Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution

Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution

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Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution ANN HUGHES

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp 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 in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Ann Hughes 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 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, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries 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 book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-925192-4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd. King’s Lynn, Norfolk

Preface and Acknowledgements This is a book about a book—or more properly about three books, the three parts of Gangraena written by the intemperate London Presbyterian Thomas Edwards and published in 1646. These were in their own time, and have remained, notorious for their extremism, their starkly polarized world-view, and their intolerance. Edwards now features in historical novels as well as monographs.1 Gangraena provided horrified detail of the unorthodox religious speculation, lay preaching, and sectarian congregations unleashed by civil war, and Edwards urged their suppression, if necessary through force. He called for the elimination of ideas and books he believed transgressed God’s truth, for the burning of other books by the common hangman, and contemplated with enthusiasm the death penalty for blasphemy. Although some contemporaries hailed Edwards as a new Augustine, most would now agree with the judgement of the pioneering radical historian of John Milton (denounced briefly in Gangraena), that he was ‘on the whole’, ‘a nasty kind of Christian’.2 Gangraena may seem a dispiriting object of study for a twenty-first-century scholar although we can no longer complacently assume that religious fundamentalism and intolerance are consigned to our distant past. However, Edwards’s polemic provides compelling evidence for the power of books to persuade, rally, or repel during a conflict in which texts of many kinds were crucial. Gangraena was probably the most controversial and the most influential of all the printed productions of the 1640s, and did more than any other books to polarize parliamentarians as they won the first civil war and agonized over peace. Edwards’s prose, luxuriating in the horrors it condemned, was heavily indebted to a wide range of sources: other books, manuscript testimony, and London conversations. Gangraena was generically complex and its author was deeply self-conscious about processes of book production and the power of print.A comprehensive study of the Gangraena phenomenon thus has much to tell us about the religious and political events of the mid-1640s, but it illuminates also broad issues about the influence of 1 Stevie Davies, Imprisoned Clay (London: The Women’s Press, 1999). Bernard Capp and Steve Hindle recommended this to me. 2 David Masson, The Life of John Milton, iii (London: Macmillan, 1873), 142.

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printed texts, and the complex interactions between print, manuscript, and talk. This book seeks to move beyond earlier treatments of Edwards’s work, hitherto considered mainly as a source for the radical movements and ideas he describes. I will seek in my book to assess the value of Gangraena as a source, or at least to compare and contrast Edwards’s narratives with other accounts of the same people, places, ideas, and events. But I will focus especially on Gangraena in its own right—assessing Edwards’s methods, sources, and impact. I aim to contribute to the cultural history of the English Revolution in particular through three broad themes. I offer a discussion of 1640s Presbyterianism as a dynamic movement, not simply an alarmed conservative response to apparently more glamorous radicals. Secondly I provide a picture of London as a revolutionary city during months of extreme crisis, and thirdly I draw on the very lively and wideranging ‘history of the book’, to present a comprehensive account of Gangraena as text and work. Many of these issues overlap or are interconnected and I fear I have been infected (to use his own metaphor) by Edwards’s own inability to organize his complex reality into a coherent pattern. I hope my readers will be more tolerant than many of Edwards’s of my often necessary repetitions. Although Edwards had been working on Gangraena, Part One for some eighteen months before its publication in February 1646, his subsequent volumes were written and published in a matter of months. My own book has been more than a decade in the research and writing. I have incurred many debts, personal and institutional. I am extremely grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for generous grants in 1993–4, which provided me with the invaluable research assistance of Dr Kate Peters. Kate has made an enormous contribution to this project: she carried out specific research in London, Essex, and East Anglia, constructed vital indices to persons and places in Gangraena, but beyond this she provided many crucial insights into the pamphlet culture of the revolution, drawing on her own important work on the Quakers. I have worked on Edwards during periods of sabbatical leave provided by the universities of Manchester in 1993–4, and Keele in 1997 and 1999, and a research leave award from the Humanities Research Board in 1998 enabled me to produce a preliminary draft of this unwieldy work. I have examined copies of Gangraena in innumerable libraries, ranging from such major institutions as the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Huntington to the tiny Innerpeffray Library, near Crieff, where the copies bought by the Marquis of Montrose’s brother-in-law can be examined.

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Throughout I have received friendly and efficient help. Similarly I have benefited from opportunities to present aspects of my work at many seminars and conferences and I am very grateful for the advice and suggestions I have received at the universities of Cambridge, Exeter, Harvard, Keele, Liverpool, Manchester, Princeton, Sheffield, and York, at the Institute of Historical Research and the Huntington Library, and at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the North American Conference on British Studies. Sean Kelsey, Geoffrey Nuttall, David Como, Michael Mendle, Kristen Poole, Ian Gentles, Ariel Hessayan, Phil Baker, David Scott, Elliott Vernon, Stephen Roberts, David Amigoni, and Dr Kei Nasu have been most generous with references and sending me unpublished work. Oxford University Press have been patient and meticulous publishers. I am very grateful to Peter Lake, Sean Kelsey, David Como, Nigel Smith, Patrick Collinson, and two anonymous readers for helpful if sometimes contradictory suggestions on my unwieldy manuscript. I thank Oxford University Press for their patience and Rowena Anketell for her meticulous copy-editing. This book has been produced within two very supportive environments. At home I am more grateful than I can express to Alice, David, and Richard for undeserved and generous help. At work, the intimate and lively atmosphere of Keele University has been crucial. I cannot say that the rapid completion of my book has been helped by my recent service as head of the School of History but I cannot conceive of any better group to be ‘in charge’ of. I am particularly grateful to Patricia Clavin for her support and to Professor David Vincent for taking time in his own very busy life as deputy vice-chancellor to read a draft of my book and offer many helpful suggestions. Christopher Harrison, Ian Atherton, Susan Bruce, Roger Pooley, Julie Sanders, and other Keele Early Modernists provide a most stimulating context for my work. I thank them all. A. H.

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Note on References

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1. Introduction: Approaches to Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena 2. Gangraena as Heresiography 3. ‘Like a Universal Leprosie Over-spread this Whole Kingdom’: City and Provinces in Gangraena 4. ‘Books Lately Printed’: Gangraena and the World of Print 5. Edwards, Gangraena, and Presbyterian Mobilization 6. Conclusions

1 55 130 222 318 416

Bibliography Index

443 475

Illustrations 1. Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of the Royal Exchange, 1644. Reproduced by permission of the Guildhall Library, London.

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2. Gangraena, Part One, title page. British Library E323 (2).

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3. The Second Part of Gangraena, title page. British Library E338 (12).

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4. The Third Part of Gangraena, title page. British Library E368 (5).

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5. ‘These Trades-men are Preachers . . .’ (1647). British Library 669 f.11 (6).

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6. Gangraena, Part One, p. 49 (second sequence), with manuscript note by George Thomason, indicating he had at least skimmed the volume. British Library E323 (2)

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Figs. 2–6 are reproduced from the Thomason Tracts by permission of the British Library.

Abbreviations BL Bodl. CJ CCJ CCL CLRO CSPD

British Library, London Bodleian Library, Oxford Commons Journals Common Council Journal Canterbury Cathedral Library Corporation of London Record Office Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles I, ed. John Bruce et al. (London: HMSO, 1858–91) CUL Cambridge University Library DNB Dictionary of National Biography DWL Doctor Williams Library, London GLMS Guildhall Library, London, manuscript HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission LJ Lords Journals NA National Archives NLS National Library of Scotland NLW National Library of Wales OED Oxford English Dictionary RO Record Office SP State Papers TCD Trinity College Dublin

Note on References All references to the three parts of Gangraena are taken from the facsimile version published by the Rota Press at the University of Exeter. This gives the first editions of Parts One and Two, with the Appendix usually only found in later editions of Part One, and Part Three. Gangraena, i. Gangraena: or A Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (London, 1646). Gangraena, ii. The Second Part of Gangraena: or A fresh and further Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and dangerous Proceedings of the Sectaries of this time (1st edn., London, 1646). Gangraena, iii. The third Part of Gangraena or: A new and higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries of these times (London, 1646). Dates are given ‘old style’, except that the year is taken to begin on 1 January.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction Approaches to Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena In late December 1647 Thomas Edwards, an exiled English minister, lay sick in Amsterdam—‘weak in body but of perfect memory and understanding’—and aware that many enemies might take advantage of his premature end: It hath ever been the policy of Satan, to blast and ingrain the credit, and reputation, of those who have been most eminent in action against his Kingdom; and making the world believe that at their death, they have recounted [recanted] their former opinions; and ended their days in the belief of those things which they opposed in their life; as appears by the example of Mr Beza, who lived to answer and confute these lying imputations, which were spread abroad concerning his death.

Edwards therefore determined to publish and declare to all whom these presents shall come: that I have dealt faithfully, and with a good conscience, in all that I have preached or written, against the late sects and errors which have risen and sprung up in England; and that I am so far from receding from my former judgement that I desire God to spare my life the rather, at this time, that I may finish some treatises, which I have begun, against that way.

If God did not spare him he insisted ‘that I die in the faith of the Reformed Churches; and am of the same mind, touching the late sects and errors, which I have openly and publicly professed both by my preaching and writing’. This declaration was witnessed by three Amsterdam ministers, representing the English, Dutch, and German churches, and it was read over and affirmed by Edwards two weeks later in the presence of his host, Henry Whitaker, and two eminent English visitors and fellow exiles, William

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Waller and Edward Massey.1 The attentions of the city ministers, and of two of the eleven Presbyterian MPs impeached by the New Model Army in August 1647, indicate something of the contemporary importance of Thomas Edwards, a ‘Presbyterian’ preacher who never obtained a permanent pastoral charge and is best known as the author of the three parts of Gangraena: or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, vented and acted in England in these four last years, published in February, May, and December 1646. God did not long spare Edwards and an admirer, the Worcestershire Presbyterian Thomas Hall, wrote in his copy of Antapologia, Edwards’s second most famous work, ‘Our most dear Edwards, true hammer of the heretics died at Amsterdam January 28 1647[/8]’.2 The focus of my book is Gangraena, and its vainglorious, controversial, and ultimately disappointed author. Unlike the ‘steady sellers’ recently analysed by Ian Green, Edwards’s book was not reprinted many times over many decades.3 In its time—its brief time during 1646 and 1647—Gangraena was the most famous printed book in a revolutionary era in which printed texts played a crucial role. It was ‘an ephemeral best seller’;‘the last book Gangraena being now in the Presse the third time within lesse then two months’, boasted Edwards as he finished Part Two. The second printing of Part One had been necessary within a fortnight. Part Two, A fresh and further Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and dangerous Proceedings of the Sectaries of this time, had at least one further edition, but for Part Three, A new and higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries of these times, one printing seems to have sufficed and there were no reissues of any part until a facsimile edition was produced in 1977.4 Gangraena became an embarrassment, best forgotten, but during its months of fame it was at the centre

1 A. C. Carter, The Puritan Reformed Church in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam, 1964), 201–2, prints this confession and Edwards’s will; the originals are inserted in the Register of the Church. 2 Birmingham Reference Library, 094/1646/1; Edwards’s will was made in a hurry on 3 Feb. 1648, ns, and proved in London in May: NA, Prob 11/204, fo. 213. 3 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4 Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1626–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 134. In Gangraena, ii. 42, Edwards claimed that a corrected 2nd edn. was abroad ‘full fourteen dayes’ before Cretensis; ii. 48 for the 3rd edn. Thomason’s date for Cretensis—John Goodwin’s attack on Part One (which capitalized on minor slips in Edwards’s work)—is 19 Mar. 1645/6. Editions of Gangraena are discussed in Ch. 4, below.

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of bitter controversy, debated in countless pamphlets, and the subject of angry conversations in London and the army. It became indeed an army grievance in the spring of 1647, along with lack of pay and legal protection, when the soldiers denounced the ‘many scandalous Books, such as Mr Edwards Gangraena’, whose ‘false calumnies’ made them ‘odious to the kingdom’.5 During these months also Gangraena was at the heart of Presbyterian campaigns in London and beyond, and contributed mightily to a fatally simplified polarization within the parliamentary cause. For the last 350 years, Edwards’s Gangraena has been ransacked by scholars as a source for the religious speculation and sectarianism of the mid-1640s. Most of these scholars, naturally enough, have been more sympathetic to Edwards’s subjects, than to the author and his enterprise, dismissing him as an intolerant, paranoid hysteric. This present work is the first book-length study of Gangraena itself, in as many contexts as possible.6 It will range from cultural analysis to discussions of high politics, drawing on insights from literary criticism, the history of the book, and studies of print culture as well as local, political, and religious history. It will discuss Gangraena’s narrative strategies and generic affiliations; explore Edwards’s sources, discussing the networks that enabled him to collect them and assessing them against other accounts of developments in the mid-1640s, in London and beyond. An analysis of a complex, controversial text such as Gangraena will provide insights into the role of print during a period of revolutionary upheaval, but will also connect print with a host of other networks and forms of communication and mobilization. Edwards’s work was a product of, and a major contribution to, a broad campaign for Presbyterian reformation, and against schism and heresy; 5 Divers Papers from the Army (London, May, 1647), BL E388 (18); I owe this reference to Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 83, 92. 6 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 130–8 offers a brief but illuminating study of the impact of Gangraena; Helen Margaret Long,‘ “Appearance into Publique Light”: Aspects of the Control and Use of Print in London in the 1640s’, Ph.D. thesis (La Trobe, 1984), included a chapter on it; Kei Nasu,‘Heresiography and the Idea of “Heresy” in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Religious Culture’, D.Phil. thesis (York, 2000), esp. ch. 3; Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Poole, ‘Dissecting Sectarianism: Liberty of Conscience, the Swarm, and Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds.), Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 45–69 are amongst other recent important works that examine Gangraena as part of a broader study. I am very grateful to Dr Nasu for sending me a copy of his thesis, and to Professor Poole for showing me her work before publication.

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his activities, and those of his allies, had a most significant impact on political identities and political divisions in the 1640s. Thus my book uses Edwards’s book as a means towards a broader understanding of the fragmented parliamentarian politics of the later 1640s, and most particularly of the crucial role of ‘Presbyterians’ in dynamic parliamentarian campaigns. Edwards and Presbyterians in general have received less attention from scholars than the apparently more radical parliamentarians described as Independents and sectaries. Yet Presbyterian zealots were at the heart of the revolutionary politics and culture of the 1640s, and Edwards’s Gangraena was a central element in Presbyterian mobilization. Any discussion of Gangraena must be based on a sense of its controversial character, both in its own time and amongst modern scholars. Edwards himself made high claims for his enterprise; as he compared himself on his deathbed to Calvin’s successor Beza, so in Gangraena he repeatedly evoked the great heresy-hunters of Christian history from St Paul and Augustine onwards as justification, inspiration, and consolation. In Part Two he inserted a letter from Suffolk, in praise of his work,‘God make you as Augustine, Malleum Haereticorum’—terms echoed in Thomas Hall’s obituary note. Similarly Edwards sought to disarm criticism of Gangraena by associating it with a more recent polemic in defence of true religion, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, which had also been denounced by ‘Jesuits and Papists’ as a ‘Book of lyes’.7 For Edwards’s friends and supporters, he was the ‘faithful friend of truth’, valiantly unmasking the evil doctrines and foul behaviour of radical sectaries. But for those attacked in Gangraena, and for others sympathetic to liberty of conscience, it was a work of ‘shameless untruths’—the words are those of the radical Independent John Goodwin, one of Edwards’s prime targets. For Goodwin, ‘Gangrena will be found a strumpet, yea and of the race and lineage of that Great scarlet whore, which corrupteth the Earth with her fornication’. The Baptist Edward Drapes dubbed Edwards ‘the father of lyes’ while an anonymous attacker added, ‘the famous forger of these latter dayes’. Most famously, Edwards attracted the opprobrium of John Milton, a minor target of Gangraena:8 Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul Gangraena, ii. 20–1, 45. [John Jones], Plain English or the Sectaries Anatomized (London, 1646), BL E350 (11), Thomason date 17 Aug. and note ‘by Captaine Jones’, 21; John Goodwin, Cretensis or A Briefe Answer to an ulcerous Treatise, lately published by Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1646), BL E328(22), Thomason date 19 Mar. 1645/6, 49–50; Edward Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull 7 8

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Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d’ye-call

Edwards has no admirers amongst modern scholars and here the debate has centred on the value of Gangraena as a source. Christopher Hill is the most influential of those who have stressed its value. In Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, Gangraena is used for general comments on the atmosphere of the 1640s such as the radicalism of the New Model Army or the insubordination of women and young people. Edwards provides evidence for the activities of a range of sectaries including Clement Writer, Laurence Clarkson, and Henry Denne, and for the spread of beliefs in perfectibility and universal redemption.9 In Hill’s Milton and the English Revolution, where the heresies enumerated by Edwards provide a context for the poet’s beliefs, there is an explicit endorsement of Gangraena as a source: ‘despite his horror and fury, [Edwards] gives a marvellous picture, still insufficiently analysed, of the heresies now being freely discussed by the lower classes’.10 Again, in an important essay, after using Edwards’s accounts of popular scepticism about sin and hell, or of mortalist errors and materialist pantheism, Hill concludes: ‘We need not accept the alarmist accounts of professional heresy-hunters like Edwards, Baillie, Rutherford, Pagitt, Ross, and several more—though Edwards’s Gangraena at least is well documented and seems to stand up quite well to examination: we need a critical edition.’11 Other historians of radical religion, such as Barry Reay or Frank McGregor, have accepted and used Gangraena as a source, albeit with some qualifications.12 As we shall see, however, Edwards’s analysis of the Discovery of A Beame in Master Edwards his Eye or a Moderate Answer to the substance of the first and second part of Gangrena (London, 1646), BL E350 (22), Thomason date 21 Aug. 21; A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1647), BL E378 (3), Thomason date 25 Apr. 1646, 10. Milton’s book, The Doctrine and discipline of Divorce, was cited in Gangraena, i. 34. For his sonnet, ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’, which ends, ‘New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large: see e.g. John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford Authors, 1990), 83–4. 9 Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 75, 189, 310, 191, 166, 148, 187–9. 10 Milton and the Puritan Revolution (1977; London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 94; see also 293, 308 on anti-Trinitarianism and mortalism where Edwards is quoted as an introduction to Milton’s views. 11 Hill, ‘Irreligion in the “Puritan” Revolution’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 198, 200, 203, 206. 12 Reay,‘Introduction’, in McGregor and Reay, Radical Religion, 14; McGregor,‘Seekers and Ranters’, in McGregor and Reay, Radical Religion, 122.

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spread of disorder focused not on plebeian radicals, but on the more overtly respectable Independents—a label he had done much since 1641 to attach to the ordained educated ministers who became the ‘congregationalist’ Dissenting Brethren of the Westminster Assembly, and to prominent if more maverick London figures such as John Goodwin and Henry Burton. Edwards’s first (1641) publication was an attack on Independency; his earlier major work, Antapologia, first published in July 1644, was a response to the Apologeticall Narration of December 1643, the deliberately moderate account of their church-way by Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Jeremiah Burroughs, William Bridge, and Sidrach Simpson. Thus historians who share Edwards’s judgement about the essential unity between ‘Independents’ and ‘Sectaries’ in a radical continuum predictably value his work as evidence. Murray Tolmie is the most notable of these. He largely agrees with Edwards’s account of the Independents in Antapologia, and if Antapologia is accurate, then there is little need to doubt Gangraena, which is a major source for Tolmie’s account of London sectarianism, for Hanserd Knollys, for the General Baptist congregations, especially that of Thomas Lambe, ‘soap boiler’ and his associates, Clement Writer, Timothy Batt, Samuel Oates, Henry Denne, and Jeremiah Ives; for the woman preacher and ‘lacewoman’Mrs Attaway; for the Independent congregation of William Carter, amongst many others.13 Many other historians with local or thematic concerns rather than a particular stance on religious developments assume that Gangraena is a comprehensive and straightforward account of 1640s radicalism (making some sensible allowance for the exaggerations of a polemicist). The sheer bulk of the work and its self-presentation as a truthful ‘catalogue’ has often had a more seductive effect upon historians than it had on many contemporaries. Keith Lindley, drawing on Edwards’s account of heterodoxy in London, describes Gangraena as a ‘painstaking catalogue’.14 Anne Laurence, in her study of chaplains in parliament’s armies, concludes that ‘Thomas Edwards is probably the most important contemporary commentator on religion, both inside and outside the army’, and although Ian Gentles is 13 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 94–9, 76–7, 80–2, 108–10. Tai Liu in Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark, Del., Toronto, and London: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1986), also uses Edwards as a source for London religious developments. 14 Keith Lindley, ‘London and Popular Freedom in the 1640s’, in R. C. Richardson and R. M. Ridden (eds.), Freedom and the Puritan Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 111–45, at 130. Lindley’s more recent book, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), also makes extensive use of Gangraena; see pp. 77, 289, 299.

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more cautious, he too finds Gangraena’s accounts of soldiers’ religious radicalism plausible.15 Murray Tolmie analyses a little solemnly Edwards’s account of the ‘Particular’ or Calvinist Baptist preacher Hanserd Knollys, preaching to more than 1,000 people in ‘great St Hellens, next door to the publique Church’. As Tolmie notes,‘It is unlikely that Knollys had a thousand members in his church’ but he concludes that ‘The explanation of Edwards’s information is probably that the meetings of Knollys’ church . . . were open to the public’.16 Gerald Aylmer regrets that Gerrard Winstanley did not get going early enough to feature in Gangraena, while Esther Cope speculates on what the absence of the prophetess Lady Eleanor Davis from Gangraena suggests about her contemporary impact.17 It is easy to sneer at the notion of highlighting what is not in Gangraena, with the implication that it is an (almost) comprehensive, or objective, register of radical activity. We shall see that the issue of whether Edwards had information he did not include is a relevant but deeply problematic aspect of the vexed question of the ‘accuracy’ of Gangraena. The literal-mindedness of some assessments of Edwards can be contrasted with the extreme scepticism of other scholars, notably Mark Kishlansky and Colin Davis. Kishlansky, with a sharp distinction between truth and error that Edwards himself might have applauded, prides himself on his resistance to seduction by Gangraena’s stories. Observing ‘rules of evidence that may seem unimaginatively rigid, but that I believe have saved me from error’, Kishlansky makes ‘little use of Baxter, Edwards, and the religious disputants. The tendency of these men to polarize and exaggerate the situations they observe should be apparent to any who have attempted to substantiate their accounts.’18 Davis regards Edwards and other ‘heresiographers’as forerunners of the ‘yellow press’journalists who, in his view, created the ‘Ranter Sensation’ in 1650–1, and argues that using Gangraena for ‘evidence of the reality of sectarian development’ is like using ‘Joseph McCarthy for sound, objective depictions’ of the politics of 15 Anne Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains 1642–1651 (Royal Historical Society, Studies in History, 1990), 77; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992), 88–9, 101; cf. 140, where Gangraena is a ‘scurrilous catalogue of the heretical beliefs and activities of religious separatists’. 16 Gangraena, i. 98; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 60. 17 G. E. Aylmer,‘The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley’, in McGregor and Reay (eds.), Radical Religion, 91–119, at 94; Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 126. 18 Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pref.

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his day. Both Davis and Jonathan Scott, in a similarly sceptical account, take up Hill’s remark about the need for a critical edition. Davis asks, ‘What does “well documented” mean in this context? Where has been the sustained examination of Edwards’s documentation and its quality? Isn’t the need for a critical edition an admission that these things have not been done?’ Scott dismisses the call for a new edition by comparing Gangraena as a source for sectarianism with the value of the works of Senator McCarthy (again) as a guide to American communism.19 The modern debate about Gangraena focuses then on its usefulness as evidence—it is used (or not) for what it can tell historians about developments beyond itself—whether these are the extreme radical and often plebeian sectaries favoured by Hill or the apparently more respectable Congregationalists alluded to by Davis. (The discrepancy between Davis’s criticism of Edwards’s account of ‘Independency’ and Hill’s actual use of Gangraena for information about sectarianism or ‘plebeian heresy’ is an issue to which we shall return.) In Chapter 3 of my book I will compare Edwards’s descriptions of religious upheaval in London, the army, and provincial England with other available accounts in order to reach some judgement on the veracity of the stories in Gangraena. In evaluating pamphlet debates in Chapter 4, I will again be concerned with establishing some sense of the reality beyond the contrasting polemical accounts of blasphemies in Rochester, or baptisms in Essex. Nevertheless, establishing the status of Gangraena as a source is not my main purpose. As Patrick Collinson has suggested for a more enduring text, but one which Gangraena to some extent resembles, ‘the question of Foxe’s strict veracity, though by no means unimportant, is perhaps the smallest of the problems facing historians’.20 My starting point is that Gangraena is worth discussing in itself—as a text rather than a source—an immensely rich and complex text that had a dramatic impact on rival parliamentarian mobilizations, and that an analysis of Edwards’s work is a most fruitful means of approaching broad issues of culture and identity during the English civil war. He may be the Joseph McCarthy of the 1640s—but a study of McCarthy also might have much to say about propaganda and political mobilization in mid-twentieth-century America. 19 J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 116, 126–9; Jonathan Scott, ‘Radicalism and Restoration: The Shape of the Stuart Experience’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 453–67, esp. 454 n. 20 Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in his Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 177. See also Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Fate, Faction and Fiction in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 601–23; David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the Puritan Reformation (Aldershot: St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, Scolar Press, 1997).

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This study is inspired and made possible by much recent scholarship— from cultural theory to more conventional historical studies of civil war London or clerical networks. It has parallels with broad studies of other books—Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and John Knox’s History of the Reformation amongst early modern texts, or Secord’s most illuminating book about a book—the evolutionary tract Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers, first published in 1844.21 It is also intended as a methodologically self-conscious contribution to the emerging cultural history of the English revolution. At the most fundamental level a study of Gangraena is concerned with truth, the status of evidence, and the validity of arguments. For Edwards himself Gangraena was above all else a definition and a defence of truth, yet his truth-telling claims were bitterly contested by his contemporaries and have proved controversial amongst scholars. There are, it is not presumptuous to suggest, echoes here of the perennially troubling debates about the claims of history itself as a truth-telling genre. I share the frustration expressed recently with the relatively ‘untheoretical’ or unselfconscious procedures of historians, particularly political historians of the seventeenth century.22 The empiricist character of much work on the mid-seventeenth century has not been conducive to broadening our understanding of the civil war—of how allegiances formed and fragmented, movements were brought into being, or individuals transformed. Until recently social and cultural analyses of literacy, protest, or popular belief have covered very long periods, or adopted a timescale ending in 1640 or beginning in 1660. The significance of the revolution is effaced or evaded. I thus seek to join the growing band of scholars of the mid-seventeenth century who are combining the insights of cultural history including the history of the book, of reading, or of print culture, with a focus on the political and religious convulsions of the ‘English revolution’.23

For Foxe see n. 20, above; Roger A. Mason, ‘Usable Pasts: History and Identity in Reformation Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review, 76 (1997), 54–68, at 55: ‘despite its extensive use as a source, it has rarely been studied as a text, and neither the thought processes which underpinned it nor the broader ideological context in which it was conceived have received the attention they deserve’; James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). I am grateful to David Amigoni for drawing Secord to my attention. 22 Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000); this book appeared when my first draft was substantially complete. 23 For earlier discussions of these points, see Ann Hughes,‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 162–88; and 21

10

Introduction

For even the most untheoretical of early modern historians, the ‘poststructuralist’ insistence on blurring the boundary between text and context, or ‘the represented and the real’, offers a liberation from, or at least a postponement of, the obsession with the literal accuracy of a text such as Gangraena. Much recent work has argued that language does not directly reflect or correspond with some reality beyond itself, rather it is through the frameworks provided by language that we make sense of the world. Where structuralist criticism sought to shown how forms of classification created meaning, the post-structuralist stress is on the instability, the slipperiness of meanings—again I have found this helpful in seeking to compehend the complex, contested Gangraena.24 Amongst work specifically on mid-seventeenth-century England, I have found Colin Davis’s study of the ‘Ranter Sensation’ both influence and provocation. Davis has insisted that the printed polemic of the English revolution cannot be taken as a direct source for the radical groups denounced therein, and he has provided an illuminating analysis of the presuppositions, methods, and influence of the anti-Ranter journalists. However, Davis goes further, arguing that the Ranters as any kind of sect did not exist, and almost suggests that the stereotyped accounts of the hostile pamphleteers are in themselves proof or their non-existence. In critiques of radical historians such as Hill or Brian Manning (who are also historians of radicalism) a reliance on printed material is connected to a tendency to exaggerate or misrepresent the nature of radical political and religious belief in early modern England. Like other critics, Davis suggests that printed sources are Hughes,‘The Meanings of Religious Polemic’, in Francis J. Bremer (ed.), Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Phenomenon (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 201–29. Important exceptions include Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997); Clive Holmes,‘Drainers and Fenmen: The Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century’, in A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jonathan Barry,‘The Press and the Politics of Culture’, in Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (eds.), Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 52–3; Tim Harris, ‘Propaganda and Public Opinion in Seventeenth Century England’, in Jeremy D. Popkin (ed.), Media and Revolution in Comparative Perspective (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1995). 24 Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake,‘Introduction’, in Sharpe and Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), at 4. Amongst an enormous amount of recent work I have found the following very helpful: Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Patrick Joyce,‘History and Post-Modernism’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 204–8; Louis Montrose,‘Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986); Raphael Samuel,‘Reading the Signs’, History Workshop, 32 (1991), 88–109; 33 (1992), 220–51.

Introduction

11

inevitably flawed, and that purer, untainted evidence is to be found in manuscript sources. Historians in general have been accused of a tendency to ‘privilege archives simply because they are dusty’.25 A book on a determinedly polemical tract such as Gangraena therefore requires some specific justification. I want to follow Davis in taking seriously Edwards’s postions and methods when writing against the sects, without assuming either that he simply exaggerated or invented his material, or that published accounts, subject to challenge and debate (and produced in a period where censorship had broken down), are less true or helpful than manuscripts with their own rhetorical and institutional particularities. As Peter Lake has argued in discussing Patrick Collinson’s accounts of the creation of the ‘stage Puritan’ in the 1590s, we can easily be too sceptical about the value of literary, partisan, or generically shaped sources. Literal acceptance of such sources as descriptions of ‘reality’ would be absurd, but there are at least two reasons for caution before we reject them out of hand. In the first place the labels, categories, or stereotypes through which people seek to define what is true or orthodox—and to demonize opponents as outsiders, as the ‘other’—have a real impact in a real world because they influence (to put it no stronger) how that world is experienced and understood. Comprehending past societies means taking their polemical classifications seriously. Furthermore, in their own time, labels have to have some plausibility—some recognizable connection to how individuals behave—if they are to have any polemical effect; indeed stereotypes often interact in a complex way with stigmatized groups’ self-images in processes of identity formation.26 25 For a critique of Manning on these lines see John Morrill,‘Provincial Squires and “Middling Sorts” in the Great Rebellion’, in Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 70–1 for the general comment. Davis did not conduct archival research on religious radicalism, but recent work using impeccably archival sources (notably legal records) has found much evidence of religious heterodoxy. See Ariel Hessayan,‘ “Gold Tried in the Fire”: The Prophet Theaurajohn Tany and the Puritan Revolution’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1996), which combines archival research with an imaginative study of a wide range of pamphlet literature. 26 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 5; Lake,‘The Moderate and Irenic Case for Religious War’, in Amussen and Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics, 55–83; Lake,‘ “A Charitable Christian Hatred”: The Godly and Their Enemies in the 1630s’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of Puritanism 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Lake has also challenged Peter White’s rejection of polemical material as any sort of guide to the religious character of the 1630s: cf. Peter White, ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’, Past and Present, 101 (1983); Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of

12

Introduction

Books matter particularly in times of civil war and revolutionary upheaval. Gangraena affected people’s understanding of contemporary ‘reality’, their identification of friends and enemies, and thus influenced their actions. Gangraena was an event in itself, ‘an ingredient in the happening’, as much as an (inevitably biased) record of events.27 Treating Gangraena as text rather than source thus opens up new possibilities for research, while another contrast drawn by literary scholars, that between work and text, is equally illuminating. Here a work is a self-contained, coherently authored, and authorized piece, while a text is a more fluid, collaborative, participatory entity. Studies of texts therefore have to encompass ‘the totality of its editions, accretions, illustrations and the experiences of its various readers’.28 Clearly Gangraena is more text than work, but my second chapter could be summed up as a discussion of Gangraena as a work. I outline its main arguments, its narrative strategies, and main generic associations—with ‘heresiography’ in particular. Basic forms of classification, ‘binary’ contrasts between orthodox and heretic, good and evil, as stressed in mid-twentieth-century structuralist theories are relevant to Edwards’s approach.A significant proportion of Gangraena was not abstract classification, however, but narrative, stories of the ‘pernicious practices’ of the sectaries. For this aspect, work stressing the fundamental importance of storytelling—narrative—to how human beings understand and construct their worlds is crucial.29 Most of what follows is concerned with Gangraena as text, rather than work, as a controversial, participatory, complex book. Gangraena is indeed Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 150–70, discusses the complex relationships between the stereotype and ‘reality’ of the Puritan. Nigel Smith,‘The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation’, in David Wootton and Michael Hunter (eds.), Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), compares the stereotypes with other sources for another potent early-modern spectre, the ‘atheist’. 27 The contrast comes from Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775–1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1989), introd. p. xiii: ‘Historians generally treat the printed word as a record of what happened, instead of as an ingredient in the happening’. Cf. Purkiss, Witch in History, 71; Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in PostReformation England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), is a wideranging attempt to connect literary forms to social reality. 28 Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler, drawing on the work of Margreta de Grazia: Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, in Thomas Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 122–40, at 135–6. The editions of Eikon Basilike are more complex than those of Gangraena. 29 Michael J. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (London: Routledge, 1988).

Introduction

13

a very productive text for examining the nature and importance of print culture during some crucial months as the civil war was won in England and parliamentarians fought bitterly over the prospects of settlement. In Chapter 4 I will explore Edwards’s own discussions of the world of printed polemic and analyse the books that he used or was inspired by. The wideranging printed debate on Gangraena will also be covered.Aspects of Gangraena could be used to support a ‘traditional’ linear or modernizing account of the impact of print, in which print replaced older oral forms and hence transformed intellectual, social, and political life, facilitating general allegiance to abstract causes.30 But Gangraena was a complicated printed book, which included extracts from many other types of print from broadsides and newsletters to lengthy polemical works by Prynne or Bastwick. It also reprinted manuscripts, chiefly letters but also many official documents from parliament, the law courts, and local committees, and reported a host of oral exchanges—sermons, debates, arguments, discussions in bookshops, or asides in casual conversations. Edwards’s controversial work provoked equally various exchanges—in print, letters, collective readings, and fierce argument. Consequently, what Davis sees as a problem with Gangraena—‘an indiscriminate jostling of different groups, sources and types of information’—when considering its accuracy, becomes of immense benefit for a broader exploration of its role in the political and religious culture of the 1640s.31 Revisionist work on print culture which challenges the modernizing view through a stress on interaction and mutual influence—between oral, manuscript, and print culture, or between popular and elite forms of thought—also helps us understand Gangraena. Gangraena was profoundly intertextual— embroiled in fierce competition for meaning with other texts, printed, written, and spoken. Indeed it could hardly be bettered as a text for a study of the complex interconnections between printed works and other forms of communication. A study of Gangraena thus demands more than an exploration of print as a novel and isolated form, and has to draw on notions of intertextuality and complex appropriations developed in cultural theory.32 30 The classic view is Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), offers a comprehensive challenge to a triumphalist account, but perhaps overstates the degree to which it is still widely accepted. 31 Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 127. 32 The work of Roger Chartier has been most influential in arguing for complex interactions between print and other forms of communication: Roger Chartier, ‘Culture as

14

Introduction

In their pamphlet debates, Edwards and his enemies deployed and debated the status of all forms of evidence as they challenged the minute details and the broader implications of the stories in Gangraena. In a period of significant cultural change and profound, revolutionary upheaval where basic assumptions about religious conformity and political obedience were called in question, it was inevitable that the authority of different forms of communication—speech, writing, or print—was contested or slippery. Competing twentieth-century theoretical positions sometimes parallel contrasting arguments in 1640s religious polemic over the authority of different discourses—between the fixity and generalizing tendencies of print on the one hand, and the direct, authorizing presence of eyewitness speakers on the other. These contrasts too will inform the discussion in Chapter 4.33 Gangraena was published in a world where many people were recently literate, and where the conflict over fundamental religious and political questions brought into being a multitude of small printed texts—newsbooks and other pamphlets—which were a very rapid response to open-ended dilemmas and unresolved crises. The consequent generic confusion and excitement perhaps helped to dissolve some contrasts between modes of communications. As McKenzie has suggested, ‘this rapid interchange of highly topical texts, of short pamphlets with short lives, helped to break down the anxiety-provoking distinction among speech, manuscript and print’.34 Gangraena was neither small nor cheap but it shared the immediacy of shorter tracts and foregrounded the relationships between talk, writing, and print. Again, the discussion in Chapter 4 does not assume manuscripts offer historians purer, untainted evidence in contrast to interested, or slanted printed material, but seeks to show how varying forms of communication operated to convince, refute, and mobilize in 1640s England. The most obvious way in which Gangraena, like any book, was not selfcontained was in its dependence on printers, booksellers, and licensers to give it material form, and on readers to tease out or construct its meanings. Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France’, in Stephen L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture (Berlin, 1984), and Chartier, The Order of Books (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994). See also Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 33 Cf. Hughes,‘Meanings of Religious Polemic’, 224–5. 34 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Speech—Manuscript—Print’, in Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford (eds.), New Directions in Textual Studies (Austin, Tex.: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1990), 87–109, at 103; cf. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).

Introduction

15

I will draw on the exciting work on the history of the book in discussions of Edwards’s licenser, James Cranford, and his bookseller, Ralph Smith, and of the ways in which the arrangements of the words on the pages of Gangraena affected the strategies and possibilities for readers. ‘What writers thought they were doing in writing texts, or printers and booksellers in designing and publishing them, or readers in making sense of them are issues which no history of the book can evade.’35 The new history of reading at once raises difficult questions and offers exciting possibilities. It has to include technical matters such as literacy rates, and the prices and distribution of books as well as theoretically informed discussions of authorship and reading. As Robert Darnton has suggested, a history of reading requires a combination of ‘textual analysis with empirical research’, connecting the ‘implicit readers of the texts with the actual readers of the past’.36 Chapter 4 will thus outline what can be discovered about actual owners and readers of Gangraena from the 1640s while Chapter 6 will discuss the variety of later readers. There and in Chapter 5 I will also consider what readers were envisaged, or ‘implied’ by Edwards. Responses to and uses of Gangraena, as with other printed products of the revolutionary 1640s, need to be located within a society where fully confident individual reading skills were socially selective, but print was familiar and ubiquitous, and where there were a variety of means whereby the semiliterate or illiterate might relate to printed works, through collective reading, oral discussion of works, and so on. It is clear that Gangraena’s message could be apprehended by many who had never read it as modern individuals might read a printed book.37 Kevin Sharpe has recently argued for reading as a revolutionary act in his study of the Berkshire gentleman William Drake, who sought to make sense of the traumatic upheavals of the 1640s through systematic reading and rereading of a variety of political, legal, and historical works. Drake’s despair at civil war led him to a bookish exile; Edwards’s contemporary readers—friendly and hostile—were more obviously activists in the crisis of the revolution in London and beyond. In Edwards’s London, as in 35 Robert Darnton,‘History of Reading’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 140–67, at 159; see also Maxine Hancock, ‘Bunyan as Reader: The Record of Grace Abounding’, Bunyan Studies, 5 (1994), 68–94. 36 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, Panizzi Lectures (London: BL, 1986), 10; Darnton ‘History of Reading’, 140. 37 For the ubiquity of print: Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen, 1981).

16

Introduction

France, then, reading was ‘a form of revolutionary sociability and . . . a mode of making sense of the Revolution’.38 Gangraena was a part work, dependent in its later volumes on the participation of readers, enthused or affronted by Part One. Despite the common stress on orality or manuscript circulation as personal forms of communication in contrast to the isolating and abstracting impact of print, I shall argue in Chapter 4 that both the sympathetic and the very hostile readers of Edwards could be seen as forming communities through their intimate relationship with his involving text.39 The history of readers and readings has complicated the history of authorship through scepticism about the degree to which authors could control the messages drawn from their books, and a stress on the contrasting ways in which readers fashion their own meanings through an independent engagements with texts.40 The paradoxes of Edwards’s Gangraena underline the ambiguities of early modern authorship. To a large extent Edwards was more compiler than author—reproducing the printed and spoken words of others—yet to contemporaries book(s) and author were marked by a mutually reinforcing notoriety; the text was ‘Edwards’s Gangraena’, while he was Gangraena Edwards, or simply ‘Gangraena’.41 Chapter 5 discusses more directly the political and religious conflicts within which Edwards developed his polemical writing and assesses the impact his polarizing rhetoric and his evocation of rival religious factions had on the events of 1646–8. It draws on pioneering work by Valerie Pearl, Michael Mahony, and Murray Tolmie on civil war London as well as a very important recent study of Presbyterian clerical networks by Elliott Vernon.42 With the important exception of Vernon, most studies have characterized Presbyterians too straightforwardly as ‘conservative’. Yet 38 Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 170–1, 334–6; Darnton and Roche, Revolution in Print, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. 39 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1984), 72; Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 148, 183–4 (but see 183 also for ‘communities of the book’). 40 Chartier, Order of Books, 10; Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). 41 M. Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Hugh Peter, A Word for the Armie and Two Words to the Kingdome (London, 1647), BL E410 (16), Thomason date 11 Oct., 7–8, for Edwards personified as ‘Gangraena’. 42 Valerie Pearl’s enduringly important article,‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, covers Edwards’s association with Robert Baillie, the Scots minister attending the Assembly; Michael Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645–1647’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 93–114; Mahony,‘The Savile Affair and the Politics of the Long Parliament’,

Introduction

17

Thomas Edwards hoped for and expected a wide readership for Gangraena; he hoped for an active readership who would make their own decisions about the validity of the arguments in his book; and he hoped and expected his book to prompt readers into support for very particular religious and political campaigns focused on the city of London and the parliament. He contributed a major element to a Presbyterian public sphere which was as politically sophisticated and at least as broad-based as the better known initiatives of sectaries and Levellers. Here the work of Zaret and Lake on the nature of a public sphere in seventeenth-century England and the usefulness of Habermas’s conceptualization will inform the discussion.43 Gangraena will thus be approached from a number of points of view, and placed in a variety of contexts. Different aspects have to be addressed in turn to make analysis possible, but of course this is to separate matters that were in practice part of a single, complex phenomenon. In Gangraena, texts and contexts, inspiration and influence are inextricably intermingled. A report to the Westminster Assembly denouncing the doctrines of a radical such as Paul Best is a source for Gangraena, an example of the networks making it possible to write such a ‘Catalogue’, but also part of the ‘context’ for Edwards’s work, contributing to the anxieties which made it necessary for him to write. Gangraena in its turn became part of the ‘context’ for religious and political conflict in 1646–8, both highlighting the dangers of error and separatism and stimulating an orthodox fightback. It was credited by hostile contemporaries with smearing parliament’s godly army, and poisoning relationships between the soldiers and London, their paymasters in parliament, and their former allies amongst the Scots. Parliamentary History, 7 (1988); and Mahony, ‘The Presbyterian Party in the Long Parliament, 2 July 1644–3 June 1647’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1973); Elliott Vernon,‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the Puritan Revolution’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge, 1999). 43 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992); Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1992); Peter Lake and Michael Questier,‘Papists, Puritans and the Public Sphere: The Campion Affair in Context’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000); David Zaret, ‘Religion and the Rise of Liberal Democratic Ideology in Seventeenth Century England’, American Sociological Review, 54 (1989); Zaret,‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion in the English Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 101 (1996); Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), are particularly useful for the 1640s. See also Ann Hughes,‘ “Popular” Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s: The Cases of Thomas Edwards and Thomas Hall’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press, 1998).

18

Introduction

Distaste for Edwards’s authoritarian paranoia has limited the attention given to him by modern scholars who mostly prefer such throwaway comments as William Lamont’s ‘Thomas Edwards and his Gangraena, the knee-jerk conservative reflexes of a Puritan confronting the “world turned upside down”of the 1640s’.44 The rest of this book seeks to redress a balance by dealing directly with Edwards and his Gangraena as text, work, source, and dynamic event of the civil war. understanding presbyterianism If historians disagree on the value of Gangraena as a source or text, they are united in distaste for Edwards both as an individual and for the broader elements in mid-seventeenth-century England he represents. David Masson’s ‘nasty kind of Christian’ is echoed in more recent judgements. William Haller’s description of ‘a hysterical fanatic’ producing ‘frenzied polemic’ is matched by Davis’s ‘frenzied hysteric’. Valerie Pearl connects Edwards with ‘the rabble-rousing, opinion-persecuting furies of our own day’, while Hill offers another contemporary echo in ‘the great red-baiter, Thomas Edwards’.45 Without offering a perverse rehabilitation of Edwards, or of religious intolerance more generally, this study will argue for a reassessment of the styles, stance, and importance of orthodox Puritan clergy and laity in the 1640s. Edwards himself was crucial to the struggle for a Presbyterian religious and political settlement in 1645/7, a struggle centred on the city of London in alliance with the Scots and elements in parliament, which combined support for a reformed, coercive, national church with hostility to political and religious radicalism. Edwards was an extreme figure within this alliance, but his career offers a way into a broader understanding of mainstream Puritanism than that found in much recent scholarship. The orthodox godly are too often seen simply as disappointed failures, whose hopes for overall reform were destroyed by aggressive sectaries or sabotaged by stubborn traditionalists.46 44 The political impact of Gangraena is discussed in Ch. 5, below; William Lamont, ‘Puritanism, Liberty and the Putney Debates’, in M. Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 242. 45 Masson, Life of John Milton, iii. 142; William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 225, 223; Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 116; Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, 527; Hill, ‘From Marprelate to the Levellers’, in Hill, Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 85–6; compare Hill, The Puritan Bible and the SeventeenthCentury Revolution (London: Penguin, 1994), 163 for ‘that great persecutor’. 46 For earlier versions of this argument: Hughes, ‘The Meanings of Religious Polemic’;

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Even this brief summary suggests the common diagnosis of disappointment is justified in a variety of ways. In Christopher Hill’s work the radicals take centre stage in defeating overall reform. He has brought before a wide audience the marvellous variety of radical speculation during the English revolution in the ‘world turned upside down’. Soldiers and mechanic preachers, including some women, drew on the emancipatory potential of the Protestant stress on individual reading of the Scriptures, or on the ‘priesthood of all believers’ and on sceptical and antiauthoritarian currents in English popular culture to challenge many fundamental orthodoxies. The authority of clergymen, the validity of a national church financed by tithes, the truth of the Scriptures themselves, the existence of sin and hell—all were attacked in debate and in print. In this framework the orthodox Puritan clergy are an alarmed conservative interest group, eager to close down debate, prevent lay preaching, and ban separation from the national church. At the same time many were uneasily conscious that their own zealous preaching might have stimulated sectarian speculation. On the other hand, a revisionist history of the reformation has challenged not only the prominence of religious unorthodoxy within Hill’s account, but also the underlying assumption that Protestantism was inherently popular or emancipatory.47 The replacement of a collective, parish-focused worship incorporating images, shrines, and rituals with an austere word-based faith, stressing individual understanding, was most likely an unpopular, inaccessible, and divisive transformation. Zealous Protestantism could appeal most easily to those with the education and leisure to cope with its intellectual demands, and the self-confidence to accept salvation by faith alone. In this framework John Morrill’s influential work suggests that the Puritan reformers of the 1640s and 1650s, and perhaps particularly doctrinaire Presbyterians, were promoting a psychologically unsatisfying, rigid Calvinist theology and an unreasonable, exclusionary discipline. Religious radicalism is seen, however, as even less Hughes, ‘ “Popular” Presbyterianism in the 1640s and 1650s’. Liu, Puritan London; John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave’, are exceptions to this characterization of Presbyterianism. 47 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), are the central works. The unpopularity of Calvinist Puritanism is argued also by Ian Green in his massive studies of enduring religious literature: Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c.1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Green, Print and Protestantism. Edwards’s success in arousing his readership (discussed in Ch. 4 and 5, below) would seem to fit Lake’s arguments rather than Green’s.

20

Introduction

popular, appealing to a small, unconventional minority who seemed very strange to most of their neighbours. Popular religion in the interregnum is located in traditional, conservative, or Anglican responses; in adherence to communal parish festivities and traditional calendrical festivals like May Day or Christmas, to the familiar rituals of the Book of Common Prayer, and to a ‘common-sense’ morality of salvation through living a decent life. Although Morrill does not necessarily share Hill’s judgement that the mainstream Puritans were essentially conservative, he does agree that they were unpopular and unsuccessful, authoritarian elitists whose reforming zeal foundered on the stubborn adherence of the majority to their old ways.48 But the more recent commonplace that zealous mainstream Puritanism could not be ‘popular’ has been questioned in its turn by Tessa Watt, Peter Lake, and Alexandra Walsham. Watt’s work on cheap print indicates that a religion of the word, even the printed word, was by no means only for an educated elite or even for the ‘middling sort’ who were the market for sermons, advice manuals, or godly biographies. Many who were formally illiterate might know the Bible by heart or discuss sermons. For those with some reading ability, broadsides offered basic Christian doctrines and moral messages while woodcuts of stern Protestant ministers were amongst the most ubiquitous of all cheap images. From the 1620s godly chapbooks costing a few pence were clearly a profitable market for publishers, serving the respectable householders of the ‘middling sort’ rather than the very poor, but a sizeable group all the same. Watt has shown that amongst the ‘steady sellers’ of cheap religious print there were few texts promoting a rigid predestinarian theology; most stressed a decent life— good works—as the way to salvation. Her conclusion that religious opinion was ‘post-Reformation’ rather than zealously Protestant has been qualified by other studies showing how popular literature such as sensationalist accounts of murder and repentance offered readers a simplified, but recognizably Calvinist world-view of struggles between the godly and the reprobate, between sin and repentance. Providentialist accounts of God’s involvement with this world—outlined in learned Cambridge treatises—were equally crucial to the ways in which many ordinary people understood human history and their own travails in a harsh and otherwise random world. Indeed, it is probable that while zealous Protestant preach48 John Morrill, ‘The Church in England’, in Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982); repr. in Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution.

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ers sought to modify ‘traditional’ or ‘popular’ beliefs, influence was felt also in the opposite direction. The stress on subjective assurance of salvation, for example, within English practical Puritan divinity, was in part a response to the needs of a broad range of laypeople. Well-documented Puritan artisans such as Nehemiah Wallington or, of course, John Bunyan reveal how an exacting Puritan regime provided an effective framework for relatively humble individuals, while Peter Lake’s work on the London Puritan milieu before the civil war has uncovered a community where box-makers rubbed shoulders with Aldermen and Doctors of Divinity. The existence of a large market for religious literature, for lively providentialist stories, and for a profoundly polarized view of the world are important prerequisites for the immediate impact of Gangraena.49 This is not to suggest that committed Presbyterianism—a religious position that made heavy demands on the self-discipline, morality, and understanding of its adherents—was straightforwardly attractive to a majority, or even to large numbers, of people in the 1640s. It is not clear what the value of discovering a majority position in the mid-seventeenth century would be, even if the search were not so obviously doomed. But Presbyterians could rally large strategic minorities in the 1640s. The campaigns for the city of London’s Remonstrance of May 1646, with which Edwards’s texts were closely linked, probably gained more numerous support than any other city political initiative in these years; the cause of orthodox reformation and city independence was attractive to many beyond the ranks of city governors. Edwards’s lecturing and publishing in the 1640s is only explicable as part of a dynamic campaign for broad public support, a campaign he felt he had some chance of winning. Presbyterianism was in most respects an authoritarian movement although it should be stressed that its organization depended on electing representatives to collective bodies who made religious and moral decisions. Because midseventeenth-century radicalism has been too exclusively associated with modern notions of personal liberation, we have not sufficiently grasped the degree to which Presbyterians themselves had a very radical programme. They campaigned for a reformed national church with effective means for inculcating the population with high standards of behaviour 49 Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety; Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 147, 196–9; Peter Lake’s work on cheap print and religious polarities is now most conveniently found in Lake and Questier, Antichrist’s Hat, sect. I; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London (London: Methuen, 1985). Green, Print and Protestantism.

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and religious belief.50 Presbyterians sought a drastically purified social order, yet in order to achieve this ideal they were prepared to risk the disorder of disruptive, socially inclusive campaigns. Presbyterian polemic— of which Gangraena was the most striking—was central to these campaigns. ‘not hanging up on great men, nor hunting after preferments and great livings ’: 51 understanding thomas edwards’s early career In seeking to understand how Thomas Edwards came to be so notorious, we are forced to rely to a large extent on his own self-presentations—the writings in which he constructed an almost moving account of a man who had sacrificed a glittering career for an unceasing and unpopular struggle against religious radicalism: I never yet sought any great places for my self, great livings, or coming into publicke places of honor and respect, to be of the Assembly, or to preach in any publicke places before the Magistrates either at Westminster or London, but have contented my selfe with small meanes, and to preach in private places in comparison, having refused many great livings and places, preaching here in London for a little, and that but badly paid.

He had relied for the last two years on some £40 per annum, spurning offers of £200–£300 a year, when ‘young men, raw preachers’, were snapping up rich livings in ‘these open times’. Yet he preached constantly: on Lords dayes, week-dayes and all extraordinary occasions of Fastings and thankesgiving: I have beene willing to forsake my fatnesse and sweetnesse, to neglect my profit, health, benefit of my Familie, all advantages, and in a sort to sequester my selfe from freinds, and all worldly enjoyments to spend my time, strength, spirits, estate, and all in reeding, writing, studying of the Controversies of these times, having prepared many Tractates against the Errors of the times.52

Sometimes poignant, often unattractively self-righteous, Edwards’s ‘life-writing’ is characteristic of heresiographers; amongst the ancients, Theodoret and Epiphanius seem remarkably similar, presenting equally paranoid self-images of valiant and embattled champions of the truth— 50 J. C. Davis,‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 507–30. 51 52 Gangraena, ii. 81. Ibid. iii. Preface, sig. )(4r–v.

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awaiting ultimate vindication by God. Edwards was also, of course, contrasting the integrity of Presbyterians like himself with the corruption and cupidity of the sectaries, and the opportunistic Independents, such as John Lilburne, ‘a darling of the Sectaries’ who ‘hath done all he hath done for money’.53 Nonetheless, Edwards’s self-portrait carries some conviction: he never did acquire any established parochial living, still less a lucrative or important one; he never did preach a fast sermon and was not nominated to the Westminster Assembly, unlike smoother, abler, or better connected contemporaries such as Thomas Goodwin, Herbert Palmer, Stephen Marshall, or William Bridge. We cannot tell whether his ‘I never yet sought any great places’ was a rationalization of failure (and we might note the ‘yet’) or whether his obviously intemperate and insensitive character sabotaged attempts at advancement. It is perhaps significant that he did not return to any of his old London parishes in the 1640s or acquire one of the many vacancies in pastoral cures available through the ejection of royalist or ‘scandalous’ ministers, but continued to rely on casual lecturing positions. Edwards’s early career was conventional enough. He was probably born in London around 1599, of a modest but not poor family, most likely the son of another Thomas of St Helens’s parish, Bishopsgate. In December 1618, Thomas obtained a long lease of a house in ‘Great St Helens’ at the ‘earnest request’ of his brother, the warden of the Skinners’ Company who owned the property. The lease was renewed for a further twenty-one years in 1637 and the house was likely a secure base for Thomas throughout the vagaries of his uncertain professional fortunes.54 Thomas entered Queens, one of the noted godly colleges, in Cambridge, as a ‘pensioner’ in 1618, obtaining a BA in 1622, MA in 1625, and was ordained deacon early in 1626.55 Ibid. i. 96. Edwards’s will mentioned sisters Judith and Susanna, and a brother Henry, and births of three children of these names are recorded as the offspring of Thomas and Mary Edwards of St Helen’s Bishopsgate between 1607 and 1617. There is no certain record of Edwards’s own birth, but he lived there on and off from 1618 until the early 1640s at least. For Thomas Edwards’s leases from the Skinners’ Company: GLMS 30708/3, Skinners’ Company, Court Minutes, fos. 26r, 162v, 166v. The rent throughout was £6. 13s. 4d. I owe this reference to the kindness of Ariel Hessayon. Israel, son of Thomas, was baptized there in April 1642. (Genealogical material is from the International Genealogical Index.) A cousin, another Israel Edwards, became a parish minister in Essex in the 1630s. He took the requisite oaths before the Bishop of London as rector of East Mersea in Nov. 1634: GLMS 9539A/1, fo. 63. Israel was also mentioned in Thomas’s will. 55 John and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Pt. i, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–54). A pensioner paid his own way at university and hence Edwards came from a relatively prosperous background. 53 54

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Queens’ Puritan reputation in Edwards’s time owed much to the presence of John Preston, a Fellow of the college until his appointment as Master of Emmanuel in 1622. Contacts formed at university were a starting point for the creation of Puritan networks within which spiritual ties, practical friendship, professional encouragement, and patronage opportunities were forged amongst clergy and laymen. Edwards’s near contemporaries at Queens included the slightly older Thomas Ball who entered the college in 1615, and became a noted leader of Northamptonshire Puritanism, the eminent Suffolk Puritan Samuel Fairclough, and Herbert Palmer, a Fellow from 1623, a member of the Westminster Assembly, and a leading university figure in the 1650s.A younger man was Thomas Cawton, who acquired a theological training in Palmer’s household after his MA, and whose career had some striking parallels with Edwards’s.56 But a more paradoxical contact of Edwards’s college career was John Goodwin, one of the most important targets in Gangraena and already a Fellow when Edwards entered Queens. Between the two there was a mutual contempt that went beyond their admittedly wide differences over doctrine and church government in the 1640s. When Edwards complained (eight times in fifteen pages) of Goodwin’s sneers—‘Tis not unknowne how the Sectaries by writing and speaking have set themselves to disparage me . . . all to weaken my esteeme, credit and authority with the people, that being looked upon as a man so weak that a Woman can answer my writings, and that I know not how to put the Nominative Case and Verb together etc’— he was perhaps also recalling ancient slights. Perhaps when Goodwin quoted Calvin in Latin—‘I forbeare to English these passages, because I desire to make an experiment upon Mr Edwards, whether he be able to do it or no’—he was remembering a difficult and mediocre student from twenty years before.57 56 For clerical networks in general: Francis J. Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), esp. ch. 1, and map 22; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24–6; John Twigg, A History of Queens College Cambridge 1448–1986 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987): the college lost its Puritan character with the presidency of Edward Martin, appointed in 1631. The Life of the Renowned Doctor Preston was written by his pupil, Thomas Ball who, with Thomas Goodwin, also published his works. The Life and Death of that Holy and reverend Man of God Mr Thomas Cawton (London, 1662), esp. 18, 19, 25, 45; Cawton was a zealous Presbyterian with some royalist sympathies by 1648/9; he was forced into exile at Rotterdam after his involvement in the royalist–Presbyterian plotting which led to the execution of Christopher Love. He had been tutored by Anthony Burgess and became the brother-in-law of William Jenkyn, the minister at Christ Church where Edwards preached in the 1640s. Like Edwards he was noted for ‘his zeal in preaching against sectaries and their hereticall tenets’, and was another,‘true Malleus Haereticorum’. 57 See e.g. Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig. )(1v, responding to attacks such as that in Cretensis,

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Edwards’s near contemporaries at other colleges included numerous future allies and opponents: Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, Henry Jessey, William Greenhill, Hugh Peter, amongst ‘Independents’; Richard Vines, Stephen Marshall, Thomas Hill, and Adoniram Byfield amongst ‘Presbyterians’ of the 1640s. Edwards reminisced wistfully about his university contacts in Gangraena: ‘I remember I have been in company with Doctor Ames, at Doctor Prestons lodging, who after the death of King James, coming to England, and to Cambridge, I heard him preach there,’ and he was especially sentimental in Antapologia about his friendship with Bridge and Thomas Goodwin, with whom, ‘many years after wee were members of Christ . . . conversed together in Cambridge as Saints’.58 The poignancy of friendships fractured but not forgotten shadows the bitter religious divisions of the 1640s. Edwards did not go on to a fellowship, but like other young men he preached in Cambridge pulpits in the hope of attracting the attention of a patron. Surviving sermon notes indicate he offered a conventional if awkward Calvinist position on the horrors of the fall, and the deceptions of Satan. Whilst it was not possible to ‘measure thy estate by outward reformation’, it was important to ‘use all diligence to make our election sure’, to see if the ‘old Grandfather Adam’ had been replaced by a ‘new heart’ from God. Edwards urged his hearers to cry to God for ‘a searching ministery, with a payre of ballances in his hand, a just judge’.59 Disaster struck Edwards’s career before it had begun, however, when he attracted the wrong sort of notice with an intemperate sermon in St Andrews church. The fullest account of witnesses before the ViceChancellor’s Court in February 1628 claimed Edwards had declared: when there aryse any doubts about the waye, & thou know not well which waye to take, yf thou beest a servant, thou must not goe to thy carnall Master to enquire of him, yf thou beest a wyfe, thou must not goe to thy carnall husband to ask him, yf thou beest a sonn thou must not goe to thy carnall father, yf thou beest a pupill thou must not goe to thy carnall Tutor to aske him, but thou must finde out a man in whome the spiritt of god dwells, one that is renewed by grace and he shall direct 23–4; cf. Gangraena, ii. 47; and Goodwin, An Apologesiates Antapologias (London, 1646), 12, 205; for Goodwin’s career see Ellen Singer More, ‘The New Arminians: John Goodwin and His Coleman Street Congregation in Cromwellian England’, Ph.D. thesis (Rochester, 1979), 16–20. Gangraena, ii. 30–140 for Edwards’s extended defence against Goodwin. John Coffey’s forthcoming work on Goodwin is eagerly awaited. 58 Bremer, Congregational Communion, 23; Gangraena, iii. 144; Antapologia, 96. In the latter example Edwards was making, as ever, a polemical point—that a godly community could be achieved without the need for a formally covenanted gathered church of ‘Saints’. 59 BL Sloane MS 598, sermon notes from Cambridge in the 1620s (includes also sermons by Preston, Ward, and Thomas Hill); fos. 84–90 for Edwards.

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thee, a littell after he sayd yf all this be not trew, then this booke (clapping his hands uppon the holy bible) is full of falshoods & god himself is a lyer & Christ a deceiver.

Another version suggested that Edwards ended with an even more dramatic flourish: ‘If the day of judgment should be now at hand, if the seales opened, if the fier were about my eares which should burne those that follow not his doctrine, I would testifie and preach this and noe other doctrine.’ On 31 March 1628 he was ordered to preach a sermon of recantation, and to produce a certificate that he had done so. The sermon was duly preached on 6 April but Edwards then ‘left the towne and made noe certificate’, and an account of Edwards’s rather qualified submission was finally produced on 18 May 1629: These are to certify that whereas Mr Edwards Master of Arts, late of Queenes Colledg in Cambridg was required to explain himself concerning words spoken by him in a sermon . . . as if he had dehorted from consulting with carnall tutors, husbands, masters. To this purpose he did explain himself in the ye said church of St Andrews Aprill 6 1628 . . . hee desired not to be mistaken, as if hee had preached against obedience to superiors though carnall and wicked, or harking to their advice and councell, for such might advise well as ye pharisees sitting in Moses chaire were to bee obeyed in their sayings, alledging also these scriptures to that purpose, 1 Tim[othy] 1. 6 etc,60 1 Pet[er] 2. 18.61 And that they ought rather to bee dutifull to such than others, that they may win them, and stop their mouthes, 1 Peter, 3. 1.62 Onely if they advise any thing contrary to the word, as to lye etc, to remember the speech of the apostle, It is better to obey God than man.

The certificate was signed by the curate of St Andrews, Thomas Goodwin, and also by Thomas Ball and William Bridge, along with the veteran Puritan Laurence Chaderton.63 The ironies multiply here. Edwards was clearly the victim of the spying and hostile note-taking he was to use himself to such effect in the con60 ‘From which some having swerved, have turned aside unto vain jangling’; 1: 7 is perhaps more relevant: ‘Desiring to be teachers of the law, understanding neither what they say, not whereof they affirm’. 61 ‘Servants be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward’. 62 ‘Likewise ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives’. 63 For a brief discussion see Margot Todd, Christian Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 199–200. My account is based on CUL, University Archives, ViceChancellor’s Court, i. 49, fos. 25r–26r; CUL, CUR 6.1 (Miscellaneous Ecclesiastical proceedings), item 39, fos. 21r–22v, 25r; those hearing his case included the eminent Puritan Samuel Ward and John Mansell, the president of Edwards’s old college, Queens.

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struction of Gangraena; and we can easily imagine what the Edwards of 1646 might have made of a preacher’s peroration on the falsehoods in the Bible or on God becoming a liar.64 There is also at least a potential contradiction between his argument here and his fears in the 1640s that religious division might disrupt families. Finally there was the humiliation of having his orthodoxy guaranteed by Bridge and Thomas Goodwin, who were, in Edwards’s account, to parade their credentials as martyred nonconformists in the early 1640s, contrasting their own sufferings with the supposed acquiescence of future Presbyterians.65 In the first part of Gangraena, Edwards attacked the Independents who ‘upbraid in printed books and speeches many Presbyterians, particularly of the Assembly, with their former conformity’, citing in particular Henry Burton’s ‘railing pamphlet’ against ‘Good Mr Calamy’. The contrary case could be made, insisted Edwards, drawing again on his own experience. Many ‘principall ringleaders in each sect, as Anabaptists, Antinomians, Independents, etc were not only conformists in the way of old conformity, but great Innovators and forward Episcopall men’. Indeed, ‘the best of the Independents’ went ‘further in conformity to the Bishops then some of us’. Burroughs, for example,‘was wont to ride up and down the Countrey in a Canonicall coat’, whereas Edwards, as great a conformist (as some of the Sectaries would make me to have been) never had a Canonicall coat, never gave a peny to the building of Pauls, took not the Canonicall oath, declined Subscription for many years before the Parliament (though I practised the old conformity) would not give ne obulum quidem, to the contribution against the Scots, but disswaded other Ministers; much lesse did I yeeld to bow to the Altar, and at the name of Jesus, or administer the Lords Supper at a Table turned Altarwise, or bring the people up to Rails, or read the Book of Sports, or highly flatter the Archbishop in an Epistle Dedicatory to him.

Pointed marginal notes reinforced Edwards’s argument: Henry Burton’s name was given as an example of those who had read the Book of Sports, 64 CUL, CUR 6.1, item 39, between fos. 22 and 23 has a less provocative version of the sermon, perhaps from Edwards’s own notes which presented it as a commentary on Matthew 7: 13, ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat’. Here the stress is on the necessity of avoiding sin rather than the potential defiance of authority: ‘bee established in the present truth . . . suffer not thyself to bee led by the opinion of men, ye practise of the world, examine things thyself according to the rule’. 65 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 227 n. 43, points to a story in Benjamin Brook’s 19th-cent. Puritan biographies that Bridge and Goodwin were witnesses against Edwards; the truth seems to be more complex though no less galling by the 1640s. Edwards does not mention his sermon in his biographical asides. See further the discussion of Antapologia below.

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while the Independent Nathaniel Holmes was credited with the flattery of the archbishop. Edwards instead had been presented before the High Commission Court, ‘for preaching a Sermon at Mercers-Chappel, on a Fast-day in July 1640 against the Bishops and their faction, such a free sermon as I beleeve never a Sectary in England durst have preached in such a place and at such a time’. All too typically, Edwards protested too much, expanding in another marginal note: ‘had I ever learned the art of timeserving, I should not write such a book as this, nor preach as I do, but would rather turne Sectary, or at lest comply with them, and so I might be a Creature and a Darling of these times’.66 But, also typically, Edwards was presenting a plausible account of his own experience during the Laudian-dominated 1630s. Soon after the Cambridge debacle, Edwards made another conventional move—to London, where ample, if insecure, preaching opportunities existed for youngish graduates unable to find proper livings or uneasy about conformity to the ceremonial of the church.67 Some of his hearers at least, seem to have regarded him as a catch, and his new parish, St Botolph’s Aldgate, celebrated his appointment as their lecturer with £1. 1s. 6d. paid ‘for wine and ringers’, in late 1628. Edwards apparently kept this lecture at least intermittently until 1636, along with other casual preaching positions.68 His tenure was marked by controversy and problems with the ecclesiastical authorities; his friend William Prynne, a great ally in the polemics of 1644–6, named him as one of the lecturers silenced by Laud as bishop of London.69 In May 1629, some thirty parishioners, all vestrymen ‘and none others’, four churchwardens, four Common Councillors, and the Alderman’s Deputy for the ward amongst them, petitioned Laud on Edwards’s behalf, following an apparent suspension.70 The lecture, claimed the petitioners, had been established anonymously for three years for the good of the Gangraena, i. 75–6 (1st sequence). For Edwards’s London career see Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 144–5, 249–50; GLMS 9235/2, Botolph’s Aldgate Churchwardens’ accounts, fos. 359r, 376v, 413r; GLMS 9236, Memorandum Book, fo. 98v; GLMS 9237, Minutes of Portsoken Ward, fo. 6v. 68 In the Preface to Gangraena, iii. sig. )(4r, Edwards mentioned preaching in various London pulpits in the 1630s. 69 William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (London, 1640), 373. Edwards’s friendship with Prynne depends on his being the Thomas Edwards who gave evidence at Laud’s trial in Mar. 1644 that ‘three hampers of Mr Pryn’s books were taken out of his house’. Laud’s own comment was ‘the weaker man he, to let his friends bookes go so’: The Works of William Laud, iv (Oxford, 1854), 106. 70 NA SP16/142/51; this petition is discussed in Gertrude Huehns, Antinomianism in English History (London: Cresset Press, 1951), 61, although she does not identify the lecturer as the author of Gangraena. 66 67

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parish, and Edwards’s appointment was ‘verie thankfully accepted of by the said parishe’ and approved of by Thomas Swadlin, the parish minister. Since Christmas 1628 Edwards had preached every Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning: By whose labor in preachinge, and the blessinge of God thereunto, your suppliants have receaved much and greate comforte in this little tyme he hath byn amongst them, And the poore of the said Parishe beinge in nomber Three Thousand and upwards, have had greate Releife by Collections att the Church doore, the people beinge moved and stirred upp thereunto by his good and Godlie instigations and persuasions used in his Sermons.

But the previous Sunday,‘the Church beinge verie full of people, there was noe Sermon att all’ and when Swadlin was asked why,‘he told them ytt was yor honors pleasure to dismisse the lecturer for a tyme for causes unknowne’. The petitioners insisted that Edwards was ‘a man everie way Conformable to the Church of England, and hath testefied the same by his practise amongst us and havinge found him since his cominge amonge us with life and doctrine agreeable’. The loss of Edwards would prejudice the whole endowment and the welfare of the poor. Clearly Edwards had solid support from the respectable men of St Botolph’s, but there is evidence to qualify their testimonial to Edwards’s conformity. According to the king’s 1629 Instructions to Preachers all lecturers were supposed to read the Service Book in their surplice and hood; it may be that Edwards’s reluctance to wear the ‘canonical coat’ was at the root of his troubles with Laud. The St Botolph’s churchwardens bought a new service book and the required vestments in 1629, but a Mr Bracegirdle, who seems to have doubled as parish clerk and curate, was paid 1s. 3d. in 1631 ‘for reading praiers for Mr Edwards’, and a further 2s. for certifying to the bishop that it had been done. It may also be that the petition exaggerated Swadlin’s commitment to the lecture, for he was himself in trouble with Laud in 1631 for going to the tavern while another minister (Edwards?) was preaching, and sending the vintner’s man to see when the sermon was over.71 In 1637 the clerk was paid £4 and the sexton £2 ‘for his late attendance upon Mr Edwards lecture, three yeares’; but by this time Edwards was curate at All Saints church Hertford.72 All Saints had been one of the parishes 71 There is clear evidence also in St Botolph’s parish records that Swadlin was not always happy with the lecture: GLMS 9236, fos. 99v, 101v, 103r; 9237, fo. 6v. 72 John, son of Thomas Edwards, curate, was baptized there 6 Mar. 1636/7, and Edwards is also listed in a ship-money return for the Hertfordshire clergy in 1636: William Urwick, Memorials of Nonconformity in Hertfordshire (London, 1884), 525, quoting NA SP16/351/84. Edwards kept his house in St Helens, Bishopgate throughout.

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bought up by the Feoffees for Impropriations, in a Puritan attempt to secure a preaching ministry, but by 1637 it was long forfeit to the crown. The feoffees had nominated John Archer, a briefly suspended London lecturer, to the living. By 1637 he was the pastor of the English congregation at Arnhem, the ‘most prestigious colony in exile’ in the Netherlands. Archer’s church of ‘pickt Christians’ featured extensively in Antapologia, where Edwards quoted his letters back to England, praising Utrecht as ‘a brave city’ [where] ‘a man may live as pleasantly there as at Hertford’, and his posthumous book, Comfort for Beleevers, was a major source for ‘Antinomian’ errors in Gangraena.73 Within a year or two Edwards seems to have been back in London: on his own account he preached at St Mary, Aldermanbury and St Stephen, Coleman street, John Goodwin’s parish, in the later 1630s besides his sermon at the Mercers’ chapel.74 Before 1644 when the publication of Antapologia and a regular lecture at Christ Church, Newgate, brought him some prominence, not to say notoriety, Edwards’s career was not a great success. His earliest antagonist, the separatist Katherine Chidley, jeered at the claims of a mere lecturer to the pastoral care of his ‘spirituall children’: ‘I pray you, how can you count the Parish of St Elens your spirituall children, seeing you are there but an hireling, and as you have not begotten them to the Faith, so you have not taken the charge of them as a Spirituall Father, and you will onely preach to them so long as any will pay you wages.’75 Hezekiah Woodward, a friend of Samuel Hartlib who replied to Antapologia, and John Goodwin in Gangraena both attacked Edwards for 73 For Archer, the Feoffees for Impropriations, and the Netherlands see Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 226–31. Later in the 1630s Philip Nye and Thomas Goodwin were also ‘teachers’ (in Edwards’s term) in this congregation. See also Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England, 26, 82–5. For Archer, Arnhem, and Utrecht: Edwards, Antapalogia (London, 1644), 23, 187–8. 74 Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig. )(4r. According to Edwards’s own chronology he had preached in Coleman Street and Aldermanbury in 1638; he claimed similar anti-separatist preaching in [St] Magnus church in London in 1633; Gangraena, i. 76 (1st pagination), Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 250, 265 n. 30 (I do not think Seaver is correct that Edwards continued to preach at St Botolph’s until 1640). I can find no record of Edwards’s troubles in the surviving High Commission material. 75 Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ (London, 1641), 67.As we saw above, Edwards had family links with the parish of St Helens and may well have been preaching there in 1641. The churchwardens’ accounts include payments to unnamed ministers in the 1630s and early 1640s. I prefer to think that Chidley had confused him with the permanent lecturer George Walker, who preached there from 1638 to 1647, and was a similarly zealous hunter of the unorthodox: Liu, Puritan London, 198; GLMS 6836. 142, 148, etc.

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moving rapidly from parish to parish in search of preferment. Edwards had a typically self-righteous response: as a ‘plain open-hearted man’, he hated ‘jugling and indirect walking’. He had left a ‘good favor’ everywhere he had ‘lived and preached, from Cambridge to Walden, and from Walden to London, and in London from one place and Church to another, and from London to Harford, and Harford to London, and from London to Isleworth, and from Isleworth, to Godalming’.76 Edwards attributed his worldly failures to his commitment to truth, to always swimming against the tide in his struggle against the errors of the powerful, whether ‘prelates’ or ‘sectaries’: ‘I have in some places preached such Sermons against the prevailing Opinions, Innovations and Corruptions of the Prelates, that many thought I should never have preached again; and indeed was not without manifold sufferings and troubles, being put out of places, stopped from coming into others.’ We may consider that his tactless zeal is a more likely explanation of his failure to find a substantial post in London in 1641–2, ‘these open times’. The veteran Puritan Stephen Dennison and the radical Independent and future fifth monarchy leader John Simpson who remained in the parish until 1659 were chosen rather than Edwards as new lecturers at St Botolph’s. It is hard to imagine Edwards as a pastoral success; his genius was clearly for rousing and divisive preaching and publishing.77 the making of a presbyterian In an indignant riposte to the prominent Independent Hugh Peter’s appropriation of the mantle of the widely respected exiled Puritan William Ames, Edwards again rehearsed, a little wistfully, the networks of his early career: 76 Gangraena, ii. 83. For the accusations see Hezekiah Woodward, A Short Letter Modestly intreating a Friends Judgement upon Mr Edwards his Booke, he calleth an Anti-Apologie: With a large but modest Answer thereunto (London, 1644), 28, referred to Edwards’s ‘walkings in and out; his scatterings here and there’. Goodwin, Cretensis, 35:‘Yea I my self have a Manuscript by me, . . . which came to my hands above a yeare since, concerning Mr Edwards himself; which discourseth his jugling and indirect walking between the two Townes of Godalmin in Surrey, and Dunmow in Essex’. There is no record of Edwards as an ‘intruder’ in any of these places in A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948; reissued 1988). In Gangraena, ii. 62, Edwards wrote of frequent trips to Godalming in 1644 when responding to Goodwin’s sneer that he should have written his reply to The Apologeticall Narration in less than seven months, given his freedom from other engagements. 77 Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig. )(4r; for Dennison (an abrasive preacher somewhat akin to Edwards but a more eminent figure) see Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 328; for Simpson, Liu, Puritan London, 107–8.

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I must acknowledge it as a providence of God, that I many years agoe by reason of my intimate acquaintance with the eminentest and godliest men of those times, and with the prime of those who are now turned Independents, did hear and know many things of all sorts of godly men, both at home and abroad, in Holland, England, New-England, which I then little thought I should ever have had any use of, but since have been and are of great use in answering Independents, when they come and tell the world stories of themselves, which men know not how to disprove them . . . Tis sufficiently known I was well acquainted with Doctor Preston, Doctor Sibs, Master Bouls, Doctor Prestons Tutor, Doctor Taylor, Doctor Stoughton, etc.78

Edwards’s claim to have been ‘in company with Doctor Ames’ was hardly evidence of intimate acquaintance; and it is easy to picture him literally on the edge of the circle of the Cambridge godly, rather than central to Puritan networks. But even as an also-ran within the Puritan communities of Cambridge and London, Edwards picked up preaching posts, as we have seen, and was called on to add his signature to circular letters and manifestos. Early in 1631, for example, Edwards was one of thirty-eight ministers, mostly from London but also from East Anglia and the Midlands who signed a testimony in support of John Dury’s drives for Protestant unity. Edwards was towards the bottom of the list but he was in distinguished company—Daniel Featley, Abbot’s Chaplain and Richard Sibbes, Master of St Catherines Hall headed the signatories who included John Davenport, Philip Nye, John White, John Brinsley, Thomas Goodwin, Thomas Ball, William Gouge, Stephen Marshall, Thomas Gataker, Henry Burton, George Walker, John Archer, and Sidrach Simpson; many were to be allies, sources of information, or targets in Edwards’s writing in the 1640s.79 Edwards’s contacts included many future Independents as well as Presbyterians, and his career, like many others, offers a caution against reading back the divisions of the 1640s into the networks and experiences of the 1620s and 1630s. He insisted in 1644 that there was no ‘unkindness’ between him and the authors of the Apologeticall Narration in which the Independents of the Assembly argued for the autonomy of individual congregations: ‘I love their persons, besides that love I beare to them as Saints,

78 Gangraena, iii. 143–5; See Webster, Godly Clergy, 328–9, for the appeal of Edwards and other ‘Presbyterians’ to the authority of Ames, much quoted in Reasons Against the Independent Government and Antapologia. Edwards found in Ames’s works ‘Principles against the Independency of Churches’ and challenged Peter’s account of his career. 79 Webster, Godly Clergy, 257, for the reference and a discussion of this document; the original is BL Sloane MS 1465, item 2. It was signed after Thomas Ball went to Northampton in 1630, but before John Archer went to Hertford in May 1631. Featley’s wife owned property in St Helen’s parish: GLMS 6836. 146.

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I have a personall love and a particular love of friendship to some of them’. The ‘some of them’ were presumably Thomas Goodwin and especially William Bridge, whom Edwards claimed as a major source for Antapologia.80 Many useful contacts from the 1620s and 1630s were pressed into service in the construction of Edwards’s most influential publications of the 1640s, Antapologia, and the three parts of Gangraena. Edwards’s own account, and the very fact that he had long been collecting evidence on issues of conformity and congregational organization, supports recent accounts by Carol Schneider, Francis Bremer, and Tom Webster. These scholars all suggest, with variations of emphasis, that while church government was not an issue on which godly networks divided irrevocably before the 1640s (the precise date is disputed), it was the subject of troubling debates in the 1630s.81 Edwards exhibited a consistent and profound bitterness about ‘Independent’ accounts of the 1620s and 1630s and Antapologia, in part at least, was a struggle over the meaning of a common past, in particular over whether it had been legitimate to cease communion with the English church. Edwards dated his own anxiety over schism (his term) to about 1637, writing in Antapologia that he had been moved by his concern for tender consciences, ‘to fall upon the more thorough studying and searching into the controversies of the Church’. In Gangraena also he claimed a consistent opposition to separatism and error: ‘Many years ago when I was persecuted by some Prelates and their Creatures . . . I preached against, and upon all occasions declared my self against the Brownists, Separatists, Antinomians and all Errors in that way, as well as against Popish Innovations and Arminian Tenets.’ At Hertford, ‘when Independency and the Church way began to be fallen too by some men of Note . . . I preached against it earely, and by all wayes laboured to preserve the people’, while in 80 Antapologia, preface, sig. A4r. See e.g. 57, 60, 143–4, where Edwards writes of Bridge ‘telling me the story of things between them’ (about conflicts at Rotterdam with Sidrach Simpson). Edwards attributed Bridge’s ‘weaknesse and distemper’, and the death of his wife, to the conflicts in the Netherlands. 81 Carol G. Schneider,‘Roots and Branches: From Principled Nonconformity to the Emergence of Religious Parties’, in Bremer (ed.), Puritanism, 167–200; Webster, Godly Clergy, esp. 278–80, 287–303; 314–17, 327; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 94–7, 116–18, 131–3. The term ‘Independent’ of course is Edwards’s designation; the Dissenting Brethren disowned it: see further below. Bremer is the most confident that future congregational opinions can be discerned from other evidence such as a greater commitment to millenarianism, to purity of ordinances, and a more ‘mystical’ faith, but he does not believe that differences were irreconcilable before 1644. Bremer also suggests that Presbyterians were more likely to have been conformists, although Webster’s account of the godly ministers of Essex (like Edwards’s own version) would not entirely support this.

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London Edwards preached ‘against Apostasie and falling to Errors on the right hand and more particularly at Coleman-street, (many in that parish being then leaning that way) gave some considerations against Errors on the right hand, and warned the people of the White Devill . . . and Master John Goodwin was then well pleased with my Sermon that he gave me great thanks’.82 The plausibility of this self-presentation is reinforced by Edwards’s emergence as an early and forthright opponent of liberty of conscience for gathered congregations—or in his own terms, as an enemy of toleration for Independents, in his first published work, Reasons Against the Independant Government of Particular Congregations which came out in the summer of 1641.83 How does Edwards’s stance compare with general discussions on the church in these years? The structure of church government was not, in godly debates before the 1640s, an essential issue, it was a matter of the well-being, rather than the very being or essence, of a true church. The focus of debate was, with few exceptions, on the correct structure and disciplinary role of the individual congregation; following Ames (one of Edwards’s favourites as we have seen), the church was defined essentially as a society of believers, a community of saints.84 The views of John Ball of Whitmore, Staffordshire, a central figure in debates about the ‘New England way’ were distinguishable from ‘congregationalist’ arguments only in his insistence that the first Apostolic Church in Jerusalem was not one congregation but many. In most debates the question of the powers of synods over individual congregations—which was to be so divisive in the Westminster Assembly—was a side issue; more central were worries about whether the move to New England amounted to a schism from the Church of England, about whether congregations there and amongst exiles in the Netherlands were too rigid in their criteria for membership and admission to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and particularly, whether all the (male) members rather than church officers should be the source of authority in the congregation. These were the issues raised by ministers in Old England—characteristically in the form of critical queries sent over to New England in the later 1630s and published 82 Antapologia, Preface, sig.A1r; Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig. )(4r. St Stephen Coleman Street was, of course, Goodwin’s parish. 83 Thomas Edwards, Reasons Against the Independant Government of Particular Congregations As also Against the Toleration of such Churches to be erected in this Kingdome (London, 1641). This was apparently published before the Nov. 1641 meeting at Calamy’s house: Antapologia, 242. 84 Schneider,‘Roots and Branches’, 171–2, 178; Webster, Godly Clergy, 292, 302.

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in the early 1640s.85 Edwards was clearly aware of these debates, as he was of the conferences over the difficult issue of conformity to the English church in the wake of the Puritan ‘diaspora’ and it seems that it was the issue of schism which most alarmed him.86 Church government figured more prominently in debates amongst the English churches in the Netherlands: in the 1620s a loose and flexible supervisory body—the English synod—operated in the Netherlands under the leadership of John Forbes with Ames as spiritual inspiration. This was, however, fiercely opposed by John Paget, pastor of the English church in Amsterdam, a congregation that was a member of the fully Presbyterian Amsterdam Synod. Paget argued bitterly over the nature of synodical authority with a succession of English exiles, Hugh Peter, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport. Webster is sceptical of earlier views that the Scotsman Paget, working within a Dutch system, kept alive an English Presbyterian tradition, and he sees the Presbyterianism of the early 1640s as a coalition of relatively conservative Amesians (such as Simeon Ashe or Edwards) with relatively enthusiastic moderate episcopalians (such as Edmund Calamy and Thomas Hill). Edwards, however, kept in close touch with developments in the Netherlands, as all his books reveal, and was to seek refuge with Paget’s old congregation in the summer of 1647. Here there may well be an important source for his zealous Presbyterianism— or more properly for his enduring opposition to ‘toleration’.87 Clearly by 1641 groups amongst the godly clergy had preferences for contrasting forms of church government, and equally clearly Edwards was in the Presbyterian ‘camp’. Early in the year he was one of the London ministers who supported the Stationers’ Company campaign for renewal of licensing for the press.88 He was amongst a minority, however, who did not believe differences should be smoothed over for the sake of public unity

85

‘Nine questions’ were compiled by a group including Ball and Simeon Ashe (then chaplain to the Warwickshire peer Lord Brooke), while thirty-two questions were sent by Lancashire ministers: Schneider, ‘Roots and Branches’, 174, 183–90; Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s: A Parliamentary–Puritan Connexion’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 771–93; see also Webster, Godly Clergy, 278–80, 303. Edwards quoted from the thirty-two questions in his Reasons, 32, 35. 86 See e.g. discussion of the meeting at Richard Knightley’s house in Antapologia, 22; Webster, Godly Clergy, 305–6. Antapologia is a much-used source for the debates of the 1630s and early 1640s. 87 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 100–2; Webster, Godly Clergy, 311, 314–17, 327; cf. Bremer, Congregational Communion, 94–7. 88 M. J. Mendle, ‘De facto Freedom, de facto Authority: Press and Parliament 1640–1643’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 303–32 at 314 and 320 n. 73 (Mar. and May 1641).

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against popery and prelacy.89 Edwards was quick to respond when Henry Burton, one of the genuine ‘martyrs’ of the Personal Rule, attacked the Protestation of May 1641, an oath intended to achieve widespread support for religious reformation through the defence of ‘the true reformed Protestant religion expessed in the doctrine of the Church of England, against all Popery and popish innovation within this realm’. Burton’s determined opposition to Arminian ‘innovations’ had brought him mutilation and imprisonment alongside William Prynne and John Bastwick in 1637 despite, as Edwards never failed to point out, an earlier career as a conformist and royal chaplain. In Edwards’s view, Burton’s demand now for liberty of conscience for gathered congregations amounted to a provocative contempt for the fortunes of the national church. Edwards’s Reasons was ‘the first borne . . . though not the first conceived’ of several works against separation, and uniquely in his publishing career, shorter than planned, in order to forestall the presentation of petitions to parliament asking for toleration in the wake of Burton’s Protestation Protested.90 Edwards was thus a reluctant participant, on his own account, in the November 1641 meeting at Edmund Calamy’s house in Aldermanbury, where in the immediate shocking aftermath of the Irish rebellion, a group of ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘Independent’ ministers agreed to put an end to public controversy over religion. As usual we may wish to be sceptical about whether Edwards was as central to the process as he claimed: For my owne part though for many Reasons I desired to have been excepted from the agreement, as being engaged by a former promise in print to set out speedily some Tractates against their way, and never did formally promise silence, yet because my brethren undertooke for me (for without my forbearing to print and preach, they would not have yeelded to the Agreement) that I might not be singular, and goe against the Judgement of all my brethren. . . . I did totally both in preaching and printing decline all those points of difference. 89 Here the interpretation of Webster and Schneider is preferred to that of Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 90–1. Tolmie (like Edwards) argues that the Independents were already committed to ‘gathered churches’ as they had developed in exile rather than to parochial congregationalism. On this view the 1641 agreement is a delaying tactic enabling them to canvas for further support. Most historians, however, see it as a genuine, if problematic, attempt at working together. 90 S. R. Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951 printing), 156, for the text of the Protestation; Edwards, Reasons, sig. A3r, **r–v; Webster, Godly Clergy, 328–32; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 132; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 8–9, offer general accounts of developments in 1641. Edwards quoted The Protestation Protested, to argue that Burton did not care what discipline or liturgy was established in the National Church ‘so as we may enjoy our Christian libertie in the true use of such Ordinances, and of such Independant Government as Christ the onely Law-giver of his Church, and Lord of the conscience, hath left us in his Word’ (Reasons, 49).

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As part of this agreement, again on Edwards’s account, some of the Independents undertook to discourage the lay preachers in the London separatist congregations that had emerged from the underground with the calling of the Long Parliament and the effective collapse of episcopal authority. Mechanic preachers—such as John Durant, soap-maker; John Spencer, Lord Brooke’s coachman; and John Green felt- or hat-maker— became notorious in 1641 through the pamphlets of John Taylor and were complained of in parliament, but less is heard of them in the next two years.91 Reasons already exhibits some of the attitudes characteristic of Gangraena, and, in Edwards’s own terms was eerily prophetic.92 Like Gangraena, Reasons was prefaced by a vigorous and rather paranoid address to the House of Commons, where he asked for protection ‘against the many Calumnies and reproaches which will be cast upon us from that spirit of separation’. He was optimistic about the reformation of the abuses of prelacy as he was to take such reformation for granted in Gangraena:‘Popery, superstition, prophanenesse have been so discountenanced of late, so discovered, and their nakednesse laid so open, as that Altars, Images, pressing of ceremonies and prophane Ministers are falling of themelves. Satan for this time hath even done with errors on the left hand.’ In this as in all Edwards’s writings, however, there was also a sense of furious disappointment, a bitter realization that the fruits of reformation were blighted. Satan had turned to new tricks: ‘Any man who hath but halfe an Eye in his head . . . may see that errors on the right hand are now coming on the stage’. Provoked by the extremities of episocpacy, a new extremity of democracy and independency was threatening true religion: ‘Independencie will bring againe what it would cast out, namely libertinisme, prophanenesse, errors, and will by some removes bring many men to be of no religion at all.’ Edwards did not yet argue (as he would do in 1646) that the Independents were deliberately risking such an outcome, rather they did not appreciate the dangerous implications of their church way: ‘I doe apprehend more evill in it, than men doe see at first, or than the Independants can see, it being their own cause.’93 Edwards argued that the Scriptures, the practices of the Apostolic Church, and the writings of authorities such as Ames provided clear evi91 Antapologia, 242; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 79–91; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 48–9, 65–7. Taylor’s accounts of sectaries and schismatics are discussed in Ch. 2, below. 92 As George Yule, Puritans in Politics 1640–1647: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament (Sutton Courtenay: Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, 1976), 117–18 also noted. Yule’s book includes extracts from Edwards’s Reasons and Antapologia. 93 Reasons, sig. A3v, *v–*3r, 54.

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Introduction

dence for the necessity of some form of ‘consociation’ and subordination in church government, and hence for the lawfulness of the ‘combination of churches in synods’.94 He thus offered six ‘Reasons Against A Toleration of some Independant Churches in England’, and argued that Independency amounted to separation and thus to an illegitimate schism. In some ways it was a more provocative and arrogant schism than that of the old Brownists or separatists for at least they had logic on their side with their belief that the English church was antichristian. These ‘semi-separatists’ claimed that they regarded the English church as a true church, yet they withdrew from it on trivial, self-regarding grounds.95 As he was to insist throughout his polemical career, Edwards argued in 1641 that toleration could not be limited:‘A Toleration may be demanded upon the same grounds for all the rigid Brownists of the Kingdom and for all the Anabaptists, Familists, and other Sectaries’. Independent churches inevitably fragmented—this was clearly demonstrated during their Netherlands exile—and their principles, apparently inoffensive in the hands of the relatively respectable, could be hijacked by more dangerous figures. In an anticipation of many of the debates over the labelling in Gangraena, Edwards predicted in 1641 that the claim he had seen made in a manuscript treatise, that two or three saints have power from Christ, ‘their immediate head’, to make a church would lead to libertinism. People would insist they could live without ministers or sacraments ‘upon pretence that they can finde none fit for them yet . . . all Heretickes, Sectaries, or Libertines will count themselves Saints, as well as our Independant men’.96 Edwards already feared the temptations of religious heterodoxy for carnal humanity, especially carnal English humanity. He was not impressed by the comparison with religiously tolerant Holland: That people of Hollanders generally are an industrious people minding their businesses, profits, and keeping to what’s established by their Lawes, not troubling their heads so much with other points of Religion, but here in England, and especially in the City of London, and great Townes, many Professors are more idle and busie bodies, tatlers also, as it is said 1 Tim. 5.13 ver.,97 very wanton also in their Wits, affecting novelties in Religion. 94 Reasons, sig. 1–20, offered eight reasons in all for opposition to Independent Government. 95 Ibid. 21–4, 31–4, 50–6. He quoted all the ‘old Puritan’ nonconformists against separation including the Independents’ acknowledged heroes Ames, Bradshaw, and Baines as well as ‘Presbyterian’ authorities such as Cartwright, Hildersham, Dod, and Ball. 96 Ibid. 34–5. 97 ‘And withal they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also, and busy-bodies, speaking things which they ought not’.

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Independency had already spread like wildfire in London without any toleration; once granted liberty,‘there would be continuall drawing of many, and many falling to them . . . independancie, liberty, power of government and rule to be in the people, are mighty pleasing to flesh and blood; people generally, cheifely meane persons, and such who have beene kept under’.98 Edwards thus already saw religious division as a threat to social order and political hierarchy. He challenged the independent ministers with a ‘question or two’ provoked by the events of 1641:‘Is it fitting that well meaning Christians should be suffered to goe and make Churches, and then proceed to chuse whom they will for Ministers, as some Taylor, Feltmaker, Button-maker, men ignorant, and low in parts, by whom they shall be led into sinne and errors, and to forsake the publike assemblies [?]’99 In contrast to his youthful Cambridge sermon, but in a clear anticipation of one of the themes of Gangraena, Edwards bemoaned the impact of religious division on happy, hierarchical families: This toleration will not onely breede Divisions and Schismes, disturbing the peace and quiet of Churches and Townes . . . but will undoubtedly cause much disturbance, discontent and divisions in the same families . . . The husband being of one Church, & the wife of another; the father of one and the childe of another; the master of the Church established by Law, the servant of the tolerated, one brother of one Church and another brother of another . . . O how will this overthrow all peace and quiet in families, filling husbands and wives with discontents and setting at variance Fathers and children, each against each other, weakening that fervent love in those relations! O how will this occasion disobedience, contempt, neglects of Governours from the inferiors of the family, whilst the Governours be looked upon by them as not in a true Church!100

Some of the content of this early pamphlet thus anticipates Edwards’s most famous works, as does his refusal to use his opponents’ selfdefinitions. The term ‘Saint’ was already the object of a bitter struggle for meaning, while Edwards always wrote of Independents and Toleration, not of Congregationalists, ‘church way’, or liberty of conscience. There is however, a sharp contrast in form. Reasons is occasionally repetitive but it is mostly an orderly and coherent work with short and clearly structured chapters; there is not the same sense of a man losing control of his material in the heat of battle as is apparent in his works of 1644–7, Gangraena, 98 Ibid. 30 (recte 38), 25; cf. 24. Edwards also pointed out that the Dutch policy of toleration extended to Jews and Anabaptists; he challenged the Independents to say openly if this was also their aim (37). 99 100 Ibid. 23. Ibid. 26.

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Antapologia, and The Casting Down. Not all Edwards’s views were fixed by 1641, of course. His argument that Independent church order, with its claim of an immmediate power from God to set up a church, threatened the royal supremacy which gave the king power to correct ‘Errours, Heresies, Schismes, abuses, offences etc’, was not relevant by 1646, but it is a sign of a persistent ambiguity in Edwards’s views on the role of the civil power, which prompts the question of what we mean by zealous Presbyterianism.101 The Edwards of 1641, unlike the Edwards of 1644–7, was willing to suggest compromise, perhaps based on his own accommodations with episcopacy and the ceremonies in the 1630s. There was a ‘middle way’ between total conformity and toleration for separate congregations which consisted in not forcing people, ‘positively to doe things against conscience’. Drawing a parallel with the position of Catholics, he cautiously envisaged a situation in which people would not be forced to come to church although they would not be allowed to set up their own churches.102 More acceptable solutions were that Independents could practise in their families, or could take lectureships provided they accepted the doctrine (if not the government) of the reformed church of England: no question but the government of the Church, which shall be established by Law, will be so moderate, that if men hold the maine points of Doctrine with the Church, be pious in life and peaceable, so as not to Preach nor speake against what’s established by Law, nor doe not make Schismes to goe and set up separated Asemblies (which practises caused troubles in the Church) they may enjoy all liberty . . . for I suppose we shall not have subscriptions enjoyned to formes of government and Discipline) but onely to Doctrines, and that also in maine and cleere poynts.

What is startling, in view of Edwards’s reputation, is the lack, which we shall see repeated, of any extended positive argument for Presbyterian government: his stress is always on schism, the evils of separation from the church, rather on the detailed arrangements for any national church. In 1641 Edwards did not see any claim to Presbyterianism, jure divino, as either likely or necessary.103 Even in 1646 Edwards noted that there were ‘some Orthodox, learned, painfull, pious men’ amongst the bishops and 101 Reasons, 30. Edwards’s attitudes to episcopacy, and to civil power, discussed below, are also not characteristic of doctrinaire Presbyterianism. 102 Ibid. 42. He did, however, quote Davenant on the lawfulness of making Papists come to church. 103 Ibid. 42–5, 39–40.

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was concerned to stress that his comparisons of sectarianism with prelacy did not apply across the board. He praised ‘Learned Bishops’ and, again, ‘some Bishops and their Chaplains’, for being ‘so zealous, couragious, against a Toleration’ (of popery) in the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, despite pressure from many powerful figures.104 In Tom Webster’s terms Edwards looks as much a converted episcopalian as an Amesian, or perhaps he should be seen as embodying the inadequacy of labels. Where Webster’s recent analysis seems entirely appropriate for Edwards is in his description of the ‘conformable’ amongst the godly, those who during the painful dilemmas of the later 1620s and 1630s insisted on the dangers of forsaking a true, if flawed, church. William Whateley, the great Banbury preacher, cautioned against excessive pride and rigidity over the ceremonies leading men to desert their responsibilities for their congregations. The fact that men like Whateley, and Edwards too as we have shown, clearly found the ceremonies painful and offensive only intensified their bitterness against brethren who had settled, they felt, for the easy option of flight. Edwards’s Reasons, like his later works, burned with a resentment at the Independents’ conceit, at their claims to be the only true godly people, that severely qualified any instincts towards compromise. In response to the argument that without toleration Independents would draw ‘most of the good people out of the Land after them’, Edwards retorted that ‘the godly and painefull Ministers of the Church of England, may and will, both out-Preach them, and out-live them’. Independent arrogance in excluding all who disagreed with them from their churches and their opposition to ‘what’s established by common consent’ was in ‘scandall and contempt of the Magistrates and Church’ and ‘though they were Ministers of gold, and had the tongue of men and Angells, yet they should not have a Toleration’. His personal experience made him sceptical of Independent claims to godliness. He had known many of them long before they ‘fell to this way, and know them since, and have not seene any of them better, or more profitable in life and Ministry’. They used to preach often, but now seldom; ‘they goe looser in their apparell and haire . . . their principles and spirits grow very narrow like their Churches, they grow more strange, reserved, subtile, in a word, they minde little else but the propagation of their Independent way (as The Protesation Protested witnesseth abundantly).’ Perhaps it would be best if they all went back to Holland.105 104 105

Gangraena, i. 51, 159–62. Webster, Godly Clergy, 159–61, 306–7; Reasons, 48–9, 52–3.

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Introduction a notorious p olemicist : antap olo gia (164 4)

Edwards next came to prominence in the summer of 1644, by which time his prose had grown more self-indulgent and his world-view more rigidly polarized. On 13 July 1644, the London bookseller George Thomason noted the receipt of Edward’s second book, Antapologia, or A Full Answer to the Apologeticall Narration, a three-hundred-page response to the thirty-page justification of their congregational way by the leading ‘Independents’ of the Westminster Assembly, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge, published the previous January. This extended polemic, printed under the auspices of two London booksellers with Presbyterian sympathies, John Bellamy and Ralph Smith, brought Edwards from the wings to the centre stage—at least in certain dramatic versions of conflicts within the parliament’s cause.106 Just over a week earlier, parliament had scored a decisive victory over the royalists at the battle of Marston Moor. The unfettered hostility to Independency unleashed in Antapologia resonated with some characteristic reactions to this success. Robert Baillie, one of the Scots ministers resident in London as a representative at the Westminster Assembly, eagerly awaited Edwards’s book, reporting in early June, on ‘a piece of twenty-six sheets, of Mr Edwards, against the Apologetick Narration, near printed, which will paint that faction in clearer colours than yet they have appeared’. It proved a ‘splendid confutation’.107 For Baillie, Marston Moor was a mixed blessing, because the Scots army got so little credit. He wrote angrily to a friend with the army about the Independents’ propaganda victory: ‘We were both grieved and angry, that your Independents there should have sent up Major Harrison to trumpet over all the city their own praises, to our prejudice, making all believe that Cromwell alone, with his unspeakablie valorous regiments, had done all that service; that the most 106 Thomason’s copy is BL E1 (1). There were two different title pages for the 1644 edition although the printer and the text itself are the same in each case. Thomason’s copy had been printed for Smith, the publisher of Gangraena; the copy in the Wing microfilm, reel 66, has Bellamy’s imprint. Both men entered the book with the Stationers’ Company on 8 May 1644: A Transcript of the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640–1708, i. (London, 1913), 113. Smith had begun his career in partnership with Bellamy, but had been operating independently for some months; both men will be discussed fully in Chs. 3 and 4. The same booksellers underwrote a reset edition in 1646. New printers had been used but text was essentially the same. 107 The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie AM, ed. David Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841), ii. 190, 7 June 1644, letter for Mr George Young, and (for the last phrase) a letter of 7 Aug. ‘for Glasgow’, 215.

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of us [the Scots forces] fled; and who stayed, they fought so and so, as it might be.’ Even ‘good Mr Ashe’, the Earl of Manchester’s Presbyterian chaplain, had given Cromwell too much credit in his account of the battle.108 The summer of 1644 marked Edwards out as a man whose time had come, a polemicist who offered an angry assessment of religious divisions in England, divisions which were assumed to be closely tied in with political and military developments, and which required urgent ripostes from Presbyterians. Edwards wrote from a sense of bitter polarization, from intense anxiety about religious radicalism and fear of the growing power of the Independents. Of course, this was a particular context, not unique to Edwards, but not shared either by all his contemporaries or endorsed by all later analyses. We shall discuss fully in Chapters 3 and 5 the impact of Edwards’s polarized vision, and explore alternative assessments of religious and political cleavages. Antapologia and, in an intensified form, Gangraena were provoked by Edwards’s experience as a London lecturer who had witnessed with horror the multiplication of Independent and other separate congregations; the burgeoning of alarmingly heterodox ideas; and divisions and delays over the settling of church government. The year 1643–4 saw the open gathering of Independent congregations in the city by ordained ministers such as Henry Burton, John Goodwin, William Greenhill, and Nathaniel Holmes; the increased self-confidence and organization of Calvinist or ‘Particular’ Baptist churches; and the startling visibility of more radical separatist groups, amongst which the ‘General’ Baptist church led by Thomas Lambe, soap-boiler, was to feature particularly in Edwards’s writings.109 Baillie claimed in June 1644 that many Independents were ‘fallen off to Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, and Socinianisme’; Edwards frequently summed up the spread of error with similar lists: ‘Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, Enthusiasme, Arminianisme, Familisme’. London-based men like Baillie and Edwards were also aware of the spread of error and schism in the provinces, and, especially, within the Eastern Association Army. The spread of radical ideas and the expansion of sectarian groups were made possible by the lack of effective church government, for the work of the Westminster Assembly, meeting since July 1643 to advise on the reformation of the church, was nowhere 108 Ibid. 208–9, to Mr Blair, one of the ministers attending the Scots army. Baillie suggested that Ashe’s letters be vetted before transmission to London. 109 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 76–7, 94–7, 107–11; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 282–8. A fuller discussion is provided in Ch. 3, below.

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near completion. Obstruction by the ‘Independents’ in the Assembly was the chief stumbling block in the eyes of men like Edwards and Baillie, but there remained a haunting and persistent fear that backsliders and moderates amongst their own ‘side’ were also to blame.110 An alarmed Edwards was thus driven to reply to the Apologeticall Narration, Humbly Submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. This pamphlet, received by Thomason on 3 January 1644, was a clear indication that the public truce of 1641 was over, although in any case, debate over church government had been carried on by proxy through the publication or republication of debates from Elizabeth’s reign, of the disputes amongst the English churches in the Netherlands, and of the manuscript exchanges over the ‘New England Way’.111 With the advantage of hindsight, Edwards regretted Presbyterian acquiescence in 1641: my Judgement was against the promise of silence upon what I evidently foresaw would follow upon it, the advantage they would make by it to encrease a party . . . in this time many of their way preached for their way both in Citie and Countrey . . . besides books were printed too in that interim for their way, as M. Cottons answere to M. Ball . . . In a word in the whole carriage of that businesse they were too hard for us by their policie and subtilty.112

The preaching promised against Brownists and Anabaptists never materialized, and the wily Independents, in the person of Philip Nye, even purloined the only copy of the 1641 agreement and took it off to Hull. By 1644, Edwards saw the Independents as deliberately underhand rather than the misguided, well-intentioned men of 1641. The Independents’ crafty practices were highlighted in the very timing of the Apologeticall Narration. Following a petition from the ministers of London, the Assembly of Divines had issued Certaine Considerations to Disswade Men from further Gathering of Churches in this Present Juncture of Time on 23 December 1643, urging men to wait for the Assembly to complete its work and not to embark on divisive private quests for reformation. This was a compromise declaration—gathering churches was unseasonable rather than unlawful—and in this light it was signed by Thomas Goodwin, and Letters of Baillie, ii. 191. Gangraena, i. 17. It was in these years that Ball’s pronouncements on church government were published by Ashe and others. John Paget’s justification of Presbyterianism came out in 1641: Webster, Godly Clergy, 331–2; An Apologeticall Narration (London, 1643) is reproduced in William Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, vol. ii (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 305–39. 112 Antapologia, 242–3. 110 111

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the other ‘Independents’ as well as by Stephen Marshall and other ‘Presbyterians’. Ten days later, however, Goodwin and his allies issued a unilateral plea to parliament for acceptance of their church way. For Edwards, this was a manipulative attempt to avoid commitment to the ‘Considerations’ which they had accepted reluctantly, and an attempt to circumvent Scottish influence on church reform, even as the Scots’ army crossed the border to join the parliamentary cause.113 Like Gangraena, but less controversially, Antapologia has been used extensively as a source by later historians, for the English churches in the Netherlands and for debates on conformity and church government in England in the later 1630s and early 1640s.114 Certain characteristics of Antapologia anticipate Edwards’s methods in Gangraena and some will be considered further in later chapters of my book. One of the most obvious is the lack of a sense of proportion: the confutation is fully ten times longer than the pamphlet it criticizes. It can be compared to some of the extended responses to criticism in Parts Two and Three of Gangraena. Antapologia contains more extended argument and debate over issues of church government than the later works, but much of it, like Gangraena, was taken up with ‘stories’ about the Apologists’ behaviour in the Netherlands and in London. The fulsome evidence on which Edwards’s stories were based is in both works presented in a semi-digested form to readers. Antapologia included printed works, letters, notably those of John Archer, other manuscript evidence, and carefully delineated oral testimony—particularly from William Bridge.115 Other aspects of Antapologia were to become familiar: an enthusiastic imprimatur by its licenser, the London Presbyterian minister James Cranford, followed by a pre-emptive preface in which Edwards explained his methods and offered a defence against anticipated attacks. He rightly 113

Certaine Considerations to dissuade men from further gathering of churches (London, 1643), Thomason’s copy is dated 28 Dec. 1643: BL E79(16). This was one of the earliest of Ralph Smith’s independent publications. For the petition see Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 95; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 468. Tolmie (Triumph of the Saints, 125), unlike Edwards, sees this declaration as a qualified triumph for the Independents; Antapologia, 6. 114 Edwards’s account of developments in Holland is in general supported by Sprunger’s research in Dutch archives: see e.g. Dutch Puritanism on Rotterdam, 168–72; and Arnhem, 226–32. Edwards is predictably unfair over Burroughs’s conformity in the 1630s, but his discussion of the Apologists in the 1630s remains invaluable: Webster, Godly Clergy, 209–10, 305–8. See also Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, discussed above. 115 Antapologia, 23–5, and see n. 80 above.

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assumed that it was his personalized descriptions of the Independents’ ‘carriage’ in the Netherlands that would attract criticism. He argued that as the ‘Apologists’ had themselves used their history of exile in the Netherlands as justification for their church way and had contended that their congregational government could deal with conflict and error, he was bound to offer his alternative account, particularly of the divisions between Sidrach Simpson and William Bridge at Rotterdam.116 The Apologists presented themselves as moderate and humble supplicants: ‘wee . . . doe here publiquely professe, we beleeve the truth to lye and consist in a middle way betwixt that which is falsely charged on us, Brownism; and that which is the contention of these times, the authoritative presbyteriall Government in all the subordination and proceedings of it’. They stressed the orthodoxy of their doctrine, differing from Presbyterians only on discipline. Edwards’s aim therefore was to disabuse readers of the Independents ‘inticing words’. They were nothing more than schismatics, and, in an indulgence of metaphors, despite their ‘face of fairenesse, candidnesse, modesty, ingenuity’, he would ‘wipe off the paint, and . . . shew the snake under the greene grasse, and the foul hand under the white glove’.117 The Apologists claimed, rather arrogantly in Edwards’s eyes, that it was unhappiness with the ceremonies, the corruptions of the church,‘long before some others of our brethren’, which prompted exile. Only later had they begun to enquire into the best forms of church government. Edwards, who of course had shared this opposition to the ceremonies throughout the 1630s, argued, in contrast, that the Apologists were moving towards what he considered a separatist position before they left England, under the pernicious influence of John Cotton and the ‘New England way’. The bitterness at Independent exclusivity was evident in 1644 as in 1641. The returned exiles’ refusal to take communion in ‘any London church’ despite their being ‘so free from pollution’ in worship, and despite their own protests that they considered the English church a true church, appalled him, as did the exclusion of the known and visibly godly from the Lord’s Supper because they were not church members, as occurred in John Goodwin’s Coleman Street gathered church.118 116 Apologeticall Narration, 16–17, 20–1; Antapologia, sig. A3r, 35, 141–4. Edwards criticized Simpson’s breakaway church for being founded by a woman. See also Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 168–70. 117 Apologeticall Narration, 24, 28–9; Antapologia, 3. 118 Apologeticall Narration, 2–5, 7–8; Antapalogia, 35, 51, 53–4. John Goodwin, of course, was not one of the Apologists, who claimed a flexible position on church membership: Apologeticall Narration, 11–12.

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The strains of the ‘conformable’ position in the 1630s are fiercely evident. The conformity of Jeremiah Burroughs and William Bridge through the early 1630s was stressed, while the self-presentation of the Apologists as suffering victims of oppression was angrily rejected: But into what remote and farre Countrey were you banish’t? and what were the Companions of your Exile? Certainly the Reader [who] . . . finds . . . such a matter made of exile and banishment, will thinke, Alas! good men, into what Patmos, Indies, or remote wildernesse were they banish’t and forc’t to flye? and will never imagine, that these were the exiled Ministers, and this their exile, who in a time of common danger, and suffering in their own land, went with their wives, children, estates, friends, knights, Gentlemen and Citizens over into Holland, where they lived in safety, plenty, pompe and ease, enjoying their own wayes and freedome: and when the coasts were cleered, came over into England, were entertain’d and receiv’d with all respects and applause, and are now Members of the Assembly of Divines.

John Archer’s health had improved so greatly in exile that he had gained ‘that strength to beget a sonne’ after many years of childless marriage.119 The cowardly comforts of exile were clear to a man who had spent the 1630s dodging prelatical oppression in London and Hertford, and yet had not received the honours and preferments of the Apologists. In Antapologia, Edwards was bound to assert the superiority of Presbyterian church government. He offered ‘a true glasse to behold the faces of Presbyterie and Independencie in, with the beauty, order, strength of the one, and the deformity, disorder, and weaknesse of the other’, so that readers would avoid ‘falling into’ Independency and ‘waite upon God in that way of his, an Assembly of so many learned and godly Divines, to see what he will be pleased to speake by them.’ He also attacked the Apologists’ methods and arguments. Quoting ‘learned Danaeus’ (whose writings and translations on heresy were an important influence on Gangraena), against ‘the foolish imitation of the Apostles in all things in matters of external order’, Edwards argued that a lack of human prudence in intepreting the Scriptures led to error and to a restless searching for new lights and new truths. He rejected the Apologists’ comparisons of churches to families or corporations—that ‘fallacious way of reasoning from the oeconomicall relations and government of husbands over wives, and fathers over children, and masters over servants . . . unto the Ecclesiasticall and 119 Antapologia, 2 (quoted), 16–18, 187–8. Cf. Edmund Calamy, A Just and Necessary Apology (London, 1646), 9–10, justifying his conformity in the 1630s against the attacks of Henry Burton.

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Politicall’. This method had been used by royalists and ‘Hierarchicall men’ to justify obedience to wicked ministers.120 This last argument alerts us to the complexities of Presbyterianism, and the problems in judging it simply as a conservative movement. On the other hand, Edwards praised Presbyterian government as fixed, certain, and orderly in contrast to the instability of a voluntary system where all churches were equal. He elaborated: Their reformation and constitution being setled by Synods and Assemblies, their Ministers being ordained by Presbyteries and classes, their Doctrine, worship, government and discipline, upon serious debate, and by common consent drawn up, their rules being fixt, known and certaine, their classical meetings frequent and constant, with higher Assemblies for appeales, their number and abilities great, their remedies and censures more solemne, and more in number.

Again we should notice that this discipline, though authoritarian, was to be based on ‘serious debate’ and general consent. For Edwards the crucial advantage of Presbyterian government was in countering ‘those many errours, divisions, evils which fall out in your way . . . all men know ‘tis better to prevent the plague and taking in poyson then to expell it; government is for prevention as well as recovering’. The only Independent solution to an erring congregation was to cease communion with it, which ‘wraps in whole Churches in sin and guilt’; the failures of Independent methods were vividly revealed in the disorders in the Netherlands. With Presbyterian government, on the other hand, punishment or correction could take account of the degree of error; its methods—such as replacing a pastor—were less drastic but more effective.121 Edwards spent several pages denying the Apologists’ claim to ‘give more to the Magistrates then the Presbyterians’which he denounced as a shamelessly insincere attempt to flatter the parliament as the Dutch Remonstrants (or Arminians) had sought to gain the support of their magistracy. (This comparison was to be further developed in Gangraena.) At least in a Presbyterian church, the magistrate was an eminent member, whereas in an Independent polity he would only be included if accounted a visible Saint. Although Edwards agreed that theoretical distinctions could and should be made between ecclesiastical and civil government, he argued that in practice in a reformed church the godly magistrate had extensive powers: ‘The Presbyterians give to the Magistrate a coercive and coactive 120 Antapologia, sig. A1r, 77, 83–4, 97, 122–3; For Lambert Daneau (c.1530–95), a foremost Genevan pastor and author, see Ch. 2, below. 121 Ibid. 152–3.

