abrupt and mostly inexplicable appearance of men and women demanding that the sacrament of baptism be administered only upon profession of faith. Narratives then continue apace with little sustained reflection upon how such individuals came to their conclusions or how they understood themselves in relation to other contemporary Christian expressions.48 Some may find this approach helpful, but surely, as Andrew Delbanco has observed, “the history of ideas is usually better understood as a process of incorporation and transformation” rather “than as a series of successive movements discrete and distinct from one another.”49 The failure to view changing attitudes toward baptism as such a gradual “process of incorporation and transformation” has resulted in an overly simplistic picture of baptistic congregational self-​identity during the 1650s. To recover a more authentic sense of how early modern actors understood the rejection of paedobaptism, one must locate that socio-​theological shift within the intellectual contexts which made it both possible for and intelligible to the historical actors involved. Chapter 3 attempted to accomplish the first task: the recovery of the intellectual context that made the shift away from paedobaptism conceptually possible during the late 1630s and early 1640s. There, we saw that when congregationalists rejected a comprehensive, coercive national church in favor of local congregations composed of visible saints, they also unwittingly undermined the logic of Reformed paedobaptism. The argument in ­chapter 3 was not that congregationalists intentionally sought to undermine the foundations of paedobaptism, but, rather, that this was the inescapable consequence of their ecclesiological revisions. But to better understand the self-​identity of baptistic congregationalists after 1649, we must now attend to that second task: the recovery of the ideas, expectations, and assumptions through which baptistic congregationalists would have understood their own doctrinal evolution. This requires that one shift attention from the intellectual prerequisites standing in the background of paedobaptism’s rejection, to the interpretive framework operating in the mental foreground of those by whom it was rejected. For to argue, as c­ hapter  3 did, that congregational ecclesiology created an intellectual environment in which believer’s baptism became newly plausible to mainstream puritans is not to say that those same puritans would have self-​consciously framed their doctrinal movement in such terms, nor does the argument of ­chapter 3 explain the significance with which

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the historical actors would have invested their actions. For the historical actors involved, their congregational ecclesiology led them to reject paedobaptism, but they interpreted that rejection against a much larger, more dramatic backdrop, a backdrop charged by the perception that God’s eschatological purposes were being providentially revealed through an unfolding historical drama in which they were the principal players. Both the self-​identity of baptistic congregationalists in revolutionary England and the specific nature of those pressures that divided them after 1649 were bound inextricably to a larger Protestant narrative of ongoing, eschatologically-​oriented reformation. In what follows, we will first examine this narrative, and then reconsider how it impinged upon the evolution of baptistic congregationalism’s ecumenical and sectarian strains during the Interregnum. Baptistic congregationalists began as congregationalists; congregationalists began as puritans; and puritans began as Protestants. In each successive phase of this admittedly oversimplified genealogy, members from within a particular strand of Christian community modified aspects of their faith and practice until reaching a point at which those modifications were constitutive of a new self-​ identity, each new Christian subculture emerging organically from the larger group in which it already belonged. But, in each of these cases, the men and women involved were motivated by a common underlying impulse:  the desire for further “reformation.” Such reformation was understood not as progressive in the sense of successive improvement, but rather as a sort of salutary regress, a happy reversion to the purer pattern of doctrine and worship established by Christ and his apostles. To advance this creative process of progressive regression, early modern Protestants relentlessly pursued the erasure of those “popish” accretions which were believed to have encumbered and corrupted the Church for more than a millennium. And if, in a loose but meaningful way, this process of ongoing reformation characterized the entire Protestant project, then English puritanism can be conceived as a more emphatic assertion of the same basic impulse. Under Elizabeth, the peculiarities of England’s top-​ down, state-​ led reformation produced a cadre of fiery, frustrated puritan Protestants zealous to achieve the “restitution of true religion and reformation of Gods churche” by “abandoning al[l]‌popish remnants both in ceremonies and regiment” and “bringing in and placing in Gods church those things only, which the Lord himselfe in his word commandeth.”50 Moreover, in its puritan iteration, the dynamic sense of ongoing reformation was inevitably cast as an eschatological movement—​it was not just that godly Christians were correcting the mistakes of their predecessors, but, rather more momentously, the people of God were leading a millennial march against the forces of Antichrist.51 During the seventeenth century, men and women spread across the “puritan diaspora” of London, the Netherlands, and the

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American colonies,52 pioneered novel forms of ecclesiology which represented a further intensification of the same phenomenon, as the “tendencies and pressures contained within the popular protestantism of the later sixteenth century” essentially comprised the “habits and embryonic forms” of the later Congregational Way.53 Each new stage in the movement from the sixteenth-​century Magisterial Reformation, to Elizabethan puritanism, and then to seventeenth-​century congregationalism was driven by a desire to push the Reformation project farther than had the previous Protestant iteration, an evolving quest to “reform the reformation it self.”54 Baptistic congregationalists operated within this same context and with these same assumptions and understood their rejection of paedobaptism as simply one more step along a journey already in progress. In the 1650s, as they grappled with the new political reality of a kingless Commonwealth, baptistic congregationalists, like many of their contemporaries, were convinced that they were men and women specially “called to live in the last Ages of the world,” and as the decade unfolded, they cultivated a self-​identity predicated on a commitment to “search, reach and press after a thorow reformation, shaking ourselves and delivering ourselves from the yoaks of bondage and Babylon that have been on our neck.”55 Fully persuaded along with the rest of English Protestantism that “the Pope of Rome” was “that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself, in the church, against Christ,” their sense of eschatological urgency was interwoven with the belief that the encroaching end-​of-​days required God’s saints to expunge any lingering vestiges of Roman Catholic idolatry.56 One of the most extensive and explicit examples of this logic can be found in the records of the Broadmead church of Bristol, collected and prepared in 1687 by Edward Terrill, an elder in the church. The records described the church’s collective extirpation of “popery” during the English Revolution as a refusal “to own, or partake in any part, consentingly to ye worship of ye the beast” that they might instead become “truly reformed in greate measure.”57 To better expound this theme, Terrill condensed the reformation process into discrete steps through which “ye Lord led them by Degrees, and brought them out of Popish Darknesse into his Marvellous light of ye Gospell.” In doing so, Terrill wove the story of his own church into the larger fabric of the Reformation, beginning his narrative not with anything happening in Bristol, but rather with the foundational Protestant rejection of the “false Doctrine of ye church of Rome,” namely “Transubstantiation, and teaching [that] man’s workes merit salvation.” These theological revisions were contextualized as simply the beginning of an ongoing process through which the Lord would “raise up a people, and make them come a step further in the reformation . . . to cast off Popish Scraps of Doctrine and worship.” These “popish scraps” composed a laundry list of conventional puritan bugbears: “Idollatrous

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Holy dayes,” “Carnal, debauched preachers,” “bowing at ye nameing of Jesus,” the “use of Pictures and Images,” and so on. As they progressed further, they “Cast off ye Crosse and other Ceremonies at their Sprinkleing Children.” This, Terrill adds, “was a good stepp, though ye people [at that time] could not see through to Reforme in that particular, to Cast off ye thing of Sprinkling itselfe, which was ye mere invention of men three hundred years after Christ.”58 By 1652, this first “good step” had been brought forward several steps more: Now ye Lord hath been of late years leading out his people out of Romish darknesse, to practise ye ordinances, as they were delivered by Christ himself and ye Apostles, recorded in holy Scriptures, (which is ye Christian’s rule). And, accordingly ye Lord awakened some of this Church to consider [that] there was noe ground for Baptizing children, much less for Sprinkleing them; and, therefore, [that] they had not been rightly Baptized, according to ye Scripture.59 Terrill’s narrative of reformation neither began nor culminated with the rejection of paedobaptism; the reformation of the sacrament simply functioned as one discrete piece of what baptistic congregationalists believed to be a much larger, divinely ordained and eschatologically oriented reformation story. Further confirmation that baptistic congregationalists thought in these terms can be inferred from the nomenclature they used to describe themselves during the 1650s. We have touched on this topic already in c­ hapter 2, but it is worth revisiting here so as to grasp how their favored self-​identifiers revealed what they understood themselves to be doing through their ongoing pursuit of reformation. The titles and labels with which they most consistently identified themselves were drawn from the language of the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul. A typical letter which circulated among churches in the west of England in November 1656 began with the following greeting:  “The brethren, messengers of the churches assembled at Bridgewater, to the churches of Christ, sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be saints.”60 Another letter was sent from “the respective churches walking in the faith and order of the Gospell in and about London.”61 Such language—​which abounds throughout the letters and church records of baptistic congregationalists—​clearly mimics that which began, for example, Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth: “Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God . . . Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Cor. 1:1–​2). The most common label used, by far, was “church of Christ,” as in a letter from December 1654 which began, “To the church of Christ at Warwick,” or a 1658 pamphlet intended to “vindicat[e]‌the Churches of Christ that we walk

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withal.”62 When presenting themselves to the wider public, they often used similar language but with an added reminder of what they were not, as in “The humble petition and representation of Several Churches of God in London, commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists.”63 Although they occasionally employed the language of “baptized believers” or some variation to describe themselves, this was almost always used in contexts where they were specifically discussing baptism and needed to differentiate their practice from those outside their circles. For example, in June 1656, the sectarian Midlands association debated “whether baptized believers may joyne in . . . hering [sic] the national ministers preach or others that are not baptised.”64 Outside of these specific circumstances, they almost always preferred generic language drawn from the New Testament. This suggests at least two conclusions. First, it indicates that although believers-​only baptism was important to baptistic congregationalists, particularly among the sectarian strain, it was not decisive in forging their self-​identity. Unlike later eighteenth-​century Baptists, baptistic congregationalists in the mid-​seventeenth century felt no need to consistently describe themselves in terms which would draw attention to their rejection of paedobaptism. Second, their preference for New Testament language reveals that they saw themselves not as innovators, but rather as simple Christians trying to recover a pattern of apostolic worship long-​ obscured by a crust of “popery.” And in so doing, these men and women were doing nothing unusual or unique, but, rather, were simply participating in what Carlos Eire has described as the “unquestioned assumption” and “common plot line” which drove the “Protestant consciousness” in all its manifold expressions.65 They, along with all other puritans, were attempting to recover the “primitive pattern” of the apostles.66 This lack of originality must be kept in mind if we are to properly understand baptistic congregationalism, and yet, sometimes, it has been obscured by scholarship which portrays the desire to recover the apostolic, biblical pattern as somehow a distinguishing mark of English “Baptists.” As one introductory survey explains, “The key issue for . . . Baptists was that only what was explicitly commanded in Scripture should become church practice.”67 Likewise, Mark Bell asserts that by relying “on the absence of infant baptism from the Bible” so-​called Baptists “demonstrate[d]‌a hermeneutic that was to characterize them throughout the seventeenth century.”68 T.  L. Underwood similarly argues that what was “most noticeabl[e] to their contemporaries” was the “Baptists” zeal for primitive Christianity,” an enthusiasm which led to “their adoption of believer’s baptism by immersion.”69 All three of these examples correctly connect the denial of paedobaptism with a self-​conscious appeal to “primitive,” Bible-​based Christianity, but in doing so the authors wrongly suggest that this interest was somehow a distinctive aspect of “Baptist” thought; that it would have “characterize[d] them”

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and would have been “most noticeabl[e] to their contemporaries.”70 Yet, clearly so-​called primitivism was an important emphasis among puritans generally and congregationalists especially. To choose an example almost at random, when a group of New England congregationalists were pressed to defend their aversion to pre-​scripted or “stinted” prayers in worship, they explained that “the primitive patternes of all the churches of God in their best times”—​that is, the early church as described in the New Testament documents—​“yeeld not the least foot steps to shew us another safe way.”71 John Cotton was even more plainspoken when describing the congregational approach to worship in 1645: “Ceremonies wee use none, but are carefull to administer all things according to the primitive institutions.”72 In many cases, the quest to reform the church and recover the “primitive” or apostolic pattern involved identifying areas where the Roman Catholic Church was believed to have inappropriately transferred now-​obsolete Old Testament liturgical forms into New Testament worship: “from the confounding of these two Covenants and states of Law and Gospell . . . the Papists have brought in many disorders into the Gospell worship.”73 Thus, the crowded calendar of the medieval church was thought to mimic the numerous feasts, fasts, and holy days set down for Israel in Old Testament scripture (e.g. Lev. 23);74 the Roman Catholic emphasis on the distinction between laity and clergy, and the priests upon whom a “special character is imprinted” at ordination mirrored the consecration of the Levitical priesthood (e.g. Lev. 8);75 elaborate clerical dress resembled that prescribed for Levitical priests (e.g. Exod. 28);76 Catholic iconography found an echo in Israel’s use of imagery in worship—​for instance, the images of Cherubim woven into the tabernacle curtains (e.g. Exod. 26); incense burned in parish churches called to mind that used during Old Testament worship (e.g. Exod. 30); Rome’s seven sacraments and its host of lesser “sacramentals” answered to Israel’s multiplicity of rituals for atonement and purification, both systems providing diverse channels through which God’s grace might flow (e.g. Lev. 1–​7);77 the priest enacting sacred mysteries while hidden from view behind the rood screen or Lenten veil recalled the high priest of Israel making his ritualized journey into the Holy of Holies (e.g. Exod. 26:33; 1 Chron. 6:49);78 and, above all else, the mass itself, the centerpiece of Roman Catholic liturgy, represented, in the opinion of many Protestants, a brazenly inappropriate and blasphemous line of continuity drawn between contemporary Christian practice and the system of regular, oft-​repeated Levitical sacrifice (e.g. Lev. 4).79 In each instance, Protestants accused Roman Catholics of maintaining an illicit continuity with Old Testament practices and forms of worship that had been divinely instituted as temporary rather than perpetual and limited to national Israel rather than binding on God’s covenant people in every age.

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In such a context, paedobaptism appeared to many like just one more instance in which Rome had wrongly perpetuated Old Testament forms. Christopher Blackwood’s Soul Searching Catechism (1653) made precisely this point, arguing that it was “absurd that baptisme should succeed Circumcision” because “Circumcision was an inlet into the Jewish Church” but “Baptism into the Christian Church.” To include infants within the people of God was thus to inappropriately transfer rituals from the Old Testament “Jewish Church” which “is at an end” into New Testament “Gospel congregational-​Churches.”80 Primitivism was a common puritan trope, and baptistic congregationalists simply pressed it one step further than most of their contemporaries. But in doing so, they illustrated the great difficulty embedded within the logic of the Reformation:  knowing when to quit. It was not at all clear where one might locate within the logic of scripture an intrinsic and coherent limiting principle by which one could differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate continuities across the testaments. Congregationalists were especially zealous proponents of ecclesiastical reform and they were never able to determine a consistent standard by which the onward roll of reformation might be appropriately constrained. When the congregationalist Philip Nye was confronted by evidence that one of his favored positions was at odds with the “reformed churches,” he recommended that one ought to “pray reformed churches may be reformed more than they are.”81 Writing in 1646, at the height of tension between presbyterians and independents, Marchamont Needham wrestled with this very problem as he replied to accusations that he and his fellow congregationalists were guilty of sinful schism: If Luthers departing from Popery was no schisme; if the first Reformation in England was no schisme; if the Presbyterians late departing from the Prelacie was schisme, but were all degrees of Reformation in their times: how comes it then that this more spirituall Church-​way of Independents which aims at a yet more perfect reformation, should beare an imputation of schisme, more than the other? At present, Satan may endeavour to blast it with the name of schisme, as he did former Reformations which succeeding years may acknowledge for the right way.82 Baptistic congregationalists were likewise questioning why the inherently dynamic concept of “reformation” should be limited in its sweep and scope to those controversies already settled. John Tombes, one of paedobaptism’s more prominent and learned critics, mused in 1645 that “it hath beene the unhappy fate of the reformed Churches, that they have so stucke to Luther, and Calvin, that they have scarce stepped one step further in reformation then they did, but

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stifly maintained onely the ground they had gotten.”83 The baptism debate simply added one more item to an already lengthy list of ecclesiastical practices in need of reform. By thus contextualizing the rejection of paedobaptism within this wider pan-​puritan—​if not pan-​Protestant—​narrative of eschatologically-​charged reformation, our understanding of baptistic congregationalist self-​identity is furthered in at least three significant ways. First, such contextualization demonstrates that there was nothing unique about the methodology through which baptistic congregationalists understood what they were trying to accomplish in their churches. In their rhetoric, their view of scripture, their eschatology, their aversion to perceived “popery,” and their obsession with recovering a more apostolic or “primitive” form of worship, baptistic congregationalists were virtually indistinguishable from other seventeenth-​century puritans, and especially from those puritans inclined toward the Congregational Way. They did not understand themselves as radically breaking with the reformed Protestant tradition, but, rather, quite naturally viewed themselves as the tradition’s most faithful heirs. Second, all of this makes it increasingly difficult to sustain the suggestion that believer’s baptism was, in and of itself, constitutive of a new, coherent, and historiographically meaningful self-​identity. If we accept that baptistic congregationalists understood paedobaptism as simply one more “popish” barnacle that had inappropriately attached itself to the ark of Christ’s church, then it becomes more clear that the removal of the same would not have necessarily required the creation of a new “Baptist” self-​ identity built around a new understanding of the sacrament. Puritans were constantly scraping off many such “anti-​Christian” accretions, yet we do not assume that each new divestment would have immediately created a corresponding new denominational identity. Third, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes with which we began this chapter, by better contextualizing how believer’s baptism appeared to those who embraced it, we are better able to appreciate why tension during the 1650s among otherwise like-​minded baptistic congregationalists accelerated as rapidly as it did. Once baptistic congregationalists realized themselves to be on the leading edge of godly reformation, their avant-​g arde status immediately raised difficult questions about their relationship to other congregationalists who were not ready to follow them quite so far down the same path:  were these stragglers well-​meaning fellow-​travelers to be persuaded and encouraged, or hostile impediments to be rebuked and avoided? As baptistic congregationalists gave different answers to these common questions, they began to sort themselves, not just according to a particular stance on communion-​access, but, more fundamentally, according to temperament, posture, and ecclesiological disposition.

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IV The preceding paragraphs have reconstructed the interpretative matrix within which baptistic congregationalists would have understood their rejection of paedobaptism. This broadly Protestant framework of eschatologically oriented reformation was held in common by English puritans and felt especially keenly by practitioners of the Congregational Way. As such, it formed the backdrop against which both the ecumenical and sectarian strains of baptistic congregationalism emerged during the 1650s, and we are now in a position to understand the linkages between this common context and the diverging trajectories which it initiated. For the rejection of paedobaptism generated intellectual pressure on its proponents, and when that pressure was released into the relative religious freedom of the post-​1649 Commonwealth, its collective force split the baptistic congregationalist movement in two. These pressures ran along two major fault lines and can be helpfully conceptualized as two discrete questions which faced baptistic congregationalists as they considered their prospects in that “first year of freedome by Gods blessing restored.” First, does believer’s baptism function as an essential entry point, or a point of right order? Second, does an imminent eschaton demand purity or unity? After 1649, these questions impinged upon baptistic congregationalists with acute force, and by answering them in different ways, baptistic congregationalists sorted themselves into what we have labeled the ecumenical and sectarian strains. The first and most pressing question concerned the nature of baptism and its role in the wider Christian economy. If the preceding analysis has been accurate—​ if, as has been maintained, believers-​only baptism was simply one more piece of an ongoing reform project—​then it raises questions as to why so many baptistic congregationalists began to increasingly isolate themselves from others who did not share their views on baptism. Why could this issue not have been simply classified as adiaphora about which good people might disagree? The answer was rooted less in abstract principle and more in the practical problems caused by the logic of baptism itself. Across almost the entire spectrum of Christian practice, baptism has functioned as the opening act of the Christian life. Whatever theological significance one applies to it, baptism has always been the metaphorical doorway into the faith and, by extension, the institutional church as well—​a fact embodied in English ecclesiastical architecture’s traditional preference for locating the baptismal font near the church’s entrance.84 “Baptisme,” explained one of puritan England’s most popular theological handbooks, “is the Sacrament of Initiation” which marks the “beginning of spirituall life by regeneration.”85 But if one believed that baptism was intended only for believers, then it followed that the “baptism”

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applied to infants was not baptism at all, and its young recipients would, in fact, grow up as unbaptized persons. “[T]‌o Infants,” argued Henry Lawrence in 1646, “the Sacrament of Baptisme is not given, but only a certain externall washing with certain externall rites and ceremonies.” An individual baptized in infancy had received only a “pretended Baptisme,” an empty thing, “voide and nothing,” and thus such a one would still require “a true real Baptisme” to be properly initiated into the Christian life.86 But if one had not yet been properly initiated into the Christian faith, then how could one possibly be fit to participate in the ongoing corporate life of the Christian church? For many baptistic congregationalists, strict consistency seemed to demand that all outside their narrow circles be thus understood as “unbaptized” persons and, at a minimum, be denied access to the communion table. The 1644 London confession of faith did not elucidate this principle, but an “appendix” published in conjunction with the confession’s 1646 revision did. The appendix explained that the document’s subscribers “do not admit any to the use of the supper, nor communicate with any in the use of this ordinance, but disciples baptized, lest we should have fellowship with them in their doing contrary to order.”87 It is important to note that the appendix was not thereby arguing that anyone holding paedobaptist conviction was beyond the pale of Christian fellowship; in other words, the problem was not that disagreement over baptism per se rose to the level of charity-​rending heresy. Rather, the argument was far narrower and based upon a strict interpretation of how the logic of baptism worked itself out: baptism was understood to logically precede communion and thus individuals now regarded as unbaptized had no legitimate place at the table. This reasoning is evident in a revealing autobiographical passage from the baptistic congregationalist Edward Terrill. As Terrill wavered during the 1650s between a baptistic and a paedobaptistic position, he described how his sacramental uncertainty complicated his search for church fellowship: And so I continued about a year and a half, not satisfied in one or the other [i.e. not satisfied with either paedobaptism or believers-​only baptism]. I  was so wavering that I  could not join with the church in the Lord’s supper, although they would have admitted me; as their manner is to receive persons if they conceive the Lord hath wrought a work of grace in them, and not for opinions’ sake. But according to the scriptures, a person ought to be baptized before he receive the Lord’s supper: now if I could have been satisfied that the sprinkling I received in my infancy was a sufficient baptism, I could have joined, as being already baptized; or if it was not baptism, I  would have been baptized. I had no peace when I did think how I stood off from the Lord’s people.

