Presbyterians favoured the persistence of the parish as the basis of religious decency – membership of a congregation was to be determined by place of residence. These parochial congregations would be integrated into a national church, and the dangers of errors, schism and heresy contained. To some advanced Protestants this looked little different from episcopacy. They favoured voluntary congregations, gathered churches, of like-minded Christians. These independent congregations could still be integrated into a national church through a Presbyterian system, but they would be independent of parochial discipline. Others favoured complete congregational independence as the guarantee of freedom of conscience. These were big issues, which raised fundamental questions about the nature of Christian community and its relationship to the national political community.36
The agreement reached in Calamy’s house was respected, but it could only be temporary, and in early 1644 it came apart.37 The Solemn League and Covenant, the ongoing deliberations of the Westminster Assembly and, after 1644, the increasing likelihood of a military victory that would force the King to agree a settlement all combined to make church government an immediate and pressing issue. Independency was routinely denounced as introductive of spiritual anarchy, or as the resurgence of a proven heresy, or both. And the challenges it posed ranged far beyond the merely doctrinal – sects were denounced in terms of the behavioural consequences of their teachings, and those consequences centred around inversions of decency. The double disadvantage was the difficulty of demonstrating that congregational independence could be squared with decency in public worship, and the influence of the Covenanters in Parliament and the assembly. On the other hand Presbyterianism might come to seem rather like another form of episcopacy, or even popery: coercive and an imposition on the individual conscience.
These developments led five leading Independents to break cover and seek to justify their beliefs publicly. An Apologeticall Narration was acquired by Thomason on 3 January 1644. The authors – Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs and William Bridge – were respectable figures and the publication was approved by Charles Herle, one of twelve clergymen appointed by Parliament to license books.38 He too was a thoroughly respectable figure and approved the publication for its ‘peaceableness, modesty and candour’. Herle recognized the need for an explanation of the Independent position, answering claims that the Protestant party was incommunicable within itself and incompatible with magistracy and giving the lie to misrepresentations of Independency. Thus, although ‘for mine own part I have appeared on and do still incline to the Presbyterial way of Church Government, yet do I think it is every way fit for the press’.39 The authors themselves apologized for publishing, saying that they would have preferred their actions to prove their case over a long period of time, but were forced to an apology by the climate of opinion against them. They had all been exiled during the 1630s40 and were apparently willing both to gather churches and to hold livings within a liberated Church of England. In essence, they argued for congregational independence within a national framework subordinated to civil authorities: churches should gather themselves, but recognize an external discipline. As with the deliberations in Parliament in 1640–42, so with the Westminster Assembly – it proved impossible for some to resist resorting to mobilization of opinion outside the assembly, and once that had been done an escalating pamphlet war took off.
The publication of the Apologeticall Narration sparked fierce controversy in the parliamentary alliance
An Apologeticall Narration was a very respectable publication, apparently produced in a spirit of brotherhood, but this spirit of brotherhood did not last, or at least was not unanimously adhered to. Their position on church government was subtle, and to many observers incoherent, and the publicists for a Presbyterian revival were very happy to point that out. But in doing so they clearly fuelled the suspicion that the Protestant party, the parliamentary alliance, was not in communion. This was to mark the beginning of a long and increasingly fractious public debate. In that debate anti-sectarian polemic was of course attractive to royalists, but was becoming as important to the argument within the parliamentary coalition.
These exchanges took on a new and shriller edge in the aftermath of Marston Moor. It was then that Thomas Edwards’s Antapologia appeared, an intemperate response to the Apologeticall Narration. Edwards had participated in the sectarian scare in 1641, crossing swords with Henry Burton, the former martyr to Laudian persecution, and, with John Taylor, heating up the discussion of the dangers of spiritual indiscipline. He now found the times suitable to his purposes and temperament. Antapologia was ten times as long as the pamphlet that it attacked, a sprawling denunciation of sectarianism and error, championing a Presbyterian settlement as the guarantor of ‘beauty, order [and] strength’. Presbyterian ministers in London quickly established Edwards in a weekly lectureship at Christ Church, Newgate, and from that pulpit he became a notorious preacher against the sects and vociferous opponent of toleration.41
Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent of Persecution was also published about the time of Marston Moor, and seemed to offer a summary of where the more advanced critique of church government was leading. Williams had emigrated to Boston in 1631, probably in his mid- or late twenties, where he was invited to take up a position in the church. He declined the invitation, however, because the congregation was making a virtue of its refusal to separate from the Church of England, and had declared his opposition to the use of secular power to punish Sabbath breaking. As a result of these views Williams became perceived in Massachusetts as a threat to the New England way, of congregational independence within an overall discipline. Unable to find a teaching post in Massachusetts he moved to Plymouth plantation, but continued to attract controversy and returned to Massachusetts, only to be banished in 1636. He fled southwards and established a settlement at Providence based on the principle of the separation of civil and religious authority. There he attracted a number of other refugees, including Anne Hutchinson, and had a brief flirtation with the Baptist church. Returning to London in 1643–4, he obtained a charter for Providence and a number of settlements nearby. But he also caused uproar with his intervention in the English debate about church government.