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power, to suppresse heresies, schisme, to correct troublers and unruly persons in the Church, to tie and bind by their authoritie to the decrees of synod made according to the word of God.’122 These passages—which were echoed in Gangraena, particularly in the discussion of the ‘Erastian’ Thomas Coleman—suggest that Edwards cannot have been entirely at ease with the city and Assembly’s defiance of parliament over Presbyterian government in 1645/6. Defiance of the secular power was a last resort when effective church government was threatened. Edwards’s role in Presbyterian polemics was most commonly as a negative harrier of sectaries rather than as a positive advocate of specific forms. Tantalizingly Edwards claimed in 1644 that Jeremiah Burroughs, in his lecture on Hosea,‘gives no more to them [the magistrates] than the rigidest presbyterians’—clearly he did not include himself in the ranks of the rigid.123 towards gangr aena Gangraena would not have been possible without the notoriety Edwards achieved through Antapologia. The 1644 work caused a great stir. The schoolmaster Hezekiah Woodward wrote that ‘all the City and Parliament ringe of it’, and Joseph Caryl, who licensed Woodward’s response, claimed he had delayed this book by a fortnight so he could add some comments of his own, ‘composing those sad differences amongst us, in speciall those that have been occasioned by Mr Edwards his booke’. It was by no means the only response to the Apologeticall Narration, but it was the longest and the most controversial.124 John Vicars, a staunch ally of Edwards throughout the 1640s, praised the ‘learned and elaborate Antapologie’, of ‘learned and religious Mr Edwards’; it had inflicted on ‘Independent Sectaries’ ‘an incurable wound’. John Dury, in Rotterdam, on the other hand, was uneasy 122 Ibid. 155–65. Edwards quoted extensively from the works of the Dutch theologians Gisbertus Voetius, Professor at Utrecht, and Willem Apollonius, against the Remonstrants. Here also, two parties were competing for the magistrates’ support. 123 Ibid. 159. 124 Woodward, A Short Letter, 2, and comments in the imprimatur at the end by Caryl. Other responses include Adam Stuart, Some Observations and Annotations on the Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644); and Alexander Forbes, An Anatomy of Independency, or a Briefe Commentary and Moderate Discourse Upon the Apologeticall Narration (London, 1644), Thomason’s date is 14 June: BL E50 (36). This last, a pamphlet of 52 pages, insisted that the term Brownists was entirely appropriate for the Apologists’ way, and argued for an inclusive visible church. Stuart’s response, in particular, stimulated a range of replies and further ripostes—in contrast to the limited debate on Antapologia.

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that his friend Hartlib had provided a preface to Woodward’s attack on Edwards; it was not the action of a ‘warye man’ and might harm their drive for religious reconciliation.125 Antapologia brought Edwards to the attention of men in the provinces alarmed at the influence of ‘Independents’, thus creating networks vital to the construction of Gangraena: ‘Reverend Sir, Though my acquaintance with you should go before my expecting any favour from you; yet since I am well acquainted with your Antapology’ wrote Robert Harmar of Colchester, by way of introducing himself. He continued, ‘All that I would beseech from you is, That I may understand whether there be any course to be taken against turbulent men, who are violent against the presbytery’. Harmar’s letter, the first of a series printed in Gangraena, was dated 18 September 1644, an indication that Edwards was already saving material to fulfil his promise of a continuing polemical campaign against Independency. Only in New England did Antapologia, apparently, prove hard to find.126 But, from Edwards’s perspective, the impact of Antapologia was profoundly disappointing. Separate congregations continued to multiply, and errors continued to spread through books and word of mouth. The settlement of church government seemed as far away as ever but now the main obstacles were not so much the Independents as the bitter conflict over the final authority within a national church which pitted zealous Presbyterians in London and the Westminster Assembly with their Scottish allies against the majority in parliament who feared and resisted clerical domination. The Edwards of 1646, even more than the Edwards of 1644, apprehended his world as divided into good and evil parties, the Presbyterians of city and Assembly under assault from wily Independents 125 John Vicars, The Schismatick Sifted, or the Picture of Independents, Freshly and Fairly Washt over again (London, 1646), Epistle to the Reader; Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers 3/2, fos. 109r–10v, 4/14 Apr. 1645, Dury to Hartlib. It must be admitted that Dury had been egged on by Robert Baillie to remonstrate with Hartlib, and a letter the following month, after he had actually read the preface to Woodward’s Short Letter, was much less critical: ibid., fos. 123r–124v, 8/18 May. I am grateful to Mike Braddick for help with the Hartlib papers. 126 Gangraena, i. 66–7 for Harmar. For another provincial minister (besides Thomas Hall: see n. 2, above) aware of Antapologia, see the sermons of a Lincolnshire minister, John Clarke, Leaven, corrupting the Childrens Bread or Christs Caveat to beware of Sectaries and their dangerous Doctrines (London, 1646), which quoted extensively from it (see e.g. 22, 30–2, 37). John Cotton, whose The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (London, 1648) was a defence of the ‘New England’ way against Robert Baillie and Samuel Rutherford, apparently knew Antapologia only by reputation and as quoted in Baillie; it was ‘a Book which I doe not know that ever I have seen. Sure I am, I have often assayed to get, but cannot yet procure it’ (32; cf. 23, 26–7).

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who mobilized significant support in parliament and were backed by an all-conquering and increasingly powerful New Model Army. Intersecting with this simple polarization, however, was a more disabling fear that Presbyterian zeal was insufficient to counter Independent stratagems. Attempts to achieve a compromise between Presbyterians and Independents were put on foot in November 1645, and a committee for ‘accommodation’ was still operating when Part One of Gangraena came out in the following February—to the alarm of Edwards and friends such as Robert Baillie. Edwards poignantly exclaimed,‘Oh ’tis want of courage, speaking out, declaring fully for one side against the sects that hath undone us’. The need to foster such courage was a clear motive for the writing of Gangraena.127 Religious and political cleavages were both reflected in, and constructed by, an escalating printed polemic which was a crucial context for Gangraena. For the sake of clarity we need to discuss printed material in its own right, here, and at greater length in Chapter 4, but this is not to imply that the books of the mid-1640s are to be regarded as separate from ‘real events’. The press, as Edwards knew as well as anyone, was a major means through which ideas spread and party alignments or identities were created. In a series of intertwined pamphlet controversies, which gathered pace in 1644–5, parliamentarian divisions were painfully exhibited, most traumatically in the public conflicts amongst the Puritan martyrs of the 1630s, Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, and John Lilburne, the younger man who had helped distribute their illicit pamphlets. From 1641 onwards, as we have seen, Burton was a provocative controversialist for ‘Independency’. He did not hesitate to attack his fellow sufferers when they went into print for the Presbyterian cause, notably in Vindiciae Veritatis, published in September 1645, and directed especially against Bastwick’s Independency not Gods Ordinance issued in the previous May.128 In these months also Burton took on in print and in direct action the increasingly eminent Edmund Calamy, when Calamy’s refusal to allow Burton to lecture in his church provoked four pamphlets.129 127 Earlier abortive moves to achieve compromise were begun in the autumn of 1644. For the revival of the committee see Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 128; Gangraena, i. 141–2; Letters of Baillie, ii. 326, 343. 128 Henry Burton, Vindiciae Veritatis: Truth Vindicated against Calumny (London, 1645), BL E302 (13), Thomason date 22 Sept.; John Bastwick, Independency not Gods Ordinance; or A Treatise concerning Church Government (London, 1645), BL E285 (2), Thomason date 21 May. 129 Two pamphlets by each man resulted, beginning with Burton’s Truth shut out of doores; or a Narrative of the occasion of proceeding of some of Alderman-bury Parish in shutting their Church-doores against me (London 1645), BL E311 (1), Thomason date 3 Dec. 1645.

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William Prynne’s interminable polemics were particularly important for Edwards. Prynne’s pronouncements on church government from September 1644 elicited almost innumerable replies, many of them by John Goodwin, soon to become the anti-hero of Gangraena. Goodwin’s outspoken claims for liberty of conscience horrified the orthodox.130 Prynne’s more general account of the ‘errors of the times’, A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandring Blasing-Stars & Firebrands, Stiling themselves New-Lights, was a crucial source for Gangraena, while Robert Baillie and Ephraim Pagitt also produced broad denunciations of error and heresy in the months Edwards was writing.131 As we shall see at length in Chapters 2 and 4, this explosion of print provided sources, context, models, and inspiration for the monumental Gangraena. However, Edwards was driven also by a characteristic individual sense of grievance that his own works had not been treated with the respect they deserved. Antapologia was endorsed and quoted by Vicars and more eminent Presbyterian friends such as Baillie, Bastwick, and Prynne, but it was not honoured with an extended reply by any prominent Independent. The only direct reply to Edwards’s Reasons had been from a woman—Katherine Chidley, a prominent figure in London separatist churches. She had written contemptuously that Edwards’s arguments were so weak that ‘a man of understanding would not meddle with them’, but ‘if he were not answered at all, he would then have abounded in vain glory . . . finding his booke to be (as indeede it was) a rangling, insinuating- contradictory- revengefull story, it appeared unto 130 William Prynne, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions touching Church Government (London 1644), BL E257 (1), Thomason date 16 Sept.; and Independency examined, unmasked, refuted (London, 1644), BL E257 (3), 26 Sept., were the most important early pamphlets; cf. Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 126. Amongst Goodwin’s many publications against Presbyterians in general and Prynne in particular, two stand out: Theomachia; or the Grand Imprudence of men running the hazard of Fighting Against God (London, 1644), the ‘substance of two sermons, Preached in Colemanstreet, upon occasion of the late disaster sustain’d in the West’, (the surrender of Essex’s army in Cornwall), BL E12 (1), Thomason date 7 Oct.; repr. in Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, iii; and Innocencies Triumph; or the Answer to the back-part of a discourse (London, 1644), BL E14 (10), Thomason date 26 Oct. Prynne in turn responded with Truth Triumphing over Falshood, . . . In Refutation of Mr John Goodwins Innocencies Triump. (London, 1644). The publication of this by Michael Sparke was ordered by the House of Commons committee concerning printing on 3 Dec. 1644; Thomason’s date is 2 Jan. 1644/5 (BL E259 (1) ). It also responded to Burton. 131 William Prynne, A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandring Blasing-Stars & Firebrands, Stiling themselves New-Lights (London, 1645), BL E261 (5), Thomason date 24 July 1645. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or a description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these latter times (London, 1645); Robert Baillie, A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London, 1645).

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me to be a taske most befitting a woman’.132 Chidley has become a notable heroine of the English revolution in modern scholarship, but Edwards was utterly humiliated by her response. It was, as Hezekiah Woodward wrote, ‘a spetting in his face’. At least, Woodward considered, with Antapologia, Edwards ‘hath attained to that height in the eyes of all the learned that he is too tall a match for a woman’. But Woodward was wrong; finding his second book was of the ‘same nature’ as the first, full of ‘revengeful, slanderous, accusations’, Chidley resolved to answer that too, reinforcing the sneers so resented by Edwards.133 Reasons, as Edwards his informed readers, was to be the start of a polemical career, while in Antapologia, he vowed ‘never to give over writing till the Church be settled and these great schismes amongst us healed’. By 1646, Edwards had still not achieved any great worldly security or acquired a prominent place in parish or assembly. Through his uncompromising lectures and his printed polemic, however, he had gained a distinctive reputation or notoriety as a harrier of sectaries and more respectable Independent alike. He had presented powerful, if largely negative, arguments for a national, coercive church as a barrier to provocative schism and horrifying error. He had exhibited a commitment to orderly church government and to authoritative truth, but also to parliamentary reform and lively debate. Gangraena was a response to a perceived crisis, a fear that Presbyterians were losing the initiative and the arguments. But more personally, it was a product of the debate that never was, the debate over Antapologia. In the Preface to Gangraena, Part One, Edwards complained,‘In the last week of June, or the first of July 1644 (in one of those two weeks I am certain) came forth my Answer (entituled Antapologia) to the Apologeticall Narration: Ever since which time I have forborne the Presse, out of an expectation of a Reply . . . with much patience passing by the many reproachfull scornfull speeches, and railings both in publike Sermons and printed Pamphlets.’ Now Edwards’s patience was exhausted: now 18 Moneths being almost expired . . . time sufficient for five such eminent persons, or some other to have returned an Answer . . . (there being none in the Presse, as I can learn) but rather ‘tis given out by the Apologists themselves, and 132 Katherine Chidley, Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ; Chidley, A New years Gift or a Brief Exhortation to Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1645), BL E23 (13), Thomason date 2 Jan. 1644/5, Epistle quoted. For Chidley’s career see Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers and the English Revolution: The Chidleys and Their Circle’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 29 (1978); Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 21. 133 Woodward, A Short Letter, 5; Chidley, A New years Gift, Epistle.

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their neerest friends, that for peace sake they forebeare it (which let them beleeve it that will, I do not) I shall waite no longer, but am resolved to appear again in publike against the errours of the time.134

It is to this most famous ‘appearance’, Gangraena, that we now turn. 134 Antapologia, sig. A4v; Gangraena, i. sig. A4v, B1r. The tract The Ancient Bounds or Liberty of Conscience, Tenderly Stated (London, 1645) probably by Francis Rous and Joshua Sprigge attacked Edwards’s interpretation of the Solemn League and Covenant in Antapologia: J. Sears McGee,‘Francis Rous and “scabby or itchy children”. The Problem of Toleration in 1645’, forthcoming. I am very grateful to Sears McGee for sending me a copy of this article before publication. Edwards made equally pointed remarks in Antapologia, 125 about the undervaluing of his first book: ‘which booke in your seeming to take no notice of, I believe you remember above the rest, and in the 25 page of your Apologie, it appeares you remember it, but the Authour of it belike is none of your Divines’. In this section the Apologists explained their reluctance to answer their critics despite ‘reproaches cast upon our persons in print’ and ‘Books have been written by men of much worth, learning and authority, with moderation and strength, to prepossesse the peoples minds against what are supposed our Tenets’. We can only speculate which passage Edwards felt applied to himself.

C H A P T E R T WO

Gangraena as Heresiography The three parts of Gangraena were a massive and notorious assault on religious liberty and the ‘Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies’ thereby generated. They took their place amongst a multifaceted, alarmist literature concerned with religious unorthodoxy in numerous learned treatises, setpiece sermons, vicious polemic, and cheaper, more populist genres. This chapter explores the content of Gangraena, to some extent discussing it as a work rather than a text, although never a self-contained one. I will provide a brief overview of the three parts of Gangraena, conscious of the dilemma that a concise summary risks giving the volumes a logic and coherence that Edwards never provided, while a reproduction of his imperfect organization and characteristic repetitions would be simply tedious. Gangraena was an urgent description of Edwards’s here and now, an intervention in pressing conflicts. Yet at the same time it drew on some of the conventions of the ancient genre of heresiology or heresiography (a term introduced into the English language with the work of Edwards’s contemporary Ephraim Pagitt). So a brief analysis of Gangraena as a work always in the making will be succeeded by a longer discussion of its place in heresiological traditions. Colin Davis argues that Edwards offers ‘a source of good evidence for the study of the mid-seventeenth century heresiographer, of which he is virtually an archetype’. The context for Davis’s comment was a sceptical judgement on the usefulness of Gangraena as a source for religious radicalism; it was no part of Davis’s purpose to offer the detailed analysis offered here of its place within heresiology. My discussion will compare Edwards with both ancient exemplars and his contemporaries.1 Gangraena was a disorganized text with complex or even contradictory messages and approaches. It cannot be simply identified as an 1 The earliest usage of heresiography given by the OED is in Pagitt’s title; Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 126; the chapters in Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton; and Nasu, ‘Heresiography and the Idea of Heresy’ provide valuable brief accounts. Japp Mansfeld, Heresiography in Context: Hippolytus’ Elenchos as a Source for Greek Philosophy (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1992) is a thorough, comparable study of a work usually used straightforwardly as a source for Gnostic errors.

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example of the learned theological genre of heresiography; its methods also echoed those of other factual genres and of newsbooks and other cheap forms, such as the semi-fictional denunciations of sectarianism produced in the early 1640s by John Taylor and others. More profoundly Edwards’s tropes and stories drew on deep cultural assumptions about monstrosity, gender hierarchies, and the workings of providence. In the last sections of this chapter, I will outline Edwards’s key arguments and discuss the broad associations which might have made Gangraena convincing to readers. gangr aena: an ou t l i n e No early modern reader took the status or reputation of a printed book for granted. As Adrian Johns has recently emphasized, there was nothing inherently truthful or trustworthy about a book; authors, printers, and booksellers had to adopt a range of strategies, both technical and rhetorical, in order to convince.2 Gangraena’s status was immediately indicated by the reassuring bulk of all three parts, by its impressively elaborate title pages and through its sponsorship by a licenser and a bookseller of impeccable Presbyterian credentials. The short title—Gangraena—drew on a key biblical text for doctrinal error and clearly placed the book in a long tradition of anti-heretical writing. The extended title page of Part One— offering a ‘Catalogue and Discovery’ of the sectaries’ misdeeds and foul opinions, along with ‘A Particular Narration of divers Stories, Remarkable Passages, Letters . . . Observations upon, and Corollaries from . . .’ offered further clues to Edwards’s purpose and methods. Neither were the biblical texts or the passages from Luther on the title page cited randomly: for the well-informed reader they again provided particular authorization and context for the book’s themes. The title pages of Parts Two and Three became more complex, perhaps more random in their emphases, as Edwards’s own text became more elaborate, less controlled in response to the ever expanding ‘swarms’ (Edwards’s term) of error, and more specifically in reaction to the ever increasing opposition to his enterprise. Part Two offered A fresh and further Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and dangerous Proceedings of the Sectaries of this time, with more stories, letters, and corollaries, but it also advertised replies to ‘the most

2

Jones, Nature of the Book, 36, 171–5, 271, 462–3.

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materiall exceptions’ by three of Edwards’s chief critics,‘brief Animadversions’ on other ‘late pamphlets’, as well as a more bizarre selection from its miscellaneous content, ‘A Relation of a Monster . . . born at Colchester’ and ‘The Copie of an Hymne sung by some Sectaries’. Part Three, A new and higher Discovery of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and insolent Proceedings of the Sectaries of these times . . . , outlined on the title page the ‘remarkable Stories, speciall Passages, Copies of Letters’to be found within the volume, and listed the ‘Sectaries late Pamphlets’ upon which ‘Briefe Animadversions’ were to be offered, as well as the ‘divers Pamphlets written lately against me and some of my Books’, to which Edwards would also reply. All editions of all three parts of Gangraena were produced for the bookseller Ralph Smith, who specialized in zealous Presbyterian works, and had close connections with the Westminster Assembly, and all carried an enthusiastic imprimatur or authorization by the London Presbyterian minister James Cranford, one of parliament’s press licensers, and Edwards’s ‘Friend in the Truth’. For Part Two, for example, Cranford claimed that ‘these Labours of this Author, as they now find acceptance with judicious and godly Christians, so also in future times will out-live the calumnies by Sectaries cast upon them’.3 Edwards began Part One of Gangraena with an Epistle to the Parliament and a Preface to the Reader in which he insisted that his work had an urgent and clear-cut purpose: ‘so it may be some good may come of this Book, to cause an humiliation for, and a suppression of heresies and schismes, as being a more free and full discovery of our times then ever yet was made’.4 He then promised a conventional, orderly structure based on the basic rhetorical division between methodology, exposition, and reflection. His ‘Tractate’ was organized under ‘three heads’:‘some particulars for the better understanding of the subject matter of this book, and right apprehending of what follows’; a catalogue of errors, blasphemies, and practices, along with ‘particular narration of sundry remarkable passages’ and some letters; and finally observations and corollaries.5 Although the text that followed was broadly divided into these three parts, it was far from orderly. A Catalogue of 176 Errors was followed by a couple of pages on sectarian blasphemies and examples of their prayers, with a further thirty-five pages of ‘Practices of the sectaries’. In each of these sections Edwards included examples which were to be treated further in subsequent pages; 3 Smith’s career is discussed in Ch. 3, below; I hope to publish a full account in the future. Cranford’s imprimaturs were inserted after the title page. 4 5 Gangraena, i. sig. A2v. Ibid. 1–18 covers methodology; 1 is quoted.

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baptizing cats, for instance, appeared as error 104 on page 28, and again as part of the fourteenth section of particular practices on page 67.6 A new section (separately paginated in the first edition) contained ‘A Copy of some Letters, with a Narration of Stories and Remarkable Passages concerning the Sectaries.’7 The first ‘stories’ concerned individuals such as Laurence Clarkson, Thomas Webbe, or Clement Writer; other sections dealt with general issues such as ‘mechanick’ and women preachers and rather random incidents at London and Colchester. These were followed by a return to accounts of individuals such as Paul Hobson, Thomas Lambe, and Samuel Oates. Lists of sectaries mentioned only in passing were interwoven with these fuller biographies and with more general or thematic statements about sectaries distributing dangerous books, denying Christ’s divinity, or seeking political dominance. Edwards began to conclude this section with ‘The last of all is one Mr [Hugh] Peters the Soliciter Generall for the Sectaries’, but he still managed to slip in some more letters and ‘a few remarkable passages’, very recent and very miscellaneous, before coming to the Corollaries (deductions or conclusions drawn from the sectaries’ beliefs and behaviour) that made up Part Three.8 On page 178, he declared it time to ‘put a period to this Book’, but ‘Books lately come forth; as also Relations from good hands, informing me of more Errors, Blasphemies, and strange Passages of the Sectaries’, enabled Edwards to increase the count of errors to 180 in a hasty postscript.9 Part Two also began with an extended epistle to the ‘Christian Reader’, in which Edwards explained that his main purpose was to answer attacks on Part One by three ‘hairy rough wilde red men’, John Goodwin, John Saltmarsh, and William Walwyn. Compared to these the authors of the Apologeticall Narration were ‘fair smooth men’. He would also treat of new errors, especially those ‘destructive to the civill Lawes and peace of Kingdoms’, and of terrible blasphemies not found since the coming of Christ.10 A short Preface claimed Part Two was an interim reply before Edwards’s full response to his critics could be perfected. A rather jumbled account of twenty-three new errors (later reduced to twenty-two when he realized one had already been covered in Part One) was succeeded by some Gangraena, 18–37, 37–9, 39–41, 41–76. The heading is at the bottom of p. 76; the text follows (in 1st edn.) on a second p. 49. Gangraena, i. 99 for Peter; 103–13 for the ‘remarkable passages’; 113–78 for the Corollaries. 9 Ibid. 180. An appendix in the 2nd and 3rd edns. of Part One added further material, including the extramarital adventures of the notorious Mrs Attaway. 10 Ibid. ii. sig. A1r–v; he singled out the opinions of John Boggis. 6 7 8

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twenty pages of miscellaneous letters and relations of sectarian activity, mainly in London but including military disorder in Northamptonshire and letters of praise and information from Suffolk.11 By page 24 Edwards was ready for his ‘Justification and Vindication of the truth of the most materiall Passages related in . . . Gangraena, from those exceptions made against them in . . . Groans for liberty [Saltmarsh], A Whisper in the Eare [Walwyn], Cretensis, alias Master Goodwin’. The response to Goodwin took up more than a hundred pages, although it was a wide-ranging, not to say rambling treatment, because it dealt obsessively with everything Goodwin mentioned and everyone he defended. Consequently Saltmarsh was discussed as part of Edwards’s reply to Goodwin (because he was covered in Cretensis) as well as in his own right. There are long passages on Robert Cosens, accused of blasphemy in Rochester, on Jeremiah Burroughs’s and William Greenhill’s attitudes to sectaries, and on John Lilburne, because Goodwin challenged Edwards’s account of them in Gangraena, Part One. Edwards then returned to the errors of the sectaries—bringing the total to thirty-four—and their ‘practices’—two more to add to the twenty-eight in Part One.12 ‘A Relation of some stories and other remarkable passages concerning the Sects, and Sectaries’ follows. As in Part One, this is jumbled and repetitive. Some of the stories had already been used as the source for errors. The Baptist Samuel Oates’s opposition to some parliamentary taxation (described in this section) was also the basis for error 26, that a free people are not obliged to pay assessments.13 Three separate accounts are given of John Durant, pastor of a congregation in Sandwich, and Edwards returned to Durant in Part Three.14 Biographical passages are interwoven with geographically ordered sections, accounts of sectarianism in the army, and general remarks on sectarian campaigns, through preaching and in print, against Presbyterians. More stories are presented under the heading, ‘Here followes a Copie of some Letters with a Narration of some more remarkable Passages concerning the Sectaries’, concluding with some cryptic remarks about the notorious woman preacher Mrs Attaway, and her companion, William Jenney. Their story too is continued in Part Three.15 ‘Certain Corollaries and Consectaries’, familiar from Part One, take up most of the rest of the volume, but again there is space for some last minute information about the importance of friendship with 11 13 14

12 Ibid. 1–3, 3–24. Ibid. 140–4. Ibid. 141, 147. Oates had already been mentioned in ii. 10, as well as in Part One. 15 Ibid. 150, 159, 175–6. Ibid. 151–76; iii. 26.

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the Scots, given that ‘lately . . . God so strangely and unexpectedly moved the heart of the King to cast himself upon them’.16 In a long Preface to Part Three, Edwards again defended his methods and his evidence. Extended passages of self-righteous autobiography sought to present Edwards as a long-standing, disinterested stalwart of truth against error. He also highlighted changes of emphasis compared to the previous parts: he had included more on politics, the army, and parliament; more by way of refutation; and he would ‘more punctually and particularly give the proofes of the Errors and Heresies named in this Third Part.’17 The final two pages of the Preface were set in a smaller type so Edwards could fit in all he wanted into the available sheets. Part Three, like the ‘third’combined edition of Parts One and Two, included a table of contents; these finding aids were a mixed blessing for readers as we shall see. The main text began with more errors, bringing the running total ‘to neer upon three hundred’. In sixteen and a half pages, fifty-three errors were listed with frequent cross-references forward to fuller accounts of the sermon, book, or conversation that provided the source. Error 16, for example, ‘that Universities are of the devil’, was based on the preaching of the army chaplains William Dell and John Saltmarsh in Oxford, and one Captain Kendall in Northamptonshire.18 Two unpaginated sheets (sixteen pages) included brief accounts of ‘strange and false Expositions of Scripture given by Sectaries in their Sermons and Discourses’, long passages attacking radical political views, and shorter sections on blasphemies and sectaries’ prayers. The ‘Relation of stories and sundry remarkable Passages’ began on page 17, with one of the most notorious: Edwards’s account of the incident in 1644 when Captain Beaumont’s soldiers ‘pissed in the Font’ and baptized a horse in Yakesly, Huntingdonshire, to forestall an infant baptism. The ‘relations’ consisted of letters or oral testimony given to Edwards by a range of ‘godly’ informants, presented with little apparent ‘editorializing’ by the author. The bulk of the material, however, highlighted religious radicalism within parliament’s army through accounts of clashes between troops and godly ministers in many parts of England, and uncovered radical hostility to the city authorities, thereby insisting on intimate links between army sectarianism and London radicalism. A second, similar, heading, ‘A Relation of some stories and other remarkable passages concerning the Sectaries’, offered more of the same; mostly brief accounts are interspersed 16 18

Gangraena, ii. 177–210 for the Corollaries. Ibid. 1–16, sig. C1r. For universities ibid. 9, 45, 80.

17

Ibid. iii, sig. )(r.

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with longer passages on the general baptist Henry Denne’s actvities in Lincolnshire, on William Erbury in Wiltshire, John Durant (again), John Bachelor, the press licenser with radical sympathies, and John Saltmarsh.19 It is hard to discern any particular organizing principle beyond, presumably, the fact that one letter or set of notes followed another in Edwards’s ‘files’. Sometimes the links seem intuitive as when an account of how a man in Norfolk, ‘who would lie often in blind Alehouses and be often drunk’ became an Independent, prompted Edwards to continue with ‘A godly Minister told me, that he knew an old man, an Anabaptist that lived in Ashford in Kent, or thereabouts, who will bee drunken, and when he is drunk he will weep much, and bewaile the blindnesse of the Church of England’.20 Perhaps both stories came from a file headed blind-drunk. Several of the stories repeat, and expand on, the list of blasphemies in the earlier unpaginated section.21 There is more extended treatment for those Edwards regarded as the most dangerous sectaries: Goodwin (again), Richard Overton, Lilburne, and, especially, Hugh Peter. The material on Overton and Lilburne duplicates earlier accounts of the political opinions of the sectaries.22 Over a hundred pages later, Edwards tried to draw this miscellany together under an elaborately indulgent heading, ‘A Relation and Discovery of the Libertinisme and Atheisme, horrible fearfull uncleannesses of severall kinds, Drunkennesse, generall Loosenesse and licentiousnesse of living, Cosening and Deceiving both of particular persons and of the State and Kingdome, fearfull Lying, Jugling and falsifying of promises, abominable Pride and boasting in the Arms of flesh, unsufferable Insolencies and horrible misdemeanors of many Sectaries of these times’—which continued for a further paragraph listing all the victims of these insolencies, including parliament, the king, and ‘the whole Ministery of this Kingdom’.23 Under eight categories (the eighth—on insolencies— covering forty pages) he used some of his previous stories, vague new gossip, and extracts of ‘libellous pamphlets’ to expand on the evil ways of sectaries, and then attempted another summary list of ‘all their wickednesses and abominable courses’.24 A further ‘Relation of some remarkeable Passages of divers Sectaries, and of the Contents of severall Letters written up here to London, from good hands concerning them’, included mostly 20 Ibid. 86–7, 89–92, 96–7, 102–3, 113–14. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 107, 113–4; cf. sig. d3v. 22 Ibid. 114–20 (Goodwin), 120–46 (Peter), 148–60 (Overton and Lilburne); cf. sig. c1v, c2r, sig. d1–3. 23 24 Ibid. 185. Ibid. 185–233, 233–40, sig. li. 19 21

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short passages on a variety of people and places, such as the Baptist Hanserd Knollys, the Welsh Independent Richard Symmonds, and sectarian influence in Bath and Bristol, with a longer section on his old enemy Henry Burton.25 ‘Corollaries and Consectaries’, as many as space permitted but fewer than intended, followed, and Part Three ended with a twelvepage postscript. Here Edwards reflected on the recent death of the prominent Independent Jeremiah Burroughs, the object of sharp criticism in earlier pages; explained why he had not yet published the promised full reply to John Goodwin, made some hasty responses to earlier attacks on Parts One and Two, and finally vowed: And now good Reader, the next Tractate thou shall expect from me shall be a Tractate against a Toleration which I hope by the end of the next moneth, or the beginning of February, may be in thy hands, and nothing by Gods help shall divert me, or retard that: I am resolved, if twenty Pamphlets should be written against this Third Part, to let them all lie till I have put forth a Treatise against Toleration and pretended liberty of Conscience.26

Gangraena thus offered a variety of material and organizing principles. There were lists of errors, sometimes themselves little more than quotations or paraphrases from printed works or letters included in other parts of the text. At intervals more extended general reflections on the dangers of sectarian actions and beliefs were provided along with the deductions and calls to action included in the ‘Corollaries’. Confusingly elaborate numbering of sections and subsections characterized these elements. The ‘narrations of stories and remarkable passages’ were ordered variously by theme, chronology, geography, and biography, but often on an apparently random basis. For many pages letter after miscellaneous letter was printed with little comment; short passages of information about books, meetings, sermons, baptisms, immoral or self-serving actions by soldiers and sectaries in London and the ‘country’ came in rapid succession.27 On the other hand, Gangraena included lengthy accounts of particular books and individuals, notably the response to Goodwin’s Cretensis in Part Two, and several set-piece, if undisciplined biographies deploying a range of evi26 Gangraena, 241–8. Ibid. 295. An example is the four pages in Part Three (172–5) which included eleven separate paragraphs of disparate information. Most of the material concerns sectarian excesses in the army, there is more on Northamptonshire than anywhere else, and most information came to Edwards in Aug. 1646, but there are significant exceptions in all cases, and it is difficult to be confident that Edwards had any clearly defined plan for this section of the book. The last paragraph introduced ‘a libellous Pamphlet entituled The Lord Majors farwell from his Office of Majoraltie’, and here Edwards paused for breath, with three pages devoted to a critique of this one tract. 25 27

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dence. In Part One Edwards gave a vivid account of the veteran religious radical Clement Writer, sometimes described as a Seeker:28 ‘one Clement Wrighter in London, but anciently belonging to Worcester, sometimes a Professor of Religion, and judged to have been godly, who is now an archHeretique and fearful Apostate, an Old Wolf, and a subtile man, who goes about corrupting and venting his Errors; he is often in Westminster-Hall and on the Exchange’. Edwards’s sources included ‘the Book of the Mortality of the Soul’ which he wrongly believed Writer had ‘a great hand in’; Writer’s views on the mortality of the soul and the fallibility of the Scriptures delivered ‘to some in the city and countrey, as to Mr Cole, Mr Farthing, Mr P a Minister, also an honest man of Winchester’; and on manuscripts spread about the city, one of which had ‘by a providence come to my hands’. The climax of Edwards’s account was a direct sighting on 9 April 1645, ‘that day commonly called Easter Wednesday’ as Edwards was chatting to Peter Cole the bookseller in his shop in Cornhill,‘I going to him to help me to an unlicensed Book’: ‘as he was thus speaking to me, there was coming on the other side of the way, and crossing over towards the Exchange Clement Wrighter, and I spake to Mr Cole of him; whereupon Mr Cole said I [Aye], there’s one that makes it his businesse to Plunder men of their Faith and if he can do that upon any, it fattens him, that’s meat to him’. Similarly in Part Three a twenty-six-page account was given of ‘Master Hugh Peters who came over from New England about five years agoe, a great Agent for the Sectaries, who hath many wayes by preaching, writing, conference and discourse, and above all by acting in severall kinds, promoted the Independent way’.29 For Peter, Edwards could draw on his own memories of Cambridge in the 1620s and Puritan divisions in the 1630s. He also used Peter’s own ‘sermons, Books and Discourses’, anti-sectarian writings by Prynne and the London Common Councillor John Jones, and a manuscript account of a conference between Peter and two Presbyterian opponents held at the house of the Independent Rowland Wilson, a colonel in the London militia. Again, a direct and more personal encounter added to the drama when Edwards and Peter had a bad-tempered clash in Westminster Hall. Gangraena was thus a disorganized, complex work that presented 28 Gangraena, i. 82–4. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 181, is sceptical about the Seeker label. Writer was a radical Independent with very distinctive, rationalist approaches to interpretation of the Scriptures. It was in fact the future Leveller Richard Overton, as yet unknown to Edwards, who had written Mans Mortalitie. For John Farthing, a harrier of sectaries and a significant figure in Presbyterian news-collecting networks, see Ch. 3, below. 29 Gangraena, iii. 120–46.

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readers with a rich variety of source material, dramatic set-pieces, lists, deductions, and exhortations. Its arguments were extreme and sometimes contradictory and its generic associations far reaching. It had at the same time a precise timeliness and a preoccupation with enduring Christian dilemmas. a work in the making Edwards’s tightly ordered structure broke down continually and indeed his repeated discussions of structure and his obsessional lists are themselves indicative of the difficulties he had in imposing control on his material. Gangraena was never a finished product but always a work in progress by an author almost overwhelmed by events. The very construction of his books, Edwards insisted, was the result of a continuous struggle between his own decisions and purposes on the one hand, and the unpredictable pressures of events and new material on the other:30 Having made fourteen Corollaries in my first part of Gangraena and sixe other in my second part, I had thought of fourteen or fifteen more for this third part, with many enlargements in most of them, but because I see if I should give that liberty to my invention upon every one of those heads as I at first intended, the Corollaries would take up divers sheets, I shall therefore (this Book being already almost forty sheets) give the Reader but 6 or 7 of them now, and that in as contracted a way as I may, referring the rest, with all further enlargements to the fourth part of Gangraena.

Time and again he tells readers what he would have included—had he not run out of time and space. At the end of a long section of ‘stories and remarkable passages’ in Part Two, for example, Edwards claims he could have included many more, ‘proved by witnesses, by Letters under their hands, and the notorietie of the things themselves, of their horrible uncleannesses, forsaking their husbands and wives, fearfull defraudings’, but having whetted the reader’s appetite he has to move on.31 In Part Three, Edwards provided an extensive enough account of John Lilburne, but stressed how much more he could have written.32 Lilburne was Gangraena, 256. Ibid. ii. 176. Making your point while pretending to omit it is the rhetorical figure ‘occupatio’, so this was perhaps a truth-telling technique, taken, as so often with Edwards, to selfdefeating extremes: Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric (London, 1966), 259. 32 Gangraena, iii. 153. 30 31

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an Arch-sectary, the great darling of the Sectaries, highly extolled and magnified by them in many Pamphlets . . . of whom I had thought to have given a full Relation in this Book, and to have laid him open in all his colours, by following him from place to place, and shewing how time after time he hath behaved himself since he came out of his Apprenticeship.

But Part Three was already too long and a full account of Lilburne’s ‘folly and wickednesse’ would also have to wait for Part Four. On the other hand, accounts of individuals unfolded over the three parts while Edwards’s preoccupations shifted over time. As is well known, his concern with the political activities of the sectaries and the army became more pronounced; it was advertised as an increasing preoccupation in Part Two and dominated Part Three. These changes of emphasis mark Gangraena as a text ever in the making—responding to and seeking to mould events. So does the way more specific narratives unfolded over the three parts as Edwards became better informed. An initial description of an anonymous lace-woman preaching in Bell Alley, later wrongly named as Mrs Atomy, is embellished in several subsequent accounts which add her proper name, Mrs Attaway, and approach her scandalous marital history and outlandish prophecies with a horrified relish.33 Part One of Gangraena discussed several pamphlets now confidently attributed to Richard Overton but treated as anonymous works by Edwards, such as The Arraignment of Mr Persecution, and Martins Eccho, while, as we have seen, he assumed Clement Writer had written Overton’s Mans Mortality. In Part Two Edwards was still writing merely of ‘one Overton’who acted as a moderator in a dispute on the mortality of the soul; but by Part Three, Richard Overton has become notorious—his political pamphlets feature on the title page and are subject to exhaustive quotation and condemnation.34 To a large extent all parts of Gangraena were very much of the moment, focusing very directly on particular weeks and months, and in their last few pages even reflecting on events of recent days. In all three parts, the latest horrors are added at the eleventh hour, often in very small type so they Ibid. i. 87, and Appendix, 121; ii. 10–11, 141. For Overton (or his books) see ibid. i. sig. B1r, 53; ii. 17–18; iii. 148–50. Edwards never attributed The Arraignment . . . to Overton: see iii. 257 where it is listed separately from Overton’s acknowledged works. Overton’s early pamphlets are discussed in Nigel Smith,‘Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style’, in Thomas Corns (ed.), The Literature of Controversy: Polemical Strategy from Milton to Junius (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 39–66. Edwards’s ignorance was shared by his close associate and (perhaps) source William Prynne. In Fresh Discovery of Some . . . New Lights, 9, the ‘Marpriest’ works are attributed to Henry Robinson, the author of several pamphlets against Prynne and in favour of liberty of conscience. 33 34

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could be squeezed in to the last allotted sheet. The Postscript to Part One included details of a Particular Baptist manifesto not seen by Edwards until 13 February and information from Northamptonshire that arrived the following day, while the news of the king’s surrender to the Scots was in equally tiny type on the last two pages of Part Two.35 Gangraena’s part in the religious and political campaigns of 1645–6 is exhibited vividly in its very structure and appearance. At the same time, however, it echoed ancient preoccupations with error and schism and appealed to both the recent and the distant past. edwards amongst the heresio graphers Edwards repeatedly evoked the great heresy-hunters of Christian history as justification, inspiration, and consolation. In the Preface to Part One, Edwards explicitly compared himself to Augustine (along with Jerome, Athanasius, and St Paul) who ‘for preaching and writing against hereticks and schismaticks, especially Donatists, suffered many reproaches, and yet rejoyced, counting their sufferings a signe of their greater glory’.36 It is not surprising that his bitter and controversial work attracted different glosses on this claim. Marchamont Nedham, the prominent journalist with Independent sympathies, sneered, ‘I suppose Mr Edwards looks to rise as high in renown as the old heresiographers, Augustine and Epiphanius’.37 This section will explore the heresiological traditions and genres that all agreed were a vital context for Edwards’s works, looking at both earlier authorities and his own contemporaries. Influences and parallels in both form and content will emerge but comparisons will also support Edwards’s own claim that he was attempting something rather different from his contemporaries. Heresiological Traditions Within Christianity, indeed within any culture of any complexity, heresy and orthodoxy go together; truth is defined by reference to the errors it

36 Gangraena, i. 183–4; ii. 211–12. Ibid. i. sig. B2v. [Marchamont Nedham], Independencie No Schisme, Or, An Answer to a Scandalous Book, entituled, The Schismatick sifted: Written by Mr John Vicars Which may serve also for a reply to Master Edwards his Gangraena (London, 1646), BL E344 (24), Thomason date 16 July, 4. 35 37

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eschews. As Paul insisted to the Corinthians, ‘For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved, may be made manifest among you’.38 For Edwards, Paul was the pioneer and ultimate example, the first defender and definer of truth; his title and ‘gangrene’ image, ubiquitous in English and continental discussions of error, came from a much-discussed text: 2 Timothy 2: 17, believed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century to be a genuinely Pauline epistle.‘And their word will eat as doth a canker [margin or gangrene]: of whom is Hymeneus and Philetus’.39 Calvin, for example, produced a monumental series of sermons on Paul’s epistles to Timothy and Titus, glossing the ‘canker’ of verse 17 as what surgeons called,‘An eating soare . . . also named S Anthonies fire . . . when there is such a great inflammation in any part of the body that the sore goeth always on further and eateth not the flesh only and the sinews, but the bones . . . a fire that devoureth all’. Such plagues of error were spread by the ‘devils instruments’ and should be speedily destroyed: ‘the disease is deadly, unlesse it be seene to in tyme’.40 Edwards must have known of many uses of the same text by direct contemporaries, including several London ministers: Daniel Featley in 1624, Henry Burton in 1631 in his earlier, orthodox guise, Richard Vines in an April 1644 sermon to the city authorities, and Edwards’s friend James Cranford in a sermon against heresy preached to the same audience in February 1646. For Cranford, ‘and their words will eat as a gangrene’, was In the preface to his work against the ‘Spiritual Libertines’, Calvin quoted 1 Corinthians 11: 19: John Calvin: Treatises against the Anabaptists and against the Libertines, ed. Benjamin Wirt Farley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1982), 187. See also S. L. Greenslade, ‘Heresy and Schism in the Later Roman Empire’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Studies in Church History, vol. 9, Cambridge, 1972), 1–20, for the importance of Paul. 39 It is instructive for us, though unknown to Edwards, that modern biblical scholarship doubts the Pauline authenticity of these epistles. They may well be an appropriation of Paul’s authority by later writers: Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 574–5; Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, The Pastoral Letters (Cambridge Bible Commentary, Cambridge University Press, 1966), esp. 3–7, 10, 87. Hymeneus and Philetus were probably Gnostic teachers known to the authors of Timothy. The preceding and following verses, familiar to many readers, underlined the message:‘Study to shew thy self approved unto God, a workman, that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth’ (2: 15); ‘But shun profane and vain babblings; for they will increase unto more ungodliness’(2: 16);‘Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already, and overthrow the faith of some (2: 18).’ 40 Sermons of Mr John Calvin on the Epistles of S. Paule to Timothie and Titus, translated out of French into English by L.T. (London, 1579); 808–9, from the 13th sermon on the second epistle to Timothy, covering 2: 16–18. Calvin stressed it was false doctrine that was the canker. 38

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Paul’s last will and testament for the good of the church.41 The Bible, as Christopher Hill has stressed, was itself the product of a struggle between heresy and orthodoxy: ‘All heresy originates from the Bible, because the Bible is a compilation’.42 2 Timothy 2: 17 was inevitably a controversial citation: a broadside denounced Cranford’s reading as contrary to the whole intent of the New Testament, but derived instead from ‘those fathers of his persecuting spirit, the Greek and Latine Prelats’.43 John Goodwin contested Edwards’s appropriation of Paul, insisting that Paul burnt with grief and sorrow when Christians were offended; ‘Mr Edwards is so far from burning when weake Christians are offended, that he is offended, when they burne not.’44 Within Edwards’s version of the Pauline tradition, heresiology has been characteristic of periods when the Christian church was becoming established or was undergoing fundamental reform and readjustment in structure, doctrine, or its relationship with secular authority. The Cheshire ministers’‘Attestation’of 1648 had a version of this analysis, suggesting that 41 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 180–2, quoting Featley’s Second Parallel (1624), 209–13 where the gangrenous error was the view that additions to the faith could not be heresy; Henry Burton quoted in Stephen Foster, ‘New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630 to 1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective’, William and Mary Quarterly, 38 (1981), 638. Burton denounced Antinomianism as a heresy spreading like a canker or gangrene. Richard Vines, The Impostures of Seducing Teachers Discovered (London, 1644); James Cranford, Haereseomachia: Or the Mischief which Heresies do and The Means to Prevent it (London, 1646), a sermon in Pauls before the Mayor and Aldermen of the ‘famous’ City of London, 1. A continental example is found in Johannes Cloppenburg, Gangraena Theologicae Anabaptisticae published in Dutch in 1625 and Latin in 1645. This work was used by Edwards’s associates Prynne (The Sword of Christian Magistracie Supported (London, 1647), 153) and Baillie, Anabaptism. The true Fountain of Independency, Antinomy, Brownisme, Familisme (London, 1647), 179. Baillie thanked William Spang for sending him a copy of Cloppenburg from the continent in Nov. 1645: Letters of Baillie, ii. 327. Nasu, ‘Heresiography and the Idea of Heresy’, 95 discusses Cloppenburg’s influence. A provincial example is found in the preface to John Brinsley, The Doctrine and Practice of Paedobaptisme Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1645), BL E300 (14), Thomason date 10 Sept., which included ‘that spreading gangrene of Anabaptism’. 42 Hill, English Bible, 5–6. 43 The Clearing of Master Cranfords Text, 2 Tim II, 17 from that imputation of cruelty and ungospell bloodinesse (London, 1646), BL 669, fo. 10 (54), Thomason date 8 May 1646. This broadside attacked Lancelot Andrews, Joseph Hall, and James Ussher as persecutors, as well as ‘the evill spirit . . . in the mouth of Mr Edwards’. John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 961–85, shows how radicals could use Paul to justify religious liberty, while Old Testament precedents for the punishment of blasphemy and idolatry were moblized against toleration. Edwards used such arguments in his last work The Casting Down of the last and strongest hold of Satan or A Treatise Against Toleration (London, 1647), but they were less prominent in Gangraena. 44 Goodwin, Cretensis, 17.

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the devil always sought to ‘bestirre himselfe . . . to trouble, retard and reproach the true Religion’, and focused on three periods in particular. The establishing of Christianity itself had been obstructed by Simon Magus, the Gnostics, and the Adamites. During the Reformation a variety of individuals and groups such as David George, Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Anabaptists, and the Libertines had challenged Protestant orthodoxy. Finally in Elizabethan England, Martin Marprelate, ‘a foolish jester’, the Brownists, and phoney prophets such as Coppinger and Hacket had stood against the English reformation. The most clear-cut cleavages of the reformation, between Catholics and Protestants, which of course generated mutual accusations of heresy, were not mentioned. The most elaborate descriptions and classifications of heresy focused on those who were nominally on your side or in your camp, threatening to sabotage your dearest aims.45 Probably the greatest era for listing heresies and heretics, and for vigorous action against both pagans and ‘unorthodox’ Christians, was from the mid-fourth to the mid-fifth centuries. During this period Christianity was established as the official faith of the Roman Empire, papal power was consolidated in the west, and doctrine defined in the Great Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon.46 Likewise, the major figures of the sixteenthcentury reformation, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Bullinger, and Beza, expended much ink and energy attacking Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Libertines.47 Massachusetts in the 1630s, and Old England in the 1640s and 1650s, were intense if local instances of this phenomenon: a heresiographer like Edwards was spurred on by the sense that a golden opportunity to complete the reformation of the church was in danger of being wrecked by divisions amongst the godly and by the terrifying emergence of heretical ideas and schismatic sects. 45 An Attestation to the Testimony of our Reverend Brethren of London (London, 1648), usually attributed to John Ley, who signed in first place, 37–48. The county testimonies are discussed fully in Ch. 5, below. For John Mush, the chaplain and biographer of the Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow, Protestants were simply ‘the Heretics’: John Mush, ‘A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’, in John Morris, The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefather, 3 vols. (London, 1872–7), vol. iii, e.g., p. 433, while Thomas More’s first book of polemic in English was A Dyalogue Concerning Heresies (1st pub. 1529), written at the behest of Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of London. Like Gangraena this was written for the ‘common man’ to encourage him to avoid the ‘cunning malice’ of heretics: The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 439–41. 46 See e.g. J. Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils and Controversies, rev. W. H. C. Frend (London: SPCK, 1989), 150–4; Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber, 1967), 238–9, 333–5; Greenslade,‘Heresy and Schism’. 47 G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1962), 194–5, 593–8, 848–52.

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Oh many of us when we saw Sathan begin to fall like lightning in the throwing down of Images, Altars, and many other superstitions, in the breaking the power of the Hierarchie, in the putting out of many Idol scandalous Ministers, expected a blessed time . . . we made account the winter was past and the deluge of heresie, errour was over, and that the time of the singing of the Birds was come . . . but we now see by this Catalogue and Discovery, that the Devil hath recovered himself.

The Devil, he argued, had promoted liberty of conscience through his followers in times of reformation from the times of the Apostles (Peter 2: 19) and Augustine’s rivals, the Donatists, to the Anabaptists, Familists, Arminians, and Socinians of ‘latter ages’; the same tactics were now adopted ‘in our dayes by all the Sectaries’.48 Thus Edwards, like many of his contemporaries, evoked many of the names and cited the writings of the towering figures of the fourth and fifth centuries, headed by Augustine, as well as the mainstream leaders of the reformation.49 The title page of Part One of Gangraena quoted Luther, and Edwards’s Preface appealed to a long list of orthodox writers: Paul, Athanasius, Augustine, and Jerome amongst the early fathers; Luther and Zwingli against the Anabaptists and Calvin against ‘Anabaptists, Libertines, Servetus, Valentinus Gentilis, Stancarus’ from the sixteenth century.50 Edwards’s text included further references to Athanasius, a staunch defender of the Catholic doctrine of the Council of Nicaea against Arianism, to Jerome, and to Irenaeus and Epiphanius, authors of influential heresiographies.51 48 Michael Winship,‘ “The most glorious church in the world”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000); Gangraena, i. 127 [recte 133], 123. 49 One era regarded by historians as important in the development of a persecuting church was, of course, missing. For men like Edwards the attempts by the medieval Catholic church to eliminate heresy amounted to antichristian persecution of the true church in waiting. These heretics had been uneasily domesticated within reformed traditions as good Protestants. Edwards’s heritage was one of justified persecution of heretics, schismatics, and blasphemers. Euan Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps 1480–1580 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 199–200, 237–50, includes a useful discussion of Protestant ambiguity over earlier unorthodoxy. For a pioneering analysis of later 17th-cent. arguments for persecution based on Augustine: Mark Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathon I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (eds.), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 331–68. 50 Gangraena, i. Preface, sig. B2v–B3v. For Francis Stancaro, an unorthodox but never formally heretical Italian evangelist, active in Poland in the 1550s, and John Valentine Gentile, an Italian associate of Servetus in Geneva, see Williams, Radical Reformation, 570–2, 636–7, 655–62. 51 Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 10–13, 41, 354–61, 385–6, for Athanasius; his Historia Arianorum was written c.358; Gangraena, iii. 65 evokes his example. For Jerome and Irenaeus,

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Augustine and Theodoret, however, were the fathers to whom he most frequently appealed. Edwards used Augustine’s writings against the Donatists, his rivals amongst African Christians, and also De Haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum, one of Augustine’s last books. Edwards, like most of his contemporaries consulted this in the version produced by the French Calvinist Lambert Daneau, D Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi liber De Haerisibus ad Quodvultdeum (Geneva, 1578).52 Less conventional was Edwards’s obvious admiration for Theodoret, whose church histories were widely used by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, but whose Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium was more rarely cited. Although Edwards’s Gangraena, as we shall see, was not modelled on Theodoret’s structure, the notion of a compendium of stories or fables about sectaries seems to have been an important influence.53 Gangraena, ii. 197; Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 192–3, 389. Jerome’s great disputes were with Origen whom he regarded as a blasphemer. Irenaeus of Lyons (c.130–200) wrote a work usually entitled ‘Five Books Against Heresies’. For Epiphanius, Gangraena, i. 44; The Panarion of Epiphanis of Salamis, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E. J. Brill, 2 vols., 1987, 1992). Epiphanius, a convert from Judaism and an intemperate defender of orthodoxy, wrote this influential heresiography in the 370s. 52 For references to Augustine’s anti-Donatist writings see Gangraena, i. 43–5, 55, 197–8; iii. Preface (sig. *v), 295; for his work on ‘Heresies’, iii. 2, 11, 258–60. This was written about 428, in response to a request from Quodvultus, a deacon of Carthage, for a brief account of heresies that would help less learned clergy. An introduction to Augustine’s influential writings against Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagius can be found in Brown, Augustine of Hippo. See also Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 239; Augustine, Letters, Augustine’s works vol. 13 (New York: Fathers of the Church, vol. 52, 1956), 112–15, for the correspondence with Quodvultus. Daneau, an associate of Beza and a prolific author whose works on witchcraft were translated into English, is briefly discussed in Olivier Fatio,‘Lambert Daneau’, in Jill Raitt (ed.), Shapers of Religious Tradition in Germany, Switzerland and Poland, 1500–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 105–19. Editions of Epiphanius’ work on heresy were published in Greek in 1544, in Latin in 1544 and 1545. Works on heresy by Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Philastrius were also available to Edwards and his contemporaries in 16th-cent. editions. Edwards mentioned Tertullian approvingly, Gangraena, iii. 74; Philastrius was included in Cranford’s imprimatur to Part Two. See also Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 2 vols., 1997). 53 For references to Theodoret’s church histories, Gangraena, i. 55, 131–2, 157; iii. 65; to the Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium, i. 11, 17, 167; iii. 2. For the works of Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus (c.393–460) see Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 393; A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser. iii (1969 repr.), includes his historical writings, and an outline of Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium; an English translation of this is available in Glenn Melvin Cope, ‘An Analysis of the Heresiological Method of Theodoret of Cyrus in the “Haereticarum fabularum compendium” ’, Ph.D. thesis (Catholic University of America, 1990). For an example of the use of his church histories see Patrick Collinson, ‘If Constantine, then also Theodosius, St Ambrose and the Integrity of the Elizabethan Ecclesia Anglicana’, in his Godly People, Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983). Theodoret rarely features among citations by

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Rather than constructing lists of heresies, reformation writers more characteristically attacked what they at least regarded as specific, coherent groups. Edwards frequently referred to Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s writings and disputations against the Anabaptists.54 He invoked the authority of Beza and recommended recent accounts of errors, such as Konrad Schlusselburg’s (1543–1619) work, Haereticorum Catalogus (Frankfurt, 13 vols. in 5, 1599–1611) (perhaps another inspiration for Edwards’s title) or the History of Anabaptism by the Leyden professor Frederick Spanheim (1600–48) which clearly influenced Gangraena. Lambert Daneau had added modern heresies to his translation of Augustine and had also produced in Elenchi Haereticorum (1573) a handbook for defining and refuting heresy, where scriptural texts justifying ‘truth’ were juxtaposed with accounts of ancient ‘errors’. This work too was used by Edwards.55 Luther, with whom he was apparently particularly identified, was the reformation authority cited most often by Edwards. A letter in praise of Gangraena, reprinted by its grateful subject, claimed, ‘Surely, he spake Prophetically that usually cald him in Cambridge young Luther’.56 Calvin Edwards’s contemporaries, with the exception of Cranford: Pagitt referred to Paul, Augustine, and Epiphanius, Heresiography, sig. A1, B1–2; Prynne cited Irenaeus, Augustine, Epiphanius, and Basil: William Prynne, A Full Reply to certaine briefe Observations (London, 1644); Prynne, Sword of Christian Magistracy, 22, 39; the title page of Cranford, Haereseomachia, quoted Athanasius, Theodoret, and Augustine’s writings against the Donatist Petilian; John Brinsley, A Looking Glasse for Good Women (London, 1645), 34–5, quoted Epiphanius on the dangers of women’s public preaching. Rutherford drew on Augustine’s anti-Donatist writings: Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 223. The London Presbyterian ministers’ A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ And to the Solemn League and Covenant, As Also Against the Errours, Heresies and Blasphemies of these Times, and the Toleration of them (London, 1648), sig. B2r, used a range of church historians and fathers, Eusebius, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Augustine as well as more recent chronologies such as Alsted’s whose Catalogue continued to 1628. The Testimony will be discussed fully in Ch. 5, below. 54 For Zwingli, Gangraena, i. Preface, 158, 172, 178; iii. 177. For Bullinger, i. 158, 176; iii. Preface. Williams, Radical Reformation, 194–5, 593–7. 55 Gangraena, ii. 141, for Schlusselburg, recommended for his account of the ‘sect’ of Osiandrists, who followed Andreas Osiander’s errors on justification; iii. 260, 271, for Spanheim. Frederick Spanheim, Diatribe historica de origine, progressu, sectis et nominibus Anabaptistisam (Franeker, 1645), was the version used by Edwards; an English trans. was published by John Bellamy later in 1646 as Englands Warning by Germanies Woe, or An historicall narration of the Originall, Progresse, Tenets, Names and Severall Sects of the Anabaptists in Germany and the Low Countries (London 1646), BL E362 (28), Thomason date 23 Nov. Spanheim, like Edwards, appealed to the authority of Epiphanius and Augustine. For Daneau, Gangraena, iii. Preface, 259–60, 271–2. 56 Gangraena, iii. 77 is quoted; i. 9, 12–13, 137, 155, 158; ii. 66; iii. Preface, 259–60, for examples of other references. Edwards’s most frequent reference to Luther’s writings was his ‘Letter to George Spalatin’, Mar. 1525 where he warned of the rise of radical groups. For this see Williams, Radical Reformation, 351–2.

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was mentioned less frequently but his Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins que se nomment spirituelz (1545) was an important example for Edwards.57 Of course there are dangers in taking heresiology, whether by Augustine or Thomas Edwards, as an accurate guide to what it denounces. Most obvious is an alarmist and often self-serving exaggeration; the more horrifying and widespread the errors, the more necessary is it for their orthodox opponents to be supported. The boundary between truth and error is fixed and rigorously policed in opposition to those who would minimize error and seek a common ground. Augustine’s urgent campaign to have Pelagius condemned as a heretic was driven by the desire of many other bishops to be reassured of his orthodoxy. Edwards’s attitude towards Independents or even Baptists has similar roots. In both cases the hectoring tone derives precisely from doubts about the intentions of the authorities. The attribution of labels also defines and excludes groups in a half-conscious attempt to evade the ways in which contradictions or tendencies in the ‘orthodox’ position have themselves given rise to error, and to avoid the open admission that many of those who hold such errors are men with whom one is familiar. Attacks on ‘Familists’ or ‘Antinomians’ as a distinct, heretical group blurred recognition of the degree to which an Antinomian stress on free grace was prompted by disquiet with legalist tendencies within ‘orthodox’ Calvinism. Heretics are ‘out there’—they are not brethren whose complicated ideas overlap with your own.58 Furthermore the often diffuse doctrines of the unorthodox become systematized through the efforts of their opponents. As Peter Brown has suggested, it was Augustine rather than Pelagius who created ‘Pelagianism’: ‘Pelagianism, as we know it, that consistent body of ideas of momentous consequences, had come into existence, but in the mind of Augustine, not of Pelagius’.59 Frequently heresiologists assumed that loosely connected ideas or even the teaching of one influential man had to be associated with a ‘sect’—an organized group of people. Hence Epiphanius described a sect of ‘Origenists’ although there is no evidence at all that For references to Calvin, Gangraena, i. 154, 158, 178–9; ii. Preface; iii. Preface, 90–2. W. de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide, trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Grand Rapids and Leicester: Baker Books, 1993), 166–71; John Calvin: Treatises against the Anabaptists and Against the Libertines, ed. Farley. Only the work on Anabaptists was available in English in the 17th-cent. 58 Foster, ‘New England and the Challenge of Heresy’; Peter Lake and David Como, ‘ “Orthodoxy” and its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground” ’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), esp. 57. 59 Brown, Augustine, 340–61; Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 234, for Pelagius. 57

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Origen had an organized following.60 The Greek word from which the term heresy is developed can mean a body of thought or a system of ideas, but in English versions of the Bible it was rendered as sect, as in the Jews’ denunciation of Paul as a ‘mover of sedition’, and a ‘ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes’.61 The labelling of the few followers of John Etherington as a sect of ‘Etheringtonians’ from the 1620s, and Colin Davis’s description of the construction of a sect of ‘Ranters’ in the early 1650s in the writings of their opponents are examples of this characteristic slippage.62 Anti-heretical writings were naturally derivative; many authors sought to provide a comprehensive history of heresy from the earliest times, beginning usually with Simon Magus, the sorcerer of Samaria, ‘a great seducer of the people’ who offered the Apostles money for the gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts 8). Such histories depended on the work of earlier writers as sources and models. Specific errors and heretical groups, characteristic arguments, stories, images, and methods of presentation appeared again and again. In his Panarion, Epiphanius cited earlier writings such as those by Irenaeus (in particular), Hippolytus, and Eusebius, while summaries of Epiphanius (although apparently not the whole work) were used by Augustine. Theodoret rarely cited his predecessors directly and did not mention Epiphanius at all, perhaps because he was sympathetic towards Origen, defined by Epiphanius as a heretic. There are clear echoes of the Panarion in his ‘Compendium’, however, along with whole sections based clearly on Irenaeus.63 One well-documented theme which echoed down the ages was the association of radical religious enthusiasm with sexual deviance—extreme asceticism, as well as overindulgence. Theodoret’s descriptions of ‘Adamite’ sexual orgies influenced Calvin’s condemnation of the spiritual libertines, while Calvin’s account influenced Rutherford’s account of antinomianism. The comparisons with earlier ages were also found in cheap print genres such as the early 1640s anti-sectarian tracts and the anti-Ranter pamphlets of the 1650s.64

60

Panarion of Epiphanius, i, p. xviii. King James Bible: Acts 24: 5: the marginal note to 1 Corinthians 11: 19 had sects as an alternative to heresies. 62 Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 2; Davis, Fear, Myth and History. 63 Panarion of Epiphanius, vol. i, pp. xvii, xix–xx; Cope, ‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret of Cyrus’, 71–2, for the passages on the Nicolaitians taken from Irenaeus. Augustine, De Haeresibus Ad Quodvultdeum, consulted in Opera Omnia, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Paris, 1837), also follows this pattern closely. 64 James G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (1987; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82–5; John Taylor [?], The Brownists Conventi61

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Problems of interpretation intensify then as heresiology becomes a tradition wherein writers accept conventional associations between doctrines, organizations, and behaviour, or locate their contemporary evidence within existing categories, some old, such as Pelagians or Donatists, some semi-mythical such as Adamites; others, Familists, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Arminians, or Socinians, more recent. Attaching an existing, historically validated label is a particularly effective means of defining contemporary error as absolute and external, asserting the otherness of tendencies often close to home. A framework taken over from earlier writers was inevitably a straitjacket distorting a complex variety of unorthodox ideas—so much so that one scholar of medieval heresy hunting has concluded that ‘The relationship between these two histories, logically and in fact quite distinct from one another, of heresy and the apprehension of heresy, is casual, fluctuating and often non-existent’.65 But this is surely to be too sceptical, especially for England in the 1640s, where there was a fierce, public struggle over the nature and parameters of orthodoxy. The recognition that heresiological accounts of error and schism are based on distinct generic models should not imply their categories had no relationship to some independent ‘reality’. In the first place, the ‘timelessness’ of labels or definitions of error derives as much from perennial tensions within Christianity as from the distorting mirror of heresiology. The troubling question of how to explain evil; the balance between the authority of clerical specialists and the initiatives of lay people, or between a commitment to defined doctrine and the possibility of direct inspiration; the degree to which Christians should compromise with the failings of fallen humanity or with the demands of secular government: all these stimulated the profound reflections of Augustine, but all arose again in many times and places. The smears that reformation radicals or seventeenth-century sectaries were Pelagians, Arians, or Donatists thus came to some extent from their common concerns: Arianism implied an unhealthy interest in the difficult mystery of the Trinity and the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ; Pelagianism a stress on the role of human effort or understanding rather than God’s cle (London, 1641), 2; Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 205–6. For ancient accounts of the unnatural chastity of Origen’s followers or the orgies of Gnostics and Manichees, see Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 199–200, 325–6; Panarion of Epiphanius, ii. 134; i. 87. 65 R. I. Moore, ‘Literacy and the Making of Heresy, c.1000–c.1150’, in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy 1000–1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 23, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 19–37, at 21.

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divine decrees in the attainment of salvation. Arminius was thus for many a new Pelagius. The label of ‘Donatist’, derived from Augustine’s rivals in Africa, was applied frequently to Independents, to indicate an insistence on the church as a select, pure ‘sect-type’ organization rather than as an inclusive body. More generally the tags of libertine or anabaptist conjured up the indiscriminate excesses of reformation radicals. The labelling was not fair or accurate in either its ancient or its modern forms—the original Donatists believed they were the true church rather than a separatist sect, while London Baptists of the 1640s bore little relationship to Munster radicals, but the process was far from random or incoherent. Furthermore these frameworks inherited from the past had a ‘real’ impact. They were distorting mirrors within which contemporary events were seen but these contemporary events were not thereby illusory.66 In some cases ancient heresies offered a cultural resource for those who were unorthodox, although as Christopher Hill has stressed, most seventeenthcentury radicals developed their ideas independently of Arius or Pelagius.67 For alarmed orthodox commentators, heresiological models were not necessarily adopted wholesale, but offered a context for interpreting what they saw happening around them. William Prynne insisted that religious liberty would lead to the ‘reviving of all old, the spreading of all new Heresies, Errors, Schismes, Sects and opinions whatsoever’.68 Lessons from the past intensified anxiety about how errors undermined true religion, particularly when the orthodox were complacent and secular authorities stood aloof. In attempting his Catalogue of contemporary error, Edwards could thus draw on a variety of legitimation, ancient and more recent. Citation provides, as Diane Purkiss has written,‘an authenticating discourse’ which validates a position ‘by aligning it with what is already apparent’.69 Furthermore identification with revered figures of the past enabled Edwards and his associates to construct for themselves a respected role out of the rather controversial endeavour of attacking other Protestants. Edwards wrote himself as a heresiographer in the process of writing a heresiography, presenting his own life as a self-sacrificing defender of truth in the face of enormous odds as part of the justification for his enterprise. Cf. Lake and Sharpe,‘Introduction’, in Culture and Politics, 16. Hill, English Bible, 6. See Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 108. 68 Prynne, A Full Reply to certaine briefe Observations. 69 Diane Purkiss, ‘Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate’, in Clare Brant and Purkiss (eds.), Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1760 (London: Routledge, 1992), 72. 66 67

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The embattled vulnerability of the ‘persecutor’ is revealed in Gangraena’s repeated passages of self-righteous and beleaguered pessimism. Edwards had ‘suffered and lost much’ in his war against sectaries, but ‘I value not my name, nor my life, if compared to the truth of Christ, but shall take pleasure in reproaches, necessities, sufferings in such a time as this is, when few are valiant for the truth; no gold shall bribe me, nor preferments take me off; no lack of supplies shall dishearten me.’70 Such traits seem perennial characteristics of the heresiographical personality. Joad Raymond’s summing-up of Edwards as a man who ‘saw himself not as a representative of a prevailing orthodoxy, but as a victim, preaching from the peripheries in an age of darkness’, could be applied almost exactly to Augustine, while Edwards’s claims that ‘hazards and dangers . . . losse of friends’ were his rewards for opposing error echo Theodoret’s letter of protest, after the loss of his bishopric: ‘I have done pastoral duty in eight hundred churches . . . in them, through your prayers, not even one tare is left, and our flock is delivered from all heresy and error . . . After all this sweat and toil I have been condemned without a trial’.71 We can contrast this paranoia with the relaxed acceptance of divergent views by those who supported liberty of conscience. In 1641 the radical parliamentarian peer Lord Brooke acknowledged that since the coming of Christianity there had been ‘no one century free from Hereticks’. So in the English church, ‘Divisions, Sects, Schisms and Heresies must come’. Brooke’s response was to propose toleration as practised by the United Provinces rather than ‘an Unity of Darknesse and Ignorance, so that the Remedy proves worse than the Disease’.72 Edwards’s fears for the fundamentals of faith were completely absent in Brooke, John Goodwin, or Hugh Peter. In a confident, throwaway remark in a sermon to MPs and the city in April 1646, Peter was reassuring: ‘I need not tell this Assembly, that every where the greater party is the Orthodoxall, and the lesser the Hereticks’.73 We are so automatically sympathetic to the religious radicals attacked by Edwards that it requires some imaginative strain to explore the stresses 70

Gangraena, iii, sig. [ ]r; i, sig. B4r–v. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 273; Gangraena, iii, sig. [ ]r; Cope, ‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret’, 47–8. 72 Robert Greville, Discourse Opening the Nature of that Episcopacie (London, 1641), quoted from Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, ii. 129–30, 135. 73 Hugh Peter, Gods Doings and Mans Duty (London, 1646), 43. For Goodwin and this point in general see Coffey,‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited’. 71

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involved in policing orthodoxy. Why was it hard to be a ‘persecutor’ in the 1640s? In the first place, when Laudians dominated the church in the 1630s, Presbyterians like Edwards had been the victims of persecution. A tract written by the very cautious Puritan Sir Symonds D’Ewes as a response to Bishop Matthew Wren’s harsh regime in East Anglia read as a demand for liberty of conscience when published under radical sponsorship some eight years later.74 It began, ‘It is the undoubted mark or brand of the Church Antichristian and Malignant, to persecute; of the Church Christian Orthodox and truly Catholike, to be persecuted’, for the truth flourished through God’s help, and often without force. Idolatry and superstition—such as the altars of the 1630s—relied on persecution for success.An anti-Presbyterian tract of 1647 noted that Lutherans, Hussites, and Waldensians had all been denounced as heretics in their day, and argued that Presbyterians were the real schismatics and heretics. For another hostile pamphleteer, Edwards’s writings revealed that the Marian persecutor Bishop ‘Bonner himselfe is risen from the dead’. In response to such attacks, Edwards repeatedly stressed both his own difficulties in the 1630s and the conformity of many Independents, seeking thereby to harness the charisma of suffering to the Presbyterian position, and to present religious orthodoxy as an absolute truth separable from the shifts of power in ecclesiastical structures.75 Secondly, as we have suggested earlier, religious disputes have an intimacy that stark heresiological categories seek to evade.Whether in fourthcentury Africa, sixteenth-century Geneva, or the London of the 1630s and 1640s, the heretic ‘other’ is someone you know; the error is something you have worried about. This was an early modern commonplace, despite the 74 Simonds D’Ewes, The primitive practise for preserving the truth (London, 1645), BL E290 (9), Thomason date 28 June 1645, 1. This copy includes manuscript corrections and may be the author’s/publisher’s proof copy. Besides the imprint of the radical bookseller Henry Overton this tract carried an imprimatur by the Independent licenser John Bachelor who praised it as ‘eminently usefull for common information against persecution meerly for conscience sake’. I do not know how D’Ewes came to allow his work to be appropriated by radicals. For some discussion see McGee,‘Francis Rous’. D’Ewes did acknowledge that Papists and Anabaptists could be dealt with by force—but this was because they were political rebels (54–7). 75 [John Ellyson], Hereticks, sectaries and schismaticks, discovered to be the Antichrist yet remaining (London, 1647), 6–7, 25; A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards, 7. For Edwards’s strictures on the conformity of ‘respectable’ Independents see Ch. 1, above, and further below. He also laboured the conformity of the more radical John Saltmarsh, who ‘made verses to incense the King to Warre against the Scots [in 1639–40]’, and ‘went many miles to an Archdeacon’ to take the controversial oath imposed at the 1640 Convocation, ‘upon his knees’: Gangraena, iii. 114.

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attempts of heresiologists at classification and exclusion.76 It was implicitly acknowledged by Edwards that errors had arisen within the Puritan community: If some of those godly Ministers who were famous in their time, should rise out of their graves and come now among us, as Mr Perkins, Greenham, Hildersham, Dr Preston, Dr Sibs etc, they would wonder to see things come to this passe in England, and to meet with such Books for Toleration of all religions, and Books in defence of Arminian, Antinomian Errors; what would they thinke when they should meet with such Ministers and Christians whom they judged godly and sound, now to plead for a Liberty of all consciences, there to meet with one of their acquaintance turned Anabaptist, another turned Seeker, a third Familist, a fourth Anti-scripturist.77

This in effect connects error with the mainstream Puritan tradition, and grants that many sectaries were amongst the old ‘acquaintance’ of the orthodox. We must remember Edwards’s warm relationships in the 1630s with Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge, and John Archer. Edwards’s ally and neighbour, the Christ’s Hospital schoolmaster and writer John Vicars, had worked closely with Hugh Peter in the 1620s in the ‘feoffees for Impropriation’, the Puritan campaign to support a preaching ministry; while the Presbyterian bookseller John Bellamy had been a member of the influential semi-separatist church founded by Henry Jacob.78 Edwards, so far as we know, had no personal history of doctrinal unorthodoxy, but many heresiographers had, as Thomas Hill, a Northamptonshire representative of the Westminster Assembly, noted in a sermon to the city of London authorities. Using the examples of Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, and Jerome, Hill showed that many of the ‘greatest lights’ had had a ‘mixture of darknesse’. Theodoret is an even clearer example who lost his bishopric for an extended period because of his unorthodoxy on the nature of Christ; the major aim indeed of his Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium may have been to demonstrate his own orthodoxy. Those more hostile to the

76 See e.g. Lysander to Hermia, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s dream, Act II, Scene ii: ‘For, as a surfeit of the sweetest things | The deepest loathing to the stomach brings; | Or, as the heresies that men do leave | Are hated most of those they did deceive: | So thou, my surfeit and my heresy, | Of all be hated, but the most of me!’ 77 Gangraena, i. 145. 78 Isabel M. Calder, Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, 1625–33 (London: SPCK, for the Church Historical Society, 1957), pp. xii, 145; Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 9–10, reports an angry encounter between the two old friends. John Bellamy, A Justifcation of the City Remonstrance (London, 1646), 20–1; in later years Bellamy insisted that Jacob’s congregation was not separatist.

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Presbyterian enterprise made much of the fathers’ambiguous position: although many were ‘lights in their darke generation’, wrote one, they were on many issues,‘as palpably hereticall, as any of your damnable sectaries’.79 Certainly, several of the ‘errors’on justification condemned by Edwards, had embarrassingly close connections to more or less orthodox Calvinism, as critics such as John Goodwin delighted in pointing out. Goodwin’s own pre-Arminian position that it was faith rather than Christ’s righteousness that was imputed to mankind in the process of justification was connected by Edwards (as well as Goodwin) to the views of an older London minister Anthony Wotton that had divided city Puritanism thirty years earlier. Edwards’s sympathies were clearly with Wotton’s accuser George Walker (with whom he must have been acquainted), a man who shared his inclination to maximize rather than underplay division, but in fact the London Puritan ‘establishment’ had not supported Walker’s contention that Wotton was a heretic.80 Antinomianism, likewise, could not be separated clearly from Calvinism, for it was both a challenge to and a development from the Calvinist doctrine of absolute predestination. Antinomians took an insistence on the power of God’s grace to the extreme conclusion that the moral law was of no relevance to justified Christians. Antinomianism was a reaction against ‘formalist’ tendencies in Calvinism which prompted an introspective and obsessive search for signs of God’s grace in the Christian’s experience. Samuel Rutherford, the author of a sustained attack on ‘Antinomianism’ and ‘Familism’, was vulnerable himself to charges of Antinomianism because of his extreme voluntarist position that God could do anything he liked, and to smears as a schismatic because of his practice as a conventicler. More generally, it is clear that the earlier semiformal, voluntary meetings of godly laity and ministers for mutual sup79 Thomas Hill, The Good Old Way Gods Way (London, 1644), 13. For Augustine’s early association with the Manichees and his return to an almost Manichean stress on evil and suffering when faced with the perfectionism of Pelagius: Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 46–7, 369–70, 393. For Theodoret, see Cope, ‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret’, 44–51; A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards, 6. 80 For a brilliant account of the Wotton–Walker dispute see Lake and Como, ‘ “Orthodoxy” and its Discontents’. The dispute only came to the notice of a broader audience after 1641 when Walker inaugurated a long pamphlet dispute, motivated by a conviction that John Goodwin had revived Wotton’s positions. For passages in Gangraena, where Edwards linked Goodwin and Wotton, see i. 56–8; ii. 108. A further connection was provided by another city minister, Henry Roborough who had been much involved in intra-Puritan disputes before the civil war, and was an informant of Edwards: see Gangraena, ii. 170. Walker was lecturer in St Helens, Bishopsgate where Edwards had a house, and, of course, both men were involved in the collective activities of London ministers in the 1640s.

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port and religious debate (such as Edwards had experienced in Cambridge) contributed to the growth of Independent and separatist congregations after 1640.81 Edwards’s project—which involved, amongst other things, attacking old acquaintances—was thus deeply controversial. Reinforcement for both author and book came not only from ancient and reformation precedents, but also from the security of a collective contemporary campaign. In a summary of all his writings the London Presbyterian artisan Nehemiah Wallington described the thirty-seventh of his fifty or so notebooks: ‘A black cover book I did begin to write against the errors of these times, but because there were so many that hath done it far better than I can, I did give it over, 1649’. Nasu’s comprehensive analysis of the religious publications of the 1640s demonstrates that 1646–8 were the peak years for books on heresy.82 Edwards’s friend, the Scots minister and representative in London, Robert Baillie, worked energetically for a printed campaign against error, encouraging continental divines to publish as well as Edwards himself.83 The struggle against error was a favourite theme of printed sermons, many originally preached on fast days or other high profile occasions. In April 1644, a traditional series of Easter week sermons before the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council included prominent members of the Assembly, Richard Vines and Thomas Hill, on the dangers, in Hill’s words, of the ‘thick mists of strange Doctrines’, spreading in the city, singling out Antinomianism, Arminianism, Anabaptism, and scorn of the ministry, for special condemnation.84 In the summer of 1645, Baillie denounced supposed ‘new lights’ as ‘the very same dead karcases of old Heresies and Schismes’ in a sermon before the Lords.85 On 25 February 1646, a fast day, and the day before Thomason noted the receipt of Gangraena, Part One,William Jenkyn, the staunchly Presbyterian minister 81 Lake and Como, ‘Orthodoxy and its Discontents’, 57; Winship, ‘ “The most glorious church in the world” ’; Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 271; Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 129–34, 223; and esp. David Como, ‘Puritans and Heretics: The Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Early Stuart England’, Ph.D. thesis (Princeton, 1999), conclusion. I am most grateful to Dr Como for sending me a copy of his thesis. 82 Seaver, Wallington’s World, 201; Nasu,‘Heresiography and the “Idea” of heresy’, 56–7. 83 Baillie hoped that Forbes (who had replied to the Apologeticall Narration) could be persuaded to ‘handle Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, the Erastian, and the rest of the modern sects’ and that the eminent divines Vossius, Spanheim, and Apollonius would also concentrate their energies on the sects. Letters of Baillie, ii. 327, 366, 371; see also Pearl, ‘Scotch Fifth Columnists’. 84 Vines, Impostures of Seducing Teachers; Thomas Hill, The Good Old Way, Preface. 85 Robert Baillie, Errours and Induration, are the Great Sins and the Great Judgements of the Time (London, 1645), preached before the House of Lords, 30 July 1645, sig. A2v.

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at Christ Church, where Edwards preached his lecture, and one of Warwickshire’s representatives in the Assembly, Anthony Burgess, urged parliament to hasten godly reformation. Jenkyn lamented that ‘every wretched sectary’ was permitted to traduce ‘our dear brethren of Scotland’, while Burgess called for a learned ministry to ‘stop the infection and contagion of heresies’.86 Cranford’s Haereseomachia, an attack on ‘toleration’ by Matthew Newcomen, and sermons by Simeon Ashe and Edmund Calamy urging the renewal of the Solemn League and Covenant were other high-profile anti-sectarian sermons in city pulpits around the time of the publication of Part One of Gangraena.87 Provincial ministers preached on similar themes, amongst them two men who shared Edwards’s publisher, the bookseller Ralph Smith. In 1645, Richard Bifield denounced Antinomians, Anti-Sabbatarians, Anabaptists, and Arminians, a litany similar to Edwards’s. Like Edwards, also, Bifield condemned those who would introduce ‘a Toleration of all sorts of religions, as all sorts of Opinions in Religion, under the name of liberty of Conscience’. The Yarmouth minister John Brinsley, one of Edwards’s informants on local religious disorder, attacked Anabaptism and separatism in repeated sermons from 1643 to 1646.88 Gangraena took its place also amongst an enormous polemical literature against specific sects and doctrines, particularly Independents, Baptists, and Antinomianism. Some of this material derived from formal disputations such as that the veteran moderate Puritan Daniel Featley had 86 William Jenkyn Reformations Remora, or, temporizing the stop of Building the Temple, preached to the Lords (London, 1646), 32–3; Burgess, Anthony, Publick affections, pressed in a sermon (London, 1646); preached to the Commons on the monthly fast, 25 Feb. 1645–6, 15–16. On the same day Thomas Goodwin preached in very different terms that the ‘saints’ were the true interest of the kingdom: The great Interest of States and Kingdoms (London, 1646). 87 Matthew Newcomen, The Duty of Such as Would Walke Worthy of the Gospel. To endeavour Union not Division, nor Toleration (London, 1646), preached at Paul’s, 8 Feb. 1646; Simeon Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed and Covenant Keeping Perswaded (London, 1646); and Edmund Calamy, The Great Danger of Covenant-refusing and Covenant-breaking (London, 1646), preached on 14 Jan. 88 Richard Bifield, Temple-Defilers defiled, wherein a true Visible Church of Christ is described and the evils appertaining to Schisme, Anabaptisme and Libertinisme discovered (London, 1645), 20–8; two sermons preached at Kingston upon Thames, 20 and 27 Feb., and dated by Thomason 22 Apr. 1645. John Brinsley, The Doctrine and Practice of Paedobaptisme Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1645); Brinsley, A Looking Glasse for Good Women (London, 1645), was directed against those of the ‘weaker sex’ tempted by the ‘refined error of Separation’, and drew extensively on the Epistles to Timothy. Sermons of 1643 against ‘the present Epidemicall Distempers of the Times’ were published by Brinsley in 1647 as Standstill, or a Bridle for the Times (London, 1647).

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with the Baptists.89 Others formed part of the increasingly complex interlocking printed debates already mentioned in Chapter 1, in which authors like Vicars, Prynne, and Bastwick endorsed Antapologia and denounced Independents and sectaries. In this camp also was Josiah Ricraft, another London author, whose printed debate with the Baptist William Kiffin, a significant target in Gangraena, came out in September 1645.90 ‘Antinomianism’ was a central concern of more orthodox Calvinists in both Massachusetts and old England. Edwards and Ephraim Pagitt both drew frequently on the account of the troubles in Massachusetts published in the name of Thomas Weld, but largely written by John Winthrop. Licensed by Cranford and one of the rare non-Presbyterian works sold by Ralph Smith, this book was something of an own goal for the Independents, for it gave men like Edwards wonderful ammunition for their argument that a congregational church structure led inevitably to error and anarchy, while at the same time alarming radicals like William Walwyn or Roger Williams with its revelation of the clear limits to religious liberty in New England.91 For ‘old English’Antinomianism both Pagitt and Edwards drew mostly on Thomas Gataker’s Gods Eye on his Israel as we shall see below.92

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Daniel Featley, The dippers dipt. Or, the Anabaptists duck’d and plung’d over head and eares at a disputation in Southwark (London, 1645). See Hughes, ‘Meanings of Religious Polemic’, for a discussion of disputations. 90 Josiah Ricraft, A Looking Glasse for the Anabaptists (London, 1645), quoted from and answered William Kiffin, A briefe Remonstrance of the Reasons of those people called Anabaptists for their Separation (London, 1645). 91 Thomas Weld, Antinomians and Familists Condemned (London, 1644), printed in David D. Hall (ed.), The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1990). Thomas Hooker believed Baillie had encouraged Weld to publish this ‘illtimed and ill-advised’ work: R. P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peter 1598–1660 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 241. It was licensed by Cranford, and entered by Smith with the Stationers’ Company in Jan. 1644, as ‘A Catalogue of such erroneous opinions as were found to have been brought into New England, as they were condemned by an Assembly of Churches in New Towne, together with the proceedings of the generall Cort holden there ag Mr Wheelwright & other seditious psons’: A Transcript of the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640–1708, i (London, 1913), 93. For its use by Pagitt: Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or a description of the Heretickes and Sectaries of these latter times (London, 1645), 96–101. All my quotations, unless stated otherwise, are from the 1st edn. of Pagitt in Thomason, BL E282 (5), date 8 May 1645. 92 Gataker, Thomas, God’s Eye on his Israel (London, 1645), but dated by Thomason 31 Dec. 1644, BL E22 (22). Edwards did not quote from other works denouncing Antinomianism such as John Sedgwick, Antinomianism anatomized. Or a glasse for the lawlesse (London, 1643) and Stephen Geree, The doctrine of antinomianisme confuted (London, 1644). A later work by Rutherford, A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist, pub. Nov. 1648, dealt with Familism and Antinomianism: Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 129–30.

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Prynne’s more general not to say promiscuous assaults on Independents and other religious radicals were important sources and models for Gangraena. Two in particular should be mentioned. Truth Triumphing over Falshood, in origin a refutation of John Goodwin’s Innocencies Triumph, expanded into an attack on ‘all Anti-Monarchicall, AntiParliamentall, Anti-Synodicall, and Anarchicall Paradoxes of Papists, Prelates, Anabaptists, Arminians, Socinians, Brownists or Independents’. The section ‘Containing Certain Corollaries from the premised Sections against the Impugners of Parliament and Princes Legislative Power and Authorising matters of Church government’ is most likely the inspiration for similar sections in all three parts of Edwards’s work.93 A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandring-Blasing-stars & Firebrands, Stiling themselves New-Lights, which consisted mostly of extracts from the horrifying pamphlets of John Goodwin, Burton, Lilburne, Overton (although Prynne does not have the attribution), Hugh Peter, and Paul Hobson, was perhaps the most important influence of all. Prynne’s challenge to the radicals’ self-description as ‘new lights’ was echoed in Baillie’s House of Lord’s sermon, and in Cranford’s imprimatur to Part One of Gangraena, which he hoped would encourage the deluded to ‘fear and suspect the pretended New lights’. Finally we should note works best described as heresiography proper, dealing with errors on a systematic sect by sect basis. Of those produced before Gangraena, Ephraim Pagitt’s Heresiography (1645, with many subsequent editions) is the most well known, but similarly structured works by John Grant and Robert Squire were published in the same year. Edwards compared his enterprise to Pagitt’s and there were some important similarities between the two men. Both took the city of London as their main reference point; a city, where, as Pagitt wrote, people were ‘running after seducers as if they were mad’. In his epistle of dedication to the Mayor and Aldermen, Pagitt condemned evil books and mechanic preachers. ‘They preach, print and practise their hereticall opinions openly’; ‘every one that listeth turneth Preacher, as Shoomakers, Coblers, Button-makers, Hostlers and such like . . . vent strange doctrine, tending to faction, sedition and blaspheme’. Pagitt denounced Roger Williams, Bloody Tenent, and books arguing for divorce and the mortality of the soul, as Edwards would, and he too used Antapologia for the origins of the ‘Independents’, a label new to him: ‘these appellations I heard not of when I began to write the treatise’. But Edwards also insisted on the contrasts be93

Prynne, Truth Triumphing, title page and 109 (recte 105).

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tween the Heresiography and Gangraena, with much justification, as we shall see.94 What then does Edwards’s Gangraena look like when compared to heresiology old and new, or to analogous accounts of error and separatism? His title, as we have seen, drew on Paul, and also introduced a persistent trope in discussions of heresy, the comparison with disease. Gangrene attacked a healthy body in a small way at first, but spread as Calvin insisted, like wildfire if not prevented. In Edwards’s book, ‘as in a cleare and true Glasse, every impartiall and ingenuous Reader may plainly behold the many Deformities and great Spots of the Sectaries of these times . . . Plague spots, Feaver spots, Purpule spots, Leprosie spots, Scurvey spots, Spots upon them discovering much malignity, rage & frensie, great corruption and infection’. Edwards’s own role here was clear: ‘in writing it I have played the part of a Physitian, made a precious treakle and soveraigne Antidote to cure and expell poysons, by correcting, qualifying, binding them, etc laying open the Errours, Heresies, etc, their evill, danger, and discovering remedies and cures proper for them’.95 Through such bodily imagery, argues Nasu, Edwards made heretics symbolically imaginable. The images also evoked ancient traditions: Panarion, Epiphanius’ title, meant medical chest and its author explained, ‘I shall be telling you the names of the sects and exposing their unlawful deeds like poisons and toxic substances, but matching the antidotes with them.’96 These images were favourites among Edwards’s contemporaries. The author of 94 Pagitt, Heresiography, Preface, 66 (recte 69). Gangraena, i. 20, 34, 171, for examples of these books. Nasu, ‘Heresiography and the Idea of ‘heresy’, provides a detailed discussion of Pagitt. Other 1645 heresiographies were J[ohn] G[rant], Truths Victory against Heresie: all sorts comprehended under these ten mentioned: Papists, Familists, Arrians, Arminians, Anabaptists, Separatists, Antinomists, Monarchists, Millenarists, Independents (London, 1645), BL E277 (7), Thomason date 9 Apr. 1645; and Robert Squire, The Arraignement and Condemnation of the chiefe Heresies and Errours of these Times which May serve as an Answer to a late scandalous and blasphemous Libell: intituled The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (London, 1645), which contained a similar denunciation of eight sects from Papists to Brownists, Anabaptists, and Seekers (but not Independents). A manuscript note by Thomason describes Grant as ‘a comfit-maker in Bucklesbury’ and the work has an imprimatur from John Downame. Little seems to be known of Grant; the DNB notes in passing in the entry on the statistician of the same name, that this comfit-maker wrote several religious works between 1643 and 1652. The title page describes the author as ‘A faithfull lover and defender of the Truth’. 95 Gangraena, iii, sig. (*); ii. 131. 96 Nasu, ‘Heresiography and the Idea of Heresy’, 80–95; Panarion of Epiphanius. This was begun in 374 or 375 and written in less than four years. The quotation is from Stevenson (ed.), Creeds, Councils, 388. See also 203, 322–3, for comparisons between heresy and disease by Jerome and Vincent of Lerins. I am grateful to Ian Atherton and Jane Tillier for help with reading on the early church.

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An Antidote against the contagious air of independency offered his work as a response to the ‘swarmes of Sectaries, that infect the Aire of the land, with their erroneous and blasphemous opinions’. Brinsley, also in the manner of Epiphanius, described one of his sermon collections as a ‘proper Antidote against the present Epidemicall Distempers’. Vines, Pagitt, Burgess, and Baillie all wrote of plagues, infections, or contagions of heresy and schism, as did the Assembly of Divines in July 1643, and the London clergy petitioning the Common Council in November 1645. There was, urged the Presbyterian clergy of Devon in 1648,‘No Gangrene, Cancer, nor Plague, so deadly’ as this of heresy, and offered antidotes of scriptural refutation of particular heterodox opinions.97 Gangraena or ‘A Catalogue’, Edwards’s subtitle, also had significant resonances, and raised, like Theodoret’s Compendium, or Schlusselburg’s more recent, massive Haereticorum Catalogus, deceptive hopes or claims to comprehensiveness. In an early passage, Edwards tried to deflate hopes of complete coverage:98 many a Reader may say, this Catalogue wants such an opinion that he knows of . . . It cannot rationally be imagined, that one man residing constantly in one place, not travelling to the Armies, not up and down from country to country, having his hands full of preaching, and writing controversies, can come to the knowledge of all errours broached in all places, or can have time to read over exactly all the books of the Sectaries, to extract all their opinions: It may rather be thus argued, what a world of strange errours, etc are there held in all parts of this Kingdom, when one man hears of so much.

Furthermore, many monstrous errors had been conceived but not yet delivered, ‘waiting only for the midwife and nursing mother of a Toleration, to bring them forth and nourish them’. It was thus, not a ‘perfect Cata-

97 [D.P.P.], An antidote against the contagious air of independency (London, 1644), 24. This pamphlet uses language very similar to Edwards’s although it is less hostile to independency. It was printed for Ralph Smith. Brinsley, Standstill or a Bridle for the Times, title page; Vines, The Impostures of Seducing Teachers Discovered, 2, 21; Burgess, Publick affections, 15–16; Baillie, Errours and Induration, sig. A3r; Pagitt, Heresiography, sig. A2v; A Copy of the Petition of the Divines of the Assembly, delivered to Both Houses of Parliament, July 19 1643 (London, 1643); CLRO, CCJ, vol. 40, fo. 153r, ‘Desires and Reasons of the London Ministers’; The Joint Testimonie of the Ministers of Devon . . . with their Reverend Brethren the Ministers of the Province of London unto the Truth of Jesus (London, 1648), BL E450 (1), Thomason date 27 June 1648, 1. The Harmonious Consent of the Ministers of the Province of Lancaster with their Reverend Brethren . . . of London (London, 1648), 14, wrote of ‘our freting Leprosie and eating gangrene’. The ‘Testimonies’ of 1647/8 are discussed in Ch. 5, below. 98 Gangraena, i. 2–3; the London ministers’ Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ of Dec. 1647 adopted Edwards’s technique of providing a catalogue of contemporary errors.

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logue’ but ‘the fullest that hath yet been made of these times’. A catalogue implied a complete listing; the term was only gradually acquiring its more recent connotations of a systematic organized description, but its very neutrality implied, improbably as it turned out, a dispassionate description.99 As other sections of this book will show, Edwards’s work was an immediate practical intervention into a contemporary crisis and was intended to have a wide appeal. ‘I have been a faithful gatherer together and storer up, Remembrancer and Treasurer of these errours and practices for the good of the publike’, he wrote, aiming to make godly people ‘afraid of forsaking the publike Assemblies, and joyning to separated Churches where these monsters daily breed’. Similarly Quodvultus wanted Augustine to write something ‘adequate for the learned and the unlearned, the idle and the busy’; Calvin, as his English translator demonstrated, produced A Shorte Instruction for to warn all good Christian People against the Pestiferous Errours of the Common Secte of Anabaptists (1549), while Pagitt, like Edwards, hoped to persuade doubters from attending ‘private meetings’ of the sects.100 When Edwards highlighted his methods and his use of evidence, he was working in a long tradition of heresiology as a methodologically selfconscious, truth-telling enterprise. For most modern commentators, the repressive and intolerant aims of the heresy-hunters are so distasteful that their commitment, in their own terms, to discovering and reporting the truth has been obscured. Theodoret’s general title was ‘The Discernment of Lies and Truth’, four books offering the stories of heresy and a fifth an account of religious truth. In pursuit of the truth, most heresiographers stressed their systematic methods for uncovering and testing material. Epiphanius attributed his sources to ‘my fondness for study. Certain things I learned from hearsay, though I encountered certain with my own ears and eyes’. He was ‘a tireless traveller’ in his search for information while his 99 Nasu, ‘Heresiology and the Idea of Heresy’, 133–4. Theodoret e.g. did not mention Pelagius whose ideas on human perfectibility were a western concern and who was not unorthodox on the eastern preoccupation, the Trinity. His account of the Donatists was very brief: Cope, ‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret of Cyrus’, 86–7. Amongst recent models Edwards had Schlusselburg, Catalogus, and most immediately Weld’s ‘Catalogue of such erroneous opinions’ in Massachusetts, printed in 1644 and repr. in Hall (ed.), Antinomian Controversy, 219–42. A Catalogus haereticorum, by Bernard of Luxembourg (c.1460–1535), went through several editions in Paris and Cologne in the 1520s, but this Catholic work would not have been relevant to Edwards. 100 Gangraena, i. 4; Augustine, Letters, 113; Calvin against the Anabaptists, ed. Farley, 15; Pagitt, Heresiography, sig. B1–2.

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fame as a harrier of heretics led other people to present him with material.101 Like other heresiographers then Edwards foregrounded his methods for readers, stressing at length the difficulties of writing, the complex processes of book production, and the elaborate ways in which information had been obtained. Edwards’s ‘showing his workings’ made for an awkward structure, as we have seen, but it also produced a text that insisted on its own unvarnished accuracy, in contrast, in Edwards’s opinion, to the wily smoothness of the Independents. Thus in a long methodological section at the start of Part One, Edwards gave a lengthy account of his ‘research methods’.102 So far as possible,‘opinions and errours’ were expressed ‘in their own words and phrases syllabically . . . in books, manuscripts, Sermons, conferences, which either are extant of their own setting forth, or set forth by other learned godly men in print, or as I have received them from credible sufficient witnesses’. He would use letters and other manuscripts, and the carefully checked testimony of ‘ear witnesses and eye witnesses’. Edwards presented himself as cautious and meticulous, interrogating informants if they ‘were ear and eye witnesses, yet if there was but one single witnesse, I have used to question, who else was present? And to enquire after circumstances and occasions, and accordingly have gone to other persons named, from one to another, to finde out the bottome and truth both of opinions held, and practises used’. If Edwards’s enquiries caused ‘persons to be shie and more reserved, I have set others to enquire’. Edwards was equally careful in his record-keeping: ‘I have a long time used to write down daily the same day, yea the same hour (when I could get opportunity of privacie) the occurrences both of opinions and practises that concern our sectaries, and that in such a manner and way, that looking upon my papers a year after I can judge of what authority the relations are.’One contemporary impressed by this methodology was an associate of the intellectual reformer Samuel Hartlib who noted a decade later that ‘Out of Mr Edwards Gangraena much may be applied to Intelligence and Communication’.103 Attacks on Gangraena, Part One prompted even more elaborate justifications of the validity of Edwards’s account in Parts Two and Three with lengthy discussions of his sources and insistence that his informants were ‘godly able Ministers, and other eminent, sound substantiall Christians,’ whereas 101 Cope, ‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret of Cyrus’, 42–3, 59, 78; Panarion of Epiphanius, vol. i. pp. 12, xix. 102 Gangraena, i. 5–7. 103 Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers, 29/5/51b, Ephemerides 1655, Pt. iv. The recommendation came from a Mr Tong.

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Goodwin and other assailants relied on ‘Sectaries, Anabaptists, apprentice boyes, or parties interested’.104 Heretical books were crucial sources for Edwards, as we shall see in Chapter 4, and ancient heresiologists too frequently proceeded by quoting heretical views and then offering counter-arguments, so that errors were publicized through the attack itself. As Edwards helped to produce the notoriety of Thomas Collier the Baptist or Laurence Clarkson the Seeker, and Prynne publicized the views of Goodwin and Lilburne, so later understandings of Donatism derive mainly from the writings of Augustine, and it is only through their extensive quotation in Calvin’s works that we know about the writings of the ‘Libertine’ Pocquet.105 Heresiography, ancient and modern, is full of salacious stories because its authors were convinced of the links between erroneous doctrine and immoral life. In one of his frequent discussions of how ‘unsound and corrupt Doctrine’ led to ‘wicked life and loosenesse of manners’, Edwards noted that many broachers of heresies and schisms had been at first ‘outwardly holy and strict in their lives’. His examples included Pelagius and the Donatists from the fourth century, the Spiritualist Caspar Schwenckfeld and the Anabaptist Thomas Muntzer from the reformation. His orthodox references ranged from Peter, Paul, and Augustine to his contemporary Spanheim.106 The unfair ‘outward holiness’ of Pelagius also bothered Edwards’s friend John Vicars:‘tis not an unknown thing to scholars, and any others verst in Ecclesiasticall histories, that the most dangerous Hereticks and first broachers of Hereticall and Schismaticall errours and opinions, as Pelagius, Arminius, etc, were men of marvellous strait life, and outward holinesse’.107 The plebeian origins and peripatetic energy of the sectaries Edwards described found parallels in reformation radicals while more specific doctrines such as ‘soul-sleeping’ and ‘allegorizing’ the Scriptures were all the more horrifying because they were known to have been held by dangerous radicals in the fourth or the sixteenth centuries. Edwards’s vivid stories of the misdeeds of Lilburne, Oates, and John Goodwin, perhaps derived from Spanheim’s pen-portraits of sixteenthcentury radicals, such as Melchior Hoffman, ‘a wily fellow, and furnished with popular eloquence’or the ‘most notorious imposter’, David George of Delft. The deceptive purity of the Donatists was the most influential par104 105 106 107

Gangraena, ii. 40–1. Brown, Augustine, 228; Calvin against the Anabaptists, ed. Farley, 299–317. Gangraena, iii. 258–60 (1st page wrongly numbered 260); cf. ii. 197–8. Vicars, Picture of Independency, 13; cf. Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 2, 6.

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allel to the Independents of his own time. Edwards challenged Independent claims to have suffered more than ‘Presbyterians’ in the 1630s as Augustine challenged the Donatists’ self-righteous parading of their principled intransigence during persecution by Diocletian.108 Where some, often Catholic, commentators argued that immorality led to error, Edwards most often assumed that error in doctrine was crucial.109 He knew of no sectary who was as ‘strict and exact in his life’ as before; ‘many of them play at Cards and Tables, are very loose on the Sabbath days, go to Bowls and other sports on dayes of publike Thankesgiving, as Mr John Goodwin and severall of his Church, they wear strange long hair, go in such fine fashionable apparell beyond their places’. ‘And as errours, heresies, are a greater evil then the sword and temporal persecutions, so are they worse then evil manners and a bad life’. It was error and heresy, more than ‘loose manners’ that destroyed the visible church. ‘Hence Luther answers to some that objected bad manners to him, I will not saith Luther commend my manners, but Doctrine, and the true Faith, and besides, ’tis impossible (saith Luther) but that bad life will follow false Doctrine’. Heresies and errors infected people who would not be tempted by corrupt manners: ‘men vent their parts, learning, get a name and fame by them, which they do not by committing drunkennesse, uncleannesse’; men persisted in their errors whereas they ‘all along purpose to repent of their wicked practises’.110 But, in this, as so much else, Edwards could be inconsistent, arguing in Part Three that hitherto secret moral failings might spur people to religious error: ‘There’s no question, but many of those Sectaries who heretofore were outwardly holy and strict, having some secret lusts and sinnes which they were no longer willing to forbeare . . . fell to those opinions and entertained those Doctrines of Antinomianisme, Anabaptisme, Independency, as a way wherein they might freelier enjoy those lusts.’ Antinomianism, of course, could be a cloak for any and all forms of misbehaviour; likewise a belief in universal redemption, in the power of 108 Spanheim, Englands Warning by Germanies Woe, 18, 20 (Eng. trans. of the work used by Edwards). For these men see Williams, Radical Reformation, 259–63, 381–6. Edwards’s stories owed something also to the technique of popular royalist writers such as John Taylor on mechanic and women preachers; see below. Brown, Augustine, 215; cf. the discussion of Antapologia, above. 109 For Catholic discussions of the connections between life and doctrine see Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 74, 88. Cardinal Pole is cited as saying, ‘it is unlike they will be freed from perverse errors, who do continue their lives in obstinate vices’. 110 Gangraena, i. 73, 151–2.

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human reason, or elimination of the belief in hell and the resurrection encouraged the attitude, ‘let us take what we find here, enjoy our pleasures and satisfie our lusts whilest we may’. Anabaptism more specifically and voyeuristically could provide opportunities for,‘dipping of naked women . . . to feed their wanton eyes, by looking upon young women naked, to satisfie their unchast touching, by handling young women naked’.111 Hence people fell into error, because the opinions and practices described in Edwards’s catalogue were ‘so pleasing to flesh and blood’, whereas Presbyterian government and orthodox doctrine ‘goes against the grain and crosses mens lust’. Hence, again, the pernicious impact of religious toleration, which exposed weak humanity to these tempting pleasures.112 All heresiographers varied in the degree to which they distinguished clearly between heresy and less serious errors, or between heresy, fundamental errors in the faith, and schism, separation from a properly constituted visible church. Characteristically Protestants have been more concerned with heresy, Catholics more alarmed by schism because of their stronger emphasis on the visible, institutional church.113 When orthodox Protestants attacked separatists, however, schism inevitably loomed larger. Furthermore, Edwards’s stress on the need for government to restrain human nature led him to argue ‘that Schisme makes way to Heresie, and separation from the Church to separation from the head’, a truth revealed by ‘many Divines both Fathers and Modern writers’.114 As far as error and heresy was concerned, Edwards was at the far end of a spectrum, habitually and presumably deliberately running the two together, where both ancient authors and Protestants writing before 1640 tended to make more careful distinctions. Augustine insisted to Quodvultus, ‘we have to be on our guard not to pass over some which are really heresies or to include some which are not’; it was differences of definition which explained why Epiphanius had discovered more heresies than Philastrius.115 Before the civil war, contrasting attitudes to the Church of Rome forced English 111 Ibid. iii. 260–1. Cf. 279, where Edwards argues that the opportunity to ‘enjoy their lusts’ attracts the ‘loosest and wickedest men’ to the sectaries. 112 Ibid. i. 135, 121–2. 113 See Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 69–70, 177–80, for Catholic discussions of heresy and schism; Questier emphasizes that the terms were often used imprecisely here too. 114 For a mainstream Calvinist (not Presbyterian) stress on the dangers of schism in the early 17th cent., J. Sears McGee,‘On Misidentifying Puritans: The Case of Thomas Adams’, Albion, 30 (1998), 401–18; Gangraena, i. 24; cf. the same argument in ii. 196–7. For a similar approach in Augustine, see Greenslade,‘Heresy and Schism’, 7–8. 115 Letters, 114–15; Augustine failed, however, to offer any precise definition of heresy.

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divines to ponder the boundary between error and heresy, while one of Edwards’s more ambiguous heroes, William Ames, had addressed the same issue in the context of separatist and semi-separatist debates. For Ames, heresy had to be a stubborn adherence to doctrine, ‘contrary to the summe and substance of faith and manners’. Popery, ‘as it was confirmed by the Councell of Trent is a pernicious heresie’, directly overthrowing faith; but Anabaptists, if they simply opposed the baptism of children, were guilty only of error. Most Arminians were not heretics although the most zealous were moving towards ‘Pelagian heresie’ in their denial that ‘the effectuall operation of internall grace . . . be necessary for the working of conversion and faith’.116 Some of Edwards’s contemporaries were equally cautious, notably the preachers of 1644 and 1645.Vines acknowledged that Independent notions of liberty of conscience did not imply ‘a freedome to be or doe what we will’, and determined not to ‘blow the trumpet or proclaime open warre against lesser differences, severity and acrimony in such cases breedes schisme and heales it not; but pernicous errours and destructive to soules (which it is cruelty to spare and not pity) must be faced and fought against’. It is not surprising that John Tombes, an otherwise orthodox minister who had come to reject infant baptism, believed that the rebaptizing of adults was at worst an error, not a heresy, while Daniel Featley regarded it as ‘an heresie long since condemned’. It is more surprising that Vines queried ‘even that point about the law which denominate an Antinomian, and that about Baptisme which denominate an Anabaptist, seeme not to be fatall to the soule?’—although he concluded these might he pernicious doctrines, there was a hesitation in Vines’s discussion, completely foreign to Edwards.117 Those proposing legislation, like those preaching to a broad 116 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 180–2, 209–13; William Ames, Conscience with the Power and the Cases thereof (n.p., 1639), iv. 9–12. In v. 140–1, Ames carefully discussed the relationship between heresy and schism. His comments on baptism were used by the Bristol Broadmead church to stress their respectability: Roger Hayden (ed.), Records of a Church of Christ (Bristol Record Society, 27, 1974), 92. For the context of Ames’ discussions, see Keith L. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames (Urbana, Ill. and London: University of Illinois Press, 1972). For Edwards’s citing of Ames against ‘Independency’, Gangraena, iii. 143–4. 117 Vines, The Impostures of Seducing Teachers Discovered, 30, 36–7; John Tombes, An Apology or Plea for the Two Treatises Concerning Infant Baptism (London, 1646), 53; Featley, Dippers Dipt, 1. Compare Burgess, Publick affections, pressed in a sermon, 17–8, ‘let not every opinion in matters of lesse consequence be accounted heresie’, comparing this situation to a country where only treason was a capital offence, but then all crimes were counted as treason. Antidote against the Contagious Air of Independency, 12, was careful to distinguish doctrinally sound Independents from sectaries. Even Obadiah Sedgwick in The Nature and Danger of Heresies. A Sermon before the House of Commons (London, 1647), delivered 27 Jan. 1647, argued for careful distinctions between error and heresy (8–12).

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audience, had to be more careful. The heresy ordinance, for which Presbyterians agitated in 1646–8, distinguished heresies and blasphemies punishable by death such as denial of the Trinity, or contempt for God, from lesser errors such as rejection of infant baptism.118 Polemicists of the 1640s tended to spurn subtle distinctions in order to justify their own intemperateness. Prynne urged the Commons to take action indiscriminately against ‘Hereticks, Seducers, Blasphemers, Seditious Sectaries, and Idolators’ while the London Ministers’ Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ And to the Solemn League and Covenant complained, ‘Instead of an establishment of faith and Truth, we swarm with noisome Errors, Heresies and Blasphemies. Instead of unity and uniformity in matter of religion, we are torn in pieces with destructive schismes, separations, Divisions and Subdivisions’, without pausing for precise definitions.119 This was Edwards’s method too; over and over again he simply listed error, heresy, blasphemy, schism indiscriminately: ‘more damnable Doctrines, Heresies and Blasphemies, have been of late vented among us, then in fourscore yeers before’.120 In the space of two pages he bemoaned that ‘Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, are not onely vented in a corner, in secret, close chambers, with doors doublelocked’, but openly in ‘the Metrapolis of the Kingdom, London’; that they increased after parliamentarian victories; that the people were generally, insensible of these ‘spiritual plagues of heresie, schism, blasphemy, intolerable Anarchy’; and that lack of action against them despite the professions of reformation would lead to dreadful judgements against England. Again in Part Three, Edwards argued that sectaries ‘use all means and wayes for a Universall Toleration of all Heresies, Blasphemies, Atheisme . . . plot all wayes, and take all courses under heaven that all Heresies and Errors may grow and increase . . . hinder all things which might prevent the growth of Heresies and Errors’, never considering how heresy, error, and blasphemy might differ.121 This lack of differentiation was central to Edwards’s overall approach. If error led inexorably to worse heresy, blasphemy, and schism, making neat distinctions 118 A printed version of the ordinance as discussed in parliament, 4 Sept. 1646, is at BL 669, fo. 9 (69). The campaign is discussed in Ch. 5, below. A later example of a work that made careful distinctions is the Anglican R. Sherlock, The Quakers Wilde Questions . . . with brief answers thereunto (London, 1655), app. 3 ‘Of Error, Heresie and Schism’, 175–6; this work blamed the increase of error on the abandonment of the Book of Common Prayer. 119 Prynne, Sword of Christian Magistracie, sig. B4r; Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, 30. The testimonies from Cheshire and Devon showed more caution in labelling error and heresy than the London manifesto. 120 Gangraena, i. 127 (recte 133). There is a very brief discussion in i. 9, of distinctions between relatively minor, and more serious errors. 121 Ibid. i. 148–50; iii. 233. These examples could, of course, be multiplied.

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was simply a time-wasting diversion from the struggle against truth. Furthermore, in Christian traditions an erring brother was to be dealt with through private discussion and admonition, not by the bitter ‘particularizing’ polemic which was Edwards’s speciality. His techniques could only be justified through a stress on the undefinable horror of what he was opposing. Although Epiphanius, Theodoret, and Daneau included sections arguing against the heretics they discussed, Edwards like some others of his predecessors assumed that the mere process of describing error was sufficient to defeat it. ‘I hope the naming of them will be a sufficient confutation’, he wrote in his general methodological introduction to Part One; the observations and corollaries, where the (almost) obvious impact of the sectaries was deduced, were quite enough. In the Preface to Part Two, Edwards defended his decision: it had been objected that offering ‘Arguments and Reasons’ would be more effective, but he remained convinced that ‘Such discoveries as these, are a more sensible, practicall way of confutation of the Sectaries to the body of the people . . . then so many syllogismes and arguments’.122 Edwards did occasionally offer some brief discussions of heretical opinions, and in Part Three, he modified his approach: ‘I doe more punctually and particularly give the proofes of the Errors and Heresies named in this Third Part then in the two former, with Animadversions by way of Confutation or Observation upon more of the Errors and Practises then I did before, as having beene desired by some so to do, and being that which I judge will make the work more profitable.’123 Even here, his refutations were brief. Amongst contemporary works, Prynne’s Fresh Discovery was the most similar, with page after page extracted from ‘libellous, scandalous, seditious’ pamphlets on the assumption that readers would be as horrified as the author. On the other hand, Grant, Squire, Rutherford, and Baillie, in his sequel to the Dissuasive against Anabaptism, all offered scriptural refutation of sectarian positions.124 Where Gangraena differed most clearly from other heresiography, both ancient and modern, was in its structure. A tightly ordered structure was Gangraena, i. 4; ii. Preface, sig. A2r. Examples of earlier refutation include Gangraena, i. 60 (2nd pagination), where Scriptures contradicting Paul Hobson’s views are given and ii. 139, where the unorthodoxy of Thomas Webbe’s position on the Trinity is demonstrated; iii. sig. )(r. 124 [J.G.], Truths Victory against Heresie; Squire, Arraignement and Condemnation; Rutherford’s Survey of Spiritual Antichrist, as discussed in Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 71–3, 213–14; Baillie, Anabaptism. The True Fountaine of Independency. 122 123

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almost a defining feature of the genre, usually based on a historical or sect by sect method, or a combination of both, marked out often by numbered sections or lists. Epiphanius described eighty distinct sects or heresies, providing for each of them an account of their links to earlier groups and their central doctrines, with a brief refutation, before concluding with a comparison to an unpleasant animal.125 Theodoret’s Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium covered fifty-six heresies in separate chapters divided among four books. Equally characteristic was his chronological approach with Simon Magus opening Book One, and Book Four ranging from Arius to Theodoret’s contemporaries such as the Donatists.126 Augustine’s De Haeresibus Ad Quodvultdeum, likewise, was a highly organized work with eighty-eight numbered sections proceeding chronologically, each dealing with a particular group, individual, or set of opinions. Predictably it began with the ‘Simoniani’, the followers of Simon Magus, and concluded with the Pelagians.127 Calvin’s more detailed and narrowly focused works inevitably lacked a comparable historical sweep, but they were equally clear in their structure. His book against the ‘spiritual libertines’ included six chapters on the movement’s origins, traced back to the Gnostics and the Manichees, followed by discussions of their erroneous use of scripture and their ideas.128 The works of most of Edwards’s contemporaries also had a clearly defined structure. Baillie’s Dissuasive began with the ‘Brownists’ of the early seventeenth century, but his main focus was on the Independents and doctrines supposedly associated with them (such as millenarianism). Despite (like Edwards) collecting ‘stories’ about Independent misdeeds, Baillie did not clog his volume with them but provided an ordered, systematic account with separate chapters on the Independents in the Netherlands, in New England, and so on. Each chapter consists of a clear narrative followed by ‘end-notes’ in which Baillie presented extracts from the Independents’ own books or from hostile accounts in order to prove his points.129 Rutherford’s Survey of Spiritual Antichrist, similarly, was a historical account from German Anabaptism to contemporary Antinomianism. The 125

Panarion of Epiphanius, vol. i. p. xvii. Cope,‘Heresiological Method of Theodoret of Cyrus’, 42–3, 56–9, 78. Augustine, Opera Omnia, vol. 8, pt. 1. Stephen Denison, in The White Wolf, listed all the 86 sects known to Augustine. I am grateful to Kristen Poole for this reference. 128 Greef, Writings of John Calvin, 169–71; Calvin against the Anabaptists, ed. Farley, 174–83. 129 For the stories see Letters of Baillie, ii. 327, where he anticipated attacks on his book, ‘I expect a showre of Independents about my ears; but I am not feared: I have a reserve of more stories’. 126 127

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structure of Prynne’s Fresh Discovery made for some tedious repetition for it comprised ten sections of ‘Libellous, Scandalous, Seditious, Insolent, Uncharitable, (and some Blasphemous) Passages; published in late Unlicensed Printed Pamphlets’, organized on the basis of their targets. Thus section two was ‘seditious, scandalous, libellous and daring passages’ against the ordinances and proceedings of parliament, whereas section four offered ‘sundry scurrilous, seditious, libellous, railing and blasphemous invectives’ against the Westminster Assembly, and the Presbyterian clergy. The principles of organization were clear enough, however.130 The tightest structure was found in the ‘sectarianizing’ works, modelled distantly on Epiphanius or Augustine. The sober Presbyterian attempts of 1645 had some similarities with the works of the conservative journalist John Taylor and other brief accounts from the early 1640s, although these latter were not meant to be taken entirely seriously. A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London (September 1641), for example, offered a short paragraph on some familiar groups such as Puritans, Papists, and Brownists, some more remote such as Mahometans, and others entirely fabulous such as Adamites and Bacchanalians. More prosaically, John Grant described ten sects from Papists to Familists, Anabaptists, and Independents, within an overall framework of a dialogue between truth and heresy, while Squire gave an account of eight.131 Pagitt’s work is the most important of this type. Beginning with the Anabaptists, he presented a series of carefully constructed chapters which covered the origins and major errors of sects, including unlikely groups of Adamites, Familists, soul-sleepers, and ‘divorcers’ as well as the more plausible Arminians, Antinomians, and Brownists. Sects of Hetheringtonians and Traskites, as constructed in the 1620s and 1630s, defined the followers of charismatic radical individuals. Pagitt included material from Thomas Weld on the ‘recent stirs raised by the Antinomians and Familists in new England’ and some material on 1630s Antinomians, but as important were references in Augustine to Adamites or soul-sleepers (‘Arabici’). His account of ‘Socinians’ drew on ancient and sixteenth-century anti-Trinitarianism; there were no English examples. In essence this was an old man’s book, drawing on ancient models more than contemporary experience; only at the very end did Pagitt refer to present events, as Edwards did: ‘Since the printing of this book I 130

17.

Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions, 129–40; Prynne, Fresh Discovery, 7,

131 John Taylor, A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London (London, 1641); [J.G.], Truths Victory against Heresie; Squire, Arraignement and Condemnation.