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Sometimes when I should see them break bread, I should weep to see myself shut out.88 Terrill’s self-​imposed sacramental exile illustrates the curious asymmetry between baptism’s significance as an abstract doctrine and a real-​life practice. The congregations with which Terrill associated clearly recognized him as a godly saint and worthy of inclusion. The bare fact of their disagreement over baptism had not, in and of itself, caused either party to view the other as hopelessly heretical. And yet, because in practice baptism functioned as the logical prerequisite to all other ecclesiastical communion, Terrill’s confusion about what constituted a “true baptism” precluded him from church fellowship. The public nature of baptism as Christianity’s official entry point forced all potential church members to reveal their opinions on the subject, and thus the sacrament’s practical edges protruded into congregational life in ways that other, more theoretical disputed points did not. In a September 1649 letter to the presbyterian Richard Baxter, the baptistic minister John Tombes explained that “[t]‌hough Justification, Redemption, &c. be of greater moment” than baptism, the sacrament’s “frequent practice needs perhaps resolution before other points that come not into so frequent use.”89 Baptism’s potential for disruption thus derived more from its practical implications within the economy of Christian life than from the actual theological significance of the issue considered in isolation. These peculiarities raised the stakes of baptismal disagreement and ensured that believers-​only baptism would function as a catalyst for radicalization among otherwise like-​minded congregationalists. Among the movement’s sectarian strain, the logic of believer’s baptism had erected an insurmountable barrier to fellowship with the “unbaptized.” When the congregations composing the Abingdon association met at Tetsworth in December 1653, they outlined criteria for admitting new members into their churches, describing eligible candidates as “such baptized persons as hold the truth in the maine and have the power of godlynes appearing in them.” The reference to “hold[ing] truth in the maine” suggests a certain latitude with respect to nonessential doctrines, and yet because of the practical nature of baptism, that point would brook no exceptions: all potential members would first need to be “baptized persons.” Throughout the Interregnum, similar discussions were repeated across the various baptistic associations which we have identified with the sectarian wing of baptistic congregationalism. In April 1656, for example, a general meeting of baptistic churches in the west of England met to consider “[w]‌hether baptism be absolutely necessary to an orderly church communion.” The answer was simple and unequivocal: “we judge it to be so, because it’s sutable to the declared will and ordinance of Jesus Christ.” To include “unbaptized”

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persons within the fellowship would be to forsake “the duty of those that believe in Christ to put on Christ in a visible way of profession by which they are distinguished from the world.” Here, again, we observe the emphasis on baptism as the entry point into Christian fellowship and the corresponding outsized significance which the sacrament took on: the “visible way of profession . . . is entred into by one baptism.” For these churches, to delimit their membership rolls to “baptized believers” was a nonnegotiable; it was an act of conformity “to the rule of God . . . without which they cannot with clearness and comfort approve themselves . . . or expect the blessing and promise of God.”90 Such attitudes and practices contrasted sharply with those put forward by the more ecumenically inclined baptistic congregationalists. Much of Jessey’s Storehouse of Provision (1650) considered “Baptisme, and its Use,” and the book specifically addressed “the Warrantableness of enjoying Communion, together by Beleevers, that Differ about Baptisme.”91 Here, Jessey flatly rejected the popular sectarian assertions that paedobaptists “denied baptism” or should be regarded as “unbaptized,” writing that they “doe not deny Baptisme, but acknowledge they are baptized.” Moreover, Jessey insinuated that his fellow baptistic congregationalists were hypocrites for failing to extend to others the charity they readily demanded for themselves: “If they [i.e. paedobaptists] shall see more, they will practise it; it were a harsh expression, if such as are unsatisfied in your late Baptisme, as you are in Childes Baptisme should say, that you deny Baptism.”92 It should not be supposed, however, that these more ecumenical ministers considered the baptismal question unimportant. Jessey boasted that his church in London baptized over 200 adults between 1650 and 1653, and a 1653 circular letter signed by nine ecumenical churches, including Jessey’s, was addressed to “all the baptized churches that hold the faith purely.” That same letter could comfortably describe infant baptism as an example of a “Judaizing” tendency “by which the reformation of the churches is hindered.”93 Such ministers clearly endorsed believer’s baptism. But, they were willing to work alongside paedobaptistic congregationalists and to allow among their members a diversity of opinion regarding baptismal practice. Although outside of our period’s chronological scope, by far the most famous proponent of this view was John Bunyan, who asserted in a 1673 tract that “[d]‌ifferences in judgment about water-​baptism” were “no bar to communion.” In organizing along such lines, these churches approached the baptismal question in precisely the same manner as did the many paedobaptistic congregational churches in which church members were permitted to hold baptismal opinions at variance with the church leadership.94 When asked about baptismal practice in 1658, the congregational minister Samuel Petto reported that among the congregational churches in Suffolk “there are members in many, if not most, of the churches hereafter mentioned, who are doubtful about infant

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baptism” but are, nonetheless, still able to “walke comfortably with their pastors & other members, who hold forth in practice what they are dubious about.”95 Baptistic congregationalists in the ecumenical strain simply presented the obverse case:  churches in which the leadership promoted believer’s baptism, yet with tolerance extended toward dissenting members. In the life of his own congregation, Jessey claimed that following such a course “hath produced no . . . ill fruits; but the contrary good, in procuring more to favour this Baptisme, or not so bitterly to oppose it.”96 If Jessey, in 1650, had entertained hopes of baptistic congregationalist unity, however, he would be disappointed, and as the decade unfolded, the debate intensified. Disgruntled members of more ecumenical baptistic congregations left for stricter fellowships. In 1652, one such individual, Thomas Munday, left the Broadmead church in Bristol “to goe and joyne himself to ye other Church in Bristoll that were all Baptized,” a decision made in spite of lengthy and “divers reasonings with ye said Brother Munday.”97 Even some opposed to believers-​only baptism recognized the growing rift within baptistic circles and cautioned against the sectarian temptation to further it. The congregationalist Nathaniel Holmes began his Ecclesiastica Methermeneutica (1652) with “a pacificatory preface” intended “to Reconcile those commonly called Presbyterians, Independents, and Anabaptists.” Beginning with the premise that the aforementioned groups shared “a full agreement in the Fundamentall Doctrinals of salvation,” Holmes urged all involved to “abate of their dividing Contestations about non-​essentials” and to embrace an “amicable bearing with, and brotherly owning one another.” For Holmes, the fact that “Anabaptists” reserved baptism for those of “ripe years,” was a “rent” which might be easily “drawne and exactly closed,” if “Anabaptists” would simply concede that baptism was “only a non-​Essential; so that its presence doth not constitute, nor its absence destitut or dissolve the Essence of a Church.” Were baptistic congregationalists to “unchurch Churches in their protest upon this account of Baptisme,” Holmes warned, they would, in doing so, effectively “build a wall of an irreconcilable difference which God forbid.”98 Such efforts proved to be decidedly ineffective. In April 1654, the ecumenical Hexham church wrote in a letter about “conflicts” which “have been most sad” between themselves and “the brethren of a neighbouring church who profess to walk by the same rule with us.” The epistle was addressed to Henry Jessey’s London church in Swan Alley, and it described efforts by the Hexham congregation to establish friendly communion with the more isolationist baptistic church in nearby Newcastle, efforts which were rebuffed by a “spirit of rigidness.” The congregation at Newcastle “cannot own us,” complained Hexham, “because we can own unbaptized churches and ministers for churches of Christ and ministers of Christ.”99 In a separate letter to the ecumenical baptistic congregation

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in Leominster, the Hexham leaders lamented the “harshness” of the Newcastle church:  they were “striking at our very foundation, because we dare not but own godly preachers and congregations (though unbaptized) as ministers and churches of Christ.” The believers at Hexham were clear that they did not agree with paedobaptism—​“as touching baptism we look on them as deficient”—​and yet, they felt “constrained” to acknowledge those practicing infant baptism as genuine and godly Christians, many of the Hexham congregation testifying that their own “conversion[s]‌” had been effected “through such instruments.”100 This division between the ecumenical and sectarian strains of baptistic congregationalism was greatly exacerbated by both sides’ shared eschatological expectations and the very different responses that such expectations were capable of producing. As we have already seen, all concerned parties interpreted their rejection of paedobaptism within an eschatological framework. All parties believed that some sort of eschatological fulfilment was imminent and that God was about “to accomplish those precious promises which he hath said shall come to pass in these latter days.” All would have agreed with the baptistic “church of Christ at Leith” when it wrote in a May 1653 letter that “[w]‌e desire to believe that all these things are fulfilling, by these many signal testimonies that the Lord is pleased to give forth to his people, in bringing down the kingdom and power of antichrist, and in the enlarging, establishing, and erecting the kingdom of his dear Son.”101 But, while both the ecumenists and sectarians were alike committed to the notion of an imminent eschaton, the prospect elicited very different responses from the two sides. The sectarian faction stressed the need to more thoroughly purify their ranks in anticipation of the last day, while the ecumenical faction reached an opposite conclusion from the same starting premise: saints need not worry about lesser disputes precisely because King Jesus would soon return to definitively settle all such controversy. Making the latter case, Henry Jessey predicted in 1650  “that within a few years . . . there will be such a powerful compelating, and perfecting of the witness of Jesus Christ in his faithfull Witnesses, as will carry so clear evidence with it, that then, all such Tearms of distinguishing Disciples shall cease, and they shall all own, and be owned of each other as one.” For the present moment, the “mist of Babylon” still hung in the air and prevented godly men and women from reaching “oneness of mind about Baptisme.” But, for Jessey, one’s attitude toward current events was to be tempered by the certain expectation that “all these things shall be finishing.” Thus, one need not be overly concerned about the saints’ incomplete theological knowledge now because “in due time, the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah.”102 Jessey’s ecumenism was thus grounded upon an explicit appeal to an imminent millennial hope, and many others within the baptistical congregational movement found this vision compelling. When the church at

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Hexham mourned the “harshness” then dividing baptistic congregationalists, “the church of Christ now at Stokesley” encouraged them by pointing to the impending return of Christ, millenarian change serving as the antidote to present division: “Look up, it is white unto harvest. The dawning of the day of the reign of the saints is already begun, so that this sun shall be dried up, or kept within its own channel. That God shall beat down Satan under your feet shortly, you need not fear.”103 For the more sectarian baptistic congregationalists, however, the prospect of Christ’s return pushed them in an opposite direction, away from compromise and toward purity. Letters of spiritual encouragement, for example, circulated among baptistic congregations in the west of England during the mid-​1650s, explained that because “in these latter daies as  .  .  .  great iniquity aboundeth and the coming of the Lord draweth nigh,” it was the duty of God’s people to be “carrying on of Sion’s buildings and the pulling down of Babylon’s walls.” As baptistic congregationalists worked to better reform their own churches, “the Lord would call and pluck forth his people out of Babylon,” would take “away the vail from off his people’s faces,” and would gather “them together in families like a flock.”104 Here, the eschatological pressure worked not, as with Jessey and the ecumenists, to bring people together, but rather to push them apart. As the apocalypse approached, the truly godly needed to become more rigorous, more distinctive, and less amenable to all that fell short of perfect conformity to the “primitive” pattern. Within such a context, the idea of partnering with “unbaptized” persons naturally became less palatable and the more sectarian baptistic congregationalists launched vitriolic attacks on the watered-​ down pan-​ puritan alliance being crafted by the Cromwellian state. The system of national ministerial maintenance was dismissed as “upholding . . . that shadowish law of Moses” and “an evill from which all the people of God ought to purge themselves.” The “national service and worship” was condemned as a “Babilonish and anti-​christian” affair which promoted “anti-​christian national communion.” Not even the architecture was spared as the sectarians repudiated “those pretended holy and consecrated places which the world calls their churches which are set apart for their anti-​christian worship.”105 All of these denunciations reflected a growing conviction among many baptistic congregationalists that 1649’s promise of “freedom restored” was proving to be significantly less attractive than they had once hoped. Such descriptions of Cromwellian England contrast sharply with those put forward by the more ecumenical baptistic congregationalists. Edward Terrill of the Broadmead, Bristol church, for example, described the period as “those Oliverian dayes of Liberty” in which “they had cast off all Popery, and ye skirts of them, even Common-​prayer, and all unscriptural forms of worship.” In so doing,

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Terrill did not limit his praise to baptistic congregations, but extended it to observe “that [an] aboundance of Primitive light was in ye Nation.” Significantly, as he elaborated upon what that “Primitive light” entailed, he described a culture of puritan congregationalism in terms that were vague enough to encompass the whole, without having to explicitly draw attention to the movement’s disagreement over baptism: ye people gathered themselves into Congregations, [and] Preached ye Gospell only, for salvation by free grace, and workes but as ye fruite of a lively faith, no Merit; and that they practized ye ordinances of ye New Testament, as they are delivered and recorded in ye holy Scripture, without any Addition, or Detraction from ye Commands of our Lord Jesus, and the example of ye Apostles in ye Primitive Churches.106 Furthermore, as we saw in ­chapter 4, even as the sectarians dismissed the national ministry as “anti-​christian” and “babilonish,” that same Cromwellian regime showcased baptistic congregationalists in prominent positions and resolutely refused to criticize or condemn the denial of paedobaptism. Many of the themes we have been reviewing flowed together nicely in a series of letters which passed between the ecumenical Hexham church and its sectarian counterpart in nearby Newcastle. The Hexham congregation had been complaining for some time that the Newcastle church exhibited a “spirit of rigidness” in refusing to “own” them (that is, enter into formal inter-​congregational fellowship). According to Hexham, they were being spurned because of their willingness to “own unbaptized churches and ministers for churches of Christ and ministers of Christ.”107 In a letter dated August 27, 1654, Newcastle wrote to Hexham and addressed, among other things, the growing disagreement between the two churches:  “Oh! dear friends, consider why will ye yet keep up that which makes this distance between you and us?” Invoking the well-​worn puritan trope of a half-​way reformation, Newcastle accused Hexham of only “going out of Babylon by half ” and urged their co-​religionists to make a clean break: “Flee out of her. Be not partakers of her sins, lest you be partakers of her plagues. Why will you suffer yourselves and us to be robbed of that comfort and communion we might have together?” By keeping company with those outside baptistic circles, the Hexham church was accused of persisting in “that which neither God nor his truth enjoins you” and sinfully failing to “remove the cause of our offence, trouble, and distance.”108 For the sectarian church at Newcastle, the apocalyptically charged times in which they were living demanded the pursuit of greater purity. Yet, to the Hexham church, the same eschatological expectation evinced an opposite response, a push for greater unity in anticipation of

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the Christ’s imminent second advent. “[H]‌ow sad it is,” replied Hexham, “that you and we, who profess all one truth, should walk at such a distance, . . . our hearts so little drawn out to seek after peace and unity.” To sow discord among Christians agreeing on fundamental points was, from Hexham’s perspective, to become “disturbers of Sion’s peace, and hinderers of her prosperity.”109 Newcastle could not abide such compromise and finished the exchange with a final letter in which they denounced Hexham’s great “evil in owning the unrighteous wages of Balaam, and such things that our Christ, in the rules of his church, doth not own. This is that, and no other thing in us, that keeps us from closing with you.”110

V The exchange between Newcastle and Hexham offers both a rare glimpse into the interaction between baptistic congregationalists of differing persuasions and a fitting conclusion to this chapter. Having set out to analyze how baptistic congregationalists understood themselves during the Interregnum, our inquiry has reached at least four significant conclusions. First, we have seen that baptistic congregationalists contextualized their rejection of paedobaptism within the wider Protestant story of dynamic, eschatologically-​charged reformation. Despite the contrary suggestions of some historians, those who rejected paedobaptism were not driven by a unique or distinctively “Baptist” vision, hermeneutic or way of reading scripture. Rather, they were participating in a broader religious culture and simply pressed the logic of certain widely-​shared assumptions further than most of their contemporaries were willing to do. Second, we have considered the way in which eschatological expectation affected baptistic congregationalists in different ways, driving some to seek a broader ecumenical unity and others to isolate themselves in pursuit of theological purity. This illustrates the fluid nature of baptistic identity during the period but also, more broadly, the protean nature of apocalypticism and its potential as a catalyst for diverse, even opposing, sensibilities. Third, this chapter has nuanced the standard division drawn between “closed communion” and “open communion” baptistic churches by drawing attention to the ways in which the rival ecumenical and sectarian sensibilities which developed during the Interregnum encompassed more than just a discrete controversy over table access and included within their remit a far more complex skein of attitudes and assumptions toward eschatology, pan-​puritan ecumenism, and the Cromwellian regime. Fourth and finally, all of these insights reinforce the conclusion that one cannot meaningfully and helpfully talk about what “Baptists” thought and did during the mid-​seventeenth century. Previous chapters have made this point by

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questioning the historiography’s often unexamined assumption that the rejection of paedobaptism was immediately constitutive of a new ecclesiastical self-​identity based upon it. This chapter has buttressed that argument by pointing to the diversity which flourished during the Interregnum among otherwise like-​minded, Calvinistic, baptistic congregationalists. The movement’s ecumenical and sectarian strains were sufficiently divergent that one cannot coherently amalgamate them under the anachronistic and unduly homogenizing label “Baptists”—​and this is to say nothing of the Arminian “General Baptists” who were active concurrently.111 To better recover how these groups understood themselves, we must speak more carefully about them, thinking in terms of baptistic congregations and individuals questioning paedobaptism, but not lapsing into denominational labels derived from later decades. Such labels effectively fabricate a coordinated, self-​aware religious group that did not exist, while simultaneously dulling our sensitivity to the rather more subtle range of religious self-​identities that were actually emerging during the period.

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In the winter of 1646/​47, Colonel John Hutchinson, the governor of Nottingham Castle, stumbled upon “some notes concerning paedobaptism” that had been accidentally left behind in “the governor’s lodgings” by one of his many guests. The governor left the pages with his wife Lucy and she, “having more leisure to read than he,” studied them carefully. What she read surprised her. For although she knew that infant baptism was in keeping with “the judgment and practice of most churches,” after studying the anti-​paedobaptist arguments set forth in the notes and “compar[ing] them with the Scriptures” she “found not what to say against the truths they asserted.” So, “being then young and modest,” she asked her husband for help. But after “he diligently searched the scriptures,” he too “could find in them no ground at all for that practice.” Intensifying the search, Colonel Hutchinson “bought and read all the eminent treatises on both sides, which at that time came thick from the presses,” but he still came away convinced “of the error of the paedobaptists.” The urgency of the question stemmed in large measure from the Hutchinsons’ personal circumstances—​Lucy was pregnant and the question needed to be resolved before the baby was born. In due course, Colonel Hutchinson invited to dinner the most able ministers he knew, explained his doubts, and awaited their replies. But “[n]‌one of them could defend their practice with any satisfactory reason” and thus the couple, “professing themselves unsatisfied,” decided that their newborn would not be baptized.1 The experience of John and Lucy Hutchinson was by no means unique during the mid-​seventeenth century. But men and women of the period who, like the Hutchinsons, struggled with and ultimately rejected the practice of paedobaptism do not fit easily under any of the labels most often used within early modern historiography. Many would assume that Lucy Hutchinson’s rejection of infant baptism made her a “Baptist.” Yet, the twentieth-​century “Baptist” historian A. C. Underwood has suggested that despite Hutchinson’s

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opposition to paedobaptism she was “not a Baptist in the true sense of that term.”2 He reached this conclusion, presumably, because she was not a member of a “Baptist” church. But then one must define a “Baptist” church. The obvious answer, that it is a church in which infants were not baptized, encounters difficulty when one recalls that Quaker and Socinian assemblies would have likewise disallowed the practice and theirs are not regarded by anyone as “Baptist” gatherings. Adding to the difficulty, there were also churches like Henry Jessey’s, in which believer’s baptism was taught but paedobaptism was openly tolerated, and numerous congregational churches in which paedobaptism was taught but baptistic believers were openly tolerated.3 When these difficulties are combined with the striking fact that no mid-​seventeenth-​century actors were yet employing “Baptist”—​or any other term—​as a consistent self-​identifier, the problem of “Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum becomes even more acute and we are still left without clarity as to what to call someone like Lucy Hutchinson. Throughout his long career, Christopher Hill issued many warnings against the dangers of imposing anachronistic denominational labels on the disjointed religious landscape of mid-​seventeenth-​century England. This project has been an attempt to take him seriously. As early as the mid-​1960s, Hill drew our attention to the “[c]‌onsiderable confusion” being “caused by historians” who, while “writing the history of their own sect” and “looking for its origins,” have “draw[n] dividing lines more sharply than contemporaries would have done.”4 Over the course of some four decades, Hill repeatedly decried the tendency to “impose too clear outlines on the early history of English sects”5 and reminded readers that many of the “congregations of like-​minded believers . . . would have regarded themselves as part of the church of Christ, and would have resisted any sectarian labelling.”6 Hill has not been alone in observing that poorly chosen religious labels can distort one’s sense of the past, and scholars of early modern religion have become increasingly sensitive to this point. Peter Marshall, for instance, has highlighted the “particular dangers” associated with the “careless or unreflective use of religious and confessional labels.” For to employ a label, he argues, “is implicitly to endorse, sympathetically or otherwise, a particular interpretation of Church history.”7 Likewise, in his analysis of the term “ ‘Protestantism’ as a Historical Category,” Alec Ryrie has observed that religious labels raise an especially acute set of historiographical problems, “not only because they tend to originate either as terms of abuse or as contested claims which groups make about themselves, but also because they imply the coherence or even existence of a particular group when that may not be obvious.”8 Perhaps the best example of both the growing concern for accurate labeling among early modern religious historians and the

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productive potential of such efforts has been the intense historiographical scrutiny applied to the label “puritan.”9 Such care, however, has not been applied to mid-​seventeenth-​century English “Baptists,” a problem that the present volume has addressed. This lack of caution manifests itself implicitly through the hasty application of anachronistic labels, but also explicitly through the ongoing attempts of many to locate some sort of distinctively “Baptist” principles that would differentiate English “Baptists” from their mid-​seventeenth-​century contemporaries. The “earliest Baptists,” we are told, “quickly developed a shared set of distinguishing marks,” although “they often disagreed over the boundaries of their rather broad spectrum of beliefs.”10 Yet, attempts to find these “distinguishing marks” have not been convincing. The most obvious marker of a distinctive “Baptist” identity would, presumably, be the rejection of paedobaptism, and, indeed, one often reads statements to the effect that all “Baptists” were “agreed on the nature and method of baptism.”11 But even these seemingly innocuous statements are deeply problematic. First, as we have already discussed at length, this sort of language wrongly implies an overarching denomination of “Baptists” who had met and “agreed” upon such matters. Second, other groups during the mid-​seventeenth century also rejected paedobaptism, but no one seems eager to classify them as “Baptists.” Third, one will sometimes encounter historians arguing that certain individuals who affirmed believer’s baptism were, nonetheless, not “true Baptists.” This was more common among earlier denominational historians—​consider the example already cited in which A. C. Underwood dismissed Lucy Hutchinson, along with several others, as “not a Baptist in the true sense of that term.”12 A more recent work similarly suggests that John Tombes’s “identity as a Baptist is questionable as he remained the vicar of Leominster from 1649 until his ejection in 1662.”13 Tombes was arguably the mid-​seventeenth century’s most prominent and accomplished apologist for believer’s baptism. And yet, his “Baptist” identity is questioned, not because he wavered in his support for believer’s baptism, but because he did not hold to other principles that are taken to be essential components of a “Baptist” identity.14 But here one enters rather murky waters, for these attempts to locate essential “Baptist principles” beyond the bare embrace of believer’s baptism prove exceedingly difficult to sustain. Some, for instance, claim to have identified a distinctively “Baptist” ecclesiology, suggesting that “Baptists” stressed “[f ]‌ormal associationalism” as “the result of a native Baptist connectional instinct.”15 By stressing “[f ]ormal associationalism” the “Baptists” thus stood “[i]n contrast to Congregationalism which held strongly to independency, to the neglect of the wider body.”16 But while “Baptists” did organize into a variety of regional associations, the suggestion that this somehow differentiated them from mainstream congregationalists is not correct. Well before “Baptists” had begun to

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formalize their own associations, the Congregational Way had been codified on both sides of the Atlantic, complete with a variety of elaborate mechanisms designed to grant autonomy to local congregations while preserving a robust consociation among them—​in other words, precisely that ecclesiology that is said to have distinguished a uniquely “Baptist” sensibility.17 Some posit that the ecclesiastical office of “messenger” is “a point by which the ecclesiologies of the Baptists can be differentiated from other religious groups.”18 But here, again, we find that this idea was not at all unique to “Baptists.” Ecclesiastical “messengers” were widely accepted and discussed among congregationalists in both old and New England.19 When, for example, the congregational representatives at the Westminster Assembly wished to explain how their polity worked in practice, they used an illustrative anecdote which referenced “two Gentlemen . . . sent as Messengers from that Church” in which they were members to the church with which they had to deal.20 Within the Congregational Way, messengers functioned almost exactly as they did within mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptist” circles:  they represented the congregations from which they were sent, whether at some sort of larger ecclesiastical gathering or in direct communication with another congregation. In his influential Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), John Cotton explained that messengers were a way of promoting the “communion of churches:” “All of the churches have the like liberty of sending their messengers to debate and determine in a Synod, such matters as do concern them all.”21 In fact, far from being a distinctively “Baptist” notion, the concept of an inter-​congregational messenger predates even the Congregational Way. 2 Corinthians 8:23 refers to individuals sent from one church to another as “messengers of the Churches,” prompting the compilers of the Geneva Bible (1599 edition) to comment:  “All churches shall bee witnesses . . . for so much as you see the messengers whom they have chosen by all their consents and sent them unto you.”22 Whatever the ultimate origin of the “messenger” as an ecclesiastical representative, it neither began with nor was unique to early English “Baptists.” Numerous other points of doctrine and practice have been put forward as distinguishing marks of mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptist” identity; the list includes millennial enthusiasm,23 the separation of church and state,24 the desire for pure worship derived from scripture alone,25 and the requirement that church members give evidence of conversion as “visible saints.”26 Still, others argue that “Baptist ecclesiology of the period was distinctive in its thoroughgoing application of [a]‌Christological paradigm to all aspects of the local congregation.”27 Elsewhere, we read that “the genius of the Baptists is the idea that the people can be trusted to interpret Scripture aright” and, similarly, that “early Baptists” were uniquely “focused on freedom both for the church and for the individual.”28 This