Three pamphlets – Queries of Highest Consideration, his reply to Mr Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed and the Bloudy Tenent – ridiculed the contortions caused by the state control of religion, exposed the illogicalities of non-separating Congregationalism and defended the Baptist argument for toleration. The ‘bloody tenet’ that he attacked was the belief that governments could impose a particular form of worship, a belief that led to the mutilation and even death of men and women seeking their own way to God. It was better to bear persecution by ungodly men than to seek to persecute others. It was said that, in Providence, Williams had first fallen off from his ministry, then from church fellowship, baptism, communion and eventually from all the current ordinances of the church. He was waiting for new apostles, ready to raise a new church from among the ruins of anti-Christian apostasy. The contemporary label for this was ‘seeker’, a description which Williams explicitly rejected, but there is some truth to the claim that he became ‘what the opponents of Separatism had always prophesied would be its reductio ad absurdum, the one-man church’.42 On 9 August, Parliament ordered the Bloudy Tenent to be publicly burned.
Pamphlets engaged with one another, in an escalating debate of increasing and immense vitality and creativity.43 Freedom of religious assembly was closely related to the issue of freedom of expression, and John Milton, who had introduced Williams to his publisher, also got into trouble on this issue.44 Milton married a woman half his age in May 1643 after a month of courtship. After a month of marriage he was convinced that it was a mistake: his seventeen-year-old wife was not bookish, resented the restraints of his style of life and was uninterested by his intellectual pursuits. In fact, she found his views detestable and profane. She deserted him for her parental
home and Milton published The doctrine and discipline of Divorce in August 1643. It signalled a shift in Milton’s career, at least on his own retrospective gloss, from a concern with religious liberty towards ‘domestic’ liberty – marriage, freedom of speech and education. This has a half-appeal to the modern reader, or perhaps an appeal to half of modern readers: he argued that marriage should be a union of soul and intellect, and in the absence of that men had a right to divorce. To seventeenth-century readers this was less than half-acceptable, of course, and attracted criticism. In the course of 1644 this put Milton on course to an argument for freedom of expression. He published an enlarged edition in February. In July he published a pamphlet citing the respectable reformer Martin Bucer in support of his views. Shortly after, he published his important tract Of Education, which laid out an extremely demanding intellectual training for the young citizen, another signal contribution to his arguments for domestic liberty; it made no mention, however, of the training girls would receive in order to make them appreciative of the conversation of their husbands.45
The hostile response to his tracts on divorce persuaded Parliament to consider prosecution – he had not sought a licence for their publication. It was this that led him to denounce prior restraint of publications, in the justly famous Areopagitica, which appeared without licence in November. It is often glossed as advocating a free market in expression, in which bad opinions would be driven out by good ones, individuals would be free to develop their views, and knowledge would increase. In fact, as with the divorce tracts, there are ambiguities: he did not raise any objection to the suppression of royalist opinions in time of war and excluded Roman Catholics from these freedoms, for example. These exceptions reflected the purpose of free speech – the promotion of virtue in society. Milton retained an attachment to the virtue and power of an educated elite. His tract Of Education was a manual for leaders in a mixed government, of Lords and Commons, and his defence of free speech was directed primarily at them.46
John Milton’s Areopagitica argued against pre-publication censorship
Milton’s views are not quite as much our own as the more triumphant treatments suggest; but they bear testimony to the radicalizing effects of war, and the possibilities arising from the luxuriant political and religious debates. These were important domestic liberties, and not the ones at stake when Parliament had met in the aftermath of defeat in the second Bishops” War. Increasing freedom of worship and of expression offered opportunities which Williams and Milton felt were good in themselves. For others they were a temporary means to achieve other ends. For royalists these radical arguments, openly expressed in print, confirmed everything they had been saying since 1642, and this made it even more uncomfortable for those within the parliamentary alliance but worried by escalating radicalism.