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heare of an assembly where one preacheth against the deity of Christ and of another great congregation of familists and of atheisticall books published’. Pagitt’s was a formulaic approach that could be regularly updated and indeed William Lee, publisher of the third and subsequent editions of Pagitt’s works, added Ranters and Quakers to the volume after the author’s death. Gangraena, in contrast, was of the moment; not a work that anyone tried to update.132 In seeking to locate Gangraena amongst the enormous, rival literature dealing with error and sectarianism, Edwards himself insisted on his concern with the here and now—‘this Catalogue of Errours, Blasphemies, Practices, Letters, is not of old errours, opinions, practices, of a former age, dead and buried many years ago and now revived by this Discourse; but a Catalogue of errours now in being, alive in these present times, all of them vented and broached within these four years last past, yea most of them within these two last years’—and with the near at hand—‘not . . . of errors . . . in Polonia, Transilvania, Holland, New-England, Somer-Islands, for then I would not have troubled the Reader neither, but in England . . . More specially in these places of England, as London and the counties adjacent, in the Parliaments Quarters, in their Armies and Garrison Towns’. He would not treat of errors maintained in royalist garrisons, but with the failures of parliamentarian reformation, ‘as the Prophet Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem . . . in thee Associated Counties, in thee Armies, and that after a solemn Covenant to extirpate heresies and schismes, are found such and such errours, blasphemous opinions, strange practices’.133 More specifically, he compared his book favourably to many of the works discussed here:‘learned Mr Gataker’s’, Featley’s, Weld’s, and Baillie’s Pagitt, Heresiography (1st edn.), passim and 121–5, 116–18, 131; for John Hetherington, the ex-familist box-maker see Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge; for John Traske see Como,‘Puritans and Heretics’, 116–61, 295–312, 421–5. There is no evidence that these men led sects in any clearly defined way. Neither is there any reason to suppose there were Adamites or organized ‘Divorcers’ in 1640s London. The 3rd edn. (1647), the 5th edn. ‘with some additions’ (1654), and the 6th edn. ‘with many Additions’ (1661), were all printed for W.L. All had an elaborate title page, including portraits in two columns of an Anabaptist, Familist, Divorcer, Jesuit, Antinomian, and a Seeker. The 6th edn. also included brief accounts of Pagitt’s life, of Mrs Traske, widow of John the ‘Familist’, and of Venner’s rising. A variation on these works organized historically or by sect, published after Gangraena, was Richard Allen, An Antidote Against Heresy or A Preservative for Protestants against the poyson of Papists, Arrians, Arminians, etc and their pestilent Errours (London, 1648). Allen’s work was organized by topic: the Scriptures, Predestination, Images, Sacraments, and finally ‘Of Toleration’. In thirty-eight chapters he gave an account of erroneous positions from ancient, reformation, and contemporary heretics, Papists and Arminians, followed by Allen’s ‘Antidote’—the arguments against the various errors. 133 Gangraena, i. 1–2. 132

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dealt only with specific groups; Pagitt ‘relates more then any late Authors’ but spent too much space on errors from ancient times and distant places to deal properly with the new horrors in this kingdom. On the other hand, Edwards laid claim to the disciplined methodology and tight structure of the heresiographer. He presented readers with a clear plan for the book, as I have shown, and promised also ‘a Synopsis of sectarisme . . . drawn as it were into one table’. He had drawn into one view, the errours and strange opinions scattered up and down, and vented in many books, manuscripts, Sermons, conferences etc and have disposed them under certain heads, and put them into their proper places, in a methodicall way for memories sake, that the Reader may the more easily finde them. The Reader cannot imagin I found them thus methodized and laid together, but confused and divided, lying far asunder, one or two in one book, some in another; others in this manuscript, others in that; this errour vented at such a private meeting, that errour in such a Sermon, this opinion in such a conference.

Rather than lead the reader into a ‘wildernesse’, by presenting ‘to publike view a rude and undigested Chaos’, he had joined scattered material together, and avoided repetition. He had thus not ‘lead the Reader thorow woods and over the mountains’, but taken ‘him directly and presently to the bird in the nest’.134 This was wishful thinking. As we have seen, Edwards’s presentmindedness continually sabotaged his attempts to impose structure on his material. It is clear that Edwards lacked (or was unable to exercise) the basic skills of the effective heresiographer—to précis, classify, and sectarianize. For illustration, let us look at his listings of errors, his attempt to control his material through complex, numbering schemes, and his treatment of ‘familist’ themes. Edwards’s first list of errors in Part One presented them in fourteen different sections—errors of the Scriptures, of God, Christ, of Sanctification, of Man, the moral law, the Church, marriage, and so on, in a system probably modelled on Spanheim’s Diatribe.135 At the end this scheme broke down, and the last twenty-five or so of these 176 errors are a miscellaneous lot. Even in his headings, Edwards found it hard to be brief, as if he was afraid he would miss something out: section seven was ‘Of the Morall Law, Justificat., Faith, Repent, Good works’. Edwards drew very closely on his sources for many of these errors expressed Gangraena, 3–4. Ibid. 18–37. Spanheim, Englands Warning by Germanies Woe. Spanheim’s errors were in sections on the Scriptures, God, predestination, Christ, man, and the church. Under man he included the mortality of the soul. 134 135

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the same fundamental beliefs with different wordings or illustrations and could have been summed up much more concisely. Error 33, for example, was that Christ did not die for ‘the unbelief of any’, while error 36 stated that no one would go to hell ‘for any sin but unbelief ’, and error 38 applied a similar principle to heathens.136 By Part Three it is even clearer that Edwards was not producing a classified list of distinct errors, but extracting dramatic passages or sound bites from his sources. The first three errors—that ‘God hath a bodily shape and proportion’, that the story of Adam eating the forbidden fruit was an allegory, and that a man might marry his sister—were taken from the pamphlet Little Non-such; four errors were based on reports of a London funeral sermon which Edwards took to imply the legitimacy of praying for the dead as Papists did; while many of the political errors consisted of vivid quotations from The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens. Again, the same point is made in different words. Error 47 was that all places and power should derive from ‘the choice and election of the people’, and that obedience in other cases was not required; while error 48 narrowed it down to ‘The Supreame power only of right belonging to the House of Commons, they only being chosen by the people.’137 In his supplementary list of errors in Part Two, Edwards revised his numbering having realized that error 21 at the beginning of this Part repeated material in Part One.138 Why he believed this had only happened once is something of a mystery, for his methods led to extensive repetition and overlap. Sin, the Trinity, the status of the Scriptures—almost any of his topics could have been codified into a much briefer account. General redemption is condemned in many different guises: error 31 in Part One was ‘That Christ died for all men alike’, while error 32 was in itself similar: ‘That by Christs death, all the sins of all the men in the world, Turks, Pagans, as well as Christians committed against the morall Law and first Covenant, are actually pardoned and forgiven’. Part Three added more of the same: error 21, ‘That Gods eternall Election is of all men, one as well as another’, was joined by at least four others on the same theme, including error 24, that Christ died for Heathens as well as Christians.139 Systematic, numbered lists and sections are characteristic of heresiological writing. Epiphanius described eighty heresies and sects, while the preface to Thomas Weld’s account of Massachusetts Antinomianism offered twenty-nine errors, as ‘a tast, for afterwards you shall see a litter of 136 139

Gangraena, i. 22. Ibid. i. 22; iii. 9–10.

137

Ibid. iii. 2–6, 15–16.

138

Ibid. ii. 140.

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fourscore and eleven of their brats hung up against the Sunne’. His ‘Catalogue of such erroneous opinions as were found to have beene brought into New-England’ comprised eighty-two errors followed by a list of nine ‘Unsavoury speeches confuted’.140 It is as if the very act of listing represents the capacity to impose order and control on the alarming phenomenon of unorthodoxy and schism. A completed list defines and limits error—but Edwards’s lists could never be finished, for errors would not stand still to be counted.141 It is no exaggeration to say that Edwards was obsessed with numbers—throughout Gangraena lists of errors, methodological principles, practices, blasphemies, and corollaries follow each other in hectic confusion. In the last paragraph, we have indicated the problems Edwards faced in producing coherent lists of errors. One modern scholar, drawing on Edwards’s account of mortalist errors, noted that ‘the greatest of the Presbyterian heresiographers’ had produced a ‘disorderly enumeration of sectarian errors’, rather than a catalogue. He reorganized the eleven relevant errors on some form of mortalism into two broad categories— soul-sleeping and the annihilation of the soul.142 Edwards’s more general lists were equally chaotic. Numbered sections generate subheading after elaborate subheading. A tiny selection from his tangled ‘Corollaries’ gives a flavour. In Part One, his seventh corollary explaining why sectarianism increased had eight subsections; his eleventh, on the ‘sad and dangerous condition’ of the times, included twelve ‘circumstances’ showing how times had changed for the worse. In Part Two, the second corollary demonstrated the bad end of sectarianism, offering eight symptoms which showed their imminent demise. The fifth symptom had four ‘particulars’ which justified Edwards’s view that Independency and sectarianism was ‘but a politick State Faction’, while a final subsection under the fourth ‘particular’ listed eight kinds of men who supported Independency. A diagram, which Edwards did not provide, was needed to comprehend the logical structure of these different numberings.143 140 Williams, Panarion of Epiphanius, vol. i. p. xvi suggests the figure of 80 derives from the Song of Solomon 6: 8–9, where there are 80 concubines (heresies), 60 queens (perhaps Christian sects), and virgins without number (non-Christian philosophies), but only one dove representing the true church; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 202, 219–47. 141 Similarly, London ministers declared in Nov. 1645 that a ‘perfect ennumeration’ of the burgeoning scandals in the church was impossible: Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 143. 142 Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 45, 73–4. 143 Gangraena, i. 135–6, 143–53; ii. 79–87. Cf. iii. 185–233, where Edwards’s account of sectarian ‘insolences’ against the House of Lords (itself subsection 4 of his eighth point) has ten subheadings. Edwards’s method here is very reminiscent of Prynne’s Fresh Discovery. The methods may be influenced by Ramist scholarship, but lacked a diagram.

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Edwards’s attempts at control are always failing, and indeed these failures underline the overwhelming nature of his task, and compound the air of obsessive paranoia that he shares, as we have seen, with many heresiographers. It may be that the whole doomed enterprise of codifying and containing contemporary error produced a certain cast of mind, as much as Edwards’s individual obsessions created a certain type of book. Finally, Edwards was not a ‘sectarianizer’. Early in Part One, he claimed that the errors in his Catalogue could be connected to sixteen types of sectaries from Independents to ‘Scepticks and Questionists, who question every thing in matters of Religion’, but he quickly emphasized that the English sects were not ‘simple and pure’, holding a mixture of opinions, and in the body of the text there is no attempt to describe organized, coherent groups holding specific views. ‘Familists’ are among this sixteen, and there are throwaway references and designations of individuals as Familists in the rest of the text, but there is no real attempt to construct an extended picture of a Familist sect in Gangraena—in contrast to the works of Pagitt, Weld, or Rutherford. In his Survey of Spiritual Antichrist, Rutherford wrote simply and decisively, ‘Familists I know say . . .’.144 There are many (unacknowledged) Familist echoes in Edwards’s stories and lists of errors, which could have made up such a picture. Some of Edwards’s apparently recent information could have been derived from long-standing assumptions or literary stereotypes concerning ‘Familists’, yet no attempt is made to link this material to Familists he knew. It is hard to know what to make of this—and a similar phenomenon is found in the 1629/30 denunciations of the London lecturer Peter Shaw where some of the errors attributed to him are long-standing Familist stereotypes, derived from the ‘polemical traps and fantasies of his enemies’.145 I believe that Edwards was genuinely presenting information emerging from the religious ferment around him, although pre-existing stereotypes help explain where the views came from and why Edwards found certain phenomena so alarming. (But he may have been more subtle than I imagine.) Sleep as an excuse for adultery is one example. Error 24 in Edwards’s second list of errors in Quoted in Burns, Christian Mortalism, 76. David Como and Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 50 (1999), 701, 704, 707. The errors included mortalism and the claim to be ‘so christed with Christ . . . that he is as Christ’. For familist echoes, see Gangraena, i. 97, 123, 145; iii. 63. Edwards, e.g. (i. 97), described Giles Randall as ‘a great Antinomian and Familist’ and listed Familists amongst the false teachers of ‘latter ages’. For a most useful discussion of ‘Familist stereotypes’ in general and Randall in particular see Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 147–8. 144 145

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Part Two was: ‘When either of the parties married is a sleep, the other is free of the bond of matrimony, sleep being in a kind of naturall death for a time; and by death the bond of matrimony is null; so that if a woman should have to do with any other man, her husband being asleep, she committeth not adultery.’146 This is amongst ‘Errours come lately to my hand’, and was presumably not familiar to Edwards when he wrote Part One, yet it was a long-standing smear against Elizabethan Familists, repeated in denunciations by renegade members, in a play by Thomas Middleton and in the 1641 pamphlet A Discovery of 29 Sects, where it was claimed that Familists allowed ‘one man to lye with another mans wife whilst he sleeps’.147 It is perhaps an interesting comment on Edwards (or the events of the 1640s) that he allotted the initiative in such adultery to the woman. The next error in Part Two, number 25,‘That the Apocrypha Books, and particularly the Book of Esdras, are Canonicall’, again had long-standing Familist associations, yet it seems Edwards derived it from the notorious Mrs Attaway, who a ‘had a great parchment role, wherein many things were written’. Through the prophecies in Esdras she had become convinced that she would never die;‘that she should bring forth children at Jerusalem and that at Jerusalem she should meet with Christ and enjoy him visibly’. She had converted her lover William Jenny to this view and they were already on their way to Jerusalem.148 The belief that the soul sleeps or dies until a final resurrection (sometimes justified from the Book of Esdras), or the contention that the Scriptures are ‘Allegories, and these Allegories are the mystery and spirituall meaning of them’ (error 5 in Part One), could also have been linked to Familist or other sixteenth-century radicals if Edwards had been giving a historical account of sectarian developments, but his sources, when given, are always recent books, disputations, or conversations.149 Edwards was thus a poor or an idiosyncratic heresiographer. His anxieties were intensified by the enduring nature of error, and he was influenced by the imagery, the aims, and the preoccupations of other authors Gangraena ii. 141. Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66, 207–9, 242. 148 Gangraena, ii. 141, 176; iii. 26. For wider beliefs in the canonicity of Esdras, the Apocryphal continuation of the Old Testament Book of Ezra, see Williams, Radical Reformation, 330–1, 819, 859–60. Edwards described how John Lanseter, a Bury preacher, had expounded the first verse of Ezra in Mar. 1646, provoking a pamphlet response: Gangraena, ii. 21. Burns, Christian Mortalism, 132–3, notes Attaway’s Familist associations. 149 For soul-sleeping, Edwards quoted Mans Mortality and referred to a disputation at the Spittle involving Richard Overton: Gangraena, ii. 17–18. 146 147

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on heresy, but he did not adopt the models of ancient heresiographers and seek to fit his own ‘experience’ into their categories. Insofar as we are concerned to evaluate Gangraena as a source for religious radicalism, a provisional conclusion would be that Edwards drew primarily on the evidence he collected or received of the contemporary religious scene, rather than beginning with models drawn from other accounts of unorthodoxy. The evidence may have been influenced by such models of course, so the question of what ‘really happened’ is deferred rather than solved.150 Edwards was not interested in isolating specific sects or in offering a historical account, tracing the origins of the errors and practices of a Kiffin, an Oates, or a Goodwin to sixteenth-century Anabaptists or to the early church. Edwards planned ‘hereafter . . . to write an Historicall narration of all the Proceedings and wayes of the English Sectaries’, but this was to begin as recently as 1640 in contrast to the normal heresiographical point of origin in Simon Magus. Edwards began with the bewildering, almost inexplicable horrors of the present. Comparisons with the heretics of both the recent and more distant past, ‘between the practices and wayes of our Sectaries, and the Sectaries of old in the Primitive times (especially the Donatists)’, worked to underline that horror.151 Some specific parallels have already been discussed; but one of Edwards’s most important themes—the political implications of religious error—was also supported by historical examples. The spread of Arianism revealed how dangerous it was when the civil power was sympathetic to or tolerant of error, while Dutch Arminianism demonstrated that an ostensibly religious movement could become a challenge to political authority.152 In Part Three, the dangers of political radicalism prompted conventional parallels with John of Leyden, Thomas Muntzer, or the most radical Donatists, the Circumcellians; William Walwyn was clearly a Circumcellian. Predictably also the most elaborate individual parallels were saved for John Goodwin, compared to Arminius, but also to some of the most prominent figures in the radical reformation: ‘as arch an Heretick, and a dangerous a man as England ever bred, and that he will be another David George, Francken, Socinus, and be canonized for a Saint amongst those of Munster, Racconia etc’. The comparison with Franck was expanded, with an air of reluctant admiration in Part Three: ‘These practises and way of Cretensis, brings to my 150

I am grateful to Tim Raylor for emphasizing this to me. Gangraena, i. 42–3. Ibid. 131–2, 167 for Arians; i. 47–8 and ii. 184 for Arminians; iii. 271 for a general comment. 151 152

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mind the practise of Sebastian Franck, a Learned man, and indeed the most Learned Sectary of all the Sectaries in these latter times . . . [but] also a great Seeker and Enthusiast . . . upon a designe to drawe men off from the Scriptures, to Revelations’.153 Above all the past provided legitimation for Edwards as an author. If the Independents were Donatists then Edwards was Augustine. The examples of Paul and Augustine helped Edwards justify his harsh ‘particularizing’ tone, which was much criticized as contrary to pastoral traditions of private admonition of individuals, with public debate confined to general, abstract matters. He repeatedly appealed to the ‘Orthodox Fathers . . . other Ancient Writers . . . the most learned and famous among the moderne’ to justify his methods: he had no ‘ill will and malice to the persons of those men’ singled out for condemnation, but acted only ‘out of zeal to the truth of God’. Locating themselves in a proud tradition enabled Edwards and his allies to overcome some of the unease generated by attacks on fellow Protestants, and to anticipate and discount the obloquy that they provoked. ‘I print (to use Theodorets expression) not to please myselfe, but necessitated to apologize, and to assert the verity of what I have delivered. Many aspersions have been cast upon me, upon my sermon’, wrote James Cranford, for example.154 Edwards was comforted by the example of Athanasius when he reflected that ‘It hath been usuall for men given to favour heresies and schismes, to speak evill of the zealous Ministers who oppose them’, in a marginal note against the description of himself as a ‘very wicked man’. He used the example of Paul to justify the inclusion of letters in his own praise. Paul, like Edwards, was a ‘humble and modest man’, who nonetheless ‘enters into a commendation of himselfe, showing he was equall with the very cheifest Apostles’ in order to defend the truth of his writing.155 But comparisons with the past also offered the consolation of ultimate victory. It was the inevitable fate of the great defenders of orthodoxy to be reviled and disappointed in their lifetimes, before their ultimate and inevitable vindication before the court of God’s truth. Osiander’s errors on justification might not have been ‘expressed with that vanity and contempt of Christ as these Sectaries do now’; the blasphemies of John Boggis were worse than those of Julian the Apostate, and sectarian disorders exceeded those of the Anabaptists, but Edwards could confidently predict 153 154 155

Gangraena,. iii. Preface, sig. [ ]v., 151, 262, 270–2; ii. 69, 44; iii. 116 for Goodwin. Ibid. iii. Preface, sig. *1r; I, 178; Cranford, Haereseomachia, Epistle to the city authorities. Gangraena, iii. 65, marginal note; Preface, sig. )(2r.

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the ultimate fate of sectarianism, ‘namely, confusion, desolation, and being brought to nought’. For ‘Whats become of the Arians, Donatists, Novatians, Pelagians, etc? though they were like a mighty floud overrunning and drowning all for a time, yet like a floud they were quickly dryed up.’‘I shall now toll the great Bell for the Sectaries, the Anabaptists, Antinomians, Independents, Seekers, etc.’ Thus a London lecturer foresaw the day when he would preach a funeral sermon for the sects and keep a day of public thanksgiving for their downfall. On that day all the sacrifices of this latter-day Augustine would be worthwhile.156 central themes in gangr aena References to other heresiology reinforced Edwards’s conviction that he was living in the best and the worst of times, that his fondest hopes of a glorious reformation faced sabotage from Satan’s instruments. Gangraena’s fundamental message was that the godly faced the most serious crisis since the Reformation (which Edwards located in the 1560s) and disaster threatened if good men failed to act:157 ‘the Devil hath had a more plentiful harvest this last yeer in England, then ever in any one yeer since the Reformation; nay, certainly more damnable Doctrines, Heresies and Blasphemies, have been of late vented among us, then in fourscore yeers before’. It was certainly worse than anything Edwards and his brethren had witnessed in the 1630s—a point underlined frequently in Gangraena through attacks on the Laudian martyr turned radical Independent, Henry Burton: If any man 9 or 10 years ago, when M. Burton was upon the Pillory for writing against some great men, who favoured Popish and Arminian Tenets, should have said to the people, this man whom you now see thus suffer, and whom you so love and adore, the time is coming when he shall plead for a Toleration of all religions, and speak against the Magistrate . . . this man . . . when all damnable Heresies and Errours shall be vented by preaching and writing, . . . shall never speake against them . . . Certainly the people would have been ready to have stoned such a man, and said it could not bee.158

Error and schism in the 1640s was at least as widespread as it had been in 156 157

i. 146. 158

Ibid. ii. 141, 79–80. Ibid. i. 133; for other examples see i. 143–4 and iii. 262; and for hopes of reformation see Ibid. iii. 246–7, 242.

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the fourth or sixteenth century as we have seen, and at one point Edwards even alleged that the godly had been attacked by the sectaries ‘in the highest unsufferable manner that (considering all things together) ever was in any age since the coming of Christ’.159 In Gangraena, error is alarmingly out of control—not tightly associated with particular groups or specific forms of behaviour, but found all over the place, never subject to final definition or full description, for new evidence continually piled in and overwhelmed Edwards. The lack of a conventionally tight heresiological structure in itself represented this horrifying chaos while the rambling narratives, separate from the lists of errors, gave them a wider resonance than a simple use of them to prove or illustrate specific unorthodox positions would have produced. Errors both merged together, and spread almost uncontrollably. Structure and content in Gangraena combined to conjure up the sprawling, endless mass of contemporary sects, blasphemies, and heresies in all their immediate, monstrous horror. The evocations of unnatural or failing bodies, the frequent references to swarms and plagues, gangrenes and other images of disease, all contributed to this end.160 In Edwards’s opinion all errors were interconnected, minor unorthodoxies inevitably bred more pernicious ones, and any defection from the true national church risked an unstoppable spread of sectarianism. Consequently any religious liberty was dangerous and those calling for such liberty—such ‘toleration’—had to be fervently opposed. The much-quoted passage on the army in Part One illuminates his general judgement on this religious melting pot: The Army that is so much spoken of upon all occasions in the news Books, Pulpits, Conferences, to be Independent (though I conceive upon good information, that upon a true muster of the whole, Commanders and common souldiers, there would not be found above one in six of that way) yet of that Army, cal’d by the sectaries, Independent, and of that part of it which truly is so, I do not thinke there are 50 pure Independents, but higher flown, more Seraphicall (as a Chaplaine, who knows well the state of that Army, expressed it) made up and compounded of Anabaptisme, Antinomianisme, Enthusiasme, Arminianisme, Familisme, all these errours and more too sometimes meeting in the same persons, strange monsters,

Gangraena, ii. 154. See Nasu,‘Heresiography and the Idea of Heresy’, 80–95, for an important analysis, and compare the very interesting discussion of Elliott Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 271–3, on Edwards’s use of the image of Proteus—an unnatural, incoherent body. At the same time of course, this incoherent body of sectaries was engaged in a tightly organized conspiracy (ibid. 279). The swarm is a similar image of sprawling, amorphous, yet purposeful threat: Poole, ‘Dissecting Sectarianism’. 159 160

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having their heads of Enthusiasme, their bodies of Antinomianisme, their thighs of Familisme, their leggs and feet of Anabaptisme, their hands of Arminianisme, and Libertinisme, as the great vein going thorow the whole; in one word, the great Religion of that sort of men in the Army, is liberty of conscience, and liberty of preaching.161

In Gangraena Edwards thus made repeated, desperate calls for the godly to organize through pulpit, press, and parliament against ‘that mis-shaped Bastard-monster of a Toleration (which is part fish, part flesh, and part neither of both)’, thus giving the sectaries ‘a miscarrying womb’. An urgent fight-back was essential for ‘There have been more Books writ, Sermons preached, words spoken, besides plottings and actings for a Toleration, within these foure last yeers, then for all other things. Every day now brings forth Books for a Toleration.’ A marginal note underlined the point: ‘Within the space of five or sixe dayes there came out five Bookes that I saw either wholly or in part pleading for Toleration’.162 ‘Toleration’ was pleaded for because it was a cause that could rally broad support, uniting a range of opinion: ‘all the sectaries and Blasphemers closing with the Independents, and the Independents with them to make one common party against the godly Orthodox Ministers and people of these Kingdoms, who are for truth and peace’. It was a more plausible aim than arguing directly for heretical beliefs.163 Edwards’s main polemical purpose in Gangraena was to implicate the mainstream Independents in the spread of religious chaos. The respectable Independents like the Apologists Thomas Goodwin or Philip Nye, who denied they were separatists, and who were properly ordained and highly educated clerics, more or less orthodoxly Calvinist in doctrine, preaching frequently in prestigious London lectureships or before the parliament, and often members of the Westminster Assembly, were as dangerous as outright sectaries. Despite some passages of qualification, where Edwards distinguished ‘between a simple pure Independent, yea a simple Anabaptist, who only holds that opinion of denying Paedobaptisme, and between an Arian, Antitrinitarian, Antiscripturist, Perfectist’, he argued that as Independency is the mother and original of other sects, so ‘tis the nurse and patronesse that nurses and safegaurds them; how do all errours take sanctuary in Independency, fly thither and are safe, as the Chickens under the wings of the Hen; all Sectaries pleading they are Independents, that being now their sword and buckler, Independents and other Sectaries, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers etc. 161

Gangraena, i. 16–17.

162

Ibid. 166, 122.

163

Ibid. ii. 124; i. 156.

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hold together, make one body against the Orthodox, godly, strict Ministers and people.164

The superficially more ‘mainstream’ Independents were dangerous partly because of the tendency for errors to become both more serious and more widespread, but also through the Independents’ dangerous campaigns for liberty of conscience for themselves—which would inevitably offer protection also to more extreme groups and positions. The respectable Independents had been the targets of Antapologia. There Edwards had included detailed accounts of disorder in the congregations of these men, as well as attacks on their personal integrity. But in Gangraena the mainstream Independents are conspicuously absent from the narratives, letters, and remarkable passages.165 Most of his stories about religious unorthodoxy involve considerably less respectable men. Edwards could not plausibly suggest that men like Jeremiah Burroughs, Thomas Goodwin, and William Bridge were guilty of heresy and immorality—of rejecting the authority of Scripture, baptizing horses or cats, or supporting divorce. Rather he sought by a process of elision, or category confusion, to establish their guilt by association. To a large degree, the very different conclusions on the value of Gangraena as a source drawn by Davis and Hill—as discussed in Chapter 1—derive from contrasting appropriations of Edwards, from rival, unacknowledged partial readings. So when Davis argues that Edwards should be rejected ‘as a valid source from which to build a realistic picture of Independency or its aspirations in the 1640s’, his judgement is based on the general arguments of Gangraena, without noting that the narratives are mostly not about the Independents (in Davis’s terms) at all. Hill’s endorsement of Gangraena as ‘a marvellous picture . . . of the heresies now being freely discussed by the lower classes’ draws much more on the detailed accounts of particular errors and individual sectaries, although the link with the ‘lower classes’ is not always as close as he assumes.166 Ordained clerics who could be called Independents are treated in some 164 Gangraena, i. 9, 125–6. The thirteenth Corollary in Part I (175–7) provided detailed historical parallels for Edwards’s argument that the Independents would ultimately endorse ‘damnable Heresies, Blasphemies’. Cf. Baillie, Anabaptism. The True Fountaine of Independency, 48–52, where similar arguments about the Independents are made. On the one hand Baillie acknowledged that not all ‘Brownists’ (a label rejected by the Apologists) were Anabaptists, or worse, but he also argued that all Independents were guilty of prompting serious and ultimately uncontrollable error. 165 There are brief exceptions in his descriptions of how Independent churches including Sidrach Simpson’s and William Carter’s have bred heretical opinions: Gangraena, ii. 16. 166 Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 127; Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 94.

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detail by Edwards, but they are all in some ways exceptional figures, all in some way distinguishable from the Apologists and their associates. Baptists like the Calvinist Hanserd Knollys and still more the General Baptist Henry Denne had long since left their conventional pasts behind. The defection of the Laudian martyr Henry Burton from his old companions William Prynne and John Bastwick over the issue of church government made him a particular target, while John Goodwin, on whom Edwards used more pages than anyone else, was, if not yet an Arminian, already unsound on the nature of justification by faith. Furthermore, Goodwin and Burton aroused greater bitterness as the most prominent London ministers opposed to the development of a Presbyterian structure in 1643–4. Hugh Peter’s overt and energetic political involvement marked him out for particular attention, and finally, in Part Three especially, Edwards provided extended discussion of the more spiritualist, ‘anti-formalist’ Puritans, suspicious of all ordinances, such as John Saltmarsh, William Dell, and William Erbury. Again, these men had, for Edwards, a dangerous political influence through their connection with the New Model Army.167 Slippery processes of elision between the categories sectary and Independent in the Corollaries and other general sections, rather than sensationalist stories about individuals, served to implicate the Independents in all the error and disorder of the times. In the long account in Part One of ‘the particular practices of the Sectaries’, Edwards usually wrote simply of what ‘they have done’—from opposing the settling of church government to baptizing cats; in the process he named a range of individuals including Thomas Lambe, William Kiffin, John Goodwin, and Hugh Peter. But his general account of how religious radicals were achieving a sinister worldly power blamed Independents: ‘not a man almost of late coming into any place or office but an Independent or Independentish’. He listed how Independents engrossed places of profit without naming them: one man— a member of the Assembly with a private church—also filled pulpits in Norwich, Yarmouth, and Fishstreet in London; another member of the Assembly had a living at Acton, four lectures at Westminster, plus other city lectures, while a ‘Mr B’ was raking in £100 per annum for preaching at 167 For these men see the entries in R. L. Greaves and R. Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century (Brighton, 1982); B. R. White, Hanserd Knollys and Radical Dissent in the 17th Century (London: Friends of Dr Williams Library, 31st Lecture, 1977); More, ‘New Arminians’, esp. 63–8, 188–92; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 110–13; for the anti-formalist Puritans see J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 3 (1993), 265–88, and Smith, Perfection Proclaimed.

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Cripplegate on Lord’s Day afternoons having refused any parochial duties. Well-informed readers could fill in the names of Bridge, Nye, and Burroughs without any overt criticism by Edwards of these widely admired ministers.168 In Part Three, ‘A Relation and Discovery of the Libertinisme and Atheisme, horrible, fearfull uncleannesses of severall kinds . . . of many Sectaries’ provided a complex and confusing account of radical looseliving under many headings and subheadings. Here the terms ‘sectary’ and ‘Independent’ were used interchangeably: it was sectaries who were most prone to drunkenness, deceit, and pride (although the examples highlighted, mainly Peter and Burton, might be seen as Independents); but Independents and sectaries who were accused of incest, of being ‘very loose in the generall course of their lives’, and of opposition to the Scots.169 Similarly, in the Corollaries in each part which sought to draw practical lessons or conclusions from the ‘Errours, heresies, Blasphemies and wicked Practises of the Sectaries’, Edwards’s detailed discussions switched rapidly between the terms sectary and Independent, showing for example that ‘Independencie and Sectarism in England is a meer faction’, and insisting that ‘from all I have laid down . . . of the Practises, Proceedings and wayes of the sectaries, we may see and observe the great difference between the carriage of the Independents and our Brethren of Scotland [my emphasis]’.170 There were significant exceptions to this loud silence about the mainstream Independents. As we have seen, Edwards could not forbear to note how many of them had conformed to the Laudian regime in the 1630s, in great contrast to his own sufferings, singling out Bridge, Greenhill, and Burroughs, again, whose ‘Canonicall coat’ was sneered at as we saw in Chapter 1.171 Attacks on the increasing political influence of Independents in army, city, and parliament led him into bitter criticism of the opposition of Greenhill and Burroughs to the Presbyterian petitioning of September 1645, as well of Peter, Lilburne, and other more militant figures.172 168 Gangraena, i. 62–75 (1st pagination); Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 107, for the identification of Burroughs and Nye. 169 Gangraena, iii. 185–223. Similarly in the unpaginated section after p. 240, the hypocrisy of the sectaries is denounced, yet Burton is a major illustration. 170 Ibid. ii. 203, from many other examples; ii. 183, 207. See also iii. 261–2. 171 Ibid. i. 75; this theme is, of course, continued from Antapologia; Edwards also gave examples of provincial Independents, and was wont also to stress the worldly ambition (and success) of Independents such as John Goodwin and Hugh Peter, in contrast to his own sufferings in the cause of truth (ii. 84–5, for an example). 172 Ibid. i. 109–10; ii. 29; cf. Lindley, Popular Politics, 357, 380.

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Much of Edwards’s analysis of the relationship between sectarianism and more orthodox Independency was double-edged or even inconsistent. On the one hand, Edwards wrote: ‘I could name’—although he didn’t—‘divers Independents who in Pulpits have pleaded for Anabaptists, Antinomians: I could tell the Reader many stories’ of how great sectaries were ‘brought off ’ by Independents when in trouble with the authorities, and of how the Independents had sabotaged the measures proposed in the Westminster Assembly to prevent the rise of Anabaptism; ‘not always directly, yet finding fault with the modus procedendi.’They were thus worse than the ‘old Independents and Brownists’ such as Ainsworth, Johnson, and Robinson who had done ‘good service’ against the Anabaptists and Arminians in their Dutch exile, or the New England Independents who had opposed familism and antinomianism.173 He was scornful of Burroughs’s preaching shortly after the publication of Antapologia, against those (unnamed) who used ‘letters, stories’ to lay open ‘the infirmities of the Saints’; and even of Sidrach Simpson who preached against dignifying attacks on the ‘Saints’ with an answer. This presumably irenic response was taken by Edwards to imply that Simpson regarded heretics and blasphemers as ‘Saints’.174 On the other hand, Edwards frequently quoted the respectable Independents against more unorthodox views. This technique had the twin effect of underlining the seriousness of errors, condemned even by Independents, and of exposing Independent heedlessness of the dangerous implications of liberty of conscience. Thus he noted Nye’s shock at sectarian denials of Christ’s divinity, Thomas Goodwin’s insistence that he did not speak for a liberty of all opinions ‘how grosse soever’, and his and Burton’s opposition to John Goodwin’s views on justification. On another occasion Burton became the object of the same treatment rather than the orthodox authority: Nye was quoted as denouncing Burton’s Protestation Protested as ‘grosse Brownisme . . . for his part he would as soon subscribe to the Book of Common-Prayer, as to divers things there’, while Mr Symonds of Rotterdam,‘one of the moderatest and modestest of that way’, refused to give his opinion in public, ‘least it should trouble the old man too much’.175 One of these attempts to co-opt the respectable Independents into the condemnation of error seriously backfired on Edwards. In two pages in Part One, Edwards suggested that Greenhill and Burroughs were increasingly alarmed by the heterodoxy surrounding them. 173 175

Gangraena, i. 126. Ibid. i. 81; ii. 108; iii. 243.

174

Ibid. iii. 164, 162 (recte 163).

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Unfortunately Burroughs, a much-respected preacher, flatly denied in conversation, manuscript, and print, the accuracy of Edwards’s example. An elaborate multi-media controversy ensued, to which we will have to return.176 On many issues, including this central one of Independent–sectarian relationships, the rambling and repetitive Gangraena presented contradictory positions rather than a single coherent view. Edwards combined, as we have seen, an account of a sectarian–Independent conspiracy with a formless inchoate image of swarming sectarianism and error. Likewise, more complexity than is often recognized surrounds the argument undoubtedly found in Edwards that religious subversion inevitably compromised all principles of social order—an argument already signalled in the evocation of religious toleration and unorthodoxy as monstrous negations of the natural order, ‘part fish, part flesh’. In the Epistle to Part One, Edwards bemoaned the ‘swarms . . . of all sorts of illiterate mechanick Preachers, yea of Women and Boy Preachers’; here, as at many other points, the sense of looming cataclysmic social breakdown is conveyed by running together transgressions of hierarchies of social position, age, and gender.177 Mechanic preachers were clearly one of Edwards’s greatest worries: ‘Lay-men, Weavers, Tinckers and Coblers’, ‘all sorts of ignorant Mechanicks . . . [were] suffered to turn preachers, and to go up and down seducing people’. Individual sectaries, whether notorious or obscure, were frequently identified by their demeaning, ‘mechanic’ occupations: ‘one Samuel Oates a weaver’, ‘John Durance . . . apprentice to a Washballmaker’; Andrew Debman, ‘an Anabaptist, and a Preacher among them, a Cooper by trade, a sorry fellow, that can neither write nor read, and yet is a great Preacher among the Sectaries’; or the ‘foure famous Preachers in Hartfordhire’, an almost nursery-rhyme quartet of a collar maker, a tinker, a bodice maker, and a taylor.178 Another common topic was the way in which religious radicalism provoked insubordination amongst servants, and thus intimate threats to the stability of godly households. The Particular Baptist William Kiffin, ‘sometimes servant to a brewer’, was a servant committed to the corruption of other servants: ‘This man’s man is now become a pretended preacher . . . hath by his enticing words, seduced and gathered a schis177 Gangraena, i. 78–80. Ibid. i. sig. a1v. Ibid. iii. 62, sig. d2r; ii. 146; iii. 96, 88, 81. For Andrew Debman or Dedman, one of the General Baptists who supported the Levellers against the army in December 1648, see Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 80. 176 178

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matic rabble of deluded children, servants and people, without either parents’ or masters’ consent; (this truth is not unknown by some of a near relation to me, whose giddy headed children and servants are his poor slavish proselytes).’179 The political discussions in Part Three amply demonstrate Edwards’s commitment to social hierarchy. He condemned ‘an Utopian Anarchie of the promiscuous multitude’, and questioned ‘whether if the Parliament had gone by the Pole of tagge and ragge, would ever Common-prayer-book, Bishops, with many other things have been put down’. It was futile to be governed by what the ‘generality . . . would have’, or to stress ‘naturall Rights and Liberties, such as men have from Adam by birth’, for it was not true that ‘every mean man’ was ‘capable of Government’.180 For Edwards a monstrous attack on the natural hierarchies of gender was demonstrated by a range of closely linked phenomena: women preachers, threats to family stability, and unnatural or immoral sexual practices by sectaries. There were many ‘horrible disorders, confusions, strange practises, not only against the light of Scripture but nature; as in womens preaching, in stealing away women naked in the presence and sight of men etc’. A soldier’s arguing in Part Three both for women’s preaching and for the proposition that a woman could lie with another man if her husband was asleep or absent, was an all too plausible juxtaposition.181 Mrs Attaway, made famous by Edwards in the 1640s and for twentieth-century readers by scholars using Edwards, got the most extended coverage as a woman preacher but there were briefer mentions of a gentlewoman (a major’s wife) who was Attaway’s companion in London, and women in Holland, Lincolnshire, Hertfordhire, and the Isle of Ely as well as a Kent woman allegedly associated with John Saltmarsh, and another young maiden preaching in Lincolnshire.182 Mrs Attaway’s absconding with a fellow married sectary, William Jenney, had pride of place amongst Edwards’s stories of familial disruption and sexual scandal.183 Two of Edwards’s informants went to hear her preach and reported a subsequent conversation with Mrs Attaway, who asked them what they thought of Milton on divorce: ‘for she had an 179 Gangraena, i. 54–5; compare ii. 11, for the story of a male Anabaptist servant who got a female Anabaptist with child and was very reluctant to marry her. 180 Ibid. iii. 218, unpaginated section, sig. d3v, c2v. 181 Ibid. i. 143; iii. 22. For the Familist associations of the sleeping husband, see above. 182 Gangraena, i. 84–9; ii. 24–5, 106; iii. 81. Attaway and the Major’s wife were alleged to be part of a wider group of women preaching in London. 183 Ibid. ii. 10–11.

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unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan; and how accordingly she hath practised it in running away with another womans husband’. There was also the account of Mary Abraham, an elderly sectarian maidservant who had seduced the sickly and feeble-minded teenage son of a godly widower and tricked him into marriage, thereby transgressing conventions of appropriate behaviour as defined by age, gender, and social status, along with many more obscure hints of sectarian rapes, adulteries, and incest.184 Above all, Edwards seems to have had an unhealthy fascination with the dipping of naked women which he associated in particular with the peripatetic General Baptist preacher Samuel Oates. Oates and others had baptized old women naked in winter, sometimes causing their death, and young maids, citizens’ daughters early in the morning,‘tempting them out of their fathers houses at midnight’. Indeed, ‘a modest and good woman’ had been heard to ‘say . . . that it was no wonder he and many such turned Dippers to dip young maids and young women naked’.185 This modest, good woman was one of only three women informants quoted by Edwards, compared to many hundreds of men; all three were disillusioned or deceived sectaries. Edwards’s scepticism about the status of women’s testimony and his utterly conventional attitudes to family hierarchy are clear. But this is hardly surprising, and equally predictable was that Edwards’s calls to action against the sectaries were directed towards male heads of households. Quoting Luther, Edwards insisted that it was ‘womanish’ to do nothing, ‘but thats worthy a man to plead the cause of God and his truth’. Godly householders should petition the magistrates, for some course to be taken against the errors, heresies, and blasphemies of the times, ‘representing the sad condition of their countreys, parishes, families, and laying open how their Wives and Children are stollen from them, and taken away against their wills; how they have no command of their servants, no quiet in their families’.186 On the other hand, it is possible to exaggerate the prominence of gendered themes in Gangraena although they were undoubtedly an important way of indicating the broad yet intimate dangers of religious error. The same beguiling stories, especially about the wonderful Mrs Attaway, are recycled again and again, and have proved equally popular with later historians.187 There is nothing in 184 185 186 187

Gangraena, i. Appendix, 120–1; ii. 10–11; iii. 187–9, 82–5, 94. Ibid. i. 62; iii. 261, 189. The last reference was to an unnamed leader of the ‘dippers’. For the other two women see Gangraena, iii. 112, 189; i. 155, 174–5. See e.g. the account of Attaway in Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary.

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the later volumes to match the five pages on women preachers in the first part of Gangraena with its detailed account of Attaway’s arguments for universal redemption. But Edwards’s arguments about the social character and appeal of Independency and sectarianism are more complex and context specific than the previous discussion would suggest. Alongside the account of plebeian heresy prompting social subversion went a contrasting narrative of the Independents as a small, socially privileged minority, with vaunting ambitions and powerful friends. Like the Jesuits, sectaries were deceitful, always plotting,‘insinuating themselves, get into great Noblemens houses and acquaintance, into great Ladies and Gentlewomens, and into Princes Courts and Houses, and follow state matters’.188 The Independents pandered to the rich and powerful for worldly ends, and took advantage of the poor. One young maiden had bought a gold ring as a present for her minister, while Edwards also claimed many other maidservants were required to give five or six shillings a year to their ministers, and ‘that some poore godly persons who have expressed great desire to be of their church way, and gone to some Independent Ministers to be admitted to Church fellowship, could not because of their poverty; that persons of great ranck and quality, as some Ladies are admitted to their Churches, in a more favorable way, and not after the ordinary manner’. One rich London widow refused to marry until her betrothed had settled £20 per annum for life on her favourite minister.189 Besides tales of mechanic preachers there were stories of more socially respectable figures seduced by error such as the ‘man, Gentleman like all in scarlet, a yong man’ who challenged Edwards himself during a lecture at Christ Church. As well as revealing sectarian servants defying their masters, Edwards described how a godly young maid was led astray after becoming a servant ‘in a family of some ranck and place where the master and mistress are Independents’. When not ‘railing against the Scots and against some of our ministers’, her master pestered her with sexual advances, predictably using Antinomian arguments to support his seduction. The devil inevitably ‘tries all sorts of men, watches all opportunities’.190 When emphasizing his own disinterested bravery in opposing them, Edwards stressed the wide appeal and strength of Independents and sectaries. On the other hand, when he urged Presbyterians to greater zeal against heresy and schism, Edwards suggested they had failed to make the 188

Gangraena, i. 46.

189

Ibid. ii. 16–17.

190

Ibid. i. 111; ii. 144–5; i. 131.

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most of their own substantial following in the struggle for religious and political pre-eminence. Presbyterian support ‘from the beginning of the differences between the king and parliament, among those who profess to stand for reformation and for the parliament hath been, and still is (without all compare) the greater part of both kingdoms, the body of both assemblies and ministers, the body of the people in cities and counties (especially of persons eminent in place and quality)’. Presbyterians were supported by the ‘Assembly of Divines, the representative body of the city, the court of common council, the ministry of the kingdom, thousands and ten thousands of godly well-affected persons’. Presbyterians did not have the ‘priviledge of ease by preaching to a few rather then to many’. In contrast the sectaries were ‘a contemptible number, and not to be named at the same time with the Presbyterians’, ‘a handfull of men in comparison’. These passages again offer utterly a straightforward endorsement of social hierarchy, but they do not suggest a simple division within that hierarchy into a prosperous Presbyterian minority and a larger, but socially inferior group of sectaries and Independents.191 In his pioneering and illuminating discussion, Murray Tolmie argued that ‘Gangraena substituted for a dogmatic a social conservatism. Edwards sought to show how the principle of toleration spread disruption and disorder from the parish churches to the institutions of society . . . presented a vivid picture of society faced with imminent dissolution into anarchy and moral confusion.’192 We need to complicate this picture. Besides the mechanic preachers of Hertfordshire, Edwards noted how former ministers of the Established Church had become sectaries, including Christopher Feake at All-Saints in Hertford, and a Master Harrison near St Albans. His women preachers included Mrs Attaway’s friend, the ‘Gentlewoman . . . in her hoods, neckelace of Pearle, watch by her side, and other apparrell sutable’.193 There was not always a neat fit between religious error, moral confusion, and social subversion. Edwards’s political critique in Part Three had a moral as well as a social dimension: was ‘every Delinquent and ignorant Mechanick’ to judge of ‘principles of Justice and Right reason’, he asked, leaving open the question of where the socially humble orthodox godly might be located. His analysis of support for Independency also combined social and moral descriptors. Independents were ‘Needy, broken, decaid men’; ‘Guilty, suspicious and obnoxious men’; ‘Some who have businesses, causes, and matters depending’ or ‘Ambitious, 191 193

Gangraena, ii. 60–3; i. 56–8; iii. 281. Gangraena, iii. 81; i. 85.

192

Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 133.

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proud, covetous men’ who wanted influential friends or profitable places; ‘Libertines and loose persons who have a desire to live in pleasures and enjoy their lusts’; ‘All wanton-witted, unstable, erroneous spirits of all sorts, all hereticks and Sectaries’.194 Edwards’s social analysis was more shifting and unstable than most commentators have assumed, reflecting complex social and political alignments particularly in the city of London as well as his own uneasy and precarious situation. Indeed, Edwards’s alarmist predictions about social dislocation were more profound, more cataclysmic than any concern with local or specific hierarchies of age, social status, or gender. As his discussion of the connections between immoral life and erroneous doctrine suggests, Edwards feared that the toleration of error and heresy presaged the dissolution of all moral principles and social ties. Rejection of sin and hell, the elevation of reason over faith, the attack on the immortality of the soul—all these doctrines involved the removal of essential restraints which preserved gullible humanity from horrendous indulgence. Hence it was ‘Libertinisme’ that acted as the ‘great vein’ going thorow the whole body of the radicalized army. Libertinism is a central term in Gangraena, carrying a variety of associations—to liberty of conscience as well as the surrender of sinful human beings to base lusts.195 Edwards’s general arguments about the horrors of schism, heresy, and blasphemy, the dangers of toleration, and the guilt of Independents and sectaries are clear enough at first sight, but their import becomes more elusive on further exploration. It would be misleading, however, to judge the impact of Gangraena, in the seventeenth or the twenty-first century, only through an intellectual analysis of its arguments and its affinities with heavyweight theological genres. Edwards rather impertinently compared Gangraena to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the most popular English book after the Bible, and we may not agree in judging his work to be the equal of Foxe’s. Yet both books made a polemical impact through reprinting a wide range of sources, and offering readers striking stories and vivid images, ensuring an emotional commitment as well as an intellectual response.196

194 Ibid. iii, unpaginated insert, sig. c2v; ii. 185. Compare the use of the image of the ‘plain man’, discussed in Ch. 4, below which also combined moral and social qualities. 195 Gangraena, i. 16–17, quoted above. Compare the association of libertinism with atheism and ‘horrible, fearfull uncleannesses’ (iii. 185). 196 Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation, has a wide-ranging treatment of Foxe.

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Edwards presented Gangraena as a substantial and serious work of heresiography, and compared himself to Paul and Augustine. Clearly he did not see himself as a hack journalist writing funny stories about tub preachers in the manner of John Taylor, but we can point to cheap print, manuscript and printed letters, and providentialist narratives as important contexts within which readers might have located his work.197 In this section I will thus discuss some of the broader generic associations and narrative techniques found in Gangraena. Amongst the many manuscript sources reprinted by Edwards, the most important were letters, some sent directly to him, some passed on by citizens, ministers, or MPs, others intercepted. Letters provided both information on sectarianism and support for Edwards himself, as many were in praise of his activities.198 Like other aspects of Edwards’s text, the role of letters is somewhat contradictory. Letters had complex, slippery generic associations lying between the public and the private, the factual and the fictional.199 The effectiveness of Edwards’s letters derived from their being written initially for a private purpose, yet their writers and recipients had allowed them to be judged within a public arena. The printing of letters sought to mimic or reproduce the directness of oral or written communication through the more generalized and relatively recent form of print. In ‘Wing’s Short Title Catalogue of works published from 1641 to 1700’, there are 802 anonymous items described as ‘Letters to’ besides many hundreds more by named authors. Furthermore, from some points of view, a letter was private, ‘a gift and an exercise in friendship’, so that readers of printed correspondence were made into accomplices or eavesdroppers, offered an intimate glimpse of a relationship from which they were normally excluded.200 On the other hand, letters were often in fact public or semipublic, circulated in manuscript or print for a variety of pastoral or polemical purposes. The letters of Erasmus, Samuel Rutherford, John Cotton, and George Fox are only the best-known examples of correspondence A fuller discussion of Gangraena’s readers is provided in Ch. 4, below. The details of how letters came to Edwards will be discussed in Ch. 3, below. 199 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 204–19; Johns, Nature of the Book, 459. 200 McKenzie, ‘Speech-Manuscript-Print’, 103; Claudio Guillen, ‘Notes towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in Barbara K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 70–101. 197 198

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with wide-ranging public and practical purposes. Inspired by the example of the epistles of Paul and other Apostles, Nehemiah Wallington in 1650 made a collection of ‘manye pious, holy, Godly and Christian Letters, some are to instruct and advise, Some to reprove and admonish, Some are sweete and comfortable & some are to stir up praise and thankfulnesse’. These ‘usefull and profitable’ letters were intended for publication in print or manuscript for they were prefaced with an address ‘To all Readers’.201 Edwards drew on both the public and private resonances of letters to demonstrate their validity. He stressed ‘their writing in a publike way, and not in a private manner, the willingness to have them published’, as evidence for the truthfulness of his correspondents. But in fact most letterwriters in Part One were not named, because they ‘live amongst many sectaries and independents’, who ‘may much molest and trouble them’. When challenged (particularly by John Goodwin) to prove the letters were not forgeries, he laid claim to the status of correspondence as a private pledge of friendship: ‘most of the men who writ the Letters, writ them not for that end to be printed, knew not of, nor imagined no such matter, neither did I acquaint them with it, and for me without their leave obtained to print their names to the world, I could not do it keeping unviolated the rules of friendship, besides I well understood that were a way to cut off correspondencey and intelligence for the future, if I should print mens names publikely to the world, writing in a private way to me’. Rather contradictorily, however, he proceeded to give the names in Part Two:‘that I may overthrow Cretensis Proposition and his Inferences, his Foundation and his superstructures, I shall name most of them who writ the Letters to me and others, as also from whose hands I received those Letters which were printed by me though not written to me’.202 Goodwin’s scepticism had as much generic plausibility as Edwards’s stress on veracity, however, for printed correspondence was often fictitious, composed by the author to support particular arguments.203 201 Lisa Jardine,‘Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus’s Familiar Letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 77–101; Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions; Sargent Bush, ‘Epistolary Counseling in the Puritan Movement: The Example of John Cotton’, in Bremer (ed.), Puritanism, 127–46; BL Sloane MS 922, fo. 2r. Wallington included letters written by or to him as well as ones from printed books. See N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 88–9, for the uses of Fox’s letters. 202 Gangraena, i. 6; ii. 33, 53–4. 203 Guillen,‘Notes towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, 85–6.

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Newsletters in particular straddled public and private, print and manuscript, and the newsbooks of the 1640s drew directly on the model of the circulated manuscript newsletter. Edwards was scathing about newsbooks, denouncing ‘false reports . . . vented in weekly news Books (the Pensioners of the Independent party)’, yet he dealt with the same kind of material, and used them on occasions as sources.204 Gangraena in turn seems to have inspired other Presbyterian newsletters. The Copy of a Letter written from Northampton, produced for Edwards’s bookseller Ralph Smith a few weeks after the publication of Gangraena, Part Three denounced the preaching of army chaplains Saltmarsh and Dell in terms very reminiscent of Edwards. Like Edwards too, this author was critical of newsbooks hostile to Presbyterianism such as the Moderate Intelligencer, or, as it was termed, the Imperfect Diurnall.205 The newsbooks Edwards cited were mostly parliamentarian ones, yet in some ways his material had more in common with the royalist paper Mercurius Aulicus which like Edwards, albeit for different motives, delighted in publicizing the bizarre activities and opinions of parliament’s religious radicals. In 1645 the paper described how a woman had said ‘God was a lyar and our Saviour Christ was a Bastard’, in the manner of Robert Cosens of Rochester and Robert Coleborne, both quoted in Gangraena as saying Christ was a bastard.206 The transgressive baptism of horses is a further common theme. One of Edwards most notorious stories, of Captain Beaumont’s soldiers urinating in a font in Yakesley, Huntingdonshire and baptizing a horse, is paralleled by a similar account in Mercurius Aulicus. In this story soldiers of Essex’s army were reported as baptizing a horse with the sign of the cross in Lostwithiel church. The horse was named Charles in derision of the king, and led the editor to comment that it was now clear why Lord Brooke had made his stable-groom a preacher. The following week the London newsbook Mercurius Britanicus gave the story further circulation in order to attack it as ‘the highest, boldest, most impudent, ridiculous story that ever was yet vomited out by an Aulicus’. The Yakesley horse baptism also took

204 Gangraena, ii. 208; cf. also i. 44, 110–11; iii. 228, for the complaints; i. 182 and iii. 114, 179 for the use of newsbooks as sources. See Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 191–2, 260–1, for discussion of Edwards’s attitudes to newsbooks, which were similar to those of ‘serious’ historians such as May, Dugdale, and Vicars, who all worried about their veracity, even as they used them copiously as sources: Raymond, Invention, 280–8. 205 The Copy of a Letter written from Northampton (London, 1647), Thomason date 6 Feb. 206 Mercurius Aulicus, 27 Apr.–4 May 1645. For Cosens, Gangraena, i. 181; for Coleborne, ii. 116. Edwards also reported from ‘an understanding honest Citizen this present January 20 in the evening, That he had lately heard a woman say there were lyes in the Scripture’: i. 119.

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place in the summer of 1644, but the details and dates Edwards gives are attached to the evidence, not the original event: ‘July the third, [1646] two citizens, honest men related to me this story, in the hearing of another minister, and that with a great deal of confidence [my emphasis]’. Because it was ‘so sad a story’ Edwards sought further corroboration and offered a letter from seven inhabitants of Yakesley, precisely dated 15 August 1646, which he had received ‘about ten days ago in September . . . from the hands of a godly minister’. He had the original still. Edwards was thus deploying a range of truth-telling techniques: the elaborate accounting of the process by which the evidence was acquired; the details of time and place; the attempts to suggest the reliability of his informants—but he was also publicizing activities which had already been made plausible by newsbook accounts.207 From another perspective, Edwards may seem to protest too much, and the sheer amount of evidence he presents, with the repeated stress on its validity demonstrated his insecurity—the lurking fear that he would not be believed, as much as his aim of convincing readers. This fear was shared by many newsbook authors, but an illuminating contrast can be made with another royalist account of religious disorder, Mercurius Rusticus. Bruno Ryves, a well-connected royal chaplain, produced a series of newsletters in 1643–4, reprinted several times later in the 1640s as a single work.208 This made a substantial volume, although at 170 pages it was dwarfed by Gangraena, in which Ryves chronicled the ‘Murthers, Robberies, Plunderings and other Outrages committed by the Rebels’ with a particular stress on iconoclasm and other desecrations of churches and cathedrals by parliament’s forces, along with the sufferings of the loyal and orthodox (that is, royalist) clergy. Like Edwards, Ryves proceeded through a very long sequence of stories, vividly elaborated with details of names, times, and places. But the tone and the methodology is very different. The ideological contrast is predictable: Ryves of course made none of the distinctions between parliamentarians which were the whole point of

Mercurius Aulicus, 43rd week, ending 26 Oct. 1644; the Brooke reference is to the preacher John Spencer, usually described as Brooke’s coachman (Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 26). Mercurius Britanicus, Monday 11 Nov.–Monday 18 Nov. 1644; Gangraena, iii. 17–18. 208 I thank John Walter for stressing the interest of this comparison to me. Ryves is discussed in Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 149 n., 157, 278, 330. By chance, the moderate parliamentarian MP Sir Simonds D’Ewes bought Mercurius Rusticus along with ‘the third part of Gangrena & other pamphlets’ for 9s. 4d., in Feb. 1647: Andrew G. Watson, The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (London: British Museum Publications, 1966). I owe this reference to J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict (London: Routledge, 1988), 102. 207

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Edwards’s polemic, but wrote generally of ‘the schismaticall Puritanicall party’ and labelled Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick together as ‘that Triumvirat of seditious Schismaticks’ at a time when they were no longer on speaking terms.209 There are equally sharp contrasts in style. Ryves is much more measured and uniform, restrained, polished, formal. He rarely interrupted his narrative with direct quotation of his sources, and he rarely felt compelled to explain, as Edwards always did, how he had acquired information. He mostly takes the authority of his narrative for granted, with the occasional aside to underline the point that authorly omniscience was not compromised by lack of precision over details: ‘At Bridstow in Devonshire, there dwells a Husband-man (and though I cannot tell his name, yet let it not weaken the credit of the Relation)’.210 Mercurius Aulicus differed significantly in style from Ryves’s work although it shared his commitment to Anglican orthodoxy. Aulicus drew on the comic mode of the anti-sectarian tracts of the early 1640s, associated particularly with John Taylor. Edwards’s stories too might have been familiar to some readers because they echoed themes in these overtly humorous pamphlets by John Taylor and anonymous writers. Taylor’s basic definitions of orthodoxy and error were different from Edwards’s but, although he drew on widespread anti-Puritan stereotypes, his specific targets were, like Edwards’s, mechanic preachers and separatists. The sensationalist stories, lists of sects, and stress on the preaching of women and low-born men were to reappear in the sombre Presbyterian works of the mid-1640s. The Brownists Conventicle (perhaps Taylor’s) referred to a list of sects including Thraskeites, Brownists, Anabaptists, Familists, and new sects of Adamists.211 These pamphlets referred to real places, locating women preachers carefully in the London parishes of St Andrews Holborn and St Giles in the Field; to real people, and their demeaning occupations, in particular the ‘most famous preaching Cobler Samuel Ryves, Mercurius Rusticus, 68 (22 July 1643); 121 (Oct. 1643). Examples of the rare inclusion of sources are at Mercurius Rusticus, 114–15 (a warrant from Nathaniel Fiennes, as governor of Bristol, July 1643); 127 (a warrant for the imprisonment of royalist cleric Robert Chestlin); 141–2 (a letter about the destruction at Canterbury Cathedral); the last quotation is at 79. 211 [Taylor?], The Brownists Conventicle, 2; the anonymous A Discovery of 29 Sects here in London similarly provided a short paragraph on each of the sects, which ranged from the plausible Puritans and Papists (although these are hardly sects) to the less likely Adamites and Bacchanalians. For a discussion of Taylor’s anti-sectarian writings and attributions see Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 164–5, 201. 209 210

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How’, immortalized by Taylor as a tub-preacher, the felt-maker John Green, and the two Samuel Eatons—one an Antinomian button-maker, active in London (until his death in 1639), the other a returner from New England whose preaching in Cheshire had alarmed episcopalians. But all these early pamphlets moved from the factual through the plausible to more extravagant fantasies of sexual indulgence and overeating, where women preachers frequent city pick-up places, and sectaries disapprove of lobsters because of their cardinal-like red-coats, but permit the eating of them skinned.212 Edwards and the other ‘Presbyterian’ writers against the sects were not strong on humour, at least of the intentional kind, although both royalist and radical writers (such as Richard Overton) used burlesque and satirical forms. Nonetheless, some of the ‘orthodox’ pamphlets and broadsides of the later 1640s seem to adopt Taylor’s categories directly, although Edwards only included those men still actively causing trouble.213 These distinct forms of writing together helped construct the conventional themes that religious disorder provoked sexual anarchy and social subversion, while drawing on these same constructions for their impact. The assumption that various types of unorthodoxy could be distinct, but also ran into each other with a sinister indeterminacy, was also found in these earlier tracts. So far we have considered Gangraena’s affinities with letters, newsbooks, and other cheap print genres but we need also to address broader, less easily defined contexts. Much recent theoretical work has drawn our attention to the ways in which narrative structures—embedded in both texts and ‘the world’ (a distinction that is in any case very problematic)— offer a framework of expectations and assumptions through which material about, say, religious radicals would be interpreted. The ‘narrativizing’ tendency to fill in gaps, or to make a coherent pattern from a variety of material helps us to understand something of what Edwards as an author was doing, while for readers (or some readers) his accounts gained validity from echoes of other remembered stories and patterns. In telling so many stories, providing a rich variety of ‘names, places, conditions, time’, Edwards was drawing on the potent power of narrative. De Certeau’s insight that ‘Every story is a travel story’ to which rearrangements of place 212 A Discoverie of Six women preachers in Middlesex, Kent, Cambridgeshire and Salisbury (London, 1641); John Taylor, A Swarme of Sectaries and Schismatiques (London, 1641), included a picture of Samuel How preaching in a tub or barrel and also mentioned the Antinomian Samuel Eaton. The Brownists Conventicle has both Eatons, Greene, and the lobsters. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 17–19, 22, 26, 36 gives the London context for these men. 213 i.e. Green, briefly, and the Cheshire Eaton; see Ch. 3, below.

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and space are central suggests something of the attractions of Edwards’s accounts of sectaries carefully placed in London: ‘Nichols who lives about Moor-Fields, that comes into Stepney Parish sometimes to draw away people’; ‘one Lamb who was a Sope-boyler, and a Church that meets in Bell-Alley in Colemanstreet called Lambs Church’; but also always on the move, ‘travelling in Essex to do the Devils work’, on ‘progresse in Kent’, ‘Emissaries out of the Sectaries Churches are sent to infect and poyson the counties’. Edwards’s researches themselves were often presented as travel stories, as he described his attempt ‘to have laid him [Lilburne] open in all his colours, by following him from place to place’.214 Edwards’s stories included many striking images, some developed from the familiar: ‘These Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, are not onely vented in a corner, in secret, close chambers, with doors doublelocked, among two or three, that few or none heare or know of them, or in some private village and remote dark corner of this Kingdom, that a man must dig through a wall to see and hear them’ but ‘in Houses that stand open for all, where many hundreds come and in the Metrapolis of the Kingdom, London, and that in the heart of the City’. Others depended on an elaborate and imaginative use of Scripture: ‘But wee may see what sad times we are fallen into, and that the Sectaries are grown fearlesse, that they dare come abroad, . . . which symptone, among many others, makes mee fear the night and darknesse is at hand, when as the wolves and the wilde beasts dare come thus out of their dens; whereas when the Sunne arises they goe to their dens.’ Edwards’s reference was to Psalm 104: 20, 22, although this referred to lions rather than wolves, which apparently led him to think of Zephaniah 3: 3, with its alarming concept of ‘the wolves of the evening’, and a sinister climax: ‘as the frogs croaking and making a noise uses to be in the evening so the croaking of false Teachers resembled to wolves, the beasts of the forrest, and frogs, presages the going downe of the Sun, and night coming’.215 Edwards made frequent use of reported speech in his dramatic encounters, as with the young woman spotted ‘buying in the Strand of a goldsmith a gold ring’, who was asked if she was to be married, but answered,‘she was to be of the congregational way, and of a church where the minister was a man of precious gifts’, so she was buying him a present. Details of place and the time when Edwards received the information added to the effect: 214 Toolan, Narrative; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 115; Gangraena, i. 6, 78, 92–3; iii. 153. I am grateful to Richard Cust for much discussion of the relevance of narrative. 215 Gangraena, i. 148–9; ii. 137.

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‘August 13. two Booksellers of Pauls Churchyard told me, that a Bookseller offering to exchange Books, as Master Dent’s Path-wayes to Heaven, for Saltmarshes Books, answer was made by a Sectarie, what do you bring such Books for? you may stop bottles with them, we will take none of your old Divinity, we have new light and new Divinity now.’216 Dramatic personal encounters between Edwards and many of his opponents punctuated Parts Two and Three. Master Mascall of Dover’s door-stopping at Edwards’s own house, with a ‘friend of his and mine formerly’, where he ‘denyed positively and peremptorily what was written of him’, and a badtempered encounter with Hugh Peter in Westminster Hall are amongst the most striking.217 All three parts had wonderful villains, led by Edwards’s anti-hero, John Goodwin, with Hugh Peter, Henry Burton, and John Lilburne among the first rank. Lilburne, ‘a darling of the Sectaries . . . a great stickler in the meetings at the Windmill Tavern . . . a man who pretends great piety, holinesse, and suffering for the truth of God, as his own books, and his friends letters of him give out, and yet from good hands of godly Ministers and others, he is reported to be a man of a loose life, prophaning the Lords Day in Sports, one who is a player at Cards, one who will sit long with company at Wine and Tipling and hath done all he hath for money’. There were a host of minor characters: the old wolf Clement Writer, the dipper of naked women Samuel Oates, the peripatetic sectary Laurence Clarkson, and the inventive Mrs Attaway amongst them.218 Gangraena’s themes and images connected with a host of pre-existing narratives, topics, and assumptions within the culture of early modern England. Mocking re-enactments of religious rituals with animals had a long history by 1644. It had been reported to Robert Cecil in the 1590s that a horse’s head was baptized in Cornwall, while accusations that a dog had been christened John were made in Devon in 1617.219 This history does not Ibid. ii. 16–17; iii. 112. Ibid. iii. Preface, 126. Such direct encounters are discussed at length in Ch. 4 below. 218 Gangraena, i. 96 (cf. ii. 29–30, where Edwards’s defends his view of Lilburne against Walwyn and Goodwin). 219 HMC, Hatfield House MSS Part X (1904), 450–1; I owe this reference to Patrick Collinson. Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994), 195. In 1630 it was alleged that the London lecturer Peter Shaw had preached ‘the outward washing of water in Baptisme, is no more then the washing or dipping of a doggs foote in water’: Como and Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians’, 710. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 41, writes of ‘numerous cases’ of animal baptism, and David Cressy, Travesties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), has a full account of such re-enactments. I am very grateful to David Cressy for allowing me to see a proof copy of the relevant chapter. 216 217

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of course imply that there was a lot of animal baptism about, but it is possible that such traditions provided a script for would-be Anabaptists to follow, and more probable that they led the orthodox to expect that sectaries would do such things. Incidents that seem both incredible and distasteful to modern readers may well have been slotted into a coherent framework of interpretation by some contemporaries. Within London, Edwards claimed Anabaptists ‘have done and practised many strange things in reference to baptisme of children, dressing up a Cat like a childe for to be baptized, inviting many people both men and women as to baptizing of a childe, and then when neighbours were come, having one to preach against baptizing of children’. In 1644 there was a long-running legal case in the city where a woman, Susan Platt, was accused of a profane re-enactment of a baptism with a cat. This case may have been Edwards’s actual source, but it is perhaps better regarded as an indication that such practices were talked about and believed to be true by litigants, authors, and readers alike. Of course, Gangraena extended the currency of such stories, both directly and through the recycling of Edwards’s material in a range of anti-sectarian print. Years later, Nehemiah Wallington remembered Anabaptists ‘that did deride and mock of the ordinance of baptism in the baptising of a cat’.220 Gangraena drew also on providentialist expectations that God’s purposes and judgements were revealed in the disasters or deliverances that every individual experienced. The specific meaning of providential narratives was contested as the nature of true religion was fought over in the 1640s—but the bare framework locating specific incidents within an overall divine plan was common to all. A particularly chilling dispute over meaning was stimulated by Edwards’s (again having his cake and eating it) rebuttal of Independent providentialism: lately upon reports (raised by them no doubt) that I was dead (though there was not the least colour for it, not being sick at all) they gave it out it was Gods just judgement upon me to cut me off, for preaching and writing against the Independents and at the same time they gave out, that Mr Calamy had broke his arme, and Dr Twisse was a dying; O saith one of their Doctours of Divinity, you may see the just hand of God against the Presbyterians, Mr Edwards dead, Mr Calamies arme broke, and Dr Twisse a dying, so that if these things had been thus, we may see how 220 Gangraena, i. 67, 14. London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SR 952/56–7; 956/32–7, 215; 958/125; 959/22, 25. There is further discussion of this case in Ch. 3, below. Wallington’s account of God’s providences is quoted in Cressy, Travesties, 174. For the circulation of the cat-baptism habit in other printed works, see Ch. 4, below.

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they would have judged it; and if such things had fallen to some of us, which have to many of the Sectaries (which I name not to upbraid them with, but to shew them their own folly,) as that by the plague of pestilence our children two at a time had been taken away, as Mr Goodwins was upon the making his house a meeting for the Sectaries, and some of our eyes put out by a Pike in the street, as one of Lilburnes was, immediatly upon his Letter coming forth against Mr Prynne and the Assembly; and our wives starke mad, as Mr Peters wife, we might have expected as bad books written of us, as were written by the Papists of Luther and Calvin.221

Goodwin’s own, equally stark version was that God had reduced the numbers of his children so he could survive after Presbyterian intolerance had deprived him of a major part of his livelihood: I could not so much look upon the taking of them away by God, as a taking them away from me, as from that misery, whereunto the undeserved hatred and injustice of my presbyterian neighbours, in wrestling and detaining my means from me, had exposed them. Men took away my means; and God made up the breach (in part) by diminishing my charge.222

If the precise import of such personal calamities was controversial, the basic pattern was widely accepted. The Presbyterian artisan Wallington noted, in his collection of God’s judgements on sinners of various kinds, an Independent couple who had spent a fast day with their congregation rather than at their parish church and came home to find their 3-year-old child, ‘a Childe much begged of the lord’, drowned in a tub of water through the negligence of a maid. For sympathetic readers Edwards’s stories linking erroneous doctrine, immoral life, and personal misfortune would have been entirely plausible, entirely congruent with their existing ‘experience’—in itself a complex category mediated and structured by providential literature.223 As Dagmar Freist has shown, existing cultural resources, familiar tropes of inversion and binary division, of disorder and family conflict, offered vehicles through which men and women could comprehend the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century, or express their own political and religious views.224 The family dramas in Gangraena mobilized conventional Gangraena, i. 70 (1st sequence). Goodwin, Cretensis, 36–8; Goodwin added that three of the ringleaders in the campaign to deprive him of the living of Stephen Coleman Street had since died. 223 BL Sloane MS 1457, assigned by Wallington to Sept. 1645; for general accounts of providential frameworks see Lake and Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat; Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety; Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England. 224 Freist, Governed by Opinion. 221 222

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understandings of the proper ordering of households to discredit sectarianism. Mrs Attaway’s contempt for the bounds of matrimony became notorious, and Edwards also demonstrated how Antinomian arguments could be mobilized to attempt the seduction of a young maid, as we have seen. Another elderly Londoner, Thomas Clark, a widower, was misguided enough to hire a maidservant on the recommendation of Henry Jessey, a central figure in London separatism,‘sometimes a minister of the Separation, but now an Anabaptist, a Seeker, and no man knowes what’. The servant, Mary Abraham, proceeded to overturn the proprieties of age (she was over 40), status, and gender by seducing his sickly 15-year-old son, ‘takes her opportunitie in this weaknesse and want of understanding . . . to labour to make this Boy marry her’. They went through some form of marriage, apparently performed by a bedridden schoolmaster, and procured a certificate that they had been married in St George’s church, Southwark ‘where she never was with him, neither is there any such marriage in the Church register book to be found’. ‘This old wench’was apparently a serial seducer of young men: ‘defending her practise in the streets to be lawfull, saying, It was commanded under the Law not to marry without consent of parents, but that was but a ceremony to them that lived under the Law; it is now lawfull, because we live under the Gospel’. The story ended with Jessey persuading the family to buy Abraham off for £10. References to parish registers, and the verbatim printing of Thomas Clark’s petition to parliament, added to the credibility of the account, but some of its impact surely came from its perennial themes of seduction, false marriage, and predatory older women.225 We shall return to the perplexing question of Gangraena’s impact on its readership in Chapter 4; definitive judgements on the assumptions of past readers are impossible. Nonetheless, it is important that many of Edwards’s themes and tropes chimed in with other contemporary experiences, and frameworks for interpreting those experiences. Gangraena was not only a piece of religious argument which readers judged rationally to be true or false. It was also a rich collection of confrontations, insults, deceptions and betrayals, colourful personalities, vivid evocations of London, and bewildering journeys. As with Foxe, so with Edwards, sympathetic readers surely wanted to believe it, or felt convinced, as much as they evaluated it in cold blood. Gangraena was an idiosyncratic heresiography, a complex, ramshackle work that reprinted letters and other manu-

225

Gangraena, ii. 10–11, 144–5: iii. 82–5.

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scripts, quoted from sympathetic and hostile printed books, and offered Edwards’s own lists and harangues. Most obviously, the three parts of Gangraena made up a massive volume with an enormous amount of information and unintended entertainment. Chapter 3 will explore the contexts and mechanisms enabling an unbeneficed London lecturer to produce such a work, and evaluate Edwards’s account of religious upheaval in city, country, and army by comparing it with other sources and perspectives.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Like a Universal Leprosie Overspread this Whole Kingdom’ City and Provinces in Gangraena Gangraena was, and could only have been, a Londoner’s book. As a London lecturer in the 1640s, Edwards was ideally placed to gather the horrifying details of separatism, heresy, and blasphemy and publicize them back in turn to city and provinces. By far the largest city in England, with a population of over a quarter of a million (70,000 of them within the walls), London was a crucial centre for ‘Intelligence and Communication’. Thus, as a hostile commentator had it: ‘Mr Edwards sitteth at the receit of Custom and raketh up all the filthy rags from all the parts of the kingdom for to make paper of them’.1 The crowded, intimate parishes of London, particularly Edwards’s part of London, provided a tremendous arena for gossip, argument, and discussion so that the religious heterodoxy of the capital was forced on Edwards in all its alarming variety: ‘errors, Heresies, Blasphemies’ were not only vented ‘in secret, close chambers, with doors doublelocked’, or in a ‘remote dark corner of this Kingdom’, but ‘in the Metrapolis of the Kingdom, London, and that in the heart of the City; so that they are not preached with us in the ear, but on the house-top, we declare our errours, as Sodom, and are not ashamed; yea, abominable errours are Printed, the Books sold up and down in Westminster-Hall, London, and dispersed in all places; yea, given into the hands of Parliament men in Westminster-Hall’.2 London provided Edwards with his sources, and inspired or terrified him into writing them up. It was in London in the early 1640s that an or1 Vanessa Harding, ‘City, Capital and Metropolis: The Changing Shape of Seventeenth Century London’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117, 124; Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers, 29/5/51b; Robert Prier, A Cristall Looking glass for a Proud Pharisee (London, 1650), 153. 2 Gangraena, i. 148–9.

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thodox minister would be most challenged by religious separation and speculation, but it was in London also that the support networks of godly clergy were most strongly developed and most effectively deployed to campaign against the sects and for the establishment of Presbyterian church government. This chapter will explore how Edwards’s location in the city made the writing or compiling of Gangraena possible, and then assess how his account of religious radicalism in the city and in the provinces compares to other discussions and other sources. For London, in particular, we will find that Edwards’s version, a partial but not fantastic view, has profoundly influenced modern discussions, so profoundly indeed that it is almost impossible now to develop a view of London, not affected (or tainted?) by the prominence of Gangraena as a source. edwards the ‘controversy lecturer ’ ‘The Heart of the City’ For most of his career Edwards was a London lecturer, by 1644 preaching a regular, weekly assault on the sects at Christ Church, Newgate, a prominent city pulpit, successor to the medieval foundation of Black Friars, and strategically placed to tap a whole range of lay and clerical networks. Christ Church was just north-west of St Paul’s churchyard, where people thronged to browse the bookshops and to exchange the latest news; the Stationers’ Hall was also close at hand. It was less than half a mile from the Guildhall where the city authorities met regularly in Common Council— the Mayor and Aldermen sharing power since 1641/2 with the Common Councillors elected annually by every ward. A little further away were the bookshops of Cornhill where Edwards’s most regular publisher, Ralph Smith, sold Antapologia and Gangraena, at, most appropriately, the sign of the Bible at the top of Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange, itself another crucial arena for gossip and news.3 Christ Church’s parish minister was a Presbyterian zealot, William Jenkyn, and several parishioners were active in the Presbyterian campaigns of 1645–51, amongst them Edwards’s fellow 3 For near-contemporary accounts of Christ Church and its environs, see James Howell, Londinopolis (London, 1657), 308–15. For St Paul’s and the Exchange as centres of news and gossip see Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 112 (1986); Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’. For bookshops the most convenient discussion is now in Johns, Nature of the Book, 77–83, 108–9; for communication in the city in general, see Freist, Governed by Opinion.

1. Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of the Royal Exchange, a crucial arena for gossip, news, and debate in London.

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polemicist the remarkable schoolmaster John Vicars.4 Vicars, a foundling left ‘betwene the Counting house and the Grammar School’, survived this inauspicious start and the attentions of the high commission in 1640, to become usher of the same school, an author of Presbyterian polemic and chronicles of parliament’s civil war victories, and one of the Presbyterian authors lampooned in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras.5 To the east of St Paul’s was the church of St Augustine, Watling Street, where the incumbent was Francis Roberts, a committed Presbyterian acquaintance of Edwards and Baillie, while further north, Edmund Calamy, the leader of city Presbyterianism, held the living of St Mary Aldermanbury. Calamy’s church was convenient for the Guildhall, and for Sion College, a combination of library, meeting place, and dining club established in the 1620s, which did so much to facilitate the collegiality of the London clergy.6 The sectarian redoubts of Coleman Street and Bell Alley were equally if uncomfortably close by. Christ Church was frequently chosen for formal, set-piece sermons to the city authorities, such as the Easter 1644 discussions of heresy discussed in Chapter 2.7 It was a popular location for the elaborate occasions which brought together London’s governors, the clergy of the city and the Assembly, and the two Houses of Parliament for days of celebration or reconciliation. Sermons, processions, and formal dinners combined to make these sober and religious occasions also convivial and ceremonial, enacting a renewal of the parliamentarian cause as a civic and godly union. The best documented example, vividly described both by Thomas Juxon, the Independent-leaning London grocer, and by Edwards’s friend, the Scots minister Robert Baillie, was in January 1644, following overtures from the royal court to the ‘Independents’. It offered, wrote Baillie, ‘a fair 4 Liu, Puritan London, 71. I do not know if Edwards was still living in his house in St Helens parish but he must have spent much time near Christ Church. As we shall see in Ch. 4, several of his victims certainly knew where he lived. 5 E. H. Pearce, Annals of Christ’s Hospital (London: Methuen, 1901), 69–71; CSPD 1640, 401, 405, 416, 421, 425, 430; Hudibras, i. i. 639–42:‘Thou that with Ale, or viler Liquors | Did inspire Withers, Pryn, and Vickars, | And force them, though it were in spight | Of nature and their stars, to write.’ 6 Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 90–1, provides a full account of Calamy’s role in city Presbyterianism and of the importance of Sion College, located at the city wall. 7 Vines, Impostures of Seducing Teachers, preached on the Tuesday of Easter week, 23 Apr. 1644. Charles Herle, Abrahams Offer, Gods Offering (London, 1644), was preached the same day. Thomas Hill, The Good Old Way Gods Way, and John Strickland, A Discovery of Peace or The Thoughts of the Almighty For the Ending of the People’s Calamities (London, 1644), were given on the Wednesday. See BL E48 (2–5), for Thomason’s copies of these. All preachers were provincial representatives in the Westminster Assembly. These ‘Easter’ semons were a longstanding part of city life.

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demonstration of the great unanimitie of all those whom Oxford plott would have divided’. After a sermon by Stephen Marshall at Christ Church, the participants processed slowly through the city to dinner at the Taylors’ Hall. The men of the city militia lined the streets, while the London Common Councillors led the procession on foot in their gowns, followed by the Aldermen in scarlet and on horseback, Essex and Warwick as Lord General and Lord Admiral, ‘and the rest of the Lords, and Officers of the armies, on foot; next to them the House of Commons, with their Speaker, and his mace before him; after the Assemblie of Divines’. The Scots commissioners had been placed between the Commons and the Assembly, but feeling it was tactless ‘to take place before all the Divines of England’, they ‘stole away to our coatch and when there was no way for coatches, for throng of people, we went on foot, with great difficultie, through hudge croudings of people’. At Cheapside, a great bonfire was made, ‘of manie fyne pictures of Christ and the saints, of relicks, beads, and such trinketts’. After a good dinner, and a psalm, ‘The Speaker of the Commons House, drank to the Lords in name of all the Commons of England. The Lords stood all up, everie one with his glas, for they represent none but themselves, and drank to the Commons. The Mayor drank to both, in name of the Citie. The sword-bearer, with his string cap of maintenance still fixed on his head, came to us with the Mayor’s drink’.8 Similarly, the thanksgivings for parliament’s crushing victory at the battle of Naseby in June 1645, and for the successes of parliament in ending royalist resistance in the west in April 1646, were celebrated at Christ Church. On the latter occasion, Joseph Caryl pointedly urged caution in defining and attacking error and insisted, ‘I shall never believe all Heresiographers’. This thanksgiving aimed also to reconcile parliament and city after the bitter tensions produced by the city’s March petition for a more effective Presbyterian church structure.9 Edwards’s Christ Church was thus a focal point for the enactment of parliamentarianism as ideology and as alliance. 8 Letters of Baillie, ii. 134–5; cf. Juxon’s Journal, DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 2v–3r. I transcribed relevant passages before the Journal became available as The Journal of Thomas Juxon, ed. Keith Lindley and David Scott (Camden Society, 5th ser. 13, 1999). This passage is at 39–40. My transcriptions occasionally differ and references to both manuscript and printed versions will be given. 9 CLRO, CCJ, vol. 40, fos. 134r, 175v; Joseph Caryl, Englands Plus Ultra, Both of Hoped Mercies and of required Duties (London, 1646), 24. This was preached before the members of both Houses of Parliament, the city authorities, and the Westminster Assembly, at Christ Church, 2 Apr. 1646; Juxon has this as 3 Apr., describing how the two Houses of Parliament, the Scots commissioners, the prince elector, the members of the Assembly, with the city governors, Major-General Massey, and others were ‘magnificently feasted in Grocers Hall by the Citty, the Red Regiment of Trayned Band being a Gard to them and Cheapside thwackt with people as at a Lord Mayors daii’: DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 70r; Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 113.

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When Cheney Culpeper suggested to Samuel Hartlib that their mutual friend John Dury should find himself a London lecture, he summed up the potential of the post:‘It is a brave center for all kindes of correspondencey, & a stage where (by makinge his abilities knowne) he may doe beste right to his aymes; Wee seldome looke for riche stuffes in shops that are scituated in some by corner out of the way’.10 Despite his lack of an established parish living, Edwards, as the lecturer at Christ Church, had one of the best stages in London, providing access to information, networks, and increasing fame. A well-known lecture had been established in the parish by the 1580s at least, but Robert Baillie suggests that Edwards’s lecture was a new initiative, specially fitted to his particular controversial (in both senses) talents. In August 1644, Baillie wrote to Scotland, how Mr Edwards hes written a splendid confutation of all Independents’ Apologie. All the ministers of London, at least more than a hundred of them, have agreed to erect a weeklie lecture for him in Christ’s Church, the heart of the city, where he may handle these questions, and nothing else, before all that will come to hear. We hope God will provide remeeds for that evill of Independency, the mother and true fountaine of all the church distractions here.

Ephraim Pagitt commended his ‘reverend Brethren’ of London for the measures against heresy,‘having to that end chosen speciall men to preach severall Lectures in severall places’, while a predictably hostile Henry Burton suggested Independents had been excluded from a lecture with initially broader aims:‘be there not some Lectures set up in sundry publike places of this City, and especially in Christ-Church, whose whole designe, businesse and practice is to declaime and decry Independents? And was not the one half of our first allowance, through underhand dealing of some we could name, subducted, and given to others to preach against us?’11 10 ‘The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 1645–1657’, in M. J. Braddick and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Political and Financial Papers (Camden Miscellany XXXIII, Camden 5th ser. 7, 1996), 266, 24 Feb. 1646. 11 The revenues of the collegiate foundation in the parish were used for five regular lectures; Richard Greenham had moved there in 1591 when he resigned his living at Dry Drayton. Proceedings against Edward Finch, the vicar of Christ Church in Aug. 1641, included as article 19: ‘That he hath since his being Vicar of the said parish much opposed the lecture, which without intermission hath for many years been continued in the west end of the said Church, called the old or lower church’: Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 122–3; The Petition and Articles or Severall Charges exhibited in Parliament against Edward Finch (London, August 1641), BL E166(12), 4; Letters of Baillie, ii. 215–16; Pagitt, Heresiography, dedication to the Mayor, Aldermen, etc. of London, sig. Br; Henry Burton, Truth, still Truth, though shut out of Doores (London, 1645), 24 (partially quoted in Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’).

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Edwards’s predilection for rough housing polemic made his lectures the most notorious in the city, and along with Antapologia, made him a natural recipient for information about sectarian excesses throughout much of England.12 The lectures were dramatic, knockabout affairs, prone to scuffles, heckling, and disorder but clearly not to be missed. Edwards had, wrote Katherine Chidley, turned pulpits into cockpits. In November 1644, the Baptist William Kiffin threw a handwritten note into Edwards’s pulpit ‘to give these leave whom you so brand, as publiquely to object against what you say, when your sermon is ended . . . we hope it will be an encrease of further light to all that feare God and put a large Advantage into your hands, if you have truth on your side’.13 This note was printed as a cheap handbill for those unable to be present. On Edwards’s account his opponents usually relied on abuse rather than debate: all the time from the beginning of that lecture by railing and wicked reports, by hubbubs and stirs, by laughing and fleering in the face of the congregation, and in the midst of the sermons, [they] sought to blast and dash it . . . about the beginning of September, in my sermon, having some passages against the preaching of illiterate mechanic persons, one stamped with his foot and said aloud, this rascally rogue deserves to be pulled out of the pulpit; upon whose words, half a dozen more who stood near him said, let’s go pull him out of the pulpit.

The following April as Edwards was finishing with a prayer:‘up stands one Colonel Washington of Hartfordshire (so his name and place is related to be) and spake openly against what I had preached, that I had not rightly given the sense of that parable of the tares, and that I was a false Prophet, or Beware of false Prophets’.14 Edwards characteristically stressed his own vulnerability, but one of his targets offered a different perspective. The Herefordshire minister John Tombes had developed doubts over infant baptism, although he was orthodox in other matters. He came to London in September 1643 and confided his troubles to other London ministers, first in oral debate but by summer 1644 through manuscript circulation of his arguments, to Stephen Marshall and Thomas Goodwin amongst others: 12 Jeremiah Whitaker as well as Edwards seems to have opposed those ‘who too much favoured Error, Heresies and ranting courses’in a weekly lecture at Christ Church in the 1640s and 1650s: Simeon Ashe, Living loves Betwixt Christ and Dying Christians (London, 1654), funeral sermon for Whitaker, 56–7, but I have not found other references to his activities. 13 Chidley, A New-Years Gift, sig. A3r; William Kiffin, To Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1644), quoted verbatim in Gangraena, i. 107–8, and mentioned in Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 61 (wrongly dated Nov. 1645). The printed version has ‘bubliquely’ and ‘hanqs’. 14 Gangraena, i. 11; ii. 174–5. Drapes, Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 11, claimed that Washington was sent for by the Lord Mayor to answer for his attack on Edwards.

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Now the Papers before named, I perceived were tossed up and down from one to another, and it seemes Master Edwards the Controversie Lecturer at Christ Church got them, and picking out some passages but concealling others that would have cleared them under pretence of refuting them, with the writing of another which he joyned with mine, meerly abused me in the Pulpit at Christ Church: which I immediately charged him with after his Sermon in the Vestry; and he only excused it by telling me he named me not though there were sundry ministers there that knew he meant me. But this it seems is like Master Edwards his justice to other men.15

In any circumstances a university-educated, godly London lecturer had a range of contacts or networks offering practical, personal, and professional support. As we saw in Chapter 1, through Cambridge and his London jobs in the 1620s and 1630s, Edwards had become acquainted with many of his allies and his opponents of the 1640s, gaining contacts which were now of ‘great use in answering Independents’.16 Friendships at university, patronage connections, gatherings at lectures, conferences, and debates helped to construct and maintain the godly connections of both ministers and laity and kept alive a complex and resilient Puritan movement in the years before 1640. In London, as Paul Seaver, David Como, and Peter Lake have demonstrated, a lively Puritan community (or communities) attempted to maintain a precarious unity over doctrine, lay–clerical relationships, and church government through private conference, semiformal debate, and manuscript circulation.17 The making and the content of Gangraena are founded on Edwards’s membership of this world, transformed in crucial ways by the revolutionary events of the 1640s. At the simplest level the clerical networks of the London Puritan clergy were extended in the 1640s. Robert Baillie described in June 1644 the weekly meetings of nearly ‘six score London ministers’, almost all Presbyterians ‘except Burton said to be a Brownist, John Goodwin to be a Socinian, and one scrupling Paedobaptisme [presumably Tombes]’.18 Godly ministers flocked to London to escape civil war and conflict in their home counties, to take advantage of the many job opportunities thrown up by 15 Tombes, An Apology, 8–9. John Vicars improbably claimed that John Saltmarsh, extensively attacked in Gangraena, had been pleasantly surprised by Edwards’s ‘godly, sound, and satisfactory preaching’, and his ‘gravity, solidity, and sweetly tempered moderation in conference’, when Vicars took Saltmarsh to a Christ Church lecture, and afterwards brought him to a conference with Edwards ‘at my house’: Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 29–30. 16 Gangraena, iii. 144 . See Ch. 1 n. 75, above. 17 Lake, The Boxmakers Revenge; Lake and Como, ‘ “Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents’; Seaver, Puritan Lectureships. 18 Letters of Baillie, ii. 191.

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the rigorous purge of Laudian and royalist clergy in the city, or to sit in the Westminster Assembly of Divines. Two representatives from each county were appointed to the Assembly and besides their labour to draw up a Directory of Worship and a blueprint for church government, many of these divines took preaching jobs or temporary London livings. They retained, of course, close ties with friends at ‘home’.19 William Strong and Stanley Gower, amongst Assembly men, contributed to Gangraena, along with many whose names are not provided by Edwards. Gower, once chaplain to the eminent moderate Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, and then incumbent at Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, the home parish of the leading Puritan politician Robert Harley, was chosen as minister of the London parish St Martin’s, Ludgate in November 1643. Having presided over the establishment of a strict Presbyterian discipline, Gower left London, not for deepest Herefordshire, but to a rather better living in the noted godly town of Dorchester as the successor to the eminent Puritan John White.20 Edwards’s bookseller, Ralph Smith, was one of the Assembly’s official publishers, and a kinsman of Adoniram Bifield, one of the two scribes of the Assembly; the other, Henry Roborough, was a veteran of intra-Puritan polemic and dispute in London. It is not surprising to find him writing a stern letter to Edwards denouncing John Goodwin’s errors on justification.21 Amongst other ministers coming to London to be at the heart of things, particular mention should be made of James Cranford, Edwards’s friend and ally in attacking heresy, and a high profile, partisan licenser of the press in the Presbyterian interest under parliament’s legislation of June 19 Lindley, Popular Politics, 50–65 on the ejections; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 81–5, 95: sixteen members of the Westminster Assembly were also involved in the London Presbyterian Provincial Assembly. 20 In Mar. 1644 it was ordered that all children in the parish were to be brought to Gower for baptism, while every person who sought admission to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was to obtain a token from him in advance to indicate their suitability. On 29 June 1646, very shortly after the London ministers abandoned their refusal to implement parliament’s Presbyterian structure unless it was strengthened, the parish ‘unanimouslie consented unto that the Ordinance of Parliament touching the Presbiterian Government should goe forward to put in execution’: GLMS 1311/1, Part One, St Martin’s Ludgate, Vestry Minutes, fos. 138v, 139r, 143r. A later, but pre-Restoration hand has added a note denouncing Presbyterian government as a ‘Scottish hell hatch’d brat’. For Strong see DNB and for Gower: David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 42; Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 211. 21 For Smith, see below; for Roborough, a hard-line supporter of George Walker in his dispute with Anthony Wotton see Como and Lake,‘Orthodoxy and its Discontents’. The letter to Edwards, Gangraena, ii. 166–70, dealt with similar issues and referred to the earlier dispute.

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1643.22 Cranford was part of an important provincial clerical connection before the civil war as one of the Thursday lecturers at Northampton where Thomas Ball and Daniel Cawdrey also preached. The town’s Sunday preachers included Thomas Hill and Thomas Case, who both came to London as members of the Assembly in the 1640s, and William Rathband who played a major role in debates amongst the godly about church government in New England. Cranford moved from Northamptonshire first as lecturer and then as rector at St Christopher Le Stocks, declaring his willingness in April 1643‘to stay with us though he hath been offerd greater preferment’. Cranford had been in trouble with the authorities for his proScots views, allegedly arguing in August 1640 that ‘their coming was only for peace’. Discussions over the Scots’ wars of 1639–40, or the ‘et-cetera’ oath imposed by the new Canons of 1640, had brought Northamptonshire ministers into contact with London men. Cranford thus entered a community already half-familiar, joining clerics whose views he knew and shared, and some with whom he was personally acquainted.23 In London in the mid-1640s, Cranford, like Edwards, was able to develop his support for Scottish religious and political aspirations into close relations with actual Scots men, as the connections of the London clergy were augmented by the less familiar presence of the zealous Presbyterian Scots representatives at the Westminster Assembly. The networks of Glasgow’s Robert Baillie are best known, because of the survival of his compelling letters recounting his energetic and frequently frustrating attempts to persuade London’s civic authorities and clergy to press for an effective Scottish-style Presbyterian church rather than the English parliament’s ‘lame Erastian’, or lay-dominated version. Like Cranford and Edwards, Baillie knew that ‘schismes and heresies doe daily encrease in all the corners of the land for want of discipline’, and like them he feared that ‘the most of them [here Baillie meant MPs] care for none of these things.’24 Edwards’s polemical talents were a much-valued element in Baillie’s 22 For Cranford as licenser see Ch. 4, below, and Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 334. Cranford was removed as a licenser after he gave an imprimatur to the ‘Vindication’ of the ‘Presbyterian’ MPs excluded at Pride’s Purge. 23 GLMS 4425/1, St Christopher Le Stocks, Vestry Minutes, fo. 35v; cf. GLMS 4423/1, St Christopher Le Stocks, Churchwardens’ accounts; Webster, Godly Clergy, 50, 55–6, 231–3; Cranford, Ball, and Cawdry were denounced in a letter from the Laudian Robert Sibthorpe to Sir John Lambe in June 1639 for refusing to aid the king against the Scots: Huntington Library, Temple MSS, 1876–1890. I am grateful to Richard Cust for this reference. The ‘et-cetera’ oath was deeply resented as requiring an open-ended commitment to the ‘doctrine and discipline’ of the Church of England as presently established. 24 Letters of Baillie, ii. 336, to Mr Robert Ramsey, 15 Jan. 1646.

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enterprise. He praised Antapologia and waited anxiously for Edwards’s ever-delayed, ever-expanding volumes of Gangraena. Baillie cited Edwards with approval in his own anti-sectarian writing, and rejoiced, prematurely as it turned out, at the impact of Edwards’s work on the mood of the city.25 Besides Cranford and Edwards, William Jenkyn of Christ Church, Simeon Ashe, Cornelius Burgess, and especially Francis Roberts of St Augustine were the ministers closest to Baillie. Roberts, Baillie, and Edwards discussed the progress of Gangraena, while Roberts was Baillie’s closest confidant in his attempts to encourage the city’s Presbyterian petitioning: ‘I purpose to see yow this night after our meeting at Dr Burgess’s house. Yow, and some two or three whom yow trust most, had need to advyse well and quicklie, for now matters are very near some issue’.26 Cranford’s close ties with Baillie cost him (literally) dearly through his involvement in a Presbyterian response to the ‘Savile affair’ in June–July 1645. This is an incident much discussed in recent work, but it bears some rehearsal here, for the insights it offers into the role of Scots and city ministers in London and parliamentary politics, and more broadly into the importance of the Exchange and other city sites for politically charged, strategic gossip. In response to allegations from the royalist defector Thomas Lord Savile that the ‘Presbyterian’ or peace party politicians Denzil Holles and Bulstrode Whitelocke had engaged in treacherous contacts with the royal court during the peace negotiations at Uxbridge the previous winter, Cranford spread accusations of secret and sinister negotiations between Oxford and a subcommittee of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, to betray parliament’s garrisons to the king. His main targets were Viscount Saye, Sir Henry Vane the younger, and Oliver St John, and the rumours were spread with the connivance of the Earl of Essex and the encouragement of Baillie, notwithstanding the latter’s subsequent desperate attempts to distance himself from his unfortunate friend.27 Despite their self-serving purpose, Baillie’s letters on the business give us a flavour of the relationship with See Chs. 4 and 5, below. Mahony, ‘London Presbyterianism,’ 94–5; Pearl, ‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’ are the pioneering works on the role of the Scots in city politics and religion. Letters of Baillie, ii. 358–9, for discussions over Gangraena (Part Two, I think, rather than Part One which is implied by the editor’s dating); 346, 333, to Francis Roberts 22 Jan. 1646, and on city petitioning. 27 Baillie’s notes for a meeting with Cranford, dated 17 June 1645, included the query,‘How this Plot, of capitulating with Oxford, may be found out?’ along with reminders to hasten Edwards and Bastwick into print ‘also the other books against Libertines’: Letters of Baillie, ii. 279. 25 26

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Cranford. Baillie acknowledged that he and Cranford had been ‘very confident and intyme friends ever since our first acquaintance’, and ‘it wes ever our custome, when we mett, to discourse freelie, as familiar friends, and lovers of the publick, of the affaires of Church and State’, but he insisted that Cranford had rashly misinterpreted and spread casual conversation between them: ‘in the Exchange he falls out very rashly and imprudentlie . . . to say little less than some Members of both Houses were banqueting [trinketting] with the King’. On the Exchange Cranford sought out Captain John Jones and other close friends amongst the city militia, Colonel Thomas Gower and Captain Richard Venner, and was soon surrounded by excited groups of people, urging them—according to hostile witnesses— to let his information ‘fly as far as it will be’. Later the same evening, Cranford discussed the plot with the sons of a staunchly Presbyterian Alderman, John Langham. These activities ended in Cranford’s summons to answer charges before the House of Commons, and his imprisonment in the Tower while Baillie himself narrowly escaped punishment. The furore was intensified by the panic caused by the shocking loss of Leicester to the king which made plots and betrayal seem all too plausible, but when this disaster was rapidly succeeded by the crushing victory at Naseby, parliament relaxed, and Cranford was released in September with a fine of £2,000.28 This affair left bitter wounds,29 but more immediately relevant is the reminder it offers that the godly networks mobilized by Cranford and Ibid. 279, 282–6:‘For the right honourable the Commissioners of the Kingdome of Scotland’. Pearl,‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, 318–25, offers the most vivid and detailed account; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 56–60 and Michael Mahony, ‘The Savile Affair and the Politics of the Long Parliament’, Parliamentary History, 7 (1988), discuss the political implications, while Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 122–4, has invaluable material on the parochial and political activities of Cranford’s connections. I think it unlikely that Cranford could have paid such a fine. The Savile plots are barely recorded in Juxon’s Journal, apart from some cryptic remarks concerning the Lord General’s [Essex’s] party, the Presbyterians and the Scots attacking the Independents in revenge (DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 40v; Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 79). 29 Saye was indignant enough about Baillie and Cranford to attack them in his political vindication mostly written in 1646 but not published until 1654: Vindiciae Veritatis or an Answer To a Discourse intituled Truth it is Manifest (London, 1654), BL E811 (2), Thomason date 12 Sept. Attributed by Thomason to Nathaniel Fiennes, this is now seen as being by his father Viscount Saye and Sele and representing his views in Apr.–May 1646: J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The Vindiciae Veritatis and the Political Creed of Viscount Saye and Sele’, Historical Research, 60 (1987), 45–63. Its delayed publication remains (to me) mysterious. Truth’s Manifest (Nov. 1645) was a justification of the Scots’proceedings in England, written by David Buchanan, the controversial young agent of the Scots commissioners, and licensed, predictably, by James Cranford. Buchanan’s pamphlet obliquely rehearsed the 1645 accusations against Saye: Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 96–7. 28

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Edwards were by no means exclusively clerical but involved a range of laymen, of respectable if rarely elevated social status, often public-spirited and influential in their vestries, wards, or Common Council. Active lay participation was at the heart of Puritan communities both before and during the 1640s; lay people were no doubt mostly deferential to their ministers in doctrinal and ecclesiastical matters, their support serving to promote clerical careers and legitimate clerical authority, but many were more than capable of initiating debate or manuscript circulation on the troubling religious divisions of these decades. The godly artisan Nehemiah Wallington wrote out for his local minister ‘some reasens and proofes out of Gods word for a Gouvrment in his Church’, justifying the Westminster Assembly and its proceedings after arguments with members of newly gathered churches: ‘hearing of some differences of Judgment about church goverment . . . now intending to be guided by this great assembly of Reverent holy and learned Devines’.30 Wallington remained impeccably orthodox in Presbyterian terms but these habits of lay activism also helped to spawn the separatism and lay preaching chronicled in Gangraena.31 Lay networks of the godly comprised a range of householders—by no means heedless of social distinctions, they were not thereby socially exclusive, so that an impecunious wood-turner like Wallington could correspond with an Alderman, sending a letter of condolence to the Presbyterian Thomas Adams ‘when his Daughter was taken away and he came & gave me kind thankes for it’.32 Several of the lay Presbyterian activists whose names reappear on the petitions of 1645–6, in the assault on the New Model Army and the attempt to establish a city militia under Presbyterian control in the summer of 1647, and even in the royalist–Presbyterian plotting of 1650/1 which cost one minister his life can also be linked to Gangraena. The grocer and militia captain John Jones—Cranford’s main contact on the Common Council—wrote a tract (produced by the printers and bookseller responsible for Gangraena) to support the city’s Presbyterian Remonstrance of May 1646, while the stationer John Bellamy (co-publisher of Antapologia with Ralph Smith his former partner), and according to Thomas Juxon one of the prime movers in this Remonstrance, produced two tracts in its support. Both authors praised Edwards’s work. As Common Councillors, 30 Nehemiah Wallington to his parish minister, 3 Nov. 1643 (copied into his letter book in 1650): BL Sloane MS 922, fo. 140r. 31 Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, ch. 11, offers a consummate account of the complexities in the parish of St Katherine Cree. 32 BL Sloane MS 922, fo. 4v.

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Bellamy and Jones sat on many crucial city committees concerned with church government and the militia; both were conscientious members of their parish vestries. Jones signed a crucial Presbyterian petition of November 1645, and was an active member of the Presbyterian militia committee in July 1647.33 Since 1641/2, the Common Council rather than the Court of Aldermen had been the decisive force in citywide politics, but the regular meetings of the ‘Vestry’ in each parish had an important part to play in mobilizing religious and political opinion at a more localized level, concerned as they were with the choice of ministers, lecturers, and other local officials, and with some say in the choice of Common Councillors at ward level.34 Gangraena drew on the commitment of several men whose sphere of influence was the vestry rather than the Common Council. Josiah Ricraft, a prolific pamphleteer who wrote against the sects and in support of Edwards, also contributed a long letter on London separatism to Part One of Gangraena. Christ Church parish itself, besides the schoolmaster John Vicars, contained several other committed Presbyterian elders and petitioners such as Nicholas Widmerpole, Anthony Bickerstaffe, and Peter Mills.35 Five Christ Church parishioners, including Mills and Widmerpole, provided hostile evidence for Part Three of Gangraena on a sermon preached by the radical chaplain William Dell before Fairfax and other members of the army at Marston, Oxford in June 1646. Versions of the same evidence had been presented to the House of Lords shortly after the sermon, and in [Jones], Plain English or the Sectaries Anatomized. Thomason’s copy is dated 17 Aug. and has a note that it is by Captaine Jones: BL E350(11); Bellamy, A Justification of the City Remonstrance; DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 79r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 123) for Bellamy and the Remonstrance. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution 484, 489, 491–2 on Common Council Committees; Mahony,‘Presbyterianism in London’, 105, 111; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 122–4. 34 Structures of city government and their transformation in the early 1640s are described in Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Some vestries were ‘select’—i.e. confined to the most prosperous male heads of household, others open. Their formal powers over appointing clergy varied but in the 1640s most London ministers had to have the support of the parish vestries. In some parishes a Common Councillor was nominated by the vestry with the election confirmed by the wardmote; in others the power to elect was actually wielded by the perhaps more open ward-mote meeting. 35 NA E179/252/15, Accounts of the levy for the ‘weekly meal’ in London, 1645–6 show Bickerstaffe (at £1. 4s.), Mills (£1. 15s.), and Widmerpole (£1. 16s.) all making above-average contributions in the parish; Lindley, Popular Politics, 46, 67 n., 197, for Mills, a bricklayer, Common Councillor, and early parliamentary zealot. As churchwarden of Christ Church in 1641/2 Mills had sabotaged the organ by filling its pipes with bricks. Mahony, ‘London Presbyterianism’, 105, 109, 111, for Ricraft,Widmerpole, Bickerstaffe, and Vicars as Presbyterian activists in 1645–6; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 165 for the eldership in Christ Church. 33

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their own printed Vindication, the London citizens claimed that ‘The providence of God’ had brought them to the ‘leaguer [the besieging army before Oxford]’—knowing the royalist headquarters was about to surrender, they felt it was their last chance to see such a sight. The evidence given to the Lords, printed as a pamphlet and finally used by Edwards, was prompted by the printed version of Dell’s sermon which they alleged omitted some of the more startling points preached at Marston. For example, Dell had preached, but not printed, that ‘The Saints are those that are now stiled Anabaptists, Familists, Independents, Sectaries, and the like’. Although no names were given, Edwards’s Gangraena was the most notorious source for such labelling. Dell rejected the providential origins of this evidence. He alleged (and some modern scholars have concurred) that the ‘remarkable opposition’to his preaching at Marston was fomented by some ‘coming out of the City of London, in all probability, out of some special designe, (seeing that the old malignity now acts in a new form)’— and now they ‘fill the whole City with lyes and slanders’. Widmerpole and the others had asked Dell whether he thought all Presbyterians were ‘carnal Gospellers’, to which Dell responded that he believed some of them were ‘godly Christians’ and that the Presbyterian–Independent distinction was only of men’s making. Whether or not Widmerpole had been acting on Edwards’s urging, he became a marked man for Independent politicians and he was one of three Presbyterian activists imprisoned for soliciting support for the city petition of December 1646.36 Later sections will consider at more length the relationship between Edwards’s Gangraena, 36 Gangraena, iii. 63–4; William Dell, The Building and Glory of the Christian Church. An exposition preached to Sir Thomas Fairfax at Marston, the Head Quarter at the Leaguer before Oxford (London, 1646) BL E343 (5), Thomason date 6 July, sig A2v, A3v; A Vindication of certaine Citizens that lately went to the Leaguer then before Oxford, or their Answer unto some passages inserted in an Epistle lately published by William Dell (London, 1646), BL E344 (14), Thomason date 14 July, 6, 8. On 2 July 1646, the Lords ordered Dell to answer a ‘Paper of the Heads of his sermon preached at Marston’; Dell petitioned against this and was freed from further attendance on 17 July: LJ, viii. 407, 436; HMC Sixth Report, House of Lords, 124, 127. The Humble Petition . . . With an humble Representation . . . to the Lords and Commons assembled in high Court of Parliament Together with the Severall Answers of both Houses of Parliament to the said Petitions and Representations (London, Dec. 1646), 9, for Widmerpole. The final version of the petition called for Widmerpole’s release. In Dec. 1646 when Gangraena, Part Three came out, and this determined anti-Independent, anti-New Model Army petition was in hand, Dell’s preaching was again a subject of controversy. Dell’s sermon before the Commons was attacked by a militant younger Presbyterian minister, Christopher Love, in Short and plaine Animadversions On some passages in Mr Dels Sermon, . . . with a reply to an unlicensed pamphlet ‘annext’to the sermon, A Reply to Master Love’s Contradictions. This had an imprimatur from James Cranford, dated 17 Dec. 1646, and was printed for John Bellamy; Love dedicated the tract to Fairfax, and urged Dell’s unsuitability as an army chaplain.

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and the politics of 1645–8, in London and beyond, but, notwithstanding contemporary accusations and later assumptions that many of Edwards’s associates were at best half-hearted parliamentarians and perhaps cryptoroyalists, it is worth stressing now that several were, in the 1640s, committed and active prosecutors of the struggle against the king. Both Jones and Widmerpole, for example, had signed a crucial radical petition in favour of parliament’s militia ordinance in March 1642.37 Amongst Edwards’s lay contacts in the city, two groups are worth particular attention: MPs and members of the Stationers’ Company, especially booksellers. The Long Parliament, in effect an executive body in permanent session unlike the temporary bodies meeting to discuss grievances, taxation, and legislation in the 1620s, had a necessarily transformed relationship both with the city of London and with the localities whom MPs ‘represented’. Christ Church, as we have seen, offered Edwards a vital forum where he and other city ministers, citizens, and political leaders could meet members of the Commons and Lords for sermons, dinners, and discussion. Gangraena recounts many informal encounters between Edwards and Members of Parliament. Local communities spent much time and money keeping MPs informed, lobbying for relief of burdens, or protesting about parliament’s demands. Bath, for example, used its Recorder William Prynne as its main intermediary with parliament although he sat as MP for a Cornish borough. The cost of deputations to London loom very large in the town accounts after Bath came under parliament’s control in 1645. In October 1648, 15s. was paid to ‘Robert Hodges, Mr Prynns man for Drawing severall orders & peticons to the Parliament’. MPs were thus a vital source of material about religion in the localities.38 Booksellers too had wide contacts in the city and beyond, with particularly close links with the clergy. Printing or bookselling was a popular career choice for sons of clerical families, with an average of seven such boys a year apprenticed in the Stationers’ Company in the 1630s.39 Many ministers were enthusiastic writers of course, and a close relationship with a sympathetic stationer/bookseller was a key to successful publication. The relationship between Edwards and Ralph Smith deserves to stand Lindley, Popular Politics, 206–7 and n. 42. Bath RO, Chamberlains’ Accounts, rolls 89–91, 1645–8; roll 91, Oct. 1648 is quoted. The correspondence discussed below between the town of Sandwich and the local MP is another good example. 39 C. Blagden, ‘The Stationers’ Company in the Civil War’, Library, 5th ser. 13 (1958), 1–17. Both printers and booksellers were in the company, with the latter the dominant group by the mid-17th cent. 37 38

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with that between William Prynne and Michael Sparke as an example of an outstanding partnership based on shared ideological commitment as well as professional interests. Edwards was very well informed, perhaps unusually well informed for a non-stationer, about the practicalities of book production, testimony again to his geographical and social proximity to the world of the bookshops and the Stationers’ Hall. ‘The stationers was perhaps a politicized community by its very nature’, concludes one scholar, while several commentators have stressed their particular commitment to Presbyterianism in the 1640s—attributable perhaps to their close links to a learned, godly, publishing ministry.40 John Bellamy, Christopher Meredith (Calamy’s publisher), and George Thomason, the bookseller and collector, were all staunchly Presbyterian Common Councillors during the 1640s, Meredith and Thomason indeed for Faringdon Within Ward which included Christ Church parish.41 Meredith and Luke Fawne are examples of Presbyterian booksellers who left generous bequests to godly ministers in their wills.42 Many of the stationers connected with Gangraena lived near to each other in the first precinct of Cornhill Ward. John Bellamy was the most prominent member of the Ward, constable in 1634, foreman of the Inquest Jury in 1642, and Common Councillor throughout the 1640s. Peter Coles, whose bookshop features in Edwards’s life and work, was apprenticed to John Bellamy in 1629 and was made free in 1637. Ralph Smith—described in one pamphlet attack on Edwards as ‘your Industrious Smith’—is less well-documented than Bellamy or Thomason, but he had a very determined partiality, as we might expect from Edwards’s publisher, for works 40 Johns, Nature of the Book, 158, 196–7. A notable exception, and a caution against all sorts of familial or network determinism, is Henry Overton, the radical bookseller attacked a couple of times in Gangraena. He was the son of Valentine Overton, an orthodox Puritan minister from Warwickshire; his sister Katherine married the conventionally Presbyterian biographical writer and London minister Samuel Clarke: D. F. McKenzie (ed.), Stationers Company Apprentices 1605–1640 (Charlottesville, Va.: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1961), 117; A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934; reissued 1988), 119. 41 Johns, Nature of the Book, 148; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 164–5; Mahony,‘London Presbyterianism’, 103; Lois Spencer,‘The Politics of George Thomason’, Library, 14 (1959). For the importance of godly publishing connections to the Puritan movement before 1640 see Eales, ‘Road to Revolution’, 198–9 (stressing esp. Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meredith). 42 Meredith’s 1653 will left £10 p.a. to the Essex Presbyterian Matthew Newcomen and his family along with a generous gift to Calamy: NA, Prob 11/229, fo. 92. Luke Fawne in the 1660s was more ecumenical; bequests to Lazarus Seaman, Arthur Jackson, and William Jenkyn (of Christ Church) stood alongside one to John Bachelor, the ‘Independent’ licenser of the 1640s: Prob 11/319, fo. 341.

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against liberty of conscience, and in support of zealous Presbyterianism, including many official works of the Assembly. Smith, a Buckinghamshire man, was of the same, younger generation as Coles, apprenticed to Edward Brewster in 1630, and becoming free in May 1639. Smith published at first in partnership with Bellamy; his first independent publications in December 1643 were characteristic of his continuing output: the Westminster Assembly’s Certaine Considerations to dissuade men from further gathering of churches and a fast sermon by William Sedgwick, Scripture a perfect rule for church government, both received by Thomason on 28 December. Edwards’s Antapologia, a major undertaking, was a joint venture between Smith and Bellamy, while Smith’s business as a bookseller really took off when he acquired a share in the production of the Westminster Assembly’s Directory of Worship secured in part through the support of his kinsman Byfield. After long negotiations between the stationers and the Assembly in 1645, Smith was granted admission to the livery of the company, an interest-free loan of £100 and a promise of a future share in the profitable English stock of the company at a cut price. Byfield’s son, Adoniram junior, was apprenticed to Smith in 1649. Like Bellamy, albeit at a lower level, Smith was an active member of his ward, as a petty juryman in 1643 and 1644, foreman in 1645, and a member of the grand jury in 1649. Both men were equally conscientious vestrymen in the parish of St Michael Cornhill. Living and working in Cornhill brought Smith and Bellamy into contact with London radicalism as well as more congenial company. Radical booksellers and printers such as Benjamin Allen and Nicholas Tew, an associate of Richard Overton in General Baptist circles and subversive printing, were Cornhill men. Allen published John Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers while Smith published the official condemnation of it issued by the Westminster Assembly. In 1643 Nicholas Tew was presented at the Inquest, ‘for admitting assemblies oftentimes into his private house confessing himselfe to be of the Separation’.43 Booksellers were directly involved in the life of the city, and in its religious controversies, not detached entrepreneurs. 43 GLMS 4702/1, Cornhill Ward, Inquest Book, fos. 208r, 225v, 231r, 241r (Bellamy), 229r, 231v, 234r, 244r (Smith); Cole was a grand juryman and constable in 1650: fos. 246v, 247r. For Allen and Tew see ibid., fos. 222r, 228v. Praisegod Barebone exhibited his freedom as a leatherseller in the ward in 1629 but had moved by the 1640s: ibid., fo. 191r. Cole had a dubious reputation as a bookseller; a ‘notorious’ pirate of others’ texts, he committed suicide as a bankrupt after the Restoration: Johns, Nature of the Book, 218, 230. A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards, 9. Smith’s publications, and the partisan nature of publishing in general, will be fully discussed in Ch. 4, below. Smith is described very briefly in Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and

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Bookshops themselves had very particular local identities, defined by street and sign. Hence Ephraim Pagitt’s references, cumbersome to modern readers: ‘For your better information read Mr Gataker’s learned booke before named, now set forth, which is to be sold by Fulke Clifton dwelling upon new Fish-street hill’ or ‘Of the stirs raised by the Antinomians and Familists in new England . . . set downe by Mr Wells in a booke printed for Ralph Smith at the signe of the Bible in Cornhill, in which you may read a learned confutation of their errors’.44 As well as places to buy, browse, or borrow books, bookshops were vital sites for conversations from asides to elaborate debate, well illustrated in Gangraena. We saw in Chapter 2 how Edwards quoted St Paul’s booksellers bemoaning their customers’ scorn for ‘old Divinity’, while a crucial stage in a controversy between Edwards and the Stepney Independents Burroughs and Greenhill took place in John Bellamy’s shop. Edwards himself was a frequent bookshop debater: In December 1644, coming into Mr Smiths shop in Cornhill, neer the Exchange where some persons were, there was some discourse about Liberty of Conscience, and Toleration, whereupon I spake against it, and Mr Cole Bookseller confessed he was against a generall Liberty of Conscience by what he saw and knew; for he knew a company that were a Church, to which he had once thought of all other Churches to have joyned himselfe a Member, who now deny the scriptures to be the Word of God.