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multiplicity of theories underscores the lack of agreement within “Baptist” historiography as to what, if anything, would have distinguished a putative “Baptist” movement from other religious groups. It does not seem overly bold to suggest that this failure to form a consensus reflects the underlying reality that none of the aforementioned proposals are particularly convincing. The various items on the list are all far too broadly defined to function as lines of demarcation between “Baptists” and other mid-​seventeenth-​century groups. During the English Revolution and Interregnum, many were, in one way or another, seeking, for example, “freedom both for the church and for the individual,” and it is exceedingly difficult to see how such nebulous ideas could meaningfully differentiate “Baptists” from a host of contemporaries. Indeed, in almost every case, the ostensibly “Baptist” identifiers are found to have been exhibited earlier and with greater clarity by either Protestants more generally or mainstream, paedobaptist congregationalists. This lack of any distinctively “Baptist” principles would come as a surprise only if one had presupposed from the outset that mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists” formed a coherent religious culture. But, on the other hand, if one were to abandon this assumption and examine the period without expecting to find a pan-​“Baptist” communion, then the pieces would fit together rather more neatly. The discovery that many ostensibly “Baptist” ideas actually come from an older and more stable transatlantic congregational culture dovetails with the central argument of this book: mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists,” especially those of a Calvinistic persuasion, are more helpfully regarded as baptistic congregationalists. Men and women during the Revolution and Interregnum who, like Lucy Hutchinson, came to reject paedobaptism were not “Baptists”—​at least, not if that term is taken to imply an imagined community of religious fellow-​travelers who were aware of one another’s existence and who understood themselves to share a clearly defined and clearly distinctive set of doctrines and practices. In this sense, there were no “Baptists” during the period at all. Lucy Hutchinson can no more be called a “Baptist” than William Laud can be called a Tractarian, the former being only slightly more anachronistic than the latter. That those rejecting paedobaptism might be described as “baptistic” is true enough, although tautological, but it seems clear in light of the preceding chapters that the embrace of believer’s baptism did not immediately or automatically generate the new sense of pan-​“Baptist” identity that seems to be implied by the pervasive use of “Baptist” as a descriptor for mid-​seventeenth-​century individuals or ideas. What kind of Christian, then, was Lucy Hutchinson? She took part in a broad puritan religious culture. Like many of her contemporaries, she questioned the legitimacy of paedobaptism. She and her husband listened to sermons, shared notes, read treatises, conversed with others, and then compared all of what they

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learned against the Bible as best they could understand it. In doing so, they were participating in the sort of public and private word-​centered devotion that Andrew Cambers has broadly categorized as Godly Reading.29 Moved by the spirit of the age, the Hutchinsons wanted to “try the spirits, search the Scriptures,” and “examine the texts of Scriptures” to determine what was true.30 During the 1640s and 1650s, one’s position on the question of baptism was not necessarily constitutive of anything beyond itself, and one’s engagement with the baptismal question was often accompanied by engagement with other doctrinal questions. The hybridized religious identities resulting from this swirl of theological inquiry are not often amenable to denominational labels imported from later decades. And so, the Hutchinsons could not have been becoming “Baptists” because the category would not have occurred to them. Christopher Hill, for his part, continued throughout his career to use denominational labels like “Baptist.” To eliminate them altogether, he explained, “would be a little drastic in view of the usage of contemporaries and of long-​established conventions of historical writing.” But, in conceding this point, he also urged that such labels “be used with extreme caution,” and he warned historians to “never forget the fluidity of religious groupings before persecution forced organization upon what we may begin to call ‘sects’ after 1660.”31 These prescriptions are eminently sensible. Unfortunately, however, despite such admonitions having been issued repeatedly by Hill and others for over half-​a-​century, they do not seem to have had their desired effect, at least with respect to mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists.” As this book has demonstrated, the historiography continues to speak of “Baptists” during the 1640s and 1650s as though the term referred to a well-​ defined movement with a distinctive set of beliefs and practices. When one attempts to distinguish between “Particular” and “General Baptists,” the confusion becomes pronounced. For if no one was using the word “Baptist” as a mid-​seventeenth-​century self-​identifier, still less was anyone during the period specifying what type of “Baptist” they were. Hill’s warning to utilize these labels “with extreme caution” has been, if not entirely ignored, at least not consistently remembered. For even when scholars offer the occasional caveat gesturing in the direction of Hill’s concerns, the force of their rhetoric overwhelmingly lends itself to conclusions that are far too vague and insufficiently nuanced. Thus, it seems that perhaps the time has come to do what Hill would not, and to take the “drastic” step of dispensing altogether with the “Baptist” label. To this end, this book has offered a close examination of the religious self-​ identity of mid-​seventeenth-​century “Baptists,” and, more specifically, those commonly known as “Particular Baptists.” I  have argued that these men and women are most helpfully understood, not by any of these labels, but rather as

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congregationalists who, as it happened, reached novel conclusions regarding the legitimacy of infant baptism. This repudiation of paedobaptism did not instantaneously alter either their basic theological orientation or their relational networks; nor did it automatically confer upon them a new “Baptist” identity, a supposition strongly supported by their basic inability to settle upon a consistent term of self-​identification.32 A coherent, overarching pan-​“Baptist” identity may well have developed over subsequent decades, but it is problematic to project this back on to the English Revolution and Interregnum. Moreover, as we saw in ­chapter 3, even the rejection of paedobaptism was itself made possible and plausible by a more basic congregational ecclesiological paradigm, a conclusion substantiated by the intense conceptual pull which believer’s baptism would exert throughout congregational circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, I have suggested that the mid-​seventeenth-​century dissenters ubiquitously referred to as “Particular Baptists” would be better described as “baptistic congregationalists,” a label which more accurately describes their mid-​seventeenth-​century self-​identity, and does not insert them retroactively into an imagined pan-​“Baptist” denomination which, at that time, clearly did not exist. This leaves open, of course, the question of what term might best describe the so-​called General Baptists. I am inclined toward something like “baptistic separatists,” a term that highlights their distinctive sacramentology without also implying that they exhibited relational and theological continuities with mainstream congregationalists. To properly locate them, however, will require sensitivity to the unique relational and theological matrix out of which they emerged, a task only possible when one jettisons unhelpful and anachronistic denominational categories.33 Of course, this is not to say that all uses of anachronistic denominational language are equally problematic. If, in fact, one is writing from a denominational perspective with the goal of inquiring after the genealogy of a modern religious group, then this sort of retroactive labeling seems to an extent unavoidable and not entirely undesirable. But this is because an inquiry of such a kind begins with a well-​established, modern denominational identity, and takes this present reality as both its starting point and its principal interest. Scholars may well wish to identify certain ideas and practices as normative within their own fully realized ecclesiastical communions and then proceed to trace the development of those distinctive practices as far back as the record will take them. Self-​identified Baptist scholar Robert Johnson, for example, has attempted to tell “the Baptist story” in his Global Introduction to Baptist Churches (2010). He begins by identifying John Smyth’s Amsterdam congregation as “the world’s first Baptist church,” and proceeds from there to track the forward progress of an imagined “Baptist” community. To locate Smyth’s church as the start of a “Baptist” movement is, as we have now seen, deeply problematic from the perspective of an early modern

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historian. Yet, when contextualized within Johnson’s wider project, the anachronism works. This is because his book is explicitly intended to meet the needs of present-​day Baptist churches and his historical inquiry functions, in part, as an unashamed exercise in denominational identity-​formation: “the intent has been to outline pathways that need further exploration to liberate, empower, and value the travails, achievements, and contributions from the many cultures that make up the global Baptist family today.”34 When “empower[ing] . . . the global Baptist family today” is openly acknowledged as one’s starting point, then a measure of anachronism and prolepsis within one’s reading of the past is understandable and perhaps even salutary—​Johnson and his co-​religionists are openly constructing their own religious self-​identity and are free to draw lines of spiritual continuity with whomever they see fit. Serious problems arise, however, when such interpretations are unintentionally appropriated by critical historians whose only ostensible goal is to better understand the early modern past. Assumptions about the existence of an early pan-​Baptist identity are so deeply embedded within Baptist historiography that scholars relying on this body of secondary literature often reproduce these paradigms unawares. The result is the near ubiquitous assumption that a coherent, identifiable group of “Baptists” were active during the early and mid-​seventeenth century. An otherwise excellent textbook, for example, explains to students that although “[t]‌here were two types of Baptist” during the English Revolution, “[a]ll Baptists . . . shared the belief that baptism should” be reserved for believers.35 Such statements contain a great deal of truth, but that truth is embedded within an ill-​conceived framework and the result is a misleading sense of England’s religious landscape during the mid-​seventeenth century. This book has attempted to clarify aspects of that landscape. I  have referred to Calvinistic “baptistic congregationalists” to describe those traditionally labeled “Particular Baptists,” and I hope that the introduction of this term and the arguments which have accompanied it will help to further our understanding, not just of early English “Baptists,” but of the period more broadly. For these insights have application beyond just baptistic congregationalists, and other religious expressions during the period deserve similar re-​e valuation. If we wish to accurately understand separatist or radical religion during the English Revolution and Interregnum we must refrain from making predication of imagined denominational bodies and begin to assess with greater nuance the idiosyncrasies of mid-​seventeenth-​century religious identity. The 1640s and 1650s were decades in which, as Alec Ryrie has put it, “the themes of Protestantism’s early history came together in a bloody, chaotic, and exhilarating symphony.”36 For many, the period’s dramatic political and societal upheavals promised apocalyptic judgment for the wicked and divine blessing

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for the faithful. And as pious men and women strove to end up on the right side of that eschatological divide, as they worked to “tear down Babylon” and “raise up Jerusalem,”37 long unchallenged theological assumptions were suddenly called into question and the reformation begun in Wittenberg continued to unfold in the books, pews, and imaginations of England’s self-​appointed saints. One such doctrine up for re-​evaluation was paedobaptism, and as the godly weighed it in the balance, some found it wanting. When we discuss such individuals, we must resist an easy recourse to well-​worn categories and instead remain sensitive both to the provisional and complex nature of the theological conclusions they reached and the unpredictability and contingency of the times in which they lived.

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Introduction 1. Robert E. Johnson, A global introduction to Baptist churches, New York 2010, 1. 2. David W. Bebbington, Baptists through the centuries:  a history of a global people, Waco 2010, 3. 3. A declaration concerning the publike dispute which should have been in the publike meeting-​house of Alderman-​Bury, 1645 (Wing D575), 1. 4. See John Coffey, Persecution and toleration in Protestant England, 1558–​1689, Harlow 2000, 99–​101, 114–​15; Ian Atherton and David Como, “The burning of Edward Wightman: Puritanism, prelacy and the politics of heresy in early modern England,” The English Historical Review (hereinafter cited as EHR) cxx (2005), 1215–​50. 5. Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, Oxford 2013, 4. 6. Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, the true fountain of independency, antinomy, brownisme, familisme, 1647 (Wing B452A), epistle dedicatory. 7. Declaration concerning the publike dispute, 1; 1 Thessalonians 5:21. 8. Ibid.; Acts 17:11. 9. Ibid. 10. See for example, Barry H. Howson, Erroneous and schismatical opinions:  the questions of orthodoxy regarding the theology of Hanserd Knollys (c. 1599–​1691), Leiden 2001, 65; Ian Birch, “To follow the lambe wheresoever he goeth:” the ecclesial polity of the English Calvinistic Baptists 1640–​1660, Eugene 2017, 25. 11. Declaration concerning the publike dispute, title page, 4–​6. 12. J. C. Davis, “Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal (hereinafter cited as HJ) xxxv (1992), 511. 13. John Morrill, The nature of the English Revolution, 1994; Margo Todd, ed., Reformation to Revolution:  politics and religion in early modern England, 1995; Austin Woolrych, Britain in revolution, 1625–​1660, Oxford 2002, 1–​6; Charles

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W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, eds., England’s wars of religion, revisited, Farnham 2011; Barry Coward, The Stuart age: England, 1603–​1714, 4th edn, Harlow 2012, 167–​284; John Morrill, “Revisionism’s wounded legacies,” Huntington Library Quarterly (hereinafter cited as HLQ) lxxviii (2015), 577–​94. 14. John Coffey, “Religious thought,” in Michael J. Braddick, (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the English Revolution, Oxford 2015, 447. 15. Peter Lake, “The historiography of Puritanism,” in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge companion to Puritanism, Cambridge 2008, 346. 16. Like many of the labels used and discussed in this book, “radical religion” as applied to religious groups in early modern England has been a contested term. Throughout the present work, I have loosely followed what Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan describe as a “functionalist approach” to the term’s usage; that is, one in which given individuals and groups are radical insofar as they “challenged the fundamental political, religious or social axioms of their day;” Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, “Introduction:  reappraising early modern radicals and radicalisms,” in Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (eds), Varieties of seventeenth-​ and early eighteenth-​century radicalism in context, Farnham 2011, 25; see also Glenn Burgess, “Radicalism and the English Revolution,” in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (eds), English radicalism, 1550–​1850, Cambridge, 2007, 62–​86. 17. J. F. McGregor and B. Reay, eds., Radical religion in the English Revolution, Oxford 1984, vii. 18. David R. Como, Blown by the spirit: Puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-​Civil-​War England, Stanford, CA, 2004, 23. 19. Writing deliberately from within a contemporary Baptist tradition, B. R. White likewise observes the lack of scholarly attention to the early English Baptists and notes the consequences within his own denominational circles:  “A great deal of nonsense has been talked by Baptists . . . because the roots of their tradition have not been carefully uncovered and studied”; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century, Didcot 1996, 6. 20. Christopher Hill, “History and denominational history,” Baptist Quarterly (hereinafter cited as BQ), xxii (1967), 65–​71; A. C. Bickley, “Thomas Crosby (d. in or after 1749),” rev. Philip Carter, ODNB. 21. Thomas Crosby, The history of the English Baptists, 4 vols, 1738–​1740. 22. Joseph Ivimey, A history of the English Baptists, 4  vols., 1811–​1830, i.viii. Other examples of nineteenth and early-​twentieth-​century denominational history include B.  Evans, The early English Baptists, 2  vols., 1864; and Thomas Armitage, A history of the Baptists, New York 1890; John C. Carlile, The story of the English Baptists, 1905; A. C. Underwood, A history of the English Baptists, 1947; William Thomas Whitley, A history of British Baptists, 1923. For a critical survey of Baptist denominational histories, see White, English Baptists, 164–​70. 23. One of the earliest and most important of such volumes was Champlin Burrage’s The early English Dissenters, 1912, a seminal text that traced an emerging early

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modern English separatist movement from the mid-​sixteenth century through to the eve of England’s Revolution in 1641. See also, Christopher Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English Revolution, New York 1975. 24. Murray Tolmie, The triumph of the saints: the separate churches of London, 1616–​ 1649, Cambridge 1977; Michael R. Watts, The dissenters: from Reformation to the French Revolution, Oxford, 1978, 65, 41–​50; J. F. McGregor, “The Baptists: fount of all heresy,” in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical religion in the English Revolution, Oxford 1984, 23–​63; B.  R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century; see also, Mark R. Bell, Apocalypse how? Baptist movements during the English Revolution, Macon, GA, 2000; Mark Bell, “Freedom to form: the development of Baptist movements during the English Revolution,” in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds), Religion in Revolutionary England, Manchester 2006, 181–​201; Andrew Bradstock, Radical religion in the Cromwell’s England: a concise history from the English Civil War to the end of the Commonwealth, 2011,  1–​26. 25. Stephen Wright, The early English Baptists, 1603–​1649, Woodbridge 2006. 26. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 72. 27. For example, in a recent work on Particular Baptists during the mid-​seventeenth century, Ian Birch limits his comments on Wright to a single mention and does not interact with Wright’s central argument; Birch, “To follow the lambe,” xviii. Larry Kreitzer has effectively scrutinized Wright’s handling of a key incident in the life of the General Baptist Thomas Lambe, but this is a fine-​grained analysis rather than an overarching critique: Larry J. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and his world, 5 vols., Oxford 2010–​2015, v.222–​28; a passing reference in support of Wright’s argument can be found in Anthony L. Chute, Nathan A. Finn, and Michael A. G. Haykin, The Baptist story: from English sect to global movement, Nashville 2015, 27. 28. Dennis C. Bustin, Paradox and perseverance: Hanserd Knollys, Particular Baptist pioneer in seventeenth-​century England, Eugene, OR, 2006. 29. Austin Walker, The excellent Benjamin Keach, Dundas, ON, 2004; Jonathan W. Arnold, The reformed theology of Benjamin Keach (1640–​1704), Oxford 2013. 30. G. Stephen Weaver, Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist: Hercules Collins (1647–​1702) and Particular Baptist identity in early modern England, Göttingen 2015. 31. Clint C. Bass, Thomas Grantham (1633–​ 1692) and General Baptist theology, Oxford 2013. 32. Richard Greaves, John Bunyan and English nonconformity, 1992; R. L. Greaves, Glimpses of glory: John Bunyan and English dissent, Stanford, CA, 2002. 33. R. D. Land, “Doctrinal controversies of English Particular Baptists (1644–​1691) as illustrated by the career and writings of Thomas Collier,” D. Phil., University of Oxford 1979; Paul Linton Gritz, “Samuel Richardson and the religious and political controversies confronting the London Particular Baptists, 1643 to 1658,” PhD, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary 1988); J. B. Vaughn, “Public worship and practical theology in the work of Benjamin Keach (1640–​1704),” PhD, University of St. Andrews 1990; Michael Haykin, “Hanserd Knollys (ca.

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1599–​1691) on the gifts of the spirit,” Westminster Theological Journal (hereinafter cited as WTJ) liv (1992), 99–​113; Howson, Erroneous and schismatical opinions; Michael Thomas Renihan, Antipaedobaptism in the thought of John Tombes, Auburn, MA, 2001; James C. Brooks, “Benjamin Keach and the Baptist singing controversy: mediating scripture, confessional heritage, and Christian unity,” PhD, Florida State University 2006. 34. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and his world. 35. See, for example, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “John Clarke and the complications of liberty,” Church History lxxv (2006), 69–​93; Douglas Brown, “Christopher Blackwood:  portrait of a seventeenth-​century Baptist,” BQ xxxii (1987), 28–​38; Michael Haykin, Kiffin, Knollys, and Keach: rediscovering our English Baptist heritage, Leeds 1996; Ronald Angelo Johnson, “The peculiar ventures of Particular Baptist Pastor William Kiffen and King Charles II of England,” Baptist History and Heritage (hereinafter cited as BHH) xliv (2009), 60–​71; David J. Terry, “Mark Lucar: Particular Baptist pioneer,” BHH xxv (1990), 43–​9; B. R. White, “Henry Jessey: a pastor in politics,” BQ xxv (1973), 98–​110. 36. Rachel Adcock, Baptist women’s writings in revolutionary culture, 1640–​ 1680, Farnham 2015; see also Curtis W. Freeman, ed., A company of women preachers:  Baptist prophetesses in seventeenth-​century England:  a reader, Waco, 2011; Ian Birch, “The ministry of women among early Calvinistic Baptists,” Scottish Journal of Theology lxix, (2016), 402–​16. Although focusing largely on Quaker experiences, many of the same issues are explored in Phyllis Mack, Visionary women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-​century England, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1992. 37. Michael A.  G. Haykin and C. Jeffrey Robinson, “Particular Baptist debates about communion and hymn-​singing,” in Michael A. G. Haykin and Mark Jones (eds), Drawn into controversie:  reformed theological diversity and debates within seventeenth-​century British Puritanism, Göttingen 2011, 284–​308; Matthew Ward, Pure worship: the early English Baptist distinctive, Eugene, OR, 2014. 38. Peter J. Morden, “Nonconformists and the work of Christ: a study in Particular Baptist thought,” in Robert Pope, (ed.), T&T Clark companion to nonconformity, 2013, 185–​212. 39. Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen:  theological debates in Cromwellian Ireland, New York 2007, 79–​98; James M. Renihan, Edification and beauty: the practical ecclesiology of the English Particular Baptists, 1675–​1705, Eugene, OR, 2009; Birch, “To follow the lambe.” 40. Samuel D. Renihan, From shadow to substance: the federal theology of the English Particular Baptists (1642–​1704), Oxford 2018. 41. Dennis C. Bustin, “Papacy, parish churches, and prophecy:  the popish plot and the London Particular Baptists—​a case study,” Canadian Journal of History xxxviii (2003), 493–​504; Scott R. Spurlock, “The politics of eschatology:  Baptists in Interregnum Scotland,” BQ xliv (2010), 324–​46; C. Douglas Weaver, “Early English

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Baptists:  individual conscience and eschatological ecclesiology,” Perspectives in Religious Studies xxxviii (2011), 141–​58. 42. T. L. Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: the Baptist-​Quaker conflict in seventeenth-​century England, New York 1997. 43. “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” Herbert Butterfield, The Whig interpretation of history, 1931, 31–​2. 44. I discuss the “General Baptists” in detail in Matthew C. Bingham, “English radical religion and the invention of the General Baptists, 1609–​1660,” The Seventeenth Century, published online May 2018, https://​doi.org/​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 0268117X.2018.1463287. 45. Alec Ryrie, “Protestantism as a historical category,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (hereinafter cited as TRHS), xxvi (2016), 59–​77. C h a p t er   1 1. Commons’ Journals (hereinafter cited as CJ), iv, 420–​2. 2. A Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, but unjustly, called Anabaptists (1646: Wing C5780). 3. Ibid. sig. A2r. 4. The confession of faith, of those churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists (1644: Wing C5789). 5. Daniel Featley, The dippers dipt, 1647 (Wing F588), 178. 6. Early Modern names were not spelled consistently. When possible, I  have used the spelling given by the ODNB. Stephen Wright, “Jacob, Henry (1562/​ 3–​1624),”  ODNB. 7. Richard L. Greaves, “Lothropp, John (bap. 1584, d. 1653),” ODNB. 8. Wright, “Jessey, Henry,” ODNB; B. R. White, “Henry Jessey: a pastor in politics,” BQ xxv (1973), 98–​110. 9. Murray Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 34. 10. W. T. Whitley suggests that by “1711 there was hardly a single Particular Baptist church in London which did not owe its origin at first, second, or third hand to this church,” W. T. Whitley, “Records of the Jacob-​Lathrop-​Jessey church 1616–​1641,” Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society (hereinafter cited as TBHS) i (1910) s, 205. 11. William Kiffen and Thomas Shepherd split off from the Jacob church in 1633. Spilsbery received members of the Jacob church during a later split in 1638, and can be reasonably “included in the Jacob circle of churches in London.” Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 25; Munden and Kilcop are both named among those who broke off from the main congregation in 1641 and were baptized by Richard Blunt and Samuel Blacklock; Burrage, Early English Dissenters (hereinafter cited as EED), ii.302–​3; Stinton, Repository,  10–​1.