On 4 January 1645 Parliament agreed to replace the Prayer Book with the Directory of Worship. Much of the Directory was very welcome to all parts of the parliamentary alliance – containing forms of worship free of popery, idolatry and superstition – but it was to be imposed through a national Presbyterian system. Congregational attempts to secure a different framework of church government had been derisively dismissed by the Commons (insisting that no more than 300 of their objections should be published) in December. On 6 January a proposal that voluntary congregations could exist alongside parochial ones, within a national church, was rejected by the Commons without a vote. A week later it was agreed that parochial congregations should be grouped under presbyteries, as the basis for national church government.47
Had he still had them, this would have been music to the ears of William Prynne – the former martyr to the Protestant cause. He had characterized Milton’s views on marriage as ‘divorce at pleasure’. In January 1645 he championed religious discipline in Truth Triumphing, which called for the establishment of a binding ecclesiastical discipline and the absolute suppression of all heresies and schisms, and cited tradition against novelty in favour of such discipline. This led him into conflict with John Lilburne, who had suffered alongside him in opposition to Laudianism in the 1630s. On 7 January Lilburne published his Copie of a letter… To Mr. William Prinne Esq., in which he argued that no earthly power had authority over the kingdom of God and that persecution of individual consciences was the work of the Devil.48
These principles, once stated in detail and at length, were difficult to reconcile, but in practice it continued to be possible for people who differed on these issues to co-operate in the war effort. Sir Cheney Culpeper eventually came to denounce Scottish Presbyterians and their allies as miniature popes: ‘I never shall make any difference between an imperial, national, provincial, presbyterial, parochial or congregational Pope’. In March 1648 he declared himself an ally of the Lilburnists, noting that ‘the Scottish aristocratical interest both in church and state… having… [pulled] down the power of monarchy and episcopacy, do begin to find themselves to be part also of that Babylonish rubbish which must down’. For Culpeper the conscience was God’s peculiar, a place beyond episcopal or any other jurisdiction, and all attempts to constrain conscience represented a form of bondage akin to the Babylonish captivity endured by the Israelites. But in November 1644 he admitted to having no hope ‘but in our geud brethren the Scots’.49 Many like him must have hoped that conflicts over discipline could be subordinated to the larger conflict – the form of church government was not, necessarily, one of the marks of a true church.50
It is difficult to know how many separatists there actually were in England in 1644. By then there were perhaps thirty-six Independent churches in London. They included seven congregations of Particular Baptists, who believed that the saved should undergo an adult baptism and who produced a collective confession of faith in 1644. There were also five congregations of General Baptists, who believed that all could be saved and were therefore in breach with Calvinist thinking about salvation. There were ten or so Independent churches under a learned minister, again rather diverse in their views. Around ten congregations gathered under lay ministers, many of them in 1643 and 1644, and represented no common denomination; they also tended to be ministers with a less respectable education in divinity. It was these groups, along with individual ‘mechanic preachers’, who created most anxiety. Among them were notorious mechanic men, like John Green and John Spencer, apprentices such as John Boggis and Thomas Webb, and women, such as Mrs Attaway and Katherine Chidley. Together these congregations, and the audiences for these preachers, can have represented only a tiny proportion of the London population, but this religious diversity fostered some very radical religious speculation. These forms of religious association were in themselves a threat to learned divinity and religious order, and their teaching threatened fundamentals of received doctrine – about sin, the soul, salvation, and the role of scripture in guiding Christian belief and practice. Millenarian views of the most exotic (and to many people frightening) kind were also preached.51 This ferment prompted fears out of proportion to the size of the problem – but in matters of normative threat size is not everything. Moreover, there were serious questions about the implications of this for those excluded – the parochial basis of religion had the advantage of including everyone, after all. In 1644, for example, John Goodwin had established a gathered church in St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, where he was the incumbent. Communion was refused to those considered to be ungodly, which amounted, effectively, to unchurching a large number of his parishioners.52
It is difficult to know about the numbers and size of Independent congregations outside London, although we should not dismiss the possibilities. In 1625, in much less helpful circumstances, there were five Baptist congregations, with a membership of at least 150.53 In counties like Lincoln and Cornwall, where there was no strong tradition of pre-war separatism, sects were an established feature of local life by 1660. It is difficult to know exactly when these congregations took root, although it often seems from the surviving sources to have been a later, oft
en post-war phenomenon. Certainly the Quakers did a lot to plant dissent in provincial life during the 1650s. But Thomas Edwards, writing in 1645 and 1646, certainly saw it as a national problem, and associated in particular with the armies.54 On numerous occasions troops had been associated with iconoclasm, but that desire for purification says nothing about views on church government – Scottish Presbyterianism had a reputation for visual austerity, after all. It was easy to conflate this activism with Independency, though – preaching and worship in the army were, as in the sects, outside an established parish setting. Claims were frequently made for grossly transgressive behaviour by troopers, including the oft-repeated story of Captain Beaumont’s men baptizing a horse in their urine in June 1644, or of the baptism of a calf in Lichfield Cathedral.55
This association between the army and a lack of religious discipline meant that the fractious debate between Independents and Presbyterians posed a double question about the meaning of a parliamentary military victory. What would it mean for religious order, and advocates of which position could claim the credit for military success? Norwich, shortly to see disarray in the parliamentary coalition, marked the victory at Marston Moor with an elaborate civic procession. Elsewhere, the strains were already becoming clear. Thomas Edwards’s virulent attack on Independency in Antapologia resonated strongly with the outrage felt among his fellow travellers like Robert Baillie at the lack of credit offered to the Covenanters for the victory. Cromwell, on the other hand, no friend to Presbyterian discipline, had little doubt that the detail of the battle revealed a key role for men of his beliefs as the instruments of God’s providence.56
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