Edwards also spoke to Cole about the ‘old Wolf ’ Clement Writer, and was in Cole’s bookshop when he spotted Writer in person.45 Gangraena offers vivid portrayals of bookshop culture and Cornhill conversations, specifically located within the city. But stationers, like Members of Parliament, had networks that connected the city with the English localities, and these links too were exploited by Edwards. Many Printers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), 167. Thomason’s copies of Certaine Considerations and Sedgewick are E79 (16) and (21), respectively. BL, M985/56, Microfilm of the Stationers’ Company, Court Book C, proceedings in Mar. and Sept. 1645; D. F. McKenzie, Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1641–1700 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1974), 155 (1649). McKenzie (ed.), Stationers’ Company Apprentices 1605–1640, 41, 43; Charles E. Surman (ed.), The Register Booke of the Fourth Classis in the Province of London 1646–59 (Publications of the Harleian Society, 2 vols. in one, 182–3, 1952–3), 5–6, 8–10. Smith made an average contribution of £1. 4s. to the weekly meal assessment in 1645: E179/252/15. He did not die until 1689, having retired to his native Buckinghamshire, and was by then a man of comfortable but not lavish wealth: NA Prob 11/397/183. 44 Pagitt, Heresiography, 91. 45 Johns, Nature of the Book, 117–19; Gangraena, iii. 112; ii. 87; i. 111, 82–3.

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booksellers, like Smith, had provincial origins and settled in the country in later life, or established their children there. John Bellamy retired to Northamptonshire and died owning extensive property there and in Kent as well as his London bookshop and his share of the profitable English stock of the Stationers’ Company. His books were bequeathed as a ‘standing Library’ for the ministers of Cotherstocke, Northamptonshire. Similarly, Christopher Meredith left books to his tenants and the poor scholars of his adopted home of Kempsey, Worcestershire, as well as to the poor children of Christ’s Hospital (where John Vicars worked). Meredith’s daughter Mary was married to Richard Harlackenden of Earl’s Colne, Essex, now well known through the diaries of the parish minister Ralph Josselin. Smith himself retired to his native Buckinghamshire and left a bequest to the poor of Emberton.46 Booksellers, of course, had contacts with provincial authors. Information sent by Richard Baxter to his London publisher found its way into Gangraena.47 Ralph Smith published the works of John Brinsley of Yarmouth, many of which dealt with the errors and separatism of the 1640s. When Edwards heard of a ‘horrid blasphemy’ committed by the notorious John Boggis in Yarmouth through ‘A Minister out of Essex writing up to a Minister in Lond[on]’, it was perhaps through Smith that he contacted Brinsley for confirmation. Brinsley duly obliged with a letter and a copy of Boggis’s examination at the sessions.48 On the other hand, provincial booksellers with London connections might be useful sources. According to the congregationalist Samuel Eaton, it was a Manchester 46 NA, Prob 11/234, fo. 329 (Bellamy, Feb. 1654); Prob 11/229, fo. 92 (Meredith, Sept. 1653); Prob 11/397/183 (Smith). Samuel Gellibrand, another well known Presbyterian stationer, had property in Kent: Prob 11/349, fo. 37. 47 Gangraena, i. 50 for the Baxter letter. For its origins see n. 58, below. Several of the copious biblical commentaries of the Warwickshire minister John Trapp were published by John Bellamy: see A Commentary, or Exposition, upon all the Epistles and the Revelation of John the Divine (London, 1656); and A Commentary on Proverbs and the Song of Solomon (London, 1650). Trapp cited Gangraena (see Ch. 4, below) and some snippets of Warwickshire information were included in Gangraena. Possible sources were Trapp or the London minister Samuel Clarke, previously of Alcester. 48 Gangraena, ii. 161–2. Brinsley’s name is not given here; the letter is ‘from a godly and learned Minister living in Yarmouth’, but Brinsley’s authorship is confirmed in Brinsley’s discussion of similar incidents in his Doctrine and practice of Paedobaptisme, preface, sig. A3v. Amongst Brinsley’s anti-sectarian works printed for Smith were A Looking-Glasse for Good Women, and The Arraignment of the Present Schism of New Separation in Old England (London, 1646), BL E335 (10), Thomason date 4 May, with an imprimatur from Cranford. I am grateful to Richard Cust for help with Brinsley. Other interesting provincial publications of Smith’s were the works of Richard Bifield discussed in Ch. 2, above, and the Devonshire ministers’ testimony, for which see Ch. 5, below.

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bookseller, Thomas Smith, who had provided some of the information about his church for Part Three of Gangraena.49 Smith was associated with the London Presbyterian bookseller Luke Fawne in the publication of general declarations by Lancashire ministers and works by Richard Hollingworth, the Manchester minister who attacked Eaton’s ‘congregational way’. Hollingworth himself was also a contributor to Gangraena; both minister and bookseller were, in their opponents’ terms,‘active men’ in promoting a Presbyterian Remonstrance in Lancashire in the summer of 1646.50 In the pre-civil war London ‘Puritan underground’ so effectively described by David Como and Peter Lake, those anxious to police the orthodoxy of their fellows eavesdropped on sermons, held tense meetings, and exchanged alarmed manuscript letters and articles of denunciation, much as Edwards did for Gangraena.51 But Edwards’s enterprise, distinctive in its breadth and its unashamed publicity, was made possible by the particular institutional and political developments of the 1640s. Parliament, the Assembly, and an expanded and partisan publishing industry all offered more permanent and more systematic connections between the metropolis and the provinces than had ever previously been known. Secondly, Edwards’s activities had an urgency, and threatened more potential danger for his ‘victims’, because of the startling transformation in the relationship of the godly to power. Strategically placed godly ministers like Stephen Marshall or Edmund Calamy who in the 1630s had agonized over their conformity in hard times or been harassed by bishops, were now in power—or at least on the verge of power. They had become central figures drawing up proposals for reformation of the church, and major brokers of patronage. The eloquent alarm of John Tombes at his denunciation by Edwards provides a good example. Tombes was in the bizarre (but to him the only scripturally valid) position of rejecting infant baptism yet being utterly orthodox in other ways. He had a family to provide for but did not 49 Samuel Eaton and Timothy Taylor, A Just Apology for the Church of Duckenfield (London, 1647), epistle and 6; the evidence concerned a deacon of the church accused of misconduct as a sequestrator in Lancashire: Gangraena, iii. 68. 50 Plomer, Dictionary, 167–8; see e.g. Hollingworth, An Examination of Sundry Scriptures (London: printed for Thomas Smith, 1645), with an imprimatur from Cranford, 17 Dec. 1644; or The deliberate Resolution of the Ministers of the Gospel within the County of Lancaster (London, 1646), BL E371 (2). Gangraena, iii. 70 for Hollingworth as a source of material; A New Birth of the City Remonstrance or a Lanchashire Petition (London, 1646), BL E350 (12), Thomason date 18 Aug. and note, ‘this is a false Copie’, 5–6. The petitioning in Lancashire is treated in Gangraena, iii. 166–7. 51 See e.g. Como and Lake,‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians’, esp. 694.

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wish to gather ‘a separated church, which I durst not do, as not knowing how to justifie such a practise’.52 A post as preacher at the Temple would be ideal, because there would be no infants there to baptize—yet Tombes did not see how he could obtain this without a testimonial from the allpowerful Marshall. Hence, he claimed his much-delayed, and most reluctant entrance into printed controversy over baptism.53 Laymen too, from the members of both Houses of Parliament to the godly householders who conscientiously attended lectures and their parish vestries, wielded direct power in conducting Parliament’s war effort, and over a range of religious and political issues had a genuine prospect of putting their aims into practice. Increasingly, however, it was clear that the aims of parliamentarians, lay and clerical, were most diverse. Presbyterians were now powerful men— or they should have been—for somehow on the brink of success, the longprayed-for church reform was being sabotaged by the delaying tactics and outright resistance of Independents—men with whom Edwards and his associates had previously engaged in common endeavours. Independents and sectaries also had the prospect of enhanced influence following the collapse of the episcopal church and the calling of the Long Parliament. In this context information became a dangerous and much disputed commodity. The controversy over Gangraena—like the penalties for circulating gossip and giving evidence imposed on Cranford or Widmerpole—underlines the third transformation in the situation of a London lecturer in the 1640s—the existence of open, bitter, and vigorously prosecuted divisions amongst godly parliamentarians. The activities of Edwards, his allies, and his opponents had a political charge and immediacy hitherto unknown—precisely of course because of the seductive if precarious prospect of actually putting their programmes of reformation into practice. We can now move on to some more detailed and precise discussion of how Edwards’s various networks were mobilized to provide material for Gangraena. He had access to administrative and legal proceedings in the 52 Hence John Goodwin’s sneers to Edwards in Cretensis, 20, concerning errors 104 (Gangraena, i. 28–9) on baptism: ‘it is sufficiently known, that the strongest shield and buckler wherewith that cause was ever protected, was the workmanship of a Presbyterian hand’, and 110,‘it calls a Presbyterian Master’. Tombes, whose doubts had been widely aired in London clerical circles, was presumably in Goodwin’s mind. 53 Tombes, An Apology, esp. 10–11; Tombes obtained his post at the Temple and his preaching ‘very learnedly’ won the praise of a regular hearer, Bulstrode Whitelocke: Whitelocke’s ‘Annals’, BL Add MS 37344, fos. 6r, 33v, 35v (1645–6).

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city. The discussion of the Common Council elections of December 1645 in Faringdon Within Ward suggests Edwards’s involvement with the Presbyterian activists there.54 Some material recounted conversations, while more detailed sections were presumably based on written notes. An example of the former, from Part Three, is hard to verify:‘July the first 1646. I was told by some of the Aldermen of the City, who were come that day from the Sessions . . .’, introduced a story about a sectary questioned for a pretended marriage. Edwards’s report of a Common Council meeting where Hugh Peter’s sermons were denounced, and one Mr H.‘a great Independent and stickler for that party, was complained of . . . for saying to two Common Councel men lately, that the King, the Scots and the Common Councel, did drive on one designe’, can be verified from the minute of the meeting of 9 February. Peter and Mr Hawkins were reported for preaching ‘strange passages . . . tending to the scandall and reproach of this Court’. Edwards has details not in the official record, yet omits the full name of William Hawkins, a city merchant-taylor. Hawkins had already been denounced by Bastwick and Prynne as a prominent Independent so it was presumably caution or a taste for the sinisterly conspiratorial rather than ignorance that led Edwards to favour initials. Some apparently characteristically alarmist stories from the courts can also be substantiated: There is one Crab of Southwarkside, a Dipper and a Preacher, who vents strange doctrines against the Immortality of the soul, etc. This man was complained of this summer to the Lord Mayor, for speaking words against the King, as that it was better to have a golden Calfe or an Asse set up, with such kind of expressions, then to have a King over them: For which words hee was bound over to answer at the Sessions; but I heare nothing what is become of him.

We are more fortunate than Edwards for modern research has demonstrated that Crab was indeed in trouble at the Assizes for saying ‘it was better to have a golden calf or an ass set up . . . than to have a king over them’, and was convicted in 1647 for scandalous words against the king.55 Edwards’s fame as a harrier of sectaries in lectures and printed works, his central location, and his ability to tap all the extended connections between metropolis and provinces came together in his acquisition of the Gangraena, i. 105; cf. CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 161r. Gangraena, iii. 24; Postscript to Part One, 183; CLRO, CCJ Common Council, 40, fo. 166r; Lindley, Popular Politics, 400 and Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 140 on William Hawkins, who was a member of Greenhill’s church. Gangraena, iii. 110; Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion, 293, quoting ASS 35/88/8 m. 1 and 88/6 m. 1 c.1646; Hessayan,‘Gold Tried in the Fire’, 318. Crab became an ascetic vegetarian in 1650s, but his only known follower Captain Robert Norwood died of starvation: Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 303–5. 54 55

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letters that loomed large in Gangraena. Towards the end of Part Three, Edwards summed up the range of opportunities: I have lately seen divers Letters and some Petitions that have been written and sent up from godly Ministers and others to Worthy Members of the House of Commons, to some Members of the Assembly, to other Ministers in the City, and Citizens, concerning the insolencies, tumults, and strange carriages of many Sectaries, Commanders and Souldiers, as also other persons both men and women of their Sect.56

Letters formed a separately printed sequence in Part One; all were anonymous, but after Goodwin’s challenge, Edwards gave details of his correspondents in Part Two.57 A description of the arguments of the General Baptist Henry Denne on universal redemption was coupled with an account of ‘new Light’ amongst the army in the West Country, from R.B. to W.S.: ‘This letter was sent me from a worthy and godly Minister, with the Superscription, For Mr Thomas Edwards, Preacher of Gods Word’. From both Edwards and Baxter we know that this was sent by Richard Baxter to William Strong and thence to Edwards:‘The abundance of nonsence which they uttered that day, may partly be seen in Mr Edward’s Gangraena for when I had wrote a Letter of it to a Friend in London, that and another were put into Mr Edward’s Book with-out my name’.58 The next letter, from ‘a Reverend Minister in the city of London, one of the Members of the Assembly of Divines’, was identified as from the Dorset minister Simon Ford to Stanley Gower. A letter mostly on London, ‘written to me by a Person religious, and cordially affected to the Parliament’, turned out to be from fellow polemicist and Presbyterian activist Josiah Ricraft, presumably written (as recently as 10 December 1645) deliberately for printing. Ricraft could easily have told Edwards face to face his stories of Kiffin and Thomas Patient anointing a woman with oil in their Baptist congregation.59 An intercepted letter—passed on by a city minister ‘who told me it was a Letter sent out of the West from about Bath,

57 Gangraena, iii. 249. Ibid. i. 49–70 (2nd sequence); ii. 54. Ibid. i. 50; Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), i. 41, quoting Reliquiae Baxterianae, i. 50–2. The letter probably refers to Paul Hobson, who is discussed in similar terms in several works of Baxter’s. Baxter’s Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-Membership and Baptisme (London, 1651), 147–9, refers to ‘Mr Edwards his Gangren’ in a discussion of 1640s errors. The material from the other letter mentioned by Baxter is identified by Nuttall and Keeble as that concerning Chesham and Amersham, i. 71 (2nd pagination), ‘I am at this present more fully informed from a godly minister in those parts’. The original letter was written to Francis Tyton, Baxter’s publisher. 59 Gangraena, i. 53, 56–7. For Ford, see below. 56 58

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by a great Sectary’—came next. Edwards’s identification in Part Two, ‘written by a weaver in Sommerset-shire one Crab (if I mistake not the name) and I received it from Master Rosewall a City Minister well known’, is not shared by the modern scholar Richard Greaves, who attributes it to Paul Hobson.60 This section ends with a series of letters from the Colchester minister Robert Harmar, whose acquaintance with Edwards had developed from reading Antapologia.61 More systematic analysis of the more numerous letters in Parts Two and Three supports Edwards’s assessment of the range of his contacts. Twentyfour letters in Part Two, sixty-two from Part Three are included in this discussion.62 Letters had a twofold purpose in Gangraena (often combined in the same letter): providing information about sectarian opinions and activities; and emphasizing Presbyterian support—for Edwards’s enterprise in particular, and for the city, the Assembly, and the Scots, and hostility to toleration more generally. A letter from Suffolk described the misdeeds of Samuel Oates, William Archer of Halstead, and John Lanseter of Bury, after gushing, ‘Your brethren in these parts desire to praise God for you, and for that courage he hath given you to encounter, and publikely to oppose the Sectaries of these dayes. God make you as Augustine, Malleum Haereticorum’.63 Thirty of these letters were sent to Edwards himself: eighteen were from individual ministers (or in one case from two Northamptonshire ministers), of whom eight can be identified. They include the solicited testimony of Brinsley, and the letter on Goodwin from Henry Roborough, perhaps also solicited by Edwards or equally plausibly thrust at Edwards by an experienced and enthusiastic clerical polemicist. Another interesting correspondent in ‘A Letter from a godly Minister out of the North concerning the Scots’ was Robert Balsome, once Essex’s chaplain, and one of the preachers sent north by parliament in September 1645. 60 Gangraena, i. 59; ii. 54; R. L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press), 155–6. 61 For Harmar, see Ch. 1, above, and further, below. 62 I have excluded from this analysis material such as Justices’ or Committee examinations, signed testimony rather than correspondence, and letters which are just mentioned in passing or in margins, but no text is given. (See, e.g. Gangraena, ii. 135, for a marginal note that twenty ministers ‘out of the Countrey’ had written in support of Edwards’s work.) We know from the account of Richard Baxter (see n. 58, above) that some material in Gangraena was paraphrased from letters, but as Edwards gives no details such ‘hidden’ correspondence can only be recovered where other evidence exists. I have not attempted any systematic analysis of such material. In any case I believe Edwards did less and less sifting or collating of his evidence in succeeding parts. 63 Gangraena, ii. 20–1.

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If Edwards is indeed the ‘Dear friend’ to whom the letter was addressed it is perhaps evidence for Edwards’s closeness to a national Presbyterian figure.64 Four letters came from individual laymen of whom only one, Colonel Francis Roberts, is or can be identified. Three were from groups of clergy—the Suffolk letter already quoted and two where no place was given—while five were from unspecified correspondents as in ‘lines from a countrey further North’.65 Forty-two letters were thus passed on to Edwards by the recipients, who were in three cases Members of the Assembly while nine were other ministers. Six were MPs or peers; six were citizens, Aldermen, or Common Councilmen of London; and seventeen were other laymen—friends,‘persons of quality’, and the like. This last category consisted mostly of Londoners although some were passed on from Lancashire.66 The original writers of these letters were twenty-four individual ministers, one group of ministers, eight individual laymen, and five groups of laity. In this last group, the letters sent from the local committee at Exeter to friends in London are worth noting.67 Finally Edwards printed fourteen letters intercepted from sectaries, such as the four letters concerning the activities of Thomas Collier, the Baptist evangelist in Somerset.68 The most vivid description of how information in letters reached Edwards concerns the Ford–Gower letter in Part One. Edwards’s own account was low-key: the letter was from Simon Ford to Mr Gowers, ‘a Member of the Assembly . . . from whose hands I received it, and told Master Gowers I should print it, to which he was willing, and since Gangraena was printed, the Author writes to me about his Letter, that he will enlarge and confirm the particulars in that Letter, and send it to me’.69 Henry Pinnell, one of the preachers described by Ford, had a different view.A sermon he had given in Poole garrison in August 1645 had led to accusations of blasphemy from a Captain ‘Throttle’ although in debates with other local ministers Pinnell had challenged Throttle’s version: 64 Ibid. iii. 33; ii. 161, 166–70; iii. 73–4. The letter from Balsome, dated 21 May 1646, hailed the king’s surrender to the Scots as ‘one of our greatest mercies since these Wars began’. For Balsome, see Anne Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains 1642–1651 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1990), 94–5. She assumes the letter is directed to Edwards himself. 65 Gangraena, ii. 149. 66 One letter, ibid. 67, had been written to an MP, and a copy provided for Edwards by a Member of the Assembly. For Lancashire: iii. 78. In few cases does Edwards give names or any details that would make identification possible. In one case there is no identification of the original recipient at all. 67 Ibid. iii. 44. In four cases the writer was not identified at all. 68 69 Ibid. 51–4. Ibid. ii. 54.

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Thus then the Gangraene gathers, Captaine Throttle deviseth a devise and smiteth with the tongue. S.F. heares the rumour and buffets with his pen . . . How easie it is for a Synedrium, a Conventicle, Session or Assembly of High Preists and Elders to perswade the Common People to Vote Christ to the Crosse when they have procured false witnesses against him? The Convocation at Poole may happily have as strong an influence upon the vulgar in those parts . . . But let his [Ford’s] paperwinged messenger flie as fast as it can (with the newes as light as itselfe) it cannot come before it is welcome to the Confederate at Ludgate-Hill, Master Gowers (if I spell his name right) who presently, instead of going his rode way to the Assembly, steps aside (I wish he did not wrench his foot or wrong his conscience) to cast his mite into Master Edwards his Treasury. I doubt he was stung when he put his finger into the Waspes nest.

Pinnell, whose protestations of relative orthodoxy are a little implausible, wished Gower, the ‘learned Rabbi’, had shown Ford’s ‘scribbled paper’ to the Assembly for there the ‘wise men of the Synod’ would have properly debated it and questioned the validity of a single testimony. Pinnell had visited Edwards but obtained no satisfaction: ‘he confessed he never knew me, nor ever so much heard of me but by that letter of S.F. of whom (by his own confession to me) he was as ignorant as of my selfe, and therefore he might have suspected him as well as me; but because one of the Presbytery had laid his hands on it, and it was brought to him by Master Gowers, it was immediately ordain’d infallible’.70 If individual members of the Westminster Assembly called on Edwards with useful incriminating material, the activities of the Assembly as an institution were as important. From the first days of its meeting, the Assembly was concerned with the growth of heresy and schism, and its proceedings may well have served to intensify orthodox alarm at the spread of error. As with the news of lower-class unrest transmitted to the parliament in the early 1640s, the existence of a national body as a clearing house for material on religious unorthodoxy added to the sense of an unprecedented crisis.71 For Edwards the Assembly’s concerns with error 70 J. Maddocks and H. Pinnell, Gangraenachrestum, or A Plaister to Alay the tumor, and prevent the spreading of a pernitious Ulcer (Oxford, 1646), but Thomason notes London, and dates it 5 Sept., 4–5. For Pinnell see Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 66; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 187, 240–1, 245–6, 311. He was a most interesting educated, visionary, spiritualist religious radical, similar to Saltmarsh and Dell. He was involved in the translations of Familist works and the writings of Paracelsus, and edited the Antinomian Tobias Crisp’s sermons for publication. 71 For the comparison see J. S. Morrill and J. D. Walter,‘Order and Disorder in the English Revolution’, in Fletcher and Stevenson (eds.), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (also repr. in Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution).

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acted as stimulus to his endeavour as well as a source of information. In the summer of 1643 the Assembly stressed the urgency of establishing effective church government as a weapon against ‘corrupt doctrines’ such as ‘Antinomianism’.72 By the following year the ‘spreading Opinions of Anabaptism and Antinomianism’ were usually coupled together as the main dangers to orthodoxy. Complaints against Mr Simpson ‘the Antinomian’ (presumably John Simpson) and ‘Mr Randalls’ (perhaps the ‘Familist’ Giles) were aired in the Assembly in February 1644.73 On 9 August 1644 Stephen Marshall informed the Commons on behalf of the Assembly that they had received many representations from ministers and gentlemen throughout England for action against such errors:‘We did persuade them for a Time, to forbear, but now we see those Men have cast off all Affection, and are so imbitterated that it is high time to suppress them’. Detailed evidence was presented on the preaching of Hanserd Knollys against infant baptism in London; on John Simpson preaching that ‘Jesus Christ is in Hogs and Dogs or Sheep; yea that the same Spirit that ruleth in the Children of God ruleth in the Children of Disobedience’; and on a Mr Randall (again perhaps Giles), removed from his living for Anabaptism who now ‘holds though a woman (though wicked) if married to one that it godly, that she is thereby sanctified’. The three men along with a Mr Penrose who had interrupted the sermon of Charles Herle in Southwark,‘in a tumultuous manner’, were sent for in custody.74 A few days later the Scots commissioners complained that while settled church government was as far away as ever, ‘on the contrarie sects and sectaries are dayly encreased

72 A Copy of the Petition of the Divines of the Assembly; Vernon,‘The Sion College Conclave’, 101–2; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 489 (for complaints against the Antinomian Robert Towne). On 7 Dec. 1643, Baillie praised a ‘supplication’ from city and country ministers, ‘regraiting the lamentable confusion of their church under the present anarchy, the increas of Anabaptists, Antinomians and other sectaries, the boldnesse of some in the citie’: Letters of Baillie, ii. 111. 73 George Gillespie, Notes of Debates and Proceedings of the Assembly of Divines and other Commissioners at Westminster, ed. David Meek (Edinburgh: Robert Ogle and Oliver and Boyd, 1846), 10a. Simpson, ‘warning that he would preach no more in corners’, had caused disorder in the city preaching at Paul’s Cross; Calamy relayed an account given by a woman parishioner of two marriages performed by Randall, ‘taking off the women’s garter and . . . other unseemly carriages’. Simpson’s case was taken to the Commons: CJ, iii. 389. 74 CJ iii. 584–5; the Committee of Plundered Ministers, in conjunction with the Assembly, were to decide on measures against these ‘dangerous opinions’. In his account of the day’s proceedings Laurence Whitaker ran together Marshall’s report with an earlier letter from the Earl of Warwick on Anabaptism and sedition in Guernsey: BL Add. MS 31116, fo. 154v. Penrose does not appear in the standard works on London or in Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary.

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and multiplyed in this kingdome, from the contagion whereof the Church of Scotland cannot long be free’. They urged particular actions against scandalous books.75 Military disaster in the West Country prompted much heart-searching amongst the godly of the Assembly in September 1644. Calamy claimed that some in the city had attributed the failures of parliament’s armies to ‘false causes’, blaming the Assembly’s attempts to suppress Antinomianism and Anabaptism for God’s judgements against them. John Goodwin was probably Calamy’s target; Goodwin’s Theomachia consisted of sermons in favour of liberty of conscience, preaching to mark parliament’s ‘late disaster’. Calamy and other Presbyterians drew the opposite conclusion: ‘that the Assembly hath not endeavoured after uniformity as they ought to have done’. City ministers petitioned the Commons to expedite the Directory of Worship and condemned the ‘many erroneous opinions, ruinous Schismes and damnable heresies unhappily fomented in City and Countrey’.76 On the defeat in Cornwall, parliament had urged the Assembly to seek an ‘accommodation’ between Presbyterians and Independents, but any attempts were rapidly overshadowed by Presbyterian demands for action against error and heresy. The Assembly attacked John Bachelor for licensing a book on the mortality of the soul, and urged the book itself be burnt.77 One immediate result of this pressure was a Commons resolution against the preaching of those not ordained, which, as Gardiner wrote,‘was easier to announce than to enforce’.78 A few days later, following the presentation of the completed Directory of Worship to parliament the Divines also offered a paper, ‘which they trembled to think on’, containing ‘Certaine Blasphemies delivered in a private house in a sermon by Mr Webb, in Queen Street, in Covent Garden, about Septemb 27’. Such specific denunciations of books or individuals were as characteristic of the Assembly’s reports to parliament as the more general exhortations, and as important sources for Edwards. Webbe was Bodl., Tanner MS 61, fo. 56r–v; another copy is in Bodl., Carte MS 80, fo. 182. Gillespie, Notes of Proceedings, 67–8. Calamy and Palmer pressed this argument; they were opposed by Nye. The final declaration on ‘the Causes of Humiliation’ was muted on this point: 69–70; The Petition of the Ministers of the City of London to the House of Commons, BL 669, fo. 10 (13), 18 Sept. 1644, about a week after the Assembly’s debate; Goodwin, Theomachia, title page. 77 Bodl., Tanner MS 61, fo. 162, the Assembly’s advice to parliament, Nov. 1644 on ‘preventing the mischiefs that will arise from . . . the divulging the dangerous opinions of Antinomianism and Anabaptism’. 78 BL Add MS 31116, fo. 174r; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1893), ii. 76 (15 Nov. 1644). 75 76

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kept in custody until early December when the Assembly men deputed to examine him certified he now disavowed all blasphemies.79 In the summer of 1645 Baillie reported the Assembly’s concerns with a range of individuals: ‘Paul Best, the Antitrinitarian, he took up some of our dayes. Mr Archer’s blasphemous book, called the Author of the very Sinfullness of Sinne, took up more of our time before we gott it burnt by the hand of the hangman. Mr Colman’s sermon to the House of Commons, the first fastday, exhorting them to keep all the Church-government in their own hand, and to give churchmen none of it, took some days also’.80 John Archer’s book Comfort for Beleevers had been reported to the Assembly by the warden of the Stationers’ Company for its dangerous expressions on 17 June 1645 and after the Assembly had confirmed it ‘maintains God to be the author of sin’, parliament agreed on 12 July that a book containing such ‘a horrid and blasphemous Heresy’ should be burnt by the common hangman. This was accordingly done, accompanied by a declaration from the Assembly which outlined the offending passages and provided page references for them. Both in its declaration and in its debates, the Assembly stressed that it was the book that was ‘odious’; Archer, who had been known to many members, ‘was dead and a man of good note’; ‘of good estimation for learning and piety’.81 In the case of Archer (and of the ‘Erastian’ Thomas Coleman, a mortally ill member of the Assembly), the Divines proceeded with some caution. With Paul Best who denied the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity, they reacted with horrified immediacy. On the morning of 10 June a packet of letters from York relating his ‘horrid blasphemies’ arrived at Westminster, provoking the Divines into a declaration that ‘the liberty of all opinions and religions, under the pretence of liberty of conscience, maintained in books and otherwise, lately published, may be speedily suppressed, which hath been the occasion of these and the like blasphemous opinions’. They then adjourned and ‘the whole Assemblie went in a body to the Houses to complaine of his blasphemies,’ and demand ‘condign 79 LJ vii. 71, 22 Nov. The details had been given to the Assembly that same day by Humphrey Chambers backed up by Joseph Caryl: Alex F. Mitchell and J. Struthers (eds.), Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and sons, 1874), 10; LJ vii. 80 for his release. He had been examined by Caryl, Chambers, and Obadiah Sedgwick. For other complaints see e.g. Mitchell and Struthers, Minutes, 96 (Hanserd Knollys, May 1645); 172–3, Dec. 1645, when William Gouge led the complaints against John Tombes and John Bachelor, for publishing the Apology. 80 Letters of Baillie, ii. 306. 81 Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 105, 111–12; LJ vii. 494; A Short Declaration of the Assembly of Divines.

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Punishment upon an Offender of so High a Nature’. Best had been preaching for some two years in Yorkshire, finally provoking Lord Fairfax into calling all the Yorkshire ministers together to investigate him. They propounded twelve questions to Best, whose answers,‘very Blasphemous and full of shifting tergiveracons’, according to MP Laurence Whitaker, provided important evidence against him. The Committee for Plundered Ministers was ordered to investigate Best, and not to engage in other business until they had finished.82 Although the wider desires of the Assembly were never achieved, and the Committee for Plundered Ministers did proceed to other matters, Best himself disappeared into the Gatehouse for years, surfacing periodically for discussions with members of the Assembly and appearances before the parliament. His precise fate remained controversial despite the Commons voting to bring in an ordinance for the death penalty after being reminded of his anti-Trinitarian blasphemies in January 1646. The ordinance for his hanging was read twice in March after ‘a very long debate’, but at the last minute the House decided to hear him before a final decision. On 4 April 1646, his views were condemned and he was given a further week to confer with members of the Assembly and consider his position. Thereafter the Commons were diverted by the conflict with Assembly and city over church government and no final decision was ever made. Best petitioned in vain for his release in August and September 1646, and was only released in late 1647, perhaps in response to pressure by city and army radicals.83 But all but the most radical parliamentarians 82 Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 101–2; Letters of Baillie, ii. 280 (letter to Lauderdale, 17 June 1645); CJ iv. 170; BL Add MS 31116, fo. 214v. The Assembly’s alarm was exaggerated: the letters were presumably not the first they had ever heard of Best. The following day the Commons heard a report from the Committee hearing the case of Jane Stratton of Southwark who had declared in April, ‘our Saviour Christ was a Bastard, the son of Joseph the Carpenter’, and urged the House of Lords to proceed against her under the legislative power, as well as examining Cranford on the words ‘divulged’ on the Exchange: CJ iv. 116; BL Add MS 31116, fo. 214v. 83 For meetings with members of the Assembly see Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 130–1, 213–14; For Jan.–Apr. 1646 see CJ iv. 493; BL Add. MS 37344, Whitelocke’s ‘Annals’, fos. 38r, 39v; BL Add MS 31116, fos. 262r, 263r–v; The Diary of John Harrington MP, 1646–1653, ed. Margaret F. Stieg (Somerset Record Society, 1977), 16. For Best’s petitions: To certaine Noble and Honorable Persons of the Honorable House of Commons assembled in Parliament, BL 669 fo. 10 (76), Thomason’s date 13 Aug. 1646; Bodl., Tanner MS 59, fo. 526, 5 Sept. 1646. In this last petition Best still insisted his aim was to clear the ‘heavenly trinitie of all Romishe and popish mists’. It was this that the Commons had taken as an attack on the creed. For the problems in finding a way to deal with Best see Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 134; for support from Londoners see Lindley, Popular Politics, 290. For Best’s career see Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary, i. 60–1. A Socinian work written in prison was burnt by order of parliament in July 1647. After his release Best lived in retirement in Yorkshire until his death in 1657.

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could agree that Best (Beast in Whitaker’s Journal) was a heretic and he served as a uniting focus, counterbalancing the hostility generated by the Savile affair, or the bitter divisions over church government. The general implications of the Assembly’s concern with heresy are complex. Alarm at the spread of error may well have increased support for a strict Presbyterian discipline, perhaps especially amongst those previously more inclined towards a modified episcopacy. At times it intensified bitterness towards Independents who were not willing to cooperate in suppression.84 On the other hand, some prominent Independents, perhaps especially Thomas Goodwin, were themselves alarmed by doctrinal unorthodoxy and so a concern with the heretical ‘other’ might, temporarily, promote some unity in the Assembly, rather as work on a Directory of Worship revealed some common ground over liturgy even as debates on church government opened sharp divisions.85 Edwards’s responses were simpler, however. For him the Assembly was a major source of alarming information and an inspiration for his polemical assaults. The Assembly worked closely—if not always harmoniously—with parliament. Likewise it cooperated in various ways with city bodies, lay and clerical. When Robert Lockyer, a joiner (probably the future Leveller–army martyr shot after the Burford mutiny), was accused at the Westminster Sessions of saying, ‘and justifiinge it in open Court that the Ministers of the ch[urch] of England are Antechristian Ministers and . . . taught Antechristian doctrine or the doctrine of devells’, he and two companions were ordered to attend the Assembly of Divines as well as to appear at the next sessions.86 The close links between the Assembly and the London clergy, which were to be given their clearest expression in their intertwined campaigns for an effective Presbyterian government in 1645–6, are also revealed in the struggle against heterodoxy. In December 1643 the Assembly’s declaration against gathering churches had been prompted by a petition from city ministers, while both city and Assembly had pondered the threat from Antinomianism and Anabaptism in the autumn of 1644. In 84 Baillie was struck by Philip Nye’s opposition to the Assembly’s declaration against Antinomians and Anabaptists: Letters of Baillie, ii. 216, 10 Aug. 1644. 85 Goodwin opposed Tombes’s views: Tombes, Apology; and was on the committee to prepare a scriptural confutation of Antinomianism in September 1643: Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 101–2.William Bridge and Sidrach Simpson as well as many Presbyterians sat on an Assembly committee established to consider the discountenancing of the public ministry and the rise of Anabaptism in August 1645: Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 123. 86 London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SBB 51, Westminster Sessions Book, 21, 30 Sept. 1644, discussed (without names) in Lindley,‘London and Popular Freedom’, 134. See Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 156 for further speculation about Robert Lockyer.

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December 1645, as Edwards was finishing Part One of Gangraena, the London ministers sent and printed a letter to the Assembly on Independency and toleration in words strikingly similar to those in Edwards’s book. The letter argued that differences of opinion amongst the godly reformers could not justify separation and so Independency amounted to schism. It was possible that some liberty of conscience might be permitted in a fully reformed church but to allow it before the government was settled would open the way to sectarian excess: ‘All other Sects and Heresies in the Kingdome wil safeguard and shelter themselves under the wings of Independency’, hence the campaign for ‘that great Diana of Independents, and all the sectaries so much cryed up by them in these distracted times, viz a Toleration, a Toleration’. Gangraena had its birth in these London Presbyterian campaigns; we cannot tell, and it does not really matter, whether Edwards was repeating the commonplaces of his circle, whether he had been the author of the letter, or whether, with his eye for a telling phrase, he had reused expressions from a meeting he had presumably attended.87 Edwards’s familiarity with the Assembly’s proceedings is evident in Gangraena. Notes taken at Simpson’s sermon in August 1644 or of Webbe’s blasphemies the following November were available to London ministers. In some cases Edwards drew very directly on the material I have discussed. Simpson’s remarks on the children of disobedience (but not on hogs and dogs) appear (with no name or attribution) as error 49 of Part One; material from the evidence against Webbe also featured amongst the errors, while Best’s opinions were in the section on blasphemies. The concern of Assembly, stationers, and parliament with a range of other evil books such as Milton’s divorce tracts, or the anonymous arguments for the mortality of the soul, may have helped bring them to Edwards’s attention.88 On the other hand it was not exactly news that John Archer had unorthodox views 87 A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London, Presented the first of January to the Reverend Assembly of Divines (London, 1645), dated 18 Dec. 1645, at Sion College, 3–4, 6; compare Gangraena, i. 126, ‘all errours take sanctuary in Independency, fly thither and are safe, as the Chickens under the wings of the Hen’. Anti-Toleration or a Modest defence of the Letter of the London Ministers (London, 1646), produced for Ralph Smith, praised Antapologia and wrote of the ‘virulent Ulcer of Universal Toleration’ (48, 20). 88 The Presbyterian Herbert Palmer, preaching on 13 Aug. 1644, at the official day of humiliation for Essex’s surrender in Cornwall, denounced wicked books on divorce; the Stationers’ Company petitioned for action against such books the same month; while in late Dec. complaints were heard in parliament against a range of ‘scandalous books’ including works by John Milton and Hezekiah Woodward: Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ii. 1643–1648 (New Haven and Oxford: Yale University Press, 1959), 104, 142; LJ vii. 116, 118. Books by Woodward and Milton are mentioned in the Preface to Gangraena, Part One, and as sources for the list of errors.

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on God and sin, for this old acquaintance of Edwards had been questioned by the Bishop of London in 1630 for catechizing that God was the author of sin ‘in some respects’. Edwards had followed Archer to a living in Hertford and had corresponded with him in the 1630s. Nonetheless the Assembly’s declaration against Archer’s posthumous Comfort for Beelevers (printed for Ralph Smith) provided a convenient summary of the work and was quoted in Gangraena. The burning of Comfort for Beleevers was itself encouraging to Edwards, who urged a ‘goodly bonfire’ of all such erroneous books.89 Proceedings against individual sectaries in Assembly or parliament highlighted notorious individuals to investigate and include, as well as providing direct sources. Edwards’s first account of the Baptist preacher Paul Hobson was prompted in part by Sir Samuel Luke’s sending him from Newport Pagnell to be examined by parliament; and Hobson’s later career featured throughout Gangraena. The activities of Hanserd Knollys in London and East Anglia also reappeared in all three parts.90 Webbe’s investigation by Assembly and parliament provided Edwards with initial evidence that could then be followed up. In parliament it was alleged that Webbe held that a man should believe according to reason, that the soul died with the body, that men were no better than other creatures (such as toads), and ‘That we did look for Matters from One crucified at Jerusalem sixteen Hundred Years ago; but that would do us no Good. It must be a Christ formed in us, in the Deity united to our Humanity.’ Error 29 in Part One of Gangraena combined this with remarks Josiah Ricraft reported Webbe making during a December 1645 conference. Edwards and Ricraft had presumably been checking up on Webbe since his release by the Commons and Edwards was certainly sceptical about Webbe’s recantation. An account later in Part One traced him through Suffolk, Essex, and Kent to show he ‘hath both in city and countrey vented many of his strange opinions’, such as ‘it was more lawfull to sit drinking in an Ale house, then to force men away out of the Ale-house, to go to Church against their consciences’. Webbe’s challenge to Edwards’s account prompted much discussion in Part Two, and provided further errors for Part Three.91 89 Gangraena, i. 23, 21, 20, 38, 172. Randall, Knowles, and Simpson are discussed in close proximity in i. 97–8 although Edwards’s material is not clearly or solely drawn from Marshall’s report to the Commons. For Archer in 1630 see GLMS 9531/15, fos. 22r, 23v–24r; Webster, Godly Clergy, 84–5. He suffered a brief suspension. For the correspondence see Antapologia, discussed in Ch. 1, above. 90 For Hobson, see e.g. Gangraena, i. 90–1; Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 135–6; for Knollys, Gangraena, i. 39–41, 184; ii. 19; iii. 48–9, 241. 91 LJ vii. 71; Gangraena, i. 21, 54–5, 74–5; ii. 137; iii. Preface, 6–7.

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Paul Best’s blasphemies were not described in any great detail in Gangraena; perhaps they were too horrible to expand on; perhaps, languishing as he did in the Gatehouse, Best could not provide any of the dramatic incidents that made up Edwards’s vivid pen-portraits of Writer, Peter, or Lilburne. Instead, opinions on Best’s fate became a litmus test for orthodoxy or heterodoxy in Gangraena, with numerous reports of conversations in which Independents and sectaries decried his imprisonment, while Edwards, implicitly at least, called for his death. An Independent minister in London claimed ‘this Imprisonment would do no good at all’, and Walwyn’s support for Best was associated with his support for the Irish rebels. John Goodwin and Hugh Peter were challenged as to whether they regarded Best as one of their ‘Saints’: ‘no question if Saint Best shall suffer by the Parliaments authority, for his damnable Heresies and Blasphemies, he shall be a Martyr too as well as a Saint in Cretensis [Goodwin’s] Kalender’.92 Most generally, Edwards shared—and in turn contributed to—the rising orthodox alarm about separatism and error, about Antinomianism,Anabaptism, and liberty of conscience, seen at its most official in the proceedings of the Westminster Assembly. In Gangraena, Edwards drew on London’s standing as a great metropolis, a magnificent entrepôt for news and alarmist reports, sent to both individuals and institutions. But the city was also a series of overlapping, intimate, turbulent face-to face communities. Edwards presented a vivid picture of London talk, of alarmist, persuasive, and sometimes fiery conversations in bookshops (as we have seen), streets, and formal meeting places. Scores of oral exchanges in the city are rehearsed in Gangraena. The following schematic treatment can give but a hint of the clamour conveyed by Edwards. He was a direct witness of many London conversations, while others were relayed at second hand, and some oral evidence was deliberately solicited, as letters were passed on or prompted. Edwards included apparently casual encounters in street and shop, as in his defence of the minister who had given him the story of Robert Cosens in Rochester: ‘a man who hath been many yeers of good account in the Church of God, a member also of the Assembly . . . did not make it his businesse or work to tell mee this story . . . but I, going in London upon my occasions, this Minister accidentally being in a shop with a friend of his, a Citizen whom I know also, I spake to them as I was going by’.93 There are also accounts of more formal disputations—notably on the mortality of the 92 93

Gangraena, i. 105–6; ii. 27, 37; iii. 127 amongst many examples. Ibid. ii. 127.

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soul at the Spittle; of lay preaching in Bell Alley and Coleman Street; of Hugh Peter or Hanserd Knollys preaching in a variety of city pulpits; and of established lectures such as Burroughs’s in St Michaels Cornhill, where in September 1646, according to a godly minister who was present, he denounced the city’s attitude to the army. An example of deliberately sought material is from 30 August 1646 when ‘Two persons of quality and worth, a reverend Minister, and another person in publick imployment, went to the Spittle in the afternoone to hear Master Randall . . . having heard many strange things of him’.94 The same kind of people were involved in both oral and written communication such as Common Councillors, sometimes anonymous, sometimes named. ‘The sectaries in the Moneth of May last raged extremely, and spake desperately, so that a Common-Councell man who had heard many of them speak, told me he had said to some of them, that they must provide Bedlam for them’, is an example of the first; Mr Mills’s story of Papists turning Independent, of the second. Edwards was able to check the first report with the Lord Mayor himself,‘who remembered there was such a thing’.95 Ordinary London citizens reported to Edwards how they had been swindled by workmen who were members of Thomas Lambe’s General Baptist church, and passed on worrying arguments over Paul Best. A ‘godly understanding man, an old Disciple . . . told me April 28 1646’ introduced the story of the sexually harassed maid, already discussed in Chapter 2.96 Some of these were named—one suggestive example is the Mr Farthing who had discussed sectarian hostility to Scriptures with the bookseller Peter Cole. These opinions were probably Clement Writer’s, who had told Farthing he believed ‘that man hath no immortall Soul’. Characteristically Farthing passed this on to Edwards in writing: this John Farthing, a Southwark man, was ‘a shorthand adept’ and a determined harrier of sectaries, the ideal contact for Edwards. He played a key role in the imprisonment of Thomas Hawes, a London supporter of Best’s following heated religious debates at the Guildhall in March 1646, and was hired by the Presbyterian martyr Christopher Love to take a record of his trial in 1651.97 Ibid. 17–18; i. 87; iii. 248, 108, 25. Ibid. iii. 182; ii. 19. This is probably the Christ Church man Peter Mills, elected as a Common Councillor in 1642; Lindley, Popular Politics, 97; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 492, for his activity later in the 1640s. 96 Gangraena, i. 104–5, 123; ii. 144. 97 Ibid. i. 121, 82; Lindley, Popular Politics, 381–2; M. Mendle,‘News and the Pamphlet Culture of Mid-Seventeenth Century England’, in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds.), 94 95

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The Divines of the Assembly spared time from theological debate and sermons to talk on city streets. Edwards had heard of sectaries who denied the divinity of Christ: On the Fast-day February 27 1644 [/5] three men, two whereof were house-keepers, and the other a yong man, an Apprentice, dwelling all in Wood-church Parish or thereabouts, in the Afternoon out of curiosity and Novelty, went to one of the private Churches in Bell-Alley . . . And upon occasion of this Discourse, I relating it to some Divines of the Assembly, they told me that Mr Nye had spoken it in their hearing, that to his knowledge the denying of Christ was a growing opinion.98

MPs passed on material from Hampshire about army disorder by word of mouth and told Edwards how Captain B (probably the notorious horse baptizer Beaumont) denied men’s souls went to heaven.99 Disorderly behaviour prompted much verbal outrage: on 16 March 1646, ‘a Member of the Assembly of Divines related this following story for a certain truth, which he knew to be so, only would not name the persons’, of how ‘one of Master Goodwins and Master Saltmarshes Saints and Beleevers) a Seeker by Sect’, promised to marry a woman but told her ‘that marriage was but an idle Ceremony, they were now man and wife before God . . . whereupon they went to bed together, and next morning after the Seeker had satisfied his lust, he ranne quite away’.100 Edwards tried to raise with a parliamentary contact the letters a sectary’s wronged wife had shown him to demonstrate the links between sexual immorality and heterodoxy, in the process revealing his own lack of proportion: The woman ‘intreated me to move some Parlia. men that there might be a Committee appointed, and shee would produce the Letters, bring witnesses . . . I moved a worthy Member of the House of Commons about it, who told me the House was full of publike businesses and would hardly intend to appoint any such Committee’.101 Visitors to the city were also a good source of material, like the ‘godly Minister in Essex who related this story to me (April 6) in the presence of a Minister of the Assembly’, offering an account of the very strict procedures for admission to the Lord’s Supper practised in Sidrach Simpson’s London congregation. This Essex man was providing city information but The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 67. I am grateful also to Sue Wiseman for information on Farthing. 98 This material had also been delivered to the parliament: Gangraena, i. 81. 99 Ibid. iii. 173, 100–1. 100 Ibid. ii. 11–12. 101 Ibid. iii. 189–90.

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most visitors offered information from home as when ‘A godly Minister living in Lincolnshire told me and another City Minister’ of the misdeeds of Thomas Moore.102 Increasingly alarmist discussions of the New Model Army’s religious and political stance were passed on by word of mouth.‘A Fellow of a Colledge in Cambridge (whom I well know) meeting me in London, told me’—about sectarian preaching in the army around Oxford. Besides printing what he heard, Edwards sometimes passed on his material to the authorities. He was told that some in the army would not fight the Irish who ‘did but fight for their Religion and Liberty of conscience’; ‘as this was told two godly Ministers, from whom I had this relation, so was it communicated to some members of both Houses’.103 Gangraena identified the crucial arenas in the city for serious conversation on the pressing issues of the day, for passing on gossip, or lobbying for support. Bookshops have already been dealt with as has Christ Church itself. Churches in general offered great opportunities for propaganda and lobbying. Hence Edwards’s denunciation of Independent preaching against Presbyterian petitioning, or of the circulation of Cromwell’s appeal for liberty of conscience in a letter after Naseby, which was printed despite the Commons’ vote against it and affixed to church doors, ‘viz the Churches of greatest resort of people’, like Burroughs’s Stepney.104 Edwards identified some radical strongholds such as the Windmill Tavern, where Lilburne was ‘a great stickler’ in the meetings; or the Three Cranes, where Hugh Peter ‘on last of May preaching . . . in the evening he spoke against the Common Council’.105 The most important public buildings were the Exchange, the Guildhall, and Westminster Hall. It was on the Exchange where Clement Writer and ‘one John Price an Exchange man’ spread radical propaganda, and Edwards could obtain from city merchants details of the latest imported religious literature. The Presbyterian minister of Stepney, Joshua Hoyle, was ‘baited and rated by several of the Sectaries and them of that way that he met with; both in the street and upon the Exchange’.106 The Guildhall was the seat of city government and the location for conferences Ibid. ii. 151; iii. 80. Other examples include material from Colchester, i. 108; Northamptonshire, iii. 150; Cheshire, iii. 179; and Saltmarsh’s preaching at Bath relayed by ‘A person of worth who was at Bath this Summer’: iii. 174. 103 Ibid. iii. 81, 23. Further refusals to oppose the Irish are recounted in iii. 22–3 as well as the account from ‘A godly young man of Summersetshire or Dorsetshire’—on a preaching lieutenant in Fairfax’s army in the west. 104 Ibid. i. 109 for Greenhill’s and Burroughs’s opposition to Presbyterian petitioning in Sept. 1645; iii. 211. 105 106 Ibid. i. 96, iii. 121. Ibid. i. 81; iii. 160; ii. 158; i. 109. 102

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between parliament and city authorities. On one such occasion, 17 March 1646, ‘the Sectaries in severall companies and knots in the Hall, 30, 40 and more in some companies, vented boldly and pleaded for all sorts of opinions’.107 Edwards also spent much time at Westminster Hall where he noticed Lilburne, exchanged angry words with Hugh Peter, and denounced the sectaries ‘walking boldly’ there. ‘A person of qualitie and a godly man told me (April 15) meeting me accidentally in Westminster Hall’ of an alarming encounter he had recently had with a friend of Clement Writer, who supported Best. Here radical books, such as Toleration Justifed, were ‘openly dispersed . . . given by Sectaries into some Parliament mens hands’.108 The talk in Gangraena is not always ‘accidental’, casual, or innocent. On the evidence of one admittedly eccentric prophet, Edwards was widely believed to have infiltrated spies and agents provocateurs into gathered congregations. Arise Evans later claimed,‘about this time M. Edwards hearing that it was reported, I had maintained my self to be Christ, and that I had prophesied the downfall of the Presbyterians, Mr Edwards sends spies to the Spittle to get Intelligence’. The Independents, on the other hand, took Evans ‘for a Decoy sent to catch them’; he was violently excluded from their meetings and attacked in the streets by people ‘crying to the people, there goes Christ’. Edwards and his associates often did deliberately seek out religious radicals. Edwards himself had investigated Mrs Attaway’s activities, while a minister and a public official, ‘Two persons of quality and worth’, had indeed gone to the Spittle although their quarry was the Antinomian Giles Randall, not an obscure Welsh prophet. Nicholas Widmerpole and the other Christ Church parishioners who reported on Dell’s Marston sermon—indeed the three men who visited Bell Alley out of novelty— are perhaps other evidence in support of Evans’s claim.109 As Gangraena was a printed book that reproduced much oral communication and manuscript material, so generally in Edwards’s London the elements of information and encounter that we have distinguished for the sake of analysis were often experienced in a more jumbled fashion. Letters might be prompted by conversation as well as the subject of debate; manuscripts denounced books and were reprinted in other books. The city was increasingly the arena for competing ideological struggles connecting This material had also been delivered to the parliament: Gangraena, ii. 8. Ibid. i. 149; ii. 104, 155; iii. 126; ii. 149; i. 119. 109 Arise Evans,‘A Narration of the Life, calling and Visions of Arise Evans’, appended to his An Eccho to the Voice from Heaven (London, 1652), BL E1304 (2), 58–9, 61. I am grateful to Tom Corns for this reference. For Randall and Attaway, see Gangraena, i. 103. 107 108

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provincial and London activists but it was also a space where bitterly divided men and women were at the same time closely acquainted. In the midst of a pamphlet controversy over the city’s Remonstrance of May 1646, both the Presbyterian bookseller John Bellamy and the Independent haberdasher John Price made much of their direct personal acquaintance. Bellamy affected sorrow that their disagreements had not been settled face to face given that they were ‘now so neare neighbors that whenever you pleased in lesse then one quarter of an hour, you might freely have communicated to me, whatever you had a desire to be satisfied in’. Instead Price had exposed aspects of Bellamy’s earlier life ‘to the world’, ‘to weaken my esteem and to render what I have written to bee the more invalid’.110 For Edwards the city provided him with an institutional structure whereby information came through the Stationers’ Company, the Common Council, Assembly, and parliament, but it also contained friends, neighbours, and familiar enemies whose letters and anxious conversations filled his pages. edwards’s account of cit y religion We have seen how London was essential to the making of Gangraena; it was equally prominent in the content of Edwards’s work. At least 40 per cent of the specific stories in Gangraena concern London.111 Besides the detailed information, Gangraena offers a compelling general picture of the religious (and political) culture of London in the 1640s; a city crammed with meetings and argument, where letters, position papers, and interrogatories were exchanged and discussed, Aldermen and parliament men lobbied, spies sent out to expose the dangerous opinions vented in sectarian congregations. There seems little reason to doubt that this sums up the experience of some of the inhabitants of London in the 1640s. In these years, men and women faced human and financial contributions towards parliament’s war effort that were without precedent, and grappled with the profoundest divisions over issues of political authority and religious change. John Milton, from a very different point of view, presented a 110 For Price see Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary, iii. 59–60. He was a prominent member of John Goodwin’s congregation. John Price, The City Remonstrance Remonstrated or An Answer to Colonell John Bellamy, his Vindication thereof (London, 1646), BL E345 (18), Thomason date 24 July, 19; Bellamie, A Justification of the City Remonstrance and its Vindication, sig A3r, 32. 111 See Table 3.1.

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similar picture of the city in Areopagitica: ‘Under the fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirr’d up in this City. What some lament of, we rather should rejoyce at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their Religion into their own hands again.’112 But beyond these generalities, how best should Edwards’s account of London be evaluated? The intractable problems in assessing how ‘accurate’ a picture Edwards provides will preoccupy us in this and the next section. We are brought face to face with the limitations of the historian’s traditional craft; checking ‘fact’ after ‘fact’ still leaves us far from a judgement on the ‘truth’ of Gangraena. Some of Edwards’s material can be verified, in that the account he gives of evidence before law courts, Common Council, or parliament turns out to be a fair reflection of the original source. Some identifiable letter writers own the correspondence as theirs; many others can at least be located as individuals. Printed responses to Gangraena often challenge details or the meaning given to particular incidents by Edwards, but they are also clearly referring to some real event as we shall see in Chapter 4. Oral testimony is particularly problematic but even here it seems plausible that John Farthing, Peter Cole, or Ralph Smith had conversations such as those reported by Edwards. However, most of Edwards’s material cannot be checked in this way. Individuals are identified only as godly ministers, citizens, or friends, and no precise places are given. In these circumstances does the verified serve to validate the unverifiable? My own conclusion is that the material in Gangraena was derived from ‘actual’—‘real’—encounters and communications experienced directly by Edwards or passed on to him by others; other readers may be more sceptical. I do not think it plausible that Edwards simply fabricated evidence—inventing letters, conversations, or depositions—to fit his case or to ‘frame’ his enemies, but I cannot prove this. This defers or diverts the question of how convincing Edwards’s picture is. He might not have falsified evidence in a crude fashion, but that does not mean he presented a fair or balanced version of a book, an event, or a person’s opinions. Edwards had extremely good sources of information in London, whereas his access to provincial material was more random, but in both city and country he selected what to include and presented an 112 Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ii. 1643–1648 (New Haven and Oxford: Yale University Press, 1959), 554.

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alarmist and often distorted account. As Edwards had particular interests and preoccupations, so his informants were often self-selected, with their own biases and blind spots. One possible solution might be to rely on detailed, modern accounts of religious radicalism in London, of which the most comprehensive is Murray Tolmie’s Triumph of the Saints. The inescapable problem here is one of circularity, for many later discussions of radical groups start from a heavy reliance on Gangraena as a source, albeit supplemented by extensive further research. At the heart of Tolmie’s book is the General Baptist congregation of Thomas Lambe, soap-boiler: ‘Lambe’s church was easily the most visible and notorious of all sectarian congregations in London up to the end of the first civil war. . . . no congregation looms larger in the pages of Edwards’s Gangraena’.113 The difficulty is that the second part of this statement may go a long way to explaining the first. In contrast to the centrality of Lambe is the complete absence from Tolmie’s book of the ‘familist’ Giles Randall, a significant figure in other modern discussions. Edwards’s picture of London cannot simply be labelled as true or false. He does not seem to have invented his material, but Gangraena cannot be taken on its own evaluation as a catalogue or some kind of neutral survey; it is a very particular construction of London religion in the 1640s. We need to be aware of why Edwards might have been preoccupied with particular individuals or groups, and more problematically, we have to explore what Edwards might have underplayed or silently excluded. To express this in different terms, why is Praisegod Barebone not in Gangraena? The following, provisional evaluation thus seeks to compare Edwards’s account of London with that found in some other sources and with other possible or plausible descriptions. Tolmie and Lindley have identified thirteen ‘Independent’ congregations meeting in London around 1646, and aspects of their activities are reflected in Gangraena. The political involvement of ‘mainstream’ London Independents, notably Burroughs and Greenhill, drew Edwards’s angry attention, along with the propensity of Independents to engross lucrative lectureships and wide-ranging congregations: ‘every one of their particular Churches is not a Parish Church but a Bishops Dioces, nay some of them are Archbishopricks and provinces, far larger then the Presbyterian Provinces, reaching from London to Dover as Dr Holms, who hath 113 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 76 for Lambe. Gangraena, i. 92–5 is Tolmie’s crucial source.

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severall members there, going twice or thrice a year thither to visit’.114 There are brief, casual remarks about the erroneous doctrines and bad behaviour emerging from the members of many of these churches, but Edwards concentrates especially on the leaders of two of them, John Goodwin and Henry Burton. Edwards’s particular hostility to Burton, the bishops’ martyr who had betrayed his old friends among the godly when he rejected the possibility of a reformed national church, was shared by many Presbyterians. Within London, bitterness was intensified by Burton’s reappointment in 1643 to the parish of Matthew Friday Street where he had been rector until his imprisonment in 1636 and lecturer since 1642; this rigid Independent thereby became a tithe-taking parochial minister. It is unlikely that Burton ever acted fully in this capacity and parishioners petitioned for his removal in 1645; tithes due from 1642 to 1645 were collected and delivered to him in June 1646,‘in respect of all duties dewe to him from the said parishoners, as his paines taken in preching mongst us’; provided he agreed to give up the keys of the minister’s house and renounced any further claims.115 Similar tensions over John Goodwin’s role as a parish minister with responsibility also for a gathered congregation were found in Stephen Coleman Street, with a similar result: leading parishioners cooperated with parliament to remove Goodwin from the living in 1645, Goodwin, moreover, was moving further and further from an orthodox Calvinist position on salvation throughout the 1640s, and the bitter personal hostility between him and Edwards burns on the pages of both men’s works. The reply to Goodwin’s Cretensis, the attack on the first part of Gangraena, dominated Part Two, while in Part Three, Edwards gave an angry summing-up of Goodwin’s role: ‘Cretensis, alias Master John Goodwin, a monstrous Sectary, a compound of Socianisme, Arminianisme, Libertinisme, Antinomianisme, Independency, Popery, yea and of Sceptiscisme, as holding some opinions proper to each of these. This man for twelve yeares last past hath disturbed the City of London, with broaching 114 Lindley, Popular Politics, 281–2; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 94–5, 122. Tolmie’s count includes Henry Jessey’s church, defined as Baptist by Lindley who adds a Whitechapel Independent congregation to Tolmie’s list: Lindley, ‘Whitechapel Independents and the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 283–91. It is difficult to be certain whether this last group were a formally organized church under Tolmie’s definition. Gangraena, i. 109; ii. 128; i. 71–2. 115 Edwards’s comment that ‘It would be too long to tell’ in any detail of what he knows of opinions in William Carter’s, Walter Cradock’s, John Briscoe’s, or William Bartlet’s churches (Gangraena, ii. 16) is typical. For his account of Burton see Ch. 2, above; Rutherford, Spiritual Antichrist, epistle, also singled him out. See Liu, Puritan London, 114–15, and GLMS 3579, St Matthew’s Friday Street, Vestry Minutes, 77 for the parochial context.

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continually one Error or other’. Members of Goodwin’s gathered congregation were at the heart of radical religion, politics, and publishing in the 1640s. Edwards noted in particular ‘One Overton an Independent Book-seller’ and ‘one John Price an Exchange man, Cretensis beloved Disciple, and one of his Prophets’.116 In contrast Nathaniel Holmes, another highly educated, beneficed Independent minister, rector of St Mary Staining from 1643 until ejection in 1662, and a future fifth monarchist, attracted relatively little attention from Edwards, for reasons that must remain mysterious.117 In Gangraena and probably in London, individual preachers and pamphleteers were as influential as organized congregations. Among ordained Independent ministers active in the city but not attached to a particular church, Edwards concentrated on Hugh Peter, presenting him as a hotheaded and embarrassingly vulgar political agitator with an unhealthy influence on the army, and all too effective links with powerful Members of Parliament. Edwards traced his dangerous wanderings through the city. At Thomas Gataker’s church in Rotherhithe on 27 May 1646, ‘he preached against the Scots by name’; on the last of May, preaching at the Three Cranes in the evening he spoke against the Common Council of the City ‘for medling with that they had nothing to do with’. He also denounced the city’s Remonstrance, spoke ‘lightly’ of the Covenant, and condemned the longing for peace with the king—‘what a stirre here was about a King, as if we could not live without one’. All this provoked an angry conference with several citizens, at the house of London militia Colonel Rowland Wilson. Edwards objected particularly to Peter’s use of London pulpits to denounce the city as a corporate body, alleging Peter had preached at the thanksgiving for the fall of Dartmouth at Allhallows, Lombard Street, that, ‘if ever this Kingdom was brought into slavery, this City would be the cause of it’.118 More,‘New Arminianism’, 125–30, and More,‘Congregationalism and the Social Order: John Goodwin’s Gathered Church, 1640–60’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 38 (1987), 210–35, for the importance of Goodwin’s gathered congregation in city life; Gangraena, iii. 114. Edwards also pointed out that Burton (even Burton) and Thomas Goodwin had condemned John Goodwin’s errors; the bookseller is Henry Overton: ii. 9. For Price, iii. 160. Price remained active as a vestryman at Stephen Coleman Street despite the expulsion of Goodwin’s congregation from the church: More,‘New Arminianism’, 87. 117 For Holmes see Liu, Puritan London, 108; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 110 (an account based on Vicars, Schismatick Sifted), and 123–4. My explanation would be that unlike Goodwin and Burton, Holmes wrote no provocative books and in the 1640s was not politically prominent. Indeed he defended infant baptism and accused John Goodwin of Socinianism. 118 For the importance of individual preachers in London see Lindley, Popular Politics, 287; 116

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Edwards’s focus on individuals rather than churches is confirmed when we look at his treatment of the more radical groups in the city, again comparing his analysis to comprehensive modern surveys. Seven ‘Particular’ or Calvinist Baptist churches in London cooperated in the issue of a Confession of Faith in October 1644, while the second edition of January 1646, from eight slightly different groups, was noted by Edwards at the very end of Part One, amongst books ‘lately printed’.119 The increasing selfconfidence and coherent organization of the Baptists in London were likely one of the spurs to Edwards’s polemical career, but he made no attempt to provide a catalogue of churches, which could easily have been constructed from the 1646 Confession, or to provide a systematic estimate (or exaggeration) of Baptist strength. His attention was overwhelmingly drawn to one of the churches represented in the Confessions, that led by William Kiffin and Thomas Patient.We have already encountered Kiffin as a heckler at Edwards’s lecture and he was in turn frequently denounced in Gangraena for both his London activities and his journeys to spread his ideas in the provinces. Edwards printed Josiah Ricraft’s vivid assault on Kiffin, ‘sometimes Servant to a Brewer [John Lilburne]’. He also included Ricraft’s account of a woman who claimed to have been cured through being anointed with oil by Kiffin and Patient. Ricraft commented that the Baptists’ Confession of Faith indicated that Kiffin was the ‘Metropolitan of that Fraternity’, but like Edwards he showed little interest in others of the brotherhood. Thereafter Edwards always included Kiffin in his lists of dangerous sectaries, denounced Goodwin’s defence of Kiffin, and repeated the story of the anointing with oil.120 A similar story in Part Three alleged that Hanserd Knollys, another 1646 signatory of the Baptist Confession, and Henry Jessey, a veteran of London semi-separatism, whose church had a complicated relationship with the London Baptist congregations, had attempted to cure a blind woman, Gangraena, i. 98–100, 182–3; iii. 120–46 are the major treatments of Peter, but there are many other brief comments. For fastidious criticism of Peter’s style see iii. 123 on his sermon at Christ Church on a thanksgiving day where his remark that he would ‘make a marriage that day between the Parliament and the City’ fell very flat; and iii. 127 on a dinner conversation where Peter spoke of an island in New England covered in pigeon-dung two foot deep (pigeons had been served at the dinner). Quoted here are iii. 121, 124; i. 183. 119 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 55–65, 122; Lindley, Popular Politics, 284–5; Gangraena, i. 184; this ‘came not to my hands till Feb 13’ although it had been handed out to MPs on 29 Jan. (Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 63). The 1646 Confession was signed by a small French group as well as representatives of seven London churches. 120 Gangraena, i. 55, 93, 104, 107–8; ii. 40; iii. 78. Edwards also mentions (iii. 112) that a woman informant had been a member of a Baptist church of the early 1640s led by Richard Blunt with Samuel Eames and Clement Writer.

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again by anointing her with oil. It was also Jessey whom Edwards blamed for recommending a lascivious elderly woman servant to the London widower Thomas Clarke.121 Knollys and Paul Hobson were the other Calvinist Baptists to feature largely in Gangraena, but the focus is again on them as individuals, whose books, sermons, and journeys wreaked havoc in city, country, and army. Knollys preached against infant baptism and prayed for the release of John Lilburne in various London venues; his preaching in Suffolk was also discussed at length. Hobson’s printed sermons were a major source of errors in Part One of Gangraena, and he is mentioned as a leader of London Baptists, but he was treated mainly as an army preacher as we will see below.122 Finally Edwards made several references to the disputation planned for December 1645 between Edmund Calamy and ‘some of the Anabaptists’, the banning of which by the Lord Mayor provoked much radical resentment.123 While five General Baptist congregations have been identified by modern scholars, one church, Thomas Lambe’s, dominates Edwards’s discussion: ‘There is one Lamb who was a Sope boyler, and a Church that meets in Bell-Alley in Colemanstreet called Lambs Church: This man and his Church are very Erroneous, strange Doctrines being vented there continually’.124 Edwards described the lively and contentious meetings of this church, where members of the congregation voted who should ‘Exercise next’, and ‘tis usual and lawful not only for the company to stand up and object against the Doctrine delivered when the Exerciser of his gifts hath made an end, but in the midst of it, so that sometimes upon some standing up and objecting, there’s pro and con for almost an hour, and falling out among themselves before the man can have finished’. Many of Edwards’s most vividly delineated characters were associated with Lambe’s church: the lacewoman Mrs Attaway, Samuel Oates, ‘a great Dipper and Preacher’, notorious for his missionary activity in East Anglia, and one ‘Overton’ (Richard) found there debating the mortality of the soul. Apart from a brief account of a ‘love-feast’ held in the General Baptist church of Edward Gangraena, iii. 19, 85 for Jessey; cf. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 59–60. For Knollys in London see Gangraena, i. 40, 98; iii. 18–19, 241; for Suffolk: i. 97–8; iii. 48–9; as an army preacher, iii. 266. For Hobson see i. 22–3, 32, 89–92, 184; iii. 45–6, 49–50. 123 Ibid. i. 91, 93–4; iii. 175; the Baptist disputants were to have been Knollys, Kiffin, and Benjamin Cox; Cranford and some others were to have assisted Calamy: A Declaration Concerning The Publike Dispute which should have been in the Publike Meeting-House of Alderman-Bury, the 3d of this Instant Moneth of December (London, 1645), 1–2, 4. This pamphlet was written by the Baptists: Benjamin Cox, An after-reckoning with Mr Edwards, or a True and Sober answer to a false accusation (London, 1646), 13. 124 Gangraena, i. 92–3. 121 122

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Barber, in a house in Bishopsgate street, there are no other discussions of General Baptist churches.125 References in passing to Brownists and sectaries, and brief descriptions of more striking individuals such as ‘one Katherine Chidley an old Brownist, and her sonne a young Brownist’ whom Edwards had much reason to resent, make up the sum of Edwards’s treatment of the nine or more separatist congregations with lay pastors found in modern accounts.126 It is unlikely Edwards was simply ignorant of all these congregations. That made famous by its leader’s role in the 1650s—Praisegod Barebone’s church—was one of the two churches (Jessey’s was the other) formed in 1640 when the founding church of London semi-separatism (established in 1616 by Henry Jacob) grew too large to be manageable. Barebone’s church was known to be meeting in Fleet Street in 1641, and he had published an attack on Richard Blunt’s rejection of infant baptism in 1642. Barebone furthermore was a former neighbour in the Cornhill ward of Smith and Bellamy; Bellamy indeed had been a member in his youth of Jacob’s church. It seems that Edwards did not find Barebone’s views or activities worth notice. He was less radical than Kiffin, an opponent of adult baptism, and his church was probably semi-separatist rather than strict-separatist. Neither Barebone nor any member of his church is known to have proselytized beyond the city as Lambe and Kiffin did. Nor did the church have the political prominence of Goodwin’s congregation or other Independent churches with an ordained, educated ministry.127 The omission of Praisegod Barebone is some guide to Edwards’s priorities, while his treatment of Kiffin is worth probing further for an example of how his descriptions could mislead without being directly inaccurate. It is striking how often in Gangraena Kiffin is paired with the very different Thomas Lambe. Edwards never directly claims that the two men—the relatively orthodox Calvinist Kiffin and the radical proponent of lay preaching and universal redemption Thomas Lambe—agreed on salvation or church organization, but he couples them together as ‘emissaries’ to provincial England, actively rebaptizing in Kent. In Edwards’s extended discussion of Lambe’s church in Part One, he broke off from showing how Lambe ‘Preaches in the Countreys up and down’, to make the general point Gangraena, 87, 93–4; ii. 17–18; i. 104–5. Ibid. iii. 170, where the Chidleys are linked to Lanseter’s congregation in Bury, Suffolk; i. 79 for Katherine Chidley’s encounter with Greenhill. Edwards never mentioned her by name as the woman who had answered his earlier works. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 65–8; Lindley, Popular Politics, 286 adds a Whitechapel separatist church to Tolmie’s list of nine. 127 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 19, 38–9, 54, 65. 125 126

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that ‘emissaries’ were sent from London congregations to ‘infect’ the provinces. He then gave examples of Kiffin’s ‘progresse in Kent’, before a ‘return to Lambe and his Church’. This insertion of the comparatively respectable Kiffin into an account of the very radical Lambe church may be a deliberate muddying of the waters, a challenge to the polemical strategy of the Calvinist Baptist Confessions which sought to stress their respectability and their distance from the Anabaptist stereotype. On the other hand, Edwards may have been genuinely confused, as Baillie seems to have been, over the different London Baptist groups. Baillie apparently believed that Thomas Lambe was one of the London Baptists associated with the Confessions of 1644 and 1646, and that therefore the rejection of the doctrine of universal redemption in these Confessions was consciously dishonest.128 It is clear from Gangraena itself and many other sources that there were many encounters, conferences, and debates, between different London churches. One ‘Mr P.’—presumably Price—in a tumultuous debate in Lambe’s church,‘reasoned for a possibility of men to be saved who are not Elected’. Even Presbyterians participated in attempts to find some modus vivendi with Independents, Calvinist Baptists, and stricter separatists, in late 1645.129 Edwards’s picture of London stresses the muddle, the overlapping interests and speculations, but it pays little attention to the distinctions contemporaries themselves often drew. It is tempting to use Edwards’s material to argue against Tolmie’s account, but it is as easy to use Tolmie against Edwards. It could be that while Tolmie has taken certain aspects of Gangraena—the vivid accounts of the activities of Lambe or Kiffin and the often passing references to particular churches—to support his own rather ‘sectarianized’ account of radical religion in the city as based on organized churches bound by formal covenants; he has ignored the impressions of flux, overlap, and confusion also conveyed by Gangraena. On the other hand, Tolmie’s account underlines how Edwards has clearly ignored many distinctions of belief and attitude (between Kiffin and Lambe; perhaps between Lilburne, Overton, and Lambe) in presenting an alarmist, blurred, yet individualized account of charismatic, evil emissaries moving through the city and beyond. Prosaically, it seems that any ‘truth’ is likely to lie somewhere between the two. Edwards’s account of London is also affected by the muted fashion in 128 Gangraena, i. 65; iii. 78; i. 92–5; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 64 for Baillie’s (genuine?) confusion. 129 Gangraena, i. 94; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 123, based on Gangraena, i. 14–15.

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which ‘familism’ as an organized sect appears in Gangraena, in contrast to its prominence in other contemporary accounts of heresy (as we saw in Chapter 2). John Grant claimed that the Familist ‘at this very time . . . doth more hurt in one houre then in ten heretofore’, while John Etherington, probably an ex-Familist himself, claimed the ‘blasphemous doctrine’ was ‘now very boldly taught by one Mr Randall, and sundry others in and about the Citie of London. Whom Multitudes of people follow, and which Doctrine many embrace’. Etherington also denounced a Dr Gill for preaching familism openly in London.130 Gill or Gell is not mentioned in Gangraena while the absence of Giles Randall from Tolmie is matched by his relatively minor role in Gangraena itself. He features briefly in a hectic account of several sectaries in Part One, but Edwards breaks off before a full discussion: ‘One Randal who Preaches about Spittle-yard, a great Antinomian and familist, a man of a loose life, and large conscience; but there would be no end of naming all’. He is in another list of sectaries to be shunned by private Christians, while we have already mentioned the ‘Two persons of quality and worth’ who went to the Spittle to hear Randall preach. A couple of Randall’s followers were also mentioned by Edwards: ‘one Marshall a Bricklayer, a yong man living at Hackney (a great follower of Mr Randal) who infects many with his errors’; and another ‘great follower’ who offered to sell his (now useless) Bible.131 There is no evidence that Randall led an organized congregation or ‘sect’, hence his irrelevance to Tolmie’s account of London’s separate churches, but why does he feature so briefly in Gangraena, compared to Goodwin, Peter, Lilburne, Clarkson, Oates, or Kiffin? The account of Randall in Part One is cut short by Edwards’s desire to give fuller descriptions of two men in many ways more theologically orthodox, the Calvinist Baptist Hanserd Knollys and the inevitable Hugh Peter. Randall appears in Gangraena after the curious have sought him out, attending his sermons in Spitalfields; Knollys and Peter may have been more orthodox, but they were much more aggressive, thrusting their views out into the world. They both had close links with the army and they were both political threats. 130 Grant, Truths Victory against Heresie, dedication; John Etherington, A Brief Discovery of the Blasphemous Doctrine of Familisme, First conceived and brought forth into the World by one Henry Nicolas (London, 1645), BL E277 (10), Thomason date 9 Apr., title page and 10. Gell’s preaching is also mentioned in the commonplace book of E. Hawes, which contains familist reflections and sermon notes. I owe this reference to David Como, whose work is doing so much to illuminate ‘Antinomian’ and ‘Familist’ milieux in the 1630s and early 1640s. Etherington is fully and subtly discussed in Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge. 131 Gangraena, i. 97, 173; iii. 25; i. 80; ii. 19–20.

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Knollys preached ‘in such a tumultuous, seditious, factious way, (going as I have been informed) with some armed men accompanying him’, while Peter was ‘so bold, daring and active for the Sectaries’; he had (in Part Three) ‘many wayes by preaching, writing, conference and discourse, and above all by acting in severall kinds, promoted the Independent way’.132 Edwards’s concern was with the bold and energetic men, with doctrine proselytized on the streets, and, from the start, with political subversion. He seems to have been less alarmed by the equally heretical, but more quietest and mystical doctrines associated with Randall, and much recent research would suggest that there was much more familist or ‘Antinomian’ speculation in London than we find in Gangraena.133 Edwards was concerned with those active in his here and now. He was not, for example, just following up the sectaries who became notorious after complaints to parliament or appearances in pamphlets in 1641. If these men were still causing trouble, as John Durant was in Kent, they merited extensive discussion as we shall see in the next section; but others are treated briefly, if at all. Two figures from 1641 appear only at the very end of Part Three: ‘There are divers other Sectaries to be discovered, and their waies and preachings laid open, as Greene the Felt-maker who was one of the first Mechanicks’ to preach publicly when the parliament met; he had apparently gone to Trinidad, but was now back preaching twice a week in an Alley in Coleman Street,‘where there is great resort and flocking to him’ and where he was occasionally joined by his old friend, (John) Spencer, ‘sometimes the Lord Brooks Coachman’. By this time Edwards only had space to promise a full account in Part Four.134 Similarly, as I have shown, it was only in Part Three that he gave a full account of Richard Overton, ‘a desperate Sectary, one of Lilburnes Breed and followers, who hath printed many scandalous things against the House of Peers’, and this is presumably a genuine reflection of the increased prominence of Overton and Lilburne in London politics. It has been suggested that in Part Three Edwards was ‘the first discoverer of the Levellers’; that his prime targets ‘were the men who were later to be recognised as the leaders of the Leveller party’. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Part Three indeed reflected the increased Ibid. i. 97–8, 98–100, at 97 and 99; iii. 120. See Como, ‘ Puritans and Heretics’, and Como and Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians’. It is also worth noting that Edwards has little interest in pursuing the career of Henry Pinnell following Simon Ford’s description of his mystical Antinomian preaching in Poole. 134 Gangraena, iii. 248–9. 132 133

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polarization of city politics, but it was a polarization that Edwards’s first two parts had helped to create; his political discussions are thus part description, part self-fulfilling prophecy.135 We have compared Edwards’s account of churches and individuals with some modern surveys, but it is even more difficult to assess the plausibility of his reports of the heterodox opinions uttered on the streets and in the meeting places of the city. One possibility is through comparison with the legal cases meticulously analysed by Keith Lindley.136 Lindley found twenty-six cases of prosecution for unorthodox religious views in city and central courts, and before parliament from 1641 to 1650, all but one in 1641–5. Robert Lockyer, as we have seen, denounced ‘Antechristian ministers’ and their ‘Antechristian doctrine’; in Lambeth some women claimed the church was like a prison; views that the Scriptures were a dead letter, or Christ a bastard, surface in the courts as they do amongst Edwards’s errors.137 One of Edwards’s most striking stories—of cat baptism—might gain specific validation from the legal records. In June 1644 a Middlesex jury presented John Platt, a Golding Lane heel-maker, and his wife Susan for speaking against infant baptism. In August they were bound over ‘for depraveing the two sacraments of Baptisme and the Lords Supper especially the sacrament of baptism (saying) that a Catt or a dogg may be aswell baptized as any Child or Children in their Infancie’. The case dragged on for months. In October Sarah Ramsden, the wife of a St Giles weaver, was accused of ‘abusing John Plat and Susan his wife . . . abetting and counselling the people to claw her by the face and saying to the people that she had Christened a cat . . . whereby a mutiny was like to be raysed’. Another local woman was in trouble ‘for charging Susan Plat with a matter of fact that she should Christen a Catt’.138 The Platts’ opponents also attacked the partiality of one of the justices involved, Robert Dawlman. William Ramsden, already accused of defaming Susan Platt, was bound to ‘answere 135 Grangraena, 148; David Wootton, ‘Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 412–42, at 418. The doctoral research of Mr Philip Baker of Cambridge University will elucidate the origins of the Levellers. 136 Principally in Lindley, ‘London and Popular Freedom in the 1640s’. Some of the same material is also used in Lindley, Popular Politics. My discussion is drawn almost entirely from Lindley’s work, although I have followed up his references to the Middlesex and Westminster sessions papers for 1644–6. 137 Lindley, ‘London and Popular Freedom’, 132–5; London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SBB51, 12 for Lockyer. 138 The cases involving the Platts are discussed in Lindley,‘London and Popular Freedom’, 132, 135; Lindley, Popular Politics, 291, 301–2; London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SR/ 952/56, 57; 957/28; 956/33, 34.

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for saying in my [Dawlman’s] presence I would heare none but Theefes, whores and Annabaptists’. One of the Platts’sureties in December 1644 was the radical printer Thomas Paine, while Dawlman was a stationer, specializing in the publication of books by Congregationalist or ‘Independent’ ministers such as Thomas Goodwin, and a close associate of the ageing radical Independent Henry Burton.139 Error 104 in Gangraena, Part One is ‘That Paedobaptisme is unlawfull and antichristian, and that tis as lawfull to baptize a cat or a Dog or a Chicken, as to baptize the Infants of beleevers’. Characteristically, Edwards reinforced his point with a story later in the volume: the sectaries ‘have done and practised many strange things in reference to baptisme of children, dressing up a cat like a child for to be baptized’, inviting the neighbours in order to mock infant baptism.140 Edwards echoes the move in the court proceedings from a form of words to an actual profane reenactment of the sacrament, and it may be that the legal proceedings were at some remove his source for his accounts. But we cannot be sure, and although historians are sometimes more at ease with routine, archival sources such as sessions papers, than with printed works like Gangraena, the significance and meaning of legal cases may be equally problematic. The truth of what ‘actually’ occurred is frequently obscure and it is hard to judge the representativeness of such cases. The accusation of cat baptism may be a product of local malice provoked by a variety of issues; it may reflect outrage at an exceptional travesty or it may represent the tip of a much larger iceberg of transgressive activity. The total of cases concerning religious unorthodoxy is not great; they take their place amongst standard presentments for nuisance and disorder, and a wide range of more unusual offences such as bigamy, buggering (rather than baptizing) mares, and scandalous words against the parliament. The decline in presentations in the later 1640s is more likely to reflect a declining willingness to prosecute, rather than a decline in unorthodoxy itself, but again the legal records 139 London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SR 956/35; 958/124–5. In Apr. 1645 the Ramsdens were accused of assaulting the Platts, while the Platts and their son Caleb were accused in turn of assaults on the Ramsdens: ibid., MJ/GBR5 (Gaol delivery Book), fos. 13v, 16v–17r; MJ/SR 959/22, 25; 965/35, 37, 184, 186. For Dawlman see Plomer, Dictionary, 63; amongst the books he produced for Thomas Goodwin was The Great Interest of States and Kingdoms, a fast sermon almost contemporaneous with Gangraena, Part One. The links with Burton are revealed in Burton, Truth still Truth, 25. See Lindley, Popular Politics, 67 n. 150, 72 nn. 189, 191, for his service as a Common Councillor, and his part in supporting parliament’s war effort. 140 Gangraena, i. 28, 67. This story impressed contemporaries, such as the Lincolnshire minister John Clarke, who in Leaven, corrupting the Children’s Bread, 52 used it amongst many other examples from Gangraena, to show the sectaries’ errors.

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themselves cannot demonstrate this. Many patterns must reflect the preoccupations of justices rather than the levels of offence; in Westminster the Baptist and future republican Josiah Berners was clearly on the lookout for sabbath-breakers, and for evidence of hostility to parliament especially as revealed in attacks on its officials.141 We would be unwise to use the legal records to suggest that Londoners really were baptizing cats, or to assess whether Edwards’s picture of London radicalism was accurate or true according to some quantitative measure. The legal records do, however, suggest how plausible much of Edwards’s material was. In the specific case of cat baptism, we have already discussed the pre-existing association between religious heterodoxy and transgressive rituals involving animals, but in the crowded, intimate milieu of the city of London, many people would have come to hear of this particular sectarian outrage and the acquiescence of an Independent magistrate. Besides being a likely source for Edwards’s story, the longrunning legal case would have predisposed readers to believe this and similar incidents recounted in Gangraena. The legal records also highlight aspects of London religious life left implicit in Gangraena. Edwards’s whole enterprise was only possible because a great many people were willing to complain to him about the religious error and disorder they saw about them, yet much of Gangraena was a lament at the increasing strength of the sectaries. The proceedings against the Platts are evidence of the hostility of several relatively humble people to unorthodox beliefs and behaviour. An attack on the house of the familist Giles Randall in February 1645, which Keith Lindley suggests may be an adaptation of traditional Shrove Tuesday rituals to attack a novel target, was sanctioned in the minds of the boys and women who initiated the assault, by official disapproval of Randall’s activities. Mary Atkinson was charged with breaking the windows and with ‘saying she heard my Lord Mayor had given order the House should be pulled downe’. William Driver had said, ‘where are the boys that should pull downe the house according to my Lord Mayors order, whereuppon a multitude of boys gathered together and broke downe the windowes of Giles Randall’.142 It was hostility 141 The buggering of a mare is in London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SR 948/99, a 1644 Calendar of prisoners; bigamy does seem to be a frequent offence but one would hesitate to use this as evidence in support of Edwards’s contention that religious radicalism was dissolving family values: see ibid., MJ/SR 955/21, 25–6 (two cases in Sept. 1644); 979/15 (Apr. 1646); 982/28, 34, 36 (three cases in June 1646 including a rare case of a woman with two husbands). For Berners see ibid., MJ/SR 963/52, 54–5; 970/158. 142 Ibid., MJ/SR 962/102, 105; Lindley, Popular Politics, 302.

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to sectarianism that prompted Londoners to offer information to Edwards, although incidents such as the attack on Randall suggest that Edwards’s anxiety about the spread of heresy was overdone. Edwards’s focus on London meant that religious radicalism was bound to loom larger than if he had lived and worked in Cornwall or Glamorgan, but his was anyway a very partial view of London. He was overly pessimistic about Presbyterian success in 1645–6, exaggerating, as we shall see, the Independents’ ability to influence the Common Council elections of December 1645. Modern assessments of the general success of Presbyterian reform in the city vary. Achievements were patchy, and significantly short of the fondest hopes of zealots like Cranford or Baillie, but the drive to establish Presbyterian government and discipline was not sabotaged by sectarianism. There was apparently enthusiasm in Stanley Gower’s parish.143 In Calamy’s parish, Henry Burton’s lecture caused disruption yet a godly discipline was instituted in January 1645 before any Presbyterian legislation came into force when at Calamy’s request, three men, including a consistently supportive Common Councillor Walter Boothby, were chosen to assist him in examining and preparing the people of the parish for admission to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. By February 1648, there were serious divisions in the parish over admission to the sacrament, but Calamy’s ministry had significant success throughout the 1640s and 1650s.144 Edwards implicitly took for granted the defeat of ‘Anglicanism’ in London. ‘Profanity’ is a product of libertine, Antinomian radicalism; yet some contemporaries and later historians have taken the very different view that resistance to godly discipline was the result of an easygoing adherence to traditional ways, such as indiscriminate admission to the sacrament. Recent scholarship suggests that many Londoners showed sympathy for their ejected ministers, the outlawed Book of Common Prayer, and the ‘traditional’ festivals of the Anglican Church. Opposition to tithes was driven most often by hostility to Presbyterian rigidity, or affection for a sequestered minister, rather than by sectarian arguments 143 For the Dec. 1645 elections, see below; for Gower in Martin Ludgate, see n. 20, above. Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, Chs. 3 and 4, offers a thorough and balanced verdict. 144 GLMS 3570/2, St Mary Aldermanbury, Vestry Minutes, fos. 52v, 58r. The absence of churchwardens’ accounts for the years ending Easter 1645 and 1646 perhaps indicates demoralization in the parish, but Calamy received almost £157 of the £160 due him in the year ending Easter 1647. £40 had been collected in tithes, compared with £48 in 1642/3 (figures have been rounded up). GLMS 3556/2, St Mary Aldermanbury, Churchwarden’s’ accounts passim.

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for liberty of conscience.145 Edwards claimed that the election of elders was obstructed in the parish of Michael Crooked Lane because the sectaries would not cooperate until they had chosen a new minister, the previous incumbent having been ‘put in by the Bishops’. The most recent account of London Presbyterianism suggests, on the contrary, that the resistance of this same Anglican minister may have been the more significant factor.146 Many of Edwards’s allies and near contemporaries saw stubborn traditionalism as a threat comparable to the radical challenge. In October 1648, the ministers and elders of the London Presbyterian Provincial Assembly issued ‘A Remonstrance of the Sad Condition of the Province of London’ originally drafted by Francis Roberts, which called for measures to prevent ‘Grosse ignorance in fundamentalls in Religion, the dangerous errors and heresies, the notorious Atheisme and prophanesse’. Their proposed remedies were greater support for the ministry and measures against ‘Anglican’ practices such as open admission to the Lord’s Supper, as well as suppression of radical groups. Such concerns are absent from Gangraena.147 Edwards’s account of London religion is clearly partial, a perhaps deliberate misrepresentation which stressed the confusing fluidity of religious radicalism and the powerful role of misguided and evil individuals in spreading error. It was built up, however, from a mass of genuine or plausible incidents in the city, from Edwards’s own experiences and the material that hurried in upon him in an ever more overwhelming fashion. He did not exaggerate the extent of radical speculation in any straightforward way; many significant figures, trends, and churches were given short shrift or omitted. The focus on radicalism in itself misleads, however; Edwards’s implicit pessimism about Presbyterian fortunes and his lack of interest in Anglican or ‘traditional’ resistance to godly reform gave radical speculation a centrality it perhaps did not quite have in practice. It remains interesting in itself that ‘Anglican survivalism’ bothered him so little in comparison with the preoccupations of recent scholarship. Finally, Edwards’s published version of city religion and politics in the 145 Alan Argent,‘Aspects of the Ecclesiastical History of the Parishes of the City of London 1640–49 (with special reference to the parish clergy)’, Ph.D. thesis (London, 1984), 220–7; Liu, Puritan London, 130–8; Bodl., Rawlinson MS E157, the London Sermons of Jeffrey Snape, 1644–7, include one preached on Christmas Day (fos. 23–4); Snape was offered London pulpits despite his ejection from an Essex living: Liu, Puritan London, 138. See Lindley, Popular Politics, 296–7 on tithes; the parish of Michael Bassishaw, where radicals including Robert Prier who attacked Gangraena in print had some influence, may be an exception. 146 Gangraena, iii. 222; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 188–9. 147 Charles E. Surman, ‘The Records of the Provincial Assembly of London, 1647–1660’, DWL, MS 201.12, 36, 19–20; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 175.

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mid-1640s can fruitfully be compared with a manuscript journal or narrative of 1644–7, kept by the Independent-leaning Londoner Thomas Juxon. Juxon’s journal has been widely used by modern scholars for its direct, eyewitness testimony to city petitioning and Common Council divisions from 1645 to 1647, his account somehow validated by the inherent authenticity of manuscript. To some scholars a printed source like Gangraena, with an obvious propagandist purpose, must provide a less plausible picture.148 Juxon and Edwards cover many of the same events, notably the city campaigns for an improved Presbyterian church government in the winter of 1645/6, and the struggle over the city’s Remonstrance of the following May; their analyses will be discussed in Chapter 5. At the most general level the two men’s analyses of the basic divisions in city and nation are very similar. Although their individual preferences are sharply divergent, both men pitched the Presbyterians in city, Assembly, and parliament and their allies the Scots against the Independents (often for Juxon the ‘honest party’) and the New Model Army.149 Juxon’s detailed descriptions of Common Council debates are not matched by Edwards, but on the other hand, Edwards’s accounts of religious division and upheaval are almost completely lacking in Juxon, although he does provide some brief details of debates in the Westminster Assembly and of divisions amongst London ministers in Sion College discussions over the powers of lay elders.150 The two most consistent targets of Juxon’s resentment were the Scots and the ambitious Presbyterian clergy, ‘our Regid Devines’ as his very last page has it. Juxon clearly had no problem with ‘private meetings’ for religious purposes, for he described the Presbyterian mayoral candidate in December 1646, John Langham, ‘as a most violent man (like an English Mastiff whatsoever you sett him uppon can hardly pull off)’ for his hostility to Independency and private congregations.151 Perhaps as a consequence of these general positions, Juxon had 148 DWL, MS 24.50, now printed as Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott. Juxon has been extensively quoted by Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution; and Lindley, Popular Politics, amongst others. Kishlansky, as we saw in Ch. 1, explicitly rejects Edwards as a source. 149 For examples see DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 31v, 38r, 62r; Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 67, 75, 104. 150 For day-to-day accounts of Common Council debates see e.g. DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 78r–79v, 107v–108r (May 1646 and May 1647); for the Assembly fo. 30r; Sion College: fo. 72v. (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 122–4, 156–7, 65, 115). In this last debate William Gouge opposed Cornelius Burgess. 151 Ibid. fos. 44r (the Scots), 64r, 65r, 66r, 67v, 72r–v (the Presbyterian clergy); 91r–v (Langham) (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 83–4, 106–7, 109–10, 137).

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no interest at all in describing what went on in such congregations and never used the terms schismatics or sectaries. There is no mention, for example, of the banning of the proposed disputation between Calamy and the baptists which loomed large in Gangraena and other contemporary pamphlets. Two of Edwards’s main targets do appear in Juxon’s narrative. He noted in November 1646, ‘Mr Jeremy Burroughs diid a man much lamented’, while two years previously he had given an account of John Goodwin’s ejection from his living, correcting an initial confusion of John and Thomas: ‘Aboute ys tyme Mr Jn [Thomas crossed out] Goodwin, Minister of Colemanstreete, Havinge preached yt ye Parliamt had no power to commande any way of Governmt in ye Church to inforce it uppo ye Consciences of men: for which he was sommened before a Comittee of Parlmt whoe examined ye business. (Mr Prinn beinge most fierce and bitter agst him as formerly agst Coll Fines). And in fine was by ye Parlmt suspended’.152 Two aspects of this account are in striking contrast to Edwards’s views. First, there is the obvious sympathy for Goodwin, but there is also the complete lack of interest in either his London parish or his gathered congregation; the ejection is a product of parliamentary politics. In sharp contrast to Edwards’s tendency to disorganized, detailed stories of individual action, Juxon always sought to place London events in a national or international context. His is a high-political, institutional account focusing on Common Council, Assembly, the king, and parliamentary factions. An early entry (with a marginal reference to the Apologetical Narration) in January 1644, illustrates this: ‘And aboute the tyme, as the K.[ing] sought to draw ye Independants to him uppon pretence of giveing liberty of Conscience, There was pressed in the Comon Counsell that the Parliament might be Petitioned to for the stablishing of Government and to prevent Gatheringe of Churches & private meetinges’.153 In September 1645, Juxon’s account of Presbyterian petitioning began with the role of Presbyterian merchant Lawrence Brinley and a typical allegation that it was ‘fomented by the severall Ministers’; but rapidly moved to general analysis, of how ‘Twas intended agst the Independents’, and was therefore linked to Scottish aims and developments in parliament.154 152 The entry on Burroughs was followed by an account of the conversion to Christianity of the son of the King of Tunis—some indication of the problems in taking Juxon’s journal as a straightforward account of London politics: fo. 26r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 140, 61). 153 Ibid. fo. 6v, under 22 Jan. (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 43–4). 154 Ibid. fo. 45v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 85–6).

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Juxon may have been writing to make sense of contemporary experience for himself, rather than to convince others, for his manuscript is in no sense an immediate daily diary of events. Much of the narrative is not about London at all, but concerns political, diplomatic, and military events on a national or often European scale; this material must have been drawn from newsbooks or city gossip, rather than privileged personal access.While there may be no reason to doubt Juxon’s specific accounts of arguments over the retaking the Covenant, the city Remonstrance, or the recruiting of soldiers in Common Council meetings in 1645–7, it seems clear that it is the manuscript narrative that is the more polished and reflective, operating at a greater distance from the events described. Edwards’s hasty printed compilation, with all its selectivity and lack of proportion, offers an immediate response to the tumultuous debates surrounding him. Gangraena’s content and the methods of its construction (discussed in the previous section) offer insights into London political and religious culture in the 1640s at least as illuminating as Juxon’s manuscript. sectaries and soldiers in the provinces As we saw in Chapter 2, Edwards never claimed that Gangraena included a geographically comprehensive account of heresy and schism. Indeed he argued that a systematic approach was impossible: had he tapped the knowledge and energy of ‘all the Ministers in the Kingdom’, reading all the books, noting ‘Sermons in publike [and] . . . meetings in private’ to ‘draw into one all the wayes of the sectaries within these four last years, a great volume would not contain the errours, prodigious opinions, and strange practices of these times’.155 His focus was on those parts where parliament’s armies held sway, and where parliament could thus be held responsible for the failures of orthodox reformation. His coverage reflected his own preoccupations, and his sources of information, which in turn depended on his personal and professional contacts, the enthusiasm of those willing to talk or write to him about their experiences, and, presumably, sheer chance. Table 3.1 confirms Edwards’s overarching concern with London and the patchy coverage of the rest of the country.156 Kent, Essex, Norfolk, and Gangraena, i. 2–3; see also n. 133, above. Table 3.1 is based on the systematic analysis of Gangraena by Dr Peters, for which I am extremely grateful. Given the nature of Edwards’s text in which extended accounts of indi155 156

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Table 3.1 County

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Total

Bedfordshire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Cambridge Cheshire Derbyshire Devon Dorset Essex Gloucestershire and Bristol Hampshire Hertfordshire Huntingdon Kent Lancashire Leicester Lincolnshire London Norfolk Northamptonshire Northumberland Oxford Somerset Staffordshire Suffolk Surrey Sussex Warwickshire Wiltshire Yorkshire

2 0 4 4 0 0 1 1 6 3 0 3 0 4 0 1 2 81 4 1 0 0 3 0 6 1 1 0 0 3

0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 9 1 0 1 0 4 0 0 0 18 2 1 1 0 1 0 2 1 0 0 0 0

2 3 2 4 4 1 9 2 4 10 2 3 1 14 6 3 2 52 6 7 2 10 8 1 5 0 1 5 2 10

4 3 6 8 4 1 11 5 19 14 2 7 1 22 6 4 4 151 12 9 3 10 12 1 13 2 2 5 2 13

total

131

44

181

356

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Suffolk are much better represented than any other area, while parts of the Midlands and the West Country appear quite frequently in Part Three, reflecting, however, the disorders of New Model chaplains and soldiers, rather than religious error and dispute ‘indigenous’ to those areas: accounts of the preaching of John Saltmarsh in Bath, or of William Erbury in Marlborough, where he lay ‘one night’ only, illustrate this. Part Three also had more letters from men unknown to Edwards, prompted by his earlier appeals for information; often, however, they wrote about sectaries such as Samuel Oates or Laurence Clarkson already made notorious by Gangraena, Parts One and Two.157 Table 3.1 also highlights the distinctiveness of Part Two; Edwards’s main concern here was to respond to his critics, especially John Goodwin, leaving less room for narratives of sectarian excess. We can explain some of the clusters of information through particular initiatives or networks: the Presbyterian zeal of bookseller Thomas Smith and minister Richard Hollingworth in Manchester; the regular correspondence between Edwards and the Colchester minister Robert Harmar, apparently bolstered by Edwards’s visits to the town, are examples.158 It is plausible (but cannot be confirmed) that a brief account of a captain taking over the pulpit at Alcester, Warwickshire, with testimony ‘from a Minister in the City who hath relation to the place’, referred to Samuel Clarke, once minister at Alcester, by then a prominent member of the city’s Presbyterian clergy.159 There is, however, no satisfactory explanation for the overall pattern of Edwards’s coverage; certainly there is no reason to assume it reflects the incidence of religious radicalism in England. Although some events and incidents from urban Surrey are included in the total for London, it does not seem plausible that there was much less sectarianism and error in rural Surrey, or Sussex, than there was in Kent. There is nothing in Gangraena on Nottinghamshire, in contrast to the extensive material on Lincolnshire. Perhaps Lincolnshire was more troubled by religious viduals or events are mixed up with brief, sketchy descriptions of one incident after another, compilation has involved difficult decisions on what constitutes a separate incident; the precision of the figures may be slightly misleading but the overall impression stands. 157 Gangraena, iii. 114, 90. 158 For Hollingworth see n. 50, above. Harmar’s first letter, prompted apparently by Antapologia, was dated Sept. 1644: Gangraena, i. 66 (2nd pagination). Thomas Webbe, Mr Edwards’s Pen no Slander (London, 1646), 8, and John Bastwick, The Utter Routing of the whole army of all the Independents and Sectaries (London, 1646), 314, both mention Edwards’s preaching in Colchester, where according to Bastwick (attacking the account in Henry Burton’s Vindiciae Veritatis), the Independents ‘openly reviled him in the congregation, using many rayling speeches’. Edwards referred to Burton’s attack in Gangraena, iii, Preface, sig. *2r. 159 Gangraena, iii. 107.

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radicalism than Nottinghamshire, but I doubt whether that would be a safe conclusion. Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir of her husband’s military career in Nottingham mentioned groups that would be regarded by Edwards as schismatic and sectarian. But Lincolnshire, unlike Nottinghamshire, was part of the Eastern Association whose army had an early reputation for religious ‘extremism’; ‘emissaries’ already known to Edwards through London activities or dangerous books—such as Samuel Oates and Henry Denne—evangelized in Lincolnshire but not apparently in the neighbouring county. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, some Lincolnshire people, notably Colonel Edward King, the friend of Prynne, were willing to complain to Edwards (or to parliament and the Assembly) about sectaries.160 To some extent, the information in Gangraena may reflect the strength of Presbyterian networks, and the book, as we shall see, clearly helped to cement ties among the orthodox godly; but the most convincing explanations for the origins of Edwards’s stories lie in specific, contingent initiatives and contacts. Gangraena’s coverage is geographically selective, but how accurate or reliable is the material Edwards presents? As with his accounts of London, the routine procedures of the historian only take us a short way towards an answer. Some of his letters can be confirmed as genuine, while the names of both the informants and subjects of Edwards’s stories, where they can be checked (an important qualification), usually tally. Edwards reported that Joseph Symonds had preached ‘strange stuffe’ before Fairfax at Bath, and that ‘Mr Boden Minister of the Bath (as I was informed) confuted his Sermon the next Lords day’; Edwards had ‘spoken the more of this Mr Symonds, because I hear he is nominated for one of the itinerary Preachers of Wales’; the minutes of Bath Council and the Westminster Assembly corroborate these basic statements.161 Amongst the Exeter committee men who wrote to ‘some of that City here in London’ to complain in August 1646 about the disorders of troops were Samuel Clark, the city’s MP from 160 For religious radicalism in Nottinghamshire see Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: Everyman, 1995), 210–11; for Colonel King’s opposition to religious radicalism see Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 1980), 198–9. One of the preachers arrested by King in 1644, Thomas Moore, featured in Gangraena, i. 96. In ii. 104–5, Edwards defended his account against Goodwin’s criticisms, partly with reference to his arrest by King. There is further material on Moore in iii. 9, 80–1. For Denne in Lincolnshire (based on depositions before JPs) see iii. 86–7. 161 Boden was confirmed as Bath’s minister, 22 Apr. 1646: Council Minutes, no foliation; Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 266, 301, 317.

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1646 who made ‘wild speeches’against the soldiers again quartered there in May 1648, and was secluded at Pride’s Purge, and Richard Crossing who refused to serve as mayor in 1649.162 When two Norwich ministers, John Carter and John Thornbecke, wrote to Edwards ‘heartily sorrie’ that they had such evidence of ‘How daring and insolent the sectaries are’, they enclosed a deposition of Richard Gunton, weaver, taken before the Mayor on 18 June 1646, against Priscilla Miles who had abused John Carter, and other ‘black-coted preachers . . . in the Steeple-Houses’. ‘The paper we send is no Transcript, but the very information taken by the Town-Clark, and subscribed by the hand of the Mayor and Informant’. If the original deposition had indeed been sent on to Edwards, that perhaps explains why it cannot now be found in the city archives, but there is a note that Priscilla’s husband Richard, a woolcomber, Henry Gunton, sugar baker (whose maid was an Anabaptist, according to the same deposition), and Robert King, weaver, were bound to ensure Priscilla’s appearance at the quarter sessions to answer ‘Ric. Gunton’s examinacon’.163 Sometimes we can add a little more detail to bare confirmation of names and places. Late news about a man who was to become one of England’s notorious ‘heretics’, the Socinian John Biddle, was clearly based on local anxieties and debates. ‘One Beedle of Gloucester, sometimes School-master there . . . had a Manuscript by him of his own making, pleading against the Third Person of the Trinity’. Bishop Usher, ‘that learned and godly Divine’, travelling through Gloucester in the summer, had tried without success to convince him of his error. Much of this is confirmed by local records and Biddle’s own accounts. Edwards’s information was not quite up-to-date; the manuscript had been sent to parliament,‘but 162 Gangraena, iii. 41–5; the letters were also signed by Richard Saunders, James Gould, and Adam Bennet. Underdown, Prides Purge, 92, 370 for Clark; for Crossing in 1649/50: Devon County RO, Exeter Corporation Act, Book IX, fo. 41r. In Feb. 1650 Saunders was chosen in his place, with Adam Bennett as an apparently reluctant lieutenant until Saunders could act,‘hee doth the same only in relacon to the descharge of the Greate trusts wherewith the Chamber is invested, the prservacon of the priveledges of the Cittie, supportacon of government & mainetayning of Justice in this place.And not in waie of any Contempt of or opposicon to any superior powers whatsoever’: fos. 55r–56r. James Gould was also present at this meeting. All the committeemen alarmed at soldiers’ preaching (and their financial demands) were apparently zealous Puritans, active in parliament’s war effort in the early 1640s, and part of a ‘government in exile’ during the royalist control of the city: Mark Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), 42, 52, 63–4, 88, 95–6, 140, 166. 163 Gangraena, iii. 33–5; Norwich City RO, Case 20a/11, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, fo. 85v, 10 Aug. 1646.

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the last newes I heard of him, he hath not been questioned as yet by those above’. By the time Gangraena, Part Three came out, Biddle was probably in prison.164 ‘A godly minister at Dover’ wrote a long letter to Edwards describing how William Bowling of Cranbrook ‘stoutly asserted’ sixteen errors or heresies ‘in my passage with him in a pair of Oares from Gravesend to London’ in July 1646. These included by now familiar arguments for the mortality of the soul as well as an expectation of a ‘personall reign of Christ in his body upon earth a 1000 yeers’, and a more idiosyncratic belief that ‘Christ shed his bloud for kine and horses and all other creatures as well as for men’. Bowling can be identified as a long-standing Kent separatist, presented in the 1630s as a ‘conventicler’ in the company of the well-known ‘Brownist’ John Turner of Sutton Valence. The views of this group on the salvation of animals are unknown, but millenarian ideas were apparently discussed in the 1620s.165 A brief aside in Part Three mentioned a ‘Master Larkin’, ‘a feirce Independent’, from New England preaching at Greenwich in Kent. He had attacked the Assembly of Divines and was notorious for many scandals. This was clearly Thomas Larkham, who had left an illegitimate child and many quarrels behind after a brief stay in New England; he was indeed a provocative cleric who caused upheaval wherever he went.166 These sort of examples provide further reassurance that Gangraena is not fantasy or invention, or at least some of it is not, for as we have shown, Edwards is frequently so vague or general that his stories cannot be checked. The vagaries of record-keeping and survival in time of war cause further difficulties; in many areas quarter sessions or corporation meetings were not held at all, or were recorded in erratic fashion. At Dorchester there are no entries in the Borough Minute Book between June 1643 and October 1647, ‘By reason of the warres this Booke was discontinued for 164 Gangraena, iii. 87–8; cf H. John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 172–4, quoting Gloucester’s sessions records and Council Book, Biddle’s autobiography, and Anthony Wood on the Ussher confrontation (for which Edwards may, of course, be the source). Biddle was apparently in prison by the autumn of 1646 and a book of his was burnt the following year—the first of many brushes with authority. 165 Gangraena, iii. 35–9: ‘A Copie of a Letter to a tittle written to me from a godly Minister at Dover’. Robert J. Acheson, ‘The Development of Religious Separatism in the Diocese of Canterbury 1590–1660’, Ph.D. thesis (Kent, 1983), 74–5, 146–7. 166 Gangraena, iii. 97; Larkham fought with a fellow minister at Greenwich and caused much trouble during his long tenure as minister of Tavistock, 1648–60: see DNB; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 315; Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 145–6; G. H. Radford, ‘Thomas Larkham’, Transactions of the Devon Association, 24 (1892), 96–146; BL Loan 9, Diary of Thomas Larkham, for 1640s and 1650s.

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fower yeares and another booke was made use of for the Towne business’.167 There is thus no way to check a good story in a letter to Edwards of May 1646, from ‘a godly minister in the West of England’:‘the Town I heard was somewhat disturbed the week before by a wandring Sectary, who had gathered a company about him, and preached in the Shire Hall (as I think they call it) chusing that of the Apostle for his text,“But we have the mind of Christ” ’. He then challenged the experienced town minister William Benn to a public dispute on the lawfulness of lay-preaching, but ‘the opinionist was foiled by that worthy Minister’.168 But the basic ‘facts’ are the least of our problems. The records of the gathered church at Bury St Edmunds confirm that John Lanseter was prominent amongst its founder members who renounced the ‘abominable Idolatories’ of the Church of England.169 This does not help much with evaluating the letter quoted by Edwards which accused Lanseter of the common heretical interest in the Apocryphal continuation of the Old Testament Book of Ezra. Lanseter, a pedlar, had opened ‘the whole Book of Ezra at a private meeting, instead of opening his pack’. Neither can we confirm Edwards’s conversation with ‘the Minister who brought up this Letter’ who claimed Lanseter and William Erbury had denounced the established ministry,‘for the Sanballas and Tobiahs of this time, that hindred the building of the temple’. Here Lanseter’s own interpretation of his activities in a published response Lanseter’s Lance is more helpful.170 Neither can we know for certain that Symonds, for example, did preach in Bath that Presbyterianism was ‘a limb of Antichrist’, or that ‘Weavers and ignorant mechanicks’ often had greater gifts than ‘learned men, and men bred at Universities’ or that Bowling was fairly and accurately reported.171 I have already suggested that Edwards was reproducing material virtually as he received it, particularly in Part Three of Gangraena, but those who transmitted the information were not disinterested reporters. A more complex evaluation of Edwards’s account of provincial England can be achieved through a variety of strategies. Detailed research on two Dorset County RO, B2/16/4, Dorchester Borough Minute Book, 74. Gangraena, ii. 172; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 203, 218–19, for Benn who in fact was closer to Independency than Presbyterianism. 169 DWL, Harmer MS 76/4, fos. 1–2 is a copy of the church’s first Covenant; Lanseter and his three children John, Mary, and Samuel were the third group to sign. The Covenant was witnessed by Samuel and Katherine Chidley. 170 Gangraena, ii. 20–1. Mrs Attaway and other radicals studied the Apocryphal II Esdras as well as the canonical Ezra as we saw in Ch. 2. For Sanballat’s guile in obstructing the rebuilding of Jerusalem, see Nehemiah 6. 171 Gangraena, iii. 242. 167 168

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areas which were a particular focus for Edwards—Essex (especially Colchester) and Kent (especially Sandwich)—will provide both context and alternative perspectives on Edwards’s discussion. Why might local people have been driven to pass on information to Edwards or his intermediaries? Is his account exaggerated or misleading? This is supplemented by a more wide-ranging, if necessarily briefer, assessment of religious concerns in the counties as they appear in some general sources. First of all, we need to take account of Edwards’s own very clear interpretive framework. Above all, as I have stressed, Gangraena was a Londoner’s book; Edwards was convinced that the provinces had been infected with error by the dangerous ‘emissaries’, sent from the city, in particular out of the churches of Thomas Lambe and William Kiffin: ‘They send forth into severall Counties of this Kingdom from their Churches in London, as Church acts, severall Emissaries . . . to prech and spread their errours, to dip, to gather and settle Churches’; they were not content with ‘poisoning many in the City, but they endeavour the leavening of all the Counties’. Or again, ‘some Emissaries out of the Sectaries Churches are sent to infect and poyson the counties, some out of Lambs, some out of Kiffins, some out of others’‘so that we are like to have Sectarisme like a universal Leprosie over-spread this whole Kingdom’.172 This assumption was an entirely understandable product of Edwards’s own experiences as a combative city lecturer, but it derived also, as we have seen, from a framework based on knowledge of the radical reformation where enthusiastic peripatetic preachers like Sebastian Franck or Caspar Schwenckfeld spread error throughout Europe. Edwards regretted the role played in the England of his own time, by charismatic men who were ‘popular and have popular gifts to go up and down from City to country, from one country to another’. ‘Truely, it is a sad thing there should be such Emissaries (so like the Divell their Master, compassing the earth, and going about seeking whom they may devoure) in the severall parts of the Kingdome, North, East, West, and South, not one part free’.173 Along with the ‘emissaries’, Edwards tended to explain the spread of heresy and sectarianism as a product of ‘wicked books’; there is much less sense in Gangraena that ordinary or obscure people might reject a national church and orthodox divinity through autonomous speculation or discussion. Gangraena, i. 65, 93. Ibid. 148; ii. 148 (which particularly denounced ‘one Collier, a great Sectary in the West of England, a mechanicall fellow and a great Emissary, a Dipper’). Similar points are made at i. 172; iii. 233; and by Baillie: Letters of Baillie, ii. 145. 172 173

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Essex in Gangraena There are more letters in Gangraena from Robert Harmar, the Colchester minister and lecturer, than from anyone else. Harmar and Edwards had been at Cambridge at the same time, but their correspondence apparently pre-dated any personal acquaintance. Colchester had a long-standing reputation as a religiously divided town where orthodox Puritans like Harmar were troubled by both the hostility of religious radicals and the obstructionism of the ‘profane’. Giles Firmin, a preacher in the town lately come from New England, complained to John Winthrop in July 1646 that ‘Providence hath placed mee in one of the worst places in the kingdome for opinion’—a view that underlines the unfairness of Edwards’s printing Harmar’s dismissal of Firmin as ‘an Independent Apothecary Physitian’.174 At the election of Colchester’s Mayor in 1646, the Recorder Harbottle Grimston complained that ‘the unhappy jarrs and differences here at home amongst yourselves, is a greate reprooch and scandall to your towne’. He feared ‘wee here in this towne are sick of the Corinthian disease; wee are rent a peeces and have wounded one another’; the Corinthians ‘had abundance of knowledge, but wanted love’.175 In 1652, Colchester was described by the local Dutch Calvinist church as ‘consisting mostly of Independents, Anabaptists and Separatists . . . the Magistracy and its Ministers and most of the inhabitants are great Independents who hate and despise even the name of Presbyterian Government’, and there was, indeed, no enthusiasm for establishing classical elderships in Colchester. There was much to alarm Harmar then, and draw him to zealous London Presbyterians. Besides his links with Edwards, he was acquainted with Thomas Cawton, a younger Queens College Puritan who was one of the

174 Gangraena, ii. 54–5, for confirmation that Harmar had written several letters in Part One (esp. 63–70 (2nd sequence) ), and for a defence of their content. Harmar entered St Johns Cambridge in 1626, receiving his BA in 1630, and his MA in 1633. Essex RO [Colchester], D/Y 2/2, Morant Papers, Restoration Church Notes, 127 for a copy of Harmar’s appointment as general lecturer in the town in the late 1630s. He was required to preach every sabbath and every Wednesday morning and on major festival days including St Dionysis day, 5 Nov., and Christmas Day, for which he received £100 p.a. Harmar’s subscription before the Bishop of London, as vicar of St Peter and St Botolph Colchester, is in GLMS 9539A/1, fo. 130v, 30 May 1640. The lecture was a site of struggle between the bishop of London and the corporation for much of the 17th cent. Most appointments in the period before the civil war were mainstream Puritans: Webster, Godly Clergy, 40–1; John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–6. For Firmin see below, Ch. 5. 175 Discussed in Walter, Popular Violence, 164; here quoted from HMC, Verulam, 205. I am grateful to Richard Cust for a copy of this material.