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12. W. T. Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” TBHS i (1910), 237–​45. 13. Stinton, “Repository;” the “Repository” was rediscovered in 1896 as part of the “Gould Manuscript,” a larger collection of source materials, named for the Rev. George P.  Gould, on whose behalf the original documents were transcribed by William Keymer in 1860. Stinton was shown to be the compiler of “A Repository of Divers Historical Matters relating to the English Antipedobaptists” by Champlin Burrage in 1912. Burrage also included transcriptions of Stinton documents 1, 2, and portions of 4 in the second volume of his history of English dissent. W. T. Whitley likewise published documents 1, 2, 3, and 4 in TBHS. For a critical evaluation of Stinton’s role as the original compiler, see Burrage, EED, i.336–​50; for the transcription of the documents see ibid. 2.292–​308; Whitley, TBHS i (1910), 203–​45; Whitley, TBHS 2 (1911), 31–​52; for a summary of all thirty documents contained in the collection see “The contents of Stinton’s repository,” TBHS ii (1911), 77–​94. 14. Beth Lynch, “Keach, Benjamin (1640–​1704),” ODNB. 15. Stinton’s materials eventually made their way to Thomas Crosby, who used them to create his own four-​volume history of the English Baptists; Crosby, History, i.i. 16. Stinton, Repository, 1–​9; Burrage, EED, ii.292–​302. 17. Stinton, Repository, 10–​12; Burrage, EED, ii.302–​5. The name comes from Thomas Crosby’s casual attribution of the manuscript to Kiffen; Crosby, History, 1.101, 148. This assertion was challenged by W. T. Whitley, who argued that Henry Jessey was the actual author in W. T. Whitley, “Rise of the Particular Baptists in London, 1633–​1644,” TBHS i, (1910), 226–​36. Half-​a-​century later, Barrie White and Murray Tolmie reopened the debate, White hesitatingly affirming Kiffen as the most likely author, Tolmie arguing for an unknown member of the Jessey church; Barrie R. White, “Who really wrote the Kiffen manuscript?” BHH i (1966), 3–​10; Barrie R. White, “Baptist beginnings and the Kiffen manuscript,” BHH ii (1967), 27–​37; Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 203. 18. White, “Who really wrote the Kiffen manuscript?” 3. 19. Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643.” 20. See Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 1–​84; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century, 59–​94; Stephen Wright, The early English Baptists, 1603–​1649, 75–​138. 21. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 2. 22. Ibid. 12. While the novelty of Jacob’s vision cannot be completely denied, there is considerable debate over the degree to which he stands in continuity with other English separatists; see B. R. White, The English separatist tradition:  from the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers, Oxford 1971, 164–​9. 23. Henry Jacob, A confession and protestation of the faith of certaine Christians in England, Amsterdam 1616 (RSTC 14330), articles 6, 8. 24. Ibid. article 4. 25. Indeed, the 39 Articles defined the “visible church of Christ” as “a congregation of faithful men,” a definition that, at least superficially, was not at all unlike that which

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Jacob endorsed; Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and confessions of faith in the Christian tradition, 3 vols., New Haven 2003, ii.533. 26. Jacob, A confession, article 8. 27. See, for example, J[ames] W[ilcock], A challenge sent to Master E.B.  a semi-​ separatist from the Church of England, 1641 (Wing W2117); John Taylor, An exact description of a Roundhead, 1642 (Wing E3638), 3–​4; Robert Baillie, A dissuasive from the errours of the time, 1645 (Wing B456), 17. 28. Jacob, A confession, title page; see Polly Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–​1640, Stanford, CA, 2011, 47–​73; on the confusing nature of Jacob’s position, see also Edmund Morgan:  “Henry Jacob  .  .  .  did gather a church of his own in London in 1616 . . . It is not apparent how Jacob justified this action, for he claimed to believe that the English churches were true churches;” Edmund S. Morgan, Visible saints: the history of a Puritan idea, New York 1963, 78. 29. While denying the validity of the national church as such, Jacob’s 1616 confession did not forbid, and, in fact, enjoined, limited communion with individual parish churches: “yet all this (as we judge) doth not simply disanull that peoples being true visible Christians with us (so long as herein they erre but of ignorance) nor the assemblies from being true visible politicall Churches in some respect and degree, as before is shewed. And therefore we communicate also with them on occasion . . . while in such communicating wee countenance out no evill thing in them.” Jacob, A confession, sig. B4r. 30. Stinton, Repository, 6, 9; Burrage, EED, ii.299, 301–​2. 31. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., Reports of cases in the star chamber and high commission, 1886, 284–​6. 32. Stinton, Repository, 10; Burrage, EED, ii.302. 33. Stinton, Repository, 7; Burrage, EED, ii.299. 34. Stinton, Repository, 10; Burrage, EED, ii.302. 35. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 25. 36. Stinton, Repository, 10–​1; Burrage, EED, ii.302–​4. 37. Stinton, Repository, 12; Burrage, EED, ii.304. 38. See Peter Marshall, “The naming of Protestant England,” Past and Present (hereinafter cited as P&P) ccxiv (2012), 87–​128; Alec Ryrie, “Protestantism as a historical category,” TRHS xxvi (2016), 59–​77. 39. John Coffey concisely surveys the scholarly usage of this “notoriously controversial” label in John Coffey, “The problem of “Scottish Puritanism”, 1590–​1638,” in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–​1700, Aldershot 2006, 67–​73. 40. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography:  or, a description of the heretickes and sectaries of these latter times, 1645 (Wing P174); Thomas Edwards, Gangraena, or, a catalogue and discovery of many of the errours, heresies, blasphemies and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time, 1646 (Wing E228); Robert Baillie, Anabaptism

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41. Adam Taylor, The history of the English General Baptists, 2 vols., 1818, i.72; Walter H. Burgess, John Smith, the se-​Baptist, Thomas Helwys and the first Baptist church in England, 1911; White, English Baptists, 15–​58; Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 69–​84; Stephen Brachlow, “Puritan theology and General Baptist origins,” BQ xxxi (1985), 179–​94; Stephen Wright has challenged the traditional reconstruction of General Baptist development in Wright, Early English Baptists, 13–​74, 99–​100, 110, 115–​21. 42. See, for example, the Calvinist affirmation of the 1644 London confession that Christ brought “forth salvation and reconciliation onely for the elect,” with the Arminianism of the 1651 Faith and practise of thirty congregations:  “Jesus Christ through (or by) the grace of God, suffered death for all mankind, or every man;” Bill J. Leonard, “Introduction,” In William L. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 2nd rev. edn, Valley Forge, PA, 2011, 150, 165. 43. See c­ hapter 2 for more detail on how so-​called “Particular Baptists” self-​identified during the seventeenth century. 44. Marshall, “The naming of Protestant England,” 90. 45. The humble apology of some commonly called Anabaptists, 1660 (Wing H3404) was composed in the immediate aftermath of Venner’s Rising in January 1661. Addressed to Charles II as a formal “Protestation against the late wicked and most horrid treasonable Insurrection and Rebellion acted in the City of London,” the Apology was signed by both Particular Baptist leaders like William Kiffen and General Baptist leaders such as Thomas Lambe; ibid. 5.  The document was a pragmatic attempt to deflect responsibility for the uprising away from the London “Anabaptists” with whom it was popularly associated. The attempted coup came at a time when popular and official hostility toward dissent was rapidly waxing. In May 1660, numerous baptistic churches in London had been vandalized by a “rude multitude” and many more were similarly threatened. These extreme circumstances combine with the politically-​oriented, non-​doctrinal character of the document to suggest that the Apology’s exceptional conjunction of General and Particular Baptists was not indicative of any deeper affinity or wider cooperation between the two groups; Larry J. Kreitzer, William Kiffen and his world, i.126–​47; Timothy J. G. Harris, London crowds in the reign of Charles II: propaganda and politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis, Cambridge 1987, 52; for Venner’s Rising, see Champlin Burrage, “The fifth monarchy insurrections,” EHR xxv (1910), 722–​47. 46. Lampkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 187. 47. “God . . . did freely, without respect to any work done, or to be done by them as a moving cause, elect and choose some to himself before the foundation of the world . . . whom he in time hath, doth, and will call, justify, sanctify and glorify;” Ibid. 189. 48. “Christ Jesus suffered death . . . bearing the sins of his people on his own body on the cross;” ibid. 190. 49. Ibid. 186–​7; see B.  R. White, ed., Association records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales and Ireland to 1660, 1971, 61.

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50. Although he does not appear to have coined the term “Calvinist consensus,” the interpretive framework to which the term refers is associated with Nicholas Tyacke:  see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists:  the rise of English Arminianism, C.  1590–​1640, Oxford 1987; see also Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, C.  1530–​1700, Manchester 2001; challenges to and engagements with Tyacke’s original thesis are numerous and include G. W. Bernard, “The Church of England C. 1529–​C. 1642,” History lxxv (1990), 183–​206; Peter White, Predestination, policy and polemic: conflict and consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War, Cambridge 1992; Anthony Milton, Catholic and reformed: the Roman and Protestant churches in English Protestant thought, 1600–​ 1640, Cambridge 1995, 543; David Como, “Puritans, predestination and the construction of orthodoxy in early seventeenth-​century England,” in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and orthodoxy in the English Church, C. 1560–​ 1660, Woodbridge 2000, 64–​87. 51. Anthony Rudd, A sermon preached before the kings maieste at White-​Hall upon the ninth of Februarie 1605, 1606 (RSTC 21435), D2r; quoted in Milton, Catholic and reformed, 397. 52. For example, William Prynne, The Church of Englands old antithesis to new Arminianisme, 1629 (RSTC 20457), 118 and passim. 53. James Warre, The touch-​stone of truth, 1624 (RSTC 25090a), 11, 25, 49. 54. Anthony Wotton, A dangerous plot discovered, 1626 (RSTC 26003), 83. 55. John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution:  religion and intellectual change in seventeenth-​century England, Woodbridge 2006, 249. 56. Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism:  experiences of defeat, New York 2016, 32. 57. Stinton, Repository, 12; Burrage, EED, ii.304; The Confession of faith, 1644, sig.  A2r–​v. 58. Samuel Richardson, Some brief considerations on Doctor Featley, 1645 (Wing R1414), 6. 59. For example, notice how the 1646 revision expands the original’s teaching on divine providence (art. v), unconditional election (art. xii), an atonement limited to God’s elect (art. xxi), and the certainty of salvation for those truly believing (art. xxiii); A Confession of faith (1646). 60. John Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 1643 (Wing S4976),  43–​4. 61. Benjamin Cox, An after-​reckoning with Mr. Edwards, 1646 (Wing C6712), 4. 62. White, Association records, 57; Titus 3:10, 1599 Geneva Bible. 63. Ibid.  25. 64. Edward Bean Underhill, ed., Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–​1720, 1854, 352. 65. Ibid.  20–​1.

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66. See, for example, Samuel Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia variis praelectionibus, Edinburgh 1650 (Wing R2376); Richard Resbury, Some stop to the gangrene of Arminianism, 1651 (Wing R1136); Robert Baillie, A Scotch antidote against the English infection of Arminianism, 1652 (Wing B469); William Fenner, Hidden manna or, the mystery of saving grace, 1652 (Wing F692); George Kendall, Theokratia, or, a vindication of the doctrine commonly received in the reformed churches, 1653 (Wing K287); John Owen, The doctrine of the saints perseverance, 1654 (Wing O740); Robert Crosse, Logou alogia, seu, exercitatio theologica, Oxford 1655 (Wing C7256). 67. Benjamin Coxe, “To the reader,” in Gods ordinance, the saints priviledge, by John Spilsberie, 1646 (Wing S4975). 68. Luke Howard, “A short journal of Luke Howard,” in Love and truth in plainness manifested, 1704, 8–​10; Luke Howard, A looking-​glass for Baptists, 1672 (Wing H2986),  5–​6. 69. Bean, Records of the churches, 149–​51. 70. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 84. 71. William Jeffery, The whole faith of man: being the gospel declared in plainness, 1659 (Wing J524), 4–​5. 72. John Spilsberie, Gods ordinance, the saints priviledge, 1646 (Wing S4975), A3r. 73. White, English Baptists, 9. 74. Ian Birch, “To follow the lambe,” xviii. 75. For example, “Basic to the Baptist argument . . . ,” William G. McLoughlin, New England dissent 1630–​1833, 2 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1971, i.38; “The Baptists’ fundamental weakness  .  .  .  ,” J.  F. McGregor, “The Baptists:  fount of all heresy,” 63; “the Baptist movement resulted from . . . ,” Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in colonial Massachusetts, Cambridge 1991, 14; “The Baptists were concerned with  .  .  .  ,” Nigel Smith, Perfection proclaimed:  language and literature in English radical religion, 1640–​1660, Oxford 1989, 7. 76. Nicholas Tyacke, “The ‘rise of Puritanism’ and the legalizing of dissent, 1571–​1719,” in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From persecution to toleration: the glorious revolution and religion in England, Oxford 1991, 31. 77. Birch, “To follow the lambe,” 179. 78. McGregor, “Baptists,” 29. 79. B. R. White, “Thomas Crosby, Baptist historian (I): the first forty years 1683–​1723,” BQ xxi (1965), 154–​68; B. R. White, “Thomas Crosby, Baptist historian (II): later years,” BQ xxi (1966), 219–​34. 80. Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans, 1732. 81. Crosby, History, i.ii. 82. Ibid. 83. Barrington R. White, “Isaac Backus and Baptist history,” BHH v (1970), 15.

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84. This aspect of Crosby’s work is mentioned in an annotated biography published by the Baptist Historical Society:  “The leading fault is that the old General Baptists and the Particular Baptists are intermixed, deliberately, but with confusing results;” “Books on English Baptist church history,” TBHS i (1909), 187–​8. 85. Crosby, History, i.173–​4. 86. White, English Baptists, 164. 87. Quoted in F. M. W. Harrison, “Benjamin Evans, author and historian,” BQ xxi (1965), 375. 88. Not to be confused with his father and compiler of the eponymous “Gould Manuscript,” the Rev. George P.  Gould (1818–​1882) of Norwich. For the elder Gould, see Alexander Gordon, “Gould, George (1818–​1882),” rev. Rosemary Chadwick, ODNB. 89. George P. Gould, review of The early English dissenters in the light of recent research, by Champlin Burrage, TBHS iii (1912), 62. 90. W.  T. Whitley, A Baptist bibliography:  being a register of the chief materials for Baptist history, 2 vols., 1916, i.5. 91. Benjamin Evans admitted that “the love of sect operates powerfully in many cases.” He continued: “In most of us there is a strong, it may be at times imperceptible, desire to sustain our denominational peculiarities.” Quoted in Harrison, “Benjamin Evans,” 375. 92. W.  K. Jordan, The development of religious toleration in England, 4  vols., 1938, iii.453. 93. For accounts of these later developments written from an internal perspective, see Ernest A.  Payne, The Baptist union:  a short history, 1959; J. H.  Y. Briggs, “Evangelical ecumenism: the amalgamation of General and Particular Baptists in 1891,” BQ xxxiv (1991), 99–​115. 94. For an early and perceptive analysis of this problem, see Christopher Hill, “History and denominational history,” BQ xxii (1967), 65–​71. 95. This problem is not limited to the historiography of baptistic groups. Writing about Catholic and presbyterian identity in mid-​Stuart Ireland and Scotland respectively, Scott Spurlock suggests that “religious labels have been employed with too little scrutiny, with the result that diverse religious, social and political motivations become lumped into overly homogenized definitions;” Scott Spurlock, “Problems with religion as identity: the case of mid-​Stuart Ireland and Scotland,” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies vi (2013), 2. 96. Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War. 97. Ibid. 9. 98. Ibid. 104. 99. Ibid. 111. 100. Philip F. Gura, A glimpse of Sion’s glory: Puritan radicalism in New England, 1620–​ 1660, Middletown, CT, 1984, 98, 102.

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101. Mark Bell, “Freedom to form: the development of Baptist movements during the English Revolution” in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England, Manchester 2006, 182, 188. 102. Ibid.  183. 103. Mark R. Bell, Apocalypse how? 110. 104. McGregor, “Baptists,” 28. 105. Ibid. 63. 106. Ibid.  28. 107. See Philip Benedict’s similar assertion that “early Baptist churches separated themselves into two clusters along the theological fault line between predestinarians and antipredestinarians;” Philip Benedict, Christ’s churches purely reformed: a social history of Calvinism, New Haven 2002, 324. 108. Michael Adams, “Peter Chamberlen’s case of conscience,” HLQ liii (1990), 282. 109. Edwards, Gangraena, i.92–​5, quoted in McGregor, “Baptists,” 30. 110. Wright, Early English Baptists. 111. Ibid. 11. 112. Ibid. 11, 99. 113. Ibid. 12. 114. Ibid. 110. 115. Ibid. 114. 116. Ibid. 114, 121. 117. Ibid.  81–​9. 118. Larry Kreitzer has effectively critiqued Wright’s treatment of this incident in Keitzer, William Kiffen and his world, v.222–​8). 119. Wright, Early English Baptists,  89–​95. 120. In ­chapter 2, I provide evidence that Spilsbery was, in fact, aware of Thomas Lambe. This evidence of a linkage between the two preachers does not, however, help to substantiate Wright’s hypothesis. To the contrary, the evidence indicates that Spilsbery wanted to sharply distance himself from Lambe and was motivated in doing so almost exclusively by the very soteriological concerns which Wright dismisses. 121. For example, parish priest Thomas Wynell described an incident in which his preaching was attended by hostile Anabaptists:  “  .  .  .  the Anabaptists from Gloucester, and Painswicke came to heare mee, and set upon me in the open face of the Congregation, as soone as I came downe out of the Pulpit;” Thomas Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, Oxford 1642 (Wing W3778), sig. B2r. Likewise, baptistic separatist Andrew Ritor wrote about “a learned Divine” who worshipped for a time with members of a baptistic church “under pretence of unfained love and friendship” but then “immediatly [sic] hasted and raised most foule and false accusations against them, as Blasphemers, Hereticks, and what not;” A[ndrew] R[itor], A treatise of the vanity of childish baptisme, 1642 (R1542), 21. Across the Atlantic, the Congregational minister George Phillips told of an

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122. 123. 124. 125.

169

encounter he had with “one Nathaniel Biscoe coming from England.” While traveling in America, the baptistic Biscoe deliberately sought to attend church and meet with the paedobaptistic Phillips because he “desired some conference . . . especially about . . . The churches constitution and Infants Baptisme . . . ;” George Philips, A reply to a confutation of some grounds for infants baptisme, 1645 (Wing P2026), 2. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 142. See especially articles XXI–​XXXII; Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 150–​3; Baillie, Anabaptism, 93. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints,  63–​5. Wright, Early English Baptists, 110. C h a p t er   2

1. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 141. 2. The reconstruction of these events is based upon document four from the Stinton Repository; Stinton, Repository, 25–​8; a transcription of this is published in W. T. Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643” 237–​45; note that Whitley’s transcription contains at least one significant error, for which, see note 7. 3. Michael A. G. Haykin, “Kiffen, William (1616–​1701),” ODNB. 4. Stephen Wright, “Barbon, Praisegod (c. 1598–​1679/​80),”  ODNB. 5. T. M. Lawrence, “Goodwin, Thomas (1600–​1680),” ODNB. 6. Barbara Donagan, “Nye, Philip (bap. 1595, d. 1672),” ODNB. 7. Simpson’s participation in this conference has not always been noted. This is likely due to the fact that W. T. Whitley’s widely used transcription of the Stinton MS 4 erroneously recorded the name as “Mr G Sympson” rather than the actual manuscript reading of “Mr S Sympson.” Whitley’s transcription error has been reproduced in, for example, Stephen Wright, The early English Baptists, 1603–​ 1649, 132; Stinton, Repository, 27; see also Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” 243. For Simpson, see Tai Liu, “Simpson, Sidrach (c. 1600–​1655),”  ODNB. 8. Tom Webster, “Burroughes, Jeremiah (bap. 1601?, d. 1646),” ODNB. 9. Stinton, Repository,  25–​8. 10. Thomas Goodwin, A glimpse of Sions glory, 1641 (Wing G1245a), 20. 11. Writing during the decade after his death, Jessey’s biographer Edward Whiston explained Jessey’s practice as follows:  “in which he dissented from other of his Brethren, to wit, Pedo-​Baptisme, and the seventh day Sabbath:  as for the first, though formerly the whole (and to his dying day some) of the Congregation was of the contrary judgment, yet no division or falling off did thence arise at all; and as for those who were afterwards received into fellowship, he held it sufficient if they owned Baptisme (in general) according to the revealed will of Christ for (said he) we do not Baptize any into this or that particular Church; but onely

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into that one general Assembly and Body spoken of, 1 Cor. 12.13;” [Edward] [Whiston], The life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 1671 (Wing W1679), 77. 12. Of course, this is not practiced consistently either. No one, to my knowledge, has attempted to classify either Quakers or Socinians as “Baptists” despite their rejection of paedobaptism, further highlighting the fluid and often arbitrary nature of post-​hoc denominational classifications. 13. Murray Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 123. 14. Francis Bremer makes a very similar point:  “Studies of the Baptist experience in early New England generally depict the Baptists as a distinct religious group in opposition to colonial puritans. But looking at the subject from the point of view of lay empowerment reveals that in many respects Baptists were puritans who simply disagreed on the subject of infant baptism” [italics in original]. Bremer also rightly notes that “English Congregationalists were generally content to view Particular Baptists as fellow puritans, members of the broader godly community, while usually identifying General Baptists as outside the perimeter fence.” These are helpful correctives. But, it should also be noted that Bremer’s interest in locating baptistic separatists within the broader ecclesial spectrum is only tangentially related to the primary focus of his research, and thus he can still speak of “Baptists” as a meaningful collective entity, writing, for example, that “Baptists [meaning both General and Particular] also divided over the necessity of a learned ministry;” Francis J. Bremer, Lay empowerment and the development of Puritanism, New York 2015, 127–​30. 15. This was first suggested by Geoffrey Nuttall in 1957, and a full-​text search of the EEBO database confirms his judgment. The reference is to Kiffen’s epistolary preface to A glimpse of Sions glory, 1641: “Christ hath given this Power to his Church, not to a Hierarchy, neither to a Nationall Presbytery, but to a company of Saints in a Congregationall way.” Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible saints: the Congregational Way, 1640–​1660, Oxford 1957, 8. 16. For the Particular Baptists’ entrenched antipathy toward Arminianism and the General Baptists who professed it, see ­chapter 1. 17. William Allen, An answer to Mr JG, 1653 (Wing A1054A), sig. br, 53, 67, and passim. 18. For the split in Goodwin’s church and the connections between Allen, Goodwin, and Samuel Fisher, see John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: religion and intellectual change in seventeenth-​century England, 249–​53. 19. Richard Farnworth, Truth cleared of scandals, 1654 (Wing F512), title-​page; James Parnell, The watcher, 1655 (Wing P541), title-​page. 20. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, Joyful news from heaven, 1658 (Wing R679). 21. John Perrot, The mystery of baptism and the Lord’s supper, 1662 (Wing P1626), title page; other examples include Humphrey Wollrich, A briefe declaration to the Baptists, 1659 (Wing W3290); Joseph Fuce, The fall of a great visible idol, 1659 (Wing F2257A); John Crook, A defence of the true church called Quakers,

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1659 (Wing C7202); George Whitehead, The authority of the true ministry, 1660 (Wing W1892); George Bishop, A book of warnings, or the visitation of the Lord’s love, 1661 (Wing B2988); for Quaker polemic against Baptists more generally, see Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War. 22. Thomas Grantham, The Baptist against the Papist, 1663 (Wing G1527). 23. During the eighteenth century, the term became far more common, as evidenced by the title of Thomas Crosby’s History of the English Baptists. 24. A confession of faith, 1688 (Wing C5795), title-​page. 25. Mark Burden, “What did seventeenth-​century dissenters call themselves?” Dissenting Experience, at http://​d issent.hypotheses.org/​blog/​4-​what- ​d id-​seventeenthcentury-​dissenters-​call-​themselves-​mark-​burden. 26. A brief instruction in the principles of Christian religion, 1695 (Wing B4602), title page. 27. Caroline L. Leachman, “Howard, Luke (1621–​1699),” ODNB. 28. Luke Howard, A looking-​glass for Baptists, 5. 29. Calendar of State Papers (hereinafter cited as CSPD), 1682, 55; a transcription was published in “London churches in 1862,” BQ i (1922), 82–​7. 30. The Confession of faith, of those churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists, (Wing C5789). 31. William Kiffen, A briefe remonstrance, 1645 (Wing K423), 6, 10, 11; see also A declaration by congregationall societies in, and about the City of London; as well as those commonly called Anabaptists, 1647 (Wing D561). 32. White, Association Records, 195. 33. John Nickolls, Original letters and papers of state . . . among the political collections of Mr. John Milton, 1743, 148–​9. 34. Immanuel Knutton, Seven questions about the controversie betweene the Church of England, and the Separatists or Anabaptists, 1645 (Wing K744), 23. 35. “Throughout the vocabulary of social description, we cannot assume an easy equivalence between our usage and theirs; it should be a first principle of historical enquiry that if we are to explain the world view of an earlier age we need to attend to its own account of itself. . . . The sin of anachronism in historical method is a mortal one because it rearranges the ideas and values of the past in ways which make past actions inexplicable except as attempted anticipations of the present. The historian is always condemned to see the past through a glass, darkly; the introduction of anachronistic categories turns that glass into a mirror;” J. C. D. Clark, English society 1660–​1832: Religion, ideology and politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd edn, Cambridge 2000, 11, 13. 36. Stinton, Repository, 27; Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” 245. 37. Stinton, Repository, 27; Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” 244. 38. Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, 104. 39. Michael R. Watts, The dissenters, 62.

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40. Robert Baillie, A dissuasive from the errours of the time, 1645 (Wing B456), 54; see also, the similar conclusions of modern scholarship, for example, Philip Benedict, Christ’s churches purely reformed: a social history of Calvinism, New Haven 2002, 389–​90; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–​ 1661, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 56–​66; Bremer, Lay empowerment, 105. 41. Stephen Wright, “Jacob, Henry (1562/​3–​1624),” ODNB. 42. Stinton, Repository, 1; Burrage, EED, ii.293. 43. William Hubbard, A general history of New England from the discovery to 1680, Boston, 1848, 187; Stinton, Repository, 2; Burrage, EED, ii.294; Morgan, Visible saints,  94–​5. 44. The seventeenth-​century clergyman and historian William Hubbard reported that Richard Brown, an elder in Jacob’s church, once ferried Ames and a travelling companion safely along the River Thames at a time “when they were pursued by some that would willingly have shortened their journey;” Hubbard, A general history of New England,  187–​8. 45. Stinton, Repository, 4–​5; Burrage, EED, ii.298. 46. John Cotton to Samuel Skelton, October 2, 1630, in Thaddeus Mason Harris, Memorials of the First Church in Dorchester, Boston, 1830, 53–​7. 47. In a letter to John Winthrop Jr dated August 18, 1637, Jessey wrote that he had been “hoping the last spring to have come with” a group of others “to N.E.,” but after being “long sought” by the Southwark congregation he had decided to accept their call and stay in London. Allyn B. Forbes, Winthrop papers, Boston 1943, iii.485. 48. Francis J. Bremer, Congregational communion:  clerical friendship in the Anglo-​ American Puritan community, 1610–​1692, Boston 1994, 48–​56, 118–​21. 49. Ibid. 21–​3,  52. 50. [Whiston], The life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 86. 51. Scholars have long debated the authorship of Glimpse; for a defense of Goodwin’s authorship see John F. Wilson, “A glimpse of Syons glory,” CH xxxi (1962), 66–​73; Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 45–​6; Crawford Gribben, The Puritan ­millennium: literature and theology, 1550–​1682, Milton Keynes 2008, 48–​9. 52. Katherine Chidley, The justification of the independant churches of Christ, 1641 (Wing C3832); William Kiffen, Certaine observations upon Hosea the Second, 1642 (Wing K423A); for Larner, see Henry R. Plomer, A dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667, 1907, 113. 53. William Kiffen, Remarkable passages in the life of William Kiffin, ed. W.  Orme, 1823, 14. 54. [W]illiam K[iffin], “Epistle dedicatory,” in Thomas Goodwin, A glimpse of Sions glory, 1641 (Wing G1245a). 55. Thomas Patient, The doctrine of baptism, 1654 (Wing P718), the Epistle to the Christian Reader; Richard L. Greaves, “Patient, Thomas (d. 1666),” ODNB. 56. Kenneth G. C. Newport, “Knollys, Hanserd (1598–​1691),” ODNB.

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57. R. L. Greaves, “Spilsbury (or Spilsbery), John (1593–​c. 1668),” in Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller (eds), Biographical dictionary of British radicals in the seventeenth century, 3 vols., Brighton 1984, i.193–​4. 58. Stinton, Repository, 10; Burrage, EED, ii.302. 59. John Taylor, A swarme of sectaries, and schismatiques, 1641 (Wing P718), 6. 60. Francis J. Bremer, “Phillips, George (d. 1644),” ODNB; although used to make a rather different argument, the following reconstruction of the Spilsbery-​Phillips-​ Lambe exchange first appeared in my article, Matthew C. Bingham, “English Baptists and the struggle for theological authority, 1642–​1646” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (hereinafter cited as JEH) lxviii (2017), 551–​7; reprinted with permission. 61. The phrase “Arminian-​influenced” is used to reflect the fact that although Thomas Lambe denied a limited atonement, the degree to which he affirmed the rest of the Arminian soteriological platform remains unclear; see Wright, Early English Baptists, 99–​100. 62. Thomas Lambe, A confutation of infants baptisme, 1643 (Wing L209), “The epistle to the reader.” 63. George Phillips, A reply to a confutation of some grounds for infant baptisme, 1645 (Wing P2026), 1. 64. Ibid.  2. 65. Wright, Early English Baptists, 115; Philip F. Gura, A glimpse of Sion’s glory, 110–​1; William G. McLoughlin, New England dissent, i.32–​44. 66. Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, sig. A2r. 67. Ibid. 68. For example, see Lambe, A confutation of infants baptisme, 4, 5, 7 with Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 1, 4, 5. These points of correspondence continue throughout the two treatises. 69. Wright, Early English Baptists, 105. 70. Ibid.  12. 71. Ibid.  94–​5. 72. Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 43–​4; Wright, Early English Baptists, 12. 73. Wright, Early English Baptists, 94. 74. Spilsbery’s text is significant among historians of early English Baptists and is often cited as an important example of early Baptist polemic. See, for example, Larry Joseph Kreitzer, William Kiffen and his world, iii.196; James M.  Renihan, Edification and beauty, 5–​6, 48–​9; Mark R. Bell, Apocalypse how?, 74; G. Stephen Weaver, Orthodox, Puritan, Baptist, 159–​60; Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 24; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century, 72. 75. Robert Baillie described Spilsbery as “the chief penner” of the 1644 confession; Baillie, Anabaptism, 94.

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76. P[raisegod] B[arbon], A discourse tending to prove the baptisme in or under the defection of Antichrist, to be the ordinance of Jesus Christ, 1642 (Wing B750), sig. A2r. 77. Ibid. sig. A2v, A3r. 78. Stinton, Repository, 27; Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” 243. 79. Praisegod Barbone, A defence of the lawfulnesse of baptizing infants, 1645 (Wing B749), sig. A3v. 80. Thomas Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, 1. 81. Likewise, Thomas Goodwin, while writing in defense of paedobaptism in 1646, refers sympathetically to “the Consciences of many good soules, as in the consequents of the contrary opinion of denying Infants Baptisme;” Thomas Goodwin, epistle to the reader in John Cotton, The grounds and ends of the baptisme of children of the faithfull, 1646 (Wing C6436), sig. Br. 82. Reasons humbly offered in justification of the action, of letting a room in London-​house unto certain peaceable Christians, called Anabaptists, c. 1647 (Wing R545). The RSTC dates the pamphlet to 1642, but Stephen Wright’s ODNB article on Henry Jessey estimates c. 1647. As Kathleen Lynch has observed, this later date is more plausible because the first presbyterian London classis in which the pamphlet’s author claims membership was only established in 1646. I am grateful to Dr Lynch for sharing her insights into this episode with me; Kathleen Lynch, “ ‘Letting a room in London-​house’:  a place for dissent in Civil War London,” manuscript, 2016; Stephen Wright, “Henry Jessey (1601–​1663),” ODNB. 83. Kathleen Lynch has argued persuasively that the author of the document was the presbyterian skinner Richard Coysh; Lynch, “ ‘Letting a room in London-​house.’  ” 84. Reasons humbly offered in justification, 5, 2, 3. 85. Ibid.  1–​2. 86. Ibid. 2, 4, 8, 4, 8. 87. Much of the reconstruction of events inside the Westminster Assembly which follows initially appeared as part of my article, Bingham, “English Baptists and the struggle for theological authority, 1642–​1646;” reprinted with permission. 88. Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly 1643–​ 1652, 5 vols., Oxford 2012, iii.223; John Lightfoot, The whole works of the Rev. John Lightfoot, ed., John Rogers Pitman, 11 vols., 1824, xiii.302. 89. Stinton, Repository, 27; Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643,” 244. 90. CJ, iii.584–​6; Lords’ Journals (hereinafter cited as LJ), vi.664–​6. 91. Lightfoot, Works, xiii.308; Dixhoorn, The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly, iii.271–​3. 92. Dixhoorn, The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly, v.87–​8. 93. The confession of faith, 1644. 94. CJ, iii.693–​4, 697. 95. A confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, 1646 (Wing C5780); Stinton, Repository, 25; Whitley, “Debate on infant baptism, 1643.”

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96. See Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, An apologeticall narration humbly submitted, 1643 (Wing G1225), 15–​21, with sections XLII and XLVII in The confession of faith, 1644. 97. Ethan H. Shagan, “Rethinking moderation in the English Revolution: the case of an apologeticall narration,” in Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (eds), The nature of the English Revolution revisited: essays in honour of John Morrill, Woodbridge 2013, 49. 98. Dixhoorn, The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly, iii.273. 99. Jay Travis Collier, “The sources behind the first London confession,” American Baptist Quarterly xxi (2002), 197–​215. 100. Dixhoorn, The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly, v.88; The confession of faith, 1644, title page. 101. The confession of faith, sig. A2r; Edmund Calamy, Englands looking-​glasse, 1642 (Wing C237), 46. 102. Wright, Early English Baptists,  132–​7. 103. Volumes on “radical religion” during the mid-​ seventeenth century, for example, will often include chapters on “Baptists” but omit any discussion of congregationalists and presbyterians; McGregor and Reay, Radical religion in the English Revolution; Bradstock, Radical religion in Cromwell’s England, 2010. C h a p t er   3 1. Joseph Foster, Alumni oxonienses: the members of the University of Oxford, 1500–​ 1714, 4 vols., Nendeln 1968, iv.1610, 1622; Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, sig. Bv. 2. Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, 51, 5. 3. Ibid. 7. 4. Edmund Morgan, Visible saints: the history of a Puritan idea, New York 1963, 125. 5. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century, 60. 6. Wright, The Early English Baptists, 1603–​1649, 73. 7. Ibid. 67. 8. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 52. 9. The complexity of these issues has, understandably, led to disagreement among scholars as to the logical relationship among the various questions at issue. In the main, I have found Polly Ha’s account to be the most perceptive and accurate treatment of the ways in which the relevant ecclesiological and sacramental questions intersected: “Although some scholars such as Tom Webster and Carol Schneider have argued that disputes over infant baptism and membership were unrelated to other ecclesiastical controversies concerning the relationship between congregations, they were in fact directly linked to the presbyterians’ and congregationalists’ disagreement over the scope of ministerial duties and the nature of the visible church;” Ha, English Presbyterianism, 1590–​1640, 112; Carol

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Schneider, “‘Roots and branches’:  from principled nonconformity to the emergence of religious parties,” in Francis Bremer (ed.), Puritanism:  transatlantic perspectives on a seventeenth-​century Anglo-​American faith, Boston 1993; Tom Webster, Godly clergy in early Stuart England:  the Caroline Puritan movement c. 1620–​1643, Cambridge 1997; see also Stephen Brachlow, The communion of the saints: radical Puritan and separatist ecclesiology, 1570–​1625, Oxford 1988. 10. Gura, A glimpse of Sion’s glory, 94. 11. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints,  50–​1. 12. Spilsbery, A treatise concerning the lawfull subject of baptisme, 25. 13. William Chillingworth, The religion of protestants a safe way to salvation, Oxford 1638 (RSTC 5138.2), 375. 14. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan political ideas, 1558–​1794, Indianapolis 2003, xiii. 15. W[illiam] R[athband], A briefe narration of some church courses, 1644 (Wing R298), 13. 16. McLoughlin, New England dissent 1630–​1833, i.34. 17. In affirming infant baptism whilst rejecting its historical undergirding, “the leaders of the Protestant Reformations in the sixteenth century perpetuated a rite which had first come into its own (in the post-​Augustinian era) and was sustained for virtually all its centuries-​long medieval life by doctrinal stipulations which they could no longer endorse;” David F. Wright, Infant baptism in historical perspective: collected studies, Milton Keynes 2007, xxvii, see also 68–​88. For Augustine’s views on baptism, see Peter Cramer, Baptism and change in the early Middle Ages, c. 200– ​c. 1150, Cambridge 1993, 87–​129; Bryan D. Spinks, Early and medieval rituals and theologies of baptism:  from the New Testament to the Council of Trent, Aldershot 2006,  63–​7. 18. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd edn, Oxford 2012, 186; elsewhere, Cameron notes that the “question about whether holiness could be ritually embedded in physical objects would become an absolutely critical shibboleth in the Reformation era;” Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: superstition, reason, and religion, 1250–​1750, Oxford 2010, 123. 19. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., Philadelphia 1960, ii.1303; see also Karen E. Spierling, Infant baptism in Reformation Geneva:  the shaping of a community, 1536–​1564, Aldershot 2005. 20. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.236. 21. The Protestant effort to explain how baptism could retain some measure of instrumental efficacy without lapsing into “the Popish error of Sacramentes . . . giving grace, ex opere operato” was especially vexed within the contested space of the post-​ Reformation English church; A survey of the Book of Common Prayer, Middleburg 1610 (RSTC 16451), 103; see Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and modern rituals and theologies of baptism: from Luther to contemporary practices, Aldershot 2006, 65–​74;

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Bryan D. Spinks, Sacraments, ceremonies and the Stuart divines: sacramental theology and liturgy in England and Scotland 1603–​1662, Aldershot 2002. 22. See Spinks, Reformation and modern rituals and theologies of baptism,  3–​64. 23. E. G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery, eds., Martin Luther, 1970, 78. 24. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation:  Europe’s house divided, 1490–​1700, 2004, 147–​50. 25. Calvin, Institutes, ii.1325–​7. 26. Ibid. ii.1329. 27. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.443. 28. Calvin, Institutes, ii.1021. 29. Belgic Confession, (1561), art. 16; Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.413. 30. Nicholas Tyacke notes that “the degree of emphasis placed by an English theologian on predestination was usually in inverse proportion to that which he put on baptism  .  .  .  Indeed the grace of predestination and the grace of the sacraments were to become rivals for the religious allegiance of English men and women during the early seventeenth century;” Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, C. 1590–​1640, 10. 31. Johannes Polyander, Andreas Rivetus, Antonius Walaeus, and Anthonius Thysius, Synopsis purioris theologiae, 3rd edn, Leiden 1642, 609; as quoted in Heinrich Heppe, Reformed dogmatics, Ernst Bizer, (ed.), G. T. Thomson, (trans.), Eugene, OR, 2007, 618–​9. 32. Theologians outside of puritan circles followed a somewhat different path. Anthony Milton notes that “Laudian writers tended to follow Hooker by hardly ever linking the division between the visible and invisible church directly and explicitly to the doctrine of predestination;” Milton, Catholic and reformed,  158–​9. 33. John Sutton, “Ball, John (1585–​1640),” ODNB. 34. John Ball, A treatise of the covenant of grace, 1645 (Wing B579), 24. 35. Ibid. 47. 36. Ibid.  91. 37. Patrick Collinson writes:  “This was an age of preachers  .  .  .  who knew that they had to make all kinds of scarcely defensible or consistent assumptions as they faced congregations of great diversity. The preachers addressed, even apostrophized, the nation, as if it stood literally and in person before them . . . They did not have one exclusionary message for all the rest. They did not preach two covenants but one, and they elided skilfully from God’s dealings with individuals to his dealings with the whole Church and Nation. . . . The godly community was at once a remnant and a multitude;” Patrick Collinson, “John Foxe and national consciousness,” in Christopher Highley and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and his world, Aldershot 2002, 28–​9. 38. Karl Barth writes:  “Am I  wrong in thinking that the really operative extraneous ground for infant-​baptism, even with the Reformers, and ever and again quite

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plainly since, has been this: one did not want then in any case or at any price to deny the existence of the evangelical Church in the Constantinian corpus christianum—​ and today one does not want to renounce the present form of the national church (Volkskirche)? If she were to break with infant-​baptism, the Church would not easily any longer be a people’s church in the sense of a state Church or a church of the masses.” Karl Barth, The teaching of the church regarding baptism, trans. Ernest A. Payne, Eugene, OR, 2006, 52–​3. 39. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds. Acts and ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–​1660, 3 vols., 1911, i.582–​607. 40. David Cressy, Birth, marriage, and death: ritual, religion, and the life-​cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford 1997, 149. 41. Spierling, Infant baptism in Reformation Geneva, 219, 226. 42. See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Federal theology and the ‘national covenant’: an Elizabethan Presbyterian case study,” CH lxi (1992), 394–​407; Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the seventeenth-​century revolution, 1993, 264–​70; Patrick Collinson, “Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode,” in Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (eds), Religion and culture in renaissance England, Cambridge 1997, 15–​45; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England, Oxford 1999, 281–​325. 43. Thomas Blake, The birth-​privilege, 1644 (Wing B3143), 28. 44. Knutton, Seven questions, 4. 45. Francis J. Bremer, “Cotton, John (1585–​1652),” ODNB; I  explore aspects of congregational ecclesiology more fully in Matthew C.  Bingham, “On the idea of a national church:  reassessing congregationalism in revolutionary England,” CH, forthcoming. 46. Cotton’s New England colleague Thomas Hooker also declined the Assembly’s invitation and, like Cotton, attempted to sway English opinion through his publications; see Sargent Bush Jr., The writings of Thomas Hooker: spiritual adventure in two worlds, Madison, WI, 1980, 96–​126. 47. John Cotton, The way of the churches of Christ in New-​England, 1645 (Wing C6471), 1. 48. This is not to suggest that congregationalists had no interest in some sort of overarching national structure by which England’s religious life might be organized and regulated. Like virtually everyone else in seventeenth-​century England, congregationalists understood religious and civil life as intertwined phenomena and would have vigorously rejected any call to see them too radically disentangled. To assert, then, that congregationalists rejected a national church means that they refused to identify any ecclesiastical body other than the local congregation as a visible church per se. Unlike presbyterians who could speak freely of “the church” in multiple senses—​from the local congregation, to a regional synod, to the national assembly—​ congregationalists believed that one could only speak of the local congregation as

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the visible, institutional church in its proper sense and official capacity. As the presbyterian Alexander Forbes explained, congregationalists “cannot endure the name of a Nationall Church, not onely as Episcopal men absurdly understand it . . . but even as we rightly understand it to be meant of all the particular Congregations making one entire body, which is represented in a Nationall Synod.” Forbes continued: “and therefore in this Apologie they constantly speak of the Churches of England in the plurall, never of the Church of England in the singular number;” Alexander Forbes, An anatomy of independency, 1644 (Wing F1439), 14; for further development of this argument, see Bingham, “On the idea of a national church.” 49. In his study of English congregationalists, Geoffrey Nuttall has identified the phrase “visible saints” as “undoubtedly their controlling idea” and that which “provides the key to an understanding of what they were after;” Nuttall, Visible saints, viii. 50. “The XXXII Questions Stated,” in Richard Mather, Church-​government and church-​covenant discussed, 1643 (Wing M1270), 23. 51. In a letter dated August 10, 1644, Robert Baillie described an incident during the Westminster Assembly in which the congregationalist Thomas Goodwin “one day was exceedinglie confounded.” Apparently, although Goodwin had “undertaken a publicke lecture against the Anabaptists . . . under pretence of refuting them,” the result was something different: “he betrayed our cause to them” as “he exponed of a reall holiness, and preached down our ordinare and necessare distction of reall and federal holiness;” Robert Baillie, The letters and journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, 3 vols., Edinburgh 1842, ii.218. 52. Reformation of church-​government in Scotland, Edinburgh 1644 (Wing H1437), 13. 53. John Robinson, A briefe catechisme concerning church-​government, 1642 (Wing R1693), sig. A2v. 54. Thomas Shepard, The parable of the ten virgins opened & applied, 1660 (Wing S3114A), 197. 55. An answer of the elders of the several churches in New-​England unto nine positions, 1643 (Wing M1270), 42. 56. Thomas Goodwin, Of the constitution, right, order, and government of the churches of Christ, 1696 (Wing G1250), 1. 57. George Gillespie, An assertion of the government of the Church of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1641 (Wing G745), 186. 58. Robert Browne, An answere to Master Cartwright, 1585 (RSTC 3909), 14; Robert Browne, A booke which sheweth the life and manners of all true Christians, Middelburgh 1582 (RSTC 3910.3), see title page; Michael E.  Moody, “Browne, Robert (1550?–​1633),” ODNB; B. R. White, English separatist tradition,  44–​66. 59. White, English separatist tradition,  70–​1. 60. White, English separatist tradition; Brachlow, Communion of the saints. 61. Henry Jacob, Reasons taken out of God’s word, Middelburg, 1604 (RSTC 14338), 5.

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62. Henry Jacob, A declaration and plainer opening of certain points, Middelburg 1612 (RSTC 14332), 10. 63. Ha, English Presbyterianism, 180. 64. An answer of the elders, sig. G2r. 65. Cotton, Way of the churches of Christ in New-​England, 78. 66. Ibid.  80. 67. C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: a history from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–​1740, Chichester 2010, 99. 68. Richard Mather, An apologie of the churches in New-​England for church-​covenant, 1643 (Wing M1267), 32. 69. John Allin, Animadversions upon the antisynodalia Americana, Cambridge, MA, 1664 (Wing A1035), sig. A2v. 70. Williston Walker notes that during the controversy “a dread of the prevalence of Baptist views, limiting baptism to adult believers, had also something to do with the reluctance of the New England pastors to confine the rite to the children of visible saints;” Williston Walker, The creeds and platforms of congregationalism, New York 1893, 249; see also Robert G. Pope, The Half-​Way Covenant: church membership in Puritan New England, Princeton 1969; Stephen Foster, The long argument: English Puritanism and the shaping of New England culture, 1570–​1700, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991, 175–​230; James F. Cooper, Tenacious of their liberties: the congregationalists in colonial Massachusetts, New York 1999, 88–​114. 71. A Directory for the publique worship of God, throughout the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1644 (Wing D1544), 42. 72. Thomas Hooker, Survey of the summe of church-​discipline, 1648 (Wing H2658), 14. 73. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 153. 74. See Arnold Hunt, “The Lord’s supper in early modern England,” P&P clxi (1998), 52–​75; Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in early modern Britain, Oxford 2013, 336–​44. 75. Richardson, Some brief considerations on Doctor Featley, 14. 76. Paul Hobson, The fallacy of infants baptisme discovered, 1645 (Wing H2272), 12; see also, the identical use of 1 Cor. 1:2 in, for example, Robinson, A briefe catechisme, sig. A2v; Mather, An apologie of the churches in New-​England,  4–​5. 77. Francis Cornwell, The vindication of the royall commission of King Jesus, 1644, (Wing C6339), A3r. 78. Kiffen, A briefe remonstrance, 9. 79. Francis Freeman, Mr Balls grounds & arguments for infants baptisme, 1647 (Wing B560), 3. 80. Ibid.  4. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid.  5. 83. Richard L. Greaves, “Blackwood, Christopher (1607/​8–​1670),” ODNB. 84. Christopher Blackwood, The storming of antichrist, 1644 (Wing B3103), 7–​8. 85. Ibid. 3.

18

Notes 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

181

Ibid. pt II, 19. Ibid. pt II, 23. Ibid. pt II, 17. Ibid. 35. DWL, Baxter Letters, MSS. vi.88, 90; Calendar of the correspondence of Richard Baxter, N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall (eds.) 2 vols., Oxford 1991, i.78, 89. 91. A Declaration by congregationall societies in, and about the City of London; as well as those commonly called Anabaptists, 1647; A declaration of divers elders and brethren of congregational societies, 1651 (Wing G1850). 92. D[aniel] T[aylor], Certain queries, 1651 (Wing T2), 8. 93. Kiffen, Briefe remonstrance, 6. 94. Tyacke, Anti-​Calvinists, 181–​244. 95. Hanserd Knollys, A moderate answer unto Dr. Bastwick’s book; called independency not Gods ordinance, 1645 (Wing K717). 96. John Bastwick, Independency not God’s ordinance, 1645 (Wing B1063); John Bastwick, The second part of that book call’d independency not Gods ordinance, 1645 (Wing B1069). 97. Bastwick, The second part of that book call’d independency not Gods ordinance, 71. 98. Knollys, A moderate answer unto Dr. Bastwick’s book, 11. 99. On the use of overtly polemical sources, see Peter Lake, The boxmaker’s revenge: “orthodoxy,” “heterodoxy” and the politics of the parish in early Stuart London, Manchester 2001, esp. 8–​9, 187–​8, 293–​4. 100. William Lamont, “Blake, Thomas (1596/​7–​1657),” ODNB. 101. Blake, The birth-​privilege,  24–​26. 102. Forbes, Anatomy of independency,  6–​7. 103. Tai Liu, “Simpson, Sidrach (c. 1600–​1655),”  ODNB. 104. Sidrach Simpson, The anatomist anatomis’d, 1644 (Wing S3821), 9–​10. 105. Adam Steuart, An answer to a libell, 1644 (Wing S5489), 3–​4. 106. Baillie, Anabaptism,  50–​1. 107. Hunter Powell has criticized historians for relying too heavily on Steuart, Forbes, and others who were “arguably peripheral figures” and were not Westminster “assembly members or had any major impact on assembly debates.” But, even if one wholly accepts Powell’s assessment, the fact that Steuart and Forbes were insufficiently attuned to the various nuanced debates then taking place within the Westminster Assembly does not invalidate their observations regarding larger social and theological trends. Furthermore, as has been observed, the conclusions drawn here by Steuart and Forbes were by no means unique or incongruent with other contemporary observers of English religious culture; Hunter Powell, The crisis of British Protestantism:  church power in the Puritan Revolution 1638–​44, Manchester 2015, 6–​7. 108. See, Wright, Early English Baptists,  13–​44.