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most determined city ministers; in the 1640s Cawton often preached for Harmar,‘where there was a nest of sectaries’.176 Harmar complained to Edwards that in Colchester,‘we are gone beyond Amsterdam, and are in our high way to Munster’; he denounced Firmin and the town’s chief independent preacher, John Ellis. Edwards’s accusation that Ellis was one of the Independents who were ‘great Innovators and forward Episcopall men’ in the 1630s, prompted an indignant rebuttal from John Goodwin, and Edwards’s extended defence of his original version. It was presumably through Harmar also that Edwards obtained an account of Thomas Webbe’s activities in Colchester, ‘Preaching severall Antinomian Doctrines; and said, I should here speak to you of other points, but that Wolves creep in among the Fold’ (which Edwards took to be a reference to his own visit to the town). He also ‘expressed himself against all Baptisme by Water; as also, for him to say he was equall to Christ was no robbery . . . This Web, also speaking with a judicious godly Christian of Colchester, said, We might not use these expressions, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, for that was to make three Gods’.177 Besides these accounts of Firmin, Webbe, and Ellis, Edwards included more miscellaneous Colchester stories: sectaries there expected the day of judgement imminently, and denounced ministers as enemies of God’s people; their boldness encouraged by hopes of a toleration. One unfortunate couple had suffered a dreadful providential judgement for their errors. A ‘learned and Godly Minister in Colchester’ reported to Edwards with some relish of how stillborn twins had been born to sectaries:‘the one a perfect child, the other was born without a head . . . the Mother . . . resolved heretofore, that if ever shee had any more children, they should never be baptized’. The mother’s wish had thus been fulfilled, in suitably grotesque fashion.178 Beyond Colchester, Edwards’s account of Essex focused on two very different men, the relatively respectable Independent minister William Archer of Halsted, and the extremely unrespectable General Baptist evangelist Samuel Oates, a Norwich weaver baptized by Thomas Lambe in 1642. An early letter in Part Two from ‘a learned and godly Minister in Essex’ dealt with both. Oates, ‘whom you mention in your Book’, had ‘seduced hundreds and dipped many in Bocking River’; Archer ‘preaches boldly Walter, Popular Violence, 164; Life and Death of Mr Thomas Cawton, 19. Gangraena, i. 63–4, 68–9 (2nd sequence), 75 (1st sequence); ii. 98–9; i. 74–5 (2nd sequence). This last account also discussed Webbe’s London ‘blasphemies’ as reported to the Assembly and the parliament, and his activities in Kent and Suffolk. 178 Ibid. i. 89, 107–8; ii. 4–5. 176 177

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against Parliament, Assembly, Directory, Ministery and all: I pray you let me hear whether there be any hope of light shining out of darknesse’.179 The diarist Ralph Josselin offers a similar testimony on the latter, from the same period: ‘Mr Archer preachd as if the Presbyterians were all of them proud conceited persons, upon which I asking him whether he meant so, he sayd he would not answer mee, but gave mee very unkind words’.180 Oates featured largely in all three parts of Gangraena. In the postscript to Part One, Edwards reported that on 3 February ‘Oats an Anabaptist and some of his fellows’ had interrupted Mr Smith, the lecturer at Billericay, saying to the people, ‘they were under Antichrist, and in Antichrists Way’. Many of Oates’s company were armed and were later indicted for riot at the sessions. The Appendix found in some editions drew on a letter of 19 February (from an Essex minister to a London minister) to describe similar activities in Bocking. ‘Our Magistrates are afraid of them’, declared the Essex man, and hoped for some encouragement from ‘the courage and constancy of the Ministers and Citizens of London . . . under the Parliament . . . the instruments of our good’.181 Parts Two and Three presented Oates in a more dramatic light, ‘who being of Lams Church, is sent out as a Dipper and Emissary . . . for many weeks together went up and down from place to place, and Town to Town’, especially to Bocking, Braintree, and Terling. ‘This is a young lusty fellow, and hath traded chiefly with young women and young maids, dipping many of them’. Many women, as we saw in Chapter 2, ‘were call’d out of their beds to go a dipping in rivers, dipping many of them in the night, so that their husbands and Masters could not keep them in their houses’. He charged for dipping on a sliding scale, 10s. for the rich, 2s. 6d. for the poor, and in the process had himself ‘grown pursie’. One young woman, Ann Martin, had died shortly after being dipped in cold March weather. For this Oates was bound over at the Chelmsford sessions, 7 April, and committed to gaol at Colchester, as the coroner had not yet finished his enquiries; meanwhile the ‘great and mightie resort to him in the prison,

Ibid. ii. 3–4; this letter may well be from Harmar. It includes also a gratuitous account of how ‘Ellis the Antinomian, brother to Ellis of Colchester, the Independent’, had married and then abandoned a widow after taking £200 from her. Oates and Archer are mentioned again in a letter from Suffolk: ibid. ii. 61. For Oates, see Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary, ii. 271. There is a brief mention of the activities of Laurence Clarkson, another notorious ‘emissary’ in Essex, in Gangraena, ii. 165. 180 The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, ns 3 1976), 56 (13 Mar. 1646). 181 Gangraena, i. 182, 120 (recte 220). 179

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many have come from London in Coaches’. It is rather an anticlimax to read in Part Three that Oates was found not guilty and released although when he visited the town of Dunmow after his release, the inhabitants ‘threw him into the river, thoroughly dipping him’.182 What does Edwards’s account look like when set against other Essex evidence? We have already seen that other views of Colchester help to explain Harmar’s anxiety and, to some extent, justify his descriptions. A longstanding ‘Anabaptist’ congregation in the town, with which Thomas Lambe was closely associated, is revealed in Borough Court records. In 1638 it was alleged Lambe had declared ‘he did wish that all churches were layd in the dust’; two years later Richard Lee, a tailor, urged to a congregation meeting in St James Parish, Colchester, that everyone ought to reveal ‘that guifte or light which hee receive from the Scriptures’. An argument over Harmar’s preaching was reported to the court in October 1645. Martha Pitman, a Colchester weaver’s wife, had been convinced by Harmar of the validity of fast days but Mark Hedge, another weaver, retorted that Harmar preached such ‘horrable blasphemy that he could heare him noe longer’.183 Thomas Webbe gave his own account of events in Colchester, acknowledging, ‘It’s my delight to converse with Zions lovers, and indeed many I did converse withall while I was at Colchester, but not to any of them did I so deliver my self ’—denying he had denounced the Trinity, as alleged, or that he knew Edwards was then in the town.184 Edwards (and Harmar) thus do not exaggerate the religious divisions or speculation in Colchester in any straightforward way; rather they present a misleadingly undifferentiated picture, where no clear distinctions are made between the moderate Giles Firmin, the beneficed Independent John Ellis, and much more radical figures such as Webbe or Lambe’s associates. Indeed, the ‘ordinary’ sectaries of Colchester are very much in the background in Gangraena. Similarly, Edwards’s focus on the lusty and peripatetic Oates obscures the role played by the local people who welcomed and supported him. The quarter sessions records, for example, do mention an attack on Smith, the lecturer at Billericay, but those convicted were local people, amongst them 182 Gangraena, ii. 146–8; iii. 105–6; see also oral evidence passed on by a visitor to London, ii. 10, and the allegation, iii. 189, that many women dipped by Oates were now pregnant. 183 Walter, Popular Violence, 163; Essex Borough RO (Colchester), D/B 5 Sb 2/7: 1619–1645, Sessions Book of Examinations and Recognizances, fos. 280r–282r. Mary Pirkes or Purcas, wife of John, in whose house they met, had been recently baptized by Lambe: Sb 2/8, 1645–6, fo. 2v. 184 Webb, Mr Edwards’ Pen no Slander, 7–8.

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Joseph Salmon, cordwainer and others of Great Burstead. At the Epiphany 1646 sessions, Samuel Bridge and nineteen male inhabitants of Great Burstead, petitioned that there hath unhappily of late sprung up amongst us a dangerous sect, separating from our congregation, holdinge meetings off their owne with the admittance of all comers even in the time of publiq worshippe; setting up mechanicks for their preachers, who brand the order offe our church, ministry, & ministers as Antichristian, administering the sacrament of the supper, rebaptising men and women, venting the poyson of unsound opinions, as universal grace, abrogation of the Law, the sinfullnes of repentance, & such like licentious Errors . . . they have boldly attempted to disturbe us in the publique worshipp, & in the face of the congregation to quarrell att the truth delivered; to the seducing offe the people, the scandall offe many, the distraction off all, & the great indangering off the publique peace.

Salmon was to become notorious as a ‘Ranter’ in 1649/50, but neither he nor his companions rate a mention in Gangraena.185 Bridge, if he was the drafter of the petition, had a line in alarmist rhetoric that was easily the equal of Harmar’s or Edwards’s, but he delivered his evidence to the local authorities, not to a London polemicist. Other sources do confirm many of Oates’s activities, although in less lurid terms than Edwards’s. Oates was summoned to answer at the Chelmsford sessions on 7 April 1646 for the disorder he had caused in Braintree and Bocking, but the records are silent on the matter of Ann Martin. In October he was presented for a riotous assembly at Sandon, just outside the church ‘under colour and pretext of an exercise of religion’.186 He had public disputations in 1646 with at least two well-known Essex ministers: Ralph Josselin, in late June, argued with Oates over the ministry, in a well-mannered debate, while about the same time John Stalham of Terling preached against Oates’s arguments for universal redemption, after Oates had spread his errors to Stalham’s ‘ordinary hearers and fellow members’. Stalham went into print, he claimed, after Oates had challenged him on two occasions to publish a refutation, once by letter from Essex RO (Chelmsford), Q/SR 327 [Calendar] Epiphany Sessions 1646, 12, 23, 76–8, 107. The witnesses included two other ministers, Nehemiah Holmes, the more ‘establishment’ brother of the independent Nathaniel, and Samuel Smith of Sandon. Both men signed the Testimony of 1648: Matthews, Calamy Revised, 273, 449. Essex RO (Chelmsford), Q/SBa 2/59, for the Great Burstead petition. Calamy Revised, 74, for Bridge who also signed the Testimony. 186 Essex RO (Chelmsford), Q/SR 328, 7 Apr. 1646, 75, 102. Oates was described as a Londoner; Q/SR 330 Michaelmas, 6 Oct. 1646. Oates was here described as a weaver of Sandon. He and other local men met at the house of a William Monke, who later became a Quaker: T. A. Davies,‘The Quakers in Essex, 1655–1725’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1986), 26. 185

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Colchester gaol and again ‘at Chelmsford Assizes to my face in the Market-place’.187 Edwards did not invent any of his Essex stories and he did not simply exaggerate the amount of heterodoxy in Essex for he missed much local speculation and controversy even in a town like Colchester where he had good sources of information. He was dependent on his inevitably random contacts, and was in any case more interested in the impact of London emissaries than in the local congregations as such.188 Where Gangraena does mislead is in its lack of discrimination between different radicals; for Edwards Ellis was as dangerous as Webbe. As well as the descriptions of Essex in Gangraena, the impact of Edwards’s book is worth considering. The Essex ministers’ direct experience of sectarianism was no doubt intensified by Gangraena and other alarmist printed material. Their cooperation in sending information to Edwards was part of a wider programme of collective action in which Essex ministers allied themselves with Londoners in the hope ‘that Scismaticks, hereticks, seducing teachers, and soul-subverting Books, be effectually suppressed’.189 These matters will be pursued further in Chapter 5. Kent in Gangraena Kent was also treated at length in Edwards’s work, and again other sources provide partial verification as well as suggesting the evasions, omissions, and subtle misrepresentations of Gangraena. As in Essex, so in Kent, the journeys of sectaries who already had a dangerous reputation form one important theme. Webbe said strange things in Kent as well as Essex; William Kiffin, Henry Denne, and Thomas Lambe preached and dipped in many towns.190 John Saltmarsh, denounced by Edwards on many grounds and in many places, had a living at Brasted in Kent, where, according to 187 Diary of Ralph Josselin, 63; John Stalham, Vindiciae Redemptionis (London, 1647), BL E384(10), Thomason date 17 Apr. 188 For an example of troubles not noted by Edwards, see the proceedings in connection with Richard Cleyton, minister of Much Easton and member of the Assembly of Divines, who found his attempts to collect tithes obstructed throughout 1645–6 by George Phillibrowne, ‘a troublesom incendiary’, committing ‘Anabaptisticall misdemeanors’: Essex RO (Chelmsford), Q/SR 326, Michaelmas 1645; Q/SBa [Quarter Sessions bundles], 2/57, 58, 60, Midsummer 1645–Midsummer 1646. 189 The Humble Petition of the Ministers of the Counties of Suffolke and Essex, Concerning Church-Government (London, 1646) BL E339 (11), presented to the Lords, 29 May 1646, printed 1 June. 190 Gangraena, i. 75, 93, 181–2; iii. 74–8.

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Edwards (Saltmarsh denied it), there was a woman preacher.191 Edwards also gave elaborately horrifying accounts of obscurer, outspoken individuals, such as William Bowling, and the Rochester blasphemer Robert Cosens, accused at the very end of Part One of calling Christ a bastard. When John Goodwin challenged this account, Edwards responded in Part Two with sixteen pages of depositions before local courts and the Kent county committee. He was forced to conclude that although Cosens had been imprisoned for a range of blasphemies, he had not, quite, said that Christ was a bastard.192 Cosens, Saltmarsh, and Robert Mascall, a prominent lay member of an Independent church in Dover, were amongst those who visited Edwards in person to challenge their portrayal in Gangraena, thus provoking further disquisitions on their misdeeds in print.193 Mascall was described in a letter from ‘five hands of persons of worth’ as ‘(a man employed by the State to be a perfector of the Customes) [who] undertakes to feed the flock’ in the absence of the minister, crying out against the present ministry, ‘your Priests, your damned Priests, your cursed Priests etc’.194 Edwards’s coverage of Kent, based as it is on such information as came his way, along with radical writing, rather than on systematic investigation, has a rather random air. Discussions of Saltmarsh’s books and his preaching to the army are much more extensive than the account of his activities in Kent. Three other Kent figures appear in Gangraena as the authors of wicked books rather than leaders of sectarian groups. John Turner’s recently published Heavenly Conference was the source for error 172 in Part One, which held that imposing the Directory was contrary to the second commandment; a point repeated at least twice more.195 Edwards was unaware of, or uninterested in, Turner’s long-standing 191 Ibid. i. 88–9; ii. 24–5, 106, for Edwards’s defence of this story. For further discussion of Saltmarsh’s activities in Kent see ibid. iii. 75. 192 Ibid. i. 181–2; ii. 111–27. I have not been able to confirm these from the records of the county committee or the local courts. 193 Ibid. ii. 114; iii. sig. *4r, 295. For further discussion of these encounters see Ch. 4, below. 194 Gangraena, ii. 163–4, 67. Mascall’s prominent role in the Dover Independent church is confirmed by the records of John Durant’s Canterbury church which consulted it over divisions in their own congregation on millenarianism and ordination in 1647. Mascall emerges as more anxious about uniformity within the gathered church than his minister at Dover, Mr Davies: CCL, U37, fos. 4r, 11v, 12r. In the 1650s Mascall moved to Canterbury and became a deacon of that church. The Dover church is discussed in Acheson, ‘Development of Religious Separatism’, 178–9. 195 Thomason’s copy of Turner’s book, BL E1171 (2), is dated 11 Dec. 1645; Gangraena, i. 36. On both i. 53 (1st sequence) and iii. 321, Turner’s comparison of the Directory to the golden calves of Jeroboam is quoted.

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leadership of a ‘conventicle’ meeting near Sutton Valence. Sir Edward Dering had described him to Laud as ‘the great leader among them’in 1636, and he faced renewed harassment from the authorities in the 1640s.196 Francis Cornwall had been imprisoned for a year at the winter assizes of 1642 for denouncing the Book of Common Prayer as popery and saying obedience should be refused if the king imposed any ecclesiastical government not expressly laid down in the Scriptures. He was in trouble again for attending conventicles in April 1646, but features in Gangraena only as a pamphleteer: ‘There is one Cornwell in Kent an Anabaptist, who hath put forth divers Pamphlets, one against Baptizing of Children, others lately printed, Dedicated to particular members of the House of Commons: The first pamphlet called, The Vindication of the royall Commission of King Jesus, set forth about three years ago, was given to divers Members at the doore of the House of Commons’.197 Finally Edwards mentioned Charles Blackwood, ‘There is one Master Blackwood about the Wild [weald] of Kent, an Anabaptist, who hath writ about a yeare and a halfe ago, a Book called The storming of Antichrist; the subject matter being against Poedobaptisme, and for Liberty of Conscience so called, wherein as I remember he is for a universall Toleration except it be in Blasphemy, and denying the Scriptures to be the word of God’.198 As in Essex, Edwards again is not concerned to provide careful differentiation between his Kent characters (although the ‘Brownist’Turner’s opposition to the Baptist emissary Kiffin is mentioned in one letter), but presents to readers a a succession of alarming opinions and activities.199 For the town of Sandwich in Kent, we have both copious records of religious tensions and evidence for the transmission of local concerns to London, as well as detailed treatment in Gangraena; the local emphasis differs from Edwards’s in revealing ways. The first object of Edwards’s suspicion in the town was John Durant or Durance, apparently a laypreacher, and a political radical:

196 For Dering: Centre for Kentish Studies, U350/C2/54; J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments Charles I (London: HMSO, 1995), 439, 518. Turner was indicted in 1642 for attending conventicles and opposing royal authority in ecclesiastical matters and indicted for recusancy in spring 1647. Acheson, ‘Religious Separatism’, 62–6, 142–3, 151–6, covers Turner’s career from the 1620s. He was defended by Prynne in the 1630s. 197 Cockburn (ed.), Kent Indictments, 420, 438, 486–7; Gangraena, iii. 98. The Vindication was published in 1645; it is not in Thomason. 198 Gangraena, iii. 98; Blackwood’s book is dated 28 Dec. 1644 by Thomason: BL E22 (15); Acheson, ‘Religious Separatism’, 210–11. Blackwood had been converted by Cornwall to opposition to infant baptism; he was not a pastor to a gathered congregation in Kent. 199 Gangraena, iii. 78.

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There is one Master Durance, a preacher at Sandwich in Kent, a bold conceited man, and an Independent, who since the beginning of this Parliament was a Washing-ball-maker, or seller of washing-balls here in London, but now turned preacher; and being never ordained Minister, hath consecrated himselfe to be one of the Priests of the high places: among many high affected strains of new light, and strange expressions which the man uses in his sermons and prayers to get himselfe a name by, viz. of a Washing-ball-maker to become such a rare man, these are some: He prayed to the Trinitie to take care or cure of these three Kingdomes, God the Father to take care of one, God the sonne of the second, and God the holy Ghost of the third Kingdome.

Twenty pages further on he is described as ‘John Durance an Independent’, who hath at Sandwich in the Church publickly prayed to God two or three severall times, that the King might be brought up in chains to the Parliament: upon which prayer one or two of Sandwich went to Master Durance, to know what his meaning was in that prayer: upon putting the question, Mr Symonds, an Independent Minister in the same Towne, and his great friend, (but more politick) being with him, answered, Mr Durance meaning was that the King might be brought in chains of gold; whereupon Master Durance replyed, that was none of his meaning; but hee meant, hee might be brought in chains of iron.

Edwards also claimed that Durant preferred to preach in a private house despite the offer of ‘the libery of my pulpit’ by a local minister Hope Sherrard.200 Two and a half years after Gangraena’s account, at least ten members of a church where Durant (now moved to Canterbury) was pastor signed a petition calling for the king’s trial. It would be rash to use this later evidence for Durant’s opinions in 1646, especially as we could as easily use his leadership of the Canterbury church as evidence for his doctrinal orthodoxy: in the later 1640s and early 1650s Durant was concerned with antiTrinitarian opinions amongst his flock, and with ‘errours of Arminius’ spreading within an associated Dover church. Durant (like, presumably, Thomas Edwards) believed in ‘a particular and certayne election of some persons from all eternitye meerly out of free grace’. He argued against less formalist church members that church officers—pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons—were established by divine ordinance, accepted public maintenance, and fostered communion with other gathered churches. His service as an assistant to the Kent Committee for Scandalous Ministers in 1654 marks him as a member of the Cromwellian establishment.201 200 201

Ibid. ii. 150, 175–6. Madeline V. Jones, ‘The Divine Durant: A Seventeenth-Century Independent’,

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Durant clearly became (almost) respectable, but even for 1646 Edwards’s account was misleading. Like many of the subjects of Gangraena Durant already had some notoriety as one of the lay preachers reported to the House of Commons in June 1641, although unlike his fellow accused, Greene and Spencer, he had preached only in private and was not proceeded against. It was from 1641 that the ‘wash-ball-maker’ label derived.202 More recently Durant had appeared in rather different guise in July 1643 as ‘an orthodox Divine’ when the House of Commons, on the petition of the inhabitants of St Peters Sandwich, approved his appointment as the Wednesday morning lecturer there. He was said to be of Pembroke College Oxford and had a testimonial from a group consisting mostly of mainstream ordained Independent clerics, Greenhill, Burroughs, William Carter, and Joshua Sprigge along with the more radical or idiosyncratic figures of John Goodwin and John Simpson. In January 1644 Durant was further recommended to Sandwich by the Earl of Warwick, as ‘a man whome God hath pleased to endue with extraordinary guifts for the Ministry of his word and the dispencing thereof as alsoe to bee of pious civill and modest conversacon in his life’. Durant had served as Warwick’s ‘Chaplaine Extraordinary’; a connection unknown to, or unremarked on by, Edwards.203 Durant’s ‘more politick’ friend Symonds was also criticized in Gangraena. He had apparently sent a parishioner to a mechanic for catechizing, on the grounds that ‘one Goose might best teach another to eate’. A longer account condemned Symonds’s hostility towards Presbyterians: There is one Mr Symonds of Sandwich, a great Independent, who preached that though hee would not say that all who came not into the Church-way were damned, yet hee would say that all who had opportunity to joyne to that way, and did not, but lived and died without repentance, for not coming into the Churchway, should be damned: And, saith hee, we had been in the Church-way in this place before now, but for an Apostate Brother in this Town, speaking of a godly Minister once an Independent, but converted from the error of that way.

This apostate Independent, or godly minister, ‘presently after in his owne Church publikely confessed, hee was once of the Independent way, and actually entered into a Church Covenant, and would baptize none but the Archaeologia Cantiana (Ashford, 1968), 193–203, is the fullest account of Durant; 199 for the Canterbury petition. See also Acheson,‘Religious Separatism’, 159–75; CCL, U37, fos. 10r, 13r–v, 14r, 20v. 202 CJ ii. 168. 203 Centre for Kentish Studies, Sa/C4 (11), Sandwich, Miscellaneous Correspondence, for copies of the 1643–4 material.

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children of parents in the Church Covenant; but (saith hee) this was when I was in the Iland of Providence alone, and in the dark’. When he returned to England, ‘and compared both wayes together, the Presbyterian and Independent’, he decided that Independency ‘was a moth-eaten garment, and had many flawes in it’.204 The ‘apostate’ minister was Hope Sherrard, who had offered Durant the use of his pulpit. There is some corroboration for Edwards’s account. Sherrard, an obviously bitter and difficult man, had quarrelled with successive governors on Providence Island, endured spells in prison, and ended his time there as the pastor of a small separatist congregation. He had an equally turbulent career in Sandwich, after apparently being imposed on the town in autumn 1643. The vestry minutes of St Peter’s parish record payments to Symonds for sermons preached in the absence of the sequestered royalist vicar, ‘before it was ordered by the comittee of the honnerable house of Commons that Mr Hope Sherwood should inioye it’. Sherrard complained to the House of Lords in 1647 that his presentation to the additional vicarage of St Clements had been blocked by the Sandwich authorities who had incensed the ‘rude seamen’ against him.205 Edwards’s listed his sources for Sandwich as a letter from one of the Jurats of the town (on Durant), and for Symonds, the disquiet of his father-in-law Mr H. as passed on by a fellow Jurat Mr F., along with a letter ‘from a friend out of Kent’. The existence of such correspondence is perhaps in itself a sign of troubles over religion. Sandwich also had a turbulent political history in the 1640s, from attempts in 1642 to raise a party for the king, to murky involvement in the 1648 royalist rising in Kent.206 Frequent 204 Gangraena, iii. 76, 108–10. Symonds and Durant were close friends: in 1655 after Symonds’s death Durant lobbied to get his son a post in the navy: Jones,‘Divine Durant’, 200. This Symonds is to be distinguished from the ‘Mr Symonds’ who preached at Bath. 205 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 48–9, 130–1, 216–17, 233–5, 241–7, 258–65 for Sherrard in Providence. Sherrard was minister of St Peter’s Sandwich from 1643, although the sequestered minister’s wife obstructed his possession of the rectory: CCL, U3/12/8/1, St Peter, Vestry Minutes, 1601–1676; U3/12/5/1, Churchwardens’ accounts, 1592–1696. He was briefly considered as minister for St Mary’s Sandwich in April 1647: CCL U3/11/8/1, St Mary Sandwich, Vestry Minutes, 1631–1774. For the complaint to the Lords: HMC Sixth Report, House of Lords, 201, 207; LJ ix. 477 (Oct.–Nov. 1647). There was dissension on the town council after a decision that Mr Forstall, the Mayor Sherrard complained of, should have his charges in the matter paid for: Centre for Kentish Studies, Corporation Year (or Minute) Book, Sa/Ac 8 fo. 74v. 206 Centre for Kentish Studies, Sa/Ac 7, fos. 421v, 427v–431 for 1642. There were great conflicts among the Jurats over whether to publish royal proclamations. One Jurat was forced to deny he had tried to make a party for the king and against the parliament. In June 1648 the town tried to block the entrance of parliament’s army, and in October there was a purge of those who had supported the ‘ingaged Gentry’: Sa/Ac 8, fos. 75v, 79r.

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letters from the town were sent to their MP Sir Edward Partheriche throughout the 1640s, in a very good example of the intensified communication facilitated by a permanently sitting parliament. Many of these complained about religious divisions and religious radicalism although they rarely coincided precisely with Edwards’s accounts. In November 1641 another minister, Mr Alderson, who had settled in Sandwich after being shipwrecked in the Downs on the way to Barbados, complained to Partheriche that a Londoner believed to be a servant of Lord Brooke’s had denounced Church of England ministers in general, and Alderson in particular as ‘Baals preists’.207 There were occasional complaints about ‘Anabaptists’, including a report in July 1644 that they had imprisoned ‘a paire’, one of whom was Francis Cornwall.208 But it was Symonds, then minister of St Clements, who attracted the most extensive protests, over the issue of baptism. In November 1643 the Mayor and Jurats of the town wrote to Speaker Lenthall about ‘able divines’ in St Clement’s and St Peter’s parishes who, in administering baptism, ‘doe use those waies which formerly have not beene used amongst us, and doe require the Parents of any Children that are to be Baptised by them either in private or publiq in Church to give them satisfaccon of the faith themselves hold’. A seaman of St Clements who refused to give such satisfaction later had his child baptized by Alderson. The town’s governors feared that ‘it will not be the case of that seaman alone, but of many others’. Symonds in turn had asked that Alderson and the seaman be summoned before the corporation to answer for their defiance—to the Mayor and Jurats’ obvious unease. On their refusal the Mayor claimed to Partheriche and to John White, chairman of the Committee for Plundered Ministers (‘he being a cheife man to settle him amongst us’), that they had been scandalized by Symonds, ‘publiquely in his pulpitt by flatt raileing’. Symonds’s rigidity is here highlighted as in Gangraena, but Sherrard, despite his later and plausible opposition to Symonds’s Independency, was presumably as minister of St Peters operating a similarly rigorous policy on baptism. The required

207 Centre for Kentish Studies, Sandwich letter book, Sa/C1, fos. 69–70, Nov. 1641. The townsmen were not sure of Brooke’s name (directing a letter to George, rather than Robert Greville) and did not know where he lived. Partheriche visited Brooke and then, as was to become characteristic, rather fobbed off the townsmen with assurances that Brooke had given his man ‘a good report’. Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 30–1, 152, 382, has Partheriche as a reluctant and moderate parliamentarian but he appears rather more committed in his correspondence with his constituents. 208 Kent Archives Office, Sa/C1, fo. 148r for Cornwall, Sa/Ac 8 fo. 26v, Aug. 1643 for another complaint about anabaptism.

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confession of faith was not described as a specifically Independent one, and the Sandwich authorities seem to see it as a more general and not very welcome change—an aspect of parliamentary religious reform. They wrote in January 1644 to Partheriche ‘we pswade ourselves that by Mr Simons over violence in his strict Ceremonies he causeth more people averse to the parliament than otherwise would be’. By this time he had also ceased administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.209 The godly MP Partheriche had opposed the employment of Alderson as a lecturer in 1641, and became very exasperated with the corporation’s attitude to Symonds. The town governors delayed sequestering Robert Lovell, the royalist vicar of St Peters, although the determination of Lovell’s wife who ‘kept her doores close locked upp, and by her kinswoman absolutely denied obedience . . . till those who kept her husband sent him unto her’ did as much to delay Sherrard’s takeover.210 There is not much evidence here of enthusiasm for Presbyterian reform; rather hints that in Sandwich the local divisions were between supporters of religious reformation and conservative—even Anglican—resistance. These tensions and the complaints they generated were transmuted in Gangraena into Edwards’s concern with Independency and mechanic preaching (themselves run together in his account). We can conclude again that Gangraena offers a skewed but not illusionary account of religious controversy in Sandwich. There is evidence that Presbyterian campaigns like Edwards’s had an impact in the town. Following the reissue of parliament’s order against unordained preaching in December 1646, John Durant was forbidden in March 1647 to continue as lecturer at St Peter’s church ‘in regard of an ordinance of parlement wch doth prohibit all those that are not ordayned Ministers’, unless he could prove he had been ordained.211 Provincial England in Gangraena The overall impression gained from examining Edwards on developments in Essex and Kent is confirmed by further local research. Edwards’s treatment of the localities was a patchy, hit-and-miss affair, not a comprehensive discussion or a systematic search for particular types of opinion or Ibid., Sa/C1, fos. 132r–135r. The struggles over St Peters can be traced in the town’s minute book, the letter book, and the vestry minutes of St Peters: ibid., Sa/Ac 8, fos. 5r, 39v; Sa/C1, fos. 128v, 129v; CCL, U3/12/8/1, no foliation: see esp. a meeting of 15 Oct. 1643. 211 CCL, U3/12/8/1, St Peter Sandwich, Vestry Minutes. The question of who was an ordained minister was complex. 209 210

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action. Archer of Halstead and Symonds of Sandwich were Independents serving parochial livings in the manner of Philip Nye or Nathaniel Holmes in London, who were treated much more obliquely. Durant, although presented as a mechanic preacher, had more in common with them than with the doctrinally unorthodox and provocative Oates and Cosens. From Norfolk, on the other hand, Edwards made almost no mention of the prominent Independent and Assemblyman (and his own old acquaintance) William Bridge. He included the account provided by John Brinsley of the ‘blaphemous wretch’ John Boggis, a London apprentice but a Norfolk man, who came to Yarmouth as Captain Paul Hobson’s surgeon; while John Carter of Norwich described the railing of Priscilla Miles against the ministry. Yet Bridge along with many others returning from exile in Rotterdam had taken the lead in establishing a gathered church at Yarmouth in 1643, with a sister congregation established in Norwich in June 1644. By November 1645 this church had 114 members (of whom 83 were women) and a considerable political impact.212 In Lancashire, on the other hand, the mainstream Independent Samuel Eaton monopolized Edwards’s attention, in part because of his earlier notoriety as a target for conservative pamphleteers in 1641, in part as a reflection of his ties to London Independent pastors and booksellers, such as Henry Overton and John Goodwin, but mainly on account of the animosity of Edwards’s informant, the committed Presbyterian Richard Hollingworth, with whom Eaton had an extended pamphlet dispute on church government.213 Durant, Eaton, Oates, Laurence Clarkson, and Thomas Collier, despite many differences, all have in common some pre-existing notoriety (ex212 Gangraena, ii. 161–2; iii. 33–5; Boggis, like Oates, came from Norwich: Oates was presented at the quarter sessions in Sept. 1644 for attending conventicles. A John Boggis, apothecary, probably the sectary’s father, was bound over to be of good behaviour in Dec. 1645: Norwich City RO, Case 20a/11, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, fos. 62v, 75v. Boggis sen. took the Covenant as a member of Peter Mancroft parish: Norwich City RO, 13c/2/13. DWL, Harmer MS 76/1, Norwich Church Book. The Yarmouth church agreed to a formal covenant on 28 June 1643; fo. 11 for the Norwich covenant, and fo. 13r for membership in Nov. 1645. For political divisions in the city see Ch. 5, below. The Yarmouth church book is Harmer MS 76/2. 213 Taylor [?], The Brownists Conventicle, for Eaton’s earlier notoriety; Gangraena, ii. 110 for Edwards’s response to Eaton’s and Overton’s remarks about a forthcoming Goodwin response to Antapologia (cf. Ch. 4, below); Goodwin attacked Edwards’s account of Eaton’s congregation (Gangraena, iii. 164) in Hagiomastix. Hollingworth’s Examination of Sundry Scriptures was intended as a contribution to the New England/Lancashire ministers’ debate over church government begun in the later 1630s. The arguments were taken up by Eaton and his fellow pastor Timothy Taylor after many local conferences and debates with Hollingworth in A Defence of Sundry Positions and Scriptures (London 1645), BL E308 (27), Thomason date 8 Nov., licensed by Bachelor 3 Nov., and printed for Henry Overton. The debate continued into 1647.

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tended and magnified by Gangraena), as dangerous ‘emissaries’, authors of wicked books, or men who had previously attracted the attention of other writers or national authorities. It was their impact in provincial England that preoccupied Edwards, not developments in the localities in their own right. The vivid accounts of Thomas Webbe in Gangraena are another instructive example. Webbe was from a Wiltshire family and was to become famous in the 1650s as the ‘Wiltshire Ranter’, but he was apprenticed in London and in the 1640s was a young hat- or feltmaker based (when not off on preaching trips) in Southwark. Webbe’s opinions and misdeeds were discussed in all three parts of Gangraena, including extracts from his ‘blasphemies’ reported to the Westminster Assembly in September 1644, a report from Josiah Ricraft, and details of his journeys in Suffolk, Essex (Colchester), Kent, and going ‘from place to place, in Gloucestershire and Summersetshires seducing people, as I am informed by credible persons’.214 The one place Webbe does not appear is in his native Wiltshire, but he was probably the ‘Mr Webb’ reported to quarter sessions by an indignant local gentleman in April 1646 to be seeking the vicarage of Warminster, claiming with typical effrontery ‘that he was a Minister and could procure Mr Chambers and Mr Carill’s hand to his certificate which he hath laboured for but cannott obteyne it (for he is a man too well knowne to them)’. Webbe ‘hath gotten some few hands in or parish of a company of factious men and women’ who ‘confesse themselves yt he is noe minister, yet he hath ye spirit and yt ye word is revealed to him & therefore fitt to be or pastor’. It would have been surprising if the promised certificate of approbation had appeared for it was Humphrey Chambers, one of Wiltshire’s representatives, and Joseph Caryl who had reported Webbe’s blasphemies to the Assembly two years before.215 As Edwards misses this local support for one of his most notorious sectaries, so his Wiltshire material is about visiting soldiers and sectaries, such as the attacks on Mr Sheppard, minister in Devizes, by Captain Pretty of Ireton’s regiment and the lay preachers Jeremiah Ives and Thomas Lambe; or the story of how William Erbury, ‘spoken of in my first part of Gangraena’, had horrified the good people of Marlborough, who ‘commonly once a week . . . meet together to confer and discourse of good things’. In Marlborough, on his way to Wales, Erbury had apparently denounced the 214 Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary, iii. 297; Hill, English Bible, 233; Lindley, Popular Politics, 290; Gangraena, i. 54, 74–5 (2nd sequence); ii. 135, 146; iii. 77, 111. 215 Wiltshire and Swindon RO, Wiltshire Quarter Sessions Rolls, Trinity 146/159; Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 10.

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Trinity and argued for ‘universall Redemption, speaking against Baptism and all ministry’; when challenged with contrary scriptures, ‘Master Erbury replyed, It was not so in the originall . . . those words were not in the Greek but put in by some who were against the Arrians’. In this story Marlborough as a location is incidental, simply a staging post on the road of one of Edwards’s feared emissaries, and providing evidence of the longstanding dangers of heresy.216 In contrast to the specificity and detail with which Edwards treated London, Wiltshire, like the rest of provincial England, lacks a precise identity—only London is fully realized as a place. Similarly for Bristol Edwards mentioned visitors such as Webbe, and Saye’s client Robert Bacon (who prompted the ‘universal leprosie’ comment that gives this chapter its title), but has nothing on the Independent–Baptist gathered congregation meeting at Broadmead which had an increasingly important local presence.217 In Bath his focus was on Symonds, as we have seen, and on the radical army chaplain John Saltmarsh already well known to Edwards: ‘There is one Mr Saltmarsh, a man who hath of late writ many trashie Pamphlets . . . He hath been at Bath this year, and there in one of the lesser Churches preached, that as John Baptist wore a leatherne girdle, so his Doctrine was leatherne Doctrine’. Saltmarsh argued with the minister at the ‘great Church’ who would not let him preach there because ‘he had heard of him by M. John Ley, and Master Thomas Edwards, and was fully satisfied concerning him’. Here again Edwards’s general, national concerns take priority, suggesting the dangers that derive from such men being treated leniently by the Assembly and favoured by the army. He can also slip in a reference to the usefulness of Gangraena in warning the orthodox about men like Saltmarsh. From a 216 Gangraena, iii. 30, 89–90. Sheppard signed ‘The Concurrent Testimony of the Ministers in the County of Wilts’: Matthews, Calamy Revised, 557; see also Wiltshire and Swindon RO, G20/1/17, Devizes Miscellaneous Entry Book, fos. 182r–197v, Chamberlains’ Accounts Michaelmas 1645–Michaelmas 1646, for charges connected with Fairfax’s forces, and on Mr Sheppard’s affairs; Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 138, 144; Gentles, New Model Army, 101 for Ives and Lambe. There is no trace of Erbury’s night in Marlbororough in local archives, predictably enough. Much money was expended on the entertainment of Fairfax, Fleetwood, and other soldiers in 1646, however: Wiltshire and Swindon RO G22/1/205/2, Marlborough Chamberlains’ Accounts 1572–1727, fos. 90v–91v; Fleetwood was the Recruiter MP for the town: G22/1/22, Marlborough, General Entry Book 1636–1646, 71. 217 Hayden (ed.), The Records of a Church of Christ, 13, 89–90, 96 for Bacon’s links with Broadmead; Gangraena, i. 93, 96–7; ii. 132, 137 for Edwards on Bacon in Bristol and Gloucester. Bacon challenged Edwards’s account of the latter in The Spirit of Prelacy Yet Working or Truth from under a Cloud. . . . Together with a Postscript, containing some generall and particular Observations, upon Master Edwards his Gangrena (London, 1646), BL E334 (5), Thomason date 24 Apr.

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local perspective, however, it seems clear that for the godly of Bath (which had only been taken from royalist control in 1645) the more immediate dangers were the inhabitants’ support for the Book of Common Prayer and anti-parliamentarian preaching, rather than the radical speculations of visitors.218 The case of Bath, like that of Sandwich, leads us to a further obvious, but crucial way in which Gangraena was a Londoner’s book, offering a very partial account of developments elsewhere. Edwards was convinced that the main danger to orthodox Presbyterian reform came from religious radicals—often described as the ‘white devils’ promulgating errors on the ‘right hand’—who campaigned for toleration, rather than the ‘black devils’, the profane people who resented godly discipline and Calvinist preaching. The assumption that the battle against prelacy and profanity had been won was somewhat complacent for London, as we have seen, while for most of the rest of England it is seriously misleading. John Morrill and other modern scholars have argued that the most damaging obstruction to godly reformation came from supporters of the Book of Common Prayer and communal parish ceremonial (the profane in godly terms).219 Many of Edwards’s like-minded contemporaries agreed; they were clearly alarmed at the spread of sectarianism and error, and these concerns were given ample expression in Gangraena, but the equally prevalent disquiet at more humdrum resentment of their attempts at reformation was not reflected. The petition sent by ‘diverse ministers of the County of Essex in the behalf of themselves & their brethren’ to the quarter sessions represented ‘the sad condicon of their congreg[aci]ons, through neglect of the presentmt of misdemeanors’, highlighting a motley crew of ‘profane swearers & cursers, wch do not sanctify the Lords day’, those who ‘foment schism & faction contrary to our holy Covenant, or maintaine Antinomian & Anabaptisticall errors & hairesies, which keep or frequent disordered Alehouses’.220 Fears of the heterodox, the profane, and the ungodly are here jumbled together in contrast to Edwards’s clearer sectarian target.

Gangraena, iii. 113–14; 174 also mentions Saltmarsh and Dell at Bath. John Wroughton, The Civil War in Bath and North Somerset 1642–1656 (Bath: Victor Morgan Books, 1973), 24–5, 114–15, for the general local picture. 219 For Thomas Hall’s use of this dichotomy see Hughes,‘Popular Presbyterianism’, 242–3. When Edwards preached in the 1630s in John Goodwin’s church he ‘gave some considerations against Errors on the right hand, and warned the people of the White Devill’: Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig.)(4r; Morrill,‘Church in England’. 220 Essex RO (Chelmsford), Q/SBa 2/58 (n.d., but found with other papers of Michaelmas 1645). 218

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Local sources for Norwich, also, suggest that abuse from religious radicals was often the least of the problems of John Carter and his godly brethren. A sermon preached at Carter’s death in 1655 praised his opposition to Quakers, Anabaptists, and ‘all sorts of giddiheaded sectaries’, but noted he had been ‘unhansomely used’ in Norwich, especially as he had refused to prostitute ‘that great Ordinance’ of the Lord’s Supper to all comers.221 Carter indeed complained throughout the 1640s that he was carrying ‘a burden beyond my strength’ at his city centre parish, Peter Mancroft, and that his promised maintenance was in continual arrears. He longed wistfully to accept an alternative offer in ‘a pretty markett towne, a healthfull ayre, a Cleane and pleasant soyle, a tractable people . . . and 9 score pounds p.ann.’. No wonder he saw so much of God in the call. From his parishioners’ point of view £120 per annum was a reasonable maintenance; they were for a long period at odds with the minister, ‘The Cheife on the parishes part against Mr Carter being want of sacraments’. As in Sandwich, the bulk of the resentment against godly ministers came from parishioners’ alienated by Presbyterian rigidity.222 As Gangraena ignores a whole current of 1640s religious opinion, it is unsurprising that his respectable godly informants faced contrasting judgements from other parts of the religious spectrum. Simon Ford, for example, whose letter to Stanley Gower provided such a vivid account of radical preaching in the garrison at Poole, was himself attacked in the royalist press as a disorderly preacher. His attempts at reform in his living of Wimborne Minster made slow progress; bells were still being rung at Christmas in 1646, although the parish had purchased the Assembly’s Directory of Worship. Much of Ford’s day-to-day experience must have involved overcoming ‘traditional’ rather than radical opposition.223 221 John Collinges, Elisha’s Lamentation (London, 1657), 20, 24–5. Carter had refused a conventional funeral sermon so this was preached on the first Sunday following his death. 222 Norwich City RO, PD 26/7/5, Peter Mancroft, Churchwardens’ accounts, 286–7, 298, 316; and foliated from the back of the book: fos. 157r, 158v, 159r–v. Trouble continued sporadically from Feb. 1643 until Jan. 1648. In Jan. 1647 the city’s MP (and London Alderman) Thomas Atkins wrote to the Mayor regretting Carter’s rumoured departure: ‘I do bessech yow lett it not be said that Norwich will not in Peters in the markett provide for a good minister, I answer yow it trobleth me’: BL Add MS 22620, fo. 48. Norwich Corporation also considered difficulties with ministers’ maintenance and measures for godly discipline: Norwich City RO, Assembly Book, fos. 17r, 35v, 39r, 48r, 49r–v (proposals to unite parishes, and augment ministers’ maintenance, 1644–1646); fo. 23r (sabbath-breaking). 223 Gangraena, ii. 54; Mercurius Academicus, quoted in A. R. Bayley, The Great Civil War in Dorset 1642–1660 (Taunton, 1910), 307–8. Dorset RO, CPE/WM/CW1/42. Ford was a minister much trusted by the Dorset authorities in the 1640s, acting frequently with William Benn to approve ministers appointed to sequestered livings by the county committee: C. H. Mayo (ed.), The Minute Book of the Dorset Standing Committee 1646–1650 (Exeter, 1902), e.g. 88. Unlike Benn he conformed at the Restoration: DNB.

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This survey of religious developments in provincial England does not suggest that Edwards exaggerated the extent of religious unorthodoxy in a simple quantifiable way. Indeed his focus on well-known authors, preachers, and emissaries in Essex, East Anglia, Kent, and the West Country meant that local activists and congregations are often absent from his work and Gangraena may underestimate the amount of support for radical preachers and congregations. On the other hand, Edwards may well have overestimated the ‘extremism’ of some of his subjects, such as Eaton, Archer, or Durant. Many of Edwards’s local stories can be shown to have had some basis in ‘actual’ provincial anxieties, incidents, and disputes, although other participants would not share Edwards’s judgement on them. Gangraena is not, however, a systematic account of radical religion, and as a guide to the overall character of religious developments in England, it is selective and misleading. edwards and the army Several recent scholars have assessed Edwards’s treatment of parliament’s army in Gangraena, most notably Anne Laurence and Ian Gentles, so a briefer discussion is provided here. Modern scholars have highlighted the fact that Edwards insisted at several points that the army was not one united radical body: ‘the Army that is so much spoken of upon all occasions in the news Books, Pulpits, Conferences, to be Independent’ would ‘upon a true muster of the whole, Commanders and common souldiers’, be found to consist of no more than ‘one in six of that way’.224 Indeed it was further evidence of the crafty deceptiveness of Independents that they had managed to convince so many that they did dominate the army. It may be that careful contemporary readers took note of Edwards’s qualifications, but their impact was surely outweighed by innumerable stories of blasphemy and harassment. Edwards, of course, had no reason to describe conformist and orderly Presbyterian soldiers unless they were victimized by radicals as when ‘our Adjutant General Gray, (who is an honest godly Scotchman)’ was attacked by Hugh Peter and accused of drunkenness because he slurred his speech.225 224 Gangraena, i. 17, cf. 60 (1st sequence); discussed in Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 77–8; even in the Preface to Part Three, Edwards insisted he was only opposed to the radical minority in the army, claiming the New Model had done the most gallant service when least dominated by sectaries: iii. sig.)(2r. See also his attack on Peter’s supposed undervaluing of Whalley’s valour in Ch. 4, below. 225 Gangraena, iii. 70; Gray in fact survived in the army until 1648, but his regiment was regarded as a Presbyterian stronghold: Gentles, New Model Army, 231.

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One theme dear to the hearts of Edwards and his correspondents was the soldiers’ disturbing of ministers in their pulpits: ‘I have been informed lately by divers honest men, that in Northamptonshire some of the Souldiers who are Sectaries . . . have come into the Parish Churches, and put by the godly Ministers who should preach, and . . . have set up Captains, and others of the Souldiers to preach in their Pulpits, and to vent their Fancies and Errours.’ The examples in Part Two included Thomas Andrews of Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, other unnamed preachers in the south Midlands, and Edwards himself denounced as a false prophet by Colonel Washington on a typically noisy Christ Church occasion.226 Incidents multiplied in Part Three, with most examples drawn from the West Country and the Midlands, especially Oxfordshire, where many forces were quartered after the fall of royalist headquarters at Oxford. Gangraena both drew upon and stimulated newsletter accounts of such encounters.227 One Floyd, preacher to a troop commanded by Major Huntington, invaded the pulpit at Aston Rowant (Roreant in Edwards’s text), arguing that ‘Lay-men, weavers, tinckers and Coblers being gifted might be Preachers.’ The 20-year-old Floyd had previously lodged at ‘Master Calvert’s the Bookseller at Ludgate Hill’. This letter ‘out of Oxfordshire to a Citizen in London’ concluded with a convenient passage of selfadvertisement for Edwards: ‘I would bee glad to know of Mr Edwards the Antagonist of Hereticks what to do in this matter; To whom though unknown, I present my love in the Lord, June 16 1646’.228 Edwards was especially critical of the assaults on Mr Skinner, the minister of Aston (a few miles east of Oxford), by Lieutenant John Webb and Colonel John Hewson. Webb and his men caused brawls in the church after they picked the locks to get in before Skinner; like Quakers a decade later, they kept their hats on when the minister came in although he tore them from their heads. Webb denounced Skinner as a ‘Popish Priest, tub-preacher’, while in November Hewson attacked him as ‘no Minister but a false Prophet, an Antichrist’. Hewson took over Skinner’s pulpit and preached himself, openly flouting parliament’s measures against lay preaching.229 Edwards concluded a ‘large book . . . would not containe all the stories of the Sectaries misusing the godly Ministers . . . it would be too much to Gangraena, ii. 20; i. 173–4; for Andrews, see Matthews, Calamy Revised, 11. Gangraena, iii. 19–21, 30–2, 62, 249–54. The examples include Devizes and Exeter, already discussed, and Wales. Cf. A letter from Northampton, and its analysis of contrasting newsletter accounts. The Clark Library in Los Angeles has a copy of this tract, apparently marked up by Edwards for a projected Gangraena, Part Four. 228 229 Gangraena, iii. 62. Ibid. 250–2. 226 227

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particularize all the wicked facts done in this kind by Col. Hewson, Major Axton, Lieut Webb, Capt Paul Hobson and divers others’. The soldiers’ opinions were as alarming as their actions; Edwards’s second theme focused on the dreadful errors found amongst the soldiery. They were heedless of orthodox teaching on sin, and denounced outward forms: an army surgeon declared ‘hee knew no seal but the spirit’. Even the soldiers of one of Edwards’s favoured commanders, Edward Whalley, were ‘full of Errours of a high nature’. A ‘reverend and learned Minister’ reported on ‘a great Champion that did openly and boldly in the Church affirme that he was raised up of God immediatly’.230 The most recent historian of the New Model Army, Ian Gentles, has a balanced judgement on Edwards’s account: ‘The persistent strain of hysteria in Edwards’ writing is a warning against literal acceptance of these charges. Nevertheless, the type of behaviour that he ascribes to the soldiers is also delineated in other, less inflammatory texts’. The aggression of Hewson and others towards the Oxfordshire parish clergy is reported also in newsbooks from 1646, while Hewson’s commitment to lay preaching is well documented.231 In the third place, Edwards denounced the religious errors and pernicious political influence of many prominent army chaplains: William Dell’s anti-formalist preaching at Oxford; Erbury and Saltmarsh in many parts of England; Hugh Peter as army propagandist and agitator—‘his hand hath been against every man, medling with all sorts of men, a Polupragmaticall, medling in the Armies with many’—all caught his attention at several points in Gangraena.232 He regretted the relatively orthodox commander of the New Model had to put up with such men: ‘tis a sad thing, that Sir Thomas Fairfax that valiant and well-affected Gentleman, should have such kind of Chaplains and Preachers upon all occasions to preach before him as Mr Dell, Mr Saltmarsh, Mr Peters, Mr Cradock, Mr Symonds, M. William Sedgwick, and such like’.233 The first section on military disorder in Part Three, headed ‘A Relation of stories and sundry remarkable Passages concerning the Sects, and Sectaries; and amongst others of some Souldiers who are great Sectaries’, began with what is probably still his best known ‘remarkable Passage’, the story of Captain Richard Beaumont and his company barring the way to the church in Yakesley, Huntingtonshire, so that a child could not come to Ibid. 231; ii. 152–3; iii. 47, 62. Gentles, New Model Army, 89, 101–2, 111, 469, 472. Hewson, with Erbury and others, took part in a public disputation on lay preaching in Oxford in Nov. 1646. 232 Gangraena, iii. 140, 27, 46–7, 63. 233 Ibid. 242. 230 231

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be baptized and then ‘in contempt of Baptisme, some of the souldiers got into the Church, pissed in the Font, and went to a Gentlemans stable in the Town, and took out a horse, and brought it into the Church, and there baptized it’. Further investigation revealed that they had called the horse Ball Esau because he was hairy, and provided him with godfathers and a godmother—a soldier whose nickname was Widow Shropshire. As we saw in Chapter 2, this incident occurred in June 1644, and involved Eastern Association rather than New Model troops. Most readers would have associated it with the radical activities of soldiers in 1646, however, which was Edwards’s main focus, because the dates when the evidence was generated are displayed more prominently than the date of the incident itself. Given what we know of Beaumont it is a plausible story. Richard Beaumont, another apprentice apothecary moving in radical London circles before the civil war, was closely associated with Paul Hobson in Colonel Charles Fleetwood’s regiment in East Anglia. These troops acquired an early reputation for religious unorthodoxy, and after their incorporation into the New Model, Hobson and Beaumont had been arrested for preaching by Sir Samuel Luke, the Presbyterian garrison commander at Newport Pagnell, in June 1645. The story about horse baptism had many resonances with other narratives of soldiers mocking religious rituals with animals, as we have seen. Its accuracy was not attacked although it was only the retelling in Gangraena that gave this incident wide currency in the cheap religious print of 1646/7.234 Beaumont’s London origins were not mentioned in this account but one of the most important messages of Gangraena was that army and city radicalism were so closely related as to be interchangeable. Stories about soldiers were interwoven with accounts of dangerous sermons, meetings, and arguments in the city, while the London connections of individual military figures were also stressed as with Giles Calvert’s lodger, young Floyd.235 One of the best-known army preachers was Beaumont’s friend, Paul Hobson, who was extensively discussed by Edwards—as an army radical, a London sectary, and (as with other provincial figures) a writer 234 Gangraena, 17–18. This incident is also discussed in Ch. 2, above, and Ch. 4, below. Gentles, New Model Army, 109. Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 188–9, for the radical activities of these men in the Yarmouth area. John Boggis was an associate of Beaumont’s: Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 136; Lindley, Popular Politics, 28. 235 Gangraena, ii. 152–7; iii. 23–7. Compare the similar, later judgement of Richard Baxter that the army was influenced by ‘men that had been in London, hatcht up among the old Separatists’: Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), 53.

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of dangerous books.‘There is one Paul Hobson a Taylor, who comes out of Buckinghamshire, and is now a Captain, having been in the Armies, who hath been a Preacher a great while’; thus Edwards introduced his long account in Part One. Edwards drew extensively on Prynne’s New Lights for his account of Hobson; he knew that he had subscribed the 1644 Calvinist Baptist Confession of Faith as pastor of a London church and been arrested by Luke, and he also quoted Hobson’s own published works, including a collection of sermons Christ the effect, not the cause of the love of God. This was a source for several errors including number 41: ‘That the unction which the Saints are said to receive from the holy One, is one with the Christhood of Christ’. Hobson had been ‘a means to corrupt some pretious hopefull yong men who went out of London’ to the armies, and following his release from custody, ‘I know not how it came about’, he preached the very next Lord’s Day in Moor Fields, and then regularly in Finsbury Fields and elsewhere around the city. More recently Hobson ‘gives out that he is sent for by a Collonel to come to Bristoll to doe some service there, (as if he had not done mischief enough in London) and truly ‘tis a sad thing that in all the Townes and Cities (for the most part) taken by the Parliaments forces, this should be the fruit of it, that Errors and Heresies should abound there, and Sectaries of all sorts get places of profit and power’. Hobson’s troops duly featured in Parts Two and Three of Gangraena in disorderly confrontation with the orthodox ministry.236 As with Edwards’s treatment of London and the provinces, there is no reason to believe that he fabricated evidence for the army’s religious behaviour but he was overwhelmingly selective in his presentation. Edwards was also, of course, offering a particular editorial ‘line’. Contrasting assessments of incidents described in Gangraena are not hard to find: as in a newsbook account of the preaching of Dell, Saltmarsh, and William Sedgewick at Headington, May 1646:‘many souldiers were at each sermon, divers of them climbing up into trees to hear . . . it is very observable to 236 Gangraena, i. 22–3, 32, 56 (2nd sequence), 89–91, 184; ii. 161, 173; iii. 45–6, 49–50, for accounts of Hobson and his errors. See also Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 135–6; R. L. Greaves,‘One “of the Most Dangerous Fellows in the North”: Paul Hobson and the Quest for Godly Government’, in his Saints and Rebels, 133–56, and Greaves’s biography of Hobson in Greaves and Zaller (eds.), Biographical Dictionary, i. 95–7. For Hobson as a leader of London Baptism see Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 58–9, 147, 158–9. Hobson’s church was apparently an offshoot of the separatist church of Spencer and Greene. Hobson was a longstanding friend of John Lilburne although he took a different stance in 1647–9. By the very end of Part One, Edwards had the 2nd 1646 edn. of the Baptist confession to hand and used Knollys’s and Hobson’s ‘tumultuous disorderly managing of their opinions’ to discredit the Confession’s professions of moderation: i. 184.

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consider the love and unity which is amongst the souldiers . . . Presbytery and Independency making no breach, nor obstructing anything in the carrying on of the work, which may be a pattern to us’, or the later praise for the ‘Army, which God hath made victorious and valiant’, made up of ‘godly and religious men . . . suffering reproaches, and jeers, and slanders, being branded, with the name of sectaries and factious persons, by some of our proud ignorant Clergy, such as Mr Edwards was’.237 Edwards’s own conclusion could not have been more different: Hence then we may see . . . what a great plague and judgement of God to this Land some of our Armies and Souldiery have been . . . in that so many Commanders and Souldiers . . . should be desperate Sectaries and hereticks . . . Certainly the Sectaries in the Armies (I speake now as a Minister of the Gospell, judging of things according to Scripture, and not according to carnall policy and outward appearance) are the greatest plague and judgement of God that hath been upon this Kingdom this hundred years . . . it had been better the Sword of the Enemy had raged from North to South, then this Sword of Heresie, and Plague of Error like a Gangrene should over-run the Kingdome as it doth . . . There are few of our Emissaries and notorious Sectaries but are or have been Souldiers, belonged to the Armies as Chaplaines, or one way or other have followed the Campe, they all smell of the Army, Hich, Knollys, Dell, Saltmarsh, Peters, Batchelor etc . . . Our Armies are the Nurseries of all errours and all our evills.238

This sharply discordant name-calling had a significant impact on general political cleavages in 1646–7 as we shall see in detail in Chapter 5. It also seems that Edwards’s polemic contributed to shifts in provincial perceptions and priorities. The area around the king’s headquarters at Oxford and much of the north and west of England were only gradually coming under parliamentarian control as Edwards wrote Gangraena in 1645–6. For Edwards it was a tragedy that military liberation brought religious anarchy: Every taking of a Town or City, is a further spreading over this Kingdom the gangrene of Heresie and Errour, where these Errours were never known nor heard of before upon our taking of Towns and Cities . . . where can a man almost go to any Garrison, town or City, and not meet with Anabaptists, Antinomians, Brownists, 237 Perfect Occurrences of Both Houses of Parliament and Martiall Affairs (London, 22–9 May 1646); Prier, Cristall Looking Glass, 383–4. 238 Gangraena, iii. 265–6; the earliest part of this passage was based on ‘a famous Speech, made by Sir Edward Dering’ in 1640 when arguing that religious reform should take precedence over dealing with the Scots army. Baxter made similar comments, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 56, ‘all Places where we went, the Sectarian Soldiers much infected the Countreys’, in discussing his reflections that ended up in Gangraena.

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etc. Can a man go to Southampton, Portsmouth, Warwick, Gloucester, Bristol, York, Lynn cum multis aliis and misse of them.239

When Simon Ford wrote to Stanley Gower, his anxiety was fixed on ‘the smoking tayles of those London Fire-brands, which retard the work’, and ‘have fumed the West too, the devil that kindles them, is so very busy in his work of compassing the Land’.240 But for most people beyond London, it is probable that struggles over religious reformation were not (yet) a priority. In what has been sometimes a frustrating search through local material—correspondence, quarter sessions records, or corporation records—worries over the level of taxation or the general unruliness of troops rather than their unorthodox religious ideas loom largest along with the perennial problems of plague, alehouses, and dilapidated roads. Letters from the West Country to the parliament in the summer of 1646, for example, focus on the disorders of the troops under Edward Massey, rather than on New Model preaching.241 When a city was captured from the royalists, the priority in religious terms was to establish a godly preaching ministry to overcome the influence of ‘malignants’. The committee overseeing the reduction of Newark regretted it had no power to remove malignant ministers—‘those Ministers that have borne Armes against us . . . plotting and contriving all the villany that possibly they can’—and settle good ones. The new parliamentarian authorities in Worcester, ‘The First City that revolted from and the last reduced to yor obedience’, asked for six ‘learned and godlie divines’ to be sent there, ‘in regarde of the most sadd desperate and blinde condition of this countie, almost wholie destitute of godly Ministers’. Complaints about religious unorthodoxy are extremely rare.242 Lay preaching, separatism, and heterodoxy were causing more alarm in the provinces by 1646–7. At a general meeting of the Committee of the 240 Gangraena, i. 149. Ibid. 51 (2nd sequence). Bodl., Tanner MS 59, fos. 330 (June 1646, Wiltshire), 392 (July 1646, Dorset). Compare Wiltshire and Swindon RO, A1/160/1, Quarter Sessions Order Book, 1642–54 not foliated; Quarter Sessions Rolls, Trinity 1646, Michaelmas 1646. The predominant concerns are plague, ratings disputes, and alehouses. Constables’presentments include occasional non-attendance at church, but concentrate on alehouses, ruined roads and bridges, and taxation. See also B. H. Cunnington (ed.), Records of the County of Wiltshire (Devizes, 1932), 161, 166–7, 169–70. 242 Bodl., Tanner MS 60, fo. 420r–v (Feb. 1646, Newark); MS 59, fo. 414 (July 1646, Worcester). A rare exception was a complaint from Ipstones in Staffordshire in July 1644 that a local captain had preached against infant baptism and episcopal ordination, and held that the immortality of the soul could not be proved by Scripture; evidence again that London emissaries were not essential to poison the provinces: Tanner MS 61, fos. 110r–111v. 239 241

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Eastern Association in February 1646, the main agenda items concerned the various financial demands of the parliament, but the committeemen were also anxious that the Covenant be imposed on those who had not yet taken it and considered measures against lay preaching. The letters between Norwich corporation and their MP Atkins were similarly taken up with the renewed measures by parliament against mechanic preachers in December 1646 as well as troubles over the excise and assessments. Presbyterians did much better in elections to fill vacant seats in the Commons from the summer of 1646 than they had in the previous year. The intensifying resentment at taxation and military rule despite the victory over the royalists was a major factor, but so was opposition to religious radicalism.243 Orthodox ministers in the provinces shared many of Edwards’s fears, their attitudes clearly shaped by news from London as well as their own experiences. The Yorkshire minister Elkanah Wales warned ‘godly Christians living about Cockermouth’ against the ‘dangerous seeds of schisms’, stressing that the ‘sectaries of these times are generally possessed with spiritts of zeale and boldnes’.244 Another northern minister, Henry Massy at Kendal, writing slightly awkward letters to his patron, Lord Wharton, an Independent sympathizer, became increasingly anxious about local people who, claiming liberty of conscience, ‘sette up the trade of preacher’. While church government was unsettled and the sects flourished, ‘god is highly displeased’, yet heterodox ideas were ‘mayntayned by some ones (and those greate ones) in London and I feare in parliament’. A local minister who had baptized a cock ‘now . . . is a pretender to Anabaptisme and Independency’. All this in an area where the committee established to set up a Presbyterian government had complained in March 1646 that half the local ministers were ‘noncovenanter and disaffected’.245 It is not possible to make definitive judgements on the specific impact of Edwards’s writing compared to more general influences. Nonetheless 243 BL Add MS 22620, fos. 18r, 60, 69, 96, 94, 45; David Underdown,‘Honest Radicals in the Counties, 1642–1649’, in D. Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Sevemteenth Century History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 193–4. 244 BL Sloane MS 4276, fos. 166r, 215v; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 506, dates this letter to July 1646, but it may be shortly after his appointment to a living at Carlisle the following March. 245 Bodl., Rawlinson Letters 52/30, 32, 34, Dec. 1646–Mar. 1647. In Oct. 1647 Massy wrote to Wharton that he saw no grounds in scripture for liberty of conscience but that it was allowed by some authors in limited cases—had Wharton asked for advice? Robert Ashton, Counter Revolution: The Second Civil War and Its Origins, 1646–1648 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 241–2, 363–4, also discusses Massy; Bodl., Tanner MS 60, fo. 527r.

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Edwards’s collecting and publicizing a variety of radical activity in London and elsewhere surely helped to provide a framework for interpretation and a template for action for local people, especially local ministers, once the demands of the war effort were less pressing. Edwards secured in print a variety of connections between the vanguard of city Presbyterians and their brethren in the provinces; thus Gangraena stimulated the broad campaigns we will discuss in Chapter 5. For those with little or no experience of radical speculation and harassment, reading Gangraena revealed how widespread it was; it intensified anxiety and hostility towards the army in places they had never been. Edwards highlighted notorious individuals for provincial readers to beware of: the minister of Bath knew that Saltmarsh was not a fit visitor to his pulpit from reading Edwards’s and John Ley’s books. Suffolk ministers reported to Edwards on the misdeeds of ‘Oates, the Anabaptist (whom your Gangraena takes notice of)’.246 Gangraena’s effect on radicals could be as drastic as its inspiration to the orthodox. In December 1647 the ministers of Rutland complained to the House of Lords against the ‘professed and known Anabaptist’ Samuel Oates. The ministers cited the Covenant’s commitment to the extirpation of ‘Popery, Heresy and Schism’ as well as the fast held in March 1647 against the spreading of blasphemy and heresy. These inspired them to represent to the peers the ‘perilous Conditions wherein our country now stands, by reason of divers erroneous and seducing spirits, lately crept in amongst us’. The main erroneous spirit was Oates, whom Edwards had made famous. The ministers knew that he dipped women naked in the middle of the night and had been arraigned for causing the death of one. They knew he was venting the ‘most false and heretical Doctrine of Arminianism, Antinomianism, Anabaptism, Socinianism, and divers Tenets tending to . . . Atheism’; he had preached universal redemption and mortality of the soul, and had denounced the Church of England as no true church and its ministers as ‘Antichristian Priests’. A great concourse of people had been drawn after him, forsaking their orthodox ministers for ‘mutinous assemblies’, sects, and schisms. Perhaps they had witnessed all this directly but the categories and language used suggest that Rutland men already had a good idea from books like Gangraena what Oates was made of.247 246 247

Gangraena, iii. 113–14; ii. 20–1. LJ ix. 571–2.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Books Lately Printed’ Gangraena and the World of Print When Edwards’s friend and licenser, James Cranford, decided to accept a permanent position as minister of Christopher Le Stocks, the parish allowed him £5, ‘by appointment towards . . . bringing of his children and bookes to London’. Books—bibles, commentaries, catechisms, sermons, treatises—were central to the lives and work of all godly ministers, but for polemicists like Edwards and Cranford, when the future of the church hung in the balance, they were as precious as family, essential tools, and continuing obsessions.1 ‘There have been more Books writ, Sermons preached, words spoken, besides plottings and actings for a Toleration, within these foure last yeers, then for all other things. Every day now brings forth Books for a Toleration’, complained Edwards, at length, in Gangraena. His opponents were equally conscious of the importance of print in mobilizing support and equally aware of the inextricable connections between print and power. As the Baptist Edward Drapes commented: If Mr Edwards or his brethen could once monopolize Printing and Licensing into their owne hands, that nothing might be Licensed, nor Printed, but that which may tend to the advancement of their pompe; then might all those tales and stories, lyes and libells, forgeries, quaint fictions, and bold malitious inventions, of which the Gangrena is compounded, pass for current coyne in the Presbyterian judgment, and that by the Authority of Imprimatur James Cranford.2

This chapter attempts a broad exploration of Gangraena’s place in the world of print, offering a case study in the ‘history of the book’ as well as an 1 GLMS 4423/1, St Christopher le Stocks, Churchwardens accounts, fo. 168v. Cranford had moved from Northamptonshire. His large family and controversial career ensured that Cranford had little but his large library to bequeath in his will: Latin and Greek editions of Saint [John] Chrysostome were left to his son Nathaniel; the rest were to be sold for the support of two unmarried daughters: NA, Prob 11/264, fo. 134 (1657). 2 Gangraena, i. 122; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 9.

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analysis of religious controversy in the mid-1640s. Edwards’s Antapologia was central to the bitter and elaborate pamphlet wars of 1644–5, when old acquaintances raged against each other while Gangraena became even better known and more widely quoted. The ramshackle Gangraena, as I have stressed already, is a marvellous basis for a discussion of the complex, multivalent impact of print, while its precariously arrogant and self-conscious author was himself attuned to the complexities of book production and the uncertain reception of books. Using Edwards’s own remarks in his text as a starting point I will first cover the elaborate production processes involved in the creation of Gangraena and then analyse Edwards’s use of printed sources. Discussion of the robust printed debate over Edwards’s works will be followed by a more speculative discussion of Gangraena’s wider readership. Works of religious polemic did not compete for meaning within a self-contained world of print but interacted with other forms of communication and mobilization. Recent bibliographical scholarship cautions historians against exaggerating the expansion of printing during the 1640s for the overall capacity of the trade remained fairly constant through the century. There was, however, a shift in the type of works produced with a drastic increase in shorter, topical works—newsletters, petitions, propaganda, official declarations—directed at a broader,‘middling’ readership as well as an educated elite. Print was a revolutionary medium, with a greater impact on ‘public opinion’ than ever before, yet it was also embedded amongst older media, connected to the intimacies of manuscript transmission and the directness of angry conversations. The 1640s indeed revealed the paradoxes of print. It was distinctively crucial to the political cleavages of these years, yet the immediacy of printed production, its responsiveness to events and to other texts also helped to blur distinctions between speech, manuscript, and print.3 The last sections of this chapter will thus show how Gangraena, the printed book, was tangled up with manuscript circulation and with direct oral encounters, while attempting to isolate the specific impact of print. producing gangr aena In a rather embarrassed explanation at the end of Part Three, Edwards half-apologized for some of his remarks about the Independent Jeremiah 3 John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv. 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17–19, 22–3, 557, 560–1; McKenzie, ‘Speech—Manuscript—Print’.

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Burroughs who had died during the production of the work. Edwards acknowledged that two or three passages might be said to be ‘a speaking evill of the dead, I desire to let the Reader know, they were both written and printed off long before Master Burroughs sicknesse and death’—‘no understanding man will once imagine a Booke of above Forty sheets could be made, written out, and printed in a month, especially by one who Preaches often, and hath many irons in the fire at the same time, and to put it out of all question besides my own testimony, the Book-seller and Printer can testifie this Third Part hath been above this quarter of a yeare in the Presse a printing’.4 This passage is instructive in many ways. It is amongst the many places where Edwards stresses for readers the actual labour of writing and book production. As we saw in Chapter 2, Gangraena was, and was overtly presented as, a work always in the making. The overwhelming and continuous pressures of religious disorder were embodied in Edwards’s repeated explanations of why his books were disorganized and ever-expanding, but never large enough to comprehend all the errors surrounding him. The very ‘roughness’ of their construction contributed to the ‘truth claims’ of the three parts of Gangraena. Furthermore Edwards, despite his authorial notoriety, was here revealing a more self-effacing awareness of the collective nature of book production. As Chartier has insisted, authors do not simply write or produce books, they are part of a collective enterprise, creating texts which are turned into actual, material objects by printers, booksellers, and licensers.5 Authors did not have control over the process as both Edwards and his friend Baillie were well aware. Robert Baillie’s return to Scotland in December 1646 was delayed by the demands of authorship: ‘it will be above twenty dayes ere I can take journey, for I have gotten but a dossan of sheets of my Anabaptisme from the presse’. Edwards acknowledged the difficulties in the errata page of the second impression of Antapologia: the Booke being printed at two severall Printing Houses, and the sheets never brought to me to correct, nor I seeing them till they were wrought off from the Presse, I cannot but think there are many Errata and mistakes; but however not having time to read over my Book and to examine every page and line (as having new Books a coming shortly against the Sects) I must venture upon thy ingenuity, intreating thee to correct what mistakes thou meetest with, and not to impute them to the Author, but to that common condition that befals Books at the Presse, especially when the Author cannot attend the Presse.

A few minor errors only could be corrected here. Printers offered alibis to 4

Gangraena, iii. 290.

5

Chartier, Order of Books, 10.

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hard-pressed authors, and Edwards was indignant at John Goodwin’s criticisms of mistakes in Gangraena that were obviously printers’ slips. They had been corrected in the second edition ‘abroad’ a full fourteen days before Goodwin’s Cretensis appeared.6 Finally Edwards, again like Baillie, always conceived of or described his books by ‘sheets’, rather than our more familiar pages. When he explained why he had been forced to cut short his account of John Lilburne in Part Three, it was because he had ‘already filled up that number of sheets I at first intended when I resolved to write this Third Part’. In small quartos like Gangraena a sheet, identified by a ‘signature’, printed on both sides and folded twice, consisted of eight pages.7 Like a modern journalist, Edwards could, in theory, write to order counting by sheets rather than our hundreds or thousands of words. Unlike most modern journalists, Edwards does not seem to have known when to stop. There is substantial evidence in the works themselves as well as much testimony in letters and other tracts, that Gangraena, Parts One and Three, especially, were much longer than their author had intended or their printers anticipated. When Edwards claimed Part Three of Gangraena had been three months ‘in the press’ he did not mean that his complete manuscript was delivered and then turned into a printed book in ‘a quarter of a year’. It seems clear that Edwards wrote (or compiled) his work in ‘chunks’ delivering them to the printer as he went along. For the production of Gangraena Edwards was indebted above all to his bookseller-publisher, Ralph Smith, who, as we have seen in Chapter 3, shared his ideological commitment to zealous Presbyterian reform. This was just as well for it is unlikely that there was much material advantage. For Antapologia, Smith shared the risks with his old partner, Bellamy, but he bore all the risks of production of the three large parts of Gangraena. Perhaps Bellamy was too cautious to be associated with it. Publishing was increasingly the preserve of bookselling members of the Stationers’ Company (rather than printers) but modern scholarship suggests that they made more money from retail bookselling than from production of books for wholesale. Smith’s share in the publication of the Assembly’s Directory of Worship was presumably profitable and he may have made something 6 Letters of Baillie, ii. 411 (to Mr George Young); Edwards was referring to the 1646 edn. of Antapologia, printed by ‘T.R. and E.M.’ (Thomas Ratcliffe and Edward Mottershead, the printers of most versions of Gangraena) with separate title pages for John Bellamy and Ralph Smith. The first impression had only one printer working for both booksellers. Gangraena, ii. 42. 7 Gangraena, iii. 153.

2. Gangraena, Part One, title page.

3. The Second Part of Gangraena, title page.

4. The Third Part of Gangraena, title page.

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from Gangraena, Part One which went to three editions and a little from the two editions of Part Two, but it was very rare for a single edition to do more than cover costs. Edwards wrote out of zeal, not for money, and he too would have gained little materially.8 Standard accounts of book production in this period describe how the skilled compositor in a print shop would estimate the length of a work in sheets and thus calculate how much paper would be needed for an edition. Most editions of Gangraena were produced jointly (as was typically the case with substantial books) by Thomas Ratcliffe and Edward Mottershead who became official partners sometime in 1646.9 They must have found Edwards an unpredictable and demanding author, delivering his ‘copy’ later and longer than expected, and too anxious for rapid publication to make a systematic and conscientious proofreader. Readers might enjoy the dramatic account of Cosen’s Rochester blasphemies included at the last minute in Part One: meeting a citizen in a London street, Edwards was given the story, ‘which when I had it from him, the last sheet of my Book being either printing off, or quite printed off, I put it in a Postscript, as the Reader sees’. Printers would have been less enthusiastic. In his last published work, issued in haste during the crisis of summer 1647, Edwards complained about the need to spend twenty days ‘reviewing, perfecting and printing’ ten sheets.10 Edwards’s aim was not the polished perfection of the academic theologian; in the urgent struggle against error he was driven to a rapid processing of information into text and then print. The tortured progress of Edwards’s polemic was well known to participants in the intimate bitterness of London politics. Antapologia was entered in the Stationers’ Company Register on 8 May 1644 and Baillie reported on 7 June that it was a piece of twenty-six sheets near printed; but on 5 July it was still 8 For the technicalities of book production I have relied on McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’, Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969); Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). There are useful brief discussions also in Johns, Nature of the Book, 87, and Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 233–4. 9 Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, 133, 151. Most versions of Gangraena simply say ‘printed for Ralph Smith’, although the first printing of Part Two and the title page for the combined Parts One and Two both have ‘printed by T.R. and E.M.’ for Smith. The single-volume versions all look very similar so are likely to be from the same shop. The printing of the composite volume (or most versions of it) is poorer than for the single parts, despite the title page. 10 Gangraena, ii. 127; Edwards, The Casting Down of the last and strongest hold of Satan (London, 1647), Thomason date 28 June, BL E394 (6), sig. A2.

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not out although expected within two or three days; by now it had ‘excressed to near 40 sheets’. In the event Thomason’s date was 13 July.11 Part One of Gangraena was entered with the Company on 8 January 1646 but dated by Thomason 26 February although it was described by Baillie as amongst ‘some late books’ on 20 February. Subsequent parts of Gangraena were subject to similar delays, but shared, as we have seen, the capacity to react to new material and events. Part Two (probably) was the subject of an exchange of letters between Baillie and the London Presbyterian minister Francis Roberts, when Baillie regretted delays in its appearance, ‘I marvell that Mr Edwards book is not yet come abroad; its stay is hurtfull’ but Roberts attributed the problems to ‘many unexpected enlargements’. Edwards collected information for Part Three as soon as he had finished with Part Two, and was already ‘writing up’ his material by September. It was licensed on 24 October; yet it was late December when Baillie recommended it to a correspondent and Thomason’s date is 28 December.12 There is no solid information on sizes of editions for most midseventeenth-century books and Gangraena is no exception. It is assumed that the economics of printing meant that editions of less than 500 or more than 2,000 were not worth producing. Rates of production are calculated on the basis of 250 impressions (125 sheets) per hour which suggests that the equivalent of some forty copies of a single part of Gangraena could have been produced in a ten-hour day, and almost 250 in a six-day week. An average edition of c.1,250 would have taken five or six weeks if printing had been done systematically from a finished text rather than the three months Edwards’s more haphazard techniques involved.13 It was common in practice for print shops to work on more than one book at a time, and this was essential for Edwards’s printers otherwise skilled workmen would have been idly waiting for the author to finish before the sheets of Gangraena were ready for collation and stitching. 11 Transcript of the Register of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, i. 113; Letters of Baillie, ii. 190 (to George Young), 201–2 (to William Spang); Thomason’s copy is BL E1 (1). 12 Transcript of the Register, i. 210, 223, 249 for the three parts of Gangraena; Letters of Baillie, ii. 352; BL E323 (2), for Gangraena, Part One; Letters of Baillie, ii. 358–9; the letters are undated but seem to relate to Mar. or Apr. 1646. Part Two was entered in the Stationers’ Register 4 Apr., but not received by Thomason until 28 May: BL E338 (12). For Part Three: Letters of Baillie, ii. 416; BL E368 (5). For George Thomason’s pamphlets collected in the 1640s, ‘the very day is written upon most of them that they came out’: Stephen J. Greenberg,‘Dating Civil war Pamphlets, 1641–1644’, Albion, 20 (1988); Michael Mendle, ‘The Thomason Collection: A Reply to Stephen J. Greenberg’; and Greenberg, ‘Rebuttall’, Albion, 22 (1990). The points at issue between Greenberg and Mendle concern the relationship between the collection and the printed Catalogue, rather than the dating of the pamphlets themselves. 13 Gaskell, New Introduction, 41, 167; Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, 405–8; Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 128.

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There are three broadly distinct editions of Part One.14 In all three the first section was printed separately from the two later sections; each edition thus had different irregular pagination. The first edition of Gangraena, Part One (Wing E228), was paginated to page 76 (after the prefatory material); at the bottom of this page was the heading to the second section, ‘A Copy of some Letters, with a Narration of Stories and Remarkable Passages concerning the Sectaries’, and then the section itself began on the next page, numbered page 49. The volume was then consecutively paginated to the end (page 184) with section three ‘Certain Corollaries and Observations’ beginning on page 113. The signature marks on this edition indicate that section one extended beyond the anticipated length, probably by four and a half sheets or thirty-six pages. Signatures run from the title page through the prefatory material into the main text, A . . . G (page 40), followed by h–m (pages 41–76), with the last a halfsheet. The signatures on the second section begin at H.15 The second edition, ‘enlarged’ (Wing E229), was reset but again Part One was printed separately, following the first edition more or less page by page with some variant spellings and printing marks along with the occasional more substantial alteration as pointed out by Ivan Roots.16 Section one ends again on page 76, but the heading for section two is on the next page, 81, and consequently references to the second and third sections in this edition are thirty-two pages ahead. The ‘Corollaries’ begin on page 145 and the main volume ends on page 216. The signatures suggest a more orderly printing from a predictable text; they follow on between pages 76 and 81, and are continuous to the Appendix which must have been produced as part of this edition although it is sometimes bound at the end of the first. The

Green, Print and Protestantism, 676, points out that Wing is not always a reliable guide to editions, sometimes noting as separate editions works which differed only in title page (as with both the 1644 and 1646 printings of Antapologia) while missing other variants. 15 Copies consulted include those in the BL (Thomason E323 (2) ), Chethams Library; John Ryland University Library of Manchester (R12062), TCD (Gall. 3b 16), NLW (BX 5202 E26), and DWL (1079 P15). The Bodl. copy, B4.1 Linc, is paginated in the same way as the other first editions but does include the Appendix and may have been intended as the first part of the combined edition, albeit with a 1st edn. title page. Rylands UCC 1701 is a similar copy of Part One with the appendix but with a 3rd edn. title page. 16 See ‘A note on the text’, following Introduction in Rota edn. e.g. p. 49 of the 2nd edn. has ‘Bishops loynes’ where the 1st edn., has ‘loyns’. The name of the notorious woman preacher, given as Mrs Atomy on p. 87 of the 1st edn., is here corrected (119) as Mrs Attaway. The 2nd edn. used more pointers in the margin such as * or the word ‘Note’ along with the printed hands also used occasionally in the 1st edn. Copies consulted include those in CCL; John Rylands University Library of Manchester (R10985 and UCC N573); NLW, Civil War Tracts 1646; Bodl. (4oX Jur (51), Tanner 843, and Wood 655); NLS (BCL A2874); and Glasgow University Library (Bo3-k.22). 14

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Preface was altered to indicate that twenty rather than eighteen months had ‘expired since the Antapologie came abroad into the world’. Several marginal notes were added or expanded between the two printings. On page 124, line 2 (page 92 of the first edition), a marginal gloss was added to a letter from Bristol, claiming that only men ‘of the New Light and New way’ were employed in parliament’s service: ‘This letter was written before Major Generall Skippons cominge downe to Bristol’. On page 131 of the second edition (99 of the first), where the Independent ministers in London resolved that Hugh Peter should stay in England despite his New England church’s command for his return, saying ‘That if the Church were twenty Churches that sent for him, he should not go’, a note was added:‘No Presbyterian Synod or Assembly ever took that power upon them against the expresse call of the Church, and without hearing the Church speak so peremptorily to determine’. Page 100 of the first edition discussed at length Hugh Peter’s profits from his parliamentary service as a counter to Cornelius Burgess’s £400 per annum,‘so much sticking in the stomacks of the Independents’. In the second edition (page 132) a long marginal note justified Burgess’s stipend. Finally, an additonal, indignant marginal note was added to the discussion of the book Uniformity Examined, on pages 212–13 (pages 180–1 in the first edition). Inevitably some changes were for the worse as on page 171 (page 139 of the first edition) where hasty proofreading rendered the ‘yong Scollers, freshmen and under-Graduats’ of Cambridge in the first edition, into Frenchmen in the second. The most important addition, however, was the eight-page Appendix, listing the latest errors to come to Edwards’s attention and further details of the sectaries’ pernicious practices, especially the misdeeds of Mrs Attaway. However, modern bibliographers insist on the ‘normality of nonuniformity’ as the first sheets of any print run would be corrected as they came off the press, so there will be many minor variants amongst copies of what are technically the same edition.17 The third edition of Part One ‘in the Presse’ when Edwards was completing Part Two probably comprised the first part of the combined Parts One and Two (Wing E227), described on the first title page as ‘The third edition, corrected and much enlarged’. This seems in fact to have been printed from the first, rather the second edition, again in two parts (with signatures running A–L, and Aa–P). The content too indicates the first edition as a basis so that again there are only eighteen months expired since the publication of Antapologia, although the additional notes are 17

McKenzie,‘Printers of the Mind’, 12; Johns, Nature of the Book, 91, 164.

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included, and ‘Freshmen’ rather than Frenchmen return to Cambridge University (page 72 in the second sequence). On the other hand the Appendix, although repaginated, is taken from the second edition—and so described itself, ‘in this second edition’—errata and omitted notes had been ‘carefully corrected’. The book has though been completely reset in a shoddier and denser format, probably more difficult to read, so that the first section ends at page 66 with ‘Here followes a Copie of some Letters . . .’; the pagination then reverts to page 1, with a repeated heading,‘A copy of some Letters . . .’ for the section which began on page 49 in the first edition, and on page 81 in the second. The pagination is then continuous to the end, at page 116 with the third section (the Corollaries), pages 52–104; the Postscript, pages 104–9; and the Appendix, pages 110–16. As these divisions indicate, the layout of the pages was very different from either of the first two editions; notes and even marks such as printed hands were set within the text rather than on the margins and consistent comparisons between page numbers are hard to make. Two separate printings of Part Two exist so far as I can tell; the first edition ran to 212 pages besides prefatory material; the second, more poorly printed (in the same manner as the third edition of Part One) contained 178 pages. Both are regularly paginated with an orderly sequence also of signatures reflecting the distinctive character of Part Two in which Edwards’s replies to Goodwin and other critics took up more space than urgent letters and stories. Copies of Part Two as an independent volume that I have seen have all been of 212 pages, although Wing lists the 178-page version also as a distinct edition in its own right. On the other hand, most of the combined Parts One and Two have the 178-page version although one copy has the 212-page printing, without a table. The errata on page 178 apply also to Part One while the tables which covered both parts are part of the same version; they are unpaginated but signatures follow on directly from the main text. The combined edition had a separate title page and separate pagination for Part Two. Presumably the 178-page version was primarily intended to be part of the combined volume but was perhaps also sold separately.18 The content of the text does not differ which created 18 Copies of this combined edition consulted include CCL; TCD, LL n13; DWL, 3049 A15 and 1044 N13; Bodl., Mansfield 276; Innerpeffray Library, Perthshire (J9); NLS, BCL C2691; Glasgow University Library, Bi3-i.2; New College Library, Edinburgh (B.a.17.2/2); York Minster Library, Stainton 116; and Huntington Library (439295). Wing also has a version [E233A], The Second Part of Gangraena, with 160 pages, but I have not seen it. E234 is the 178-page version, E235, 212 pages. I have seen copies of Part Two [E235], at John Rylands University Library (R12062, UCC 1702); TCD 3b 16; DWL, 1079 P15; NLS,A 2874. This is also the Rota version. The

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problems for cross-referencing, but there are innumerable variants of spelling besides stylistic contrasts, products of erratic proof-reading rather than deliberate revisions or corrections.19 There is only one version of Part Three (Wing E237), with extensive prefatory material, a main text paginated (with several errors and two unpaginated sections) from page 1 to 295, and an unpaginated table. Examining signatures rather than pages complicates matters somewhat. The very long preface has a separate signature sequence and was presumably printed separately once Edwards had finished his obsessive autobiographical justifications; the table which took up one and a half sheets (twelve pages) was also distinct and could be bound at the front or the end. The two unpaginated sections consist of two sheets or sixteen pages between page 16 and page 17, one sheet between 240 and 241. The text is continuous and the catchwords fit, suggesting Edwards could write to a set length, but the signatures indicate Edwards’s characteristic unexpected ‘enlargements’ which the printers had not allowed for.20 The additions Edwards made to his marginal notes for Part One are not without interest; he was anxious to avoid implicating Skippon, a city favourite, in Independent party-building at Bristol; he was keen to augment his references to William Ames, an author also much used by Independents, arguing that schism led to heresy; and he added to his defences of the Assembly and of a prominent Presbyterian minister. But these poorer quality of printing in the 178-page edition can easily be seen by comparing the border separating two sections on p. 19, with that on p. 24 of the 212-page version; it is also significant that the section, ‘A Justifcation and Vindication of the truth of the most materiall Passages related’, here starts on a new page. The combined edition with a 212-page Part Two is Henry Oxinden’s copy in CCL. 19 Some variations of printing make one version more accurate than the other but this is not a result of authorial intervention. On p. 34 of the 212-page edition, for example, the reference Timothy 1:12 is given for the commonplace that all Cretians are liars; p. 27 of the shorter version has the correct reference, Titus 1:12. On the other hand the longer version is correct on page 37 where it gives 16 Jan. for the city petition to the Lords, rather than 26 Jan., and on page 140 where Edwards notes that error 21 (rather than error 11) duplicates material in Part One (cf. 30, 116 of the 2nd edn.). 20 The copies I have seen, besides the Rota version, include John Rylands University Library of Manchester, R12062; NLW, 5202, E26; TCD, LL n13; Bodleian, Wood 655; NLS, BCL A1048, A2875; Glasgow University Library, Bi3.i.2; New College Library, Edinburgh (B.a.17.2/3). The passages on the ‘Levellers’ between pp. 16 and 17 were perhaps expected to fill one sheet and ultimately occupied two for the signatures run A/B/c/d/D while there are two signatures Ii covering the unpaginated section and pp. 241–8. There are many examples of inconsistent pagination towards the end of Part Three; to give just one, signature Nn (recte 273–80) is paginated 273, 174, 175, 276, 277, 179, 178, 280 in NLS, Copy, A2875, and 173–180 in Glasgow University Library Bi.3-i.2.

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changes hardly amount to a wholesale revision and their content is less important than the overall impression of books produced under pressure to meet immediate purposes. Gangraena was written in haste and updated or corrected in a haphazard and equally hurried fashion. In addition readers created their own versions of the texts; binding at the time or slightly later has produced many imperfect copies or copies not clearly assignable to precise editions; certainly different versions of both Parts One and Two are found as part of the combined edition.21 The briefest bibliographical discussion thus shows how the state of Gangraena as a physical object reflected the circumstances of Edwards’s writing. In Chapter 2 I discussed the ways in which Edwards’s Gangraena was always a ‘work in the making’. I return again to similar themes, here stressing how the nature of the printing industry helped to structure the conduct of religious polemic in the 1640s. The crucial factors for Edwards were his singular combination of protracted authorship with potentially speedy and flexible printing technology within communities that were extremely knowledgeable about all aspects of book production. The mechanics of print facilitated rapid responses—so that Edwards could regard fourteen days as a reasonable time for Goodwin to take account of his second edition in Cretensis, while we know from Thomason’s collection of tracts that a decent printed account of the battle of Marston Moor fought on 2 July 1644 was available in London by 8 July. The long genesis of Gangraena, Part One had its advantages enabling Edwards to react to new information and to several recent tracts, published only after his own work had been entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 January.22 The almost immediate printed responses of Edwards’s ‘victims’ or opponents are further testimony to the flexibility of the press in revolutionary London. Of the major responses (which Edwards dealt with in his Second Part), John Saltmarsh’s Groanes for Liberty (which attacked Gangraena in an appendix) was entered 4 March and Thomason had it by the 10th; John Goodwin’s Cretensis was entered three days later, and with Thomason by the 19th. William Walwyn’s several replies were rarely licensed but the first were also received by Thomason in mid-March. In the middle of composing a later tract Walwyn heard that, despite ‘all the labour towards the conversion and reducting of Master Edwards into a truly charitable and Christian disposition’, Edwards had produced another volume and Cf. n. 18 above. These included episodes in the pamphlet war between Calamy and Burton over the latter’s lectureship in Mary Aldermanbury, and the Baptists’ Confession of Faith. 21 22

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Walwyn was thus able to add ‘A Graine More, And no More’ advising readers to read his ‘Antidote’ twice over.23 It is hardly suprising that Cranford, as the licenser, could cite an unfinished version of Gangraena, Part One, with approval before its publication. In a sermon preached on 1 February he commended an account of ‘above 160 errours, many of them damnable, of which you shall have an account not long hence’. In the version published some six weeks’ later he added a marginal reference to ‘Mr Edwards Gangrene’—which had by then of course, some 180 errors. The notoriety of Edwards’s views could sometimes backfire, however. The delays in completing Antapologia meant it was attacked in print even before it was published, as occurred with other works of religious controversy. Fearing that ‘truth will hardly overtake a lye that is set out foure or five dayes before it’, Edwards included additional passages of self-justification in his Preface: ‘for besides other grounds calling for it, within these few dayes, just before the Antapologie was comming forth, a Pamphlet, entituled The Anatomist Anatomized was printed, rather to prepossesse the Reader against the Antapologie, then to answer the Anatomie of Independencie’. Edwards here referred to Sidrach Simpson’s reply to Alexander Forbes’s attack on the Apologeticall Narration, in which Simpson also mentioned that ‘there is an Antapology in Presse, or a collection of such faults as either mens mistakes and malice, or perhaps mens owne infirmities have made, either beyond the Seas or here. This Anatomist is a forerunner to that as some few great drops before a shower.’24 23 Transcript of a Register, 216, 219; Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty (London, 1646), BL E327 (20); Goodwin, Cretensis, BL E328 (20); Walwyn, A Whisper in the Eare, BL E328 (2), 13 Mar.; A Word More, BL E328 (20), 19 Mar. Walwyn, An Antidote against Master Edwards His Old and New Poyson (London, 1646), had an imprimatur from Bachelor 26 May 1646, and was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 10 June, the day Thomason noted receipt of his copy: The Writings of Wiliam Walwyn, ed. J. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 205, 215. 24 Cranford, Haereseo-machia, 5; Antapologia, sig. A1r–v; Sidrach Simpson, The Anatomist Anatomis’d (London, 1644), 4. Thomason’s date is 28 June 1644: BL E52 (22). This was mainly an answer to Alexander Forbes’s An Anatomy of Independency, entered with the Stationers’ Register on 13 June and available very promptly to Thomason on 14th: Transcript of a Register, 114; BL E50 (6). For another example, see Cornelius Burgess’s Sion College, What it is and What it Does, dated by George Thomason, 24 May 1648. This replied to two pamphlet attacks on the London Presbyterian clergy by John Goodwin and his church-member John Price but also provided ‘a Little Taste, by the way, of another Young Thing of Mr J. Goodwins, running about with the shell on the head before it be all hatcht, under the name of . . . The Youngling Elder’. This last pamphlet was not noted as received by Thomason until 15 June although its preface was dated 6 Apr.; it seems it circulated in an unfinished form much earlier: BL E444 (3), title page; E447 (27), title page and preface.

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The transparency of publishing processes was central to the religious controvesies of the 1640s. Thomas Webbe’s answer to Gangraena, ‘by a providence came to my hand without ever seeking it, or indeed imagining that ever Web (such an Heretick and Blasphemer) durst have appeared in print, or been taken notice of to be in London’. Sometimes information about printed polemic was made available directly. During their exchanges over the city Remonstrance in May 1646, ‘the neare neighbours’ John Bellamy and John Price argued face to face over a forthcoming pamphlet. When Price refused to check ‘matters of fact’ in an advance copy of Bellamy’s ‘Vindication’, Bellamy insisted on reading extracts out in the company of mutual acquaintances, including the ill-matched brothers-inlaw, the minister Samuel Clarke and the bookseller Henry Overton. Participants in the religious and political controversies of the 1640s in general, and Presbyterian polemicists in particular, differed from the gentlemanly scientific authors described by Adrian Johns, dependent on the members of the Stationers’ Company, printers and booksellers, who jealously guarded the mysteries of their crafts. Edwards may not have had direct access to the Stationers’ Hall, but he was clearly privy to its secrets as were such friends and allies as William Prynne, the Stationers’ lawyer, or James Cranford, one of the licensers of divinity books under parliament’s ordinance of July 1643.25 His intimate acquaintance with the activities of the Stationers’ Company intensified Edwards’s sense of humiliation at the hands of John Goodwin, who had never finished a reply to Antapologia despite entering it in the Stationers’ Register. In the Preface to Part One Edwards claimed Henry Overton, the bookseller-publisher, had ‘boasted the Answer was in the presse’, and that Samuel Eaton, another of Overton’s authors, had seen it. Eaton claimed it exposed Edwards as ‘a poor weak man, and my Book a slight easie piece’. When Goodwin challenged this version, Edwards insisted that the reply had been entered in the Stationers’ Hall-Book,‘so that I and many more lookt every day for the coming of it forth; and I never knew before now, that books were entred into the Hall-Book, but just when they were going to the presse’. It had been entered, ‘in July last, and given to the Book-seller to print . . . but stopped’. Some at least of this information was correct. Goodwin’s answer had been entered in the Register on 20 July 1645 under Bachelor’s authority and with Henry Overton as 25 Gangraena, ii. 137; Bellamie, Justification of the City Remonstrance, 47–8, 32; Johns, Nature of the Book, 102–3, 128, 137, 196–7; William M. Clyde, ‘Parliament and the Press’, Library, 4th ser. 113 (1932–3).

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publisher. It was finally published in late August 1646 and although a lengthy preface (dated 17 July 1646) dealt with Gangraena, Part Two and the current controversies over the city’s Remonstrance, much of the main text replying to Antapologia could have been produced months earlier. It may be, however, that Goodwin was not deliberately infuriating Edwards with delay, but had simply not finished the text. This work concludes with ‘A briefe presentment of the Chapters and Questions designed for discussion in the second part of this Answer’—but no second part ever appeared.26 Edwards regarded book production in the 1640s as a partisan affair.27 The determined Presbyterianism of his own bookseller-publisher, Ralph Smith, and the consistent support for Gangraena of the licenser Cranford have been discussed earlier. In Gangraena Edwards took for granted their service in the cause of truth, while attacking radical booksellers and licensers. The now notorious Giles Calvert, ‘One Calvert a Sectary and a Bookseller on Ludgate-hill’, was mentioned only briefly but ‘One [Henry] Overton an Independent Book-seller and a member of Master John Goodwin’s Church’ was a more frequent focus. Edwards noted in a margin: ‘All kind of unlicensed Books that make any ways for the Sects and against the Presbyterians are sold at his shop, and tis given out the man sels them, but not the Master’.28 These two men were indeed the underwriters of most of the attacks on Edwards. Calvert published Saltmarsh’s, several of Walwyn’s works, and Robert Bacon’s response; Overton, predictably, was the bookseller for John Goodwin and John Price, but also for the works of Samuel Eaton and Thomas Webbe, as well as Burroughs’s attack on Edwards. In the Epistle to Parliament in Part One, Edwards regretted that ‘never more dangerous unlicensed Books printed, then since the Ordinance against unlicensed printing’, but in many ways he was more angry at how many wicked books were able to obtain a licence. Under parliament’s ordinance of July 1643 all works were supposed to be entered in the Stationers’ Company Register before publication, with an imprimatur from one of the licensers there named. Different types of work— medicine, philosophy, small tracts and newsbooks, and so on—were allo26 Gangraena, i. sig. B1v–2r (in the margin); ii. 110; Transcript of a Register, 179; Anapologesiates Antapologias (London, 1646), BL E352 (5), Thomason date 27 Aug. The section on divisions amongst the Independents in Rotterdam did include a reference to Burroughs’s 1646 Vindication against Edwards, indicating some revision after July 1645. 27 This is in contrast to much modern discussion of the print trade (such as Green, Print and Protestantism) which stresses the pragmatic, material priorities of booksellers and printers. 28 Gangraena, ii. 9. Edwards was specifically concerned here with the distribution of The Last warning to all the Inhabitants of the City of London in Mar. 1646.

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cated to specific licensers with divinity books assigned to a group consisting largely of clerics with Presbyterian sympathies. It was by no means necessary to have works entered and licensed in order to reach an audience. It has been calculated, for example, that Thomason collected twice as many items in 1644 as were entered in the Stationers’ Register—and while Thomason missed some items, not everything entered will have been printed, so even this figure is an underestimate.29 Why then did licensing matter in the freedom of the 1640s when so many unlicensed books were produced? Answers must vary. For the most radical printers and writers such as Richard Overton there was the increasing danger in the mid-1640s of being harassed and imprisoned by parliamentary committees for printing or selling unlicensed books. Milton requested, but was refused, a licence for his Divorce tracts. For less provocative figures, such as the mainstream Independents, however, a licence was a sign of authority and respectability. Hence Edwards’s fury in Antapologia that Charles Herle, a prominent member of the Assembly, had licensed the Apologeticall Narration. Herle, he deduced, coming from Lancashire and so ‘having lived remote’ had been sadly ‘surprized’.30 Cranford’s effusive recommendations for Gangraena involved him in attacks from Edwards’s critics so that the riposte of John Lanseter to his representation in Gangraena also included ‘A little Crum for Mr Cranford, the licensor’ in the form of a mock imprimatur. John Bachelor performed a parallel service for many responses to Edwards’s works: Robert Bacon’s Spirit of Prelacy was a ‘remarkable Relation, penned with a sweet spirit of meeknesse, one of the most Sovereigne remedies for all our divisions, in my judgement deserves to be Printed’.31 Edwards predictably subjected Bachelor’s activities to extended, vituperative analysis, rather in the manner of Prynne’s detailed assault on the practices of the Laudian censors in the 1630s.‘One Mr Bachilor, the Licenser general of Books, not only of Independent Doctrines, but of Books for a general Toleration of all Sects, 29 Gangraena, i. sig. a2r; Clyde, ‘Parliament and the Press’; Greenberg, ‘Dating Civil War Pamphlets’, 389. Ralph Smith did not bother to enter or obtain licences for most of his 1647 publications. These were both ephemeral and extreme. Entrance and licensing were properly separate processes; the former established ownership of the ‘copy’ in a member of the Stationers’ Company, the latter authorized the content: Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’, 398–401; Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), History of the Book, iv. 564–5. 30 Baron, ‘Licensing Readers, Licensing Authorities’, 222–3 for Milton; Antapologia, 54; Hezekiah Woodward, A Short Letter, 12 did indeed use Herle’s imprimatur as evidence that the Apologeticall Narration could not be a ‘troubling of the church’. For ‘strategies of entrance’ in general, see Johns, Nature of the Book, 218–19. 31 Lanseter’s Lance, inside title page; Bacon, Spirit of Prelacy, imprimatur 11 Apr. 1646.

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and against Paedobaptisme etc.’ appeared in a list of London sectaries in Part One, and in Part Two Edwards mocked Goodwin’s claim that he had not replied to Antapologia because of the Presbyterian restrictions on the press: ‘when as all men know the Independents have a Licenser of their own at hand, Master Bachelor, who is such a friend to all the world of beleevers, that certainly he cannot deny Cretensis’. He was Licenser to Master Saltmarsh, Cretensis, Walwin, Webb and divers other Sectaries; . . . a Man-midwife to bring forth more monsters begotten by the Divell, and borne of the Sectaries within these three last years then ever were brought into the light in England by all the former Licensers the Bishops and their Chaplaines for fourscore years . . . severall Pamphlets for a Toleration, yea not only for a limited bounded Toleration of some Sects and opinions as suppose Anabaptists, Independents; but for a Universall generall Toleration.

Bachelor, in Edwards’s view, ‘besides that hee is no Minister, nor well studied man, is such an Ignoramus’ that he was unfit to be a licenser.32 The manuscript of Webbe’s reply, ‘by a providence’ come to his hand, proved to Edwards that Bachelor had not only given an imprimatur, but helped Webbe with his text, ‘mending severall things in the Answer’, particularly relating to the extreme claim to be equal with Christ. On the other hand, through malice or ignorance, Bachelor had let through many heretical anti-Trinitarian passages in Webbe: ‘putting in words in some places, blotting out words, and changing some expressions for others, yet hee let this passe without any correction or note upon it’. As we saw in Chapter 2, Edwards meticulously sought samples of Bachelor’s handwriting as further confirmation of the alterations—revealing again an insider’s access to publishing processes.33 An equally detailed discussion, which reveals Edwards’s concern with the minutiae of printing techniques, focused on Bachelor’s role in producing a second edition of Leonard Busher, Religious Peace, a work arguing for religious liberty first published in Amsterdam in 1614. The new edition of Busher was entered in the Stationers’ Register with Bachelor’s licence the same day as Gangraena, Part Two. The ‘wicked32 Anthony Milton,‘Licensing, Censorship and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’ Historical Journal, 41 (1998); Prynne, Canterburies Doome, 245 ff., passages altered or deleted in books licensed by Laud and his chaplains. They were, in Edwards’s eyes, spoiling good books, while Bachelor was disguising the faults of bad books. Gangraena, i. 97; ii. 42; iii. 102–3; ii. 139. The basis for the ‘no minister’ is unclear. Although there is no evidence for Bachelor’s ordination, he was appointed to a lectureship in Kent by parliament in 1643 and served as an army chaplain: DNB Missing Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 173, 347. 33 Gangraena, ii. 137–9.

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nesse of Master Bachiler the Independent may the more appear’ in that he did not give Busher ‘a bare Imprimatur’ but ‘a speciall Reccommendation . . . discourses of the lovelinesse, excellency, sweetnesse, glory shining in them’. Secondly he made the book more ‘reader friendly’ through ‘materiall alterations’ with marginal notes emphasizing important passages in a distinctive ‘great letter’. Edwards learnt this ‘from a person of some quality, and a Scholler who saw the Originall Book’. He concluded,‘This Bachiler is such a desperate Licenser, that . . . I am afraid that if the Devill himselfe should make a book, and give it the Title, A plea for liberty of conscience, with certaine Reasons against Persecution for religion, and bring it to Mr Bachiler, hee would license it, and not onely with a bare Imprimatur’.34 This was what godly authors like Edwards were struggling against. Bachelor insisted in February 1646 that he had not licensed books subject to the ‘harshest censure’, such as Williams’s Bloudy Tenent, but admitted authorizing works he disagreed with, ‘as a lover of Truth’, providing they were not positively harmful.35 The revisions of Busher or negotiations between Bacheor as licenser and Webbe as author were examples of practices commonplace throughout the seventeenth century, but for Edwards they were entirely illegitimate attempts to smuggle pernicious doctrines into the public domain. Thomas Hall, the Worcestershire Presbyterian, saw the world in similarly polarized terms. On his copy of Goodwin’s Theomachia, sold by Overton and licensed by Bachelor, he altered the latter’s name to ‘Babler’ and heavily underlined the location of Overton’s shop—in an all too appropriate ‘Pope’s Head Alley’.36 go od bo oks and bad: edwards ’s ‘printed sources’ Edwards’s Gangraena drew extensively on this deeply partisan world of print. He was inspired by and dependent on the elaborate polemical world of 1644–5, where Bastwick and Prynne, in particular, relentlessly attacked John Goodwin and John Lilburne who were equally zealous in response. Obscurer figures such as the Christ Church schoolmaster Vicars, writing as ‘a poore and unworthy Presbyterian’, came to Prynne’s and Bastwick’s defence and also endorsed Antapologia against the Independents’ ‘most Ibid. iii. 103–5; Transcript of a Register, 223. Bachelor’s remarks are prefaced to Goodwin’s Twelve Considerable Cautions (Feb. 1646), quoted in Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, i. 137–9. For the general point: Johns, Nature of the Book, 239–48. 36 Birmingham Reference Library, Thomas Hall Library, C24. 34 35

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unjust and injurious quarrellings . . . against his most learned Antapologia, not hitherto answered, indeed, unanswereable by the best of you all’.37 The drive to combat the impact of wicked books was one of Edwards’s strongest motives for writing while printed books were a major source for errors. He explained in Part One his use of ‘divers printed books, either of the sectaries themselves, or of persons of note and worth for learning and piety’ who had confronted errors. These books were ‘upon the margent by the errours’. ‘Quoting Books knowne to hundreds’ was, he repeated in Part Three, amongst the guarantees of the truth of his work. The de facto removal of restrictions on the press meant that books as sources of error and heresy loomed much larger in the 1640s than in the pre-war ‘Puritan underground’ where accusations derived more often from sermons and discussions, recorded in manuscript notes.38 Edwards’s immersion in the press ensured that his analysis was not confined to works of religious and political debate. He had an overheated awareness of the influence of newsbooks, denouncing them as the ‘pensioners’of the Independents and the stooges of the army.39 He also drew attention to the cheap print, including ballads and woodcuts, which mocked the Presbyterians and particularly the Assembly, ‘scorned by . . . a Ballad made of them, having a first and second part, wherein they are scoffed with the title of Black-bird Divines’. This ballad was called ‘A Prophecie of the Swineherds destruction, To the tune of the merry Souldier, or the joviall Tinker’, and included a woodcut of two men, ‘Sir John Presbyter and Sir Symon Synod’. Edwards provided an indignant description (which may well have boosted sales) of another picture in sectarian pamphlets, ‘an heart pictured, over which is written, Tender Conscience religiously affected, with some verses over that: and under the heart, with daggers at it, stands the Pope, the Prelat, and the Presbyter in the midst of them two, with a book in his hand, where Directory is written, Anti-christian Presbyter written by him, and the Crown under his foot’. Three pages of fulmination 37 Goodwin’s Theomachia was the most obvious provocation for Prynne. His Truth Triumphing was in turn attacked in Goodwin’s Innocencies Triumph; John Lilburne, Innocency and Truth Justified (London, 1645); Lilburne, A Copie of a Letter, written by John Lilburne to William Prinne upon the coming out of his last booke, intituled Truth triumphing over Falshood (London, 1645). The last two were produced in Jan. 1645; the Copie attacked Prynne’s ‘bitter and unsavoury Language against the poore Saints of God’ (2). See also Bastwick, Independency not Gods Ordinance; John Vicars, A Letter (London, 1645); Vicars, The Picture of Independency (London, 1645), 6–7. 38 Gangraena, i. 6; iii, Preface, sig. *3v; Lake and Como, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians’. 39 Gangraena, ii. 208–9; iii. 142; cf. Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 191–2.

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on the impact of this ‘wicked scandal’ followed, although Edwards took comfort from news from the Exchange that a counter-version picturing the Independents had been drawn in Holland.40 At another extreme, as described in Chapter Two, Edwards was influenced by Prynne’s Truth Triumphing and especially his A Fresh Discovery of Some . . . Stiling themselves New-Lights. Prynne’s ‘Corollaries’ and his copious extracts from radical writing (without refutation) provided models for Gangraena, while Edwards also cited Prynne for specific information concerning Independents and sectaries such as Peter, Goodwin, Burton, Lilburne, Hobson, and Beaumont, and the still anonymous author of Mans Mortality. But Edwards spread his net more widely, and did not duplicate Prynne’s extracts. Edwards’s working methods can be demonstrated more clearly through his use of other orthodox works, by Pagitt and Gataker. Some of the errors on the ‘moral law’ listed in Gangraena, Part One follow very closely the six Antinomian errors provided in Pagitt’s Heresiography, but although Edwards did acknowledge and use Pagitt, closer analysis reveals that Edwards was not copying Pagitt; both heresiographers were working from a common source in Thomas Gataker’s Gods Eye on his Israel. Pagitt simply reproduced the six errors given by Gataker; Edwards offered a more random, but more creative version. Gataker’s (and Pagitt’s) first error was Edwards’s number 66: ‘that the morall law is of no use at all to beleevers’ (Gataker had ‘a believer’); the second was 73; and the third, with additions by Edwards, was 79. The fourth error in Gataker was used, with elaborations, as Edwards’s error 75. Gangraena does not seem to have used the fifth error, but the sixth—that ‘when Abraham denied his wife . . . all his thoughts, words, and deeds were perfectly holy and righteous’—was adopted as Edwards’s 80th error.41 In addition Edwards cited Gataker for his errors 74, against fasting, and 78, that believers should not be troubled by sin. One peculiar result of Edwards’s approach is that the Antinomians themselves were rather effaced in his text. Gataker’s work was directed particularly against Giles Randall and John Simpson and in his text the errors were clearly assigned to the preaching of these men. In Gangraena, Edwards cited only Gataker 40 Gangraena, ii. 155–60; iii. 221, again condemns ‘disgracefull pictures of the Presbytery’. For the pictures discussed: Dictated Thoughts upon the Presbyterians late petitions (London, 1646), BL 669, fo. 10 (48), Thomason date 14 Apr. 1646; and The Tender Conscience religiously affected (London, 1646), E354 (11), 17 Sept. (not the version discussed in Edwards’s Part Two, which came out ‘about the sixth of this moneth of May’). Nigel Smith, ‘Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style’, in Corns (ed.), Literature of Controversy, discusses these pictures and notes the danger of quoting without condemnation. 41 Pagitt, Heresiography, 90–1; Gataker, Gods Eye on his Israel, sig. C2r–v; Gangraena, i. 25–6.

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not the radical preachers, compounding the under-representation of Randall already discussed. It is impossible to offer a comprehensive analysis of the scores of tracts used by Edwards in Gangraena; at least ten works of Goodwin’s are cited, twelve of Lilburne’s, six apiece of Saltmarsh’s and Prynne’s, four of Burroughs’s, three of Bastwick’s. The key tests of Edwards’s use of printed sources must concern radical rather than orthodox works. John Goodwin accused Edwards of ‘the most unworthy and unchristian . . . racking, wresting, misusing, misconstruing the words and phrases of the Apologists’, and more specifically of misrepresenting Jeremiah Burroughs when he used remarks in Hearts Divisions as a source for error 150 that magistrates should ‘bear with’ those in religious error. Edwards argued in a marginal note that this would mean those who refused in conscience to take up arms against an oppressive prince would escape punishment. Goodwin pointed out that Edwards ignored the passages in Burroughs’s book which supported the magistrate acting where error was destructive to the state, and claimed that Edwards’s example of doubts about bearing arms was precisely a situation where the civil authority could act. In Part Two, Edwards countered by arguing that Burroughs had preached on many occasions against too sharp a distinction between matters of religion and matters of state.42 How can we make a definitive judgement on whose view is ‘correct’? Each interpretation is rooted in an interpretive framework which validates the specific point. Goodwin’s accusation was not that Edwards misquoted Burroughs’s words, but that he distorted their meaning through his deletions and juxtapositions; a charge that can be validly made against his use of several other works. As often, however, Edwards’s necessarily rushed methods of work, hurling hastily read, undigested blocks of other men’s prose directly into his own book, had more unpredictable results. His (brief) treatment of the work of John Milton, whom posterity has made his most eminent victim, is instructive. Error 154 in Gangraena, Part One: ‘That ’tis lawfull for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitnesse or contrariety of minde arising from a cause in nature unchangeable’ directly and accurately quoted an italicized section from Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The next clause in Gangraena was another direct but mangled quote from some twenty pages later, ‘for disproportion and deadnesse of spirit, or something distastefull and averse in the immutable bent of name’. This makes no sense, unlike the correct version, which has 42

Goodwin, Anapologesiates, 190; Cretensis, 43; Gangraena, i. 33; ii. 97.

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‘immutable bent of nature’. The next clause is an abbreviated paraphrase of a passage ten pages later. Edwards had ‘man in regard of the freedome and eminency of his creation, is a law unto himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him, neither need he hear any judge therein above himself ’, based on Milton’s,‘for even the freedom and eminence of man’s creation gives him to be a law in this matter to himself, being the head of the other sex which was made for him; whom therefore though he ought not to injure, yet neither should he be forced to retain in society to his own overthrow, nor to hear any judge therein above himself ’. This is not a misleading account of these passages—or indeed of Milton’s general view of divorce—but it is not a thoughtful or systematic account of the pamphlet.A closer, more careful reading indeed might have alarmed Edwards even more. As it was he ignored Milton’s radical attitudes to the law, his optimistic views of human nature, or rationalist biblical criticism. Furthermore he failed to address an argument that directly opposed his own views on ‘toleration’: Milton’ s suggestion that ‘men who follow Anabaptism, Familism, Antinomianism, and other fanatic dreams’ may be driven to it by ‘the restraint of some lawful liberty which ought to be given men and is den’yd them’. Readers were thus not given a guide to Milton’s book, but a stark summary of its most obvious and controversial position. This is then juxtaposed in Gangraena with error 155, for which no source is given, ‘Tis lawfull for one man to have two wives at once’, which most unfairly connects the issue of divorce to the very immorality Milton was seeking to counteract. Milton’s reputation was then further impugned through the gratuitous association with Mrs Attaway’s marital adventures. She had resolved to ‘look more into . . . Master Milton’s Doctrine of Divorce’, for ‘she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk in the way of Sion, nor speak the language of Canaan . . . accordingly she hath practised it in running away with another womans husband’.43 In contrast to the ruthless ‘source-mining’ of Milton were the bloated passages from the pamphlets of Richard Overton and John Lilburne included in Part Three of Gangraena. Paraphrases of A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens provided many of the errors ‘on government’, such as number 50 which Edwards rendered, in an extended fashion, as That whatever the Fundamentall Constitutions of Kingdomes and Common wealths have been by forefathers, whatever agreements, compacts have been of subjection and obedience . . . yet the men of the present age following many 43 Gangraena, i. 34; ii. 11; Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as quoted from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ii. 1643–1648, 242, 328, 347, 278.

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hundred years after, ought to be absolutely free from what their forefathers yeelded unto, and freed from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations . . .44

The compacts of subjection and obedience were Edwards’s addition, but this is not a misleading account of the argument. Later in this volume whole pages are taken up with more or less accurate extracts from Overton’s Arrow against all Tyrants, and A Remonstrance again.45 A more complex conclusion on Edwards’s treatment of the Baptist Thomas Collier is found in Barry White’s pioneering study.46 White argued that ‘Edwards dealt fairly, if unsympathetically, with his opponent’s activities and writings’, and indeed offered unequalled (if unverifiable) evidence for Collier’s evangelizing activities in Somerset. Edwards’s discussion is ruthlessly selective, however, in its concentration on the most alarming aspects of Collier’s writings; he omitted to mention his relatively orthodox Calvinism, perhaps deliberately; perhaps, as we have seen, because Edwards like Baillie assumed all ‘Anabaptists’ shared the belief in general redemption of Lambe, Denne, or Oates. Kiffin and Knollys were misrepresented in similar fashion. Edwards discussed one of Collier’s books and ‘ignored’ two others although we should be cautious in developing conspiracy theories here for one of these missing books was extremely rare. It was not bought by Thomason and may have been unavailable to Edwards also. But we should also note that the main purpose of this missing tract, Three great queries now in controversie (1645), was to denounce Arminian views. Edwards used Collier’s Certaine Queries to illustrate opposition to baptism, and his denial of the civil magistrate any power over the true church. The main focus though was on Collier’s suggestion that parliament should give power to the Saints, which White describes as a ‘not unreasonable deduction’, given that Collier did insist that he was writing of an external kingdom as well as a spiritual kingdom. Edwards’s hypersensitivity to political radicalism in Part Three ensured that this aspect of Collier’s argument loomed much larger in Gangraena than in the original work. Furthermore, Edwards left out Collier’s insis44 Gangraena, iii. 16; for the original,‘for whatever our Forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered, or were enforced to yeeld unto; we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kindes of exorbitancies, molestations or Arbitrary power’: Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, 354–5. 45 Gangraena, iii. 149–51 (The Arrow); 194, 198–203, 208–9 (The Remonstrance). 46 B. R. White, ‘Thomas Collier and Gangraena Edwards’, Baptist Quarterly, 24 (1971); Richard D. Land,‘Doctrinal Controversies of English Particular Baptists (1644–1695) as illustrated by the Career and Writings of Thomas Collier’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1979), which argues that Collier’s radical spiritualized millenarianism of the 1640s, when he was at odds with more ‘formalist’ Baptists, was succeeded by a more moderate stance in debates with the Quakers in the 1650s.