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109. See Bingham, “English Baptists and the struggle for theological authority, 1642–​ 1646,” 546–​69. C h a p t er   4 1. Baillie, Anabaptism, title page, 129. 2. Baillie, The letters and journals of Robert Baillie, iii.429. 3. For example, Dennis Bustin refers to Jessey as an “Independent;” Bustin, Paradox and perseverance, 334; Geoffrey Nuttall can describe Jessey and company variously as “Congregational men” and “Baptized Independents,” the latter term coming very close to my own neologism, “baptistic congregationalists;” Nuttall, Visible saints, 72, 147. 4. See, for example, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–​1660, 4 vols., 1903; Jordan, The development of religious toleration in England. 5. John Coffey, “The toleration controversy during the English Revolution,” in Christopher Durston and Judith D. Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England, Manchester 2006, 42–​68; John Morrill, “The Puritan Revolution,” in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge companion to Puritanism, Cambridge 2008; Blair Worden, God’s instruments:  political conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell, Oxford 2012, 63–​90, 313–​54. 6. Jeffrey R. Collins, “The church settlement of Oliver Cromwell,” History lxxxvii, 2002, 22–​3, 39. 7. John Calvin, A short instruction for to arme all good Christian people agaynst the pestiferous errours of the common secte of Anabaptistes, 1549 (RSTC 4463). 8. The term “radical reformation” is problematic, as Kat Hill observes, because “[i]‌t gives the ‘radical’ reformation an ideological coherence which it never had, as if all these diverse streams of thought were connected, and yet it also compartmentalizes the ‘radical’ movement into neat branches with a traceable lineage.” Kat Hill, “The power of names: radical identities in the reformation era” in Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (eds), Radicalism and dissent in the world of Protestant Reformation, Göttingen 2017, 55–​6. See also, George Huntston Williams, The radical Reformation, 3rd edn, Kirksville, MO, 2000; Kat Hill, Baptism, brotherhood, and belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, Oxford 2015. 9. See Norman Cohn, The pursuit of the millennium:  revolutionary and mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, 2004 , 252–​80; Sigrun Haude, In the shadow of “savage wolves:” Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation during the 1530s, Boston 2000; Ralf Klötzer, “The melchiorites and Münster,” in John Roth and James Stayer (eds), A companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–​1700, Leiden 2007, 217–​56; C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: a history from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517–​1740, Chichester 2010, 45–​7.

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10. An harmony of the confessions of the faith of the Christian and Reformed churches, 1643 (Wing H802), 294. 11. James Gairdner, ed., Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 8, 1885, 317. 12. Carrie Euler, “Anabaptism and anti-​ Anabaptism in the early English Reformation:  defining Protestant heresy and orthodoxy during the Reign of Edward VI,” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, literature and politics in early modern culture, Cambridge 2006. 13. See Highley and King, John Foxe and his world. 14. John Foxe, Acts and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, 1583 (RSTC 11225), 1133. 15. Ibid. 2145. 16. Ibid. 2051. 17. Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society, Cambridge, MA, 2012, 92; see also, Paul Lim’s argument that Socinianism, rather than representing the leading edge of an enlightened rationalism, was actually an example of sola scriptura pressed into a more extreme form; Paul Lim, Mystery unveiled: the crisis of the Trinity in early modern England, New York 2012. 18. A short history of the Anabaptists of high and low Germany, 1642 (Wing S3597), sig. A2r. 19. Alec Ryrie, “Scripture, the spirit and the meaning of radicalism in the English Revolution” in Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (eds), Radicalism and dissent in the world of Protestant Reformation, Göttingen 2017, 101. 20. Taylor, Swarme of sectaries, and schismatiques; McGregor and Reay, Radical religion in the English Revolution. 21. David Cressy, England on edge: crisis and revolution 1640–​1642, Oxford 2006, 424. 22. Lake, The boxmaker’s revenge; David R. Como, Blown by the spirit: Puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-​Civil-​War England, Stanford, CA, 2004. 23. In response to this expanding public space, many historians have attempted to locate a modified form of Habermas’s “public sphere” in the context of mid-​seventeenth-​ century England; see, for example, Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the struggle for the English Revolution, Oxford 2004, 409–​15; David Zaret, Origins of democratic culture: printing, petitions, and the public sphere in early-​modern England, Princeton 2000; Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England,” The Journal of British Studies xlv (2006), 270–​92; Cressy, England on edge, 322; Andrew Cambers, Godly reading: print, manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–​1720, Cambridge 2011, 159–​61; Bernard Capp, “The religious marketplace: public disputations in Civil War and Interregnum England,” EHR cxxix (2014),  48–​78. 24. Goodwin, A glimpse of Sions glory, 20.

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25. See, for example, Pagitt, Heresiography; Baillie, Dissuasive from the errours of the time; Edwards, Gangraena; for heresiography as a literary genre, see Nicholas McDowell, The English radical imagination:  culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–​1660, Oxford 2003, 22–​49; Hughes, Gangraena; Ann Hughes, “Thomas Edwards” Gangraena and heresiological traditions,” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, literature and politics in early modern English culture, Cambridge 2006. 26. Featley, Dippers Dipt, sig. Bv. 27. McGregor, “The Baptists: fount of all heresy,” 26. 28. See John Coffey, “‘The last great triumph of the European radical Reformation?’ Anabaptism, spiritualism, and anti-​Trinitarianism in the English Revolution” in Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers (eds), Radicalism and dissent in the world of Protestant Reformation, Göttingen 2017, 201–​24. 29. Knutton, Seven questions, 23. 30. Featley, Dippers dipt, 119–​219. 31. Pagitt, Heresiography, 127. 32. Featley, Dippers dipt, sig.B2v. 33. Hughes, Gangraena, 114; For example, Edwards testifies that Anabaptists “have baptized many weakly ancient women naked in rivers in winter, whereupon some have sickened and died; they have baptized young maids, Citizens daughters, about one and two a clock in the morning, tempting them out of their fathers houses at midnight to be baptized the parents being asleep and knowing nothing”; Edwards, Gangraena, 58. 34. Edwards, Gangraena, 2.122–​3. 35. Isaiah 11:6. 36. See, for example, the annotations accompanying these verses in the Geneva Bible, 1599 edn. 37. John Coffey, “A ticklish business:  defining heresy and orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution,” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, literature and politics in early modern English culture, Cambridge 2006, 110–​1. 38. Christopher W. Marsh, The family of love in English society, 1550–​1630, Cambridge 1994, 238. 39. I have expanded on this theme in Bingham, “English Baptists and the struggle for theological authority, 1642–​1646,” 546–​69. 40. William Cooke, A learned and full answer to a treatise intituled the vanity of childish baptisme, 1644 (Wing C6403), sig. B2r. 41. Wynell, The covenants plea for Infants; Samuel Chidley, A Christian plea for infants baptisme, 1643 (Wing C3836A); John Stalham, The summe of a conference at Terling in Essex, Januarie 11, 1643, 1644 (Wing S6166); Stephen Marshall, A sermon of the baptizing of infants, 1644 (Wing M774); Cooke, A learned and full answer; Blake,Birth-​Privilege; Josiah Ricraft, A looking glasse for the Anabaptsists, 1645 (Wing R1430); Thomas Blake, A moderate answer to these two questions, 1644

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(Wing B3148); John Waite, The way to heaven by water, 1644 (Wing W221B); Thomas Blake, Infants baptisme, freed from Antichristianisme, 1645 (Wing B3146); Featley, Dippers dipt; Robert Fage, The lawfulnesse of infants baptisme, 1645 (Wing F85A); George Phillips, A reply to a confutation of some grounds for infant baptisme, 1645 (Wing P2026); Thomas Bakewell, An answer or confutation, 1646 (Wing B526); Baillie, Anabaptism; Thomas Bakewell, Heresie decteted:  or the grand sectaries of these times confuted, 1649 (Wing B533A). 42. Baillie, Anabaptism, 48. 43. Marshall, Sermon of the baptizing of infants, sig. A2r-​v. 44. Ibid.  26–​7. 45. Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, 1. 46. Marshall, Sermon of the baptizing of infants, 54. 47. Ibid.  5. 48. Ibid.  6. 49. Sampson Bond, A sermon preached before the reverend committee of divines, 1646 (Wing B3586A), 28. 50. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.642; Jonathan D. Moore, “The Westminster confession of faith and the sin of neglecting baptism,” WTJ lxix (2007),  63–​86. 51. A testimony to the trueth of Jesus Christ, 1648 (Wing T823), 18, 4. 52. Ibid. sig. Bv. 53. CJ, iii.697. 54. A vindication of a printed paper, entituled, an ordinance presented to the Honorable House of Commons, for the preventing of the growth and spreading of heresies, 1646 (Wing V465), sig A2r; An ordinance presented to the Honorable House of Commons, 1646 (Wing B355). 55. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, i.1133–​6. 56. John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 141–​7; Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: experiences of defeat, New York 2016, 95–​6. 57. Coffey, “Ticklish Business,” 117–​8. 58. Crawford Gribben provides a welcome exception when he describes the quest for a Cromwellian settlement as follows: “Perhaps surprisingly, given their complaints about the doctrinal content of the Racovian catechism, the committee did not wish to exclude Arminians or Baptists from ministry in the new religious settlement. This recognition that Independents could find ways of working alongside Baptists was to be another significant milestone in Owen’s religious and administrative career.” Gribben, John Owen, 140; likewise, John Coffey helpfully describes the Baptists’ movement from “persecuted sect” to participation in the nation’s ecclesiastical life as “a triumph;” Coffey, “Last Greatest Triumph,” 224. 59. For example, Cromwell’s “concern was unity, not toleration. God’s peculiar interest was to be found almost exclusively among presbyterians, independents and baptists. Oliver remained unsympathetic to quakers, socinians, anglicans and Roman

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catholics;” J. C. Davis, “Cromwell’s religion,” in John Morrill, (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990), 196; Cromwell’s “desire to unite the godly—​by which he largely meant Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists but excluded Anglicans and Roman Catholics—​meant that he abhorred sectarian factionalism;” David Loewenstein, Representing revolution in Milton and his contemporaries: religion, politics, and polemics in radical Puritanism, Cambridge 2001, 160; “The triers were an eclectic body . . . with Presbyterians and Independents in roughly equal proportions and two or three Baptists as well;” Austin Woolrych, Britain in revolution, 1625–​1660, Oxford 2002, 584. 60. The theological, cultural, and political significance of denying paedobaptism is discussed in c­ hapter 3. 61. Coffey, “Ticklish business,” 118. 62. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, ed., The constitutional documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–​1660, Oxford 1889, 400–​3. 63. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, ii.180–​4. 64. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 173–​ 91; Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, Oxford 1982, 194–​233; Worden, God’s instruments,  63–​90. 65. Collins, “Church settlement,” 18; Christopher Durston, “Policing the Cromwellian church:  the activities of the county ejection committees, 1654–​1659,” in Patrick Little, (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate, Woodbridge 2007, 205. 66. For a concise overview see Ann Hughes, “‘The public profession of these nations:’ the national church in Interregnum England,” in Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds), Religion in revolutionary England, Manchester 2006; for the implementation of religious reform at a local level, see Bernard Capp, England’s culture wars: Puritan Reformation and its enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–​1660, Oxford 2012, 110–​31. 67. Stuart constitution, 312. 68. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, ii.423. 69. On the impressive degree to which English parochial worship had, by mid-​ seventeenth century, “earthed itself into the Englishman’s consciousness and had sunk deep roots in popular culture,” see John Morrill, The nature of the English Revolution, 1994, 148–​75. 70. John Coffey, “Puritanism and liberty revisited: the case for toleration in the English Revolution,” HJ xli (1998), 961–​85. 71. Stuart constitution,  312–​3. 72. Cromwell, Writings, iii.834. 73. For Biddle, see Nigel Smith, “‘And if God was one of us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-​Trinitarian heresy in seventeenth-​century England,” in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, literature, and politics in early modern English culture, Cambridge 2006; Sarah Mortimer, Reason and religion in the English Revolution:  the challenge of socinianism, Cambridge 2013, 160–​83, 224–​8; for

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Nayler, see Leopold Damrosch, The sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan crackdown on the free spirit, Cambridge, MA, 1996. 74. Stuart constitution,  312–​3. 75. In July 1655, London officials used the 1648 Ordinance to charge John Biddle with denying “CHRIST to be the most High GOD.” The same officials also expressed interest in charging the baptistic congregationalist William Kiffen with violating the ordinance. And while the incident as a whole illustrates the haphazard, often arbitrary nature of state sanctioned religious freedom during the period, it is telling that while the harassment of Biddle continued, the threats against Kiffen never materialized; The spirit of persecution again broken loose, 1655 (Wing S4992), 3, 20. 76. C. H. Firth, ed., The Clarke papers, 5 vols., 1891–​1901, iii.53. 77. B. Reay, “Quakerism and society,” in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical religion in the English Revolution, Oxford 1984, 141; Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 10. 78. Accounts of persecution are collected in Joseph Besse, A collection of the sufferings of the people called Quakers, 1753. 79. Coffey, Persecution and toleration in Protestant England, 1558–​1689, 153; David Underdown, “Settlement in the counties, 1653–​ 58,” in G. E. Aylmer, The Interregnum: the quest for settlement, 1646–​1660, 1972, 173. 80. A true state of the case of the Commonwealth, 1654 (Wing T3114), 41. 81. See Cressy, Birth, marriage, and death, 173–​80. The 1653 act may have also helped contribute to the sense among some critics that baptism was widely neglected during the period by both ministers and congregants alike; John Evelyn, A character of England, 1659 (Wing E3485), 17–​8; The diary of Abraham de la Pryme, ed. Charles Jackson, Durham 1869, 151. 82. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, i.715–​8; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–​ 1660, 4 vols, 1897, ii.242; CJ, vii.297–​9,  301–​4. 83. The humble proposals of Mr. Owen, Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Sympson, and other ministers, 1652 (Wing O761); John Owen, Proposals for the furtherance and propagation of the gospel in this nation . . . .as also, some principles of Christian religion, without the beliefe of which . . . salvation is not to be obtained, 1652 (Wing O799). 84. Some baptistic congregationalists were actually among those who resisted the implementation of The Humble Proposals. It is instructive, however, that these ministers—​a group which included Henry Jessey and Hanserd Knollys—​objected not on theological grounds, but rather because of their opposition to a national tithe, a position which reflected a wider separatist culture rather than a logical correlate of their anti-​paedobaptism; see Carolyn Polizzotto, “The campaign against the Humble Proposals of 1652,” JEH xxxviii (1987), 569–​81; Birch, “To follow the lambe,”  150–​1. 85. The bookseller and collector George Thomason managed to obtain a copy of this document; Thomason 125:E.826[3]‌; Coffey, “Ticklish business,” 121–​2.

18

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Notes

86. CJ, vii.397; The diary of Thomas Burton Esq, ed. John Towill, 4 vols., 1828, i.cii–​cxxvi. 87. See, for example, Second Helvetic Confession (1544), art. 20, Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, 509–​10; Belgic Confession, (1561), art.34, Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, 422–​3; Heidelberg Catechism, (1563), Q.74, Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, 443; Westminster Confession (1647), chap. 28,§ Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions,  641–​2. 88. An harmony of the confessions of the faith of the Christian and Reformed churches, 286–​301; Anthony Milton describes the Harmony of confessions as “a fundamental expression of Protestant accord;” Milton, Catholic and reformed, 383. 89. Stuart constitution, 312. 90. Dyke is incorrectly described by the ODNB as a “General Baptist minister” (that is, a “Baptist” holding to an Arminian soteriology). This is not, however, supported by the evidence, and Dyke’s associations were consistently with those baptistic separatists commonly described as “Particular Baptists,” a group which included William Kiffen, Hanserd Knollys, and Nehemiah Coxe. Most notably, from 1668 until his death in 1688, he served as co-​elder alongside Kiffen at the “Particular Baptist” congregation at Devonshire Square, London; A. C. Bickley, “Dyke, Daniel (1614–​1688),” rev. Beth Lynch, ODNB. 91. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, ii.855–​8, 968–​90; Collins, “Church settlement,” 27–​9; Woolrych, Britain in revolution, 1625–​1660,  583–​8. 92. Assessments of their activity and effectiveness vary considerably. Christopher Durston’s evaluation is more pessimistic, whilst Ann Hughes and Jeffery Collins are more sanguine. Durston, “Policing the Cromwellian Church;” Hughes, “The national church in Interregnum England;” Collins, “Church settlement.” 93. Wynell, The covenants plea for infants, 92, 7. 94. The most telling anecdote is Cromwell’s famous rebuke to Major General Lawrence Crawford after the latter had arrested the baptistic William Packer: “Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing to faithfully serve them, that satisfies;” Cromwell, Writings, i.278; for Anabaptist participation in the army, see Wright, Early English Baptists, 1603–​1649, 186–​200. 95. Worden, God’s instruments, 73. 96. Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant, “Whig history and present-​centred history,” HJ xxxi (1988), 1–​16; T. G. Ashplant and Adrian Wilson, “Present-​centred history and the problem of historical knowledge,” HJ xxxi (1988), 253–​74; see also, Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an art: nine essays on history, New York 2015, 18–​52. 97. For example, the Whitehall debates of 1648–​9; see Carolyn Polizzotto, “Speaking truth to power:  the problem of authority in the Whitehall debates of 1648–​9,” EHR cxxxi (2016), 31–​63. 98. This is what Paul Lim and Sarah Mortimer have provided in their treatments of anti-​Trinitarian thought during the period; Lim, Mystery unveiled; Mortimer, Reason and religion.

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99. See, for example, Samuel Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia variis praelectionibus, Edinburgh 1650 (Wing R2376); Richard Resbury, Some stop to the gangrene of Arminianism, 1651 (Wing R1136); Baillie, Scotch antidote against the English infection of Arminianism; Fenner, Hidden manna or, the mystery of saving grace; George Kendall, Theokratia, or, a vindication of the doctrine commonly received in the reformed churches, 1653 (Wing K287); Owen, The doctrine of the saints perseverance; Crosse, Logou alogia, seu, exercitatio theologica. 100. Crawford Gribben, “John Owen, baptism and the Baptists,” Bulletin of the Strict Baptist Historical Society xlii (2015), 18. 101. Coffey, John Goodwin, 242. 102. John Goodwin, Basanistai. or the triers, (or tormenters) tried and cast, 1657 (Wing G1151),  9–​10. 103. Marchamont Nedham, The great accuser cast down, 1657 (Wing N389), 54; Coffey, John Goodwin, 255–​60. 104. Mortimer, Reason and religion, 212–​20. 105. Joshua Toulmin, Memoirs of the life, character, sentiments and writings of Faustus Socinus, 1777, 253–​4. 106. Valentin Smalcius, The Racovian Catechisme, Amsterdam, 1652 (Wing R121), 109. 107. CJ, vii: 113–​4; see Gribben, John Owen, 137–​40. 108. CSPD 1649–​50, 13. 109. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 155–​9; Wright, Early English Baptists, 186–​200. 110. Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishemen: theological debates in Cromwellian Ireland, New  York 2004, 84–​5; John Cunningham, “Divided conquerors:  the Rump Parliament, Cromwell’s army and Ireland,” EHR cxxix (2014), 830–​61. 111. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the life of Colonel Hutchinson, London 1863, 299–​300. 112. Cromwell, Writings, iii.437, 440. 113. Henry Lawrence, Of baptisme, Rotterdam 1646 (Wing L663); Timothy Venning, “Lawrence, Henry, appointed Lord Lawrence under the protectorate (1600–​1664),”  ODNB. 114. Lake, Boxmaker’s revenge, 404. 115. Euan Cameron, “The ‘godly community’ in theory and practice of the European Reformation,” in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Voluntary religion, Oxford 1986, 132. 116. David F. Wright, Infant baptism in historical perspective: collected studies, Milton Keynes 2007, 168; see also Cameron, “The ‘godly community,’ ” 152–​3. 117. See Mark Noll, “British methodological pointers for writing a history of theology in America,” in Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory (eds), Seeing things their way: intellectual history and the return of religion, Notre Dame, IN, 2009. 118. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, i.1133–​6.

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119. John Owen, A sermon preached to the Honourable House of Commons in Parliament  .  .  .  with a discourse about toleration, 1649 (Wing O805), 77; congregationalists’ reconciliatory stance towards presbyterians can be seen in their willingness to allow regional expressions of presbyterianism such as the London classis to proceed unhindered; DWL, MS 38.37, Register book of the fourth classis in the province of London 1646–​1659. C h a p t er   5 1. CJ, vi.110–​13; Sean Kelsey, Inventing a republic: the political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–​1653, Manchester 1997, 93–​7. 2. Watts, The dissenters, 117–​29; on the Levellers, see Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: radical political thought in the English Revolution, Manchester 2013. 3. John Lilburne, The second part of Englands new-​chaines discovered, 1649 (Wing L2181). 4. The humble petition and representation of several churches of God in London, commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists, 649 (Wing H3441). 5. CJ, vi.177–​8. 6. Tolmie, Triumph of the saints, 187, 183. 7. “For in the time of Cromwell’s usurpation, they did then hale us before the judgment seats, because we could not worship God, after the will of their Lord Protector; for so they stiled him in their articles against us;” Thomas Grantham, non-​extant MS “Christianitas Restaurata,” as quoted in Crosby, History, iii.86. 8. The term “sect” is often, though not always, used pejoratively. When applied to early modern actors, the term can often, as Christopher Marsh has observed, inadvertently “absorb and legitimate” the hostility of the group’s contemporary critics. Thus, in the present chapter, I have deliberately avoided referring to any of the groups described as “sects,” but have nonetheless retained the term in its adjectival form, using “sectarian” to identify an isolationist attitude that grew increasingly pronounced among certain networks of baptistic churches during the Interregnum; Marsh, The family of love in English Society, 1550–​1630,  3–​4. 9. Stephen Wright, “Jessey, Henry (1601–​1663),” ODNB; see also, the similar descriptions of Jessey in Nuttall, Visible saints, 72, 147; Bustin, Paradox and perseverance, 2006, 334. 10. Philip Benedict, Christ’s churches purely reformed:  a social history of Calvinism, New Haven 2002, 404. 11. Henry Jessey, A storehouse of provision, 1650 (Wing J698), sigs. A4r, A2v. 12. Ibid. sig. A3r. 13. Ibid. sig. A4v. 14. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham,  346–​9. 15. [Whiston], Life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 83.

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16. Jessey, Storehouse, 146. 17. Edward Bean Underhill, Records of a church of Christ meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–​1687, 1847, 7; [Whiston], Life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey,  9–​10. 18. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 42, see also 51. 19. See Adrian Johns, “Coleman Street,” HLQ lxxi (2008), 33–​54. 20. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 303–​6, 309–​11. 21. [Whiston], Life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 86. 22. For the role of baptistic congregationalists within the Cromwellian religious settlement, see c­ hapter 4. 23. CSPD 1653–​4, 393. 24. CJ, vii.245, 264; CSPD 1652–​3, 74. Jessey is said to have made “his great designe of bettering the Translation of Bible . . . the Master Study of his life;” [Whiston], Life and death of Mr. Henry Jessey, 60; Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism, 140. 25. Firth and Rait, Acts and ordinances, ii.855–​8. 26. See Andrew Crome, “English national identity and the readmission of the Jews, 1650–​1656,” JEH lxvi (2015), 280–​301. 27. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 343–​8,  1–​69. 28. See B. R. White, “The organization of the Particular Baptists, 1644–​1660,” JEH xvii (1966), 209–​26; B. R. White, The English Baptists of the seventeenth century,  77–​94. 29. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists,  3–​4. 30. Stephen Wright, “Cox, Benjamin (bap. 1595, d. in or after 1663?),” ODNB. 31. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 126. 32. Stephen Wright, “Collier, Thomas (d. 1691),” ODNB. 33. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 54. 34. Ibid.  18. 35. See ibid. 110–​24; Robert Dunlop, “Dublin Baptists from 1650 onwards,” Journal of the Irish Baptist Historical Society xxi (1988), 5–​16; Crawford Gribben, God’s Irishmen: theological debates in Cromwellian Ireland, Oxford 2007, 79–​98; R. Scott Spurlock, “The politics of eschatology: Baptists in Interregnum Scotland,” BQ xliv (2010), 324–​46. 36. Early modern piety has been fruitfully explored as part of a wider historiographical turn toward the history of the emotions; see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-​Wilson, eds., Reading the early modern passions: essays in the cultural history of emotion, Philadelphia 2004; Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, Oxford 2013, 17–​98; S. Bryn Roberts, Puritanism and the pursuit of happiness: the ministry and theology of Ralph Venning, 1621–​1674, Woodbridge 2015; Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda, eds., Puritanism and emotion in the early modern world, New York 2016. 37. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 149, 183.

192

192 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes

Ibid. 61. See ­chapter 4. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists,  67–​8. Ibid.  154. Ibid.  176–​7. See, for example, E. P. Winter, “The Lord’s supper: admission and exclusion among the Baptists of the seventeenth century,” BQ xvii (1958), 267–​81; E. P. Winter, “The administration of the Lord’s supper among Baptists of the seventeenth century,” BQ xviii (1960), 196–​204; White, English Baptists,  10–​1. 44. Benjamin Cox, An appendix to a confession of faith, 1646 (Wing E364), 11. 45. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 131. 46. CSPD, 1653–​4, 13. 47. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 169. 48. For example, J. F. McGregor explains that during the 1630s and 1640s, the “most radical” English separatists “seceded to form congregations practising believer’s baptism” and “further demonstrated their exclusive separatism by adopting the dramatic ritual of baptism by total immersion. Henceforth they were known by their opponents as Dippers as well as Anabaptists.” As McGregor’s narrative then unfolds, he gives considerable attention to “Baptist” growth and development, without giving commensurate attention to the implications of the rejection of paedobaptism within the wider intellectual context of puritan and congregational thought; McGregor, “The Baptists: fount of all heresy,” 28. 49. Andrew Delbanco, The real American dream:  a meditation on hope, Cambridge, MA, 1999, 112. 50. John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An admonition to the Parliament, 1572 (RSTC 10848), A2r. 51. See Christopher Hill, Antichrist in seventeenth-​century England, Oxford 1971; Gribben, The Puritan millennium; Jeffrey K. Jue, “Puritan millenarianism in Old and New England,” in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge companion to Puritanism, Cambridge 2008, 259–​76. 52. Watts, Dissenters, 62. 53. Patrick Collinson, Godly people:  essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, 1983, 14. 54. Calamy, Englands looking-​glasse, 46. 55. Heart-​ bleedings for professors abominations, 1650 (Wing H1310), 3; White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 82. 56. Westminster confession of faith, 1647, ch.25; Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.639; on the Protestant equation of the pope with antichrist see Milton, Catholic and reformed, 93–​127. 57. Hayden, Records, 96. 58. Ibid.  93–​5.

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59. Ibid.  104–​5. 60. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 83. 61. Ibid. 173. 62. Ibid. 134; for more examples of the “church of Christ” label, see 35, 58, 60, 72, 102, 126, 158, and passim; Robert Steed and Abraham Cheare, A plain discovery of the unrighteous judge and false accuser, 1658 (Wing S5376B), “To the reader.” 63. The humble petition, title page. 64. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 25. 65. Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: the early modern world, 1450–​1650, New Haven 2016, ix. 66. See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To live ancient lives: the primitivist dimension in Puritanism, Chapel Hill 1988. 67. Bradstock, Radical religion in Cromwell’s England, 10. 68. Bell, “Freedom to form: the development of Baptist movements during the English Revolution,” 183. 69. Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 120; see also, White, English Baptists,  12–​3. 70. See also, McGregor, “Baptists,” 39. 71. An answer of the elders of the several churches in New-​England unto nine positions, 1643 (Wing M1270), 56. 72. Cotton, The way of the churches of Christ in New-​England, 68. 73. A[ndrew] R[itor], The second part of the vanity & childishnes of infants baptisme, 1642 (Wing R1542), 27. 74. See Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England 1400–​ 1580, 2nd edn, Oxford 2005, 11–​52. 75. Dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent, 1545–​63, sess. 23, ch. 4; Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and confessions, ii.866. 76. Readers of the popular Geneva Bible surely appreciated the work’s many illustrations depicting the elaborate cultus of ancient Israel. It does not seem too great a leap to imagine Elizabethan puritans connecting the image showing “The Garments of the High Priest” in the book of Exodus, with the strikingly similar clerical robes then giving so much offence in their local parish churches; see The Geneva Bible: a facsimile of the 1560 edition, Peabody, MA, 2007, 38. 77. For sacramentals, see Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe,  58–​62. 78. “Both screen and veil were barriers, marking boundaries between the people’s part of the church and the holy of holies, the sacred space within which the miracle of transubstantiation was effected;” Duffy, Stripping of the altars, 111. 79. See Milton, Catholic and reformed, 196–​205. 80. Christopher Blackwood, A soul-​searching catechism, 1653 (Wing B3101), 48. 81. Quoted in David F. Wright, Infant baptism in historical perspective: collected studies, Milton Keynes 2007, 246.

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Notes

82. M[archamont] N[edham], Independencie no schisme, 1646 (Wing N391), 2–​3. 83. John Tombes, An examen of the sermon of Mr. Stephen Marshal, 1645 (Wing T1825), 22. 84. Robert Whiting, The reformation of the English parish church, Cambridge 2010, 38. 85. William Ames, The marrow of sacred divinity, 1642 (Wing A3000), 206. 86. Lawrence, Of baptisme, 358–​9, 367. 87. Cox, Appendix, 11. 88. Underhill, Records of a church of Christ meeting in Broadmead, 65. 89. DWL, Baxter Letters, MS iii.243; Correspondence of Richard Baxter, 49. 90. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists,  63–​64. 91. Jessey, Storehouse, title page, 93. 92. Ibid. 122. 93. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 346, 341. 94. See J. A. Halcomb, “A social history of congregational religious practice during the Puritan Revolution,” PhD, University of Cambridge, 2010, 144–​67. 95. Francis Peck, Desiderata curiosa: or, a collection of divers scarce and curious pieces relating chiefly to matters of English history, 1779, 505. 96. Jessey, Storehouse, 101. 97. Hayden, Records, 105. 98. Nathaniel Homes, Ecclesiastica methermeneutica, 1652 (Wing H2563), sigs. Br, B2r, preface. 99. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 349. 100. Ibid.  352. 101. Ibid. 326. 102. Jessey, Storehouse, epistle to the reader, 110. 103. Underhill, Records of the churches of Christ, gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 352, 54–​5. 104. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 65, 75, 87, 89. 105. Ibid. 151. 106. Hayden, Records, 107. 107. White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 349–​53. 108. Ibid.  363–​4. 109. Ibid. 369–​70. 110. Ibid. 372. In the passages cited here there is some ambiguity as to precisely what the authors were discussing. The language in the letters is vague and convoluted and does not explicitly identify the issue in view. Further complicating matters is the fact that most of the letters in question are specifically concerned with a rather tangled dispute between Thomas Tillam from Hexham and Paul Hobson from Newcastle. Yet, despite this confusion, there is good reason to believe that the specific passages cited above pertain not to any personal disagreement

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between Tillam and Hobson, but rather to the more general disagreement surrounding association with the national church ministry and unbaptized persons, a disagreement which typified the distinction between the ecumenical and sectarian impulses among baptistic congregationalists. Three pieces of evidence support this claim. First, as cited above, previous correspondence between Hexham and the churches at London and Leominster refer explicitly to Hexham’s ongoing argument with Newcastle regarding communion with the unbaptized; White, Association records of the Particular Baptists, 349–​53. The time frame also works, as the letters to London and Leominster were sent approximately 5 months prior to the exchange between Hexham and Newcastle. Second, the general tenor of Newcastle’s critique conforms to the pattern established elsewhere among sectarian baptistic churches—​the biblical call to “come out of Babylon” (Rev. 18:4) being a frequent refrain used to justify the sharp break from the national ministry. Third, Newcastle’s reference to the “unrighteous wages of Balaam” lends strong support to this interpretation. In Numbers 20, the sorcerer Balaam was hired by the pagan king Balak to curse the Israelites. The phrase “unrighteous wages of Balaam” is likely drawn from a New Testament text which likens Balaam to contemporary false teachers: they “have gone astray following the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, which loved the wages of unrighteousness” (2 Pet, 2:15; Geneva Bible, 1599). The commentary of the Geneva Bible (1599) helpfully illumines what the Newcastle church might have had in mind when invoking the reference, explaining that 2 Peter 2:15  “condemneth those men  .  .  .  that sell themselves for money to curse the Sonnes of God after Balaam’s example” and “under pretence of false lib­erty, they draw men into most miserable slavery of sin.” This fits perfectly with the sectarian critique of ecumenical baptistic ministers who took livings from the national church and partnered with the “unbaptized” in their local congregations. If one reads this passage as further comment on the Tillam-​ Hobson dispute, however, it is rather more difficult to interpret; The Bible, that is, the holy scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament, Amsterdam 1599, note on 2 Pet. 2:15. 111. For the problems associated with “General Baptist” self-​identity during this period, see Bingham, “English radical religion and the invention of the General Baptists, 1609–​1660.” C o n c lus i o n 1. Hutchinson, Memoirs of the life of Colonel Hutchinson, 299–​300. 2. Underwood, History of the English Baptists, 70. 3. See Halcomb, “A social history of congregational religious practice during the Puritan Revolution,” 144–​67. 4. Hill, “History and denominational history,” 65.

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Notes

5. Hill, The world turned upside down, 14. 6. Hill, The English Bible and the seventeenth-​century revolution,  36–​7. 7. Marshall, “The naming of Protestant England,” 90. 8. Ryrie, “Protestantism as a historical category,” 59. 9. See, for example, Patrick Collinson, “A comment concerning the name Puritan,” JEH xxxi (1980), 483–​8; Peter Lake, “Puritan identities,” JEH xxxv (1984), 112–​23; Peter Lake, “Defining Puritanism—​again?,” in Francis Bremer, (ed.), Puritanism: transatlantic perspectives on a seventeenth-​century Anglo-​American faith, Boston 1993; John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–​1689, 1998, 3–​8; Coffey, “The problem of ‘Scottish Puritanism,’ ” 1590–​1638,” 67–​73; Lake, “The historiography of Puritanism,” 346–​71. 10. Leonard, “Introduction,” 3. 11. Underwood, Primitivism, radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 9; see also, Bradstock, Radical religion in Cromwell’s England, 11; Barry Coward, The Stuart age: England, 1603–​1714, 4th edn, Harlow 2012, 236. 12. Underwood, History of the English Baptists, 70. 13. Birch, “To follow the lambe,” 23. 14. In c­ hapter 5 we discussed how Henry Jessey’s identity as a “true Baptist” has also been called into question for similar reasons. John Bunyan’s relationship to “Baptists” is likewise treated with skepticism; see, for example, Watts, Dissenters, 241. 15. Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 160. 16. Birch, “To follow the lambe,” 190; likewise, Freeman, A company of women preachers, 44. 17. For example, see John Cotton’s “seven waies” through which “all the Churches enjoy mutual brotherly communion amongst themselves” John Cotton, The keyes of the kingdom of heaven, 1644 (Wing C6437), 17–​9; see also. Nuttall, Visible saints, 95–​100; David D. Hall, A reforming people: Puritanism and the transformation of public life in New England, New York 2011, 96–​126. 18. Bass, Thomas Grantham, 46; see also J. F. V. Nicholson, “The office of ‘messenger’ amongst British Baptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” BQ xvii (1957), 206–​25. 19. See, for example, R[athband], A briefe narration of some church courses, 21–​2; Cotton, The way of the churches of Christ in New-​England, 106; Thomas Hooker, Survey of the summe of church-​discipline, 1648 (Wing H2658), pt I, 65; pt IV, 45; and passim. 20. Goodwin et al., An apologeticall narration, 20. 21. Cotton, Keyes of the kingdom, 18. 22. The Bible, that is, the holy scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament, 2 Cor. 8:23–​4, note “o.” 23. Bell, Apocalypse how? 24. For example, “It should be recalled that the Baptists held as a matter of principle that the State and Church must be completely disassociated.” Jordan, The development of religious toleration in England, iii.460.

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25. Ward, Pure worship; see also, Horton Davies’ assessment: “In fact, Baptism apart, it would be difficult to distinguish their worship [i.e. that of English Particular Baptists] from that of the Independents, for the latter were Calvinists in doctrine, demanded Scriptural warrants for all their ordinances, believed in extemporaneous prayer, and insisted upon the local autonomy of each gathered church;” Horton Davies, Worship and theology in England, 3 vols., Grand Rapids, MI, 1996, ii.507. 26. H.  Leon McBeth, The Baptist heritage, Nashville 1987, 75–​6; Lumpkin, Baptist confessions of faith, 187. The emphasis on “visible saints” emerges so clearly from congregationalists, rather than from the “Baptists,” that two of the most definitive studies of seventeenth-​century congregationalism use the term for their titles; Nuttall, Visible saints; Morgan, Visible saints. 27. Birch, “To follow the lambe,” 66. 28. Leonard, “Introduction,” 4; Weaver, “Early English Baptists,” 141. John Coffey’s work on early modern toleration debates clearly demonstrates that such calls for expanded religious liberty were in no way unique to “Baptists;” Coffey, “Puritanism and liberty revisited, 961–​85; Coffey, Persecution and toleration in Protestant England, 1558–​1689; Coffey, “A ticklish business; Coffey, “The toleration controversy during the English Revolution,” 42–​68. 29. Cambers, Godly reading. 30. John Mabbatt, A briefe or generall reply unto Mr. Knuttons, 1645 (Wing M112), sig. A2r. 31. Hill, English Bible, 35. 32. This struggle with self-​identification continued well after the Restoration. As late as 1688, they had yet to settle on a concise term with which to consistently describe themselves and were forced to begin a major new confession of faith by self-​presenting, not as “Particular Baptists,” but using the rather more cumbersome “Congregations of Christians, (Baptized upon Profession of their Faith).” The next year, when “more than one hundred Congregations” met in London for a general assembly, they referred to themselves as “the Baptized Churches . . . Owning the Doctrine of Personal Election, and Final Perseverance.” In 1695, when the same network of churches published a catechism, the term “Particular Baptists” was still conspicuously absent, and the document’s title page referred to its subscribers as “the elders and brethren of many congregations of Christians, (baptized upon profession of their faith);” A confession of faith, 1688, title page; A narrative of the proceedings of the general assembly, 1689 (Wing N216); A brief instruction in the principles of Christian religion, 1695. 33. I explore the question of “General Baptist” identity in Bingham, “English radical religion and the invention of the General Baptists, 1609–​1660.” 34. Robert E. Johnson, A global introduction to Baptist churches, New York 2010, 1–​2. 35. Coward, The Stuart age, 236. 36. Alec Ryrie, Protestants: the radicals who made the modern world, 2017, 107. 37. Goodwin, A glimpse of Sions glory, 2.

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21

Index

1616 Confession of Faith,  14–​16 1644 Confession of Faith, 6, 12–​14, 17, 20, 33–​39, 43, 48, 52–​53, 57–​61, 80 1646 Confession of Faith, 6, 12–​13, 20, 36, 48, 59, 100, 158, 165n59 1688 Confession of Faith, 42, 197n32 Abingdon association, 125, 127 Abraham, covenant of, 38, 69–​70, 98 Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 93 Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, 103 Adams, Michael, 31–​32 Adcock, Rachel, 7 adiaphora baptistic practices, 114, 137 See also paedobaptism vs. believers-​ only baptism agitators and confrontational behavior, 3, 32, 87 Aldermanbury debate, 2–​3 Allen, William, 41–​42 Allin, John, 79 Ames, William, 45–​46 Anabaptists “Anabaptist” confession, 12 baptistic English separatists connected with continental Anabaptists, 100 as dangerous and problematic, 56, 90

within ecclesiological landscape of England, 84 in Germany, 43, 95 immersion, baptism by, 14, 17, 65, 133, 192n44 mainstream status, 102 origin of term, 3 “semi-​Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists,” 62–​63, 85 seven churches commonly called Anabaptists, 7, 12–​14, 17, 36, 38, 46, 57–​61,  91 softening attitudes toward, 90–​117 as triers and ejectors, 107 uprising, 43, 93, 164n45 anarchy, 93, 97 Anglican church. See national/​ established church in England Answer to Mr. J(ohn) G(oodwin) (Allen), 41 Antichrist, 48, 83, 130–​131, 142 pope as, 192n56 See also popery antinomianism, 57, 100, 103, 117 antipaedobaptists. See paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism anti-​trinitarianism, 87, 100–​102, 109–​111, 116–​117,  188n98

2

222

Index

apocalypse/​last day, 96–​97, 142–​145, 154 Arminian Baptists. See General or Arminian Baptists Arminianism, 87, 102, 106, 109–​111, 113, 117 arrests of dissenters and heretics, 12, 16, 34–​35, 93, 101, 188n44 Ashplant, T. G., 109 Assembly of Divines, 12, 19–​20, 56–​61, 69–​73, 100, 103, 106–​112, 117 and 1644 Confession of Faith,  57–​60 clash between independents and presbyterians, 77 denunciation of persons “hindering work of reformation,” 85 “True Reformed, Protestant Religion,” 106 atonement, 18–​20, 23–​24, 33, 100, 134, 165n59, 173n61 Augustine, 69–​70, 176n17 Baillie, Robert, 17, 36, 45, 88, 90–​91, 98, 179n51 Balaam, 145 Ball, John, 71–​72 Baptist Bibliography (Whitley), 28 “Baptist” label, 4, 65, 84, 91 assumptions regarding coherent group of “Baptists,” 22, 25–​26, 29–​30, 33–​ 36, 40, 61, 66, 91, 112, 154 “radical religion,” 175n103 self-​identity during 1630s and 1640s,  1–​61 self-​identity during 1650s, 118–​146 See also General or Arminian Baptists; Particular or Calvinistic Baptists Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–​1680 (Adcock), 7 The Baptist Against the Papist (Grantham), 41 baptistic congregationalists, 4, 40–​49, 84–​85, 153–​154

“Baptized Independents,” 182n3 and Cromwellian religious liberty, 112–​113,  120 early leadership, 49 and “formal associationalism,” 149 and rejection of paedobaptism, 44, 91 rifts among, 120–​121, 127–​128 seven London churches, 7, 12–​14, 17, 36, 38, 46, 57–​61, 91 transatlantic scope, 8, 46–​48, 51, 53, 58 triers and ejectors, 113 See also the Congregational Way; congregationalism “The Baptists: Fount of All Heresy” (McGregor), 30 Barber, Edward, 42 Barbon, Praisegod, 38–​39, 53–​55, 112 Barebones Parliament, 105 Barrow, Henry, 77 Barth, Karl, 177n38 Batte, Jo, 34 Batte, Timothy, 34 Baxter, Richard, 84, 139 believers’ baptism. See paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism Bell, Mark, 30, 133 Beukelsz, Jan, 93 Bible bibliolatry/​biblicism,  66–​67 Geneva Bible, 150, 193n76 godly reading, 152 new translation, 125 sola scriptura, 94 See also New Testament; Old Testament Biddle, John, 101, 103 Birch, Ian, 25 birth records decoupled from baptismal records, 105 Biscoe, Nathaniel, 50, 168n21 Blacklock, Samuel, 17 Blackwood, Christopher, 82–​84, 135

23

Index Blake, Thomas, 72, 86–​87 Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648, 100–​105, 116, 118 Blunt, Richard, 17, 34 Bond, Sampson, 99 Book of Common Prayer, 72 Bremer, Francis, 47, 170n14 Bridge, William, 47, 56 A Briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons and Grounds of Those People Commonly Called Anabaptists (Kiffen), 43 Brooks, Thomas, 84 Browne, Richard, 45 Browne, Robert, 77 Bunyan, John, 7, 30, 140 Burden, Mark, 42 Burrage, Champlin, 27–​28, 158n23, 162n13 Burroughes, Jeremiah, 39, 44, 47–​48, 56–​57,  59 Butterfield, Herbert, 8 Callamy, Edmund, 3 Calvin, John, 68–​70, 83, 92, 135 Calvinism “Calvinist consensus,” 55, 165n50 within early English “Baptists,” 4, 6, 18 See also baptistic congregationalists; Particular or Calvinistic Baptists “Calvinist consensus,” 55, 165n50 Cambers, Andrew, 152 carnal/​sexual indulgence, 95–​97, 100, 103, 126, 132 Carter, Philip, 44 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism Cavalier Parliament, 91 Certaine Observations upon Hosea (Kiffen), 47 Chamberlen, Peter, 31–​32 Chapuys, Eustace, 93 Charles I, 85, 118, 121 Chidley, Katherine, 47

223

Christian orthodoxy loose definition of, 103, 110 See also national/​established church in England A Christian plea for infants baptisme (Chidley), 98 Church of England. See national/​ established church in England circumcision, 69, 71, 81, 83, 98–​99, 135 Clark, J. C. D., 44 clerical dress, 134 Coffey, John, 4, 20, 102–​103, 197n28 Collier, Thomas, 96–​97, 125 Collins, Hercules, 7 Collins, Jeffery, 92 commonwealth transition from kingdom to, 120 See also Cromwellian national church communion/​Lord’s Supper, 46 baptism as prerequisite, 138–​140 “open” and “closed,” 127–​128, 145 Como, David, 5 conditional/​unconditional election, 19, 54, 70, 165n59 confessions of faith 1616 Confession,  14–​16 1644 Confession, 6, 12–​14, 17, 20, 33–​39, 43, 48, 52–​53, 57–​61, 80 1646 Confession, 6, 12–​13, 20, 36, 48, 59, 100, 158, 165n59 1688 Confession, 42, 197n32 confrontational behavior, 32 Confutation of Infants Baptism (Lambe), 49 the Congregational Way, 38–​61, 64, 71–​76, 112–​115, 121, 125, 131, 136–​137 coining of phrase, 40, 48 as company of saints, 48, 73–​75, 78–​83 concept of inter-​congregational messenger, 150 ideological rupture with Magisterial Reformation, 115

24

224

Index

the Congregational Way (Cont.) radical ecclesiology, 76 refined and nuanced, 89 See also Particular or Calvinistic Baptists congregationalism civil life intertwined with religious life, 178n48 coining of phrase “Congregational Way,” 40, 48 distinction between national church and individual congregations operating within it, 15 ecumenical strain of baptistic congregationalism, 124–​125 emergence of baptistic congregationalists as contingent event, 68 ideological rupture, pronounced differences dividing baptistic congregationalists, 123 internal and external members of covenant community, 70–​71, 74–​75, 80, 82–​83, 86 local gatherings/​congregations, 14–​15, 76, 78, 80 logic of, 68 natural extension of congregational principles, rejection of paedobaptism as, 81 orthodox baptistic separatists as closer to mainstream congregationalists than to other baptistic separatists, 55 paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism, 61, 63, 81, 85, 121–​123 personal and theological connections between “Baptists” and congregationalists, 40 as “radical religion,” 175n103 “seed” of congregationalism, 45 See also Particular or Calvinistic Baptists; saints, company of; visible church

Cornewell, Francis, 81 corpus Christianuum, 78, 102 Cotton, John, 46, 73, 78, 80, 134 covenant community, internal and external members, 70–​72, 74–​75, 80, 82–​83, 86 covenant of grace, 52, 69, 71, 98–​99 The Covenants Plea for Infants (Wynell), 62 Cox, Benjamin, 12–​13 Coxe, Benjamin, 3, 21, 23, 125 Coysh, Richard, 174n83 Cresset, Edward, 107 Cressy, David, 72, 95 Crokhay, Gertrude, 93 Cromwellian national church, 9, 90–​146 Cromwellian settlement, 103–​105, 111 Ireland and Scotland, spread of baptistic ideas, 126 military exigencies and religious tolerance, 108, 111–​112 “quasi-​Erastian” aspects, 92 religious toleration under Cromwell, 92, 101, 103–​104, 108–​109, 121 tiered framework of religious legitimacy, 100–​105, 108, 111, 117 vision of national spiritual renewal, 102 Crosby, Thomas, 5, 25–​29, 40 Davenport, John, 46 Davies, Horton, 197n25 Davis, J. C., 4 “A Declaration by Congregationall Societies in, and about the City of London; as well as those commonly called Anabaptists,” 84 Delbanco, Andrew, 129 The Development of Religious Toleration in England ( Jordan), 28 Diggers, 1 Dippers, 192n44 Directory for Publique Worship, 72