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tence that civil magistrates could restrain all civil disorders, including those committed by ‘saints’; and his denial of toleration to Catholics as ‘proved enemies to the Civill State’. This echoes the treatment of Burroughs denounced by John Goodwin. A pattern of selective quoting rather than outright misquoting is repeated in Edwards’s analysis of Hugh Peter’s writing. The extensive discussions of Peter were based also on his actions and his preaching, but included an account of Master Peters last report of the English wars, which ran to almost twenty pages, an achievement in itself given that Peter’s original only covered twelve.47 Edwards managed this through a typically repetitive technique of showing, ‘First, the maine designe and scope of these Answers and Reports: Secondly, the way and manner of managing it, to make his designe take’. Within Peter’s design Edwards discerned eleven ‘particulars’ including excusing the sectaries from ‘all blame’ and magnifying the success of the Independent commanders in the army.48 Edwards’s technique throughout is accurate if selective quotation, recycled as wilful misunderstanding. His seventh particular,‘excessive boasting, trusting in, and omnifying this Army’, ran together passages from several different pages to create a misleading impression without distorting the words on the original pages. Edwards gratuitously added ‘a speech lately related me, of a great man of Master Peters his Religion’ that the army could defeat the great Turk.49 Peter’s suggestion—‘Why may we not follow the practise of other Reformed Churches? and gather up godly youths out of shops, and send them for improvement somewhere, why not a Colledge of Oxford set apart to that use?’—as a solution to the lack of able preachers, and his proposal for flexible approbation of itinerant preachers who could not meet the rigid demands of the Assembly, surely strike modern readers as moderate, flexible proposals. Edwards, however, picked up one of the least important aspects of Peter’s argument to pursue his own agenda: But by the way let me ask Master Peters, why not some sent to Cambridge, but all to Oxford? This clearly shewes the designe, because Cambridge, all the Colledges in Cambridge are Presbyterian, but at Oxford there being so many preaching Commanders and Officers, they may quickly learn the opinions of the Army, and their way of preaching and be sent forth with their desperate Principles, destructive both to Church and State.50

47 Gangraena, iii. 127–46; Master Peters last report of the English wars (London, 1646), BL E351 (12), Thomason date 27 Aug. 48 49 Gangraena, iii. 128, 131. Ibid. 133–4. 50 Last Report, 12–13. Gangraena, iii. 131.

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Edwards justified his fifth point, that Peter ‘crys up, magnifies and extolls to the Heavens the Commanders in the Army of his Religion and mind’ through the ‘great wrong and injury he hath done Colonell Whalley in this Relation’ of the taking of Worcester, by the simple method of omitting from his discussion the phrases in which Peter mentioned Whalley, (whom he described as ‘that valiant Commander of Horse’) and extracting only the references to Pride, Eure, and Rainborough. He does include Peter’s remarks on Whalley for point six,‘Weakening and darkning the valour, faithfulnesse and worth of other Commanders, not Independents’, claiming Peter gives Whalley (who was rather optimistically regarded as sympathetic to Presbyterianism) ‘only a preparatory part’—when in Edwards’s view he had reduced the city ‘to the last point’.51 The distortions in the presentation of Milton or Peter, important to an analysis of Edwards’s methods, do not matter much for those whose main concern is the authors themselves for they can consult the original works. One basic principle of heresiography was to isolate the most damning and dangerous passages—hence Edwards is most partial on the relatively ‘moderate’ Burroughs or Peter, but less misleading on the ‘Leveller’ pamphlets; these indeed were so terrible that he could scarcely bear to leave any paragraph out. Problems arise when Edwards’s account is used for books where no copy of the original source has survived, as with Barry Reay’s discussion of Laurence Clarkson’s Pilgrimage of Saints: ‘Luckily we can get some idea of its contents from Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena’. Edwards cited Clarkson’s work for errors 1 and 4 (on the Scriptures), and 97 and 107–8 ‘Of the Church, Gospell, Ministry and Sacraments’, including ‘That there ought to be in these times no making or building of Churches, nor use of Church-ordinances, as ministering of the Word, Sacraments, but waiting for a Church’. The analysis presented here would suggest that while Clarkson almost certainly wrote the words quoted (or an approximation of them), the overall impression of the work may be misleading.52 A contrasting problem with Edwards’s use of printed material is worth Last Report, 4, compared with Gangraena, iii. 131–2. Barry Reay,‘Laurence Clarkson: An Artisan and the English Revolution’, in Christopher Hill, Barry Reay, and William Lamont (eds.), The World of the Muggletonians (London: Temple Smith, 1983), 168. Clarkson claimed in his autobiographical Lost Sheep Found that Giles Randall sold copies of The Pilgrimage for him. It is mentioned briefly in other contemporary works. Gangraena, i. 18–19, 28–9, 97 for the errors. The main description of Clarkson (72–4) included details of proceedings against him by the committee at Bury for ‘dipping’ in July 1645 and further extracts from The Pilgrimage. Clarkson had now, claimed Edwards, ‘turned from Anabaptist and Dipper, to be a Seeker’. Perhaps this description helped to structure Clarkson’s own account of his sectarian development. 51 52

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a brief discussion, the perplexing matter of material he ‘ignored’ or underplayed. As with Collier, so with Peter, he discussed some printed material, and left out other works. Edwards used scathing oral reports to dismiss Peter’s sermon on the 2 April 1646 fast day, preached at Christ Church: ‘I heard not the Sermon, but it was related to me by some Ministers, and Citizens, who did hear it, that they beleeve never in the memory of man so weak and so odd a Sermon was preached before such an Auditory.’53 Peter had embarrassed his audience, claimed Edwards, by holding up his hands to consent to a marriage between the city and the army, and urging the reluctant congregation to do the same. By the time Part Three was under construction, a printed version of this sermon could have been used by Edwards. This confirmed that Peter had at least used a wedding image, urging that both city and parliament come to the associated dinner as if it were a marriage feast. The printed version also had an epistle to the parliament in which Peter made an appeal for peace that must have been entirely uncongenial to Edwards, arguing that religious error should be dealt with by public debate, ‘reasonable souls may sooner certainly be taught with Reason and Scripture, then with cudgels’. Passages such as this were no help to Edwards’s construction of Peter as Independent agitator, while there is no mention at all in Gangraena of the sermon preached on the same occasion by the moderate Joseph Caryl which offered a judicious critique of overzealous heresiography.54 Books were, for Edwards, a crucial means by which errors were spread throughout England, and (in his text) a vital source. But he was most exercised by the books produced by those who were also dangerous preachers and activists (whose authorial identity was underlined as we shall see), rather than by intellectual error per se. Hence there is much less in Edwards than in Prynne about the very alarming book The Bloudy Tenent, written by Roger Williams, which argued for broad religious toleration. The book (with no author named) is quoted very briefly as error 13 in Part One with the same words quoted in a discussion of recently published books on toleration, and it is one of the books Edwards recommends for burning. But Williams’s authorship is mentioned only in Part Two, with a Gangraena, iii. 123, Peter, Gods Doings and Mans Duty, 38, sig. A1r; Caryl, England’s Plus Ultra. Caryl is discussed in Ch. 5, below. A much more prosaic account of this fast day is in Harrington’s Diary for Thursday 2 Apr.: ‘Day of Thanksgiving: The Houses of Parliament and Assembly of Devines feasted at Grocers hall but first heare 2 sermons at Christchurch of Mr Caril and Mr Peters’: The Diary of John Harrington MP, 1646–1653, ed. Margaret F. Stieg (Somerset Record Society, 74, 1977), 16. 53 54

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passing reference in a paragraph concerned with another New England radical, Samuel Gorton, a ‘great Sectarie in New-England, holding many desperate opinions there; a copie of which, given by Mr Williams of NewEngland (that writ the Book cal’d The bloudy Tenet) unto a Reverend Minister now at London, I have seen and perused’.55 Gorton mattered to Edwards because he had come back to old England to vent his ‘desperate opinions’ in Lambe’s congregation, whereas Williams, despite his dangerous book, was not a troublemaker in England. Similarly, despite Edwards’s concern with Antinomianism, he never mentioned the New England clerical associate of Anne Hutchinson, John Wheelwright, although the latter’s heterodoxy had been magnified in Weld’s A Short Story, which was amongst Edwards’s sources. The more intellectually inclined Samuel Rutherford, in contrast, roundly denounced Wheelwright in his The Spiritual Antichrist (1648).56 Radical books were most dangerous when associated with religious and political activism in Edwards’s ‘here and now’. defending gangr aena Gangraena predictably aroused some outraged printed responses, especially from those named in Edwards’s tract, and some equally committed defences, most notably by Edwards himself in Parts Two and Three. By no means all of Edwards’s ‘victims’ went into print to defend themselves. The decision to reply was not straightforward; raking over the faults of individuals in the public prints was a controversial even illegitimate undertaking in the Puritan tradition, and some feared (or professed to fear) descending to Edwards’s level. In London intra-Puritan debates of the 1620s and 1630s, print had been very much a last resort.57 More generally, dignifying Gangraena with an answer risked giving Edwards’s distasteful polemic a significance and credibility it did not deserve. As the response to Antapologia from well-known Independents was, in Edwards’s view, disgracefully sparse, so Gangraena was challenged mostly by the more radical and less respectable ends of the religious spectrum. Jeremiah Burroughs of the nationally prominent Independents and the Cheshire man Samuel Gangraena, i. 20, 122, 171; ii. 174–5; cf. Coffey,‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited’. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 199–200; Foster, ‘New England and the Challenge of Heresy’. 57 Lake and Como,‘ “Orthodoxy” and its Discontents’. 55 56

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Eaton were the major exceptions.58 Hugh Peter’s renunciation of any intention of replying to critics (such as Edwards?) was typical of the high-minded protestations of the non-responders: ‘how I have been represented unto you, and others, by printings or otherwise, shall not fill up this paper’.59 Those who did reply adopted various strategies of justification and apology. One technique was to answer Edwards in a postscript to a more substantial work, hence implying that Gangraena, however unpleasant, was somewhat marginal. Marchamont Nedham’s reply to Vicars’s Schismatick Sifted served also as a reply to ‘Master Edwards his Gangraena’, while John Lilburne offered ‘unto Tho. Edwards, the Author of the 3d Ulcerous Gangrena, a bone or two to pick’ within a larger attack on the powers of the House of Lords. John Saltmarsh’s answer to Part One was a late postscript in a miscellaneous volume against Presbyterian intolerance; his answer to Part Two also responded to Gataker and two ‘nameless’ authors.60 Others professed to their readers that they went reluctantly into print. Thomas Webbe claimed it was to ‘my hearts grief ’ that he had engaged his pen against Edwards but was satisfied a ‘sweet and Christian-like Answer’ was God’s will. He was concerned lest ‘hatred should answer hatred, and malice, malice’, but claimed that Edwards threatened his livelihood as well as his good name. Benjamin Cox, a Particular Baptist, similarly judged ‘it no honour to encounter such a man as you’.61 Some, like John Lanseter had, on their own account, tried to deal with Edwards 58

Jeremiah Burroughs, A Vindication of Mr Burroughs Against Mr Edwards his foule Aspersions, in his Spreading Gangraema, and his angry Antiapology Concluding with a Briefe Declaration What the Independants would Have (London, 1646), BL E345 (14), Thomason date 23 July; Eaton and Taylor, A Just Apology for the Church of Duckinfield. Another possible exception is Robert Bacon with his influential connections to Viscount Saye and Sele, but he had links with London General Baptists and is described by Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 138 as an Antinomian. 59 Peter, Gods Doings and Mans Duty, sig. A3r. 60 M. N. [Nedham], Independencie No Schisme, BL E344 (24), Thomason date 16 July; John Lilburne, The Oppressed Mans Oppressions declared . . . As also there is thrown unto Tho Edwards, the Author of the 3d Ulcerous Gangrena, a bone or two to pick (London, 1647), 30 Jan.; John Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty. Presented From the Presbyterian (formerly Non conforming) Brethren, reputed the ablest and most learned among them, in some Treatises called Smectymnuus . . . Also Some Quaeres For the better understanding of Mr Edwards last Book called Gangraena (London, 1646); licensed by John Bachelor, 27 Feb.: ‘These Groanes for Liberty, out of Smectymnuus his own mouth, I approve to be printed’. BL E327 (20), Thomason date 10 Mar. 1646 corrected to 1645; Saltmarsh, Reasons for Unitie, Peace and Love. With an Answer . . . to Master Edwards, his Second Part, called Gangraena, directed to me . . . ( London 1646), BL E340 (30), Thomason date 17 June. 61 Benjamin Cox, An after-reckoning with Mr Edwards, or a True and Sober answer to a false accusation (London, 1646), 1; Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 1.

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through the time-honoured godly methods of private admonition and conference: despite intending ‘to cleare himself as publikly as he had asperst him’, Lanseter nonetheless determined first to speak directly to Edwards ‘in a peaceable way’.62 John Goodwin effectively contrived to have his cake and eat it, producing a fifty-page reply to Part One in a matter of weeks while declaring that he had not expended much effort on such a worthless work: ‘Reader, I have (for the present) given thee onely a taste of Mr Edwards grapes: yet sufficient (I presume) to convince thee, that his vine, is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah . . . I professe truly, that I have not read one quarter of the book, as yet; nor know whether I shall ever care to read it through or no.’ In Hagiomastix, he dealt briefly with Part Three of Gangraena, ‘not judging [it] worthy of being smitten any more with the pen, but rather with the whip of correction’.63 The resort to print was justified by the pressing need to combat Edwards’s pernicious lies. The title page of Goodwin’s Cretensis offered a ‘cure of the said dangerous ulcer, called Gangrena, and to prevent the spreading of it, to the danger of the precious soules of men’. Drapes claimed in his Epistle ‘To the Impartiall Reader: Had not truth been more engaged in this following discourse then my selfe, I should have rejoyced in the continuing of my accustomed silence’. It was essential that the ‘free borne people of England’ were shown that their ministers were prone to error so they would not fall into a ‘lamentable slavery’. Cox feared ‘silence should argue a guiltiness’ and bring disgrace on ‘the way of God in which I endeavour to walk’.64 Answers to Gangraena took a variety of forms, some very general, others more specific. There were broad, impersonal, or ideological critiques of Edwards’s enterprise such as To the High Court of Parliament. A Dilemma from a Parallel Humbly Presented, which sought to prove that Gangraena was as much a threat to parliament’s privileges as Charles I. Extracts from Edwards were put side by side with quotations from royalist declarations against parliament’s proceedings in the summer of 1642 in separate ‘parallel’ columns on each page. Thus it was shown that both Edwards and the king sought to constrain parliament’s freedom of action, and that both 62

Lanseters Lance, sig. A3v. Goodwin, Cretensis, 50; Goodwin, Hagiomastix or the Scourge of the Saints Displayed in his Colours of Ignorance and Blood (London, 1647), BL E374 (1), Thomason date 5 Feb. 1646 corrected from 1647, sig. b1v. 64 Drapes, Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 31; Cox, An After-reckoning, 1. 63

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accused the parliament of fostering sectarianism and schism.65 John Saltmarsh, too, mostly confined himself to generalities. At the other extreme, individuals went into print to defend themselves or, in one case, to justify a particular book. Thomas Webbe’s Mr Edwards’ Pen no Slander or some of Walwyn’s replies were examples of the first.66 The Counter Buffe challenged Edwards’s use of Little Non-such, a pamphlet he had quoted for errors on allegorizing the Scriptures and, especially, opposition to the forbidden decrees of marriage. The Counter Buffe suggested these matters were, at the least, open to question.67 John Goodwin combined self-defence with responses to Edwards’s accounts of several other men, while John Lanseter added a general condemnation of Gangraena as partisan and inaccurate to his own version of his proceedings at Bury St Edmunds. The Baptist Edward Drapes produced a most interesting and complex reply. It included general criticisms of Edwards as an uncharitable liar, specific defences of Drapes’s close Calvinist Baptist associates Paul Hobson and William Kiffin, along with the General Baptist Samuel Oates, but also some extended passages of middle-level critique of Edwards’s discussions of independency. Where Edwards had presented Independency as a ‘meer Faction’, supported by ‘Needy, broken, decaied men’, Drapes mounted a vigorous defence of the Independents and turned the tables on the Presbyterians. As Presbyterians admitted all kinds of men promiscuously to their parish assemblies, it must be they who had the support of ‘needy and broken men’, and it was Presbyterians who were a ‘bloody’ and a ‘prophane people’. In his appeals to the Scots to oppose sectarianism it was Edwards who was provoking a new war, not that sectaries sought a new war against the Scots. The Saints, from the time of Christ, were always persecuted, but they would triumph despite all Presbyterian attempts against them ‘with a Petition, a 65

To the High Court of Parliament. Walwyn, A Whisper in the Eare of Mr Thomas Edwards, reprod. in Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, vol. iii, and Writings of William Walwyn, ed. McMichael and Taft; Walwyn, A Still and Soft Voice from the Scriptures Witnessing them to be the Word of God (London, 1647), pub. in Mar., in Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft. 67 The Counter Buffe or Certain Observations upon Mr Edwards his Animadversions touching a Pamphlet intituled Little Non-such (London, 1647), BL E399 (25), Thomason date 22 July. This, like the original tract, was printed for ‘H. P.’ and may, of course, have the same author. Edwards (Gangraena, iii. 2) used Little Non-such for the error that the story of Adam was an allegory; The Counter Buffe, 3–4, pointed out that in Little Non-such, the issue was posed as a query, but insisted that there were ‘Allegories, Tropes, and Figures’ in the Bible. For discussion of the forbidden decrees: Counter Buffe, 7–15. For the original tract: Little Non-such: or certaine new questiones (London, 1646), BL E353 (8), Thomason’s date, 3 Sept. 1646. 66

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Remonstrance, gangrenous Discourse, and virulent sermon’. It could not be schism to refuse communion with the English church, for it was not a true church and no one could prove it was:‘Tractate after Tractate, sermon after sermon, Petition after Petition, Gangrena after Gangrena and Volume after Volume, they would never be able to doe it; a third, nay a fourth Gangrena wil not effect it’.68 The responses to Gangraena included a rich variety of extravagant insult. We illustrated in Chapter 1 Goodwin’s laboured contempt for Edwards’s academic competence, his weak Latin and uncertain grammar, and his shameful reputation as a polemicist so faulty that a woman could answer his arguments, marvelling in Anapologesiates that he had recommended his 1641 work, Reasons against Independent Government, to the Parliament in Antapologia, ‘though this piece of his hath been convicted, and baffled by the pen of a woman, and was never yet reliev’d by him with any rejoynder’.69 As we have seen, Edwards advertised all these insults through repetitious denials in his own works, most plaintively in the Preface to Part Three.70 Goodwin was unrepentant about the delays in his own reply to Antapologia, and mocked Edwards’s prolific polemic. It was only because Presbyterians preached to ‘bare walls and pews’ that they had the gall to fill their sermons with ‘loose and lying, and frivolous reports and stories, or virulent invectives against the Saints and servants of God’ and so much time to write. Independents’ pastoral success meant they were too busy to ‘be as like the Tree spoken of in Revelation as Mr Edw[ards] himselfe’.71 Other religious radicals queued up to denounce Edwards book, ‘called in Latine Gangrena, But in English a Book of Scandals’, ‘That simple book, that libelling book of Mr Edwards called the Gangraena’, full of ‘Apocryphal stories, feigned tales and forged relations’. Edwards, the ‘famous forger of these latter dayes’, was a persecutor of true religion ‘dwelling in Club Court, between the Pope and the Prelate, a little on this side the fagot in Smithfield’.72 Walwyn suggested Edwards had been poisoned by his own Gangraena, ii. 183–5; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 8–12, 14, 15–17, 20. Goodwin, Cretensis, 10; Anapologesiates, 2. On p. 205, Goodwin yet again denounced Edwards’s ‘Grammaticall infelicitie’. 70 Gangraena, iii. sig. )(v; cf. ii. 37. 71 Cretensis, 15–16. Goodwin was mocking Edwards’s promise in the Preface to Part One, ‘I aim at, and shall endeavour to be like that tree spoken of in the Revelation, to yeeld fruit every moneth’: sig. b1v. 72 Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty, 25; Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, 45; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, Preface; A Letter, 10, and dedication to Edwards. Compare also Lilburne, Oppressed man, 21,‘that ulcerous book’. 68 69

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bile against the godly, while Saltmarsh declared: ‘I am afraid of you. Your face and complexion shows a most sadly parched, burnt, and withered spirit’. Very similar comments on Edwards as a sick man were made by Henry Pinnell: ‘You may guesse at Master Edwards his diet and constitution by his complexion, and so long as his queasy pen no better digesteth those crude, raw and incocted informations, no mervaile if you reade his sicknesse in his forehead, as you may the substance of his booke in the front of it.’73 These comments may well be referring to actual physical weaknesses of Edwards, but they may equally plausibly be an extension of the metaphor of disease from the book to its author. Most prevalent of all amongst the general attacks was the objection that bitter, public ‘particularizing’—exposing the faults of individuals— was not the way the godly should deal with error and division. John Saltmarsh’s argument was typical: ‘Doth not the word bid you restore those that are fallen in meeknesse and tell your brother his fault first betwixt you and him? And you never yet came to any of them that I could hear of, but print, proclaim, tell stories to the world of all you hear, see, know. Is Christ in this spirit?’74 The crucial text alluded to by Saltmarsh was Matthew 18: 15: ‘Moreover, if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother’. Henry Pinnell, one of the Poole preachers, used an adjacent passage, arguing that the church should be told of the failings of the Saints, and seek to reform them ‘before the world heare of them’. As John Bellamy pointed out, however, in his dispute with Price over the city Remonstrance, and with overt comparison to Edwards’s proceedings, the verses following Matthew 18: 15 advised that if a brother ‘will not hear thee’ he should be challenged in front of witnesses, and, failing that, his fault should be told ‘unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican [Matthew 18: 16–17]’.75 For Bellamy and Edwards, error had spread too far for private admonition. 73 Walwyn, A Parable, or consultation of physitians upon Master Edwards (London, 1646), in Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft, 255; Saltmarsh, ‘An Answer in few words to Master Edwards’, unpaginated appendix to Reasons for Unitie, Peace and Love; Gangraenachrestum, 8. This passage may indeed be taken from Saltmarsh; Johns, Nature of the Book, 403, for 17th-cent. beliefs that physical disabilities were a sign of inner psychological states. 74 Saltmarsh, ‘An Answer in few words to Master Edwards’. 75 Maddocks and Pinnell, Gangraenachrestum, 5; Bellamy, Justification of the Citie Remonstrance, epistle to John Price, sig. A3v. Later pamphlet controversies also connected the issue of ‘particularizing’ with attitudes to Edwards. A defender of ‘Sion College’ in 1648 asked Price how he could spread scandals against the Presbyterians: ‘are not you the man, amongst others, that hath so often accused and enveighed against M Edwards for particularizing of

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But Edwards’s opponents saw no justification for this public assault. Goodwin denounced it as ‘so polluted an intention, as to call the world together to see the nakednesse of the Saints . . . he hath spread a table for Satan with the shame and sorrowes of the Saints . . . yea he hath made Belzebub himselfe drunk with the bloud of the Saints’.76 Others claimed Edwards sought to ‘kill the Saints in their good name, and in their reputation’; he was more cunning than Machiavelli, as ‘his Gangrenous Epistle testifyes, by his Going, Writing, Eavesdropping, his Sending his Spyes, Emissaries,Agents, and factors abroad, to pry into the haltings, failings, infirmityes, and nakednes of his Brethren . . . exposing them to a publique sale, to the view of all men, even to his own shame’. He should ‘fill not the world with clamors of Schismaticall and Hereticall Seducers’, but ‘preach and hold forth the everlasting Gospell’.77 Lanseter similarly condemned Edwards for a ‘stronger desire to discover the weaknesse of those that are godly’, than the wickedness of drunkards, swearers, idolaters, and witches, while Walwyn pictured him egging on his ‘Intelligencers’ to discover suitably gory misdeeds:‘A Taylor and Porter Preach, whats this now adayes’, ‘Is there none amongst them addicted to drunkennesse, or whoredome or theivery?’78 In Part Two Edwards reproduced a letter from his close ally, Henry Roborough, to counteract ‘The great objection against you is, You are too vehement in your opposition’. The practice of Luther was mobilized in Edwards’s defence against the charge of ‘particularizing’. Edwards and his allies argued that they were not publicizing the faults of the Saints or the minor peccadilloes of their ‘brothers’, but warning a credulous people, and performing a vital task in exposing heretics and blasphemers in the defence of God’s truth. Ironically Goodwin himself in response to similar accusations justified personal attacks on the grounds they were directed men, printing their names, words, and actions to their perpetuall oblioquie’. Yet ‘Mr E. named those, that so weak Christians might know the wolves, though in sheeps cloathing: Mr P. names these that he might undermine and enervat the successe of their Ministery thereby’: The Pulpit Incendiary Anatomized (London, May 1648), 6. The same issue was raised in the bitter recriminations between Price and Walwyn in 1649. 76 Cretensis, 4–5; cf. Hagiomastix, sig. B4, where Goodwin writes of Gangraena’s service for Satan, ‘against the Saints by reproaching, calumniating, aspersing, traducing them in the sight of the sunne’. 77 Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, 40; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 7; A Letter, 7. Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 4 also argued that if he had erred (which was not conceded), Edwards should have dealt with him by brotherly admonition instead of denouncing him to all the world. Nedham, Independencie no Schism, 2–3, condemned the use of harsh words. 78 Lanseters Lance; Walwyn, A Parable, in Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft, 253.

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only against those who were ‘for the High and Antiparliamentary way of Presbyterie’.79 In the printed controversy over Gangraena there was consequently a fundamental cleavage over who was a saint or a brother. To his opponents Edwards’s heretics were God’s persecuted Saints, his errors were truths, ‘innocent, yea and well-deserving truths’, in John Goodwin’s terms. Edwards sought to make ‘the precious Elect and beloved ones of God’ odious to the world. ‘Many things . . . are called Error and Heresie, Antinomianism, Familism, and then Sectaries; But under these reproachful names there may and do lie hid many glorious truths’. He was ‘blaspheming many Truths of God, under the names of errors and heresies’.80 Saltmarsh professed to believe that Edwards was performing a service to the truth, ‘by presenting some truths under the name and notion of errours and heresies, which can scarce obtain from the press and pulpit any other way of appearing abroad’.81 Several others argued that Edwards was, perhaps deliberately, dividing and undermining the parliament’s cause, ‘Rayling and reviling of a people they know to be faithfull’, furnishing ‘the profane men of the world with multitudes of scoffes and jeeres against Jesus Christ, his wayes and his Saints’. Being labelled ‘Hereticks, Schismatickes and many other such like names’ had ‘disheartened many and caused them to leave the service’, claimed Thomas Webbe, while Lilburne argued that he had been attacked ‘for no other cause but for standing for the Fundamentall Lawes of England’.82 John Goodwin in particular highlighted the crude simplicity of Edwards’s contrasts between truth and error, by claiming that several of the errors listed in Gangraena were positions held by men in the Presbyterian camp. In Hagiomastix he claimed provocatively that most of Edwards’s errors and blasphemies were committed by members of the national church: ‘the Baptizers of Ball-Esau with many others’. In Cretensis, in a discussion of Edwards’s errors 104 and 110 on baptism, he wrote,‘it is sufficiently known, that the strongest shield and buckler wherewith that

Gangraena, ii. 167; Goodwin, Hagiomastix, sig. b1v. Goodwin, Cretensis, 10, 18; Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 3; Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, 419. 81 Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty, 25–6. John Bastwick claimed in Utter Routing, sig. G4v, that a ‘vapouring’ Independent had jeered that he and Edwards had ‘bred more Independents then any two of the Kingdom’, and that Edwards had done as much damage to Presbyterianism as Wren had to ‘prelacy’. 82 Walwyn, An Antidote, in Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft, 208; W. G. [William Goffe], A Just Apologie for an Abused Armie (London, 1647), sig. A4r; Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 14; Lilburne, Oppressed Man, 21. See also Walwyn, A Parable, 262. 79 80

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cause was ever protected, was the workmanship of a Presbyterian hand’ (referring presumably to John Tombes).83 For error 64 Edwards had cited A Vindication of Free Grace against M. John Goodwin as its source:‘Naturall men may do such things as whereunto God hath by way of promise annnexed grace and acceptation, and that if men improve their naturall abilities to the utmost in seeking grace, they shall finde it.’ Goodwin knew someone else who had argued thus, and whose work was regarded as impeccably orthodox: I desire to be informed by any understanding man, whether there be not every inch, yea every jot and tittle of the substance of it, asserted by a great Doctor (while he lived) of the Presbyterian Schoole, and who, being dead, yet speaketh much for that way. I meane Mr John Ball, in his Treatis of the Covenant of Grace, not long since published by Mr Simeon Ashe

This work was graced with a preface from ‘five great Masters of the Assembly it selfe, all of them of intemerated fidelity to the Presbyterian Cause’.84 Goodwin took clear pleasure in raking over the long-standing divisions within Calvinism over issues of justification and salvation which had erupted in the bitter dispute between Anthony Wotton, now long dead, and George Walker, still prominent in city Presbyterian circles. In the course of that dispute Wotton, whom Edwards, like Walker, regarded as heterodox, had gained the support of the veteran and much respected Puritan Thomas Gataker. Goodwin spent much time exposing the problems with error 70 in Gangraena, Part One,‘faith in a proper sense is imputed to justification, and not Christ’s righteousnesse’, which Goodwin took to be an accusation against himself although Edwards named no source. Goodwin invoked the authority of David Pareus of Heidelberg and Gataker in order to deny this was an error:‘let us referre the decision to two sufficient men, and without exception, both for learning and integritie, and knowledge of the case, the one a foreign Divine, some years since at rest with God, never knowne to me; the other a neighbour Minister indeed, and of the Assembly it selfe, but between whom and my selfe, there was never any acquaintance, beyond a casuall enterview, and the exchange of a few words’. Goodwin listed the authorities Gataker quoted to support positions on justification condemned by Edwards (pointing out that neither he nor Gataker shared these views). They included Calvin, Beza, 83 Goodwin, Hagiomastix, sig. B4; Goodwin, Cretensis, 20. Goodwin offered a partial paraphrase of Gangraena omitting the reference to the baptism of cats and chickens. 84 Gangraena, i. 25; Goodwin, Cretensis, 20–1. The five great masters were Edward Reynolds, Daniel Cawdrey, Calamy, Hill, and Anthony Burgess.

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Pareus, Musculus, Bullinger, and Fox: ‘And yet were these men never yet, that I ever heard or read, for so saying, condemned as Heretiques, much lesse as blasphemous Heretiques, but had in high esteeme’, echoing Milton’s terms. Goodwin concluded with a derogatory reference to Henry Roborough’s role as a scribe in the Westminster Assembly, as well as to his support for Walker against Wotton: ‘I trust . . . the Authoritie of the Clerk [is not] equall to that of the Justice of the Peace. If Mr Gataker hath spoken, I hope Mr Roborough will hold his peace’.85 If you removed all Edwards’s mistakes, repetitions, forgeries, and mutterings of the distracted, mocked Goodwin, ‘the formidablenesse of the subject matter of his Catalogue will be much eased, and the form of it been found much more formidable than the matter’. On Edwards’s methods, he wondered that he stopped at ‘so small a number as 180, and did not advance to that Angellicall quotiant in the Apocalyps, which is ten thousand times ten thousand’. Goodwin could help him reach 500 errors, including several in ‘his own Antapologie’. On the other hand, if he followed ‘the verdict of as learned and ingenuous a pen as ever wrote on his side’—presumably Augustine—‘he must release the better halfe (I beleeve) of his prisoners, and instead of an 180 Errors and Heresies, take his tables and write downe, four-score’.86 Men like Thomas Webbe or Henry Pinnell, whom Edwards had accused of the most serious doctrinal errors, offered predictably careful responses, writing as they were while the anti-Trinitarian preacher Paul Best languished in the Gatehouse as the House of Commons debated his capital punishment. Their replies combined the argument that Edwards’s definition of error was flawed, with a concern to deny his most dangerous accusations. Webbe was accused of a variety of ‘blasphemies’ and errors in Part One, based on material delivered to the Assembly and thence to the parliament, a long letter from Ricraft, and accounts of his proceedings in Essex and Kent.87 Webbe’s reply, as we have seen, may have benefited from the editing of John Bachelor. To the accusation that he had declared ‘That a Saint may say he is equall with Christ and count it no robbery’, Thomas Webbe replied,‘I could wish with all my heart, that he would (if it had been 85 Goodwin, Cretensis, 23–6; the reference was to Gataker’s defence of Wotton against Walker. Gataker’s biographer confirmed his unorthodoxy: Simeon Ashe, Gray Hayres Crowned with Grace (London, 1655), 52, explained that Gataker differed from the majority in the Assembly ‘concerning Christ’s obedience in order to our justification’ but ‘his own love of unity imposed upon him silence’. Saltmarsh made virtually the same point, with reference to Gataker and Twisse: Groanes for Liberty, 35 (recte 37). 86 87 Goodwin, Cretensis, 9, 11. Gangraena, i. 57, 74–5.

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an errour) have done God so much service, as to have disproved it; I was speaking out of Joh. 7. 22. the words are these; The glory which thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as thou Father and I am one’. He agreed that he had argued in Colchester that there was no scriptural warrant for continuing to baptize by water, but claimed he had urged his companions ‘not to make such a division about it’. To Edwards’s accusation that he had vented ‘Antinomian’ doctrines in Kent, he retorted ‘onely this, if to teach Faith and Repentance be Antinomianisme, then I taught it’. But to the old charge that he had told a ‘Citizen’‘that the golden calf, the Scriptures was false’, he retorted, ‘I do with an unfeigned detestation utterly detest against it, or any opinion that shall lead me to the questioning of the truth of Scripture, in the least measure’. He offered an equally emphatic denial to reported remarks against the Trinity: ‘It’s my delight to converse with Zions lovers, and indeed many I did converse withall while I was at Colchester, but not to any of them did I so deliver my self ’.88 Rather disappointingly Webbe also denied he had ever said,‘it were better for a man to sit and be drunk in an alehouse, then to be compelled to go to Church against his conscience’. Instead, when summoned before the magistrates for his preaching in Milton, Kent:‘Justice Hindrick demanded of me, whether he might not being in authority, compell a man from Alehouse to Church? My answer was, That I thought (as also his experience might witnesse) that there was many a man at Church which had rather be at an Alehouse; wherein we did agree.’89 John Lanseter disowned some of the words attributed to him, but also denied there would have been anything to criticize had he uttered them. He had not, in fact, condemned all ministers of the English church ‘for the Sanballats and Tobiases of this time . . . this is false also: but suppose . . . that I had, what evil had I done?’ He had spoken from the first chapter of Ezra ‘at the private meeting of honest men in Bury’, to argue that God’s spiritual house should be built only by the Saints, ‘such whose spirits God had raised up’, ‘a chosen Generation, a royall priesthood, a spouse of Christs’. He did support the idea of a formal church Covenant. All this was favourably contrasted with the laxity of parochial Presbyterianism—‘the Independents excrements becomes these Presbyterians ornaments’. On the other hand he denied completely that he had ‘opened’ the whole Book Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 6–9. Ibid. 10. The remarks about an alehouse being better than a church are quoted as Webbe’s in Hill,‘Irreligion in the “Puritan” Revolution’, 198. 88 89

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of Ezra—support for the authenticity of the apocryphal continuation in 1 and 2 Esdras, being associated with ‘familism’ and other groups of the radical reformation.90 Henry Pinnell, describing his preaching at Poole, explained that he had said the Saints were delivered from sin by justification, but had never claimed they were free from sin, and consequently denied any Antinomian ideas. Simon Ford’s letter to Gower claimed the Poole congregation had ‘much confided in’ the ‘extasies’ of ‘a woman, (their Oracle, a Supernumary Sybell at least) lately delivered of a childe’ who proclaimed ‘such Revelations, in which she told us Christ did appear to her gloriously and perfumed her’. But Pinnell insisted the woman was distracted.91 The most radical assault on Edwards’s enterprise came not from those who said he had exaggerated or misrepresented errors, but from men like Walwyn and Saltmarsh whose commitment to liberty of conscience and open debate made the whole question of error irrelevant.92 Walwyn denied that the labels Seeker, Antinomian, or Anabaptist were ‘names of reproach’; he argued that liberty of conscience was a ‘known truth’, and thus to oppose it was heresy, and urged a commitment to ‘try and examine all things’.93 Saltmarsh, in defending Bachelor, and condemning persecution, made similar points. He was ‘a friend to all the world of beleevers, as to give them the Scripture liberty of proving and trying all things, and not to silence the Presse, as some would, and as the Prelates did silence the Pulpit’. Gangraena was ‘Persecution and Prelacy sublimate’, yet Saltmarsh would not deliver Edwards to the civil magistrate. He urged instead an openminded humility: ‘Let the world see that Men in these times are not Infallible, as you all conclude, but may mistake their Brethren for Enemies, some Truths for Errours, and Zeal for Persecution, as the very Jewes did when they crucified Christ, as they thought, for Blasphemy; And some shall kill ye, sayth Christ, and think they do God good service.’94 Far from arguing that disputes amongst the godly should be kept private, then, Saltmarsh and Walwyn urged open and charitable debate. Despite profound cleavages over religious liberty and religious truth, Lanseters Lance, sig. A4v, B1r, B3r–C1r, C2v. For Esdras and Familism, see Ch. 2, above. Gangraenachrestum, 2–3, 20–1; Gangraena, i. 52. 92 Coffey,‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited’. 93 A Whisper in the Eare of Mr Thomas Edwards, 6 (recte 10); A Word More to Mr Thomas Edwards, quoted from Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft, 193; A Still and Soft Voice, in Writings, 266; cf. A Parable, in Writings, 250, where Walwyn wonders why men like Edwards who had opposed ‘compulsion and restriction of worship, in the Bishops times’, now attacked the religious liberty of others. 94 Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty, 32. 90 91

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participants in these printed disputes shared many common assumptions and methods, beyond the obvious parallel conviction that opponents were slanderous particularizers, exposing the faults of the godly, while the authors were brave defenders of the truth. Bitter opponents dealt with ‘evidence’ in very similar fashion. As we suggested in Chapter 2, Edwards validated his stories and ‘errors’ by hurling an enormous amount of partially digested material at his readers, presenting printed, manuscript, and oral ‘sources’ in complex and mutually reinforcing juxtaposition. Some word-of-mouth evidence was Edwards’s own; some was passed on to him in an apparently spontaneous fashion; while some was deliberately solicited, as when he urged ‘a Doctor of Physicke, a godly man and prudent’ to accompany him to a house in Cheapside to discuss the views of Attaway and Jenney.95 Manuscripts were quoted and authenticated at length. Edwards’s account of Laurence Clarkson drew on material from the committee at Bury St Edmunds, while a copy of an intercepted letter from the Baptist Hanserd Knollys also came from a Suffolk committee. The startling blasphemies of Robert Cosens at Rochester, who said ‘that Jesus Christ was a Bastard’, were supported by evidence from local courts and committees. Similar remarks by ‘one Coleburne of Watford . . . a great Anabaptist and Sectarie . . . that our saviour Christ was a bastard, and the first time that he taught was in a tub upon the sea’ were based on King’s Bench records.96 Less ‘official’ manuscripts, authenticated by provenance, were also included. When John Goodwin openly doubted that Thomas Moore, ‘a great Sectary and manifestarian that hath done much hurt in Lincolnshire’, even existed, Edwards retorted that he was ‘famous at Bolton, Lynn, Holland’, and that Goodwin ‘may with as much truth deny there is any such man as Master Hugh Peters . . . I have seen and have by me at this time writings of his to the quantity of almost twenty Sheets, for his opinions, written by Thomas Moore himself, subscribed with his name, to a worthy and learned Member of the Assembly’.97 The richest validation for Edwards’s narratives came from combinations of different forms of evidence, as illustrated by the rich contexts provided for his most evocative manuscript sources: letters. Letters might be prompted by conversations, as with the first letter printed, from William Strong: ‘who after he had told me by word of mouth the contents of this Gangraena, iii. 26. Ibid. i. 72–4 (Clarkson); iii. 48–9 (Knollys); i. 181 and ii. 112–20 (Cosens); ii. 116 (Coleburne of Watford). See also iii. 33–5 for material from the Mayor’s court at Norwich, and 86 for examinations of Henry Denne by Lincolnshire Justices. 97 Ibid. ii. 104–5. 95 96

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Letter, promised to send it me in a Letter, and I acquainted him then what use it was for, and he said he would justifie what he writ, and named others in whose presence Master Denne maintained these points’, and they prompted further discussion. On the other hand written material submitted to parliament reached Edwards by word of mouth. A few lines recounting how soldiers on the march from Exeter to Oxford had spent a fast day ‘stark drunk’ were followed by as many lines explaining how Edwards knew of it, through ‘a Letter written from a worthy Colonell in the Army’ which had been circulated to ‘divers persons of worth’and finally related in Edwards’s hearing by ‘a worthy Member of the House of Commons who read it, and knew all the particulars, of place, time etc’ in a conversation with a fellow MP.98 Thus Edwards’s sources were not offered naked to the reader, but clothed in extensive discussion and verification. Edwards insisted he was not peddling gossip or hearsay, although as so often, he tried to have things both ways, rehearsing dubious evidence only to reject it. An ‘understanding godly Minister’ told him that ‘a great Sectary in one of their Conventicles’ had prayed in summer 1646 ‘to this effect; O Lord, cast down, or confound all Monarcks and Monarchies, and lift up or advance thy servant Lilburne’. Edwards hoped to speak directly to the ‘eare witnesses’ but not having done so,‘I do relate it but as a report, and not with that confidence as I do things I hear, or find written, or that I have from godly persons I know who are eare witnesses’.99 Such scruples, of course, were supposed to validate all the other oral testimony, which many less partisan judges might have questioned. The standing of his informants was crucial to Edwards’s validation of both written and oral evidence, as it was for ancient heresiographers and early modern scientists.100 Whereas a gentleman scientist was always likely to be believed, Edwards’s reliable witnesses had both ideological and social credibility. As many examples have already suggested, Edwards was never simply told something, but always informed by reputable godly people at carefully defined times and places. At the end of Part One there are many revealing illustrations: On the 24 of December last, a Citizen of good worth in this City related to me at his own house in the hearing of many others . . . About the beginning of May last, a ju99 Ibid. 54; iii. 32. Ibid. iii. sig. d4v. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994). Mark Jenner and Justin Champion directed me to Shapin; see also N. H. Keeble, ‘The Autobiographer as Apologist; Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)’, in Corns (ed.), Literature of Controversy, 115, for Baxter’s use of epithets to describe hostile and sympathetic informants. 98

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dicious godly Minister who came out of the countrey told me in the hearing of a Gentleman also . . . November last the 11. I was informed for certain, from the testimony of an honest godly man, that would not tell an untruth for Ten thousand pound, who was also an Ear-witnesse . . .

The three women informants in Gangraena, amongst innumerable men, were all disillusioned or deceived sectaries. The last was ‘a Sectaries wife . . . who showed me severall Letters written from Sectaries to other mens wives, Sectaries, to tempt them from their husbands; she had intercepted the Letters that shee might the better discover her husbands naughtinesse’.101 Oral evidence might also be validated by quasi-legal written testimony, although there is no sense in which the direct testimony of ‘eye and ear witnesses’ was consistently seen as inferior to written evidence.102 Edwards’s account of the debate at the Spittle about the immortality of the soul ‘was given me under the hand of a godly honest Citizen . . . an eare and eye witnesse’ who ‘delivered me this Relation in writing before two sufficient witnesses, and declared himself ready to make proof of this before Authority when ever he should be called’. Indeed Edwards had offered in Part One, admittedly on condition that ‘some exemplary punishment’ be executed on the ‘prime seducers and heads of these sects’—‘to make a legall proof by witnesses, and other concurrent circumstances of the most notorious and grossest matters’ in his text.103 Sometimes verification was absurdly detailed. Edwards carefully checked the handwriting on the manuscript of a pamphlet of Thomas Webbe to prove the licenser John Bachelor had altered it before publication, and explained to readers how a ‘copie of a part of a Letter written by a shee Sectarie’ ended abruptly: ‘The rest was torne away by a Sectary, it was signed M.D’. How could anyone doubt such a carefully circumspect chronicler?104 Despite Edwards’s best endeavours, many printed responses challenged the veracity of his accounts, through a parallel mobilization of written, spoken, and printed evidence. Extensive quotation and counter-quotation of offending passages was one characteristic of the pamphlet debates. The Counter Buffe reprinted all the extracts from Little Non-such used as errors in Gangraena followed by a response on each issue. Goodwin quoted many paragraphs of Gangraena, Part One in Cretensis, juxtaposed with his own, Gangraena, i. 103; iii. 189–90, 188, 112–13. For a similar equivalence in the 16th cent.: Bob Scribner, ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print in the early German reformation’, in Biller and Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy, 260–1. 103 104 Gangraena, ii. 17–18; i. 8. Ibid. ii. 139; iii. 59–60. 101 102

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contrasting interpretations; Gangraena, Part Two, in turn, quoted and challenged the version in Cretensis. Goodwin’s attacks on the pictures of Robert Cosens, the Rochester blasphemer; John Ellis, minister of Colchester; John Lilburne; and many others were based on methods akin to Edwards’s own. It was not the case, insisted Goodwin, that Cosens had called Christ a bastard or said that if Christ came back to the world, he would be ashamed of many things he had done, ‘as appeares by the said Examination under the hand of the Clerk of the said Committee which I saw and read’. In general Edwards’s version was falsified through ‘Counter Information I had from the mouth of the said Cosens himselfe and have the particulars under his hand’. Goodwin also quoted ‘Mr Ellis himselfe’ in a letter to a friend in London, ‘ “The aspersions cast on me, and some others here, by Mr Edwards, are as false as foule” ’; and drew on personal acquaintance with John Lilburne to transmit a denial of Edwards’s stories of Lilburne’s predilection for card-playing, and of his eyes being damaged in an accident: ‘he is able to see and read twenty untruths and ten in Mr Edw book’.105 When his stories were challenged, Edwards was driven to ever more elaborate, exhaustive, and exhausting displays of his own evidence. For Cosens he amassed further official material from committees and courts, and backed his respectable witnesses against Goodwin’s ‘Anabaptisticall boy’.106 All participants sought to discredit rival informants; Webbe and Pinnell arguing that the malice of their denouncers had distorted the accounts used in Gangraena. In his defence of Kiffin and Hobson, Drapes discredited Edwards’s witnesses and printed letters from Fairfax and others to create an alternative narrative.107 Edwards had drawn heavily on a letter from the writer Josiah Ricraft for material on Webbe and Kiffin; Goodwin retorted with a letter from ‘an Anabaptisticall Apprentice’ (Ricraft’s term) that implicated Ricraft in royalist plots; Ricraft then printed a range of testimony (including extracts from parliament’s proceedings) in his own defence.108 Edwards’s disproportionate response to Jeremiah Burroughs’s repudiation of a story in Gangraena, Part One, to be discussed fully below, was motivated by Burroughs’s high standing as a respectable and honest figure within godly circles; he could not be dismissed as a sectary or apprentice boy.109 106 Goodwin, Cretensis, 38–40, 46, 48. Gangraena, ii. 112–23. Maddocks and Pinnell, Gangraenachrestum, 4. Cf. Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, 12; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 22–7. 108 Ricraft, Nosegay of Rank-smelling Flowers, 1, 3–4; cf. Pearl,‘Scotch Fifth Columnists’. 109 Gangraena, i. 78–9; ii. 41, 95. 105 107

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Edwards’s opponents were especially sceptical of the authenticity of the letters included in Gangraena. Saltmarsh mocked the missives directed to the ‘Good Mr Edwards’ or the ‘Worthy Reverend good Mr Edwards’; perhaps they were written by Edwards himself as there was ‘not one name . . . subscribed’. The anonymity of the letters in Part One gave ample scope to critics. To Goodwin, it seems not a little strange that Mr Edwards should keep the names of his informers, who have contributed so liberally towards the same designe with himselfe, under hatches, or within the vaile; when as he prostitutes his own name with so much confidence (that I say not impudence) in the frontispiece of his booke. If hee judgeth it honourable in himselfe, to bee taken notice of for Commander in chiefe in the Classique warres against Sectaries and Independents; he had no reason to hide the names of his Captains, and those that served in inferior place of command under him in the same service.

Goodwin mused on Edwards’s motives—was it so he could claim all the credit himself; did he fear the discovery of his forgeries, or (Goodwin’s preferred explanation) did he want ‘to suppresse the examination of the truth of the letters’?110 Edwards’s double-edged response to these slurs was first to claim he was protecting his informants from harassment, especially from the army, but then to identify most of his correspondents anyway.111 Both Edwards and his critics had an ambivalent approach to the details of narratives. Sometimes truth was conceived of as an chain of unbreakable links so that if one element could be challenged, the whole construction was worthless. Saltmarsh pointedly asked whether the story about a woman preacher in Brasted in Kent ‘which is known to my selfe and all in that place to be a meere untruth, be not a way to judge of most of his Stories, Letters, Relations’?112 Minute or apparently trivial incidents in Gangraena became the focus for obsessively detailed examination in responses and in Edwards’s reiterations in succeeding parts as more and more evidence was hurled at readers. But where details were successfully challenged, then Edwards tended to claim this did not invalidate the main point of his account. In his dispute with Burroughs, he accepted that there had not been a special meeting arranged between Burroughs and Greenhill to discuss the spread of error, but the issue had been raised at Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty, 26; Goodwin, Cretensis, 6–7. Gangraena, ii. 32–3. 112 Saltmarsh, Groanes for Liberty, 26; Edwards mobilized more local information in his defence: Gangraena, ii. 24–5. 110 111

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their ‘usuall meeting on the Lords day’; this ‘mistake’ should not be ‘a matter to be so much made of as to be branded with forgery’.113 The incidents attracting the most attention were those carrying some providential message, or suggesting a link between bad behaviour and erroneous doctrine. In the first category, Edwards’s challengers sometimes assaulted the meanings he had attached to events all agreed had happened, as we have seen already in the contrasting understandings of the deaths of two of Goodwin’s children. Or Edwards’s descriptions were simply denied, as when Goodwin contradicted his account of one of Lilburne’s eyes being ‘put out by a Pike in the street . . . as one of Lilburnes was, immediatly upon his Letter coming forth against Mr Prynne and the Assembly’.114 A less serious dispute arose over the account from a godly Cheshire minister in Gangraena, Part Three, that the Independent Samuel Eaton had had to cease preaching to his congregation at Duckinfield, when they were alarmed by the sound of a drum. For Edwards, the drum signified the Independent ‘thirst for a new warre with Scotland’, exhibited in this, the first Independent church to be established, even before the return of the Apologists from Holland. Both Goodwin and Eaton himself insisted on a more prosaic and natural explanation: the disturbance had been caused by a dog, not a drum.115 Perhaps the most disproportionate and unintentionally comic discussion of behaviour involved the lengthy spat between Goodwin and Edwards over Independent bowling (and, it turned out, Presbyterian fishing) on official fast days. John Goodwin answered at length Edwards’s brief comment in Gangraena, Part One on sectarian misbehaviour, ‘many of them play at Cards and tables, are very loose on the Sabbath days, go to Bowls and other sports on dayes of publike Thankesgiving, as Mr John Goodwin and severall of his Church’. Goodwin’s response drew a shameless accusation from Edwards of long-windedness,‘great swelling words of vanity . . . speaking over and over again the same things, spending whole pages and leaves upon that which he might have spoken and answered to in three or four lines’. But Goodwin was in a dilemma; Edwards’s general conclusion connected to his brief remarks was certainly worth refuting: ‘I 113 Gangraena, ii. 88–9. Indeed Edwards claimed it would have been more to the Stepney men’s credit if they had called a special meeting. 114 Gangraena, i. 70 (1st sequence); Goodwin, Cretensis, 36–7, 48. 115 Gangraena, iii. 164–5; Goodwin, Hagiomastix, sig. B3r–v; Eaton and Taylor, Just Apologie for the Church of Duckenfield, 18. Eaton and Taylor also disclaimed Edwards’s account of the early founding of their church.

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do not know, nor hear of a Sectary in England, that is so strict and exact in his life, as he was before, and as thousands of the Presbyterians are’. On the other hand, Goodwin became widely known as a bowler in London printed material of the 1640s as we shall see, and he inevitably contributed to this notoriety by his extended response.116 Goodwin’s own version—‘But (Reader) . . . the story truly and briefly is this’—explained that after preaching ‘somewhat long, and to wearines in Michaels Cornhill in the fore noon’, on the day of thanksgiving for the victory at Naseby, he had rested at home until ‘about five or six of the clock’. Then some friends had visited and finding Goodwin still exhausted, ‘desired me to walk out a little into the fields with them, suggesting that a walk in the fresh aire might doe me some good’. On their way back they had dropped in on the ‘garden house’of a mutual friend (a Presbyterian):‘During which time (and I know not how long before) there was a company playing at Bowles in a little Alley in the Garden; whom (I presume) we shall not wrong in case we judge them Presbyterian, though (I confesse) wee did not examine them upon the point.’ Goodwin and his friends were invited to join in, and ‘betook ourselves for about halfe an houre to the exercise’, and then, the light failing, they went home. This was then, a spur of the moment, harmless recreation; one indeed that brought together men of differing judgement on church government, whose divisions Edwards sought to magnify and exacerbate: ‘This is the story of that drop of water which Mr Edwards hath got upon the tip of his finger to cool his tongue’. Goodwin, like Edwards, could not resist further comment and ‘animadversions’. He had not handled a bowl for months or even years before, and if something so trivial so offended Edwards he would promise never again to cast a bowl on a thanksgiving day. But were Presbyterians as immune from such lapses as Edwards implied? Would he condemn the ‘constant practice of the gravest Presbyterians themselves, going to see the Fireworks usually made in sevrall places of the Citie, on every fifth of November, being the most ancient and honourable day of publick thanksgiving unto the Nation’? And what of those ‘Presbyterian starres and those of the first magnitude’, whom Goodwin could name if he chose: who upon a day of publick thanksgiving, fell every whit as far from heaven, as Mr J Goodwin and those of his Church did.Yea, if you sift the Doctorate it self of the Assembly, I beleeve you wil find a man dropping through your sieve, who with three more . . . consecrated the greater part (if not the whole) of an afternoon upon a 116 Gangraena, i. 73 (1st sequence) for the original remarks; ii. 38 for the comments on Goodwin’s response (in Cretensis, 28–37).

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publick thanksgiving day, to a service that had no more Religion in it, then the Fishermans daily occupation and imployment: nor did their exercise (it seems) receive any great testimony from heaven, they ate but very little of the labour of their hands; two Roaches (as saith the History) being all that Providence and they could agree upon for the reward of their afternoones service.

Goodwin thus mocked Edwards’s obsession with divisive trivia and turned the tables with accusations of Presbyterian ‘looseness’, and the clearly providential failure of an afternoon’s fishing. He also claimed he had evidence of more serious lapses by Presbyterians, threatening to tell what he knew of Edwards’s own ‘jugling and indirect walking between the two Townes of Godalmin in Surrey, and Dunmow in Essex’ if Edwards did not cease to spread slander. There is no mention of the Naseby thanksgiving as the occasion of the bowling in Gangraena, but Goodwin expanded on this aspect, suggesting Edwards had picked it because many ‘eminently instrumentall in the victories . . . cannot presbyterialize in the things of God’.117 Edwards, his critics, and his supporters mostly argued within providential frameworks, and both sides also appealed to the judgement of the ‘plain man’. Attempts to seize the moral high ground by claiming the support of the most honest, conscientious readers have been connected specifically with radical publishing. Walwyn accused Edwards of writing ‘out of the pride and vanity of my owne mind, out of disdaine that plaine unlearned men should seeke for knowledge any other way then as they are directed by us that are learned’, and, for himself, insisted that ‘a plaine discreet man in a privat house, or field, in his ordinary apparrell, speaking to plaine people (like himselfe) . . . out of the word of God’, had more in common with Christ than ‘a learned man in a carved pulpet, in his neate and blacke formalities’.118 Edward Drapes, in his significantly titled Plain and Faithfull Discovery, held that ‘Plain dealing without the least flattery is the true language of a faithful friend’, while an opponent of the city Remonstrance of May 1646 claimed it had deceived ‘well-meaning and plain-hearted men’.119 Goodwin, Cretensis, 29–35, for this account. Walwyn, A Prediction of Mr Edwards His Conversion and Recantation (London 1646), Thomason date 11 Aug., 9, 13, here quoted from Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, vol. iii. In Cretensis, 29–30, Goodwin denounced Edwards for preferring ‘to defame the good wayes and servants of God; or else to make lowd challenges to all the world’, than to discuss issues peaceably with ‘a few plain conscientious men’. 119 Drapes, Plain and Faithfull Discovery, preface; A Moderate Reply to the Citie Remonstrance. 117 118

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But the trope of the ‘plain’ ingenuous man, undeceived by the guile of crafty and elaborate propaganda, was a widespread and contested image in religious polemic.120 Edwards consistently presented himself, and other Presbyterians, as straightforward honest men, in contrast to the underhand dealing of sectaries and Independents: ‘tis not to be expected from me a plain open-hearted man (who hate [sic] tricks, playing under-board, reserves and designes . . . that I should discover all their practices and wayes’. Presbyterians were ‘plain honest men and not acquainted with policies’. Henry Roborough’s letter to Edwards foresaw that all Presbyterians ‘must look to suffer for plain dealing’, while John Jones’s defence of the city Remonstrance also appealed to ‘honest and plaine hearted Presbyterians’. In defending Gangraena in particular, Jones denounced ‘all the glosses, pretences, and faire promises with which they [Independents] use to deceive the simple’.121 Furthermore, within the printed debates on Gangraena, Edwards and his critics often agreed that some version of the event described in Gangraena did occur; it was the details and, most emphatically, the meaning or implication of the events that were challenged. As Edwards exulted over Goodwin,‘after two whole leaves spent, and a mountain of words cast up, confesses in the close the thing I charged him with, that he played Bowls on a day of public thanksgiving, only he minces, extenuates, hides his sin all he may’.122 More significantly, when Edwards’s subjects or ‘victims’defended their controversial preaching, they were clearly describing occasions recognisable from Gangraena. Thomas Webbe denied aspects of Edwards’s account, as we have seen, but he acknowledged that his preaching had caused trouble in Milton, Kent, for which he had been brought before the magistrates for preaching ‘false doctrine’ and ordered to leave the town. Henry Pinnell had preached on sin to a company of friends in Poole garrison, while his companion John Maddocks had argued for public lay preaching in a debate witnessed by Simon Ford. Lanseter had preached on some, at least, of Ezra to a gathered congregation.123 All this in turn suggests that it is worth taking Gangraena seriously 120 The ‘plain man’ was a common trope in many kinds of religious debate: for a usage by William Laud see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 164, and for the tradition in the German Reformation: Scribner,‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print’, 266. 121 Gangraena, i. 41, 74; ii. 167; Jones, Plain English, 15, 20. Jones accused Burroughs in particular of deceitful moderation. 122 Gangraena, ii. 76. 123 Webbe, Mr Edwards’s Pen no Slander, 11–12; Maddocks and Pinnell, Gangraenachrestum, 2–3, 20–1; Lanseters Lance; Cox, An after-reckoning with Mr Edwards, 7–8, accepted Edwards’s account of his conformist past: Cox had been ‘so exact in that conformity that I cannot now think of it without being ashamed’.

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as a source, although Edwards’s accounts always offer one perspective only, contested or revised by others. Edwards’s determined self-defence was augmented by the efforts of several other Presbyterian polemicists. Edwards was outraged that John Goodwin of all people should berate him for his harsh expressions when Goodwin himself was ‘a man so foul-mouth’d in all kind of filthy language, that his maid had need scowr his mouth alwayes with a wisp when he goes to write any Book’. Cretensis was ‘a most ungodly, Anti-christian, insolent, proud, malicious, wrathfull, lying, obscene, scurrilous, nonsense, absurd, contradictory peece’. Ricraft too attacked Goodwin’s ‘railing and reviling against M. Thomas Edwards, a worthy minister of Gods word, whom (I am confident) all the filth of M. Goodwins tongue cannot stain’ and denounced him as an Arminian and Socinian. John Vicars agreed that Gangraena, Part Two had exposed Goodwin’s ‘notorious jugling’ as well as the ‘unworthy double-dealing of those two Grandees of the Independents’, Burroughs and Greenhill. Vicars also endorsed Edwards condemnation of ‘toleration’, ‘that cursed cause of the ruine of all sound Religion and sincere holinesse, libertie of conscience for all damnable sects and schismes whatsoever’.124 Further legitimation for Gangraena thus came from sympathetic authors. Gangraena, Part One received a near contemporary plug as we have seen in the printed version of a sermon preached by Edwards’s licenser James Cranford.125 Reassuring affirmation was achieved through the mutual citation for both general arguments and detailed points in each others’ books by the prominent Presbyterian controversialists Edwards, Prynne, Bastwick, and Baillie. Edwards was the major source for Baillie’s account of the ‘Antipaedobaptisme, Arminianisme, Arianisme, Familisme and other wicked Errors’of the Anabaptists in the long-promised sequel to the Dissuasive. Baillie had relied ‘Especially [on] M. Edwards Gangraena, first and second part, To which as yet I have seen nothing replyed, to anything that is considerable, though many with great passion have essayed it’. As Edwards had used Prynne’s Fresh Discovery as source and inspiration, so Prynne in turn drew on Edwards for specific illustrations of the political radicalism of Lilburne and Overton and to bolster his argument that the magistrate could punish ‘false teachers’.126 124 Gangraena, ii. sig. A3, 41; Ricraft, A Nosegay of Rank-smelling Flowers, 1; Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 11, 22, 35. Vicars drew extensively on Antapologia to describe the deceptive self-righteousness of Independents. 125 Cranford, Haereseo-machia, 5. 126 Baillie, Anabaptism. The True Fountaine of Independency . . . , Thomason date 4 Jan. 1646/7, 179, 62–79, 106–28. Radical political ideas and the heterodoxy of Mrs Attaway, Paul

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Obscurer, provincial ministers also drew on Gangraena. John Trapp, of Stratford-upon-Avon, whose extensive biblical commentaries were produced for John Bellamy, used it for his discussion of 1 Timothy 1: 3: ‘What hideous Heresies are nowadays broached and preached amongst us in City and Countrey. See Mr Edwards his Gangraena, the first and second part’; while a Lincolnshire preacher quoted Gangraena for evidence of sectarian cat baptizing and other enormities.127 Foreign divines too quoted Edwards in discussions of English religious conflicts, although one of the most eminent, Johannes Hoornbeek, like some recent scholars, preferred Antapologia, to ‘peculiari libro tit. Gangraena’.128 More distantly, Gangraena was amongst the inspirations for the cheaper anti-sectarian print—some short pamphlets, some large illustrated broadsides—which erupted from the autumn of 1646, particularly to support the passing of a heresy ordinance. A Relation of Severall Heresies described a range of sects from Jesuits and Socinians to Separatists, ‘Apostolicks’, and Antinomians in twenty pages, and then gave details of the heresy ordinance. A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and Other Nations, from January 1647, presented very similar material in picture and verse, concluding its twenty-two-verse discussion with the pious hope, ‘Should these absurd and grosse opinions take place, what divisions and confusion would they work among us? but such is the wisdome and care of our worthy and pious Parliament, to provide an Ordinance for preventing of the growing and spreading of heresie’. It included pictures of twelve sectaries from a Jesuit through a naked Adamite, an Arminian, and a Familist to a Divorcer. In these characteristic publications, pictures, lists, and brief definitions were the staple fare, and Pagitt’s Best, and Thomas Webbe were amongst the evidence taken from Gangraena. Baillie’s working copy is discussed below. Baillie had also used radical writers, especially Tombes, John Goodwin, and Lilburne as well as orthodox British and continental divines. In Prynne, Sword of Christian Magistracie Supported, Gangraena was, along with the Dell fast sermon that had occasioned the tract, the most commonly quoted contemporary work: see Sword, sig. a2, a3, a4, b1v; 21–2, 28–9, 39, 45, 81, 92, 97, 112–13 (2nd sequence), 117–19, 153, 159, 166. Gangraena, iii. 180–240, on ‘Leveller’ ideas and activity was most cited. See also Bastwick, Utter Routing, sig. H1r, for praise of Edwards. 127 Trapp, A Commentary, or Exposition upon all the Epistles and the Revelation of John the Divine, (1st pub. Bellamy, 1647; 1656 edn.); Clarke, Leaven, Corrupting the Children’s Bread, 11, 22, 51–2 (the cat story). Antapologia was also quoted extensively in this printed version of two sermons originally preached in Lincolnshire in 1645. 128 Johannes Hoornbeeck, Summa Controversiarum Religionis (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1653), used a variety of English sources for his sections on Presbyterians, Independents, and Antinomians, Robert Abbott, Baillie, Brinsley, and Rutherford, as well as Edwards: 672–3, 686. For this work see Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 367.

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Heresiography, a work easier to fillet than Gangraena, was the obvious influence, flavoured with John Taylor-style assumptions about disorderly tub-preachers.129 A work printed for the 10 March day of humiliation for blasphemy and heresy showed greater affinity with Edwards’s approach. In seven pages it quoted a range of recent books as sources for errors and blasphemy: Clarkson’s Pilgrimage of Saints for its views on the Scriptures, Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers for God as the author of sin, and Williams’ Bloody Tenent on toleration, as well as Paul Best’s anti-Trinitarian manuscripts. All these feature in Gangraena, Part One. This work also drew on Little Non-such and A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, which were highlighted in Part Three, and was denounced in its turn in Goodwin’s Hagiomastix.130 Material directly from Gangraena, particularly the striking story of the baptism of a horse, featured in Tub-preachers overturn’d. Edwards was supported, according to this author, by ‘all knowing Orthodox men’, and provided damning evidence against ‘your pragmaticall schismaticall preaching (alias pratling Buffe-Coats and others I’le name) . . . they pissed in a Font, and brought a bald horse in the Church in the Font, and baptized him by the name of Ball-Esau because they said he was hairy’. The author listed a host of mechanic sectaries, some—Kiffin, Patient, Hobson, Oates, and Lamb—featured in Gangraena, but others, such as Praisegod Barebone, did not. Some of Gangraena’s wicked books, such as Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers or Clarkson’s Pilgrim of the Saints [sic], were attacked as erroneous, but there were other ways the pamphleteer might have come across them. Gangraena almost certainly provided the material for the climax, a verse on a ‘lace-woman’, one of the ‘women Tubbers alias Dubbers’: such another Sold Bone-lace in Cheapside . . . Did take a text, and boldly did descant The lawfullnesse to preach of a she-Saint . . . Could Preach nine times a weeke, morning and night, Such revelations had she from new light. 129 A Relation of Severall Heresies (London, 1646), BL E358 (2), Thomason date 17 Oct. There were no contemporary references although the pamphlet claimed to deal with errors of ‘our times’ as well as errors ‘of old’. For the campaign over the heresy ordinance, see Ch. 5, below. A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions in England and Other Nations (London, 1647), BL 669, fo. 10 (11), Thomason date 19 Jan. 1646, 1647 crossed out. 130 Hell broke loose: or a Catalogue of many of the spreading Errors, Heresies and Blasphemies of these times for which we are to be humbled (London, 1647), BL E378 (28), Thomason date 9 Mar. 1646; Goodwin, Hagiomastix.

5. The top part of a 1647 broadsheet entitled ‘These Trades-men are Preachers in and about the City of LONDON. Or, A DISCOVERY OF THE MOST DANGEROVS AND DAMNABLE TENETS THAT HAVE BEEN SPREAD WITHIN THIS FEW yeares: By many Erronious, Heriticall and Mechannick spirits. By which the very foundation of Christian knowledge and practice is endeavoured to be overturned.’

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This was clearly Mrs Attaway who had persuaded a ‘brother’ to forsake his wife and had gone beyond seas with him.131 This sixteen-page pamphlet seems to have been closely connected to a large broadsheet of April 1647, which had pictures of twelve preachers identified, as in Edwards’s text, by their trades. A reader of Tub-preachers could have put names to the pictures—Hobson was the tailor, Kiffin the glover,Wilkin the ‘meal-man’, and so on. A list of forty-nine errors included at its head the view that Christ’s righteousness was a ‘beggarly righteousness’, derived from Gangraena, Part Three, and at number 11, again,‘A company of souldiers in derision of Baptisme, baptized a horse, having pist in the Font, sprinkled it on the Horse, and Crost him on the Forehead, and named him Ball-Esau because he was hairie’. This story thus had an extended currency.132 These months also saw Presbyterian attempts to challenge the visual material supporting liberty of conscience discussed by Edwards. Proper Persecution, or the Sandy Foundation of a general Toleration showed a Bishop, the Pope, and a ‘Profane Libertine’ attacking honest hearts, and was expressly directed against Dictated Thoughts. Reall Persecution, or the Foundation of a general Toleration’s illustration was of ‘a Foole Ridden Ante-Presbyterian Sectary’. Both used extracts from Overton’s satires against the Assembly—Martins Echo and The Arraignment to illustrate ‘wicked and abusive language against godly Presbyterian Ministers’— amongst whom Edwards loomed large.133 Convincing readers of the truth of his accounts was for Edwards as for many authors ‘a hard-won and brittle achievement’, if indeed he ever did achieve it.134 The printed controversy over Gangraena more obviously produced for Edwards an enduring notoriety, based as often on contempt as on praise. It was played out in all types of print from single-sheet broadsides through forty-page tracts such as Cretensis and extensive commentaries such as Trapp’s. The debate drew on networks and alliances amongst city Presbyterians and city radicals, but also connected London with 131 Tub preachers overturn’d or Independency to be abandon’d and abhor’d as destructive to the Majestracy and Ministry of the Church of England (London, 1647), passim, 11 for Ball-Esau and 16 for the lace-woman. This pamphlet was a reply to A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards. 132 These trades men are preachers in and about the City of London or a Discovery of the Most Dangerous and Damnable Tenets that have been spread within this few years (London, 1647), BL 669, fo. 11 (6), Thomason date 26 Apr. 1647. For the ‘Ball-Esau’ story in a pamphlet of Dec. 1647, Hinc Illae Lacrimae, see Ashton, Counter Revolution, 243. 133 Proper Persecution, or the Sandy Foundation of a general Toleration (London, 1646), 669, fo. 10 (104), Thomason date 22 Dec. 1646; Reall Persecution, or the Foundation of a general Toleration (London, 1647), 669, fo. 10 (114), 13 Feb. 134 Johns, Nature of the Book, 623.

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provincial England, and England with broad European concerns. The shared techniques of debate should not mask the cleavages over religious truth and church practice, or lead us to underestimate the crucial role this polemic played in the religious and political conflicts of the mid-1640s. reading gangr aena The tracts written against Gangraena or using it sympathetically as a source offer the most detailed and obvious evidence for readings of Edwards’s texts (always remembering Goodwin’s ostensible ability to reply to a work without wasting too much time reading it). A much fuller exploration of reading and readers of Gangraena is attempted here, however, inspired by the rich current scholarship on the suggestive, difficult history of reading. Edwards was certainly aware that he could not take for granted the responses of his readers, and modern scholarship also insists that readers are not simply passive recipients of a meaning that is clearly contained within a text, which straightforwardly represents the author’s intentions. The most stimulating, complex work on reading draws attention to the myriad ways in which meaning emerges from ‘the triangle [of] . . . the text, the book, and the reader’. In attempting to understand how a notorious work like Gangraena was comprehended, we can draw on a variety of recent theoretical discussions. At one extreme, it is argued that readers create meaning, so that the ‘birth’ of the reader implies the ‘death’ of the author. But on other accounts the author—or more precisely the ‘text’—produces the reader by constraining interpretative possibilities or conjuring up particular responses. Attention has been paid to the ‘intended reader’, to the overtly expressed expectations of readers contained in particular texts, and also to the ‘implied reader’. This last is more obliquely embedded in the text through ‘a network of response-inviting structures’; a reader is constructed in the text with a range of presumed skills, knowledge, and ways of understanding. Such textual constructs are presumed to have some impact on the responses of ‘real’ readers. It is not necessary to choose between these contrasting positions; exploring both authorial assumptions and techniques on the one hand, and readers’ creations of meaning on the other, can bring a range of fruitful insights into the impact of Gangraena. One of the main things readers seek to do is to understand authors’ intentions; an author cannot control the meanings readers derive from texts, and these meanings are contested by different readerships, but disputes over the implications of a particular

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text do not suggest that all and any meanings flow freely from it. Gangraena had many different readers; indeed it offers an extreme but instructive example of how members of what Stanley Fish calls rival ‘interpretive communities’ could draw sharply contrasting conclusions from the same material; of how they created, rather than simply extracted, meaning. ‘Interpretive communities’ offered contrasting judgements on Gangraena as a defence of fundamental religious truths, or as a bitter, personalized assault on the truly religious. In Fish’s formulation ‘interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive stategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions’. Debates, such as that over Gangraena, occur, in Fish’s view, not because texts have stable meanings, but because ‘of a stability in the make up of interpretive communities and therefore in the opposing positions they make possible’. Such collective readings—constructions of meanings—were publicly demonstrated in the printed controversies discussed in the last section.135 This section will explore Edwards’s evocations of his readers, his assumptions about their approaches to his text, and its likely impact upon them. It will analyse the clues Edwards offered to readers—in the form of section breaks, tables, and cross-referencing; and draw on the ‘history of the book’, which pays attention to the character of a book as a physical object, the ways in which the arrangement of the words on the pages constrained understanding. Other practical matters such as literacy rates, reading practices, price, and distribution must also be addressed: what sort of people could afford Gangraena, where would they obtain it, how many were able to read it—by themselves or in company? Much of our discussion will deal with plausible general contexts but I will also seek to discover something about the traces left by ‘real’, ‘actual’ readers of Gangraena in library lists or on surviving copies. 135 Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999); Raven, Small, and Tadmor (eds.), Practice and Representation of Reading; Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 34–9; Chartier, Order of Books, 10, 27; Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, repr. in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1989), 114–18; Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader. ReaderResponse Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987), esp. 141–4; Hancock, ‘Bunyan as Reader’; Stanley Fish, ‘Interpeting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry (1976), repr. in Rick Rylance (ed.), Debating Texts: A Reader in Twentieth Century Literary Theory and Method (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), 161–70, at 169–70; Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), is a comprehensive study of the availability and modes of reading of historical genres in this period.

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The pamphlet wars of mid-seventeenth-century England erupted within a society saturated with print, yet one where in all social groups print interacted closely with manuscript and oral communication.136 Technical literacy in the modern sense of an individual’s ability to read the printed word fluently and silently was probably a still minority skill, dependent on social status, gender, occupation, and location, yet there were many other ways in which people became familiar with printed texts. A rich volume of recent scholarship has explored the mysterious and complex ways in which readers respond to and construct meanings from and with texts. A range of methods of apprehension—from individual silent reading, collective reading and discussion to listening to others read, and memorizing songs, biblical texts, or sermons—ensured that varying messages were drawn from printed religious literature as from other printed material, by many who lacked fluent reading skills. As Margaret Spufford insists, ‘illiteracy was everywhere face to face with literacy, and the oral with the printed word’. Roger Chartier elaborates: ‘Between literacy and illiteracy there exists a wide range of reading abilities . . . between private, individual reading and passive listening to spoken words there exists a wide range of attitudes toward print culture’. Seventeenth-century men and women read and discussed books together, they heard and read sermons and biblical texts, they memorized vivid tales from books and passed them on in conversation; surely many of Edwards’s stories of cat baptism, naked ‘dipping’, and soldiers’ assaults on ministers were spread in the same way. Like more obviously popular texts Gangraena—or parts of it—can be seen as ‘coming from the people and speaking back to them’.137 Edwards’s expectation of a wide and varied readership was thus not as absurd as his critics, then and now, have assumed. It was ‘the big City 136 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press (London: Faber and Faber, 1979); Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories; Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety. Jack, Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), argued for sharp polarities between oral and written forms while Ong, Orality and Literacy, emphasized the ‘tenaciousness of orality’ (115), but as a ‘residual’ form (158). Chartier, in ‘Culture as appropriation’ or The Order of Books, has been the most influential scholar arguing for interaction. For elite orality see Hughes,‘Meanings of Religious Polemic’; and for a comprehensive discussion, Fox, Oral and Literate Culture; Fox, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule’, Past and Present, 145 (1994). 137 Margaret Spufford,‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, Social History, 4 (1979), at 427; Chartier, ‘Culture as appropriation’, 236; Adam Fox, ‘Popular Verses and their Readership in the Early Seventeenth Century’, in Raven, Small, and Tadmor (eds.), Practice and Representation of Reading.

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merchants’, writes Hill, who read Gangraena, yet Edwards had aimed at ‘a manuall . . . for everyones reading’. Gangraena thrived in a crowded and competitive market, claimed Edwards, as was shown by the ‘quick sale these Books had being bought up by learned and judicious men of all ranks, the last book Gangraena being now in the press the third time within less than two months’—a great achievement ‘when the Presse is so thronged with such variety of Books, and many excellent peeces come forth, more then men can read’.138 Edwards claimed his book was necessary for men of all ranks and opinions, ‘for all sorts of men, Magistrates, Ministers, people, both those that stand, and those that are fallen, yea the very sectaries themselves’; and for as many of those as possible—hence his frequent, unavailing resolutions to be brief. His intended readers included those who might be tempted by sectarianism; those ‘who are meerly deceived out of their high opinion of some of the men, and of the way, as a most holy people’, would ‘upon the discovering to them, the dangerous Errors, Heresies, pernicious practises that attend that way . . . be recovered’, while in the Preface to Part Three he hoped ‘the Sectaries themselves . . . would but look into this Glasse’. He was encouraged by finding ‘both in Histories and in the experience of our own times, that many Sectaries have been regained’ by books, like the sixteenth-century Anabaptists ‘reclaimed by learned Musculus’ or a contemporary member of a London Independent congregation who became ‘a profest Presbyterian’on reading ‘some Books against Independencie’.139 If Gangraena was essential reading for all manner of people, there was an obvious, but crucial sense in which the very existence of Edwards’s books was dependent on readers. Gangraena was only possible as a series of collaborations, between Edwards and those who eavesdropped on the terrible errors uttered at the Spittle or in Bell Alley, and passed on what they had heard; and between author and readers who offered Edwards letters and depositions incriminating local sectaries. As a ‘part work’, Gangraena was well placed to develop a productive relationship with its readers (who might well have heard about Gangraena, rather than studied it closely). In Part One Edwards issued a passionate appeal to readers to join his crusade against sectarianism: my earnest desire is to all the godly Orthodox Readers, into whose hands this book shall come, who are enemies to sects and schismes, and lovers of truth, peace and order, whether Gentlemen of Committees in the severall Counties, or Souldiers 138 139

Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 150; Gangraena, i. 8; ii. 48. Gangraena, i. sig. B4r; ii. 203; iii. sig. (*)r; ii. 204.

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in the Armies, or Ministers in the severall parts of the Kingdom, or other godly Christians, that they would be pleased within this three or four moneths next following, to communicate to me all the certain intelligence they have, of the Opinions, wayes and Proceedings of the Sectaries.140

Part Two and, especially, Part Three thus included many anxious reports sent to Edwards by both ministers and laypeople, who noted especially the notorious individuals exposed in Gangraena, Part One. A letter from Essex added to the damning picture of Samuel Oates: ‘Good Mr Edwards, I thank you for your Book: Oates whom you mention in your Book, hath been sowing his Tares, Booltmong, and wild Oates in these parts these five weeks without any controll, hath seduced hundreds, and dipped many in Bocking River’. John Carter and John Thornbecke of Norwich were inspired by Part Two of Gangraena to provide Edwards with more evidence on the daring insolence of the sectaries, while a Yorkshire minister sent material on a ‘great Sectary’, Philip Tandy, who ‘is (as I have heard) by name mentioned in Master Edwards his Gangraena’. This last suggests Edwards’s engagement with his audience did not depend on close reading, for Tandy had not in fact featured in his work.141 Edwards expected his readers to be active, not only in providing him with material, but also in judiciously weighing the mound of evidence presented and comparing it to that presented in other books. He was confident that his account of Walwyn in Part One would be validated so ‘that every judicious Reader, who hath but read M. Walwyns Pamphlets, out of them will acquit me, that I have said nothing of him but truth, he being out of his own mouth and writings condemned for a dangerous man, a Seeker, and a strong head’. The judicious reader was frequently coupled with the ‘indifferent Reader’ asked to balance Edwards’s account of John Goodwin with the fallacious discussion in Cretensis: And now, good Reader, I desire thee impartially and without prejudice to weigh Cretensis objections and exceptions against my Book, and my Answers, and then judge whether I have not wounded, and laid this great Goliah of the Sectaries 140 Gangraena, i. 42. John Foxe and, among Edwards’s acquaintances, the biographer Samuel Clarke both issued similar appeals for material: Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’; Collinson, ‘A Magazine of Religious Patterns: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Puritanism’, in Godly People, 506. 141 Gangraena, ii. 3; iii. 33, 55. The Oates report is probably from Robert Harmar of Colchester. Booltmong (OED ‘bullimong’) is a mixture of various types of grain (or nonsense in this case). For Tandy, a radical Baptist and protégé of Lambert see David Farr, John Lambert, Parliamentary Soldier and Cromwellian Major General, 1619–1685 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 107–8.

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(coming out in defiance against the Reformed Churches) upon his back; and whether God, who chuseth the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty; and things which are despised, to bring to nought things that are of esteem, hath not made use of mee, a man so vilifed by the Sectaries, a poor weake thimble full of dust, by the wind strongly blowing this thimble full of dust into Cretensis eyes, to blinde him and befool him.142

Judgements involved working backwards and forwards through Edwards’s text: ‘Now whether my pen hath abused Master Ellis of Colchester, and other faithfull servants of God in those parts with base calumnies and slanders, I desire the reader to turn back to Master Harmars Letter page 54, 55. and to read what he hath sent me under his hand.’ So did full accounts of a variety of individuals such as John Saltmarsh—‘the Reader if he turne back to page 45 may read more’—or Hanserd Knollys, where Edwards clearly assumed readers would have loyally bought and read all three parts of Gangraena: ‘There is one Mr Knollys an Anabaptist, spoken of in my first part of Gangraena, and in this third part page 48,49 a Letter of his is printed’.143 In this image of active readers working through the text, turning back to earlier pages and previous volumes, and comparing Gangraena with opposing books, we are reminded of the characterization of reading as a journey. There are clear parallels also between such reading practices and both the peripatetic evil of the sectaries themselves and Edwards’s methods of exposing them, by following them in their journeys. He had developed his account of Walwyn,‘following him from place to place, from person to person with whom he hath conversed, and from one thing to another that he hath had his hand in’; and wrote in exactly the same terms of following Lilburne ‘from place to place’.144 A variety of guides and signposts were provided for journeying readers by Gangraena’s intrusive author and his printers. These can be divided into three types. The first was the arrangement of the words on the printed page, different font styles and decorative borders to indicate distinct sections; ‘white space’ breaking up the black text—‘the fragmenting of the page to assist reading’—in Joad Raymond’s phrase. Secondly, there were editorial interventions stressing important points through printed hands, and marginal notes. It is not unreasonable to assume that most of these were Edwards’s emphases, although some may of course have been added 142 Gangraena, ii. 26, 48, 136; this was another trait shared between Edwards and his opponents. Edward Drapes e.g. also urged his readers to ‘reade seriously, judge faithfully, not with a criticall eye, but with a judicious heart’: Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, preface. 143 144 Gangraena, ii. 98–9; iii. 113, 241. Ibid. ii. 26; iii. 153.

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by printers. Finally some editions of some parts included Tables of Content.145 As one might expect, Edwards was very aware of how the style of a book as a material object affected the messages readers took away. In his discussion of John Bachelor’s work as a licenser, Edwards noted he had altered print fonts as well as actual words in his reissue of the Anabaptist Leonard Busher’s plea for religious toleration, in order to emphasize particular points.146 Equally characteristically, however, Edwards (like his printers) was often working at so hectic a pace that attempts to provide guidance for readers backfired. All three parts were broken up into an enormous variety of sections and subsections, facilitating the reading of the large volumes in small ‘chunks’ of individual letters, ‘Relations’ of sectaries, or lists of errors. There was no consistency at all, however, in the techniques by which Edwards or the printers marked a break between one theme or one type of material, and another. In all three Parts the ‘Corollaries’ were marked off from the rest of the text: in Parts One and Two they began on a new page with an elaborate border, while Part One also had a heading in large type. In Part Three (perhaps as the printers ran out of room) the new section was signalled less decisively merely by ‘white space’, a gap in the text, a line through the page, and a heading in slightly larger type. At some points in all three parts, relatively insignificant divisions were overemphasized through the use of decorative borders: the short Antinomian hymn in Part Two was introduced with a large border a third of the way down the page. This was perhaps merely a space-filler, but it was not a useful division for readers.147 A similar border on a new page (24) introduced the section of over one hundred rambling pages replying to Goodwin. On the other hand, decisive shifts in the text from one category of material to another were masked by unobtrusive markings. In the first printing of Part One the switch from errors to ‘A Catalogue of the Blasphemies of the Sectaries’ was marked with only a small amount of ‘white space’ and a small italicized heading. There was a most indistinct break between sections one and two in this edition.A small italicized heading at the bottom of the last page of the first section,‘Here follows, A Copy 145 Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 146–9, for the intrusive author; Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, ch. 6 and p. 266; Chartier, Order of Books, 11–14; Rigney, James, ‘ “To lye upon a Stationers’ stall, like a piece of coarse flesh in a Shambles”: The Sermon, Print and the English Civil War’, in Lori-Anne Ferrell and Peter McCulloch (eds.), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 191–2; Martin Elsky, Authorising Words. Speech, Writing and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 115–30. 146 147 Gangraena, ii. 103. Ibid. 14.

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of some Letters, with a Narration of Stories and remarkable Passages concerning the Sectaries’, might easily have been missed, while the next page jumped straight in to the first letter with no heading at all: ‘Mr Henry Denne in a Conference with me . . .’.148 Further guidance was offered, particularly in Part One, through marginal emphases, headings, references, and comments, while Parts Two and Three used printed hands in the margin to emphasize particular points. When Robert Harmar wrote from Colchester that Ellis had preached for the pulling down of our churches, a marginal hand drew the reader’s attention to this remark in particular, while frequent hands stressed the attacks by troops on godly ministers in Part Three.149 William Goffe, defending the army, perhaps offers evidence for the success of this technique when he complained of Edwards’s slander that men were dismissed from the army only for being Presbyterians, ‘wherein by this memorandum he takes thee by the hand’, adding a hand in his own text.150 However, in the variant printing usually found in the combined edition of Parts One and Two the marginalia, even including the printed hands, were crowded amongst the dense main text, reducing their capacity to influence readers. The ‘combined’ or third edition of Parts One and Two of Gangraena, and Part Three, included guidance for readers’ travelling through the text through apparently helpful tables. Edwards was also a compulsive crossreferencer. Reliance on such aids to reading is, however, a frustrating experience for the modern student and must have been equally infuriating for contemporary readers, not least those who were also Edwards’s subjects. One set of problems was a result of the variant editions of Parts One and Two with different (imperfect) paginations so that page references given in the text or in tables did not necessarily work with the version readers actually had. It is also predictable that an author who had produced such a repetitive and disorganised main text was not a natural indexer; his tables are not so much classifications as alternate, abbreviated narratives. The table in the combined Parts One and Two was in effect four separate tables, reflecting the work’s complex structure, as Edwards stressed: ‘The first part of Gangraena is by the printer cast into two severall numbers of pages, which divides the whole into two, the first consisting of 66 Pages, the 148 Ibid. i. 37, 76 (1st pagination), 49 (the next page). Of course such complications might encourage careful checking: see Thomason’s note below. 149 Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 149; W. W. Slights,‘The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 682–716; Gangraena, ii. 55; iii. 249–55. 150 Goffe, A Just Apologie for an Abused Armie, 18.

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other of 116 Pages, according unto which division the Reader must goe in finding out the Contents specified in these following Tables.’ The first two tables were mostly summaries, albeit longwinded ones, of Edwards’s main points. From the first part, for example, ‘The Reader is forewarned not to be hindred from beleeving the truth of things contained in this Book, by all the clamours and reproaches cast upon it, p. 8.’, or from ‘A second Table . . . of the second division of the first part’, ‘The Sectaries are a subtill, cunning, active, nimble, deceitfull, self seeking, plotting, undermining generation, and we have cause to suspect them in everie thing, to feare them yeelding, and to feare them flying, and to look about us in all kinde of transactions with them, p 73’. On occasion, though, the table gives only a brief and unspecific account of complex sections, such as ‘The Catalogue of the Errours, Heresies contained in p. 15, 16, . . . 30, 31’. Named sectaries, so important in the text, are rarely included in the first two tables and only at one point has any sifting or classification taken place, when ‘A relation of some women preachers and of their doctrine, 29, 30, 31, 32’ is extracted from and placed before ‘A relation of some stories p. 17 to p. 42’. A third table ‘containing the names and relations of the principal Ringleaders of corrupt opinions and Errours in the first Part of Gangraena’ does give page references for the most of the sectaries discussed by Edwards, although it does not include Burton, Burroughs, or Greenhill. It is organized on neither an alphabetical nor a page-by-page basis so it is by no means clear where any individual should appear in the two columns. The page numbers of course only work with this edition. But it is even more misleading for readers looking for a full account of any individual—or for how they were themselves treated by Edwards! The chart gives pages only for the main stories told by Edwards; it does not include examples from general headings or books and sayings used as evidence in the Catalogue of errors.151 The fourth,‘Table of the main matters contained in the second Part’, offers a wonderful page-by-page summary narrative, but it is inconsistent and unhelpful as a guide to the text: ‘A discovery of Walwyn to be a dangerous and desperate man, a pleader for all Religions, etc, p. 21, 22, 23’; ‘A proof of Lieutenant Colonel Lilburns playing at Cards p. 24’; ‘Master Burroughs resembled by Cretensis to Achilles, and Master Edwards to Troilis, where see Master Edwards answer to that comparison, p. 80, 81’; and so on. Only at two points does Edwards do anything other than go 151 The page numbers given for Hanserd Knollys e.g. are 38, 39, but there are many other mentions of him (e.g. 35).

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through the text, bringing together two references to Saltmarsh’s response to Edwards’s account of women, and adding the page numbers for the ‘discovery of the names of those who writ Letters’to the earlier reference to the reasons why the names had been concealed. Although many individuals are named in this ‘narrative’ table, others such as Collier, Clarkson, or Oates are omitted, despite lengthy treatment in the text. At the end, however, Edwards did squeeze in ‘The names of some Ringleaders of Faction and of Errours not named in the Table of the first part of Gangraena’, again a rather random list including Saltmarsh, Durant, and Collier, but not John Lanseter of Bury. The most comprehensive and systematic table, running to some eleven pages, is the one at the front of Part Three. There is again a summary narrative which here did bring together references from different parts of the book. There are fewer omissions, but the very length and complexity of the table, and the lack of a consistent sense of proportion, qualified its usefulness. A brief entry for ‘Animadversions’ sums up fifteen pages whereas it took almost a whole column to summarize pages 95–6, on the miscellaneous misdeeds of soldiers and sectaries. The separate table of names is in no discernible order, neither alphabetical or by page, and some references (such as those to Hugh Peter on the unnumbered sheets) have been missed. It is not clear why some obscure sectaries such as Priscilla Miles of Norwich (pages 34–5) are included only in the summary narrative while others such as William Bowling of Kent (pages 35–9, although the table has 35–7 only) are only in the table of names, and most are in both. The faults are in some ways the reverse of those in the tables for Parts One and Two, with men like John Poole or Blunt and Emmet who are only names in the text honoured with an entry in the table along with major subjects like Peter, Lilburne, and Overton. If the tables offered deceptive guides to navigating the text, the same could be said for the author’s cross-referencing, reliance on which rendered any journey through the text liable to sabotage through misleading signposts. The simple reference in Part Two (on page 7 of the first, or page 6 of the second, printing), ‘There is one Laurence Clarkson, a Seeker, spoken of in my Gangraena, pag 104 and 105. who put forth a Pamphlet called The Pilgrimage of Saints’, would only have worked for readers of the second edition of Part One. The relevant passage is on pages 72–4 of the first edition, and pages 19–20 of the ‘second division of the first part’ in the combined or third edition. Indeed purchasers of this combined edition would be completely bewildered by all cross-references to Part One in the second volume. All cross-references by Edwards himself to Part One in his second

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part were to the second edition, but if he was refuting his opponents he used their page references which were often to the first edition. So in Part Two, page 90 (or page 74 of the second edition), when Edwards discussed Jeremiah Burroughs’s attack on the ‘story Master Edwards hath page 79 of one Nichols’, page 79 referred to the first edition. There are no crossreferences in Part Two which use the third printing of Part One; yet this is the version usually included in the combined edition. With one version Edwards’s cross-referencing did not work even within the text, that is the second printing of Part Two which amounted to 178 pages besides prefatory material. The cross-references though were the same as in the 212-page edition. In the Epistle to the Christian Reader, Edwards denounced the blasphemies of ‘one John Boggis’, with a reference to ‘Pag 162, 163 of this present Book’. But these are the pages for the first printing and the account of Boggis here is on pages 133–4. Again on page 121, he wrote of ‘one Samuel Oats, a Weaver (a man I have spoken of in my former book, and in this too, page 10)’; in fact the reader needs to consult page 8.152 As there was only one printing of Part Three, consistent internal crossreferencing was added by the compositor as he went, while the references back to the first two parts were more precise, providing of course the reader had the version Edwards referred to, as ‘In my First and Second Parts of Gangraena, page 28, 29 of the First Part, Third Edition, and in page 1 and 117 of the Second Part, Second Edition, I have laid down some Tenets of the Sectaries destructive to Civill Government and humane Society’. As he worked on Part Three in the summer of 1646, Edwards was apparently using a combined edition of Parts One and Two as his reference copy. In contrast to tightly structured contemporary works such as Baillie’s Dissuasive or Pagitt’s Heresiography, where it was clear where a particular theme was to be found, the loosely organized and complexly printed Gangraena was harder work but perhaps more involving. Reading involved complex journeys for sympathetic or hostile readers, marking, comparing, adding incrementally to the complex, piece-by-piece accounts of notable individuals and events. This at least would be the conclusion to be drawn from the book itself. How easy, though, was it for potential readers to obtain Gangraena? Here we need to shift the discussion to practical matters of price, print run, and distribution, ostensibly straightforward issues complicated by the elusiveness of precise information. Gangraena, like most books, did not have 152 See below for a copy in York Minster Library (XIV P44 (1), (2) ), where a reader has corrected the cross-referencing in his 178-page copy of Part Two.

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a fixed price; many collectors, like the secretary to the Army Council, William Clarke, haggled so that the price paid was less than the bookseller’s original offer. Copies were given away or bought second hand. We can be sure, however, that purchasing Gangraena was a substantial investment, for books cost at least 1d. a sheet and Edwards’s volumes ran to thirty or forty sheets. Sir Simonds D’Ewes spent 3s. on ‘Mr Edwards his book [presumably Gangraena Part One] and other small books’ in March 1646, while the copies of Edwards’s Antapologia, and of all three parts of Gangraena preserved in the library of the Presbyterian Thomas Hall of Kings Norton, were valued, a little optimistically, at 2s. 6d. and 10s. respectively in the early 1660s. The relative cost of Edwards’s books can be illustrated through Clarke’s purchases of material on religious debates in 1644–5: he paid 4½d. for the Apologeticall Narration and 1d. only for the Assembly’s Certaine Considerations against gathering churches, yet Antapologia cost a hefty 1s. 6d. The one sheet anti-sectarian broadsides similarly could have been obtained for 1d.153 Yeomen and moderately prosperous shopkeepers could have afforded Gangraena but they would have had to think hard about such a purchase. Purchase at full or near full price was by no means the only way of obtaining Gangraena. Certainly a satirical attack on Edwards which pictured his ‘Industrious Smith’ casting up his accounts claimed very few copies had actually been sold: Imprimis, given to the Honorable House of Commons, out of hopes to finde favour there, so many books . . . It. given to a School-boy to correct your false Latine, and other amendements 40s, in dry money (too much by 39 in so dry a bargaine) . . . It. sent to the Reformed Churches to shew them the variety of our Sectaries, and your valiant encountrings, so many. It. given away to friends to make a party, who have taken the Covenant to be faithfull to us till death, so many. It. so many let out at livery at pence a peece, but finding no satisfaction returned them, Green, Print and Protestantism, 39 and n.; Mendle,‘Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth Century England’, in E. Sauer and J. Andersen (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 565. I am very grateful to Michael Mendle for directing me to Clarke’s collection. Details of his prices are noted in Worcester College Oxford, vol. BBs2, a collection of tracts on religious debates of the 1640s. Watson, Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 264, 28 Feb.–7 Mar. 1646. D’Ewes spent 9s. 4d. on Mercurius Rusticus; Gangraena, Part Three; and ‘other pamphlets’a year later, Library, 266. Most of Thomas Hall’s library (but not Gangraena) is now in Birmingham Reference Library; a catalogue and valuation of his books is included in Hall’s life: DWL, Baxter Treatises, vol. 9. In a copy of the combined edition of Parts One and Two in DWL (ref 3049 A15) is written in a mid-17th-cent. hand: ‘Both parts of gangrena 4s’; on a 2nd edn. of Part One in the NLW (Civil War Tracts 1646), the price is noted as 2s. 8d. The price dropped in the 1650s, as we shall see below. 153

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spoiled, so many. It. so many sold for little or nothing, to The Exchange, to Grocers, Cooks, etc . . . It. so many sequestered for my owne proper use, in my study behind the doore (alias the house of office) . . . And lastly (to ballance the accompts with the bakers dozen) lying still in my hands, and are lyke to lye so many hundreds, Come along customers if you lacke any154

Unfair as it was, this attack probably highlighted the combination of gift, loan, and sale whereby Gangraena was circulated. Letters printed by Edwards suggest that he had distributed Gangraena to likely allies: ‘I received the books sent mee, and shall make the best use I can of them; the one I keep for my own use, the other I pleasure friends with’, wrote one from ‘a Countrey farther North’ while a ‘godly Minister out of the country’ informed a London minister, ‘His last Book Gangraena of the Second Edition I received this last post, together with his Letter’.155 The correspondence of Edwards’s friend Robert Baillie confirms that authors gave away their books, thereby sending British Presbyterian polemic throughout Europe. The books Baillie sent to his kinsman and regular correspondent William Spang in December 1644 included Edwards’s Antapologia, ‘the author’s gift to me; so it’s gratis acceptistis’ and Samuel Rutherford’s latest book, again with the compliments of the author. Baillie distributed many copies of his own books freely around his acquaintances: in November 1645 Spang received detailed instructions, ‘I have sent yow seven of my Dissuasives; only one for yourself; the rest, with my service, to Thomas Cunninghame, Mr Strickland, Apollonius, Spanheim, Dr Stewart, and Voetius. As yow have occasion to send them, send allwayes a Sermon with a Dissuasive’. By January he could report to his colleague Robert Ramsey, ‘The whole first impression is sold; the second I expect to-morrow. When Thomas Young comes home, he hes a dozen for friends; and also many of my late Sermons, and forty of his own, to be sold’. His sequel on Anabaptism was similarly dealt with in August 1646. With a letter to the minister at St Andrews, Robert Blair, Baillie sent twelve copies to be passed on to James Hamilton with detailed instructions, one copy for Blair, one to Hamilton, the third to ‘dear Mr Henderson’; four others to eminent Scots politicians including Baillie’s cousin the general. The five remaining were sent on to another contact with a note on their distribution.156 A Letter to Mr Thomas Edwards, 9. Gangraena, ii. 149, further north than Yorkshire—probably Durham or Northumberland; iii. 77. A West Country minister described receiving Parts One and Two in iii. 40–1. 156 Letters of Baillie, ii. 251, 327, 335, 386. 154 155

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Londoners could buy Gangraena in the bookshops discussed in earlier sections, and for provincial readers, there were bookshops in all significant towns, although their main sales often came from paper rather than books. A Warrington stationer, Robert Booth, whose estate was valued at £181 on his death in 1648, had some 239 separate (named) works in his shop, amounting to over 1,100 copies, although very few were recent books. Thomas Cooper, a Birmingham stationer, had ‘Bookes in the shop together with the Tooles and Implements belonging to the shop’ worth £103 on his death in 1662. Bookshops (like the later auctions) sold material secondhand and, like the emerging parish and town libraries, might loan works.157 Edwards’s impact is not that of the ‘steady sellers’ analysed by Ian Green on the basis of a minimum of five editions in thirty years, but given the wide discussion and wide availibility of Gangraena this is not a reliable guide to its influence—and of course the lack of specific evidence on print runs makes counting editions problematic.158 The three editions of Part One, two of Part Two, and one of Part Three were enough to ensure its wide circulation; there was no need for a reprinting in the later seventeenth century when Edwards was still often cited in religious and political debate.159 If statistical certainty is impossible, the extent of Gangraena’s accessibility can be demonstrated through a variety of more impressionistic evidence. William Clarke and Thomas Hall are very different identifiable contemporary owners; amongst Presbyterian politicians, Sir Simonds D’Ewes (who apparently bought very little religious material in the 1640s) purchased copies of Parts One and Three, and the Earl of Essex’s library included ‘Edwardes Gangrena’ as item 55, and a copy of the combined first and second parts, as item 64. In a remote village in Perthshire, the oldest 157 Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), Cambridge History of the Book, iv. 676; John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge: Studies in Publishing and Printing History, Cambridge University Press, 1985); Johns, Nature of the Book, 117–19, 155–6; W. Harry Rylands, ‘Booksellers and Stationers in Warrington, 1639–1657’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1 (1885); Lichfield Diocesan RO, administration and inventory of Thomas Cooper, 18 Sept. 1662 (individual items are not identified). As many as 70 per cent of Jeake’s books were purchased second hand: Michael Hunter, Giles Mandelbrote, Richard Ovenden, and Nigel Smith (eds.), A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1623–90 (Cambridge and Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. xxix, xxxvi. The Sussex minister Giles Moore purchased books in the 1650s and 1660s from London bookshops and second-hand from the estates of recently dead local ministers. He owned Pagitt’s Heresiography, but not (apparently) Gangraena: The Journal of Giles Moore, ed. Ruth Bird (Sussex Record Society, 1971), e.g. 186. 158 McKenzie,‘Printers of the Mind’, 14; Green, Print and Protestantism, 19, 176–7. 159 I am grateful to David Loades for this point; see also Ch. 6, below.

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free library in Scotland holds two copies of Gangraena, purchased by the brother in law of the royalist leader Montrose.160 There are copies of Gangraena in all major libraries in the British Isles and Ireland, while one useful survey, of early books in cathedral libraries, gives some indication of the circulation of different versions. Two cathedral libraries hold the first edition of Part One; four libraries contain six copies of the second edition; six libraries hold seven copies of Part Two; and five hold six copies of the combined Parts One and Two. Four libraries have a copy of Part Three.161 From the later 1670s, the massive libraries of several of Edwards’s contemporaries, particularly his clerical contemporaries, were sold through the novel means of the book auction, often held in coffee houses. Through the printed catalogues produced for these, we can obtain some impression of how widespread the circulation of Gangraena was amongst learned men caught up in the controversies of the 1640s. Of twenty-seven auction catalogues between 1676 and 1688, at least fourteen included works by Edwards: six had Gangraena and other tracts, four Gangraena only and four copies of Edwards’s other works. Seven out of eight catalogues from the 1670s offered Edwards’s material but only seven also of the nineteen later ones, perhaps reflecting declining purchases after the 1640s. Many of the Presbyterian clergy whose libraries were sold had copies: Gabriel Sangar of Wiltshire had all three parts of Gangraena and Antapologia; Lazarus Seaman, Gangraena and The Casting Down; Thomas Jacombe apparently had two copies of Gangraena in three parts ‘complete’. Thomas Manton, however, had Antapologia and Reasons against Independent Church Government, along with the replies of John Goodwin and Jeremiah Burroughs to Gangraena, but not the work itself. It is perhaps not suprising that William Greenhill’s library contained no works by Edwards, more so that Thomas Gataker, whom Edwards had quoted with approval, did not appear to own any of Edwards’s books. But men of all opinions brought books of which they disapproved as well as those they agreed with; Jacombe had a bound volume with thirteen tracts for and against the opinions of the Socinian 160 J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict (London: Routledge, 1988), 102; E. W. Powell, Innerpeffray Library (Innerpeffray, Crieff, 1998); Watson, Library;Vernon F. Snow,‘The Lord General’s Library, 1646’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 20 (1966), 121. 161 Margaret S. G. McLeod, et al. (eds), The Cathedral Libraries Catalogue: Books Printed before 1701 (London: BL, Bibliographical Society, 1984); there are probably more copies of Part One in other libraries. Some of the Bodleian copies were acquired early on, such as the first printing of Part One that was from the collection of Thomas Barlow, Bodley’s librarian in the 1650s and later bishop of Lincoln: shelf mark, B4.1 Linc. Predictably, Edwards’s works are very well represented in Scottish libraries with many copies of Reasons and The Casting Down as well as the more familiar Antapologia and Gangraena.

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John Biddle, while the tolerant Benjamin Worsley had Gangraena, Pagitt, and many works by Prynne as well as Socinian and other radical books.162 The library of Milton’s friend, the doctor Nathan Paget, included amongst over 2,000 volumes much radical and polemical religious literature—hermetic and familist books; works for and against religious toleration, including Gangraena and one of Walwyn’s replies; Baptist, Quaker, and Ranter tracts—besides his medical books.163 The intense religious debates 162 Johns, Nature of the Book, 153; Hunter et al., (eds.), A Radical’s Books, p. xxxvii, for circulation of 1640s material after library sales. My analysis is based on Catalogus Variorum & Insignum Librorum Selectissimae Bibliothecae Reverendi Viri Gulielum Greenhill (London, 1678); Bodl., Wood E13: a collection of printed auction catalogues including the libraries of Lazarus Seaman (sold 1676), 59–60; Thomas Manton, 29, 52–5, 69; Dr Benjamin Worsley (1678) (MS numbering), 156, 166, 169; Gabriel Sangar (1678), 39; Dr John Godolphin and Mr Owen Phillips (1678), sold together; the library included Antapalogia and all three parts of Gangraena. Bodl., Wood E15, a similar volume which includes Catalogus Variorum Librorum Selectissimis Bibliothecis Doctissimorum (i.e. the libraries of Henry Stubbes, William Dillingham, Thomas Vincent, Thomas Cawton) (1680), 125–6, 148–9 (recte 248–9), listing two copies each of Gangraena, Parts One and Two, two volumes simply described as Edwards’s works, one described as ‘Four Edwards Pieces’; and one copy each of his ‘treatise of Toleration’ [The Casting Down] and his ‘Apologia’ [Antapalogia], see also 246–7, 250 for classifications of sermons and tracts; Catalogus Librorum Bibilothecis Selectissimis Doctissimorum Virorum . . . (London, 1681), libraries of George Lawson, George Fowler, Owen Stockdon, Thomas Brooks, 47, listed one copy of Gangraena; the Library of Nicholas Lloyd (1681); Ralph Button and Thankful Owen (1681); Dr William Outram and Dr Thomas Gataker (1681). Bodl. Mus Bibl. III 4o (21): auction catalogues of 1687/8, including Bibliotheca Selectissima, Diversorum Librorum (London, 1687); A Catalogue of the Several Libraries of the honorable Sir William Coventry and the Honorable Sir Henry Coventry (London, 1687); A Catalogue of Choice Books in Divinity, History, Physick and Poetry, Romances, Travels etc (London, 1687); Bibliotecha Womockiana (Cambridge, 1687); Bibliotecha Maynardiania (London, 1687). This had, 13, Antapologia, described as Edwards’s ‘Answer to Goodwyn, Nye, Simpson, Burroughs, Bridge about the Controversies of the times’. Catalogus Librorum . . . Edwardi Wray (London, 1687); Bibliotheca Latino-Anglica (London, 1687), 32 (for Gangraena, Part Three); A Catalogue of Choice English Books (London, 18 July 1687); Books sold at Newcastle, 1 Aug. 1687; Books sold at Wellington’s Coffee House, 17 Oct. 1687, 16, 21, 23, and appendix, 5, for two copies of Gangraena, Antapologia and Casting Down; Bibliotecha Jacombiana (London, 1687), 56, 88, 104; Catalogus Variorum Librorum (London, 1687); The Library of Mr W. Sill (1687); Choice English Books (London, 19 Dec. 1687), 8, 9, included Pagitt, Baillie’s Dissuasive and The Casting Down, but not Gangraena; A Catalogue . . . learned and eminent Citizens of London (London, 1688). A Catalogue of the Libraries of Two Eminent Persons . . . which will be sold by way of Auction at Tunbridge Wells (London, 1684). This is a minimum figure for ownership of Gangraena for all Catalogues pay most attention to the more valuable Latin and Greek books and include several items of miscellaneous English tracts which might have included Gangraena. The Catalogue of (mainly) Gataker’s library, for example, simply listed as item 64,‘69 Tracts about Church Government, Episcopacy, Liturgy, Ceremonies, Preaching, Schism, Separation, Conformity, non-Conformity, Liberty of Conscience, Toleration, Comprehension, the Covenant’ and so on. For book sales see A. N. L. Munby and Lenore Coral (eds.), British Book Sales Catalogues 1676–1800: A Union List (London: Mansell, 1977). 163 Hill, Milton, pp. 492–5, app. 3 ‘Nathan Paget and his Library’. These books were auctioned in 1681. Compare the library of the radical Samuel Jeake which was around the same size and included Bastwick’s Independency not Gods Ordinance, and Ricraft’s Looking Glass for

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of the interregnum, and the explosion of print culture that was so closely associated with them, seem to have qualified the tendency for godly ministers to concentrate on the edifying and pastoral rather than the ephemeral and polemic in the books they bought (or at least those they preserved).164 Gangraena was thus widely available to those who could afford to buy it, or managed to borrow it. How widespread though was the practical capacity to read such a book? Fluent technical literacy in a modern sense was the preserve of a minority in the mid-seventeenth century, albeit a growing one; a minority that was socially, geographically, and ideologically determined. Nonetheless, studies of literacy based on counting people’s capacity to sign their name underestimate the ability to read for reading was taught first in school and many young people whose families could afford only minimal schooling had reading but not writing skills. Consequently the careful studies of Bristol by Jonathan Barry, which show that by the mid-seventeenth century 65 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women could sign their names, imply that the ‘average man’ and many women would have been able to read. The situation would have been very similar in Edwards’s London. Books are found in a third of midseventeenth-century Bristol inventories and in the same proportion of inventories for people dying in the 1660s from Birmingham, a town with a reputation for godliness. Although it was the more prosperous who left wills and inventories, it is clear that reading matter is under-recorded for ephemeral chapbooks and broadsides were rarely valued.165 There are further reasons for relative optimism about the capacity to comprehend Edwards’s Gangraena. Townspeople were more literate than the Anabaptists, and Nosegay (but not Edwards’s books) as well as a vast range of radical material by John Archer, Christopher Blackwood (Jeake’s wife’s brother-in-law), Thomas Lambe, John Goodwin, and others. Hunter et al. (eds.), A Radical’s Books, 16, 24, 26, 98–9, 202–3, 244–5. 164 Rigney, ‘ “To lye upon a Stationers’ stall” ’, 197, giving the example of Samuel Ward’s library at Ipswich. 165 Margaret Spufford,‘First Steps in Literacy’. Reading was commonly taught between the ages of 6 and 7, writing in the following year, at an age when poorer families would have required children to work; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 1500–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1988); Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture’; Barry, ‘Press and Political Culture’. I have analysed 50 Birmingham wills and inventories proved at Lichfield in the 1660s; Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988), 49, 55, found book-ownership varying between 9 and 29 per cent in a more general survey of inventories from 1675.

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those who lived in the country, and Gangraena was, we should stress again, a Londoners’ book. It spoke, of course, to the zealots in the religious controversies of the age, and books were of vital importance to godly Christians, both Presbyterian and sectarian. Books were precious weapons in the spreading and defence of God’s truths, themselves encapsulated in God’s word, the Scriptures. More pragmatically books were crucial in mobilizing support, or defending individuals and groups from attack. The pioneering work of Margaret Spufford showed twenty years ago the struggles many Puritans and sectaries underwent in the midst of poverty and hard toil to acquire the reading and writing skills necessary for full participation in religious exploration and debate.166 Furthermore, as we have shown above, the clear message of recent scholarship is that silent and rapid reading by individuals was by no means the only, or even the main, way in which books were consumed in early modern England. The distinction between literacy and illiteracy was blurred, and understanding was often generated in collective contexts. Edwards provides much supporting evidence of public, collective discussion over Gangraena. In the Preface to Part Three he described how sectaries had tried to discredit his book: some Sectaries that have been of the same name of those Sectaries that I have related stories of (though they could not but know by many circumstances, and particulars in the stories they were not the men but others) have said, There’s a story related of me, I am the man he speaks of, and ‘tis all false, for I was at such a place then and could not do so: thus one Webb an Officer in the Army did, telling the people in the West where he found Gangraena that the story of Webb was of him, I am that Webb in Gangraena, and ‘tis all false, I never preached such things, nor was ever questioned about such things, or did such things related.

This discussion was itself passed on to Edwards in conversation when ‘a godly Minister in the West of England told me he heard one Webb an Officer in the Army speak thus to the people to possesse them against Gangraena’. Edwards indignantly pointed out,‘I writ not of that Webb, but another Webb a younger man here in London, not one of the Army, who put out a Booke for the vindication of himselfe’.167 When the soldiers complained in spring 1647 about the ‘aspersions and false calumnies’ in ‘scandalous Bookes, such as Mr Edwards Gangreana’, we should not assume they had read the books thoroughly in a manner we would understand, 166

Spufford,‘First Steps in Literacy’. Gangraena, iii. Preface, unpaginated after sig. *2; Edwards’s Webbe was Thomas, the future ‘Ranter’; the speaker quoted was Lieutenant John Webb (also in fact a Londoner). 167

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but they ‘knew’ and had reached a judgement on what they said. Edwards certainly felt his books were ‘hated among the Sectaries in the Army’.168 All the evidence for how Gangraena was read is partial, elusive, and difficult to pin down. In Chapter 2 we discussed Edwards’s various strategies, conscious or spontaneous, for involving readers: the evocative and ambiguous effect of printing ‘private’correspondence, the familiar themes and preoccupations that resonated from other print genres and deeply embedded narratives, amongst which providential messages loomed large; the vivid personalities and striking images presented often in manageable chunks within a large and unruly text. In this chapter we have explored Edwards’s more abstract summations of his ideal readership, and the well-intentioned if clumsy guidance presented within the text, and discussed the sharply contrasting ‘interpretative communities’ of readers demonstrated in the printed debate over Gangraena. We turn now to the most elusive hints of all, the traces left by contemporary readers or at least owners on or through their copies of Edwards’s books. The binding of Gangraena with other tracts of the 1640s indicates nearcontemporary moves to understand the experience of civil war and religious upheaval; bringing us as close as anything else to the English equivalent of the French insight that reading was ‘a form of revolutionary sociability and . . . a mode of making sense of the Revolution’. Some surviving bindings of course indicate decisions by auctioneers or more recent librarians, but there is much secure contemporary evidence. Both William Clarke and Thomas Hall were meticulous organizers of their large pamphlet collections, enclosing tables of content in their own hands in most of their volumes. In 1651 a nostalgic Robert Baillie had all Edwards’s works except the last bound in a volume with the Apologeticall Narration and seven hostile responses to Gangraena.169 Surviving libraries and book auction 168 Divers Papers from the Army (London, 1647), BL E388 (18), Thomason date 22 May, 6; Gangraena, iii. 106. There is no sense here of the argument sometimes advanced by later scholars that ‘private’ readings might be more dangerous or subversive than public, collective engagements with a text. 169 Darnton and Roche, ‘Introduction’, p. xv; Mendle, ‘Preserving the Ephemeral’; Lesley Le Claire, ‘The Survival of the Manuscript’, in Mendle (ed.), Putney Debates; Clarke’s collection is in Worcester College Library, Hall’s is in Birmingham Reference Library. Clarke’s volume BBs3 bound together Antapologia (1646 printing) with all parts of Gangraena and two responses. Glasgow University Library, Special Collections, Bi3–i2 for Baillie’s volume; John Durkin and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), pl. xxxvi and 8, for Baillie’s marks of ownership. Durham University Library includes two thematically bound volumes of Edwards’s works: Cosin I 3/27 has Gangraena, Parts One and Two, with the heresiological works of Cloppenburg; Bamburgh G/5/16 (from a parish library) combines Pagitt; Baillie’s Dissuasive; and Gangraena, Parts One and Two. TCD, Gallery 3b.16 is a later example; it has Gangraena bound with a dozen more controversial tracts in 1849.