25

Index divine providence, 165n59 Dixon, Scott, 78 Dupper, John, 16 Dyke, Daniel, 107, 126 The Early English Baptists (Evans), 27 The Early English Baptists, 1603-​49 (Wright), 6, 28 Eaton, Samuel, 16, 64 Ecclesiastica Methermeneutica (Holmes), 141 Edward VI, 93 Edwards, Thomas, 17, 32, 96–​97, 99, 101 Eire, Carlos, 133 election, unconditional, 19, 54, 70, 165n59 Elizabethan England, 14, 93, 103, 130–​131 The Early English Dissenters (Burrage), 27 episcopacy, 15 dissolution of, 94, 103 within ecclesiological landscape of England, 84 See also national/​established church in England Erastians, 84, 92 established church. See national/​ established church in England Euler, Carrie, 93 Evans, Benjamin, 27 executions, 93–​94, 99, 100, 103, 118, 121 falling from grace, 20–​22, 36, 52, 54, 111 Familists, 90, 97 Farnworth, Richard, 41 Featley, Daniel, 12, 95–​96 “federal holiness,” 86 first tier vs. second tier of covenantal membership, 71, 81 first tier vs. second tier questions of faith, 20, 22–​24, 54–​55, 70, 87, 100–​105, 108, 111, 117 Fisher, Samuel, 41

225

Forbes, Alexander, 87–​88, 179n48, 181n107 “formal associationalism,” 149 Fox, George, 104 Foxe, John, 93 free will, 21–​22, 25, 36, 54, 102, 111 freedom of religion under Cromwell, 92, 101, 103–​104, 108–​109, 121, 151 Freeman, Francis, 82 “functionalist approach” to describing radicals, 158n16 Gangraena (Edwards), 98, 109 Gardiner, Stephen, 93 General or Arminian Baptists, 17–​18,  24–​30 alignments as provisional and in flux, 33 and atonement, 18 “denominational teleology,” 32 direct lineage to Helwy’s congregation, 34 dismantling of Reformation, 20 “early English Baptists,” 17 ecclesial landscape of early modern dissent, 28 hierarchy of errors, 22 ideological rupture, pronounced differences dividing baptistic congregationalists, 121–​123 during Interregnum, 117 orthodox baptistic separatists as closer to mainstream congregationalists than to other baptistic separatists, 55 polemical agenda of classification, 42 publicly distinguishing between groups, 53 relationship and collaboration with Particular Baptists, 6, 18, 22, 33 “Semi-​Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists,” 62–​63, 85 and singular “Baptist identity,” 21,  26–​30

26

226 General or Arminian Baptists (Cont.) soteriology vs. sacramentology as theological boundary marker, 61 as wholly distinct movement, 24 Geneva Bible, 150, 193n76 Germany, 22, 43, 45, 93, 95, 99 Gillespie, George, 76 Global Introduction to Baptist Churches ( Johnson), 153 Glover, Jose, 48 Godly reading: print, manuscript and Puritanism in England (Cambers), 152 Goodwin, John, 20, 41, 84, 109 Goodwin, Thomas, 38–​41, 44–​45, 47, 56–​57, 59, 76, 84–​85, 109–​110, 112–​ 114, 117, 125, 179n51 Gould, George, 27–​28 grace, falling from, 20–​22, 36, 52, 54, 102, 111 Grantham, Thomas, 7, 42, 120 Great Seal, 118 Greenhill, William, 44, 84 Greenwood, John, 77 Gregory, Brad, 94 Gribben, Crawford, 185n58 Gunpowder Plot, 19 Gura, Philip, 30, 66 Gurdon, Brampton, 47 Ha, Polly, 77 Habermas, Jürgen, 183n23 half-​way covenant, 63, 79 half-​way reformation, 144 Harmony of the Confessions of the Faith of the Christian and Reformed Churches, 107 Harrison, Thomas, 84 Heidelberg Catechism, 70 Helwys, Thomas, 18, 34 Heresiography (Pagitt), 96 heresy hunters, 17, 95–​96

Index hierarchy of doctrines of faith, 20, 22–​24, 54–​55, 70, 100–​105, 108, 111, 117 hierarchy of visible church, 71, 81 Hill, Christopher, 148, 152 History of the English Baptists (Crosby), 5, 26 History of the English Baptists (Ivimey), 5 History of the Puritans (Neal), 25 Hobson, Paul, 81, 194n110 Holmes, Nathaniel, 141 Howard, Luke, 23, 42 Hubbard, William, 172n44 Hughes, Ann, 96 human nature, 106 The Humble Proposals of 1652, 106–​107,  187n84 Hutchinson, John, 112, 147, 152 Hutchinson, Lucy, 147–​149, 151–​152 immersion, baptism by, 14, 17, 65, 133, 192n44 incense, 134 Independency Not Gods Ordinance (Bastwick), 85 Independents, 4 “Baptized Independents,” 182n3 conclusion of feud between congregationalists and presbyterians, 117 Cromwellian tolerance, 102, 108 within ecclesiological landscape of England, 84 grouped with “antipaedobaptist” in contrast with presbyterians, 83 infant baptism. See paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism informal ministerial networks, 46–​48,  53–​55 The Instrument of Government (1653) (Cromwell), 103–​105, 107 Interregnum, 90–​117. See also Cromwellian national church

27

Index Ireland, 111, 126 Catholic and presbyterian identity, 167n95 Cromwellian settlement, 103–​105, 111 Isaiah,  96–​97 Israel, analogy with England, 72–​73, 97 Ivimey, Joseph, 5 Jacob, Henry, 13–​18, 36, 45–​46, 77–​78,  80 Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church,  12–​37 1616 Confession of Faith,  14–​16 emergence of Particular Baptists, 18, 34 Jessey Memoranda, 14 mediating stance between radical separatism and national church, 14 paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism, ideological shift, 38–​39 within “puritan diaspora,” 45 and validity of infant baptism, 64 Jeffrey, William, 24 Jerusalem Chamber, 56 Jessey, Henry, 12–​18, 34–​35, 38–​40, 44–​49, 54–​55, 57, 59, 61, 64–​65, 80–​81, 84–​85, 87, 91, 107, 112, 116, 120–​128, 140–​143 Jessey circle churches. See Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey  church John of Leiden, 93 Johnson, Robert, 153–​154 Jordan, W. K., 28–​29 Joyful News from Heaven (Muggleton), 41 Judaism, 125, 135 circumcision, 69, 71, 81, 83, 98–​99, 135 continuity between Old and New Testaments, 65, 98–​99, 135 covenant of Abraham, 38, 69–​70, 98 infant baptism, “Judaizing” tendency of, 140 Isaiah,  96–​97 law of Moses as type and shadow, 143 judgment day/​apocalypse, 96–​97, 142–​145,  154

227

justification, 99, 111, 114, 139 Justification for the Independent Churches of Christ (Chidley), 47 Keach, Benjamin, 7, 13 Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (Cotton), 150 Kiffen (Kiffin), William, 3, 7, 13–​14, 17, 38, 40, 42–​43, 47–​48, 55, 59, 81, 84–​85, 111, 116, 119–​120, 127–​128 Kiffen Manuscript, 14, 17 Kilcop, Thomas, 13 Knollys, Hanserd, 3, 7, 13–​14, 38–​40, 48, 56–​57, 59, 84–​86, 107, 115, 124, 126–​128 Knutton, Immanuel, 43, 72, 95 Kreitzer, Larry, 7 Lake, Peter, 4, 114 Lambe, Thomas, 32, 34–​35, 42, 49–​53,  159n27 Larner, William, 47 last day/​apocalypse, 96–​97, 142–​145,  154 Laud, William, 151 Laudianism, 15, 85, 177n32 Lawrence, Henry, 107, 113–​115, 120, 138 lay empowerment/​lay-​theologians, 2, 60, 97, 170n14 Leiden, John of, 93 Levellers, 30, 118–​119 Levitical sacrifice, 134 Lightfoot, John, 57 Lilburne, Robert, 107 A Looking-​Glass for Baptists (Howard), 41 Lord’s Supper. See communion/​ Lord’s Supper Lothropp, John, 13–​14, 16–​18, 46, 82 Low Countries, 14, 18, 45–​47, 87, 130 Lumpkin, William, 19 Luther, Martin, 69, 83, 95, 135

28

228

Index

Lutheranism Lutheran confessions, 93 paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism, 102 Lynch, Kathleen, 174n82–​174n83 magisterial reformation, 74, 78–​79, 83, 92, 115 Magus, Simon, 86 mainstream religion. See national/​ established church in England Marsh, Christopher, 97 Marshall, Peter, 18, 56–​57, 98–​99, 148 Martyr, Justin, 102 Mather, Richard, 79 Matthews, John, 23 McGregor, J. F., 5–​6, 30–​32 McLoughlin, William, 67 Melanchthon, Philip, 69 “messenger,” office of, 150 millennialism, 56, 93–​97, 130, 142–​143,  150 Milton, Anthony, 177n32 ministerial networks and congregational affinities, 46–​48,  53–​55 ministerial oversight by triers and ejectors, 103, 107, 109–​110, 113, 126 mixed body, internal and external members of covenant community, 70–​71, 74–​75, 80, 82–​83, 86 A Moderate Answer to Dr. Bastwick’s Book (Knollys),  85–​86 Morgan, Edmund, 63, 67 Morrill, John, 186n69 Mortimer, Sarah, 110 Muggleton, Lodowick, 41 Muggletonians, 1 Munday, Thomas, 141 Munden, Thomas, 13 Münster, 43, 45, 93, 95, 99-​100, national/​established church in England, 2–​5,  90–​117

biblical doctrine and discipline, 77 civic and ecclesiastical identity, 72–​73 civil wars’ effect on religious settlement, 56 clash between independents and presbyterians, 77 collapse of longstanding institutions, 89, 95 “come out of Babylon,” 195n110 comprehensive intake of any and all,  81–​82 and Confession of Faith,  57–​60 ecclesiological definition in constant motion, 77 Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey church, mediating stance, 14–​15 nature of organized visible church, 65–​67,  77 opposition to Roman Catholicism, 20 “publick profession,” 106 quasi-​formal declaration of “communion,” 124 relationship between church and state in Interregnum England, 90–​117 rifts among baptistic congregationalists related to, 120–​121, 127–​128 theological experimentation, 3 treatises refuting Anabaptist errors, 97 triers and ejectors, 103, 107, 109–​110, 113, 126 Trinitarian Protestantism, 106 voluntarism as danger to civic and ecclesiastical order, 114 vs. local gatherings/​congregations, 76, 78, 80 See also Assembly of Divines; Cromwellian national church; paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism Nayler, James, 103 Neal, Daniel, 25–​26 Needham, Marchamont, 125, 135

29

Index the Netherlands, 14, 18, 45–​47, 130, 153 networks and congregational affinities, 46–​48,  53–​55 New England and “puritan diaspora,” 45–​51, 65, 73–​75, 78–​79, 83, 89, 124, 131 “according to the New England way,” 124 “Baptist” ideas coming from, 151 Half-​Way covenant, 180n70 New Testament, 132–​135 and baptism of infants, 66, 68, 81–​82, 88, 135 continuity between Old and New Testaments, 65, 98–​99, 134–​135 and individual church, 73–​75 liturgical forms, 134 and national church, 15, 78 A New Confession of Faith, or the First Principles of the Christian Religion, 106 Nuttall, Geoffrey, 179n49 Nye, Philip, 38–​39, 47, 56–​57, 59, 112–​113,  135 Nye, Stephen, 59 Of Baptisme (Lawrence), 113 Old Testament, 134 circumcision, 69, 71, 81, 83, 98–​99, 135 continuity between Old and New Testaments, 65, 98–​99, 134–​135 covenant of Abraham, 38, 69–​70, 98 shadowish law of Moses, 143 original sin, 36, 52, 54 baptism as elimination of, 69 See also paedobaptism vs. believers-​ only baptism orthodoxy, 2, 9 explicit and universal rejection of believers-​only baptism, 102 heresy hunters, 17, 95–​96 loose definition of, 103, 110

229

See also Calvinism; national/​ established church in England outward sign, baptism as, 67, 70, 74 oversight by triers and ejectors, 103, 107, 109–​110, 113, 126 Owen, John, 109–​110, 116–​117, 125 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 121 Packer, William, 107, 111 paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism,  2–​5 1630s and 1640s, views during, 12–​37 1650s, views during, 118–​147 “An Account of divers Conferences, held in ye Congregation of w(hi)ch Mr Henry Jessey was Pastor, about Infant baptism,” 14 “An Act touching Marriages . . . and also touching Births,” 105 application of sacrament vs. actualization of faith, 70 “Christians in name but not in deed and truth,” 49 and circumcision, 69, 71, 81, 83, 98–​99,  135 communion, baptism as logical precedent to, 138–​140 conscience, baptism according to, 39 continuity between people of God across Old and New Testaments,  98–​99 corpus Christianuum, 78 doctrinal position on baptism vs. personal alliances and broader ecclesial self-​identity, 47 exaggerated importance of baptism per se, 66 explicit and universal rejection of believers-​only baptism by Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, and Orthodox, 102

230

230

Index

paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism (Cont.) grace, requisite signs of, 79 Half-​Way covenant, 63, 79 Heidelberg Catechism, 70 identity based upon distinctive sacramentology, 43 ideological shift, 38–​39 immersion, baptism by, 14, 17, 65, 133, 192n44 Independents grouped with “antipaedobaptists,” 83 as “Judaizing,” 140 legitimacy of baptism administered by false church, 50 logic of baptism itself, 137–​138 logic of believer’s baptism, 67–​68, 74 “middle way,” 86–​87 natural extension of congregational principles, rejection of paedobaptism as, 81 origin of debate, 2–​5 “outward religion,” 54 outward sign, baptism as, 67, 70, 74 peripheral, in-​house debate, 121–​123 as point of agreement among all Christendom, 64 practical consequences, 139 “publick profession,” 106 purity vs. unity, 137 Racovian Catechism, 111 “Reasons and Arguments” against believer’s baptism, 50–​51 rejection of paedobaptism by otherwise orthodox puritan types,  62–​89 Sacrament of Initiation, 137 scriptural warrant, 66, 68, 81–​82, 88, 135, 147 sectarian interests, 126, 141 sine qua non of fellowship, 121 social/​civic activity, baptism as, 72

sympathy between baptistic and paedobaptistic congregationalists,  54–​55 top-​tier Cromwellian theological legitimacy, 105 use of modifier “baptized,” 43 visible church, effect on, 79 visible saints, limitation of church membership to, 65 Pagget, Ephraim, 17 pan-​Baptist identity distorted understanding of, 22, 25–​26, 29–​30, 33–​36, 40, 66, 91, 112, 154 See also “Baptist” label Parnell, James, 41 Particular or Calvinistic Baptists, 3–​4, 12–​37,  154 alignments as provisional and in flux, 33 and atonement, 18 “Calvinist consensus,” 165n50 as congregationalists/​congregations of Christians, 36–​37, 40–​42, 55, 71 “denominational teleology,” 32 disassociation from Arminian doctrine, 20 “early English Baptists,” 17 ecclesial landscape of early modern dissent, 28 as fellow puritans, 170n14 hierarchy of error, 22 ideological rupture, pronounced differences dividing baptistic congregationalists, 121–​123 during Interregnum, 117, 119–​120 Particular Baptist Western Association, 19 polemical agenda of classification, 42 publicly distinguishing between groups, 53 relationship and collaboration with General Baptists, 6, 18, 22, 33 self-​description as, 18

231

Index “Semi-​Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists,” 62–​63, 85 and singular Baptist identity, 26–​30 soteriology vs. sacramentology as theological boundary marker, 61 See also baptistic congregationalists; Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey  church Patient, Thomas, 48 Saint Paul, 132 Perrot, John, 41 Petto, Samuel, 140 Phillips, George, 45, 49–​51, 53, 168n21 pluralism, religious, 92, 101, 103–​104, 108–​109,  121 polygamy, 93, 97 popery. See Roman Catholicism Powell, Hunter, 181n107 predestination, 6, 19, 52, 70, 111, 168n107 prelacy/​priesthood, 103, 109, 111, 134 presbyterianism, 45 Cromwellian tolerance, 102, 108 within ecclesiological landscape of England, 84 feud between congregationalists and presbyterians, 117 independents in contrast with presbyterians, 83 local congregations, regional synods, and national assembly, 178n48 “radical religion,” 175n103 visible church within, 76 See also national/​established church in England Price, John, 109 Pride’s Purge, 121 priesthood/​prelacy, 103, 109, 111, 134 primary and secondary doctrines of faith, 20, 22–​24, 54–​55, 70, 100–​105, 108, 111, 117 primitivism, 7, 88, 134–​136, 143–​144 Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War (Underwood), 7

231

print culture, 89, 94–​95 protectorate,  90–​117 Protestant Christianity Anabaptism within, 93–​94 and Biblicism, 88 Church as comprehensive society, 114 evolution of Protestant narrative, 130–​134 “Protestantism” as label, 148 rationale for paedobaptism, overturning of, 68–​71 Purgatory, 20, 100 Puritanism, 4, 14 baptistic groups as product of, 25, 95, 170n14 diaspora (see New England and “puritan diaspora”) label of “puritan,” 149 paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism, intra-​puritan conflict, 5 puritan ministerial friendships, 46 puritan underground, 95 Quakers, 7, 23, 29, 41–​42, 102, 104, 112, 117, 148, 170n12 Racovian Catechism, 110–​111 “radical reformation,” use of term, 182n8 “radical religion,” use of term, 158n16 Ranters, 1 Reay, Barry, 5 rebaptism, 16–​17, 23, 62, 79, 88, 96, 127. See also paedobaptism vs. believers-​ only baptism redemption, 21, 139 Reeve, John, 41 Reformation Church as comprehensive society, 114 intrinsic limiting principle, 135 Reformed churches Anabaptism within, 93 and Biblicism, 88

23

232

Index

Reformed churches (Cont.) explicit and universal rejection of believers-​only baptism, 102 rationale for paedobaptism, overturning of, 68–​71 religious freedom, 92, 101, 103–​104, 108–​109,  121 Remonstrant views, 110 Repository (Stinton), 14, 17, 25, 162n13 Richardson, Samuel, 12–​13, 20, 81 Ritor, Andrew, 168n21 Robinson, John, 45 Roman Catholicism, 131–​136 and Calvinistic soteriology, 20 Cromwellian settlement, 103–​105, 111 logic of sola scriptura, 94 Old Testament practices and rituals, 134–​135 “popery,” 94, 103, 109, 131, 133, 135–​136,  143 priesthood, 111, 134 sacramental structure of baptism, 69, 87, 102 Row, John, 125 Rudd, Anthony, 19 Rump Parliament, 84, 102, 106 Ryrie, Alec, 11, 94, 148, 154 sacramentology, reframing, 62–​89 baptism (see paedobaptism vs. believers-​only baptism) communion (see communion/​Lord’s Supper) Rome’s seven sacraments and “sacramentals,” 134 soteriology vs. sacramentology as theological boundary marker, 61 saints, company of, 49, 63, 65 within congregational ecclesiology, 48, 73–​75,  78–​83 Corinthian church, 81 covenantal relationship, 98

salvation, 20, 52, 70–​71, 90–​91, 131, 141, 144 1646 revised Confession of Faith, 165n59 unconditional election, 19, 54, 70, 165n59 See also soteriology schism, 15, 29, 49, 135 Schneider, Carol, 175n9 Scotland, 126, 167n95 Seaman, Lazarus, 57 The Second Part of Englands New-​Chains Discovered, 119 sect, use of term, 190n8 Sectaries and Schismatiques (Taylor), 49 self-​identity of Baptist groups during 1630s and 1640s, 1–​61 self-​identity of Baptist groups during 1650s, 118–​146 semi-​separatists, 13–​15,  77 “semi-​Anabaptists” and “compleat Anabaptists,” 62–​63, 85 See also Jacob-​Lothropp-​Jessey  church separation of church and state, 80, 92, 150. See also national/​established church in England “separatism,” 5 Sermon of the Baptizing of Infants (Marshall), 98 A Sermon Preached before the Kings Maieste (Rudd), 19 seven London churches, 7, 12–​14, 17, 36, 38, 46, 57–​61, 91 seven sacraments of Rome, 134 sexual/​carnal indulgence, 95–​97, 100, 103, 126, 132 Shagan, Ethan, 59 Shepherd, Thomas, 13, 75 Simpson, 39, 57, 87 Simpson, John, 39, 84 Simpson, Sidrach, 39, 47, 56, 59, 84–​85, 87, 112–​113

23

Index Skelton, Samuel, 46 Smyth, John, 18, 65, 88 Socinianism, 87, 102, 109–​111, 148, 170n12 Socinus, Faustus, 110 sola scriptura leading to theological and moral chaos, 94 Some Principles of Christian Religion, without the Beliefe of Which . . . Salvation Is Not to Be Obtained, 106 Somerset Confession, 19 soteriology, 17–​20, 33–​37, 52–​53, 70 “Arminian-​influenced,”  173n61 first-​tier vs. second-​tier issues of debate, 20, 70 as theological boundary marker, 61 See also Arminianism Southwark conferences, 13, 39 Spang, William, 90 Spierling, Karen, 72 Spilsbery (Spilsbury), John, 13, 16, 21, 34–​ 35, 48–​54, 58, 66, 128 Steuart, Adam, 87–​88, 181n107 Stinton, Benjamin, 13–​14, 25–​26, 45 Stinton documents, 14, 17, 25, 34, 45, 162n13 A Storehouse ( Jessey), 122–​123, 140 Sympson, Sidrach, 87 Synod of Dort, 32, 36 Taylor, Daniel, 84 Taylor, John, 49 Terrill, Edward, 131–​132, 138–​139, 143–​144 Thomason, George, 58 tiered covenantal membership, 71, 81 tiered framework of religious legitimacy, 20, 22–​24, 54–​55, 70, 100–​105, 108, 111, 117 Tillam, Thomas, 124 tithing, 187n84

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tolerance, religious, under Cromwell, 92, 101, 103–​104, 108–​109, 121 Tolmie, Murray, 5–​6, 16, 32–​33, 36, 40, 64–​67, 119–​120 Tombes, John, 107, 125, 127, 135, 139, 149 The Touchstone of Truth (Warre), 19 Tractarians, 151 A Treatise Concerning the Lawfull Subject of Baptisme (Spilsbery), 48–​50, 52, 54 Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (Ball), 71 triers and ejectors, 103, 107, 109–​110, 113, 126 Trinity anti-​trinitarianism, 87, 100–​102, 109–​ 111, 116–​117, 188n98 broad Trinitarian Protestantism, 106 Triumph of the Saints (Tolmie), 119–​120 Truth Cleared of Scandals (Farnworth), 41 Tyacke, Nicholas, 177n30 unconditional election, 19, 54, 70, 165n59 Underwood, A. C., 147, 149 Underwood, T. L., 29–​30, 133 Venner, Thomas, 19 vestments, 134 visible church, 86 divided into two tiers, 71, 81 purity of, 81 vs. national church, 73–​74, 79 visible saints. See saints, company of Warre, John, 19 Watts, Michael, 5 The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-​ England (Cotton), 73 Webster, Tom, 175n9 western association of churches, 19, 125–​126

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Westminster Assembly of Divines. See Assembly of Divines Whiston, Edward, 47 White, B. R., 5–​6, 14, 24, 26–​27, 32–​33, 64 Whitehall Conference, 125 Whitley, W. T., 28 William Kiffen and His World (2010–​2015) (Kreitzer), 7

Williams, Roger, 106 Wilson, Adrian, 109 women, 7, 96–​97, 184n33 Wooton, Andrew, 20 Worden, Blair, 108 Wright, David F., 115 Wright, Stephen, 6, 32–​35, 51–​53, 64 Wynell, Thomas, 62–​63, 168n21

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