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catalogues illustrate both the sheer volume of print generated by the revolution, and how owners sought to classify and control this flood of print, thereby, perhaps, making some sense of troubled times. Thomas Hall’s tables of content reveal thematic organization into funeral sermons, Presbyterian manifestos, particular controversies, and the like. Thomas Jacombe had a ‘Compleat Collection’ of fast sermons before both Houses of Parliament in eleven volumes. Thomas Manton, the moderate Presbyterian, had ordered his fast sermons alphabetically; the whole of volume 36 of his English books consisted of seventeen parliamentary sermons of Stephen Marshall, while the sermons of six ministers whose names began with S (including Strong, Seaman, and Sedgwick) were bound together as volume 42. Other bindings in Manton’s library juxtaposed opposing viewpoints: he put Saltmarsh and John Goodwin together with the Presbyterians such as Ley and Gataker who had written against them. Volume 70 in an auction of the books of eminent Londoners included Walwyn against Gangraena as well as the work itself in two parts, Edwards’s Reasons against Independent Church Government and The Casting Down, together with ‘other pieces of the said Edwards’. Lazarus Seaman had a volume on toleration with Edwards’s works bound with the declarations of the London ministers. Three volumes in the library of Benjamin Worsley (a ‘projector’ and associate of Hartlib in the 1640s and 1650s) comprised a more general Collection of above 380 Letters, Treaties, Instructions, Rules, Protestations, Engagements, Declarations, Messages, Addresses, Representations, Petitions, Bills, Concessions, Reports, Apologies, Resolutions, Remonstrances, Animadversions, Arguments, Pleas, Demurrs, Observations and Answers, relations of Fights, Sieges, Storms, Surrenders, and divers other Papers and Transactions betwixt King, Parliament, City and Army, from 1640–1649.170

As William Sherman insists,‘Reading often leaves no trace’, but there are surviving copies of Gangraena with tantalizing contemporary annotations and marks. Some owners were at least concerned to mark their possession by adding their names, from the notable such as Thomas Tanner or 170 Bibliotheca Jacombiana (1687), 90. Jacombe’s library contained over 15,000 volumes. Bodl., Wood E13, Auction Catalogues of Lazarus Seaman (1676) 59–60; Thomas Manton (1678), 29, 52–5, 69; Dr Benjamin Worsley (1678), 169 (MS pagination); A Catalogue . . . learned and eminent Citizens of London (1688), 44. Samuel Jeake’s books (some of which were purchased in the auctions of the later 1670s) were often bound to reflect particular pamphlet exchanges, while his Lilburne tracts followed the chronological development of his career. Jeake did not own any of Edwards’s work although he had some of Saltmarsh’s responses: Hunter et al. (eds.), A Radical’s Books, pp. xxxvii, xlviii–xlix, 210–11.

6. Gangraena, Part One, p. 49 (second sequence), with manuscript note by George Thomason, indicating he had at least skimmed the volume.

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David Drummond, Lord Madertie who added a clear signature to all his books, to those unknown—to us—like the woman who signed ‘Dorothy Mogridge her booke’ in a mid-seventeenth-century hand. Other copies were passed down in families, a Henrie Bradshaw was the first owner of a copy now in the National Library of Wales, while a descendant Th. Bradshaw added his name in a later seventeenth-century hand. The most famous collector amongst Edwards’s London contemporaries, George Thomason, checked through his copy of the first printing of Part One: where page 76 is succeeded by page 49 he wrote ‘this doth follow’. An anonymous and presumably irritated reader corrected Edwards’s crossreferencing in his edition of the densely printed version of Part Two, which suggests a systematic if impenetrable reading.171 Owners did not necessarily regard Gangraena with the reverence its author hoped for, but used it for a variety of purposes. One Joshua Read used his copy of Part Two to check his watch (timed at 9.59) with the ‘Town clock’, three minutes behind. He also began to draft an indenture on a fly leaf. The Kent parliamentarian Henry Oxinden underlined several passages, especially in the lists of errors in his copy of the combined edition of Parts One and Two but he also scribbled the names of Kentish gentleman (apparently for some sort of commission) on the back cover. More seriously, a mid- or late seventeenth-century owner of a copy now in Dr Williams Library made brief ink marks and underlinings on Edwards’s text, and noted other works on toleration on the frontispiece, including the erroneous (but explicable from the title) comment that ‘Tho Alle writ agt this Book’. Presumably, for this reader, consulting Gangraena was part of a programme of study on religious liberty and persecution. Marks on Robert Baillie’s copies of Parts One and Two suggest that he used them to extract material for the footnotes or ‘Testimonies’for Anabaptism, the True Fountain of Independency, the sequel to his Dissuasive. Edwards’s letter on Denne (page 1, of the second ‘division’, of Gangraena, Part One, third edition) was Testimony ‘M’ on page 108 of Baillie’s book; Testimony ‘KKKK’ (pages 118–19), ‘horrible blasphemies against the Trinity’ in a church off 171 William H. Sherman,‘What did Renaissance readers write in their books?’, in Andersen and Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers, 130. Other important work on annotation includes Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habit of Appropriation’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Zwicker, ‘Passions and Occasions: Milton, Marvell and the Politics of Reading c.1649’, in Boesky and Crane (eds.), Form and Reform. Bodl., Tanner MS 843 (2); Innerpeffray Library, Perthshire, J9; Bodl., 4o X Jur 51 (4); BL E323 (2); York Minster Library, P44.

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Bell Alley came from page 33 (‘first division’) of Edwards’s book. These and many other relevant passages are heavily marked in the Glasgow copy.172 Only rarely are there more extensive annotations.173 In a Bodleian copy, where Edwards argues that any errors committed by Presbyterians occurred when they were ‘Episcopall and foolish’, ‘and foolish’ has been underlined and ‘did flourish’ is added in the margin but later crossed out. It is not clear what this amounts to—presumably an ‘Anglican’ comment, later regretted.174 More extensive indications of a slightly later reader creating his own meanings from Edwards’s text are found in the marginalia to a copy in Trinity College Dublin. These may have been made by a Henry Whitaker, intriguingly the name of Edwards’s host in Amsterdam in 1647–8, but the notes indicate a post-restoration reader. This reader was obsessed with the parallels between Dissenters and Papists or Independents and Papists, an argument used by Edwards, but not with any particular emphasis. ‘See how papists & Dissenters concurre’, he wrote against a report that ‘one Mr L had said . . . That men ought not to be troubled for their consciences, but Papists should be suffered’. Frequent comments to the same effect were written against the lists of errors at the start of Part Three: ‘Independant opinions many of them Papall’; ‘How Jesuits in the Independant shapes have brought in prayers to Saints into England anew’; ‘note that Romish Priests doe not baptize with water alone butt with oyle, cream etc’—this against the sectarian view that John’s baptism with water was ended by the coming of Christ; ‘How the Independents & Anabaptists have borrowed the old Hereticks tenets to confound us’. Finally this reader noted ‘The Independents mallice to Charles the first’ against Edwards’s paragraph on the sectaries’ denunciations of the king as a delinquent.175 A 172 NLS, A 2874 (2) for Read’s copy; Oxinden’s is in CCL; DWL, 3049 A15 (Parts One and Two). Rigney,‘ “To lye upon a Stationers stall” ’, 201–3, discussing readers’ annotations, mentions the drive to cross-reference, as a means of reinforcing or challenging an author’s meaning; Glasgow University Library, Bi3-i2. 173 Unfortunately Thomas Hall’s copy does not seem to survive; Hall made extensive personal, academic, and partisan notes on many of his books. Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 264–7, demonstrates that annotation was rare in newsbooks and pamphlets which were probably read once only. There were some marks of emphasis such as underlining or small hands, with occasional personal comments or later corrections. For more complex and ‘adversarial’ readings of religious literature see P. Collinson, A. Hunt, and A. Walsham, ‘Religious Publishing in England, 1557–1640’, in Barnard and McKenzie (eds), Cambridge History of the Book, iv. 59. 174 Bodl., 4° B 47Jur, on p. 80 of Part Two. 175 TCD, LL n13, a bound volume owned by a Henry Whitaker and later a Claud Gilbert, and containing several of Edwards’s works including all parts of Gangraena (Parts One and Two in the combined edition). Comments are from i. (2nd pagination), 46; iii. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 195.

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Thomas Carre or John Jefferson added three pages of biblical texts invoking God’s wrath against sectaries to his copy of Part Three. Isaiah 30: 1, 8, 9, 10, was to be applied to ‘English sectaries or rather wretched Libertines’ with further verses relevant to betrayers of the Covenant ‘and bloodie butchers of their lawfull prince and destroyers of their antient lawes and Government’. Even this serious reader used the book to draft a letter to a friend and remind himself to buy four dozen curtain rings and some green thread for his wife.176 I have not found any manuscript commonplace books that include extracts from Gangraena, although they may well exist. One Isle of Wight minister, perhaps a Mr Sparkes, kept a commonplace book from the 1650s, but mainly noted congregational works. On the punishing of heretics he noted that John Owen had advocated leniency in a House of Commons sermon of April 1646, while his list of books owned or read included Cotton’s ‘Church Way’, John Goodwin’s Theomachia, Lilburne’s Innocency and Truth Justified, and Burton’s Vindiciae Veritas, amongst books discussed by Edwards; but no Presbyterian works.177 The most revealing readings are thus found in the printed responses to Edwards, as we have demonstrated above. The vast majority of the replies to Gangraena were from the subjects (or victims) of hostile description within it. Like modern scholars checking footnotes and indices of colleagues’ work for their own names and work, or celebrities skimming tabloid newspapers, many clearly searched Gangraena for accounts of themselves—although they might come to the defence of others besides themselves in their responses.178 These personalized readings can only be demonstrated through analysis of other printed works. In Cretensis, Goodwin assumes, although Edwards gives no name, that it is his views that were referred to in error 70 on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in justification.179 However immodest, Goodwin was clearly correct here. On the other hand, Walwyn’s repeated pamphlet assaults on Gangraena were a disproportionate, self-publicizing response to a relatively minor and diminishing role in 176 The notes were presumably added after 1649. Either Carre or Jefferson had been given the book by his wife in Apr. 1650: Durham University Library: Cosin I 3.36. 177 Isle of Wight RO NWD/PR/14, unpaginated section; the Commonplace Book of John Oliver, the minister of Montacute in Somerset, dates from the late 1650s and was concerned with Quakers and Ranters, sectaries unknown to Edwards: Somerset RO DD/PH/205. 178 The exceptions are Drapes, Plain and Faithfull Discovery, and the distinctive political reading found in To the High Court of Parliament, where Edwards’s work is paralleled with declarations of Charles I as attacks on the authority of parliament. As discussed in Ch. 5, below, this is characteristic of the attitudes of the Saye circle. 179 Goodwin, Cretensis, 22–3.

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Edwards’s writings; while one eccentric prophet offered a bizarrely selfobsessed version.Arise Evans, a Welsh visionary who defended the Episcopal Church and the Book of Common Prayer in disputes with Baptists in Bell Alley and at the Spital, claimed, as we have seen, that Edwards had set spies on him, ‘hearing that it was reported, I had maintained my self to be Christ, and that I had prophesied the downfall of the Presbyterians’. Evans believed Edwards ‘makes me the foundation of his work’ against the Independents. This was an extreme example of a reader’s creation of meaning independent of the author—for Evans is not mentioned at all by name in Gangraena, although the assumption of the ‘old’ Dictionary of National Biography—and most later commentators—that the sectary in Lambe’s church ‘who maintained and affirmed that he was Jesus Christ’ was a reference to Evans may well be right. It was not much of a ‘foundation’, however.180 Gangraena was most commonly a book that confirmed or intensified readers’ existing beliefs or prejudices; we know of no reader who was ‘converted’ by it. That is not to say that its overall impact was negligible. In Chapter 5 I will explore, using indirect but compelling evidence, how Edwards’s polemic contributed to polarization amongst parliamentarians in 1646–7, with very concrete political results. Reading and action were obviously intertwined here. There is also some individual evidence of the impact on readers. Cliffe suggests that D’Ewes’s reading of Gangraena influenced his broad use of the term ‘Independent’. I have quoted several times from the most extended (unprinted) discussion of Gangraena between Cheney Culpeper and Samuel Hartlib, shortly after the publication of Gangraena, Part One. The letter was initially contemptuous, condemning the book as no better than lavatory paper, and bemoaning ‘the presbyteriall locke upon the press’. In a postscript, however, Culpeper uneasily testified to the power of Edwards’s stories: ‘Inter alia in [Edwards] his 180 Evans, ‘A Narration of the Life, Calling and Visions’, appended to An Eccho to the Voice from Heaven, 58–9; Gangraena, ii. 173. Evans was later imprisoned in Newgate and Bridewell for claiming to be Christ, but was widely assumed to be mad rather than dangerous. Christopher Hill, ‘Arise Evans: Welshman in London’, in his Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 48–77, is the fullest discussion of Evans; 54 mentions the Gangraena reference. Gangraena, iii. 31–2, has another, vaguer reference to a London sectary who claimed he was Christ and exhibited (fake) stigmata. For all we know this too could refer to Evans (or not). The most obvious reference to a Welshman was the gossip in i. 81, on denial of Christ’s divinity in London,‘there was a company of them met about Coleman-street, a Welchman being their chief who held this opinion’. H. John McLachlan believed this was a reference to the ‘Seeker’William Erbury: Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England, 164 n.

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booke I observe Fol: 53 [recte, 53 first sequence] (what I formerly feared) what disadvantage & objection Lilburne proves to his party; & howe the other side (for wante of true strength) take advantage (like the Duc:) of the weaker vessells’. The portrayal of vivid villains in Edwards’s books may well have discomforted some of their allies.181 interactions: print and talk, bo oks and au thors Like modern cultural theorists Edwards and the other religious polemicists of the English revolution were well aware that the frontiers of a book were porous; their works built on and responded to other printed texts, and mobilized a vast range of talk, writing, and print as evidence and counterpoint. Authors met and argued, books prompted conversations and debates which often found their way (perhaps by letter) into further books. A significant proportion of Gangraena consisted of letters or reports of conversations about books, including Edwards’s own.182 The interactions between print, manuscript, and direct encounter have already been suggested at many points; it is time for a more focused discussion. The most obvious way in which books prompted fiery talk was in direct encounters between rival authors or authors and subjects. As John Price and John Bellamy debated their printed controversies over the May 1646 city Remonstrance on London streets so Gangraena led to fraught, hottempered encounters between men directly caught up in the arguments over the book. Several of Edwards’s ‘victims’ went deliberately to confront him; others challenged him in casual city meetings. As Edwards explained: ‘some who having beene mentioned in Letters written up to friends, and printed by me, have come to my house, denying peremptorily those things spoken of them in the Letters, desiring to know who writ them that they might have reparations’. Typically, Edwards had no scruples about revealing the names of his sources, and then wrote again to check his material, ‘they have returned me Answers, that those things were most true, and Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 102; for a fuller discussion see Ch. 5, below. ‘Letters of Culpeper’, in Braddick and Greengrass (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Papers, 266, 24 Feb. 1645/6. 182 Amongst many examples are the argument a godly minister had with the Kent Baptist Christopher Blackwood over his book The Storming of Antichrist: Gangraena, iii. 98. For some of the many hostile discussions of Gangraena, see ii. 44–5, 48–9; iii. 77. Compare Daniel Woolf, ‘News, History and the Construction of the Present in Early Modern England’, in Dooley and Baron (eds.), Politics of Information, 88–92, on the symbiosis between talk, manuscript, and print in the reading and discussion of news. 181

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they would make them good’. Of ‘divers notable instances’, he had space in this Preface (to Part Three), to ‘relate only one’, an account of his meeting with John Mascall of Dover, who had been the subject of a letter in Part Two. Mascall,‘coming to my house with a friend of his and mine formerly, denyed positively and peremptorily what was written of him in the Letter, declaring he was of another judgement than to speak so of our Ministers and Synods as is expressed in that Letter’.183 Amongst others featured in Gangraena, Robert Cosens had briefly visited Edwards in March 1646, and Edwards had once had ‘conference’ with Thomas Collier, ‘upon two questions for five houres space (sufficient time for one to trouble himself with such a vain unruly taulker)’. The two had argued over the ‘Morality of the Sabbath’ and the validity of infant baptism.184 The most vivid account in Gangraena concerns Hugh Peter, and reveals, like stones making overlapping ripples in a pond, the mutually reinforcing impact of preaching and debate, written evidence and printed books. Late at night on 31 May 1646 two citizens confronted Hugh Peter at the Independent Colonel Rowland Wilson’s house over a sermon preached earlier that day at the Three Cranes, attacking the city Remonstrance and the Covenant; ‘under both their hands they gave me in writing the summe of the conference between him and them’. Peter clearly suspected (with some justification) that the citizens were following him around for Edwards’s purposes, pointedly asking if they challenged Edwards’s controversial activities also: Master Peters asked us, whether as we came to him about what he preached, had we ever been with Master Edwards about what he had written against the Saints: we told him we conceived Master Edwards had written nothing against the Saints, neither was what he had written any offence to us, as what he had preached was, and that we had cause to beleeve what Mr Edwards had written was true, he being a godly Minister.

Three days later the principals themselves clashed face to face, in Westminster: ‘I walking in Westminster Hall, Master Peters meeting me, spake to me, that I had abused him in Print, and that I had broken a Gospel rule, which was, If thy Brother offend thee, do and tell him his fault between him and thee alone’. Edwards made his usual defence that this prohibition applied only to ‘private offending’ not to public activities. Peter ‘said I had 183 Gangraena, iii, sig. *4r–v. Typically Edwards solicited a letter from an orthodox Dover minister, Michael Porter, vouching for the original account. It is discussed on iii. 67 and reproduced on 163. 184 Ibid. ii. 114; iii. 29–30.

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wronged him in those things I had written of him, and that coming twice up from the Army; each time he found himself in a Book of mine: I told him I would prove them, . . . and he was like to be in a third Book; whereupon he call’d me Knave, and stinking fellow’. Edwards accused Peter of abusing the Scots, Peter charged Edwards with speaking against the Saints. ‘I replyed, Paul Best, Wrighter, etc such Saints’ and reproached Peters for his attacks on Presbyterians. Edwards then sought to emphasize his victory over an unruly and undignified assailant by a gratuitous narration of Peter’s after-dinner conversation about a New England island covered in pigeon dung two feet deep.185 Most of these accounts come from Gangraena itself, and show, as intended, Edwards’s determination and integrity in the defence of truth despite intrusive, embarrassing encounters. Other versions suggest that when challenged, Edwards had a cowardly tendency to disclaim responsibility for his book, insisting he was simply reproducing the information of others. Henry Pinnell, the Poole preacher denounced in a letter from Simon Ford to Stanley Gower, visited Edwards for satisfaction but could get none: ‘he confessed he never knew me, nor ever so much heard of me but by that letter of S.F. of whom (by his own confession to me) he was as ignorant as of my selfe, and therefore he might have suspected him as well as me; but because one of the Presbytery had laid his hands on it, and it was brought to him by Master Gowers, it was immediately ordain’d infallible’.186 When John Lanseter confronted Edwards with ‘do you know that those things are truths which you have written here of me?’, the reply was, in Lanseter’s version, ‘They are none of mine saith Edwards but the relations of others’. On this occasion, Edwards refused to divulge the names of his informants and failed (despite his famed filing system) to find the letter about Lanseter: ‘I know not where to finde it, saith Edwards, but I will (when I have time) look for it’. When Lanseter denied many aspects of the story in Gangraena, he had Edwards responding only with a weak, ‘It may be . . . you are not the man’. In this account, which culminated in a general argument between Lanseter, Edwards, and various bystanders over whether the ordained ministry hampered reformation, the radicals won the victory.187 John Saltmarsh also believed he had the best of his encounters with a sick and bitter author: ‘when I called to you the other day in the Ibid. iii. 124, 126–7. Pinnell and Maddocks, Gangraenachrestum, 6. 187 Lanseter’s Lance, sig. A3v–B. A month later friends of Lanseter had a further, futile argument with Edwards. The account of John Tombes of his confrontation with Edwards at Christ Church (in Ch. 3) gives a similar picture. 185 186

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street, and challenged you for your unanswerable crime against me, in the third page of the last Gangrena . . . How were you troubled in spirit and language? Your sin was, as I thought, upon you, scourging you, checking you, as I spoke.’ But Edwards challenged this account as ‘deceitfully and falsely related’, remarking that one meeting with Saltmarsh, ‘being at Master Vicars his house and in his hearing, he hath given the Reader already a good part of it in his Schismatick sifted, little I think to M. Saltmarshes credit’.188 Direct encounters involved many of Edwards’s allies. Besides arranging a meeting between Edwards and Saltmarsh, Vicars also ran into Peter in Westminster Hall (in early 1646) and used the occasion to heap ridicule on an old friend. Of Peter,‘I will only say this by the way, that whosoever loves to laugh at a Sermon (which is Satans Musick) let him go heare Master Peters preach’. Peter seeing Vicars,‘singly walking in the Hall, and being my old acquaintance, came unto me, together with his Independent Brother, Master Bachiler, who heard our conference all the while’. Peter attacked Vicars’s Picture of Independency for ‘sadding and grieving the hearts of God’s Saints’, but when pressed to say what precisely was wrong with it, could only reply, ‘tis naught all over, naught all over’ and then ‘ran away swiftly from me’.189 According to John Lilburne, William Prynne had ‘one day in Westminster Hall laid violent hands upon me, having my sword in my hand, to provoke me to strike him’. John Bastwick similarly had engaged in angry argument over Edwards’s impact in Westminster Hall (again); he had discussed control of the press with Hanserd Knollys, and ‘could never meet my Brother Burton, but he would alwayes after his Salutation, in a deriding and scornefull manner, aske me, when my Book came forth, telling me that he expected some monster’.190 These meetings are known to us because they are described in printed polemic, and are obviously an integral part of the argument, marking opponents as ineffective blusterers. Nonetheless we acquire a marvellous and not misleading picture of Westminster Hall thronged with authors, variously unrepentant or defensive, brought into angry contact with those they had denounced in print, many of whom were long-standing acquaintances or former friends. 188 Saltmarsh, ‘An Answer in Few Words to Master Edwards’, in Reasons for Unitie, Peace and Love; Johns, Nature of the Book, 403, for 17th-cent. beliefs that physical disabilities were a sign of inner psychological states; Gangraena, iii. 295. 189 Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 29–30 (Saltmarsh), 9–10 (Peter). Peter and Vicars had cooperated long before in the ‘Feoffees for Impropriations’ (see Ch. 1, above). 190 Lilburne, A Copie of a Letter; Bastwick, Utter Routing, sig. a1v, G4v–H1r, A1r.

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If books were ‘interactive’ because they prompted angry debates and ‘real life’ encounters, Gangraena also contained within itself much evidence of the complex overlaps between printed, manuscript, and oral forms of communication. The most pointed discussions occurred when Edwards’s stories had to be defended from criticism and rebuttal, and the relative value of spoken, written, and printed evidence was endlessly weighed. Gangraena is an excellent, perhaps the best, illustration of how the 1640s, which saw a political and religious crisis of the most profound nature, also, and inevitably, saw anxious contest about the authority of different types of evidence. The most valid testimony, as we have seen, was that most comprehensively validated through its juxtaposition with other media: the direct oral reports of reputable eyewitness, backed up by legalistic written declarations; or official legal and committee records, vouched for by oral informants. Edwards never decisively committed himself to the superiority of either written material or direct eyewitness testimony; indeed it was the standing of the informants not the medium of transmission that was crucial.191 Challenges to the accounts in Gangraena provoked the most determined hunts for more corroboration—in printed works, conversations, and manuscript testimony. Edwards contrasted his own rigorous procedures with John Goodwin’s lax presentations of ‘loose informations . . . by word of mouth’, yet Goodwin in fact proceeded in a parallel fashion. Responding to Edwards’s personal attacks he fought back with hints of written evidence, and threats to put it in print: ‘I my self have a Manuscript by me, which came to my hands above a yeare since, concerning Mr Edwards himself; which discourseth his jugling and indirect walking between the two Townes of Godalmin in Surrey, and Dunmow in Essex. The writing will be attested by good hands, and if there be no remedy, will be content to submit it selfe to the Presse’.192 When Edwards and Goodwin disagreed over what (precisely) Robert Cosens had said, or John Saltmarsh denied any knowledge of a woman preaching in Brasted, Kent, all parties mobilized further evidence—letters, depositions, and oral testimony.193 191 Cf. Scribner,‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print’, 260–1 on the equivalent authority of oral and literate forms. 192 Gangraena, ii. 85; Goodwin, Cretensis, 34; see Ann Hughes, ‘Print, Persecution and Polemic: Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena (1646) and Civil War Sectarianism’, in Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) for a fuller version of this argument. 193 Gangraena, ii. 24–5, 115–20, 127; Goodwin, Cretensis, 40; Saltmarsh, Groanes For Liberty, 26.

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But the best example of how disputes over Edwards’s initial narratives could spawn a complex network of printed refutation, city argument, and written declarations is found in his controversy with Jeremiah Burroughs, cut short only by Burroughs’s premature death. Aspects of this conflict have already been referred to, but it is now time for a full discussion. The initial brief story in Gangraena, Part One, was in many ways an unlikely flashpoint. In just about a page Edwards suggested that the relatively respectable Independents Jeremiah Burroughs and William Greenhill (lecturers and pastors of a gathered church in Stepney) were so alarmed by the ‘wicked opinions’ of one ‘Nichols who lives about Moor-Fields, that comes into Stepney parish sometimes to draw away people’ that they had called a special meeting to see what could be done to curb him. John Goodwin then disputed this version. He solicited and printed in Cretensis some ‘lines’ from Burroughs that the story ‘ “is all false. I know no such man as this Nichols, I never heard there was such a man in this world, till I read it in Mr Edwards his book” ’. There had been no meeting about him, and according to Burroughs (as reported by Goodwin), Greenhill also knew of none.194 This brief story had an important message as Edwards claimed that ‘Mr Greenhill, and Mr Burroughs either one or both of them, concluded, it was a sad thing that a mans wife and children should be thus taken away by false Teachers, and there should be no meanes left against such a one but Prayers’. Burroughs had conceded there was a need for some government of the church and some power to be exercised by the magistrate to preserve ‘fundamentall Doctrines’. Edwards therefore argued that a major reason for the denial printed in Cretensis was ‘to free themselves from suspicion and jealousies . . . as if they were against other Sects and Opinions, and for a Toleration of no other Sects but their own, and were for the Government of the Church to be setled in regard of these horrid Opinions and Heresies daily vented, and for the coercive power of the Magistrate against Sectaries’.195 Whatever the motives of Burroughs and Greenhill, once his account was challenged, it was vital for Edwards to convince readers that the Stepney men were guilty of ‘equivocations, mentall reservations, and untruths, even to the wounding of their own reputations’, because they were muchrespected figures who compromised Edwards’s claims to superior testimony, ‘being accounted for men of that way somewhat moderate and among the best of that party’. When Edwards accused John Goodwin of re194

Gangraena, i. 78–9; Goodwin, Cretensis, 41–3.

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Gangraena, i. 79; ii. 95.

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lying on ‘Sectaries, Anabaptists, apprentice boyes, or parties interested’, he had to except ‘Master Burroughs, whom yet I shall prove to have forgot himself in writing that paper set down by you page 42’.196 So twelve pages in Gangraena, Part Two, were spent justifying the one page in Part One, and Edwards highlighted the crucial oral testimony of a character variously referred to in the erratically printed polemic of these months as Mr Allen, Mr Alle, or Mr Alley. Thomas Alle (as he was called in his own pamphlet) had already appeared in Gangraena, Part One, as Mr Alley giving an account of Burroughs’s and Greenhill’s opposition to the Presbyterian petition of September 1645. Alle, according to Edwards, had long been a ‘great friend’ of Greenhill and Burroughs, admiring them as ‘godly and learned men’, but he differed with them over church government and thus over the 1645 petitions, ‘seeing the mischief of Toleration and the good of settled Government’. In Part Two Master Allen [sic] ‘of Stepney parish, a godly understanding man’ was cited as proof of the original story about Nicholls. Allen ‘was upon the place and heard all [and] related it to divers in Master Bellamy’s shop, in my hearing’. Edwards, characteristically, wrote this all down:‘I went immediately home, and writ down in my Diary the whole businesse from first to last, with the day of the month, the place, and persons, when, where, and to whom also besides my self it was told.’197 But this was far from the end of the matter. The meetings, manuscripts, and discussions which filled Edwards’s book in turn prompted further debates and confrontations, manuscripts, and more books. Burroughs, reluctantly on his own account, decided to clear his name in print, ‘hearing there are some whose spirits are as dryed timber to his fire . . . I thought it might not be amisse to spend an houre or two upon this vaine man’. Consequently when he met Mr Alle, Burroughs asked him to sign a note that the Testimony of M. Burroughes which M. John Goodwin pag. 42 saith he has under his hand about Nichols is true . . . Something has caused M. Alle since to mince the matter, and to make a relation of some things that neither I nor M. Greenhill owns, but at that time when he gave my justification under his hand he was urged againe and againe in the presence of many to declare whether he could say anything against the truth of any particular in my testimony, and he protested he could not.198 197 Ibid. ii. 95, 41. Ibid. i. 109–10; ii. 87–8. Burroughs, A Vindication, 4–8, for this and the following paragraphs. This pamphlet also challenged Edwards’s account of Burroughs’s conduct in Holland in Antapologia. 196 198

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Alle’s ‘mincing’ had occurred in a pamphlet of his own, published in June 1646, a month before Burroughs’s.Alle claimed providence led him to the press: ‘I had no thought nor knowledge of my being brought upon the Stage in Print, untill I saw my name in Master Edwards His Book called Gangraena’. This ‘hath caused many of my friends to look bigge upon me, and to harbour causelesse jealousies against me, and many that formerly were seeming friends have given me very scurrilous speeches and unchristian like language, and would give me no reason of their speaking, but said I was in Mr Edwards his Book.’ Alle resolved to give his own account,‘that there may be a cleer understanding of the truth’. Offensive oral debate apparently forced Alle to the press. However, this accidental turn to print is rendered suspicious by the fact that Alle’s work is produced by Edwards’s printers and publisher, and by its largely confirming the original account in Gangraena, Part One.199 Burroughs’s own response had some fun with Edwards’s mistaking of Alle’s name, and claimed that the account in Gangraena had constructed a coherent and sinister story out of vague, disconnected conversations: ‘I meet occasionally with M. Greenhill; among many things in discourse he expresses his greate griefe at the horrid blasphemies there are abroad; upon which I expresse likewise my sense of such things; and this is all M. Alle tells him: therefore I blame not the man so much as I blame M. Edwards for moulding reports as he pleaseth.’ Everyone in London had heard of Nicholls’s preaching, claimed Burroughs, and everyone had heard dangerous errors publicly vented, indeed Burroughs had witnessed discussions about God as the author of sin in Mr Bellamy’s shop before he had heard that Nicholls held such views. His conclusion was that Edwards was superfluous as well as misguided. Burroughs then inconsiderately died just before Gangraena, Part Three, was finished, leaving Edwards to make half-hearted apologies for critical passages early in the book.200 The dispute between Edwards and Burroughs thus began with oral testimony in a London bookshop recorded in manuscript and printed in a book— Gangraena; it continued with further oral and manuscript testimony printed in Goodwin’s Cretensis and Burroughs’s Vindication while the outpouring of print provoked further talk which led Edwards’s original informant, Alle himself, to a considered resort to the press.

199 200

Alle, A Brief Narration, 3–5. Gangraena, iii. 90 for Burroughs’s death.

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the role of print From some perspectives, then, Edwards’s work underlines the shifting boundaries between oral, written, and printed communication, stressed in many other studies, and suggests how different forms of debate might overlap. But Gangraena’s controversial impact also helps us understand the specific role of print during a time of unprecedented, revolutionary upheaval. Edwards clearly did not regard print as any more (or less) ‘truthful’ or ‘authentic’ than eyewitness oral testimony or manuscript letters and depositions. Neither did he share the squeamishness of some authors who preferred a more controlled ‘scribal publication’ to the risky exposure of print; on the contrary print was essential. What print offered was publicity and potential political impact—through rallying people far and wide to the Presbyterian cause. Print was a means by which sects and sectarianism became notorious, and two bitterly opposed communities were conjured up and fitted for action. While some denounced the enterprise of exposing individual beliefs and behaviour in print as illegitimate, Edwards believed describing error and blasphemy was to discredit and perhaps to destroy it. Print fixed stereotypical sectarian misbehaviour within contemporary understandings. We have already seen how the story of the soldiers baptizing a horse ‘Ball Esau’ spread from Gangraena to cheap print in 1646–7. The notion that cats were baptized to profane orthodox infant baptism also became familiar through repetition in printed works. The prolific Presbyterian author and London cleric Samuel Clarke (once of Alcester) published in 1659 an account of schisms and heresies that drew on Edwards’s work. In the copy in Dr Williams Library a later seventeenth-century reader has commented, ‘The Anabaptists are very angry with Mr Slater for saying thay baptize dogs & Cats in degradation of infant Baptizme. See the 149 page of this Book words to the same Efect’. On page 149 Clarke offers his ‘error 28. That its as lawfull to Baptize Dogs, and Cats, and Horses, as Infants of Believers.’ It is Edwards’s error 104, again, still causing dispute at the end of the century, when Susan and John Platt were long forgotten.201 Edwards also seems to have been remarkably successful in identifying individual sectaries with characteristic, unsuitable behaviour, damning 201

Samuel Clarke, Golden Apples, or Seasonable and Serious Counsel from the Sanctuary to the Rulers of the earth, held forth in the Resolutions of sundry Questions and Cases of Conscience about Divisions, Schismes, Heresies, and the Tolleration of them (London, 1659), 149 and frontispiece; cf. Gangraena, i. 28. The Dr Williams copy belonged to a John Maie and is dated 19 May 1692.

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John Lilburne for posterity as the ‘darling of the Sectaries . . . a man of a loose life, prophaning the Lords Day in Sports, one who is a player at Cards, one who will sit long with company at Wine and Tipling, and hath done all he hath for money’; John Goodwin similarly became famous for playing bowls on a fast day.202 These labels stuck, with both hostile and (once) sympathetic writers referring to Goodwin’s bowling months and years later. Josiah Ricraft remonstrated with Goodwin: ‘I shall say only thus much to the man in his passion, that I wish he never play one Rubber more at Bowles, nor publish lyes to the reproach of himselfe, and the Gospell’. William Walwyn dealt with attacks on his own behaviour by members of Goodwin’s congregation by recalling Edwards’s smear: ‘As for my breach of the Fast, one would think Mr John Goodwin’s playing at Bowls upon a Fast day in the afternoon . . . might have stopt these mens mouths’.203 Milton’s condemnation of Edwards for naming and printing heretics would have read like praise to Edwards himself, for this was precisely his purpose: By my Books, especially Gangraena, many Sectaries being so discovered by name and places of abode, laid open in severall of their opinions and wayes, will not be able for the future to do so much hurt and mischiefe among the people; their Sheeps skins are by this pull’d over their Wolves ears, and many will now shun, and be afraid of them, who before knew them not.204

Gangraena frequently charted the activities of sectaries and Independents who were already notorious, through their own actions and books or the writings of others; as we have seen he was not hunting out the obscure or developing a comprehensive, general picture. Paul Hobson, Samuel Oates, Henry Denne, Thomas Collier, Samuel Eaton, and John Durant amongst many others had already caused alarm amongst the orthodox before they appeared in Gangraena. An appearance in Edwards’s books, however, was a sure sign of intensifying fame, and it was through being named and described in print that some sectaries acquired an inescapable notoriety throughout the country. Naming was a crucial means whereby the orthodox could be put on their guard. Thus in Part Three Edwards decided to identify the radical 202 Gangraena, i. 73 (1st sequence), 96. These identifying sins were the more notorious for being challenged, and then defended at length in Gangraena, ii. 29–30 (Lilburne and cards), 75–6 (Goodwin’s bowling). 203 Ricraft, Nosegay, 24; Walwyn’s Just Defence, in Haller and Davies (eds.), Leveller Tracts, 365 (Walwyn’s response to attacks on him by Goodwin’s congregation, early June 1649). 204 Gangraena, ii. 46.

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writer John Hall whose errors had been included anonymously in Part Two so ‘that the people of those parts may be aware of him, and shun him as a dangerous man’.205 Besides shunning dangerous sectaries, readers, as we have seen, were supposed to report back to Edwards on the misdeeds of men like Oates or Clarkson so that further enormities could be printed in subsequent parts of Gangraena. Even better was the direct action provoked by Presbyterian polemic as when the minister at Bath refused to allow John Saltmarsh to preach in his church because he had read about him in books by Ley and Edwards, or when Samuel Oates was denounced by the ministers of Rutland in terms that suggest Edwards was an important source for their attitudes.206 The notoriety sectaries gained through being in Edwards’s books was often inextricably connected to their own books, which were crucial to the identities Edwards constructed. Clarkson was pre-eminently the author of The Pilgrimage of Saints while the Kent separatists Francis Cornwall and Christopher Blackwood were similarly identified as the authors of, respectively, ‘divers Pamphlets, one against Baptizing of Children, others lately printed, Dedicated to particular members of the House of Commons’ and ‘a Book called The storming of Antichrist’.207 It may be that Gangraena did much to spread the reputation of daring books. Laurence Clarkson later described his 1640s evangelizing: I took my journey for Gravesend . . . I called for a pot of Ale, so after a few words uttered by me, the man was greatly taken with my sayings, insomuch that he brought me some bread and cheese, with which I was refreshed, and bid me take no care, for I should want for nothing, you being the man that writ The Pilgrimage of Saints, I have had a great desire to see you, with some soldiers and others.

Yet The Pilgrimage of Saints, as we have seen, is so rare that no copies now survive, in contrast to the ubiquity of Edwards’s works. Is it fanciful to wonder if the ‘strange opinionated people’ of Gravesend had heard of Clarkson through Gangraena rather than his own writings?208 The greatest notoriety achieved through print was, of course, Edwards’s own—he and his book were inseparable in contemporary discussion— the book was Edwards’s Gangraena, while he was Gangraena Edwards, or even, in a 1647 pamphlet by Hugh Peter ‘Gangraena himselfe’. One 206 Ibid. iii. 171. Ibid. 114; LJ ix. 571–2. Gangraena, ii. 7; iii. 98. 208 Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found (London, 1660), 21. Cf. Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, 273, for the general comment that Edwards spread ‘heresy and perniciousness’; and Reay,‘Introduction’, in McGregor and Reay (eds.), Radical Religion, 14. 205 207

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mid-seventeenth-century owner binding and listing a collection of polemical pamphlets described Goodwin’s Cretensis in personalized terms as ‘Goodwyn agst Edwards gangraena’.209 This identity was cemented through innumerable citations and quotations by both allies and opponents; indeed Edwards and his allies often gave further publicity to hostile comment by reproducing it in their own works. Antapologia was heavily raided by Richard Overton to provide the words with which Sir John Presbyter, son of Sir Symon Synod, gave in evidence against Liberty-ofConscience, in his mock-trial satire, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution, and Edwards was denounced there as an ‘impudent, and desperate Incendiary’. Overton’s attacks were given further publicity in Prynne’s A Fresh Discovery and in Gangraena itself.210 Edwards indeed revelled in repeating his enemies’ attacks, through his horrified recitals giving them further currency. He quoted, for example,‘a libellous Pamphlet entituled The Lord Mayors Farewell from his Office of Majoraltie . . . That if Master Edwards or Doctor Bastwick had any such blot against us, doubtlesse there would be great Volumes of a hundred sheets a peece blazed throughout the Kingdome, to disgrace us at your breach of promise’.211 Edwards insisted there was no personal animus in his strikingly personal accounts of individual sectaries, their books, and their behaviour: I desire the reader not to be mistaken, or offended at my freedom in this Book, in naming so many persons . . . as if I did it out of bitternesse and passion, or out of ill will and malice to the persons of those men . . . I can say it truly of all those men whom I principally lay open, and give the people warning of, that I have had nothing to do with them, and they have not wronged me at all, but as they have wronged the truth, and the glory of God; and among all these notorious sectaries, excepting Wrighter, and one or two more, I know them not so much as by face, having never so much to my knowledge as seen them: I never saw Den, Hich, Clarkson, Paul Hobson, Web, Lamb, Marshal, with many others named in this Book.212

This passage could be mobilized behind a modernizing, triumphalist view of the impact of print, working to create abstract impersonal communities defined through common ideology rather than neighbourhood or direct 209 Peter, A Word for the Armie (London, 1647), quoted in Stearns, Strenuous Puritan, 306, and discussed more fully in Ch. 5, below. NLS, NHA D188. 210 Overton, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution, reprod. in Haller, (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, iii; Antapologia, 280–2, 289, 294, 297, 302–4 is quoted on 19–21 of Overton’s tract (229–31 of Haller), 19 is quoted here. 211 Gangraena iii. 175–6. The main purpose of this pamphlet was to condemn the banning of the dispute between Calamy and leading Baptists. 212 Ibid. i, 178.

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ties. In Eisenstein’s classic formula: ‘even while local ties were loosened, links to larger collective units were being forged. Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be found in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar’.213 During the 1640s, printed propaganda helped to create ‘large new reading publics . . . mobilized them for politico-religious purposes’. David Zaret has argued that the printing of petitions in the 1640s had a dramatic and novel effect, not simply enlarging the ‘scope’ of those who were aware of their demands, but transforming the content and nature of politics, producing a rational readership that was invited to judge between different sides of crucial issues.214 Likewise, in the controversy over Gangraena, a judicious readership was invited to sift the truth in complex, interlocking religious debates. A study of Gangraena does indeed suggest that a revisionist scepticism about the impact of print can be taken too far. But Gangraena also calls into question simple contrasts between print as an abstract, generalizing medium and either the intimate world of manuscript circulation or the personal, face-to-face mode of oral communication. Print was at the same time both intimate and abstracting. Gangraena drew on and stimulated a vast variety of direct encounters. Reading, discussing, and responding to Edwards’s work cemented many local networks and personal ties. Ministers discussed Gangraena in their county meetings and wrote in with further information and support, while soldiers’ hostility was reinforced by collective readings. However, print made these direct encounters and local readings visible, available, to a world beyond the direct participants, and created a sense of ideological solidarity amongst people who had never seen or met each other. Some of Edwards’s informants were personal acquaintances, but many knew him only as the author of Antapologia or Gangraena. In the 1640s, richly complex printed works like Gangraena worked just as much as scribal publication to ‘define communities of the like minded’.215 This process applied to both Edwards’s targets and his allies, to both religious radicals and the orthodox godly. Edwards sought to define in print an alarming, sprawling community of sectaries encompassing both the deceptively respectable Independents like Jeremiah Burroughs and horrendous blasphemers and heretics like

Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 95–6. David Zaret, ‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion in the English Revolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 101/6 (May 1996); cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1988). 215 Love, Scribal Publication, 33. 213 214

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Robert Cosens or Mrs Attaway. Some of his opponents—not least John Goodwin—helped to reinforce this sense of sectarian community through printed defences of other victims besides themselves. In defending himself, Benjamin Cox was careful to locate his suffering within a more general framework, ‘being one of them whom Master Edwards hath abused, unjustly calling them Sectaries, Timeservers and Innovators’. Henry Pinnell took it ‘as a badge of honor to be abused among my betters’, naming Burroughs and Goodwin in his margin. John Lanseter likewise wrote of Goodwin as ‘a man who hath given clearer testimony of his godlinesse then Mr Edwards hath done’, while Drapes defended the General Baptist Oates against the charge of murder—‘the truth is the woman dyed of dropsie’, not as a result of Oates’s dipping—along with his fellow Calvinist Baptists Kiffin and Hobson. Nedham praised ‘pious, acute Mr Saltmarsh’, Peters, Goodwin, Nye, Walwyn, and Holmes.216 Some of these printed responses defended men already closely acquainted as when John Lilburne denounced the attack in Gangraena, Part Three on himself ‘and my honest Camerade Mr [Richard] Overton’ or William Walwyn drew attention to Edwards’s gleeful receipt of material hostile to Peter, Goodwin, and Kiffin. But John Goodwin also defended men he had come to know only as a result of the shared experience of denunciation in Gangraena and men he had never met at all. He devoted most of Cretensis to self-defence but at the end turned to ‘another small parcell of accounts to clear with him in the behalfe of others’, including old acquaintances such as Jeremiah Burroughs and William Greenhill, Robert Cosens whom he had met to get a alternative to Edwards’s account of Rochester, and John Ellis of Colchester whose letters denouncing Gangraena had come into his possession (in an echo of Edwards own methods).217 These alliances were reinforced in print by Gangraena, Part Two where Edwards discussed all Independents and sectaries mentioned in Cretensis as subsections of his answer to Goodwin, before appealing to ‘Master Goodwin, Consider sadly of what you have done in your Book Cretensis, how you are become guilty, and have made your selfe partaker of 216 Cox, An after-reckoning, title page; Pinnell and Maddocks, Gangraenachrestum, 8; Lanseter’s Lance, sig. C2v; Drapes, A Plain and Faithfull Discovery, 13, 21, 25; M.N. [Nedham], Independencie No Schisme, Epistle to Vicars, 5–6, 8–10. Cf Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, which praised Bacon, Goodwin, Burton, Sterry, Burroughs, Greenhill, Holmes, Peters, Saltmarsh, Nye, Kiffin, Hobson, Walwyn, Spencer, and Patient. 217 John Lilburne, The Oppressed Mans Oppressions declared (London, 1647), 22; Walwyn, A Parable, in Writings, ed. McMichael and Taft, 254; Goodwin, Cretensis, 38 ff; similarly, as we have seen, Goodwin defended Eaton’s Cheshire congregation in Hagiomastix. These two men knew each other, probably through Henry Overton.

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all the heresies, blasphemies, wicked practices I have spoken against, in pleading for all, (without any distinction) as Saints, servants of God, and such like.’218 While Goodwin created in print a broad community, an alliance of Edwards’s victims, he also presented a very clear sense of the opposing ‘party’. In his very belated response to Antapologia, he denounced Prynne, Ricraft, and John Bellamy besides Edwards. The printed responses of other Independents and ‘sectaries’ worked in the same fashion: Lilburne combined attacks on Prynne and King (his perennial enemies) with hostility to Bastwick—Prynne’s ‘brother in Evill’—and Edwards; Nedham’s reply to Edwards was an appendix to an attack on John Vicars while Robert Prier attacked Calamy and Bastwick as well as Edwards (who was his main target).219 Presbyterians did not depend on their opponents for the construction of a community through print; it was of course a constant theme of their own printed works, effected through citation and cross-reference. Edwards directed his readers to Bastwick, and especially to Prynne for further general material on the sects. At the end of his ‘Catalogue of the Blasphemies of the Sectaries’ in Part One, Edwards wrote, ‘But I will not trouble the Reader to name any more of them: M. Pryn in his Fresh Discovery of New Lights hath extracted many passages of this kinde out of the Pamphlets of the sectaries’. Calamy, Ley, and Gataker were also frequently commended.220 Prynne and the rest reciprocated Edwards’s praise, using and commending both Antapologia and Gangraena. Vicars defended ‘reverend and religious Master Edwards’ against the criticisms of Saltmarsh, Burroughs, Walwyn, Goodwin, and Burton; and attacked Lilburne for ‘his frothie and most scurrilous letter, to ever to be honored M. Prinne’. Ley and Gataker were also commended as part of a stress on ‘our own Presbyterian Party’, ‘our Presbyterian-Ministers’. Bastwick wrote of a similar lineup, defending Vicars, Cranford, and Edwards against Burton, Knollys, and Peter. Presbyterians also were defining in print a community of their enemies, a community which usually had John Goodwin at its heart. Josiah Ricraft wrote to support all those—Prynne and George Walker as well as Edwards—who had exposed Goodwin’s heterodoxy, and felt his ‘fiery fever of furie’ in return.221 Gangraena, ii. 136. Goodwin: Apologesiates, preface; Lilburne, The Resolved mans Resolution, 39; Nedham, Independencie No Schisme; Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, 173, 229–30. 220 Gangraena, i. 39 and also 45, 68, 89, 96; iii. 192, 113. 221 Vicars, Schismatick Sifted, 21–3, 28–9, 2–3. For his earlier praise of Antapologia, see Picture of Independency, 7; cf. Prynne, Truth Triumphing, sig. A4v. Vicars, Coleman Street 218 219

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Vicars, Prynne, Ricraft, and Edwards were of course personally acquainted—their cooperation in print was cemented or encouraged by ties of neighbourhood and joint practical endeavour. Their continual, mutual cross-referencing in books, however, constructed a picture of Presbyterian solidarity that spread through the kingdom. An abstract Presbyterian community was conjured up—and could be joined by those did not know Edwards and his allies, but had read, contributed to, or acted on the three parts of Gangraena. A letter from ‘a godly Minister in the West of England’ began ‘Whom (though unknown to me by sight) I love and honor for your love to truth, and for your zeale against the spreading infectious Errours of these times’, while a letter from Oxfordshire asked for advice from ‘Mr Edwards the Antagonist of Hereticks what to do in this matter; To whom though unknown, I present my love in the Lord’. Zaret’s insistence that public opinion is both ‘a nominal and real entity’ is illuminating here. Constructions of a Presbyterian alliance or community in Gangraena and elsewhere were not ‘merely literary interventions foisted upon an unsuspecting public’ in Zaret’s words but were based on and in turn influenced the disputes over religion engaging men and women in countless churches, homes, and streets throughout England.222 For Edwards this evocation of community had a direct and urgent practical purpose—to rouse zealots and waverers alike to action against heresy and error. His works sought both to define a united Presbyterian party and to describe the broad, various, yet interconnected threats that faced it. Repeated references to a common stance against the sects, evocation of ‘our Presbyterian ministers’ worked to blur divisions amongst the orthodox, effacing in particular Prynne’s anxieties about clerical domination. Throughout Gangraena, Edwards stressed the bitter polarization of parliamentarians, expressing divisions sometimes as groups of antagonistic individuals, sometimes as opposed institutions or collectivities. Goodwin was presented as an enemy to the whole ‘Presbyterian party’, writing against Edwards, Prynne, George Walker, Henry Roborough, and the Scots theologian Dr Adam Stewart, as well as denouncing ‘Citie, Assembly, Parliament, and all Presbyterians’. The potential victims of Independents included, according to Edwards, the Earl of Manchester, Colonel King, Conclave (London, 1648) similarly defended Prynne, and Ricraft as well as the recently dead Edwards; Bastwick, The Utter Routing of the Whole Army of all the Independents and Sectaries (London, 1646); Ricraft, A Nosegay of Rank-smelling Flowers, 4. He included extensive extracts from Walker’s attack on Goodwin. 222 Gangraena, ii. 170, 11 May 1646; iii. 62, 16 June 1646; Zaret,‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion’, 1517–18.

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Prynne, Calamy, Vines, Marshall, Sedgwick, Gataker, Ley, Newcomen, Seaman, Hill and Burgess, as well as Master Edwards because he hath written of the damnable Errors, Heresies, and Blasphemies of these times, and the better to preserve the people, and to make them take heed, hath given the names of some of the prime seducers, Wrighter, Erbury, Hich, Wallwyn, Denne, Kiffin, Lambe, Lilburne etc.

A long roll-call of friends and enemies thus represented and communicated Edwards’s view of profound religious cleavages in the England of the mid-1640s.223 In the 1630s Edwards’s friend John Vicars had bemoaned the prohibition of the press to ‘God’s people’, forcing Puritans to rely on manuscript circulation ‘to vindicate the truth’.224 Presbyterians thus took full advantage of the opening of the presses in the 1640s, even as they condemned Independent and sectarian exploitation of print. Arguing with Hugh Peter or John Saltmarsh in the street was all very well, writing letters of denunciation had its place, but it was only print that offered the vital publicity that facilitated political mobilization. Gangraena made the horrible errors and outlandish behaviour of individual sectaries notorious; it also conjured up opposing communities of wicked sectaries and godly, embattled orthodox ministers and lay people. Print made possible new forms of political mobilization demanding readers actively judged between rival propaganda and acted on their judgements. The orthodox were to ‘shun’ the sectaries but were also urged to go further, to support the measures necessary to defend God’s truth and destroy error: settled church government, a blasphemy act, a purge of ‘Independents’ from military and civil office. Books had escaped from the study and the college, to play a major mobilizing role in the pressing conflict over religious reformation. Writing and reading had become revolutionary activities. The precise role and practical impact of Edwards’s polemic will concern us in Chapter 5. Gangraena, ii. 107–8; 30–1; iii. 163–4. The Diary of Thomas Crosfield, ed. F. S. Boas (London and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 89. I owe this reference to Alex Walsham. 223 224

CHAPTER FIVE

Edwards, Gangraena, and Presbyterian Mobilization In his long exculpatory Preface to Part Three of Gangraena, Edwards presented himself as an unworldly author, concerned only with the struggle against error, and not greatly involved with practical campaigns for Presbyterian church government: I have beene willing to forsake my fatnesse and sweetnesse, to neglecte my profit, health, benefit of my Familie, all advantages, and in a sort to sequester my selfe from freinds, and all worldly enjoyments to spend my time, strength, spirits, estate, and all in reeding, writing, studying of the Controversies of these times . . . And as for Domination and affecting of Rule and Government, I have little meddled in that kind, beene at few meetings of that nature, and do professe I am so farre from being ambitious in that way, that I should account it a great happinesse to have a call to a place only to preach and write, and a yeerely Pension for the maintenance rather then Tythes.1

Despite Edwards’s lack of interest in the details of church government, this was mostly special pleading. We have seen that his account of radical sectarianism in London focused on error actively promulgated and its practical implications rather than on intellectual heterodoxy as such. Edwards was not an organizational leader of London Presbyterianism, but like all heresiographers he intended his work to have a definite impact on the world of domination and government. Gangraena clearly both reflected and sought to influence the programme of the city’s zealous Presbyterians. Edwards feared shameful compromises would be made between Independents and Presbyterians: ‘We have too many wounds with which we have been wounded in the house of our friends; many Ministers have and do undo us; some by their total silence, others by speaking too favourably of the sects’. The most fundamental principles of true religion were at stake: ‘tis high time now to speak out, when the truth of God, the 1

Gangraena, iii. sig. )(4v.

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Faith once delivered to the Saints, more pretious then our lives is almost lost, three Kingdoms almost ruined, and all the Reformed Churches in their truth and peace hazarded’. Ministers that would ‘let the wolves come freely, and not bark’, deserved to be denounced as ‘dumb dogs’. So ‘all godly orthodox Ministers who would not have all run to ruine’ should ‘lift up their voices like trumpets . . . for he that is not now with God in his Cause, is against him’. Edwards’s programme for action was addressed not simply to ministers but to all in authority: ‘Magistrates, Ministers and other Christian Masters of Families, Parents etc have been asleep and too careless’.2 Edwards’s friend Robert Baillie expected Gangraena to aid the orthodox cause.Writing in February 1646 as Part One was published, he rejoiced that truely the body of the city is a zealous and understanding people, fully apprehensive of the mischiefe of the Sectaries among them. Their ministrie are faithfull watchmen; and some late books have done them good; especially Mr Edwards’s Gangraena; which must either waken the Parliament, and all others, to lay to heart the spreading of the evill errors, or I know not what can doe it. The city is in so good a temper these two moneth as we would wish.3

Retrospectively, and from the opposite religious perspective, Edwards’s targets or victims also credited him with significant influence. The journalist and future republican John Hall, briefly mentioned by Edwards, offered a rather detached, hostile summing-up, published in London in August 1647, a day or two after Edwards himself had fled the city, in the face of its occupation by the New Model Army, all his hopes in ruin: This congregationall way never thought on till within a few yeeres, being free and leaving a scope to men’s consciences, was much entertained by many Sectaries; nay some who carried only the character of pious and orthodox, and some under the colour of it broached opinions which were as new as the government. That occasioned the detestable Mr Edwards with a great deale of waspish and violent rancour to write his Gangrena: questionlesse this booke did a great deale of harme, for being full of falsities, and almost monkish forgeries did engage many to a justification who it may be would otherwise after the first evintitation of their fancies have sate still.

In particular, Hall argued, Edwards inflamed the soldiers of the New Model Army, thereby provoking the fatal confrontation with the Presbyterians in 1646–7. The army ‘muttered at this booke, and some pro2

Ibid. i. 155; ii. 198.

3

Letters of Baillie, ii. 352, to William Spang.

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ceedings of the same nature, insomuch that the Presbyterian Party, which by some countenance of the State grew haughty, sought to oppose them, and in pursuance of it, wrought so farre upon the consciences of the Aldermen and Common-Counsell (men verst in little else but their trades, and utterly ignorant of State affaires) thought the greatnesse of their Citie sometimes engaged them, that they petitioned the Parliament to disband the Army’.4 William Walwyn, friend of Clement Writer, advocate of toleration and Leveller, writing in 1649, also blamed Gangraena for the emergence of bitter, self-defeating cleavages amongst parliamentarians: In the year 1646, whilst the army was victorious abroad, through the union and concurence of conscientious people, of all judgments, and opinions in religion; there brake forth here about London a spirit of persecution; whereby private meetings were molested, & divers pastors of congregations imprisoned, & all threatened; Mr Edwards, and others, fell foule upon them, with his Gangreen after Gangreen, slander upon slander, to make them odious, and so to fit them for destruction, whether by pretence of law, or open violence he seemed not to regard; and amongst the rest, abused me, which drew from me A whisper in his ear, and some other discourses, tending to my own vindication, and the defence of all conscientious people.5

Edwards was thus blamed for smearing the (sectarian) godly and inflaming divisions, or alternatively praised for bolstering the zeal of the (orthodox) godly. Modern scholars can be quoted to the same effect as Edwards’s contemporaries. He was, concluded Valerie Pearl,‘the man who did so much to embroil the religious parties in London and to split the nation into factions’.6 The accumulation of quotations does not amount to a conclusive argument for the influence of Gangraena. The difficulties in isolating Edwards’s precise role in political transformations and intensifying bitterness are obvious. 4 L. L. N. [John Hall], A True Account and Character of the Times (London, 1647), BL E401 (13), Thomason date 9 Aug. 1647, 4–5. This work is discussed in David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71, and see also Smith, Literature and Revolution, 187–90, for Hall as an apostle of rationalism and ‘Baconian modernity’. This idiosyncratic pamphlet called for Edwards and Burgess and other ‘hotter spirited men’ to be punished as incendiaries, argued that Presbyterian government was incompatible with ‘our civill government’ and supported moderate episcopacy. It finally proposed the reopening of the theatres. 5 Walwyn’s Just Defence (London, 1649), here taken from Haller and Davies (eds.), Leveller Tracts, 352. 6 Pearl,‘London Puritans and Scotch Fifth Columnists’, 526–7.

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This book, taking Edwards’s Gangraena as its focus, inevitably risks crediting it with too great an influence on contemporary events. The danger of seeing the world only through Edwards’s eyes and in his terms cannot wholly be avoided. Readers may well need to be more sceptical than this author. Edwards died in exile, a disappointed man; his positive impact fell far short of his own hopes, and it may plausibly be argued that the most clear-cut result of Gangraena’s arguments was the negative one of uniting the opponents of the Presbyterian programme. It is rarely possible to decide whether Edwards is reflecting, exacerbating, or creating religious divisions or to credit him specifically with particular initiatives. In Chapter 4 I argued that Gangraena was the most notorious and widely discussed work of zealous Presbyterian polemic in this period, but I have also shown that it took its place amongst a large body of intertextual, mutually reinforcing printed work by Bastwick, Prynne, Ricraft, and Vicars attacking ‘toleration’ and ‘sectarianism’. But ‘either-or’ solutions to questions of influence are not appropriate to the complex processes of mobilization and fragmentation amongst parliamentarians in the mid-1640s: Gangraena’s three parts arose from, had an impact on, and were influenced by the religious and political cleavages of city and nation. As a polemicist, Edwards often described the world as he wished it to be, hoping Presbyterians would live up to his account of their zeal; analysis must focus on interactions between author, book, and context, and on affinities of language and theme, rather than on direct, demonstrable influences. In this chapter I will begin with some general discussion of how Gangraena affected mid-seventeenth-century alignments and how it has influenced our own understandings of politics and religion in the 1640s. What follows is a combination of narrative for 1645–8 with thematic analysis of particular initiatives and turning points. Particular attention is paid to London, the headquarters of the Presbyterian vanguard, and the site of Edwards’s own activities. In London, Edwards was both chronicler of and participant in Presbyterian victories and setbacks. The information and appeals for a zealous orthodox fightback that filled the pages of Gangraena are integrated with an account of religious divisions and Presbyterian campaigns in the city based on alternative sources such as Juxon’s Journal, and major recent accounts of London by Robert Brenner and Keith Lindley. For London, and beyond, I shall highlight Edwards’s own role and suggest affinities in language, priority, and changes of emphasis between Gangraena and Presbyterian campaigns in city, provinces, and parliament.

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Antapologia was published at almost the same time as parliament’s crushing victory at Marston Moor, a victory for which, in the view of men like Edwards and Baillie, the ‘Independent’ troops of Cromwell were given all too much credit. By this time Edwards and Baillie already saw the world in terms of two sharply polarized religious groupings—parties even—of Presbyterians and Independents, whose fortunes depended on a contest for support in parliament and the city of London, and on the relative success (or perceived success) of their military counterparts, the Scottish army and the Eastern Association Army commanded by the Earl of Manchester, but identified increasingly in 1644 with Oliver Cromwell. In London it was well known by spring 1644 that Colonel Charles Fleetwood permitted the heretical speculations of John Boggis or Laurence Clarkson in Great Yarmouth. These two, like Richard Beaumont who was made captain in the summer of 1644, were to be made notorious by Edwards’s Gangraena. On the other hand, in Lincoln Colonel Edward King (already a man with a reputation as an enemy of the sects, already a friend of Prynne) had emerged as a determined enemy of the radical John Lilburne. We know from the careful work of Clive Holmes and Anne Laurence that the Eastern Association Army as a whole was not as radical as many contemporaries believed. But their perceptions, made credible by specific dramatic incidents, helped to structure contemporary writing and political action. Robert Baillie is a well-documented example, complaining from May 1644, that the army had been ‘seduced to Independencie, and very many of them have added either Anabaptisme or Antinomianisme or both’.7 Baillie’s (and Edwards’s) habit of connecting the twists and turns of their religious fortunes to military success was shared by more radical commentators such as the London militia commander and broadly ‘Independent’ sympathizer Thomas Juxon. From the autumn of 1644, Juxon put the conflicts in the Eastern Association Army in a religious context: Cromwell’s quarrel with Manchester was provoked by his ‘beinge firme to the Scotts and their Church Discipline’. On the other hand, Juxon placed religious developments in a military context. When Essex’s army surrendered in Cornwall, ‘Independent’ influence increased and parliament ordered the Westminster Assembly to set up a committee for accommodation between Presbyterians and Independents: ‘This was much 7 Holmes, Eastern Association, 188–9, 199–203; Laurence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 28; Letters of Baillie, ii. 146.

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stomacked at by the Scotts and or Rigid Presbyterians and delayed. The moderate Partie inclined much to ye Independents’. But when the Presbyterian Scots took Newcastle, ‘The Parliament crouch soe farr as to saende by severall of the Lords with the Mace their love to the Assembly’ and suspended their former order. ‘Thus’, concluded Juxon grimly, ‘the Scotts incroach uppo us’.8 Military reform in the spring of 1645 did not alter such perceptions. Although Holmes and Kishlansky have variously argued that the SelfDenying Ordinance and the creation of the New Model Army were a means, in the short term at least, of containing the religious conflict unleashed in the quarrel between Manchester and Cromwell, the army in general, and Cromwell in particular, were increasingly linked to the cause of liberty of conscience. In July 1645, Baillie complained of the ‘retardment we may have from this great victorie [Naseby] obtained most by the Independent partie’.9 In September 1645, Cromwell’s postscript in his letter to the House of Commons announcing the fall of Bristol, rejoiced in the fact that ‘Presbyterians, Independents, all have here the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same pretence and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere . . . As for being united in forms, commonly called Uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do, as far as conscience will permit, and from brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion, but that of light and reason.’According to George Thomason,‘This was printed by the Independent party and scattrd up and downe the streets last night, but expresly omitted by order of the House’.10 Had the Scots army done better service in the summer, Baillie felt, the Assembly’s attempts to strengthen the Presbyterian ordinances would not have been condemned by parliament as an arbitrary power.11 Throughout the pages of Gangraena, Edwards’s disappointment at the limited impact of Antapologia is palpable. Sects continued to multiply, errors to spread, while orthodox plans for reformed government and discipline were stillborn. Through the lucky success of a dangerous army and the failures of the zealous, a Presbyterian sell-out in the discussions on DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 24r, 26r–v; (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 59, 61). Holmes, Eastern Association, 209–11; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, ch. 2; Letters of Baillie, ii. 291. 10 The illicit broadside is BL Thomason 669, fo. 10 (38); the postscript was omitted in the Lords Journals, and the official publication (Thomason, BL E301 (18) ). It was reprinted in Rutherford, Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist, 250, to show how dangerous Cromwell was. 11 Letters of Baillie, ii. 325. 8 9

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‘accommodation’ renewed in November 1645 seemed a real possibility. Baillie condemned the Committee for Accommodation in his Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time, and worried especially about the moderation of its chairman, Stephen Marshall, who was proving the Independents’‘most diligent agent’, urging Presbyterians to grant ‘much more than my heart can yield to’. The committee was still sitting when Gangraena, Part One came out and Edwards’s remarks about Presbyterian lukewarmness, or want of courage, are to be read in this context.12 In the three parts of Gangraena, Edwards elaborated his polarized world view. In Part One he summed up the Presbyterian party as ‘the Assembly of Divines, the Representative body of the City, the Court of Common Council, the Ministry of the kingdom, thousands and ten thousands of godly well-affected persons, the Kingdom of Scotland, yea all the Reformed Churches own that way’. In Part Three, he predicted violent confrontation, albeit through the indirect reporting of London gossip: The sectaries in the Moneth of May last raged extremely, and spake desperately . . . one sectary a kind of Gentleman belonging to a Parliament man said in the hearing of some, that the King, the House of Lords, the City, the Scots, and the Assembly were joyned together, but they had the House of Commons and the Army; and gave out some such words as if some three or foure thousand horse should billet in the City’.13

In Part Three also, Edwards discussed at length the political attitudes of Lilburne and Overton, and was concerned at several points to emphasize the close relationships between city and army sectaries, and their mutual hostility to Presbyterianism. Through his descriptions, his calls to action, and his labelling or name calling, Edwards constructed a misleadingly simple account of the religious and political divisions of the later 1640s. His account of the ‘Independents and sectaries’ in city, country, and army blurred or ignored many significant differences, most obviously between respectable Independents such as Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, and the wilder sectaries, but also between John Goodwin’s congregation of ‘Saints’ and the campaigners for popular power congregating around Lilburne and Overton, or between the army and the city radicals. Edwards’s account of Presbyterianism also was wishful thinking as much as description; his repeated laments—‘such a time have we fallen into of Lukewarmnesse’—designed 12 Letters of Baillie, ii. 326, 343; Gangraena, i. 141–2; for the revival of the Committee for Accommodation: Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 128. 13 Gangraena, i. 57; iii. 182.

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to ignite Presbyterian campaigns as determined and united as he believed the radical ‘party’to be—‘Oh if so few have done so much, and that in a bad cause, what might not we doe in a good cause’. He ignored divisions on the precise arrangements for church government, alluded only in passing to those amongst the orthodox who believed in ‘accomodation’ with Independents rather than confrontation, and never suggested that there were English ‘Presbyterians’ who lacked his own enthusiasm for the Scots.14 Edwards’s account of divisions should be seen as invocation, as an attempt to bring polarization into being, rather than as dispassionate description. We can thus mobilize a great deal of evidence that does not fit Edwards’s categories. We have already seen that he misrepresented the position of relatively moderate provincial figures such as Eaton or Durant, and the account he gave of the progress of his arch-enemy John Goodwin to separatism and Arminianism did not do full justice to the complexity of Goodwin’s journey. In his belated reply to Antapologia, Goodwin insisted that he, like Edwards, had preached ‘agst the faces of three of the more predominant Errors (as I judge them) or sects amongst us’ (these were Antinomians, Anabaptists, and Seekers), and was now in his Lord’s Day lecture busy ‘about the pulling downe of the error of the Anti-Scripturists (more dangerous and pestilentiall then all the rest)’.15 Although he made some opportunist comments on how even Independents disapproved of Burton’s tactics or John Goodwin’s theology, Edwards was not concerned to explore the complex positions of those who did not fit his labelling. The London Independent Nathaniel Holmes, briefly mentioned in Gangraena, attacked Goodwin’s views on salvation, and defended infant baptism, although he was to associate himself with radical millenarian politics in the 1650s.16 A modern study of Giles Firmin, the New England returner who became an Essex minister, sees him as working for peace and godly unity. In Gangraena, he features in the letters from Harmar as ‘an Independent Apothecary Physitian’, whose only previous preaching experience was on board ship, and his attempts at peacemaking are dismissed as ‘jesuit-like’. A credulous reader of Gangraena would have been surprised to learn that Firmin was the son-in-law of the virulent anti-army preacher Nathaniel Ward, that although he rejected the labels of either Independent or Presbyterian, he was licensed as a Ibid. iii. Preface, sig. [ ]r, 281. Apologesiates, Preface sig. A1r; More,‘New Arminians’, chs. 6, 7. 16 Gangraena, i. 72; cf. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 109–10, 123; Liu, Puritan London, 95 n. 91, 108; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 273, 563. 14 15

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Presbyterian preacher in 1672, and that he wrote critically of Hugh Peter to Winthrop, in July 1646: ‘I could wishe hee did not too much Countenance the Opinionists which wee did so cast out in N. England. I know he abhors them in his heart, but hee hath many hang upon him, being a man of such use’. Firmin claimed he had been singled out by Edwards precisely because he did not fit the radical New England stereotype.17 On the other hand a reader would have wondered how the Assemblyman William Strong, who passed on Richard Baxter’s letter concerning the army to Edwards, could be generally described as an Independent. The degree to which respectable Independents agreed with Presbyterians on doctrine, even as they differed on church government, is masked throughout Edwards’s writing. Edwards’s Cambridge contemporaries Thomas Goodwin and William Bridge defended doctrinal orthodoxy in the Assembly. In a debate on sins liable to excommunication in January 1645 Bridge insisted that Arminians and Socinians were heretics and blasphemers.18 We must be wary of ignoring chronological changes in the relationships between Presbyterians and respectable Independents. Practical cooperation was much easier after 1647 or 1649, once attempts at an authoritarian, compulsive church government had been decisively defeated, and Presbyterians needed all the protection they could find. Nonetheless it is worth rehearsing some of the extensive evidence of men with very different labels working together as John Brinsley and William Bridge did in Yarmouth in the 1650s. In London members of gathered churches were often prepared to contribute to the running of their parishes: Edmund Rosier, the pastor of an Independent church, acted as a churchwarden in his parish of Mary Abchurch in 1655; another pastor, Praisegod Barebone, and the militia Colonel Rowland Wilson, Peter’s host during a debate reported in Gangraena, both audited parish accounts throughout the period.19 But even in the mid-1640s there are men whose actions and beliefs do not fit the Presbyterian–Independent cleavage, of whom the most inter17 Susan Hardman Moore, ‘Arguing for Peace: Giles Firmin on New England and Godly Unity’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Unity and Diversity in the Church (Studies in Church History, 32, 1996), 251–61; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 197; Gangraena, i. 68–9 (2nd sequence); ii. 63, 99; Winthrop Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1947), 89. 18 For Strong see DNB; his funeral sermon (in 1654) was preached by the ‘Presbyterian’ Obadiah Sedgwick who had attacked heresy in 1647. Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 41; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 101. Thomas Goodwin lectured in favour of infant baptism in 1644, according to John Tombes, Apology, 9. 19 For Yarmouth see DNB, John Brinsley; for London, Liu, Puritan London, 185–6. I owe the qualifications to discussion with Peter Lake. For a good summing-up of the contrasts between the 1640s and the 1650s in London see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 569 n. 15.

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esting is the London preacher Joseph Caryl, usually defined as an Independent, and a clear opponent of the enterprise represented by Gangraena, yet willing to cooperate with city Presbyterianism in 1647. Caryl, preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, and pastor of Magnus parish, preached, with Hugh Peter, at the April 1646 thanksgiving to mark the reconciliation between city and parliament. Caryl took the opportunity to criticize heresiography. He accepted there were ‘errours amongst us and some very dangerous, destructive and damnable’, but there were perhaps not as many errors as the heresiographers claimed: ‘I shall never believe all Heresiographers for his sake who put Aerius into his Catalogue for opposing prelacy. There may be an errour in taxing some with errours’. Wherever heresy and error opposed sound doctrine, the godly should use ‘all the penalties which Chirst hath charged upon it’, but the ‘artillery, ammunition and weapons’ were to be found in the Gospels not in the ‘Pope’s forge’. The godly should not use ‘Antichrist’s broom to sweep Christ’s home’. For Caryl, classical Presbytery was apparently among the Gospel weapons against error: he attended the fourth London Classis until 1649. He took a particularly active part in the rigorous examination of the Independent Joseph Symonds, recently returned from Rotterdam, who was chosen in December 1646 by the vestrymen of Michael Cornhill (with Ralph Smith and John Bellamy amongst them) to take over Burroughs’s place as the expository lecturer there. Questioned on his rumoured support for toleration, Symonds insisted he ‘hath preached ye contrarie doctrine this last summer’. Nonetheless the Classis’ demand for written assurances in the end led Symonds’s backers to move the lecture elsewhere. Here Caryl, working with the determined Presbyterian Henry Roborough, took a harder line than Edwards who regarded Symonds as ‘one of the moderatest and modestest of that way’.20 As Chapter 2’s discussions of preaching on heresy have suggested, there were men labelled as Presbyterians who did not live up to Edwards’s definitions. Richard Vines, we remember, did not want in April 1644 to ‘proclaime open warre against lesser differences’, while Thomas Hill preaching the next day presented a similarly balanced view, denouncing error, but showing insight into how the godly might flounder: ‘Many desiring to runn farre from Popery and prelacy, (which formerly oppressed their spirits) have now before they were aware, ingaged themselves in the very 20 Caryl, England Plus Ultra, 23–5; for his career see DNB and Matthews, Calamy Revised, 103–4; Surman (ed.), Register Booke of the Fourth Classis, 5–6, 8–10, 77; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 186–8; Gangraena, iii. 243. Edwards had severely criticized proceedings in Rotterdam, however.

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quarters of the Arminians and Socinians’. He argued that ‘Before wee speake or think of tolerating or banishing’, the orthodox should try to reconcile differences and reclaim people from error through education, preaching, and catechizing.21 Attitudes hardened, not least through Edwards’s Antapologia, but in July 1645, Hill was still preaching unity, hoping to avoid both the ‘Confusion’ of Independency and the ‘Severity’ of Presbyterianism. For Hill, unity against the ceremonies and episcopacy, and in favour of parish discipline, should overcome division on church government.22 As late as March 1647, there was some hesitancy in Richard Vines’s treatment of heresy, as we shall see below. Finally of course, the ‘Presbyterian’ Stephen Marshall, proponent of ‘accommodation’ in 1644–5 and the principal peacemaker of 1647, was a perennial source of anxiety and disappointment to his more single-minded brethren. One acquaintance of Edwards’s certainly never forgave him; Robert Baillie wrote to Simeon Ashe in December 1655,‘I am sorie Mr Marshall is a-dying: he was ever in my heart a very eminent man’, but he had ‘long ago lost the hearts of our Nation’, through his betrayal of the Covenant and his rapprochement with Cromwell.23 The orthodox godly did not spend the 1640s concerned only with church government or even the struggle against heresy; a positive concern with godly reformation and their own spiritual fulfilment remained equally important and cut across ‘party’ lines. Amongst the preachers regularly heard in the 1640s by Walter Yonge, junior, son of a parliamentary diarist, were Cranford and Jenkyn; the notes he took focused on the pursuit of holiness and sanctification. Jenkyn preached a whole series on these themes with texts from the Song of Solomon, urging his hearers not to rely on outward ordinances, ‘many belive that ye hearing of ye word and formall dutyes will effect or salvation, this is a poor weak means’. At this level there was common ground with Dell. Nehemiah Wallington, whose pride in his election as a parish elder prompted him to write a book, heard Independent preachers like Hugh Peter as well as Presbyterians. In the same spirit Alderman William Underwood, a ruling elder in Stephen Wallbrook, left bequests to the Independent pastor George Cockayne as well as to his Presbyterian parish minister Thomas Watson.24 Vines, Impostures of Seducing Teachers, 30; Hill, Good old Way, 41–6. 23 Hill quoted in Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 121–2. Letters of Baillie, iii. 302–3. 24 BL Add MS 18781–2 (quoting 18781, fo. 40, Mar. 1644); Seaver, Wallington’s World, 147–9 and n. 241, 171–2; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 162. In the later 1640s the Worcestershire gentleman Nicholas Lechmere heard a range of city preachers including Richard Vines, Simeon Ashe, Stephen Marshall, William Strong, Thomas Goodwin, Thomas Manton, and 21 22

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From one angle—Edwards’s angle—we discern bitter religious divisions; from another we can see a broader unity of purpose amongst the orthodox godly. It is unsurprising then that modern accounts differ sharply, or that there is a very strong correlation between reliance on Edwards as a source and a polarized view of religious divisions. For Murray Tolmie, Edwards’s account of an Independent–sectarian coalition was an accurate judgement, revealing the Independents’ own disingenuousness in concealing the full extent of their commitment to religious liberty and gathered churches. Tolmie’s account of the 1640s draws heavily on both Antapologia and Gangraena: ‘Thomas Edwards complained bitterly, and justly, that the Apologeticall Narration was far from being the frank and full statement of the Independents’ differences from the Presbyterians that it professed to be’, and criticizes those like Nuttall who have ignored Antapologia in their stress on what ‘Independents’ and ‘Presbyterians’ had in common. Tolmie suggests, like Edwards, that the ‘deliberate reticence’ of the Apologeticall Narration was tactical; the Independents’ hopes of gaining parliamentary support ‘depended in part at least on concealing from their secular allies the full degree of their commitment to the gathered church’.25 On the other hand, for those who stress the common ground amongst the godly, or the late and hesitant emergence of divisions, Edwards is not a useful or valid source. Where Tolmie regards ‘the assumption implicit in this policy [of accommodation] . . . that the moderate English Presbyterians and the Independent Clergy had more in common than the latter had with the sects’, as misguided or even dishonest, for others, such as Zakai and Bremer, who do not make much use of Edwards, it was a simple fact. Bremer, unlike Edwards and Tolmie, takes the Apologeticall Narration at face value, and emphasizes the role of moderates such as Marshall, Herle, and even Calamy. For him, ‘the failure to achieve a mutually acceptable settlement has often obscured the degree to which most who would later be designated Congregationalists and Presbyterians wished for such an agreement and sincerely worked for it in the period before 1644’.26 Kishlansky’s rejection of ‘biased’ sources like GanJohn Tombes: BL Add MS 39940–2. I am indebted to Stephen Roberts for giving me a copy of his notes on Lechmere. 25 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 94–9, 128–9, 218 n. 49 (for the comment on Nuttall), 226 n. 31. 26 Ibid., 126; Bremer, Congregational Communion, 131–7, at 131; in other passsages Bremer argues that accomodation remained a real possibility until late 1645. Avihu Zakai, ‘Religious Toleration and its Enemies: the Independent Divines and the Isue of Toleration during the English Civil War’, Albion, 21 (1989), 1–33; this does not use Gangraena at all, and misspells

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graena clearly contributes to his overall account of the painful emergence of adversary politics, at least a year later than Baillie’s or Edwards’s accounts of the implications of Marston Moor.27 The existence of a ‘reality’ at odds with that presented by Edwards, and the rival modern accounts based on these contrasting bodies of evidence, bring us closer to a provisional assessment of Edwards’s impact. This requires a more sophisticated understanding of political identities, both individual and collective, as more fragmentary, contradictory, and contingent than dominant modes of analysis imply. To oversimplify, three main approaches can be found in discussions of civil-war political and religious division since the 1960s, based on boxes, linear developments, or factions. There is a drive to fit people into hard and fast categories; they are Presbyterians, members of a ‘war party’, or Levellers, and once the definitions are clarified they can be put in the right boxes.28 On the other hand, there is a search for a clearly defined turning point, the time when once and for all religious and political divisions emerged, party alignments were fixed, or adversary politics sprang into life. The main alternative to the boxes or the timeline is to see politics in terms of shifting factions, based on practical matters such as patronage connections or regional interests.29 Thinking about the impact of a piece of polemic like Gangraena may help us move away from these oversimple categories without jettisoning the importance of principle.30 Political identities are not self-contained or coherent, political alliances are not fixed or given, but are always under construction, and never more so than in a period of massive and traumatic disruption, such as civil war. The developments of the 1640s brought Antapologia. Some of the judgements here—that Caryl was an Independent, and John Goodwin a sectary—need refinement. Zakai stresses Independent opposition to unlimited toleration, and their support for the authority of the civil magistrate in religion. Liu, Puritan London, presents a view of shifting alliances amongst the godly in the city although he argues it is unwise to distinguish too sharply between ‘middle way’ Independents and sectaries. 27 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 139–50. 28 See e.g. the controversy over Presbyterians, Independents, and ‘PresbyterianIndependents’ variously interpreted in the 1960s, and wisely discussed in Underdown, Pride’s Purge, ch. 3. Some discussions of the ‘Levellers’ also work with rigid, self-defeating definitions, see Hughes,‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’. 29 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, traces the emergence of adversary politics. For accounts based on patronage or regional networks see J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 40 (1990); David Scott, ‘The “Northern Gentlemen”: The Parliamentary Independents and AngloScottish Relations in the Long Parliament’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999). All these works are more subtle than my summary suggests. 30 See Underdown, Prides Purge, 16–23.

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shifting possibilities and dilemmas as different groups competed to make the parliamentarian cause identical with their particular religious and political aims. Edwards and his associates experienced the bitter fragmentation of old friendships—seen most starkly in the defection of the martyr Henry Burton from his fellow sufferers Bastwick and Prynne. They engaged in intensely fought contests over the meaning of the experiences of harassment, nonconformity, and exile in the 1630s, and faced the sabotage (as they saw it) of the long-hoped for reformation of the church by men who also claimed to represent parliamentarianism and godliness. Edwards’s labels and alliances may have involved as much wishful thinking as accurate reportage, but, to put it naively, polemical definitions have a way of coming ‘true’ through their capacity to constrain possibilities for debate and action, limiting what it was possible to say or the alliances it was feasible to form. Discursive strategies have the power to effect change, interacting of course with more obvious structures—in city government, parliament, and army. The labels insisted on by zealous polemicists were appeals for support, attempts to transform fragmented aims and identities into coherent programmes and parties, not boxes into which people automatically or easily fitted. Polemicists do not simply reflect, or act as tools of, a pre-existing power base. Polemical strategies, such as that headed by Edwards’s Gangraena, worked like the shaking of a kaleidoscope, turning a complex mixture into a momentarily simpler pattern, which then dissolved and formed again in a subtly different fashion.31 Many scholars of the mid-1640s have rightly stressed that the majority of MPs, Common Councillors, and ministers were ‘not party men’, having more confused or contradictory aims.32 But the central issue is not how political actors should be classified, but how minorities are able to impose their vision or programme on those whose views are less developed or less committed. Political groups often coalesce in the face of a perceived common enemy as much as in agreement around particular programmes, and here vivid propaganda like Gangraena had its effect, offering an all too plausible sectarian–Independent ‘other’ against which ‘Presbyterians’ 31 Cf. Zaret’s comment on how, in printed petitions, ‘public opinion is nominally constituted in texts for the purpose of influencing individual opinions’: ‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion’, 1532–3. In a most illuminating study Anthony Milton shows how Peter Heylyn’s polemic helped to create a vision of Laudianism within a shifting and unstable ideological process: Anthony Milton, ‘The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds.), Politics, Religion and Popularity: Early Stuart Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 32 See e.g. Mahoney,‘Presbyterian Party’, 30–1; Underdown, Prides Purge, 46–7.

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could unite. It thus helped to create clear-cut polarities out of a muddled ‘reality’. In the process Edwards (and those with whom he was allied) constructed a coherent aggressive Presbyterianism as well as a sinister Independent coalition, encompassing horrible blasphemy and terrible error, threatening civil authority and backed by a powerful army. The cleavage of 1646–7 was not permanent or stable and its terrible climax in August 1647 when the New Model Army occupied London was not inevitable. The city zealots drew back from the brink of armed conflict; but for a crucial period, Edwards’s fatal simplifications sabotaged rival possibilities for alliance amongst the orthodox godly. One enlightening if dangerous exercise is to explore an alternative 1640s chronology to that of increasingly bitter division between ‘Presbyterians’ and ‘Independents’, a chronology based on the undoubted common ground on Calvinist doctrine, the need for godly reformation, and an educated and ordained ministry, between men who preferred a Presbyterian church and those who believed in the autonomy of the gathered congregation. This—we could call it the Bremer chronology—might start with the agreement at Calamy’s house in 1641, and continue with the attempts at ‘accomodation’ in 1644–5, regarding them as genuine negotiations with some chance of success, rather than, as Tolmie suggests, dishonest postponements of an inevitable breach.33 The successful intermediary role of Nye and Marshall in August 1647 would also feature in this framework as would the continuing attempts to construct voluntary associations of provincial ministers, ‘Presbyterian’ or ‘Independent’, and to achieve national agreement on ‘fundamentals’ of doctrine, throughout the 1650s.34 This counterfactual exercise suggests that the Presbyterian– Independent split seen as inevitable by Tolmie and others was in fact the product of contingent polemical competition within an unstable 33 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 128, should be contrasted with Bremer, Congregational Communion, 155. An alternative view of the divisions of the 1640s, which will no doubt qualify some of the argument here, is found in Como, ‘Puritans and Heretics’, 408–9, which stresses divisions between formalist/legalist Puritans (who turned to Presbyterianism as a way of controlling behaviour) and those (including Nye and Thomas Goodwin) who stressed an assurance that came from the spirit and the gospel rather than from outward duties: ‘the battles over church government masked a more fundamental intellectual and emotional bifurcation within puritanism, a split over that most basic of Christian antinomies, the relationship between Law and Gospel’. But some Presbyterians (including the zealous Jenkyn) stressed the spirit, and some Independents, in New England at least, attacked anti-formalism in Antinomian form. 34 See e.g. Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. S. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church History, 21, Oxford, 1984); Hughes, ‘The Frustrations of the Godly’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration.

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spectrum of opinion. That the alternative chronology remained unrealized was in part because of the panic over error and the bitterness at its toleration generated by Edwards’s Gangraena and other polemic, although amongst other factors one might point to the incoherence of the respectable congregational position within a developed Protestant state as opposed to an exile community in the Netherlands or the ‘wilderness’ of New England. We know that in practice anxiety about separatism and heresy divided the orthodox godly in the 1640s, as the Quaker ‘threat’in the 1650s brought them closer together. The division that prevailed in the 1640s was between Independents and sectaries, on the one hand, and Presbyterians, on the other; in the 1650s Presbyterians and Independents were set against sectaries and Quakers. Was this was the only possible trajectory, or had Edwards’s success in linking schism and heresy so closely in 1646 done much to eliminate more positive developments for the supporters of godly reformation?35 The following detailed treatment should help provide some answers. edwards, gangr aena, and lond on presbyterianism Edwards completed Part One of Gangraena as city Presbyterians and members of the Westminster Assembly began a dynamic petitioning campaign against the inadequacies of parliament’s ordinance of August 1645 on church government, a campaign that led to a bruising collision with parliament and ultimately a humiliating climbdown. From its earliest sessions, the majority of the Assembly linked the dangers of heresy and schism, discussed in Chapter 3, to delays in the settling of church government. From the start London ministers, of whom Edwards was one, worked closely with allies in the Assembly. A petition from London ministers in November 1643 prompted the Assembly’s Declaration against the gathering of churches the following month. The Common Council planned to reinforce the ministers’ petition through their own petition to parliament: that they would be pleased to speed the settlement of church government for the quieting of the minds of the people, and that private persons may be prohibited to anticipate the wisdom of both Houses of Parliament by assembling themselves together and exercising of church discipline without the warrant of the civil power,

35

Cf. Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 162–3, 235.

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which tends much to the dishonour of Parliament and the disturbance of the church, City and kingdoms.36

The city ministers themselves petitioned the Commons in September 1644 for the expedition of the Directory and a settled church government, and again the following March urged they be given effective powers to keep back the ignorant and scandalous from the sacrament.37 But zealous Presbyterian ministers in city and Assembly considered the August 1645 ordinance to be wholly inadequate, especially as it established lay commissioners as the final court of appeal for those denied admission to the sacrament, rather than a national assembly as in a fully Presbyterian system. With fears already sharpened and tempers rising, through the Assembly’s concern with Paul Best and John Archer’s book, the ‘Savile affair’, and Cromwell’s appeal from Bristol for religious liberty, the London clergy began a petitioning campaign and Edwards, presumably, hastened to finish his catalogue of religious error. The unsympathetic Juxon believed the campaign was ‘fomented by the severall Ministers . . . against the Independents’, while Baillie blessed God for the steadfastness of city and people.38 There are many parallels in language and preoccupation between Gangraena and the city campaigns, and many personal connections. Central to the campaign was the conviction—Edwards’s conviction—that lack of discipline and uniformity prompted the diseases of radical separatism and vicious error. Attempts to get official city backing for a petition on church government in September foundered when the House of Commons voted the petition scandalous. The petition was coordinated, according to Juxon, by Lawrence Brinley, a zealous parliamentarian and Presbyterian new merchant, and was ‘sent in to every parishe for to be subscribed by all that had 36 CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 86r–v, (Jan. 1644) discussed in Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 468; DWL, MS 24.50, Juxon’s Journal, fo. 6v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 43). At the same time the great dinner and thanksgiving at Christ Church was supposed to cement parliamentarian unity. 37 BL Thomason, 669, fo. 10 (13) and CJ iv. 73, for the Sept. 1644 petition. 38 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 45v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 85); Letters of Baillie, ii. 326. The story of the Presbyterian campaign can be traced in many modern works, with W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth (London, 1890), remaining the authoritative general version. For London, Lindley, Popular Politics, ch. 8, gives the fullest account and has been very useful for this chapter. Still useful are Ian Gentles, ‘The Struggle for London in the Second Civil War’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 277–305; Argent, ‘Aspects of the Ecclesiastical History’, 135–7, 294; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 78–90; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 110–16. Edwards is a crucial source for Tolmie and Lindley; Juxon for Kishlansky, Brenner, and Lindley.

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taken the Covenant & that there Qualities should be allsoe sett downe’. On its failure handbills were pinned up in the Royal Exchange and other key city arenas, urging a tax strike because effective measures were not taken against the ‘damnable doctrines being broached daily to the scandal of our religion’.39 The next month the Presbyterians had more success. As Juxon had it (in his third attempt at a narrative of events): The ordinance for the choice of Elders came forth where in every Classis in London was appoynted 3 ministers & 6 others or Tryers to trye those that should be made elders in every parish etc. But the ministers were not well pleased wuth it, therefore mett at Sion Coll and founde the Parliament had putt as many more laymen as Clergy which shewd what they intended. And besides had not given enough power to them.

On 20 October 1645, the Common Council read through the ordinance and established a committee to confer with the ministers on their ‘doubts’ over its procedures. Spurred on also by renewed citizens’ petitioning on ‘many woofull divisions touching matters of Religion’, the Common Council resolved to petition parliament for an improved ordinance. Eighty-eight ministers put their names to the ‘Desires and Reasons’, recorded by the Common Council. The list was headed by George Walker, the veteran hard-line controversialist; it included Ashe, Gower, Calamy, Samuel Clarke, Cranford, Roberts, and Christopher Love. Thomas Edwards’s name was in sixtieth place. The ministers’ desires were simply for the establishment of Presbyterian government and an eldership with ‘sufficient’powers. Their fundamental reason for objecting to current proposals was that they ignored the ‘Intrinsicall power’ in ministers and elders, but ‘rune in such a straine as if all of it were only of Political Constitucon, and merely to be derived from the Civill Magistrate’. The powers of the eldership to exclude parishioners from the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for scandal were unclear, and those scandals themselves were enumerated in a ‘very defective manner’. Consequently the ministers would be forced to ‘dash themselves upon one of these two Rockes’ of admitting the scandalous, or exercising an usurped, illegitimate jurisdiction. There was ‘noe Power at all settled for rootinge out of Schisme and divisions; which is our greate disease. Nor for reduceing us to unities . . . which is our vehement desire. But rather the defects of this power will (as we apprehend) extreamlie confirme and increase Sects and division 39 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 45v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 85); Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 79, followed by Lindley, Popular Politics, 357. For Brinley see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 365, 397–8, 399 n., 425 n.

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amongst us, and s[e]peracon from us, more then ever heretofore’. Disclaiming any aspirations for ‘Arbitrary, unlimited and exorbitant Power’, the ministers insisted that their allegiance to the Solemn League and Covenant and the need to be ‘faithfull to the Church of Christ wherein we are Stewards and Watchmen’, drove them on.40 Likewise the sixty citizens who petitioned the Common Council insisted unity had to rest on ‘puritie of Ordinances’, for separatism was justified on the basis of the existing impurity, so that there were ‘manie woefull divisions’ over doctrine and discipline. ‘Truth is cryed downe, error cryed upp, Brotherlie love abated, unbrotherlie variance increased’. John Jones, Ricraft, Vicars, and Widmerpole were among the friends and associates of Edwards who put their hands to this petition.41 Despite fierce opposition from some Aldermen and Common Councillors who argued that it was impertinent to attack an ordinance long and carefully considered by parliament, the Common Council petitioned parliament as the ministers urged, receiving a testy response from the Commons, and more conciliatory thanks from the Lords.42 But no changes were forthcoming, however, and religious divisions played a role in the annual Common Council elections in December. In Gangraena, Part One, Edwards claimed that lobbying in Farringdon within Ward (where Christ Church was located) showed ‘what stirring fellows these Sectaries are’— for they scattered papers around the ward, listing eight ‘outs’, sitting councillors, to be rejected, eight ‘ins’ for election. Edwards does not seem to have been perfectly informed, and he was, characteristically, unduly pessimistic about Presbyterian fortunes. Although most of the ‘outs’ were Presbyterian sitting Councillors and many of the ‘ins’ can be identified as radicals, there were anomalous figures in each category. At least half of the ‘outs’ won re-election; none of the eight ‘ins’ were successful.43 Baillie agreed with Edwards that ‘The Independents are sticking too openly to have the Common Counsell of London modelled to their mind’, but other 40 For these events see Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 79–80; DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 48v–49r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 89–90); CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 148r, 149r, 150v, 151r–153v. 41 CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 153v; Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London’ for the lay petitioning. 42 Juxon described the ‘longe debate’ in Common Council: DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 49r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 90); CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 154v. The following day rival petitions were presented to Common Council, one calling for the release of ‘notorious delinquents’, imprisoned without trial (presumably Lilburne and others); the second praising the Council for their ‘faithfulness and paines’ in petitioning parliament over religion. For their presentation see Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 80. 43 Gangraena, i. 105; Lindley, Popular Politics, 360–1, for the evaluation; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 80–1.

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evidence suggests the Presbyterians themselves mobilized most determinedly for these elections. At the ward-mote where Common Councillors were chosen,‘A Representation’ was circulated urging those elected to push for certain ‘desires’ at the first meeting of the new Common Council. These desires were the familiar ones for the settling of church government according to the Solemn League and Covenant, ‘before we be utterly ruined with Rents and Divisions’, and for ‘no toleration, either of Popery, Prelacy, Schisme, Heresie, Superstition, Prophaneness’—again in conformity with the Covenant. The aim was to get another petition to parliament. According to Juxon, ‘to this ende there was a sermon in every ward, all of them drove one & the same way, not to choose men of Erroneous opinions. The Petitione was Principally against scisme etc and all wrott by the same hande’.44 On 8 January the new Common Council, at the urging of the inhabitants of several wards, referred the drafting of a new petition to a committee, probably the one established in October 1645 to confer with city ministers. On 14 January, the Councillors reflected on the failure of the November petition, and on how ‘Inhabitants of most of the wards’ had urged further addresses to parliament during the elections. Their own petition evoked the horrors of religious division in terms similar to Edwards’s. Private meetings on the Lord’s day—at least eleven in one parish—multiplied; orthodox ministers were ‘neglected and contemned’ as anti-Christian, as if the ‘tirrany of the prelatical government’ had not been overthrown: ‘by reason of such meetings and the preaching of women and other ignorant persons, supersticon, heresie, schismes and prophanes are much increased, families divided, and such blasphemies as the peticioners tremble to thinke on uttered to the high dishonour of Almighty God’. They had heard that petitions were being organized for liberty of conscience and urged parliament to oppose toleration and settle church government speedily.45 This petition, like the ward-mote representations, drew freely on the authority of the Covenant to legitimate city Presbyterian demands. The Council met after an intimidating ceremony was held in the morning at

44 Letters of Baillie, ii. 344; To the Right Worshipfull, the Aldermen and Common Counsellmen of the Ward of Farrington Within at their Ward-Moot, 22 December 1645, BL 669, fo. 10 (41); a copy was inserted in the CCJ (CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 161r) on 14 Jan. when the petitions to parliament were finalized. DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 56v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 97). 45 CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 160r–v. On 8 Jan. the Common Council also made arrangements for the ceremonial retaking of the Covenant, discussed below.

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the church of Michael Bassishaw, where after rousing sermons by Calamy and Ashe ‘the Solemn League and Covenant was renued . . . with prayer and fasting’ by the city governors and their officers.46 Both sermons stressed the dangers of Covenant-breaking, the need for settlement of church government, and opposition to error. ‘A city without wals is exposed to every enemy, so is the Church without a government’, urged Calamy in his dedication to Mayor Adams and the rest of the city governors. He hammered away at the duties of the city authorities to succour true religion. As Esther had saved the Jews, ‘Who knoweth whether God hath not raised you up to be Mayor, to be Sheriffs,Aldermen and Common Councell men for such a time as this is’, asked Calamy. ‘My prayer shall be (and oh that God would hear me!) that you may be able to say, when I was first Mayor, or first Sheriffe, or first Common Councell man, I found a City full of errors and heresies, but now I shall leave it full of truth, full of holinesse, and a City at unity within itself ’. Auditors were enjoined to think of the Covenant ‘in your bed, in your closets, in your walks’.47 More aggressively Ashe demanded: Have you not connived at the spreading of pernicious errors in this City? Hath not your zeal against schisme and sinfull separations from our Church Assemblies been very much cooled? Is not your love towards our Brethren of Scotland in a great measure lessened? Have not your vigorous endeavours to promote the setling of Christs government in our Congregations been wofully diminished? And have you not been lamentably wanting in labouring the thorow reformation of your selves and families?48

These were avowedly partisan sermons, as Ashe’s reference to the Scots suggests. Despite a rhetoric of unity, it was unity on Presbyterian terms that was proposed. Both Ashe and Calamy shared Edwards’s twin fears about the spread of error and the pusillanimity of the orthodox. Extending his wall metaphor, Calamy warned: Our enemies also raise false reports to weaken the hands of the builders, and to make us afraid, as they did Neh.[emiah] 6. 6 10. They say that the Presbyterian Government (which is the Government that comes neerest the Word, and the 46 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 81; P. J. Anderson, ‘Presbyterianism and the Gathered Churches in Old and New England 1640–1662: The Struggles for Church Government in Theory and Practice’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1979), 149. Ashe, Religious Covenanting Directed; Calamy, Great Danger of Covenant refusing. The quotation is found in both title pages. The sermons were published before the end of Mar. for Thomason amended the dates of his copies from 1646 to 1645: BL E327 (5–6). 47 Calamy, Great Danger of Covenant refusing, sig. A3r–A4v. 48 Ashe, Religious Covenanting, 4.

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Government of the best Reformed Churches) will prove Tyrannicall, and Episcopall . . . our seeming friends seek to undermine us. . . It is impossible (say some) to purge our Churches according to the rule, they are so full of rubbish, and therefore it is better and safer to study Separation from, rather then Reformation of our Churches.

Rather, Calamy insisted,‘though God hath given us glorious victories over our enemies, yet the Churches of Christ lye desolate, Church-reformation is obstructed, Church-Discipline unsetled, Church-divisions increased. The famous City of London is become an Amsterdam, Separation from our Churches is countenanced, Toleration is cried up, Authority lyeth asleep. And therefore it is high time to take the Covenant again’. The covenant enjoined them to achieve uniformity in religion and the extirpation of popery, heresy, and schism, so toleration was ‘as contrary to this clause of the Covenant as Heaven is to Hell’.49 These were also profoundly controversial sermons. In his preface Calamy noted the ‘many harsh and bitter censures’ he had suffered. In the sermon itself he acknowledged that some refused the Covenant out of ‘unnecessary scrupulosity’, but pointedly continued that ‘I conceive that those who scruple it, are amongst those that are absent, and therefore I should but idle away precious time to satisfie the objections’.50 The Common Council agreed on 9 February (at the same meeting where Peter and Hawkins were complained of) that the names of those who had not retaken the Covenant should be noted and the oath should be solemnly read quarterly at their meetings. Tempers in the Council were already frayed by the conflict over what response to make to an overture from the Scottish parliament and, according to Juxon, the Independent minority eventually ‘tould them they had once taken it, and did beleve it was enough & sayd no more’.51 For the time being, the city’s petition fared better than those of the previous autumn. Both the Commons on 15 January and the Lords on the following day gave the city thanks and promised measures against women Calamy, Great Danger of Covenant refusing, sig. A2r–v, 3, 30–1. A sermon the following month by Matthew Newcomen to the same audience (at Paul’s church) urged unity, but argued that those who disagreed with Presbyterians on minor matters should keep their views private and avoid schism. Those who erred on fundamentals should be suppressed: Newcomen, The Duty of such as would walke worthy of the Gospel, 14–17, 39–41. 50 Calamy, Great Danger of Covenant refusing, sig. A3v, 8–9; Juxon was perhaps one of the absentees for he does not mention the ceremony. 51 CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 166r–v; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 502; DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 61r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 102). See below for the Scots. 49

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and mechanic preachers.52 A new crisis was looming though as a result of the Commons’ orders in January for the city to choose commissioners to hear appeals from those excluded from the sacrament, a matter referred after ‘much debate’ to the committee established to confer with the ministers. In a much-quoted passage, Thomas Juxon alleged that ‘in London ’twas not the Cittie nor the Comon Counsel, But a few ingaiged men there that are Triers’ who mobilized for the Presbyterian cause in the winter of 1645/6, relying on some ‘30 or 40 hands for the Affirmative . . . five for the Negative & the rest where are the Major pa[r]te are silent as either not willing or not dareing to appeare’.53 There is no reason to doubt that Edwards, although never named by Juxon, was amongst the ‘engaged men’, the rigid ministers who urged the city authorities to push parliament into action against religious error, heresy, and schism and in favour of a powerful Presbyterian church settlement. Edwards’s networks and sources, his participation in the ministers’ petition of November 1645, and his knowledge—albeit and perhaps deliberately partial—of the Common Council elections in December locate him within the zealous Presbyterian lobby. The focus on sectarianism and error as a spur to the settlement of church government, the fearful harping on the dangers of ‘toleration’ (in contrast to Independent talk of liberty of conscience), and, in general, the very high profile given to religious issues in the city are all characteristic of Gangraena. What is missing, as Tolmie noted, is any concern with detailed questions of church government as such. As the first part of Gangraena was completed, and published, it was the dangers of religious radicalism, the necessity of adherence to the Covenant, and the threats from hesitant friends as well as open enemies which exercised Edwards. As we have shown, Part One was entered in the Stationers’ Company Registers on 8 January 1646, but not published until some six weeks later. The book reflects the circumstances of its completion during this time of high excitement of meetings, petitioning, oath-taking, and argument, along with more specific irritations—such as the bitter spat between Calamy and Burton after the latter was removed from a lectureship at Mary Aldermanbury.54 Gangraena, Part One discussed and commended the city petitioning campaigns, and also articulated fears that the Presbyterians were losing ground because Independents and sectaries were more energetic, and 52 53 54

CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 166r–v; BL Add MS 31116 fo. 254r–v. CLRO, CCJ, 40, fo. 161v; DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 64r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 106). Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 132–3. See also Ch. 4, above.

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some Presbyterians were foolhardily acquiescing in proposals for accommodation. Edwards quoted the city’s 16 January 1646 petition ‘that Church Government may be speedily settled before we be destroyed one by another through rents and divisions’, appealing also to parliament’s own declarations, going back to February 1644, ‘now two yeers past wanting but three weeks’ for expedition. Uniformity and discipline were essential to ‘restrain mens nature and wantonnesse’.55 He was critical of the Stepney Independents Burroughs and Greenhill for their attempts to obstruct the Presbyterian petition of September 1645. They had attacked the Presbyterian incumbent Joshua Hoyle, when he had ordered the petition read after Burroughs’s morning lecture, while Thomas Alleys (actually, as we have seen, Alle), who had tried to gather signatures in the parish, had been ‘baited and rated by several of the Sectaries and them of that way that he met with; both in the street and upon the Exchange’. In a fast on 24 September Mr Greenhill ‘fell upon this Petition in a bitter manner’, claiming that Presbyterian government would be more tyrannical than the bishops, and asked whether his audience wanted to ‘return into Egypt again?’ (Was it this sermon Calamy had in mind when preaching on the Covenant in January?) Burroughs denounced it as an affront to the ‘Army that had done so much for us?’, while his wife ‘said it was a second Binions Petition’ (after the petition organized by the royalist George Benyon against parliamentarian control of the city militia in February 1642).56 The fears of a Presbyterian sell-out over accommodation that haunt Part One are echoed by Baillie and Juxon; both felt that city petitioning against toleration was prompted by fears that toleration would be established by law, which alarmed the ‘Independent’ Juxon as much as Baillie: ‘now the buisnes comes to bee: Not whither they shall connive at a Tolleration but whither they shall by a Law allowe them one . . . And indeed to doe that were a thinge as without a president soe oposite & destructive to aney settlement of Discipline’.57 Edwards knew that, unwisely, some Presbyterians had attended city meetings in December, of ‘several Sects, Seekers, Antinomians, Anabaptists etc, to consult about Liberty of Conscience’. Gangraena, i. 116–18, 121. Ibid., 109–10; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 128–9. For Alle see Ch. 4, above. Lindley, Popular Politics, 201, for Benyon. Edwards also indignantly recounted another slur implying royalist allegiance—that it was a ‘Digby’s’ petition—and attacked Independent newsbook accounts. 57 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 54v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 107–8). Juxon did believe that the Presbyterian clergy had only themselves to blame; their ambitions had so alarmed the Parliament that they were determined never to grant Presbyterianism jure divino. Letters of Baillie, ii. 344. 55 56

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He reassuringly suggested in one passage that the Presbyterians were there to find out what the others were up to, but it looked alarmingly like another example of how ‘we may thank a great many moderate men (as they would be called) that things are at that bad passe as they be’. The ‘earnest pressing of Accommodations, Tolerations and other wayes of compliance, have undone us’.58 The last few pages of the first edition mentioned events and books as recent as 13 February, while the Appendix to the hasty second printing included breathless reports on city divisions, and rumours of an Independent counter-attack: I have been within these last few dayes from good hands informed that in this last week of February there have been some meetings of Sectaries in the City to consult and to draw up some Petition to the Parliament to counterworke the CommonCouncel, and their consultations and debates were to this effect that seeing the Common-Councel and the Scots agree so together for settling ChurchGovernment, and that now new Votes and Resolves of both Houses are come forth to settle the Government of the Church, it was needfull for them to do something.

Edwards had heard that the petition would insist to parliament that the Common Council represented only a minority, and that the city should not correspond with foreign powers (presumably the Scots). Far from criticizing parliament’s legislation on church government, this petition ‘thanked them for their deliberation’, and asked them to take direct control of the city militia. Edwards had grasped or anticipated some of the ways in which Independents and other radicals would appeal to parliament’s authority against the corporate interests of the city from the spring of 1646. There does not seem to be any evidence that this petition was ever presented despite (according to Edwards) hoping for support from forty or fifty thousand hands, from moderate Presbyterians, malignants, and ‘all those that keep separated meetings’.59 Gangraena thus took its place amongst the city campaigns and the preaching offensive against sectarianism on official city and parliamentary occasions in January and February 1646. Edwards clearly reflected or summed up important aspects of the city’s Presbyterian mobilization, and his stories of radical error and excess encapsulated and publicized the alarming implications of toleration. The degree to which he shaped the Presbyterian programme, and the practical influence of his work are more intractable questions. Edwards’s vivid narratives picked out Lilburne, 58

Gangraena, i. 83–4, 14–15, 141–2.

59

Ibid., 121 (2nd pagination).

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Goodwin, Writer, Peter, Lambe, and Walwyn as dangerous men to be carefully tracked by the orthodox. He provoked several radical city figures, notably John Goodwin and William Walwyn, into indignant and rapid rebuttal, and Robert Baillie, as we have seen, offers contemporary backing for Edwards’s importance. From the publication of Part One, Edwards was to be the most notorious of Presbyterian propagandists. Gangraena, Part Two, despite Edwards’s preoccupation with answering Goodwin and his other critics, nonetheless reflected in its early and later sections the rising tension between city Presbyterians and parliament. It was registered with the Stationers’ Company on 4 April, a week before the Westminster Assembly’s petition on church government was voted a breach of privilege by parliament in an unmistakable, shaming rebuff. Edwards as usual took longer to finish than expected and Thomason noted receipt of a copy on 28 May, two days after the presentation to parliament of the city’s Remonstrance, which considerably raised the political stakes.60 During the three months or so between Parts One and Two the pivotal events were the city’s March petition against the lay commissioners and the Common Council’s humiliating climbdown when the House of Lords voted it too a breach of their privileges. Baillie’s hopes for the city were dashed but then revived when a Remonstrance replaced the selfdefeating tactic of petitioning on issues already determined by parliament. It will be argued here that the Remonstrance, and the ensuing city debate over its aims and methods, shows increasingly close affinities with Gangraena. Following renewed petitions from citizens, prompted, alleged Juxon, by the clergy, the Common Council resolved on 11 March to petition parliament against the commissioners, whose role ‘tends much to the discouragement of such as are willing to submit to the Presbyteriall governm[en]t’. The Council asked to be excused from exercising any church discipline ‘contrary to the scripture’—an insult, in Juxon’s view, given that the commissioners had been debated ten times in the parliament.61 The next day, despite bitter debates in the Common Council and warnings the petition would be seen as an attack on parliamentary privilege, the city authorities went to the Lords ‘in gr[ea]t pompe’ to present it. The Lords duly, Stationers’ Register, 1. 223; BL E338 (12). CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 173v–174v; DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 65r–v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 107–8). The citizens’ petition claimed one hundred signatures but only twenty-four are included with the copy in the Journal. They are analysed in Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London’, 101. For these events see also Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 473; Lindley, Popular Politics, 365–7. 60 61

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with some dissent, voted it a breach of privilege and more moderate opinion, led by the city Recorder and MP John Glyn, successfully counselled against any attempt to deliver it to the Commons who had already agreed with the Lords’ vote. The Council indeed begged the two Houses to expunge any record of their presumption from their records. Baillie was bitterly critical of this retreat: ‘by a few fair words from the houses they were made all as mute as fisch’; while Juxon noted ‘great murmurings’ against the Recorder, ‘much incouraged’, as usual, by the ministers. Their ‘frinds without and the Ingaiged Party wthin the Courte reproach them . . . they had betrayd their frinds and asked Pardone when they should have Justified the Actiones’.62 The immediate aftermath of this debacle provided one of the vivid setpieces of Gangraena, Part Two. Wishing to minimize the conflict with the city, members of both Houses came to the Guildhall on 17 March to explain to the Common Council their votes against the petition. Thomas Juxon typically offered a very polished account of how the parliamentary committee won over the city governors.Although ‘nothing w[a]s expected but a sad breach . . . Each man that spake did soe dexterously aply there discourses with all sweetnes & love that they founde them selves overcome by them’. Edwards remembered the day differently: Tuesday March 17 on the day that a Committee of Lords and Commons came down to Guildhall to the Common-Councell concerning their late Petition; many Sectaries from all parts of the City and Suburbs, came to Guild-hall, where, from about four a clock, till about nine, the Sectaries in severall companies and knots in the Hall, 30, 40 and more in some companies, vented boldly and pleaded for all sorts of opinions, the Antinomian opinions, the Anabaptisticall opinions, etc, pleading for a generall Toleration of all Sects, yea some maintained that no immortall spirit could sinne . . . many other horrid opinions were maintained at the same time, so that ‘tis beleeved, that never since Guild-Hall was built, there was so much wickednesse and errour broacht and maintained openly in it.

One godly citizen told Edwards that his opposition to the sectaries on that day had cost him work from an Independent woollen draper after an association of twenty years.63 John Farthing, an informant for Part One, was so 62 BL Add MS 31116, fo. 259v for the parliamentary proceedings; DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 65v–66r, 67v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 108–10). Letters of Baillie, ii. 366. 63 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 66v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 109). Samuel Browne’s speech was especially commended. Juxon has the meeting on 16 Mar., but most authorities prefer Edwards’s 17 Mar. date. Gangraena, ii. 8–9; Bodl., Tanner MS 60, fo. 554–5, is ‘Heads from the Lords to be spoken of at the Common Council’. Other details are in BL Add MS 31116, fos. 259v–260r; Lindley, Popular Politics, 366–7, 381–2; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army,

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alarmed by ‘so great an appearance of Independants and separatists’, and by the Common Council’s retreat, that he denounced Thomas Hawes, an associate of Paul Best, as a blasphemer in ‘hot and mallitious expressions’ at the Guildhall and had him committed to prison.64 According to Edwards it was two days after this meeting that a radical Independent pamphlet The last warning to all the Inhabitants of London, denouncing ‘all Kingly government, receiving the King in again, and against all established Ecclesiasticall government’‘came abroad in Print’ and was circulated especially by ‘Samuel Fulcher an Egge man’ and General Baptist, and the Independent booksellers Henry Overton and ‘One Calvert’.65 In the same week Goodwin’s Cretensis and two of Walwyn’s attacks on Gangraena, Part One, were available in London, according to Thomason’s dating.66 Edwards work was already both chronicling and featuring in city disputes. From its earliest meetings, the Westminster Assembly had been concerned with error and schism, as was shown in Chapter 3. In December 1645 the London ministers sent a letter to the Assembly decrying ‘that great Diana of . . . a Toleration’, in language echoed by Edwards in Gangraena.67 For most of the Assembly’s members, the rise of heresy was facilitated by inadequate proposals for church government. On 25 December, angered by Bachelor’s licensing of Tombes’s attack on Marshall, the Assembly set up a high-powered committee including Vines, Ley, and Gower, to draft a declaration, ‘concerning the blasphemies and heresies and other dangerous opinions printed and published and spread abroad, and many of them licensed, together with dangerous and schismatical practices’. Throughout 82–4. Scepticism about pamphlet sources leads Kishlansky to leave out the sectarian demonstration. CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 175v for the Common Council’s report of the meeting, and plans for the 2 Apr. thanksgiving as a symbol of their reconciliation with the parliament. 64 The Afflicted Christian Justified. In a Letter to Mr Thomas Hawes, An Honest and Godly Man (London, 1646), printed date 18 May, BL E337 (26). The pamphlet refers to events from 5 Apr.; Hawes’s offending words against the Trinity pre-dated the 17 Mar. meeting. Gangraena, i. 81, 112 for Farthing’s material; Lindley, Popular Politics, 289–90, 382 n. 65 Gangraena, ii. 9; Thomason’s copy of this pamphlet is in BL E328 (24), no publisher is given. Thomason’s date was 20 Mar. This pamphlet did indeed attack ‘compulsive ChurchGovernment’, and the Scots, and defended the English army against its critics. The radical bookseller William Larner was questioned about the tract after copies were seized at his shop on order of the Commons, but the author was apparently Richard Overton: see Lindley, Popular Politics, 382. A pamphlet response of late May denounced the sectaries as ‘but the Jesuites Apes’, a view that is briefly canvassed in Gangraena, and insisted that Presbyterian government was ‘most congruent to holy Scripture, most orderly and uniforme’: An Alarum to the last Warning Peece to London (London, 1646), BL E339 (6), Thomason date 30 May, 12, 18. 66 BL E328 (2, 20, 22), A Whisper in the Eare of Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1646), 13 Mar.; Cretensis, and A Word more to Thomas Edwards (London, 1646), both 19 Mar. 67 A Letter of the Ministers of the City of London. See Ch. 3, n. 87, above.

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the winter and spring the Divines continued to press for action against Paul Best. On church government, the Assembly cooperated closely with the London campaigns; the Assembly too petitioned against the lay commissioners, and received the same response as the city. On 20 March 1646, after a long debate, in which even the accommodating Marshall said there was much in the ordinance on church government ‘which did lie very heavy upon his conscience’, the Assembly decided on a petition, delivered on 23 March, which argued that commissioners were contrary to the form of government ‘which Christ hath appointed in his Church’. Parliament’s anger was by now predictable, although it took a day-long bitter debate before this petition in its turn was voted a breach of privilege, on 11 April, when as a sympathetic MP noted laconically, ‘The Saints went out, I remained’.68 The city’s climbdown or reconciliation with parliament in March 1646—cemented by a thanksgiving at which the distinctly unPresbyterian Hugh Peter and Joseph Caryl were the preachers—reveals the limits of city zeal over church government.69 Although the most engaged ministers and citizens could push the city into giving priority to the settlement of the church, when it came to the crunch the Common Council drew back from confrontation with the parliament, as it was to shun renewed bloodshed in August 1647. The hopes raised and then dashed by the city emphasize the urgency of Edwards’s insistence that the want of effective church government played into the hands of sectaries. The fear of betrayal that haunted his work, the danger of being ‘wounded in the house of our friends’, is all too comprehensible. The events of March therefore to some extent encourage scepticism over the influence of Gangraena. But from another perspective, shifts in the tactics and priorities of city Presbyterians following the March debacle suggest that Edwards’s work had a significant impact. On 14 April 1646, the Common Council resolved to continue its campaigns by way of a Remonstrance, entrusting its drafting to John Bellamy and John Jones amongst others.70 As finalized on 22 May and presented, in 68 Mitchell and Struthers (eds.), Minutes, 172–3, 208–11, 225, 252–3, 257, 448–55; Diary of John Harrington MP, 18; BL Add MS 31116, fo. 264v; Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 90–9, for general cooperation between City and Assembly. 69 Peter, Gods Doings and Mans Duty; Caryl, Englands Plus Ultra. Thomason’s copies are BL E330 (11–12). See Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 95–102, for discussion of how men like Baillie overestimated the influence and the unity of the city. 70 CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 176r; Bellamie, A Justification of the City Remonstrance and its Vindication. The subheading was An Answer to a Book, written by Mr J. P. Entituled the

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slightly different versions, to each House of Parliament on 26 May, the Remonstrance spent much more time attacking sectaries (defined, Edwardsstyle as non-Presbyterians) than on the precise shape of any Presbyterian government of the church. The Remonstrance’s stress on political themes was also shared with Edwards. The Remonstrance began with a by now familiar appeal to the Covenant, and praised parliament (using the words of its own Grand Remonstrance of November 1641) for the determination not ‘to lette loose the golden reynes of discipline and Government in the Church’, and its opposition to separation, Brownism, and Anabaptism. Yet, despite all parliament’s ordinances on the directory and church government, they found private and separate Congregacons daily erected in divers parts of the City and elsewhere . . . all maner of Herisies, Scismes, and Blasphemies, boldly vented and mainteyned by such as to the point of Church Government professe themselves Independent, wee cannot but bee astonished at the swarme of sectaries which discover themselves everywhere, who, if by their Endeavours they should gett unto places of profitt and Trust in Martiall and Civill affaires, may tend much to the disturbance of the publique peace both of the Church and Commonwealth.

The running together of heresy, schism, and blasphemy and the attempt to implicate Independents in all three; the ‘swarms’ of sectaries; and the insinuation that sectaries–Independents with craft, guile, and all too much success had sought to insinuate themselves into powerful military and civilian positions parallel the arguments of Gangraena.71 Edwards was not the only writer or preacher to touch on these themes in these months, but his works offered most clearly a programme for action, and extensive, frightening, city-based evidence that made it clear why action was so necessary. Like Edwards, the drafters of the Remonstrance praised ‘our Brethren of Scotland’, who had come to the aid of the English parliament in its darkest hour and were now scandalously traduced by the enemies of peace and settlement. The Remonstrance demonstrated also a coming together of city concerns with that of the emerging political ‘Presbyterian’ grouping in City Remonstrance Remonstrated, Thomason date 21 Aug.; Thomason also noted that J.P. was John Price of John Goodwin’s congregation: BL E350 (23), sig. A2r–v. 71 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 86–9, on the novelty of the Remonstrance; Gentles, ‘The Struggle for London’, 280, on the ominous absence of any praise for the army. See also Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 133–6; Lindley, Popular Politics, 367–70. The text of the Remonstrance is available in pamphlet form (BL E338 (7), E339 (1) ); in LJ, viii. 332–4; and in CCJ 40, fos. 178v–179r. Extensive extracts are in Keith Lindley (ed.), The English Civil War and Revolution: A Source Book (London: Routledge, 1998), 332–4.

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parliament, with its stress on the need for a speedy peace and a reduction in taxation. This close association is seen in Juxon’s belief that on 22 May Bellamy went to the House of Lords and consulted Essex over the timing of the Remonstrance’s presentation, ‘whoe ordered it to bee on Tuesday following’. We have no corroboration for this, although most modern scholars, as usual, believe Juxon, but it is in any case significant that someone writing close to the event believed it. Finally the Remonstrance emphasized the need to defend city privileges, including regaining control of their militia.72 It concluded with a set of requests covering all these matters; the first four focused on religious issues, mostly expressed in the negative terms also favoured by Edwards. The Remonstrance asked that some ‘speedy course’ be taken to suppress private and separate congregations; that ‘all Anabaptists, Brownists, hereticks, Schismaticks, Blasphemers, and all such sectaries as conforme not to the publick discipline established or to be established by Parliamt may be fully declared agst and some effectuall Cause setled for proceeding agst such persons’. All should be ‘equally required’ to obey church government as established by parliament, and ‘noe persons disaffected to the presbiteriall Governmt sett forth or to be sett forth by the parliament may be imployed in any place of publike trust’. Gangraena of course had done much to show why this last issue was urgent, denouncing Independents’ ‘seeking and getting into all sorts of offices and places they are any way capable of (being Sequestrators, Collectours, Receivers, Surveyers, Excisers, Customers, Secretaries, Clerks, etc. . . . not a man almost of late coming into any place or office but an Independent or Independentish’.73 The May Remonstrance focused on the enemies of Presbyterian reformation and uniformity, rather than arguing positively for particular forms of church government, and located city concerns clearly within the increasingly polarized politics of two or three kingdoms. These were Edwards’s perspectives also and his text surely had an impact on the shifts in city politics. The change of focus, however destructive of godly unity in the long run, was in the short and medium term a successful strategy. 72 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 79r; A few weeks earlier Juxon had presented the Remonstrance as a stratagem of the ‘Ld Essexs Ptie . . . to advance ymsels & Ruine ye Scollicters pty’: fo. 77v, (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 123, 122). The solicitor was Oliver St John. Lindley, Popular Politics, 368; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 139–42, for political Presbyterianism in 1646. Tensions between city and parliament were shown in the Remonstrance’s hostility to the activities of the Committee for Advance of Money, and to the immunity of MPs and their servants from prosecution for debt. 73 CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 179r–v; Gangraena, i. 62.

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Groups in the city and parliament could coalesce against the sectarian ‘threat’, when they could not so easily agree over forms of government. The Remonstrance was welcomed in the House of Lords, and although the Commons gave a more reluctant and equivocal answer, this was warmer than the response to the petitions. The John Glyn whose counsel of caution over the January 1646 petition had so annoyed city hardliners was by the summer of 1647 one of the eleven leading Presbyterian MPs whose impeachment was sought by the army. More generally, it is telling that the same House of Commons that rejected the impertinent petitions from city and Assembly over church government also spent many hours in these same weeks discussing the appropriate punishment for the ‘Socinian’ Paul Best, and measures against heresy in general.74 ‘Presbyterianism’ as a political movement in parliament and city could encompass many who had no particular commitment to Presbyterian church government, but feared the rise of schism and heresy. There are clear parallels with Edwards’s construction of a Presbyterian community in print, a community that comprehended men like the ‘Erastian’ Coleman or the sceptical Prynne, as we have seen in Chapter 4. Tolmie, as we have seen in Chapter 2, claimed Edwards ‘substituted for a dogmatic a social conservatism’, but the Presbyterian mobilization in London should not simply be labelled conservative.75 The city’s Remonstrance, like all three parts of Gangraena, exhibited alarm at the breakdown of religious, and by implication social, discipline, encapsulated in an abhorrence of mechanic preaching. The immediate problem with Independents and sectaries in this framework, however, was not their social obscurity, but their increasingly close links with the rich and powerful. In the opposition to parliament’s plans for church government from October 1645, or the electioneering for the Common Council in December, it was Presbyterians rather than Independents or sectaries who took the initiative, deploying all the techniques of early 1640s parliamentarianism—preaching, petitioning, pamphleteering, lobbying meetings, street-corner and vestry debate—to win supremacy within the parliamentarian cause. Furthermore, it is by no means clear that it was city ‘radicalism’ that had the most widespread, or the most socially diverse support. On the contrary, the campaign over the Remonstrance seems to have been the most popular (in numerical terms) of any in the London politics of the 1640s, even if we cannot verify John Bellamy’s 74 75

Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 86–7. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 133; cf. the reference to ‘lay conservatism’ on 136.

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very precise claim that 8,634 hands were put to a petition in support of the Remonstrance presented on 23 June (no signed copy survives). The Remonstrance did not counterpose the interests of humbler people to those of their governors or social superiors. The Common Council noted that ‘many grave Citizens of worth and quality’ attended the presentation, with many thousand others in support, ‘all Citizens of the best ranck and qualitie, freemen and Inhabitants’.76 While reflecting and reinforcing the social hierarchy of the city, the leaders of Presbyterian campaigning acknowledged that the issues should concern London householders, and even inhabitants in general. Presbyterianism in London was clearly popular in the common sense of the word—widely supported if not socially subversive. It was also radical in its methods and, it can be argued, in its aims. Although most recent scholarship insists that it was (future) Independents who were most prominent in forwarding the city’s parliamentarian war effort in the early 1640s, it is equally striking that several of the most active Presbyterian campaigners—Jones, Bellamy, and Brinley most obviously—were equally militant. These are not politically conservative figures in the overall spectrum of English politics in the 1640s, neither were they failed or renegade parliamentarians. Rather they were parliamentary activists who had fought the war for a reformed state church and city privileges, not for religious liberty and military domination.77 The Presbyterian vision involved radical moral and cultural change through the participatory parish-focused discipline of a restructured church; it is the post-Enlightenment association of radicalism with individual liberation that has obscured this point. It should not be assumed that the city’s Remonstrance was written on the basis of a blueprint found in Edwards’s Gangraena, Part One. The only individual singled out for punishment in the Remonstrance—the Southwark semi-separatist Roger Quartermayne, whose conduct of the office of City Provost Marshall had affronted the authorities—is not one of 76 Bellamie, Justification, 6; CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 184r. There are two versions in the Thomason collection: The true Copy of a Petition, delivered to the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commons of the City of London (London, 1646), BL 669, fo. 10 (58, 63). On the first, briefer version, Thomason has written, ‘Composed and finished June the 5th, I having a hand in it’. Thomason, of course, owned Gangraena and had at least scanned Part One. 77 Lindley, Popular Politics, 391; Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 303–20. Vernon, ‘The Quarrel of the Covenant: the London Presbyterians and the regicide’, in Jason Peacy (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Palsgrave, 2001), for eloquent arguments that in their protests against the regicide, city Presbyterians put forward their own version of parliamentarianism, not a royalist position. They rejected the Independents’ claims to be the guardians of the parliamentarian cause.

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Edwards’s targets.78 The sources do not exist to demonstrate direct influence in any conclusive way. Nonetheless it would be excessively scrupulous to deny Edwards some credit for the content and tactics of the city’s Remonstrance. Furthermore the subsequent controversy was entangled at many points with the debate on Gangraena, also dominated by Londoners and particularly fierce in May and June. Thomason noted the receipt of Thomas Webbe’s Mr Edwards Pen no Slander (an attack despite its ambiguous title) on 21 May; he obtained copies of further attacks on Gangraena by Saltmarsh and Walwyn in June. Defences of Edwards by Josiah Ricraft and John Vicars, Presbyterian petitioners and pamphleteers, appeared in the same months.79 Several attacks on the Remonstrance are strikingly similar to the responses of Goodwin,Walwyn, and others to Gangraena. It was denounced, as Edwards was, for ‘insinuating into the people that all manner of heresies, schismes, and blasphemies, are tolerated . . . swarmes of sectaries are encouraged’. When the king denounced Anabaptists he ‘did alwayes Intend the Parliaments’ friends, and besides these, whom you mean we cannot tell’. One man’s heresy was another’s truth: For Brownists and Anabaptists, they are a people that shame not to shew themselves, their profession and practice in Religion, being in their account an honour to them. For Hereticks, Schismaticks, Blasphemers, they are words at Liberty bestowed, and may be retorted: That which some judge Heresie and Schisme, others judge sound Doctrine and warrantable separation.

Such labelling might have fatal consequences,‘to the Prison, to the Pillory, to the Fagot, to the Fire with the Puritan, the Non-Conformist, the Roundhead, the Separatist, the Sectary, the Schismatick, the Heretick, the Independent, names at pleasure bestowed upon Godly men’.80 Lindley, Popular Politics, 368. Webbe, Mr Edwards Pen no Slander, BL E337 (4); Walwyn, An Antidote against Master Edwards his old and new Poyson (London, 1646), BL E1184 (4), 10 June; Saltmarsh, Reasons for Unitie, Peace and Love (London, 1646), BL E340 (30), 17 June; Ricraft, A Nosegay of Rank-smelling Flowers, Such as Grow in Mr John Goodwins Garden (London, 1646), BL E336 (5), 6 May; Vicars, The Schismatick Sifted, BL E341 (8), 22 June. Thomas Alle’s A breif Narration, on Edwards’s account of Burroughs and Greenhill also came out in late June (BL E341 (27) ). An Answer or Confutation of Divers Errors Broached and Maintayned by the Seven Churches of the Anabaptists (London, 1646), by the Presbyterian layman Thomas Bakewell, was also issued in May: BL E336 (10), Thomason date 7 May. For Bakewell’s commitment to combating error see Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 157, 264. 80 A Moderate Reply to the Citie Remonstrance (London, 1646), BL E340 (20), Thomason date 12 June, no pagination; The Interest of England Maintained . . . Certaine Observations upon a Dangerous Remonstrance lately presented (London, 1646), printed date 8 June, BL 340 78 79

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The debate over the Remonstrance was thus also a debate over the validity of Edwards’s enterprise. Defences of the Remonstrance covered themes very reminiscent of Gangraena, and usually made direct reference to Edwards. John Bellamy contrasted John Price’s raking-up of faults from his much earlier life, with Edwards’s scrupulous focus on recent outrageous errors, and demanded of Price, in words that might come from Gangraena, whether he really wanted blasphemers and heretics in places of public trust: ‘such as deny that there is a God . . . say God is the author of sin . . . such as hold that all Religions, Worships, Consciences, whether Paganish, Jewish, Antichristian etc should be tolerated’.81 In his defence of the Common Council’s right, as the city’s representative body, to petition or deliver remonstrances to parliament, John Jones also praised ‘Those truths published in the Books of Mr Thomas Edwards, Mr Bayly, and divers godly Divines, and other honest men, published on purpose (as I do this) to unmaske you, and to give a caveat to well-meaning people, who are apt to be cheated with your counterfeit coynes, and great pretence of holinesse, liberty and pure Ordinances, the old engines and artifice of Hereticks and Scismaticks’. He also defended Edwards against the criticisms of Burroughs.82 On the other hand, pamphlets in Edwards’s defence contained overt references to London Presbyterian campaigns such as John Vicars’ extravagant praise for Presbyterian Lord Mayor Thomas Adams’s fighting, ‘in the Cause of Truth and Righteousnesse, backt with the sacred Suffrages and faithfull Affections of very many thousands of most peaceable honest-hearted and God honouring Covenanters’. Josiah Ricraft’s Nosegay, a pamphlet attack on John Goodwin’s Cretensis, denounced the radical tracts ‘Martine Marpriest, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution . . . Londons Warning Peece, and the rest of the lying, railing, blaspheming rabble rout, who speake naturally M. John Goodwins language’.83 The people who argued over the Remonstrance were the same as those who debated Gangraena. Particularly prominent in the assault on the Remonstrance were members of John Goodwin’s congregation, led by John Price, as author, and Henry Overton as publisher of most of the extended arguments against it, as well as Goodwin’s and Webbe’s responses to Gangraena. Walwyn, the most inveterate pamphlet attacker of Edwards, (5), 6–7. Prier, A Cristall Looking-glass, attacks both Edwards and the Remonstrance, and seems to have been written some time before its publication: see 353. 81 Bellamy, A Justification of the City Remonstrance and its Vindication, sig. A3v, 11. 82 Jones, Plaine English, 6–10, 17. 83 Vicars, Schismatic Sifted, sig. A2v; Ricraft, A Nosegay of Rank-smelling Flowers, 4.

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was also active in the politicking around the Remonstrance. His A Word in Season, noted Thomason, was ‘Intended against ye Remonstrance now in hand’ in mid-May, while a second edition was ‘Given about Westminster Hall by Lilburne the day the cittie remonstrance was presented, which was 26 May’.84 Goodwin was, as we have seen, the single most important target of Gangraena, while Walwyn, treated more obliquely in Part One, gained as much fame by his responses to Edwards as he did from anything Edwards actually wrote about him. The relationship between Edwards’s work and city politics is, of course, circular. He presumably treated Goodwin and his church so extensively because of their perceived importance to both the spread of error and the city’s emerging radical politics; it is then predictable that Price and the others were to be found resisting the Remonstrance. On the other hand, the assault on Independent congregations and religious liberty, spearheaded by Edwards’s Gangraena, in itself spurred his victims into action. Like Lilburne’s long imprisonment in 1645–6, for which Prynne as much as anyone was blamed by radicals, Edwards’s Gangraena, turned into a political programme in the city’s Remonstrance, underlined the urgent need for a radical response. London campaigns over Presbyterian church government and the Remonstrance were increasingly bound up with tensions over the city’s close relationship with the Scots, and, following Charles’s surrender to the Scots in May 1646, with ‘Independent’ fears that a city–Scots–royalist axis would impose a shameful peace. By 1646, the polarization apprehended precociously by Edwards and Baillie from summer 1644 had become a commonplace of political life. In February the Scots commissioners brought a letter to the city from the parliament of Scotland, thanking Londoners for ‘expressions of love to them’; their ‘forwardnes in this Comon cause of religion’, and particularly for ‘their zeale & Indeavours towards the settlinge the Government of the church accordinge to ther Covenant’. The propriety of transacting business with another nation without consulting parliament caused much heart-searching, and subsequently great anger in the Common Council when the goldsmith Francis Allen, an Independent Alderman who was also an MP, reported on city debates to the House of Commons. The MPs took especial exception to the report that the city 84 Walwyn’s works were usually produced by the radical printers Thomas Paine, and William Larner, sometimes in conjunction with Giles Calvert for whom Saltmarsh’s books were printed. A Word in Season To all sorts of well-minded People in this Miserably Distracted and Distempered Nation (London, 1646), BL E337 (25), 18 May 1646. Thomason also noted it as ‘Written by Mr Sadler’, but most commentators attribute it to Walwyn: Lindley, Popular Politics, 383–4. BL E1184 (3), for the 2nd edn.—in 16mo format.

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accepted the Scots had been smeared by ‘incendiaries’. In the subsequent angry meetings, on Juxon’s testimony, ‘Nathaniel Fiennes tould them the Cittie was there wife & they could not but take it ill an other should come to draw away her affections from them. Twas replyed if the addresses to their wife had bin in seacret, then might be cause of Jealousies but to doe it openly & in their sight there was no danger’.85 The king’s secret flight from Oxford in late April 1646 spawned panic-stricken fears that he intended to come to an apparently sympathetic city, but his ultimate resort to the Scots was little better. The printing by David Buchanan of the Scots version of their fraught negotiations with the English parliament over peace propositions to be given to king caused bitter fury. Buchanan—Baillie’s ‘most sincere and zealous gentleman’—was voted an incendiary by the parliament and his work was burnt by the public hangman but not before it had sold three or four thousand copies—again according to Baillie.86 Edwards’s books reflected but also contributed to the construction of these alliances and polarities. There are fragmentary and intriguing hints that his writing was linked to the highest of politics. We have suggested he may have been close to Essex through his chaplain, while one of his minor victims, Robert Bacon, a preacher in Gloucester and Bristol, alleged Edwards attacked him as a way of attacking his patron the Independent Viscount Saye and Sele, ‘the most constant Patriot of his Countrey, and lover of good men’. He dared not denounce Saye directly, ‘others having sped so ill before him’—the marginal reference to ‘Mr Cr’, presumably an allusion to Cranford and the Savile affair. Nedham, at that time an associate of Saye, gave Edwards a prominent place in his attack on clerical intolerance, while the anonymous author of To the High Court of Parliament. A Dilemma from a Parallel compared Gangraena’s attitude to parliament to the king’s 1642 Declaration against the militia ordinance. Both Edwards and the king blamed parliament for allowing the spread of sectaries, and both were guilty of breach of parliamentary privilege in presuming to dictate to the Houses. These views were characteristic again of the Saye circle in 1646–7.87 85 DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 59r–v, 60v, 61r, 62r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 100–4); CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 170v–171r, 172r–v; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 473, 502; BL Add MS 31116 (Whitaker’s Journal), fos. 255r, 256r. 86 Letters of Baillie, ii. 364, 367, 369–70; DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 75v–76v, 79r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 119–20, 123); Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 85, 96–7. Buchanan was the main target of Saye’s Vindiciae Veritatis: Adamson,‘Vindiciae Veritatis’. 87 For Balsome see Ch. 3 n. 64, above; Bacon, The Spirit of Prelacy Yet Working, 31–2. This dealt mainly with conflicts in Gloucester in July 1644. It carried a fulsome imprimatur from John Bacheler, who described it as a ‘remarkable Relation, penned with a sweet spirit of

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One would hesitate to describe Edwards simply as a tool of Essex and the Presbyterians, but his much repeated descriptions of city, Assembly, and Scots, opposed by sectaries and an increasingly dangerous army, with a divided parliament in the middle, threatened to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.88 Edwards publicized the details of William Hawkins’s offending words against the Common Council in February, ‘that the King, the Scots, and the Common Councel, did drive on one designe’. He denounced ‘persons known to be most desperately opposite to the Presbyterians, to the Covenant, to our Brethren of Scotland, the Assembly, to the godly orthodox Ministers, the men in great request, walking boldly in Westminster Hall, at the House of Commons door daily; familiar with some Parliament men, preferd to places of trust and honour, having favour in things wherein other men can find none’.89 The last few pages of Gangraena, Part Two were taken up with an extended comparison between the sectaries and the Scots, to the benefit of course of the latter. Edwards rejoiced that God ‘in his wonderfull providence gave the King to them’, for the cause of peace, and on his very last page, in tiny type, he extracted with glee from the speeches of St John, ‘a prime able member of the House of Commons’, and ‘Master Burroughs a chief man among the Dissenting brethren’ in support of the Scots alliance. These speeches, originally delivered in the city in October 1643 when the alliance was first proposed, were published by John Bellamy, only days before Gangraena, Part Two came out, presumably to embarrass the now anti-Scottish St John and Burroughs. For his own part, Edwards concluded, ‘I had a great deal rather fal and perish with the Kingdom of Scotland and the Presbyt[erian] party in England, standing for the Covenant and the truth professed in all the Reformed Churches, then to grow and flourish for awhile with the Sectaries standing for a Toleration of all Sects and Opinions, yea then to be a King among them, as John of Leyden was at Munster’.90 meeknesse, one of the most Sovereigne remedies for all our divisions, in my judgement deserves to be Printed’. [Nedham], Independencie No Schisme and To the High Court of Parliament: A Dilemma from a Parallel (London, 1646). 88 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, ch. 4, stresses parliament’s resentment at Scottish pressure to agree with the Westminster Assembly on church government. On the other hand, Baillie was increasingly fearful that Independents in parliament such as Saye and Wharton would move the adjournment or effective dissolution of the Assembly: Letters of Baillie, ii. 344, Dec. 1645. 89 Gangraena, i. 183; ii. 155–7. 90 Ibid., ii. 211–12; Foure Speeches delivered the sixth of October 1643 (London 1646), BL E338 (1), Thomason date 23 May 1646, compared to 28 May for his Gangraena, Part Two. Edwards

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Juxon’s Journal similarly constructed a polarization around the Scots, although he assessed it very differently. The founding of the New Model had been a victory for the ‘Independent partie’, and a setback for the ‘Presbiterian and Lord Generalls & Scotts partie’, while in the struggle over church government the following autumn, parliament faced an insoluble dilemma, because ‘The Presbyterians are great & have the Scotts to them. And the Independents have done too good service to be soe ill rewarded as not to have there liberty’. In London, ‘The Ministrs doe very much presse the Common Counsel forwards & make them Active. Now the Scotts are cried up more then ever & the Covenant pressd. The godly partie in the howse represented as men of no Justice as men that would have no peace. No Government nor no kingly power & as men that would disunite the 2 kingdomes’. By this means ‘good and consciensous’ people ‘beinge over credulous’ as well as ‘bad & intressd men’ had come to doubt the commitment of the godly who were the great bulwark of the parliament.91 Much city pamphlet debate in the first half of 1646 covered the same themes. The epistle to the pamphlet in support of Thomas Hawes claimed his sufferings showed what dangers the godly faced if the ‘inhumane fury and rage of these Blew-conspiring party of presbyters be not timely crush’d and smothered before all its theatning formidable events be delivered out of its Northerne Wombe’. The author asked ‘whether a Blew Bonnet may not prove as dangerous a fashion as ever was the Episcopall Catter Cap’, and urged that the Assembly be adjourned until the king was delivered up by the Scots.92 John Vicars, on the other hand, in supporting Edwards, also supported his ‘loyall and loving Scottish Brethren’, the work of the Assembly, and the Covenant. The Scots reciprocated such support with a letter of praise for the Remonstrance and the city’s steadfastness ‘amidst the many mists of errour and herisie wch hath rise from the bottomlesse pitt’.93 Opponents of the Remonstrance presented it as an attack on the authority of parliament, promoted by royalists with the ultimate aim of may of course have seen it earlier. Edwards did not bother to quote from the more predictable and consistent praise for the Scots from Calamy and Obadiah Sedgewick. 91 DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 38r–v, 46r, 61r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 76, 86, 103). 92 The Afflicted Christian Justified, Epistle, 10, 18–19; the same language is used in The Interest of England Maintained, 19. Conscience Caution’d and so set at Libertie (London, 1646), BL E341 (7), Thomason date 20 June, is another attack on the Remonstrance denouncing the clergy and the Scots while promoting the sovereignty of the people. Catter or Cater meant mitred. 93 Vicars, Schismatic Sifted, sig. A2v, 3, 19, 26; CLRO, CCJ 40, fo. 188v (10 July).

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destroying parliament’s godly army. Gangraena, as we have seen, was attacked on similar grounds. The extended attack on the Scots largely written by the Independent peer Saye and Sele or his son Nathaniel in April–May 1646 (although not published until much later) warned the city ‘to have a more watchfull eye upon their Malignants, who drive on the Court designs . . . having cajoled and deceived the honest meaning men they are for Reformation of Religion, the Presbyterian Government, and against Sects, Schisms and Heresies, (whereof they have no more care, than of their old shoes’. Excluding non-Presbyterians from office would eliminate many peers, most of the House of Commons, and nearly all the army, ‘the most Victorious, Faithfull, Godly, just and vertuous Army that any age ever brought forth’. (John Bellamy indignantly referred to Essex, Waller, and the Scots as counter-evidence.)94 On Juxon’s account one of the most prominent critics of the Remonstrance, the Independent Stephen Estwicke, protested in Common Council, ‘My Lord this Courte deales unjustly with the parliamt, before he could goe on was interrupted’. As part of a wide-ranging declaration explaining their plans for government in state and church, the Commons had insisted on 17 April that they were committed to a Presbyterian church, but not to giving an ‘arbitrary and unlimited Power and Jurisdiction to near ten thousand Judicatories [parochial elderships]’. Nor, they continued,‘have we yet resolved how a due regard may be had, that tender Consciences which differ not in fundamentals of religion, may be so provided for, as may stand with the word of God and the peace of the kingdom’.95 Edwards’s palpable disappointment with parliament is thus reflected in the Remonstrance’s expressions of regret that ‘the said Sectaries doe encourage themselves, by their misconstruccon of that Expression in the late declaracon concerninge tender consciences to expect a tolleration (contrary to the Nationall Covenant, as we humbly conceive)’.96 Petitions and pamphlets against the Remonstrance indeed drew attention to the 17 April declaration and urged that parliament be left to manage the affairs of the kingdom in accordance with it. The declaration offered a gloss on the commitment in the Covenant to reformation according to the ‘word of God’; the oath itself had been intended as ‘a more plaine 94 [Saye], Vindiciae Veritatis, 26; The Interest of England Maintained, 7–9 (quotation is at 7); cf. A Moderate Reply passim and To the High Court of Parliament; John Bellamy, A Vindication of the Remonstrance and Petition (London, 1646), BL E343 (2), Thomason date 6 July, 26–7. 95 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 78r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 122–3); CJ iv. 512–13. 96 CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 178v–179r.

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discovery of the Parliaments enemies, and not for a snare to the Parliaments friends’.97 On 23 June 1646, the Common Council, as we have seen, accepted a wellsupported petition in support of the Remonstrance. That same afternoon a committee was established to answer it and to draw up a letter to the king, who had written to the city attempting to get their support for a peace settlement in late May. As with communication with the Scots, the idea that the city might negotiate independently with Charles caused profound disquiet in parliament and weeks of heart-searching within the Common Council.98 Some contemporary commentators did see in the city a yearning for the return of the king. The young royalist divine William Sancroft wrote to his father: ‘the late breaches with the synod, Scotts and Citty, have much disposed mens minds to looke back from whence they are departed’ so that ‘ever since the voting downe of the synods and citties petition, the Assembly-men have praid very zealously for his Majesty’. Sancroft claimed Calamy, preaching before parliament, had told them ‘they had brought us out of Babylon, and left us in Babel’.99 But the relationship between city Presbyterianism and royalism, and the more specific question of Edwards’s attitude to the king, are more contradictory and perplexing than a simple model of increasing rapprochement would suggest.100 Edwards and the supporters of the city Remonstrance were obliged by the demands of the polemical and political context to reject Independent allegations that they were covert royalists. Their protestations were not thereby insincere. Bellamy insisted that while the House of Commons was indeed the representative body of the kingdom it was but one of the three 97 The Humble Acknowledgement and Petition of Divers Inhabitants In, and About the Citie of London (London 1646), BL E339 (12), Thomason date 3 June (presented to the Commons, 2 June). On his copy Thomason noted ‘Nicolas Mano & Salloman Simple who amongst other, subscribed this Independant petition’. Lindley, Popular Politics, 385–6, thinks these may be Nicholas Tew and Solomon Smith; A Moderate Reply to the Citie Remonstrance, for the quotation; The Interest of England Maintained, 6; [Price], The City Remonstrance, 14, for other references to the Declaration. A petition delivered to the Common Council on 22 May, and aimed at forestalling the Remonstrance, praised the ‘constant courage and wisdome’ of Parliament: A Petition of Citizens of London Presented to the Common Councell (London 1646), BL 669, fo. 10 (57). 98 CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 184r–v, 186v. Lindley, Popular Politics, 369–70. In July the Commons forbade the city from sending any reply. Common Council proceedings over the answer to the king can be followed in Juxon’s Journal: DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 79r–v, 83r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 123–4, 128–9). 99 Bodleian Tanner MS 59 fos. 121, 161; H. F. Cary (ed.), Memorials of the Great Civil War in England, 2 vols. (London, 1842), i. 17–18, 29–32, May 1646. 100 See Gentles,‘The Struggle for London’, for a very balanced account.

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estates of King, Lords, and Commons, through whose coordination ‘the Prince’s Soveraignty, and the peoples free-dome and liberty are together preserved and maintained’. The King was obliged to obey laws passed by the Lords and Commons.101 When discussing sectarian attempts to sabotage Presbyterian petitioning in Part Three, Edwards insisted that the right to petition was ‘a great part of the liberty and priviledge of the subject’, and suggested that even many princes who had been ‘against al defensive Arms and other wayes of the peoples seeking their right, yet still granted them the liberty of petitioning’. If the sectaries ever came to power they would rule by force and make the people slaves. Edwards clearly endorsed here the mainstream parliamentarian support for armed defence against royal infringement of the people’s rights. On the other hand, the potential for Presbyterian–royalist cooperation is revealed in his recognition that ‘The King was a true Prophet in what he spoke in his Declarations concerning Anabaptists, Brownists and Sectaries’.102 In the end the Remonstrance could not be pressed on a reluctant parliament, and in the same weeks city ministers also decided to make the best of a bad job. On 19 June, following a ‘zealous and earnest seeking God’ in a special prayer meeting at Sion College, the London ministers decided, with qualifications, to act on the latest parliamentary orders to implement a Presbyterian system. It was ‘the present unspeakable miseries of the Church by wofull Divisions, Blasphemies, Heresies, abominable loosenesse, Libertinisme, and Atheisme, and the Spirtuall Ruine of many Congregations through false Teachers’ that largely motivated them, along with the clear impracticality of any further petitioning campaign. The ministers’‘Considerations and Cautions’ laid them open to the derision of some supporters of liberty of conscience who pointed out that any ‘heretic’ could conform as closely as the Presbyterians were prepared to. More importantly for the Presbyterians’ own priorities, this decision drew a line under the bruising debates on church government, and left the ministers free to focus on an Edwards-style agenda of action against ‘Blasphemies, heresies . . . Libertinisme’.103 101 Bellamy, A Justification of the City Remonstrance, 2–4, 36, 41. See also Bellamy, Vindication, 12–14. A Glasse for Weake ey’d Citizens or a Vindication of the Pious, Prudent and Peaceable Petition (London, 1646), printed date 19 June, BL E341 (5). 102 Gangraena, iii, sig. Ii1v, after 240, compared with 291. Cf. To the High Court of Parliament. 103 Certaine Considerations and Cautions Agreed Upon by the Ministers of London, Westminster (London, 1646), BL E341 (11), Thomason date 22 June 1646. This pamphlet (published for Ralph Smith) outlined the ministers’ continuing disquiet over the measures for

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The ambiguous compromises of June 1646 are evident in Gangraena, Part Three, received by Thomason on 28 December 1646.104 Edwards’s fears of betrayal haunted Part Three: ‘I could have had more friends among the Presbyterian party to have beene more moderate (as they call it) (for such a time have we fallen into of Lukewarmnesse, and favour of Sectaries, that the being earnest against them hath made some who goe for Presbyterians not to owne me as otherwise they would.’105 In Part Three Edwards was also conscious of how much things had changed for the worse in 1646. John Price’s books on the city’s Remonstrance could not have been written ‘in the yeare 1645, but in the yeare 1646, that they agree so with Lilburne, Overton etc’.106 It was all the more essential that lukewarm Presbyterians, especially in the city, roused themselves to fight for their cause in an increasingly polarized world. Gangraena, Part Three in its call to zealous action thus intensified the crisis it described. Part Three reinforced the model of politics already clearly stated in the earlier parts, a bitter polarization constructed around Edwards’s heroes— the Scots—and his villains—the New Model Army. The army and the civilian sectaries were threatening the stability of three kingdoms, in a variety of contradictory ways, as Edwards repeated different alarming rumours. Some said that when the Scots’ army left, the Presbyterians in the army would be packed off to Ireland. Others had overheard Independents asserting that it was better that Ireland be lost, ‘then England hazarded by sending away the Army’. The New Model’s hostility to the Scots featured largely in an extended diatribe on the ‘unsufferable Insolencies’ of the sectaries, with perhaps self-defeating claims that they had accused the Scots of being mercenary, ‘a false, dishonest, selfe-seeking People’, who ‘now demand more hundred thousand pounds then all Scotland is worth if it were to be sold’.107 Oppostion to the Scots was inextricably bound up for Edwards with sectarian hostility to the Assembly, to Presbyterian sympathizers in parliament, and especially to the city, conceived of as a Presbyterian stronghold. administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but also their decision to act hoping that the magistrates (parliament) would eventually be brought round to their views. Scottish Dove, 17–25 June, for the meeting (BL E341 (19) ). [Saye], Vindiciae Veritatis, 37, is a typical comment. 104 Thomason dated his copy 28 Dec. 1646: BL E368 (5). 105 106 107 Gangraena, iii, sig. [ ]r. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 47, 96, 193, 223–4.

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In the interval between the publication of Parts Two and Three of Gangraena, the sudden death in October of the Earl of Essex, ‘the head of our partie’, wrote Baillie, ‘hes wounded us exceedingly’.108 But there were also hopeful signs: a ‘heresy ordinance’, enthusiastically supported in Gangraena, began its long progress through the parliament, as we shall see, and Presbyterian campaigns emerged in several counties. In London Presbyterians continued to press the Common Council for action—against seditious books, and in support of ministers’ maintenance by tithes—but they overreached themselves in the autumn’s mayoral election. ‘We had laboured much, and were in full confidence’, reported Baillie, to have John Langham chosen but,‘by the winning of some, Gayre is the man, a greater malignant than sectarie’. Juxon thought the violent Presbyterians had alienated many by their bitter attacks on the Independent John Warner. Juxon thought Gayre, despite not being ‘over well affected to the parliament’, might do more to promote ‘love and amitie’ in city government than Langham, the intemperate English mastiff.109 In a famous passage in Part Three, Edwards summed up his fears about the impact of the radical programme: in the stead of the Fundamentall Government Lawes and Constitution of this Kingdome, to set up an Utopian Anarchie of the promiscuous multitude, and the lusts and uncertaine fancies of weake people for Lawes and Rules; and if these audacious men and their daring books shall escape without exemplary punishment; and instead thereof, be countenanced and set free, I do as a Minister pronounce the plague of God will fall upon the heads of those who are the cause of it.110

The great threats of ‘utopian anarchy’ came from city radicals and a politicized army. It was in Part Three that Edwards offered his fullest account of lay preaching and wild religious speculation within the army, along with the plethora of stories of military harassment and abuse of godly ministers especially in the Midlands and the West Country. For Edwards the armies were the ‘Nurseries of all errours and all our evills’; all the most dangerous sectaries ‘smell of the Army’. Decent Presbyterians among the soldiers were being removed.111 The prominence of the mystical army preacher William Dell in Part Three, with evidence of his preaching in Oxford perhaps solicited by Edwards from Nicholas Widmerpole and other Christ For provincial activities and the heresy ordinance see below; Letters of Baillie, ii. 401, to William Spang, 2 Oct. 1646. 109 CCJ 40, fos. 187–8, 190v, 193r; Letters of Baillie, ii. 400, to William Spang, 2 Oct.; DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 91r–v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 137). 110 111 Gangraena, iii. 217–18. Ibid., 266, 273. 108

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Church activists, was a sign of increasing alarm at radical influences in the army. Dell was a target for Prynne also, and for Christopher Love, the younger Presbyterian minister who became a royalist-Presbyterian martyr in 1651. Both Dell and Love preached before parliament on 25 November 1646; when Dell printed his sermon a couple of weeks later he added to his own text some comments on the ‘chief Contradictions’ in Love’s preaching. In mid-December, Love returned the compliment by publishing ‘Animadversions’ on Dell’s sermon and a reply to Dell’s criticism of his own performance. Love’s work, licensed by Cranford and sold by Bellamy, had a dedication to Fairfax urging Dell’s unsuitability as an army chaplain. It contested Dell’s views that only ‘heart reformation’ mattered and that it was wrong for magistrates to punish error and heresy. Gangraena, Part Three, published at the end of December, cited Dell’s sermon, but Love’s response came too late.112 Throughout Part Three Edwards emphasized the close relationships between city radicals and army sectaries, and their mutual hostility to city Presbyterianism, interweaving stories of London figures such as Attaway and Randall with the misdeeds of army preachers, then declaring: ‘Some who come from the Army tell me, that the Sectaries in the Army do exceedingly raile against the City and Citizens, and call them the Sect of the Adamites’, not because they adopted an Edenic nakedness as heresiology had it, but they because they followed the Presbyterian Mayor, Thomas Adams.113 Innumerable asides and conversations as well as extended treatment of central figures like Hugh Peter, with connections to both army and city, all reinforced a sense of the alliance between soldiers, sectaries, and proto-Levellers—an alliance which has appeared to historians to be more precarious than it usually appeared in Gangraena, Part Three (with some important exceptions as we shall see). Edwards referred to Overton’s and Lilburne’s ‘great Patrons, whether in the Army or out of the Army’, and accused Jeremiah Burroughs of preaching for the army and against the city. The sectaries were frequently guilty of ‘scoffing and scorning at fasting and holy exercises, speaking by way of reproach of the morning exercise’, 112 Prynne, Sword of Christian Magistracy, sig. A4r, 92; Diary of John Harrington MP, 46, 25 Nov. has,‘Mr Del preach against Civil Magistrat. Mr Love oppose him’. Love, Short and plaine Animadversions On some passages in Mr Dels Sermon . . . also . . . A Reply to Master Love’s Contradictions (London 1646); Thomason, BL E366 (7) printed date 17 Dec. 1646, no Thomason date. Love’s answer to A Reply has continuous pagination with the critique of the sermon, but is labelled BL E366 (8). For Dell in Gangraena, iii. 9, 454, 64, 242, 266; his sermon Right Reformation and his reply to Love are mentioned on 262. 113 Gangraena, iii. 17–25, at 24.

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conducted by the leading London Presbyterians. He reported that on 25 November when Master Case and Master Seaman had prayed on the public fast day, sectaries sent into them notes or ‘bills’ for prayers: ‘You are desired to pray for the suppression of those Preistriden slaves who go about to get hands for disbanding of Sir Thomas Fairfax Army who under God have wrought the peace of the Kingdome’.114 In these polarities, Edwards himself often took centre-stage: The City remonstrance, and my books, are exceedingly hatefull to the Sectaries in the Army; they speake desperately against the City, and the City Remonstrance . . . I have been told also from good hands, that my books are so hated among the Sectaries in the Army, that no Commanders nor Officers dare be knowne to have them, or to read them . . . some Presbyterians . . . have been forced to read them by stealth in the night in their beds, when they have been sure none should carry tales of them.

Presbyterians were in the same situation as Protestants oppressed by the Spanish Inquisition who had to read the Bible or the works of William Perkins in dangerous secrecy.115 Edwards insisted in Part Three that one of the most distinctive developments of 1646 was the increasingly politicized approach of the sectaries. In his Preface, Edwards warned ‘The Reader shall find in this Booke the Sectaries designe and Practise, not to be only corrupting Religion . . . they have in Terminis in divers Pamphlets and some sermons declared against Monarchie and Aristocracie’. He had ‘in this Third Part . . . discovered much more of their Anarchicall and Antimagistraticall spirit, many of these last Errors plainly showing they are enemies to all Government, Order, and Distinction, and would bring all into a popular confusion’. Not ‘only one Book but many, not only one page but divers pages prove these

114 John Morrill, ‘The Army Revolt’, in Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution; Mark Kishlansky, ‘The Army and the Levellers: The Roads to Putney’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979). Both stress the distinctions between army and civilian radicals. Cf. now John Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘The case of the armie truly restated’, in Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates. Mahoney,‘Presbyterian Party’, 323–7, stresses the role of Gangraena, Part Three, in encouraging city hostility to the army.As Gentles suggests the earlier parts also had a role:‘The first two volumes of Gangraena both articulated and accelerated the deepening distrust between the army and political and religious conservatives’: Gentles, New Model Army, 140–1. Gangraena, iii. 151, 182, sig. Ii4v (unpaginated section between pp. 240 and 241). John Price, The Pulpit Incendiary (London, 1648), in the spring of 1648 denounced the anti-army preaching at the morning exercise. 115 Gangraena, iii. 106. Compare iii, Preface, sig. *2v, where sectarian abuse of the Scots, the city, the Assembly, and the parliament is connected to attacks on Edwards himself by Burton, Burroughs, and Goodwin.

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Errors’, so Edwards did not promise detailed citations. Amongst his ‘political errors’ was the opinion, cited from the Baptist Thomas Collier, that the Saints should have an external kingdom as well as a spiritual one, but the bulk of Edwards’s political discussions were based on the works of Lilburne and Overton who were to become identified as the leaders of a ‘Leveller’ movement. The general ‘political’ passages presumably expanded as Edwards wrote for they continue, as already explained, into unpaginated sections.116 I have already suggested that the prominence of Richard Overton in Part Three, in contrast to his earlier obscurity, represents a genuine raising of his profile in the city. Five pages of stories began with ‘There is one Richard Overton a desperate Sectary, one of Lilburnes Breed and followers, who hath printed many scandalous things against the House of Peers’, and there were many other long sections based on his recent pamphlets. Overton and Lilburne are always coupled together by Edwards and the most focused treatment of Lilburne, ‘an Arch-sectary, the great darling of the Sectaries, highly extolled and magnified by them in many Pamphlets’, follows immediately on the discussion of Overton.117 Walwyn is not particularly associated with them by Edwards although the radical printer William Larner is, and it was to be a further year before the term Leveller was to be applied to this grouping of city radicals. Edwards was clearly alarmed by pamphlets arguing that the civil power had no jurisdiction at all over the conscience and that all legitimate power was derived from the choice of the people, and there is no reason to doubt that such ideas were circulating in the city in a manner hitherto unknown. It is nonetheless likely that Edwards’s account of late 1646 presented a level of radical unity and organization that did not quite or yet exist; it was in the following year that anti-Presbyterian petitioning campaigns offered evidence of more effective radical coalescence.118 One of Edwards’s rarer qualifications or distinctions was most prescient, as he pointed to a large contradiction between Overton’s and Lilburne’s 1646 pamphlets on popular sovereignty and the supremacy of 116 Gangraena, sig. *4v–)(1r; sig. c, d, following p. 16 (sixteen unnumbered pages); and sig. Ii following p. 240 (eight pages). The quotation is from sig. c1v, following p. 16. 117 Ibid., 148. Page after page was quoted verbatim from The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens in particular: see the long repetitive section on the ‘unsufferable insolencies’ of the sectaries, 193–233, 153. 118 Morrill and Baker, ‘Case of the armie’, date the label Leveller to the aftermath of the Putney debates in Nov. 1647. Walwyn and Lilburne are seen as allies in Gangraena, ii. 29–30. Lilburne (again from June 1646), Larner (from Mar. 1646), and Overton (from Aug.) were all in prison.

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the Commons, and John Goodwin’s arguments in Theomachia, that the House of Commons should have no power over religion ‘because they are chosen by the riffe raffe of the Land, all sorts of men, worldly men, drunkards etc. having a right of nominating persons to a Parliamentary trust and power’. On this argument the Lords, ‘of Noble Parentage and well bred’, would have a better claim to power.119 Edwards also highlighted a rare disagreement between Goodwin and his usually loyal associate, John Price, ‘Cretensis beloved Disciple’, whose pamphlets against the city’s Remonstrance had credited the House of Commons with supreme power, and supported the authority of the common people rather than the Saints. Edwards here was offering a clever and opportunistic attack on radical inconsistencies, but it was over just this choice—simply between the rule of the Saints and the appeal to popular sovereignty—that Goodwin (and Price) broke decisively with Levellers such as Walwyn, Lilburne, and Overton early in 1649.120 This is an example of another characteristic specific to Part Three, which included extended responses by Edwards to radical errors. Edwards defended the House of Peers against the attacks of Lilburne and ‘all the Sectaries wicked Libells, shewing the weaknesse of those Principles, That all power in Government is founded upon the immediate free election of all those that are to be Governed, and of a necessity that all who are to be subject and obey must be represented’. Such principles would unravel all order, discipline, and property rights: ‘all the Acts, Lawes, Proceedings, Processes of former Parliaments, and of this present Parliamnent . . . are void and Null . . . all who possess any thing as Lands, Houses, debts, by judgements of Courts, have no Title to them; all men who exercise any power of Rule and Government over others are usurpers, intruders’.121 Edwards argued with great conviction against the appeal to abstract, natural law, making a repetitive but effective case for specific, positive law and historic customs. The sectaries denounced the laws and customs of this nation, and instead ‘plead for naturall Rights and Liberties, such as men have from Adam by birth’. They ‘speak of being governed by Right reason’, Edwards mocked: ‘Is it not rationally to be supposed that those Ancestors 119 Gangraena, iii. 159; Goodwin was quoted from Prynne’s Truth Triumphing. Edwards also contrasted Lilburne’s 1646 position with his earlier acquiescence in his trial before the Lords. 120 Gangraena, iii. 161; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 181–91, offers the most convenient discussion; this is the context for the bitter pamphlet attacks on Walwyn by Price. 121 Gangraena, iii. 153, sig. c2r. Edwards’s extended arguments are found in the unpaginated section after 16, and (repetitiously) 154–9.

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who founded a Government for such a Nation, and those who have followed in a Succession having yeelded to and settled such Lawes, could better judge of right reason . . . [than] every mean man who knows no reason of Lawes and States, nor is capable of Government’. Edwards argued (mischievously citing Hugh Peter on the great contrast between England and Scotland) that nations had different climates, dispositions, and constitutions, while within every nation there were different privileges and freedoms, such as the complex tapestry of rights to vote in England. Thus Edwards presented the moderate parliamentarian case for liberties rather than liberty, traditional rights not natural rights, adhering to the ‘fundamentall constitutions of Government made many hundred yeers before, and ancient bounds set by Lawes, with birth-right inheritance’, and denounced Overton and Lilburne, for attacking English laws ‘as I beleeve neither Papists, nor any English men ever did before them’.122 Edwards was as contemptuous of Lilburne’s and Overton’s concept of the people: did it comprise ‘all the men, women, and children born in England, men-servants, maid-servants, poore people and beggars’? If so, where would they meet, how would disagreements be settled, what would become of the constitution of King, Lords, and Commons? Edwards’s own answers were clear: Does not a constitution of a Government for such a people and Nation, made by the wisdome of Ancestors some hundred years before, though not by election of the peopl [sic] once in every year, or seven, or more, but founded upon such and such good Lawes, and in succession of persons by birth and inheritance, bind a people to obey and subject, as well as if chosen by them?123

The prescient but mischievous analysis of potential conflicts between Goodwin, the anti-hero of Gangraena, Part Two, and Lilburne and Overton, the villains of Part Three, should not overshadow the overwhelming thrust of Edwards’s polemic in December 1646 which was to deepen a broader cleavage within parliamentarianism. Part Three revealed sectarian and military hostility to Presbyterianism in general and most particularly to its vanguard in the city of London. For Independents or more radical figures amongst the soldiers the situation was reversed: Edwards’s Gangraena was the most prominent element in a campaign of vilification of non-Presbyterians in general and the army in particular, a campaign that in the heresy ordinance, the summonses to parliamentary committees (especially the Committee of Examinations chaired by the Presbyterian 122

Gangraena, sig. c2v–C4r, 194.

123

Ibid., sig. d1r, 160.

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Colonel Edward Leigh) and the grim sermons of February–March 1647, had all too real successes. Furthermore in Part Three, Edwards did not confine himself to a call for religious repression. In his challenge to the dangerously democratic opinions of Lilburne and Overton, he aligned himself very clearly with the populist Presbyterian political programme emerging under the leadership of Denzil Holles in parliament. Central to this was the dismantling of wartime administration with oppressive committees, heavy taxation, and a bloated army. If Overton and Lilburne wanted to argue that ‘power in Government be founded on immediate election of the people’, Edwards insisted they should go back and ask the people if they were happy with everything the Long Parliament had done: whether they were willing such things should be, viz. Anabaptists, Brownists, and all kind of Sectaries to enjoy such freedom of meetings, all sorts of ignorant Mechanicks to be suffered to turn preachers, and to go up and down seducing people, whether so great an Army to be still continued in this Kingdom, and they assessed to pay such Taxes for their maintenance, and whether Committees shall be still continued in this Kingdom; whether great sums . . . shall be given away on men who little need it . . . and if things appear to be against the mind of the generalitie of the people, whether are the people bound to obey their Orders and Ordinances in such cases?124

This amounted in effect to a call to rebel against parliament itself, a step that led the most zealous city Presbyterians to ruin in July–August 1647. ‘we may bethink ourselves what’s to be d one’: gangr aena, provincial mobilization, and parliamentary initiatives Gangraena’s message was not intended for Londoners only, but directed to all in authority. The twelfth corollary in Part One offered a particularly comprehensive programme for action, calibrated for different groups: Hence then from the consideration of all the errours, heresies, blasphemies, and practises of the sectaries in England; we may bethink our selves what’s to be done, if we would have the Kingdom saved . . . to turn away the wrath of God from this 124 Ibid., sig. d2r (unpaginated section between 16 and 17). Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 142–60, for the Presbyterian programme under Holles. Kishlansky argues that Holles did not intend to ruin the New Model Army, but army perceptions, sharpened by Gangraena, and other assaults, were rather different. I am indebted to Phil Baker who is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on the origins of the Levellers for discussion of Edwards’s impact on the army.

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Kingdom; which for the heresies, blasphemies, disorders, and confusions of these four last yeers, is ready to come forth upon us like fire, and burn that none can quench it: Now the remedies and directions that I shall give . . . are both to Ministers, Magistrates and people, which shallbe such rules as more properly and peculiarly concern each of them in their several places.125

Private Christians were ‘First, [to] mourn and sigh in secret, be as the Doves of the vallies, mourning for the dishonour of God and his Name . . . Secondly, they should take heed . . . and beware least they be led away . . . beware of the sheeps clothing, of Satan transformed into an Angel of light’, shunning the company of the seductive sectaries and their conventicles described in Gangraena. More publicly they should in all humble manner petition the Magistrates, againe and againe, that some course be taken against the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies of these times, representing the sad condition of their countreys, parishes, families, and laying open how their Wives and Children are stollen from them, and taken away against their wills; how they have no command of their servants, no quiet in their families.126

Lay men in London, as we have seen, lived up to Edwards’s expectations in the petitioning campaigns of 1646. Edwards’s exhortations were directed more particularly, however, to ministers, as individuals and collectively. Edwards’s programme of action in Part One began with many pages urging ministers to preach against error and to denounce toleration at every opportunity: ‘Lets therefore fill all Presses, cause all Pulpits to ring, and so possesse Parliament, City and whole Kingdom against the sects, and of the evil of schism, and a Toleration, that we may no more hear of a Toleration nor of separated Churches.’ They should also pray ‘night and day’against ‘all the errours, heresies, roots of bitternesse, poysonous principles got in among us, and to give a miscarrying womb to the sectaries, that they may never bring forth that misshaped Bastard-monster of a Toleration (which is part fish, part flesh, and part neither of both’. He also recommended collective action by the clergy, for ‘as many eyes see more then one, and many hands build up more: So acts and wayes propounded by a Community, many Ministers carry more waight and authority, then done by one single Minister’.127 We have seen at length how London ministers amply illustrated, and were perhaps inspired by, Edwards’s descriptions of Presbyterian zeal. Gangraena can also be connected to provincial Presbyterian campaigns. Gangraena presented in print and helped to construct in practice a union 125

Gangraena, i. 153.

126

Ibid., 173–4.

127

Ibid., 164–6.

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of city and provincial ministers against error. It both publicized and facilitated intimate connections between Presbyterianism in London and in provincial England. Edwards’s letters and stories revealed that the conflicts and alliances of the city were being recreated in many parts of England. One letter in Part One,‘lately written’ (in January 1646 and probably from Harmar in Colchester) claimed,‘I am much comforted, and so are all with us, that pray for the peace of Jerusalem, that the City both Ministers and people, are for the greater part so united in their desire of government, and for the suppression of Schisme, that gangrens our Church and State’. On the other hand a neighbour, ‘One of our gravest Lecturers, (I wish I could say discreetest) hath ever since our meeting about Classical Assemblies, opened himself with much bitternesse against the Parliament; Assembly and Scottish Government, calling the Parliament stout-hearted, the Assembly a rotten company, the government Ecclesiasticall in Scotland a filthy stinking government . . . Oh what promises have we had of Uniformitie in Religion, both in Doctrine and Discipline! but the sons of Zerviah are too strong for us’. This minister associated himself with Edwards’s criticism of Jeremiah Burroughs, and was comforted by ‘the unity of the City [which] raises up my hopes that God will confound all Machivelian policies’. Another Essex minister writing to a London minister on 19 February 1646 praised, as we have seen, ‘the courage and constancy of the Ministers and Citizens of London’.128 John Bellamy denied John Price’s accusation that the city’s Remonstrance had fomented differences in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, but throughout 1646–7, there is evidence of campaigning on religious issues in several counties, often self-consciously linked to initiatives in London and support for the Scots. ‘Divers Ministers about Colchester in the County of Essex’ wrote to the Assembly of Divines in February 1646, as their brethren of London had done, in the hope that ‘a blessed Reformation may be endeavoured against an intolerable Toleration’. On 29 May 1646 a petition from some three hundred ministers in Essex and Suffolk called for the establishment of church government, and action against separatism. The ministers described how ‘Schisme, Heresie, Ignorance, Prophaneness and Atheisme, flow in upon us, Seducers Multiply, grow daring and insolent, pernicious Books poyson many souls’. They demanded action against ‘seducing teachers, and soul-subverting Books’, and associated the orthodox of those counties with the expectations of the 128 Ibid., 101–2,Appendix, 120 [recte 220]. The sons of Zeruiah (2 Samuel 3: 39) killed Abner against the wishes of King David.

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foreign reformed churches, the ‘longing desires’ of the brethren of Scotland, and the petitions of the Assembly and the ‘great City’ of the kingdom. Harmar, of course, was amongst the signatories. In February 1647 a Suffolk petition to the Lords supported the London petition of December 1646, urging, again, the establishing of Presbyterian church government, measures against sects and heresies, and a political purge of those who had not taken the Covenant.129 Lancashire was predictably zealous. A petition supporting many demands of the city’s Remonstrance and claiming more than twelve thousand signatures—of an ‘active cruell and Anti-parliamentary spirit’ according to a hostile account—was presented to the Lords in August 1646. Edwards’s informants Hollingworth and Smith were prominent in its organization. It called for church government to be established in accordance with the Covenant, and described how ‘schism, error, heresy, prophaneness and blasphemy wofully spread, separate congregations are erected and multiplied, sectaries grow insolent, confidently expecting a toleration through the misconstruction of the late declaration’. It is unlikely that the independent Samuel Eaton and a few companions had caused such alarm in the county, more likely that news from London spread by Edwards and others had intensified the fears of Lancashire Presbyterians. The petition overtly associated the county with the general Presbyterian programme calling for a ‘safe and well-grounded peace’, support for the ‘renowned city of London’ that had made so many sacrifices for the parliament’s cause, and for ‘our dear brethren of Scotland’ who had come to England’s assistance ‘in depth of winter when our enemies were most proud and potent’. Like the London Remonstrance the Lancashire petition called for action against heretics, schismatics, and blasphemers and for the removal of members of separate congregations from ‘all places of public trust’. It was not presented to the Commons until 15 September, the day an ordinance for establishing Presbyterianism in the county was introduced.130 129 Bellamie, A Justification, 6; A true copy of a Letter from Divers Ministers about Colchester in the County of Essex, to the Assembly of Divines Against a Toleration (London, 1646), BL 669, fo. 10 (42, 44), written on 11 Feb. and published on 7 Mar. The Humble Petition of the Ministers of the Counties of Suffolke and Essex, Concerning Church-Government (London, 1646), presented to the Lords, 29 May 1646, printed 1 June: BL E339 (11); The Humble Petition of the Inhabitants of the County of Suffolk . . . to the House of Peers (London, 1647), BL E377 (4), Thomason date 17 Feb. 130 A New Birth of the City-remonstrance or A Lanchashire Petition (London, 1646), BL E350 (12), 18 Aug. Thomason noted ‘this is a false Copie’, and the true copy was not yet delivered to the House or published. The New Birth quoted Hollingworth as preaching that ‘none refused

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In Norwich, a city whose ministers had sent reports to Edwards, an attempt by the Presbyterian clergy, with Thornbecke and Carter prominent among them, to present a Remonstrance parallel to London’s was prevented by fierce opposition from local Independents and the caution of the city’s MP Thomas Atkins. The opponents of the Norwich Remonstrance alleged Carter and others were the puppets of the London Presbyterian clergy, gathering at ‘Sion College’, and that their attacks on supposed ‘sects, Sectaries, Heritiques, Schismatiques’ presaged a ‘Bellum Prebyteriale’ to succeed the bishops’ wars. Its supporters defended their London model and the necessity of preventing the further spread of religious error, which in Norwich led to ‘the daily infection of divers, who though they be of the inferior sort of women etc, yet have equally immortall soules’. In general the Presbyterians attacked Norwich Independents as ‘thirty men and fourscore women, and the best of them scarce a Common-councell man; with the rabble of poore mechanicks & silly women entrap’d in your snare’; their counter-petition was ‘filled with maids and girles hands’. Like their rivals, the Norwich Presbyterians put the local struggle in a metropolitan context, associating the Norwich Independents with ‘your saucy brother-Mar-priest and Lilbourn’.131 In Lincolnshire the Presbyterian Edward King, a friend of Prynne and long an enemy of religious radicals in general and Lilburne in particular, used similar language in October when to subscribe but Malignants or Covenant breakers’. A True Copie of the Petition of Twelve Thousand five hundred and upwards of the Well-affected Gentlemen, Ministers, Free-holders and others of the County Palatine of Lancaster (London, 1646), BL E352 (3), 31 Aug. This included a commentary by another minister, John Tilsley, who attributed the attacks on the petition to ‘insolent John Lilburne’ (10), and prayed that not ‘one fret of this Gangrene’ might affect Lancashire (20). The demands are 3–5. Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis (Chetham Society, ns 20, 1890), 1–2, for its presentation and the establishment of the classical organization under an ordinance finally passed on 2 Oct. 1646. 131 Vox Populi, or the People’s Cry Against the Clergy. The Rise, Progresse, Ruine of the Norwich Remonstrance Framed and Fomented by the Ministers of that City (London,1646), BL E351 (7), Thomason date 25 Aug., is a hostile, Independent account. On 2 Sept. it was condemned by the city governors who also felt it necessary to deny they had any hand in compiling it. (Quotes are from 4, 6, 9.) An Hue-and-Cry after Vox Populi or An Answer to Vox Diaboli (Norwich, 1646), BL E355 (13), Thomason date 25 Sept. 1646, with an imprimatur from Cranford, 2 Sept., was the main Presbyterian response to Vox Populi; quotations are from 11–12, 24–5. Other responses were Truth Vindicated from the Unjust Accusations of the Independent Society in the City of Norwich (London, 1646), BL E351 (4), Thomason date 22 Aug., imprimatur from Cranford, 10 Aug., a general argument against separation; and Vox Norwici or the City of Norwich Vindicating their Ministers (London, 1646), E358 (4), 19 Oct., signed by fifteen laymen who wrote in defence of their ministers. The account of the membership of the Norwich Independent church was remarkably accurate: see Ch. 3, above. The abortive Norwich Remonstrance is not discussed by Edwards. For a full account see Evans, Seventeenth Century Norwich.

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he called on the Grand Jurors to present ‘all Papists, Anabaptists, Brownists, Separatists, Antinomians and Hereticks, who take upon them to creep into houses and lead captive silly women laden with sinnes’.132 In other counties, more radical opinion mobilized against the city Presbyterians. Captain John Jones, in the language of Gangraena, denounced the ‘active Emissaries of the Sectaries’ who had stirred up trouble over tithes in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. A petition to the Commons against tithes from Hertfordshire was ‘much disliked’ by mainstream MPs.133 In Kent too, radical groups were better organized and there was certainly no enthusiasm for setting up Presbyterian church government in the county. In letters written to his friend Samuel Hartlib, shortly after he had read Gangraena, Cheney Culpeper described his efforts to get a petition from Kent that would attack any power not based on popular consent as embodied in the House of Commons, and oppose any compulsive Presbyterian church government. The attempts of the Scots and the city to put pressure on the parliament were explicitly condemned, and Culpeper hoped that Hartlib’s contacts could mobilize the help of men like Hugh Peter in this design.134 Gangraena contained stories from all these counties, and the very act of contributing evidence to Edwards was one means by which provincial ministers and laymen could become included in Presbyterian networks. Thereafter ministers read about the alarming and geographically wideranging activities of sectaries in Gangraena; they were then on the lookout for the men made notorious within its pages, and deployed Edwards’s evidence in their own sermons and tracts. Gangraena showed why action was necessary and in itself contributed to ministerial organization. Several local petitions and remonstrances echo the concerns and the language of 132 King quoted in Ashton, Counter Revolution, 244. For Lilburne’s accusations that King conspired with Prynne to ruin him see e.g. The Resolved mans Resolution, to maintain with the last drop of his heart blood, his civil Liberties and freedomes (London, 1647), Thomason date 14 May 1647, 39: ‘I am confidently perswaded Pryn was the maine instrument to provoke his treacherous Tyburne deserving comrade, and extraordinary great associate, Colonel Edward King, to arrest me upon the 14 of April 1646’. Prynne, according to Lilburne, also used his membership of the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Whole Kingdom to harrass his enemies in general and Lilburne in particular. 133 Jones, Plain English, 6. Diary of Harrington, 25; BL Add MS 31116, Whitaker’s Journal, fo. 267v. There is a copy of this petition in Bodl., Tanner MS 59, fo. 127. 134 ‘Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper’, Letters 104–5, 267–70 (26 Feb. 1645/6; 4 Mar. 1645/6). On 21 Apr. 1646, the Kent Committee reported to Speaker William Lenthall that at a meeting of twenty gentlemen and twenty ministers to discuss setting up a classical presbytery, we ‘doe finde the ministers in generall and the major part of the gentry to be desirous yet a while to wayte the further directions of the Parliament’: Bodl., Tanner MS 59 fo. 77.

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Edwards’s Gangraena, and presumably owe something to this most publicized work of Presbyterian polemic as well as to London models. And, of course, Edwards’ s collaborators were also active in general Presbyterian initiatives. The most elaborate example of cooperation between London ministers and groups of provincial Presbyterian clergy came in the ‘Testimonies’ against error signed and published in 1647–8. In his call to action in Part One Edwards specifically proposed that ministers should work to draw up remonstrances against error as county petitions against the bishops’ errors in ‘doctrine, worship and government’ had been gathered together into a general remonstrance in 1640. Now there was ‘a more fruitful field to walk in, more matter, stranger Doctrines, greater Blasphemies’, and ministers should aim to do better than the eight hundred ministers’ signatures collected in 1640: it were good to set forth some Books against the errours of our times, with joynt consent in the name of all the Ministers, to send out some grave Admonition to the people, in the name of the City-Ministers subscribed by all, to warn the people, in the name of God to beware of the errours of these times, and to withdraw from sectaries, and to return again into the bosome of the Church; and lastly, for the Ministers to make a Remonstrance of all the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies, Schisms, Insolencies, Tumults, that have been in England these last five yeers, out of all the Printed Books, publike Sermons, preachings in private Houses, discourses of the sectaries; and with a Petition humbly to present it to both Houses, with hands subscribed of all the Orthodox godly Ministers in this Kingdom.135

This tactic came to fruition in 1647–8, starting predictably with A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, And to Our Solemn League and Covenant, As Also Against the Errours, Heresies and Blasphemies of these times and the Toleration of them, signed by fifty-two London ministers in 14 December 1647. Edwards had by then fled to Amsterdam but many familiar friends put their names to the London ‘Testimony’: Calamy, Ashe, Cranford, Jenkyn, George Walker, Roborough, Roberts, and Christopher Love amongst them. The ‘Testimony’ made no mention of Gangraena, but its methods were reminiscent of Edwards’s: a ‘catalogue’ of errors was provided, ‘All of them being collected out of their Authors own Books alleadged in the margin and laid down in their own words’, with a few more added from a disputation in Oxford in December 1646, and from evidence presented by the Assembly to parliament. Like Edwards, the

135

Gangraena, i. 165–6.

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London ministers justified their proceedings with reference to ‘Tertullian, Ireneus, Augustine, and many ancient Fathers’. The ministers regretted that many ‘old accursed heresies . . . dead, buried and rotten in their graves’, were now revived ‘to the poisoning and subverting of many thousands of precious souls’, but like Edwards they spent most time on recent abominations. Like Edwards, but not to the same degree, the ‘Testimony’ concentrated on attacking errors, leaving less space to elaborate on the positive arguments for Presbyterian church government and the Covenant. Webbe’s reply to Gangraena was amongst the works quoted, and much material highlighted by Edwards also featured: Little Non-such, Mans Mortalitie by ‘R.O.’, Clarkson’s Pilgrimage of Saints, Paul Best’s rejection of the Trinity, and the various offences of John Goodwin and John Saltmarsh, for example. The ‘Testimony’ was inevitably briefer and better organized than Edwards’s rambling works; it was up to date with references to works published since Gangraena, Part Three, such as Joseph Salmon’s Antichrist in Man; and it was more even-handed with many references to the works of the Anglican Henry Hammond who was taken as arguing for general redemption. The highly charged last few pages, which bewailed the falling hopes of the orthodox godly as ‘reformation’ turned into ‘deformation’, the nation swarmed with ‘noisome Errours, Heresies and Blasphemies . . . destructive schismes, separations’, and the ‘hideous and complexive evil’ of toleration heralded the destruction of ‘Magistracy and Ministry, and with them, all Religious and Comely Order in Church and Commonwealth’, contain many echoes of Gangraena.136 In his copy of the London testimony, the Worcestershire Presbyterian Thomas Hall praised the ministers as ‘Haereticorum mallei’, hammers of the heretics, and as Edwards had hoped, the London testimony inspired other clergy into action. Thirteen other counties issued ‘Testimonies’ or ‘Attestations’ in support of the London initiative, published by the Presbyterian sympathizers amongst the London booksellers, Michael Sparke, Luke Fawne, Thomas Underhill, Christopher Meredith, and Ralph Smith. Lancashire, Warwickshire, and Gloucestershire were the earliest, in March 1648, with the others following in late spring and summer.137 Some were 136 A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, 30–4; much is reminiscent of the Preface to Gangraena, Part One. Nasu, ‘Heresiography’, 43–4, 173–6, has a useful discussion of the London Testimony. He describes Hammond’s indignation at his inclusion on the basis of a book licensed by John Downame—one of the signatories to the Testimony. 137 Matthews, Calamy Revised, app. One, 553–8, provides a convenient list of the ministers’ testimonies and their signatories. Hall had several testimonies bound in the same volume with a range of other orthodox defences such as Love against Dell, or William Jenkyn against

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relatively brief and almost formulaic manifestos, endorsing the Solemn League and Covenant and the London Testimony, and denouncing toleration. Despite similarities of form and even title (those from Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, and Essex were identical) each county’s manifesto included something distinctive. Wiltshire, for example, had a marvellous prologue: In this time of Jacobs trouble, wherein the great red Dragon hath watched the woman cloathed with the Sun, to devour the man-child as soon as it should be borne, and wherein the serpent hath cast out of his mouth a flood of Heresies and Errors, to carry away the woman and the child, wee are much comforted to see that God hath raised up any help for the woman in the earth, and that there is a remnant of her seed which keep the Commandements of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ.138

The West Riding Attestation had conventional references to several books mentioned in Gangraena, such as those by Best, Clarkson, Biddle, and Archer; and these ministers vowed never to consent to the toleration of an Edwards-style list of errors from ‘Arrianism’ through Antiscripturism and Libertinism to ‘Socinianism, scepticism, or any other Heresies, Sects or erronious opinions whatsoever’. But they also drew attention to a local scandal, the recent religiously motivated murder of a mother by her son, daughter, and son-in-law who wanted to kill the evil spirits in her.139 Testimonies issued later in 1648 included some troubled comments on the Scots’ threats of renewed military intervention, this time against the English parliament, justified by English scorning of the Covenant. The ministers of Staffordshire hoped that their public adherence to the principles of the Covenant would nullify the accusations of Covenant breaking, ‘by which means some in Scotland take advantage to pretend a just ground Goodwin: Birmingham Reference Library, 094/1648, C/24. The Attestation of the Ministers of Somerset joyning with the Reverend Ministers of London against the Errors and Blasphemies of the Present Times (London, 1648), BL E457 (26), dated by Thomason 9 Aug. 1648, was apparently the briefest and the last. Full references for testimonies not otherwise discussed are: The Gloucestershire Ministers Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemne League and Covenant . . . (London, 1648), BL E433 (25), 28 Mar. 1648; A Testimony of the Ministers in the Province of Salop, to the Truth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemne League and Covenant (London, 1648), BL E442 (18), 14 May 1648; The Warwickshire Ministers Testimony to the Trueth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemn League and Covenant (London,1648), BL E432 (14), 16 Mar. 1647/8. 138 The Concurrent Testimony of the Ministers in the County of Wiltes, with their Reverend brethren of London (London, 1648), printed date 26 June 1648, BL E449 (27), 1. 139 Vindiciae Veritatis; or an Unanimous Attestation to Gods Truth (London, 1648) from the West Riding of Yorkshire, BL E444 (5), 6 Apr., 4–7, 9.

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of waging war against us (which God in his mercy avert)’. The Cheshire ministers praised the freedom of Scotland from the evils of error and heresy which they attributed to their enjoyment of ‘the firme establishment of a subordinate Presbyteriall Government’. Yet they regretted that a new war in the name of the Covenant was threatened:‘wee are assured that such a warre as some would stirre up and carry on under pretence of asserting the Covenant against Independent Sectaries and Hereticks, would make the breaches of the Covenant wider’.140 The very widely supported Essex Testimony confined its sharpest condemnations to the uncontroversial evils of Popery, Arminianism, and Socinianism and, slightly ambiguously, judged it ‘most agreeable to Christianity, That tender Consciences of Dissenting Brethren bee tenderly dealt withall, yet we dare not carry in our bosomes such steely consciences and rockie hearts’ as not to mourn the continuing spread of error despite the fasts against it.141 The most elaborate testimonies came from Devon, Lancashire, and Cheshire. The Lancashire ‘Harmonious Consent’ was a lengthy exposition in support of the Covenant, the Westminster Assembly, the Scots, and Presbyterian government. Like Edwards, the Lancashire ministers bemoaned the ‘lukewarmness’ of the godly, and the damage done by the fact that those holding errors ‘pretend to more piety and holiness’ than was the case under ‘Prelatical tyranny’.142 The Cheshire ‘Attestation’, the longest of all, while clearly committed to Presbyterian government, displayed a caution, and a tactically moderate appeal to the Independents to seize the common ground with Presbyterians that marks it off from the others. The Cheshire ministers stressed the ‘great doubt, much dispute and difficultie’ in defining heresies, and noted that some writers against heresy had themselves fallen under suspicion. They acknowledged that many of their Independent ‘Brethren’ were ‘learned, godly, charitable and kind even to their Presbyterian brethren (and some of them to be so adverse in a great measure to such a Toleration as you might terme intolerable and abominable)’. Yet Independency was an error in itself, and (echoing the language in Gangraena) ‘if not the naturall mother, yet such a tender Nurse and Patronesse 140 A Testimony of the Ministers of Stafford to the Trueth of Jesus Christ and the Solemn League and Covenant (London, 1648), BL E453 (16), 14 July, 6; An Attestation to the Testimony of our reverend brethren of London,‘resolved on by the Ministers of Cheshire at their meeting May 2 and subscribed at their next Meeting, June 6, 1648’ (not in Thomason; Thomas Hall’s copy consulted), 13, 31. 141 A Testimony of the Ministers in Essex to the Trueth of Jesus Christ and to the Solemne League and Covenant (London, 1648), BL E438 (4), 3 May 1648, 3. 142 The Harmonious Consent, BL E434 (7), Thomason date 30 Mar. 1648.

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to hereticall opinions of all kindes’. Nonetheless, Independents like Jeremiah Burroughs were urged to join the Presbyterians, with whom they had more in common than those ‘who under the titles of Independents (howsoever otherwise divided) are united together against the Presbyteriall Government’.143 The Northamptonshire ministers acknowledged that in their Testimony, errors were simply ‘noted’, rather than ‘discussed and disproved’, and this was the pattern of almost all counties.144 The Devon manifesto was the exception, offering scriptural ‘antidotes’ to the errors listed in the London testimomy—from those on God, the Trinity, and the divinity of Christ, to universal redemption, the mortality of the soul, and infant baptism. They presented extended arguments against toleration’, remarking, ‘Wee also leave the mysterie of Hollands and Polands prosperity by toleration, to bee judged when the cup of Gods indignation is put into their hand’.145 In city and country 902 ministers ultimately testified against error, more than had signed the Remonstrance of 1640 though a little less than the thousand Edwards had hoped for. In many counties ministers with Gangraena connections were prominent signatories: in Lancashire, Richard Hollingworth was second after Richard Heyrick, the senior Manchester minister and Assemblyman.146 In Essex where 132 ministers, more than in any other county, signed the Testimony, the predictable name of Robert Harmar is found with two other Colchester ministers.147 In contrast only thirty-nine ministers signed the Norfolk ‘Attestation’, amongst them John Carter of Norwich and John Brinsley of Yarmouth.148 In Northampton143 An Attestation to the Testimony of our reverend brethren of London, 2–3, 13, 31. They also provided a brief history of heresy as discussed in Ch. 2, above. John Ley is usually credited with writing the Attestation which ran to 54 pages of text. 144 The Testimony of our Reverend Brethren, Ministers of the Province of London . . . attested by other Ministers in the County of Northampton (London, 1648), BL E441 (29), Thomason date 11 May, 4. 145 The Joint Testimonie of the Ministers of Devon, 4–23. The original sources given by the London ministers for these errors were also cited (Best, Biddle, Little Non-such, and so on). This distinctive testimony was perhaps drafted by George Hughes of Plymouth, the first signatory: see also DNB. 146 The Harmonious Consent. It seems that Charles Herle the more conciliatory Lancashire representative in the Assembly (and licensor of the Apologeticall Narration) did not sign. 147 A Testimony of the Ministers in Essex. 148 The Attestation of the Ministers of the County of Norfolk, and City of Norwich. In Vindication of the Ancient Truths of Jesus Christ, and prosecution of the Solemn Covenant: Against The spreading Errors, and prodigious Blasphemies that are Scattered abroad in these licentious Dayes. As it was Represented to the Ministers of the Province of London, June 9. 1648 (London, 1648), BL E447 (6), Thomason date 19 June. The first printing was for Michael Sparke while a second printing was produced for a Norwich bookseller, W. Franklyn.

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shire, Thomas Ball, an old acquaintance of Edwards, Cranford, and other London ministers, as well as the long-suffering Thomas Andrewes, the butt of the radical soldiery, were amongst the sixty-nine signatories.149 It is of course predictable that these works, concerned as they are with denouncing error and heresy, should show parallels with Edwards’s methods and content, and one would hesitate before giving a great deal of credit for their organization to Gangraena. They may be no more than another example of the cooperation amongst ministers in the localities, and the close connections between provincial ministers and city clergy, which is evident also in the provision of material for Edwards’s stories. As I have argued, Edwards both benefited from such clerical sociability and helped to foster it. Equally Edwards’s methods of listing errors, his horror at the prospect of toleration, and his highlighting of particular individuals and books do seem to have had an impact on the testimonies of 1647–8. Precise connections between counties producing testimonies and areas for which Edwards had abundant material are more difficult to find. Essex ministers supported their London colleagues with enthusiasm, but there was no Suffolk testimony despite the well-supported joint petition from the two counties in favour of Presbyterian government in May 1646 and the December 1646 petition in support of a London petition. The divided county of Kent produced no Presbyterian manifesto in these months; more surprisingly there was none from Hertfordshire or Lincolnshire, although much material on Samuel Oates had come to Edwards from Lincolnshire and a Presbyterian petition from Hertfordshire in July 1646 had attracted sixty-three signatures.150 Part One gave equally detailed advice to the country’s civil rulers and again several of Edwards’s ideas found practical expression. Some of his predictions were easy enough to make—the suggestion that magistrates ‘should call upon the people for a solemn renewing of the late Covenant’ was written while such a renewal was already being arranged in London. Others were never carried out to Edwards’s full satisfaction as his urging ‘the wicked books, printed of late years, (some whereof licensed, dispersed, cryed up) should be openly burnt by the hand of the hangman’ as Comfort for Beleevers had been. He provided a convenient list of the 149 The Testimony of our Reverend Brethren, . . . attested by other Ministers in the County of Northampton. 150 For the Essex and Suffolk petitions see n. 129, above; for Hertfordshire: Matthews, Calamy Revised, p. lxxii; for King and Lincolnshire, n. 132, above; for Rutland, Ch. 3 n. 247 above. A Declaration set Forth By the Presbyterians within the County of Kent (London, 1647), printed date 12 Jan., BL E370 (25), seems to me to be eccentric and perhaps satirical.

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books that had provided the most erroneous material for his lists of error.151 Edwards also proposed: ‘The Magistrates from the consideration of all these errours, heresies, blasphemies, should appoint and command a solemn general Fast, to be kept throughout the Kingdom, for this very end, that the Land might be humbled and mourn for these heresies, blasphemies etc . . . and for the fearful breach of our solemne Covenant.’152 A fast was finally arranged for March 1647 in the midst of a deluge of preaching against heresy. The regular public fast day, 27 January 1647, was also taken up with stern sermons on the sectarian threat.William Jenkyn of Christ Church preached to the Lords, while in the Commons Obadiah Sedgwick presented the growth of heresy as a ‘Serpents’ flood’, and urged parliament to establish a solemn fast day to seek God’s help against it, as they had done for floods of rain. An ordinance of 4 February called for just such a day of public humiliation on 10 March to seek God’s assistance for the suppression of the ‘Errors, Heresies and Blasphemies’ that spread in the kingdom. This day seems to have been widely observed. Richard Vines, who regularly covered the danger of heresy in his sermons in 1646/7, preached before the Commons along with a more piquant choice in Thomas Hodges, minister of Kensington, who had himself been suspected of Antinomianism in the 1630s.153 The fast was kept in distant Kendal, as the minister Henry Massy reported to his patron Lord Wharton, hoping it was the beginning not the end of parliament’s action against ‘errours, sects and synns’. In Dorchester, a godly town whose godly minister, William Benn, was mentioned with approval as defeating an impudent wandering sectary in Gangraena, ‘This day was collected at the special fast [to prevent heresies] this day at Peters £4–6s’. This was 152 Gangraena, i. 171. Ibid., 168. William Jenkyn, A Sleeping Sicknes the distemper of the Times. A sermon preached before the House of Peers (London, 1647), BL E372 (10), Sedgwick, The Nature and Danger of Heresies, 4, 39, both printed before 25 Mar. as Thomason has substituted 1646 for 1647. On the same day John Arrowsmith, A Great Wonder in heaven; or a lively Picture of the Militant Church (London, 1647), BL E372 (12), and Lazarus Seaman, The Head of the Church, The Judge of the World (London, 1647), BL E372 (11), preached more general sermons. Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, i. 913 (4 Feb.), for the ordinance; BL E373 (12), for a printed version. Richard Vines, The Authours, Nature and Danger of Haeresie (London, 1647), BL E378 (29); Thomas Hodges, The Growth and Spreading of Haeresie (London, 1647), BL E379 (1). Bodl., Tanner MS 59, fo. 121, 4 May 1646. Sancroft reported on Vines’s preaching against sectaries and for the settlement of church government in Cambridge. He had denounced the ‘swarms of sects’; and argued that the church should not lose ‘under Constantine which it had under Nero’, for ‘the Church had a power of jurisdiction in it before the supreme magistrate was a Christian’. Bodl., Rawlinson MS E70, sermon notes from Cambridge, 1647–9, fo. 8r. 151 153

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almost £1 more than had been collected at the routine monthly fast in February.154 Although these 1647 sermons acknowledged that there were distinctions between error and heresy, they were less careful and more hardline than the sermons preceding Gangraena discussed in Chapter 2, reflecting the degree to which divisions hardened over the course of 1646, a process to which Edwards made a large contribution. Vines, a man moderate in temperament if not in policy, stressed in his sermon that heresy had to be precisely defined rather than used in ‘the vulgar and indeed abusive acceptation of the word . . . which usually men flinge in the face of others at random, that are not of their opinion’. He quoted Francis Bacon on the differences between the ‘strivings . . . of one Israelite with another: and these Moses quiets and parts them fairely, and some (namely haeresies fighting against the very foundation) are like the Egyptian striving with the Israelite whom Moses smites down’. The more respectable Independents were, presumably, Israelites rather than Egyptians, but Vines in his conclusion challenged them with questions that showed the influence of Edwards’s arguments and language: I would intreat, nay press it upon those that are called pure Independents, that they would zealously and sincerely declare against the doctrinall errours and haeresies of these dayes, that such pernicious opinions may not shelter themselves under their name or wing, nor ever any indulgence or toleration be either desired or granted upon such a reason, as all may come in at the same breach or port, for that would ben but a selling of the Church into a liberty of being in captivity to destructive confusions and errours.155

The sermons by Jenkyn and Sedgwick also reveal parallels with Edwards—2 Timothy 2:17 was one of Sedgwick’s texts and he referred to ‘some who have printed large Catalogues of them’, offering his audience ‘a few of the more notorious’. Some items on Sedgwick’s brief lists of blasphemies and heretical opinions might have been culled from Gangraena: sectaries calling Christ a bastard, arguing for the mortality of the soul, or denouncing the ministry as anti-Christian. Both sermons called for action 154 Bodl., Rawlinson Letters 52, no. 34, 15 Mar.; Gangraena, ii. 172; Underdown, Fire from Heaven, 213–14; Dorset RO, Dorchester Borough Minute Book, B2/16/4, notes at the end. An anonymous minister preached on the text, ‘I have somewhat against thee because thou hast lost thy first love’ (Revelation 2: 4) on this fast day: Bodl., Rawlinson MS E155, notes in preparation for sermons, fos. 220–7. 155 Vines, Authors, Nature and Danger of Haeresie, 49, 63–6, 70; the first citation in this work is to James I, the last to Bacon. Sedgwick, Nature and Danger of Heresies, 8–12, also has an extended section defining heresy.

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against toleration, heresy, and blasphemy, and for the support of the ministry and settled church government. Jenkyn denounced the heretics, sectaries, and libertines who laid waste church government, but like Edwards he was also very critical of those who had let it happen. The ‘sleeping sickness’ of his title was the inaction of the authorities in the face of an unprecedented calamity: ‘Bee sensible that the Church is wounded by the soule-stroying opinions of Antinomians, Arminians, Anabaptists, Seekers, Anti-scripturists, Anti-trinitarians etc. All which with many more have been more propagated these foure yeares of Church Anarchie, then in fourscore of Church tyranny’—a passage that echoed a persistent refrain in Gangraena.156 Vines preached that ministers should blow the trumpet in the war against ‘Damnable heresyes that fight against fayth’, but stressed that ministers were helpless without backing from the magistrates.157 As ministers urged action, parliament remained bitterly divided over a proposed ordinance against heresy, introduced in September 1646 by Nathaniel Bacon and Zouch Tate. Tate had overseen the military reorganization that created the New Model Army; his increasing identification with the Presbyterian political programme, driven in large part by his anxiety about religious radicalism, provides an example of how religious upheaval, publicized by men like Edwards, contributed to political realignment.158 Some such ordinance had been proposed by Edwards in Part One of Gangraena, where he urged ‘some exemplary punishment upon some of the most notorious sectaries and seducers’ and their ‘abetters’ in the printing trade. Although he suggested existing statutes against rogues and vagabonds could be used against the ‘emissaries’ who plagued the provinces, he also commended the sixteenth-century senate of Zurich that had legislated against Anabaptism. In Part Three, Edwards praised ‘Master Taet and Master Bacon’, predicting that ‘their names will be famous in all

Sedgwick, Nature and danger of Heresies, 31–3, 37–40; Jenkyn, A Sleeping Sicknes, 28–9, epistle; Thomas Hodges’s sermon, Growth and Spreading of Haeresie, was a largely historical account, based on Theodoret, Augustine, Eusebius, and Bullinger’s attacks on Anabaptism; it made only the most general reference to the contemporary situation. 157 Bodl., Rawlinson MS E70, fo. 8r, notes on a Vines sermon in Cambridge. Similar arguments are found in Vines’s fast sermon on 10 Mar. 1647 where he stressed that the pulpit was powerless while the ‘poison is carried up and downe in books and cryed at mens door every day’: The Authours, Nature and danger of Haeresie, 67. 158 The ordinance is printed in several versions: see BL 669, fo. 9 (69); E358 (2); BL E354 (16)—with critical observations, BL E373 (12). For Tate see Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 28; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 161. Tate was secluded at the Purge. Mr Bacon the ‘Suffolk lawyer’ was probably Nathaniel Bacon, recruiter MP for Cambridge, rather than his more recently elected brother Francis. 156

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generations; when the names of Lilburne, Overton etc, yea and of all their great Patrons, whether in the Army, or out of the Army, will be a by-word and a curse’.159 Yet the ordinance was not finally passed until 2 May 1648, after Edwards’s exile and death. Throughout September 1646 a whole day each week was spent in debate in the Commons. On 16 September, with ‘Mr Whitaker in the chair til he profess he could endure no longer’, the diarist John Harington spoke in the debate to support the magistrates’ duty ‘to render the greatest real thanks possible for our charg was by making lawes and causing them to be executed to procure all men to perform the duty of Christians’. He condemned the neglect of ‘punishing great offences as haeresy, which is as a gangreen or cancer’. A week later Holles and Selden spoke at length in support of the ordinance, but Henry Marten and Sir Arthur Haselrig were prominent in obstructing its progress, proposing delay until the Assembly had perfected its Confession of Faith.160 The ordinance had a necessary precision over error, heresy, and blasphemy. Heretical doctrines were those that contravened the Trinity, the resurrection, the divinity and manhood of Christ, and denied that the Scriptures were the word of God. Obstinacy in such views was to be punished by death. A first offence of blasphemy would lead to branding, a second to death. Many of the views condemned by Edwards were defined (only) as errors, punishable by imprisonment: universal redemption, free will, soul sleeping, that the moral law was no rule for a Christian life, or a justified believer need not pray for pardon of sins, that Presbyterian government was antichristian, or that infant baptism was wrong. The controversy over the heresy ordinance was reflected in the explosion of cheap print popularizing the misdeeds and errors of the sectaries discussed in Chapter 4, and in lively pamphlet debate over the ordinance itself, in which John Goodwin led the attack. Goodwin’s Hagiomastix had been taken by some to imply that the Scriptures were not the word of God, but this did not deter him from raising doubts over the authenticity of the Scriptures in his criticism of the proposed ordinance. He also questioned whether opposition to baptism or holding the doctrine of free will were even errors.161 Gangraena, i. 72; iii. 151. Diary of John Harington, 34, 36, 38, 43, 46; BL Add MS 31116, journal of Laurence Whitaker (the exhausted chairman of the Grand Committee on Religion), fos. 283v, 284; Perfect Occurrences, week ending 18 Sept. 1646, BL E354 (14). The final ordinance is in Firth and Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances, i. 1133–6. 161 For Hagiomastix see Ch. 4, above, and the (obscure) reference in Vines, Authors, Nature 159 160

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For Goodwin, the heresy ordinance was a return to a popish persecution. At the other extreme, to Robert Baillie the ‘Blasphemy Ordinance’, as he termed it, was an essential measure against the ‘blasphemies, heresies and errours, which abound everywhere, [and] cryes to Heaven for a vengeance against the land’. Its passing would crush the ‘other partie’. Edwards clearly looked forward to the capital punishment of Paul Best with equanimity and was not concerned to define the border between error and heresy. The more conciliatory Vines would have reserved the death penalty for blasphemous and seditious heretics (amongst whom Best might well have counted), advocating ‘light’ rather than ‘fire’ as the weapon against ‘simple heretics’ whose opinions were not linked to schism, blasphemy, or sedition.162 How to define and punish heresy were questions that perplexed and divided the more orthodox godly from the mid-1640s to the 1656 debates on the Quaker Naylor and beyond. The terms of definition and debate in 1646/7 were part of the common currency of orthodoxy rooted in 2 Timothy and other ‘Pauline’ texts; but the aggression and urgency with which legislation was pursued in 1646/7 can again plausibly be attributed to the rousing Presbyterian campaign spearheaded by Edwards. Certainly Presbyterian MPs were in contact with clerical zealots. In August or September 1646 Robert Baillie sent a long memorandum to Zouch Tate, hoping ‘That yow may not forget whereof yesternight we spoke’, and claiming, ‘Your more than ordinare favour to me, makes me bold to be your remembrancer’. This urged Tate’s diligence on a long list of issues from support for Lancashire’s presbyterian petition, to the nationwide establishment of Presbyterian government, including the ordinance against heresy.163 Edwards’s acquaintance with Baillie and Jenkyn in London, his contacts with provincial Presbyterian activists in Essex, Lancashire, and Norwich, and the responses to the anti-sectarian measures he and Danger of Haeresie, 67; also Walwyn’s Just Defence (London, 1649), in Haller and Davies (eds.), Leveller Tracts, 354. Goodwin, Some Modest and Humble Queries (London, 1646), BL E355 (1), 27 Sept. 1646. A demurre to the Bill for Preventing the Growth and Spreading of Heresie (London, 1646) similarly doubted whether many of the doctrines denounced were really errors and argued that no one actually held the most drastic ones. 162 Letters of Baillie, ii. 396, writing very optimistically to the Earl of Lauderdale.Vines, Authours, nature and Danger of Haeresie, 62–5. For Edwards on Best see Ch. 3, above. Matthew Newcomen in Duty of such as would walke worthy of the Gospel, 16–18, offered precise definitions of punishable offences: blaspheming the name of God, doctrines destructive to the soul, and those that led to schism. 163 Letters of Baillie, ii. 393. Baillie’s memorandum also covered the need for Assembly approval for itinerant preachers and reform of Oxford University. He urged Tate to come to the Assembly, if only for ‘one half hour in the week’, to exhort it to greater diligence.

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urged in Gangraena reinforce a sense of his importance to the radicalisation of the Presbyterian programme in 1646–7. ‘all the . . . grand incendiaries . . . in a moment slunke away’: gangr aena, edwards, and the crisis of cit y presbyterianism 1 6 4 Gangraena, Part Three, as we have seen, presented a desperately polarized politics where subversive soldiers, London sectaries, and activists supporting Lilburne and Overton, with backing from Independents in parliament, threatened the godly Presbyterians in the city, Assembly, Scotland, and the English parliament. As we have also emphasized at many points, Edwards’s high-profile, much-debated descriptions helped to construct the very cleavage he was describing as he publicized the sectarian threat and proposed a programme to combat it. Gangraena was central to the creation of Presbyterian activism in London, and beyond. Part Three furthermore reinforced the mutual paranoia between Presbyterians and the New Model Army, and a ‘community’ of Edwards’s victims also coalesced in 1646–7, as Edwards’s elision of Independents and sectaries was for a while a self-fulfilling prophecy in city and army.165 Edwards thus contributed to a fatal spiral where each ‘side’ perceived itself as under threat and was driven to drastic actions which could be defined as self-defence, but were seen by opponents as further appalling aggression. The climax came in July and August 1647 when the city authorities and parliament did indeed try to establish a Presbyteriancontrolled London militia, as an alternative force to the New Model, then quartered in alarming proximity to the city. The city’s nerve broke and in the end the New Model Army marched into the city in strength and unopposed on 6 August,‘in a way of triumph as to conquered peopell’ as Juxon complained indignantly, forgetting briefly his inveterate opposition to city Presbyterians and their clerical engages. Juxon nonetheless praised the army’s discipline in a much-quoted passage. They came ‘in soe great order and civillity that twas not heard of soe much as an apple tooke by aney of them’. In another encomium to the New Model, Thomas Edwards took the 164 The quotation is a paraphrase of Juxon’s comment in August 1647: DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 118v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 168). 165 Cf. Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 200, ‘The process of the Army’s politicization, therefore, was a responsive one; a series of reactions to both real and imagined threats’.

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place of the apples, Hugh Peter declaring: ‘I doe professe I conceive even Gangraena himselfe might have marcht through the Army unmolested, though we are not ignorant: hine nostri fundi calamitas. The Lord pitty and pardon, the Army doth’.166 By the time this pamphlet came out in October, Edwards—not trusting the army to pity and pardon—had been for several weeks in exile in Amsterdam, whence he had fled on the collapse of the city’s resistance in August. This flight and the presence at his deathbed a few months later of the Presbyterian leaders Sir William Waller and Major General Edward Massey suggest he was close to the centre of events. Leading Presbyterian Aldermen, peers, and MPs who did not escape in August suffered many months imprisonment and the prospect of trial for the capital offence of treason, so we should perhaps hesitate before accusing the notorious Edwards of paranoia. Edwards featured largely as we shall see as motif in polemic and debate between the army and its opponents throughout 1647 but his practical activities at the height of the crisis remain obscure. We should also always be aware of Edwards’s tendency to overestimate his own importance. The publication of Gangraena, Part Three at the end of December 1646 coincided with, and contributed to, the raising of the stakes in London. He chided Presbyterians with their supine response to Independent plots: ‘what a shame ‘tis that a handfull of men in comparison should by their activity, diligence, minding their work, bring things to that passe they are . . . if so few have done so much, and that in a bad cause, what might not we doe in a good cause, if courageous, zealous and intent upon it? certainly we might in a short time break the hearts and the neck of that faction’. A zealous city might still turn the tide: if the City of London and the Government of it would appeare as they might, and when they have begun, follow and prosecute it in beginning to put the Lawes in exceution against those who come not to Church, in punishing those Sectaries who live under their jurisdiction and government for abusing them in print, in taking care that no Sectarie have any office or place of government in the City, in petitioning the Parliament againe and againe, they might by the blessing of God quickly remedy all.167 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 119r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 168). Peter, A Word for the Armie, 7–8. (The Latin could be translated as ‘who is at the root of our calamities’). Peter went on to deny that ‘a generall toleration’ was ‘the Armies Gangraena’, as they only wanted ‘what the Puritans beg’d under the Prelates’, some liberty of conscience under a state religion. 167 Gangraena, iii. 281. 166

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Renewed petitioning campaigns in London in December 1646 shared the priorities of Gangraena, Part Three. They stressed the disorders in the commonwealth as well as in the church as power-hungry Independents amassed power in army and parliament, and the aims of the Solemn League and Covenant were ignored. ‘There is a new petition, almost in readiness, to come from the City for these things we desyre’, Baillie enthused; while Juxon denounced the same as a petition calling for many unreasonable and dangerous things. When three ‘well-affected’ citizens, including Nicholas Widmerpole of Christ Church, were arrested and questioned by a Commons Committee about this petition, there were rowdy disturbances on the streets of London and at the meetings when it was urged on the Common Council. On 10 December ‘diverse wellaffected freemen and Covenant engaged Cittizens’ asked the Common Council to approve two petitions to the Lords and Commons, from ‘a great number of considerable citizens of known worth and of approved integrity to the Parliament’. On the 18th, after heated debate, over ‘evry particuler Paragraffe, article or clause’, the petitions were approved and presented to the two Houses on the following day, where they were received with approval, albeit more qualified in the Commons than the Lords.168 The version to the Lords conveyed ‘the loud and unanimous cry of many thousands of our fellow Citizens’, impelled by the ‘growing miseries and encreasing distractions of these times’. Although it acknowledged the ‘signall Victories’ achieved by the New Model Army, the petition urged its speedy disbanding, complaining in the language of Gangraena,‘That there are some Officers, and many common Soldiers of that Army, who either have never taken the Covenant, or are disaffected to the Church Government held forth by the Parliament; That the Pulpits of divers godly Ministers are often usurped by Preaching Souldiers, and others, who infect their Flock, and all places where they come with strange and dangerous Errours’. They were a bad example to others who had spurned the Covenant, and there could be no peace settlement, ‘while they are Masters of such a power’. The petition further demanded city control of its own militia, the issue at the heart of the crisis in 1647.169 168 Letters of Baillie, ii. 411, to George Young; the same letter commended the heresy ordinance and a ‘fine book’ by the London ministers arguing for Presbyterian government by divine right. DWL, MS 24.50 fos. 94v–96v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 141–2) on the disorders surrounding the petitioning. CLRO, CCJ 40, fos. 199v–204 for the proceedings and the texts. 169 To the Right Honourable the Lords Assembled in High Court of Parliament, The Humble Petition of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commons of the City of London, in Common

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A ‘humble representation of the pressing grievances and important desires of the well-affected freemen and Covenant-engaged Cittizens’ accompanied the petitions, renouncing passivity (or lukewarmness), and revealing, like Edwards, the priority of religious grievances, but also their inescapable involvement with the troubles of the Commonwealth: ‘For who can see Religion, Lawes, Liberties, (things of so great and precious concernment,) not onely assaulted, but even overwhelmed, and the Unity, Peace and Prosperity of the Kingdomes violated, and almost destroyed, and by a treacherous and cowardly silence continue to hold his peace?’ The first clause bemoaned the ‘bold contempt’ shown to the ‘most sacred Oath’, the Solemn League and Covenant. Enemies to the Covenant were to be regarded as ‘malignant Enemies to the Parliament, or the Peace and Union of the Kingdomes, and the Reformation of Religion’, deserving ‘condigne punishment’. Covenant refusers should ‘not bee countenanced, imployed in, or advanced to places of publike Trust, as being a discredit to your Government, dangerous to the Kingdomes; and a hindrance to the Reformation of Religion’. For these ‘Covenant-engaged’ citizens, religion was ‘more precious than their lives’, and they had hoped that it was secured by the Covenant: ‘But with bleeding hearts we speake it, how is it, that for all this, such an inundation of errors, Schisms, Heresies, is broken in upon us, which if not speedily prevented by your Wisdomes, and opposed by your impartiall Justice wee feare will have its dreadfull effect to the totall subversion of the power of godlinesse?’ They were astonished that after such a Covenant, there should such blasphemies bee uttered to Gods highest dishonour; that such Hereticall opinions should bee broached, to the never so much vilifying of the truth; that such Schismes should bee acted and fomented, to the renting and dividing of the Church; that the Government established should bee so much defamed, and opposed to the contempt of Parliament, in words, in bookes, in practise, by the Sectaries of these times . . . What are our estates, our liberties, our lives unto us, if the Arke of God be taken?

The remedies as well as the diagnosis had close parallels with Edwards’s Gangraena. The petition asked for the suppression of unordained preachCouncil Assembled Together with An humble Representation of the pressing grievances, and important desires of the well-affected Freemen, and Covenant-engaged Citizens of the City of London (London, 1646), BL E366 (14), Thomason date 21 Dec.; E366 (15) is the petition to the Commons, with the same printer, Richard Cotes. The text has been checked with the Common Council version; the printed version has ‘this Army’. The petition hoped that the king would be brought ‘home’, but they left the precise arrangements to God’s providence and the parliament.

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ers, an end to ‘separate Congregations, the very nurseries of all damnable Heresies’; for the punishment of heretics and schismatics, and the encouragement of ‘all Godly and Orthodox Ministers who labour in Gods husbandry’. Only then did they move on to ‘political’ demands, for free elections to vacant seats in the Commons; for curbs on the powers of committees; for the relief of Ireland and an end to any breach between England and Scotland. Central to the Representation, as it was to Gangraena Part Three, was an attack on the army: ‘the enemies now being subdued, the Armies may be disbanded, that the so much complained of oppressions by their meanes may be redressed, and taxes for their support may be released and the Militia of the Kingdome settled’. This would convince ‘slanderous tongues that this warre hath not beene intended as a trade, but as a meanes of regaining our lost peace’ and securing religion, laws, and liberties.170 Both Houses promised speedy consideration of the petitioners’ demands, but the only practical manifestation was the renewal of the April 1645 order against unordained preachers. More important was the worsening of the already poor relationships between the New Model Army and city Presbyterians. The army’s predictable reaction is revealed concisely in Cromwell’s brief letter to Fairfax,‘Wee have had a very longe petition from the Citty, how it strikes att the Armie you will see’. Further evidence of the palpable tensions of late 1646 came when the familiar figure of Edwards’s friend Josiah Ricraft was amongst Presbyterian citizens examined by parliament in December 1646 for spreading rumours that the Independent MP Sir John Evelyn had called for the army to be brought up to overawe the city. These events may well be connected to the murky rumours about the army’s intentions repeated in Gangraena, Part Three. Some of these have already been quoted, but perhaps the most eerily prophetic was the double-edged account given to Edwards by ‘A Citizen of London of good ranck’. This alleged that ‘a Commander a great Sectary’ told all and sundry at Boston Fair that the city was prepared to raise their own army if the New Model ‘came neere London to lye neere them and to awe them’.171 170 The Humble Petition . . . With an humble Representation . . . to the Lords and Commons assembled in high Court of Parliament Together with the Severall Answers of both Houses of Parliament to the said Petitions and Representations (London, 1646), BL E366 (16); this also printed the response of the two Houses to the petitions of 19 Dec. The Lords thanked the city for their ‘constant and reall expressions of fidelity and good affections’, and gave ‘hearty thanks’; the Commons commended the city’s ‘constant good affections’: 2–4. The representation also asked that debts due to the city from sequestered royalists and from MPs be secured, and that the warrants against Widmerpole and others be withdrawn. 171 LJ viii. 617; BL E370 (4), is a printed version of the order of 31 Dec. 1646; Writings and

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Let us then explore Edwards’s associations with the events and debates of 1647. At the end of January the king was finally surrendered to the English parliament by the Scots whose army went home a few weeks later. In March the Presbyterians in parliament sought to implement their programme of disbanding the New Model, and sending some troops to suppress the continuing revolt in Ireland. No proper measures were taken to deal with the army’s grievances over pay and the lack of legal protection for actions committed during the war, and when the parliament contemptuously rejected an army petition, denouncing its promoters as ‘enemies to the state’, smouldering resentment erupted into army revolt.172 The army regiments elected representatives, known not entirely appropriately as agitators, and drew up manifestos of their grievances. The soldiers denied being ‘a mere merecenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state’, and claimed the right to defend ‘ our own and the people’s just rights and liberties’.173 From early June, the army’s capacity to influence the future settlement of the kingdoms was strengthened by the seizure of the king from parliament’s custody. Prominent amongst army grievances was resentment at the name calling that had brought them into disrepute with the people they had served, and in at least two regiments this stigmatizing was overtly linked to the obvious target of Edwards: that whereas divers persons have both privately and publickly laboured by aspersions and false calumnies to make us odious to the kingdome, thereby seeking to alienate their affections from us, in order to which they have published many scandalous Bookes, such as Mr Edwards Gangreana and divers others of that nature . . . the severall particulars whereof we protest against as most false and are confident that it proceeded not from any probable ground, . . . but simply from the malice of our Enemies.

Indeed the historian and army secretary John Rushworth, in a later account claimed that when the individual regimental grievances were contracted ‘into a method’, to be presented to parliament by Major General Skippon, ‘they medle with nothing but what pertains to them as soldiers and earnestly desire Justice and Reparation in what they have presented as Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1937–47), i. 420–1 [from Sloane MS 1519]; Mahony,‘London Presbyterianism’, 108; Gangraena, iii. 24. 172 For the general events of 1647 I have relied particularly on Ashton, Counter Revolution; Gentles,‘Struggle for London’; Valerie Pearl,‘London’s Counter-Revolution’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972); Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, ch. 8. 173 The Army’s ‘Declaration or representation’, 14 June 1647, here quoted from J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 296.

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their Grievances, particularizing no Man, unless Mr Edwards for his Gangrena, which he is charged to put forth to make the Army odious to the kingdom’.174 Much army and city radical material from 1647 stressed how the most well-affected parliamentarians had been denounced as heretics, sectaries, and schismatics, often associating Edwards in particular with the process. A Just Apologie for an Abused Armie, probably by the officer William Goffe, was a rapid response to Gangraena, Part Three, as well as to the calls from city and parliament for the disbanding of the army. The author offered ‘a seasonable caution to my godly friends, that are in danger to be led away through mistake, into wayes of bitter persecution against the Saints, who are for that purpose by a hellish Strategem, masqued under the ugly vizards of Sectaries, and Heretiques; that so not onely Dogs and Beares may worry them, but some wel-meaning, honest men, may be also made to joyn issue with that design [of disbanding the army]’. Edwards had denounced the army as worse than Cavaliers, but ‘such slanderous Books and discourses . . . are the manifest works of the flesh, and serve only to darken the truth, by bringing up an ill report upon the Professors of it, and to furnish the profane men of the world with multitudes of scoffes and jeeres against Jesus Christ, his wayes and his Saints’. Any prelate might have claimed that Presbyterians as well as Independents and Anabaptists were sectaries and heretics, and thus denounced Calamy, Ashe, and Case as heretics as easily as Burroughs or Goodwin.175 Goffe allowed the army was not free from error but it was nonetheless God’s army, in contrast to the profane multitude who cared nothing for the king of the Saints. Those denounced as Independents and sectaries 174 Divers Papers from the Army, 6; Farr, John Lambert, 50; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 21–3, Edwards was mentioned in the grievances of Lambert’s and Hardress Waller’s regiments. The particular insult mentioned was that the army supported the restoration of the king ‘to his Crowne, throne and Dignity’—which is not, in fact, in Gangraena. 175 John Rushworth, Historical Collections, vi (London, 1722), 485–6. ‘WG, an impartiall observer of the Army, and reall Well wisher to the whole Kingdome’, A Just Apologie for an Abused Armie (London, 1647), BL, E372 (22), Thomason date 29 Jan. 1646[/7]. Gentles, New Model Army, 102, for the attribution to Goffe. The epistle, sig A3–4, is quoted in this paragraph.Wootton’s remark,‘Leveller Democracy’, 419, that Gangraena, Part Three ‘was met almost with silence’, could be qualified. There are fewer challenges to the details of his stories (although John Goodwin, Hagiomastix mounts several) but many objections to the validity of the whole enterprise. Published a few weeks earlier was The Antichristian Presbyter or Anti-Christ Transformed by Richard Lawrence, Marshall-general of the army (London, 1647), BL E370 (22), Thomason date 9 Jan. 1646/7. This did not mention Edwards by name but its ‘briefe Discovery of old Antichrist in the new shape of Presbytery’ was clearly directed against him amongst others. Compare also the summing up of John Hall quoted at the start of this chapter.

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should rather rejoice that God ‘hath made you to differ from the world’. It was Edwards who was the lawless ‘Antinomian’, ‘for surely none but one who hath cast off all the fear and respect of the Law of God, would dare to print such palpable lies and slanders against an Army, in which the safety of a whole Kingdome doth consist’. These slanders had provoked many a ‘blind parson’ and his ‘wicked parishioners’ to abuse anyone in the army who presumed to ‘goe never so little beyond the ordinary straine in Divine knowledge, and strict conversation’.176 Edwards had become a symbol of intemperate attacks on the army so that a sermon at parliament’s monthly fast on 30 June by the returned New England minister Nathaniel Ward could be described as ‘worse then Edwards his Gangraena’. Ward attacked the army for attempting the exclusion of opposing MPs ‘by a Caesarian section’, and for corrupting ‘so many ignorant Country men and Townes, with impious and blasphemous opinions, and rude manners’.177 Peter’s remark about Edwards being safe from the army occurred in a pamphlet reply to Ward’s sermon and to his A Religious Retreat Sounded to a Religious Army, which urged that the army be disbanded.178 Meanwhile, the Presbyterian campaigns represented by the city’s Remonstrance of May 1646 and the polemical assault led by Edwards prompted a variety of radical groups and individuals—Hugh Peter, members of Goodwin’s and Lambe’s churches, Walwyn, Lilburne, and Overton—to campaign for liberty of conscience and support for the army. These alliances were by no means as clear-cut as Edwards insisted; there were many differences of emphasis amongst the city ‘Independents’ and ‘sectaries’, and between the city radicals and the army. William Walwyn,

A Just Apologie, 20–1, 14, 17, 15. For specific page references to Gangraena, iii. see Apologie, 9, 14. 177 The Clarke Papers, vol. i. ed. C. H. Firth (Camden Society, ns, 49, 1891), 150; Nathaniel Ward, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, At their late Monthly Fast, . . . 30 June 1647 (London, 1647), 22–3; cf. Certaine Scruples from the Army Presented in a Dialogue (London, 1647), BL E390 (21), Thomason date 3 June, which complained about the sermons and books against the army especially by Edwards, Bastwick, and Prynne. 178 Ward, A Sermon Preached, 22–3; A Religious Retreat sounded to a Religious Army,‘By one that desires to be faithfull to his Country, though unworthy to bee named’(London, 1647); BL E404 (34), Thomason date 27 Aug. Ward’s Religious Retreat which alluded to Gangraena was sent by an increasingly disillusioned George Thomason to his old friend Henry Parker, the early propagandist for parliament, but by then in Hamburg: Spencer, ‘Politics of George Thomason’, 12. Ward’s subsequent response to Hugh Peter suggests he was the author of the Retreat: Ward, A Word to Mr Peters and Two Words for the Parliament and Kingdom, or An Answer to a scandalous Pamphlet (London, 1647), BL E413 (7), Thomason date 9 Nov. This (11) criticized a sermon by Peter which urged a marriage between the city and the parliament— as Edwards had done (Gangraena, iii. 123). Attacks on Gangraena are mentioned, 26. 176

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writing in the context of the bitter cleavage with Price and Goodwin in 1649, distinguished (as Edwards usually did not) between the ‘Independents’ and the more radical group with which he was identified.179 The caution of Goodwin’s circle delayed the presentation of radical petitions in late 1646, but by the spring of 1647 greater unity in the face of the Presbyterian assault enabled a succession of petitions to parliament— receiving responses from the lukewarm to the hostile. By late May a range of city figures including Hugh Peter and both Price and Walwyn were meeting in Oliver Cromwell’s house in Drury Lane to discuss tactics. But while Peter was at Cromwell’s side during much of the crisis, it is notable that Lilburne and Overton remained in prison long after the New Model occupied London in August. The ‘large’ petition of March 1647 for which Thomas Lambe and several associates were examined by Leigh’s committee put forward a comprehensive ‘Leveller’ programme.180 It demanded recompense for all the ‘blood and treasure’ sacrificed in the war; and praised the House of Commons as the supreme authority of the nation, based as it was on the free choice of the people. Here too there is much evidence of the bitterness against clerics who had denounced their enemies as ‘Hereticks, sectaries, Schismatiques’ just as the Court of High Commission had attacked Puritans (Presbyterians included) in the 1630s. Again Edwards was not named but is an obvious target. It was essential that parliament prevented ‘impious persons . . . reviling, and reproaching the well-affected’. The petition thus demanded the repeal of all statutes molesting ‘religious, peaceable, well affected persons’ for religious differences; no man was to be persecuted as heretical for preaching or publishing religious opinions in ‘a peaceable way’; no ‘necessary truths and sincere professors’ were to be suppressed as ‘errors, sects or schismes’; and certainly religious differences should not be used to justify exclusion from office.181 179 Walwyn’s Just Defence, as reprinted in Haller and Davies, Leveller Tracts, 352–4; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 505–12; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 144–55; John Morrill, ‘The Army Revolt of 1647’, in his Nature of the English Revolution for these splits. 180 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 151–2; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 190, 329 n. 39; the ‘large petition’ with an account of the proceedings connected with it is printed in Walwyn’s Gold tried in the fire, of June 1647, included in Andrew Sharp (ed.), The English Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1998), 73–91. 181 Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, 111, 399–405; see also the early March petition of ‘divers yongmen and Apprentices’, as quoted in a pamphlet of July printed for the radical William Larner, The Humble Petition of Many Thousands of Yong Men and Apprentices of the City of London (London, 1647), E398 (9), 6–8, which condemns the odium placed on good men, and their exclusion from places of public trust.

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In response to radical organization in army and city, the London Presbyterians reiterated the demands of December 1646. Petitions of March 1647 sought to vindicate the city’s loyalty to parliament from ‘the malitious tongues of sectaries’ and looked forward to a well-grounded peace sealed by the king’s taking the Covenant. ‘Here the Petitioners should willingly have concluded, but that the Army, (which they hoped should ere this have bin disbanded) is now drawn so suddainly and quartered so near the Parliament and this City; besides that in the same juncture of time, a most dangerous and seditious petition is set on foot.’ They asked that parliament prevent the social dislocation that supplying the army would cause, and allow the city to nominate their own committee to control the city militia (which had been a radical preserve since 1643).182 Towards the end of June, Edwards’s last major work, The Casting Down of the last and strongest hold of Satan or A Treatise Against Toleration, was published.183 This sought to demonstrate the ‘unlawfulnesses and mischief ’ of any toleration, limited or unlimited, within any Christian Commonwealth or kingdom. This was a typically repetitive tract but more systematic than usual. Each proposition—that there was only one God and therefore one faith and truth, or that magistrates had the power to punish heresy and blasphemy—was supported through arguments drawn in turn from Scripture, ‘sound reason’ and the ‘light of nature’, the teachings of the church fathers, and finally specific historical examples. It was occasionally cited in other works against liberty of conscience, but did not have the impact of Gangraena or Antapologia. Edwards characteristically presented The Casting Down as a work in progress, the first part of a longer publishing programme. The hasty errata were excused by his ‘not having time to read and weigh every page, much less sentence or line’ while the epistle to the Christian Reader explained the absence of a planned epistle to parliament, a preface, and an introduction in which he had hoped to 182 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 189; To the Right Honorable The Lords and Commons, Assembled in High Court of Parliament. The Humble Petition of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commons of the City of London (London, 1647), BL E381 (2), Thomason date 17 Mar.; CCJ 40, fo. 207v; DWL, MS 24.50 fos. 102v–103r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 150–1). 183 The Casting Down of the last and strongest hold of Satan or A Treatise Against Toleration (London, 1647), BL E394 (6), Thomason date 28 June. This was printed for George Calvert rather than Ralph Smith, perhaps because Smith, who was very involved in publishing the most zealously Presbyterian declarations of these months, no longer bothered to seek licenses. The authority of registration and licensing was important to Edwards as we have seen. No work printed for Smith is registered with the Stationers’ Company between Oct. 1646 and Dec. 1647.

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challenge those (such as Goodwin) who argued that the New Testament offered support for liberty of conscience: But these Preparatives and Additionals amounting to some Ten Sheets, (the reviewing, perfecting and printing whereof would take up at least twenty dayes) and not knowing what a Day might bring forth, the Storme comming on so fast, I thought it best, for fear this Book might be suppressed at the Presse and never see the Sun, to send it forth as it was, that the Church of God at home and abroad might have the benefit of it, and to reserve the rest for a second Part (if God spare life and liberty).184

For once, Edwards’s palpable evocation of crisis, both personal and general, was entirely justified for he was indeed writing as a storm burst over London. On 4 May, the House of Commons finally joined the Lords in granting the Presbyterian-dominated city authorities control over their militia. Friends and allies of Edwards—Colonels John Jones and John Bellamy—regained prominent positions in city military affairs while Josiah Ricraft was nominated as scoutmaster. The new authorities proceeded to purge city forces by imposing the Covenant.185 ‘Reformadoes’— soldiers disbanded from provincial forces (including Massey’s), old followers of pre-New Model Generals such as Essex or Waller, New Model Officers removed for Presbyterian sympathies—gathered in London in ever-increasing numbers to engage in bitter lobbying of the parliament that seemed, in its preoccupation with the New Model, to take little account of their own arrears and other grievances. These two developments threatened the New Model with an autonomous and hostile military force, controlled by some of the very individuals prominent in smearing them as subversive sectaries. A chilling game of cat and mouse ensued where the New Model Army marched ever closer to London, from Reading to St Albans or Uxbridge, to pressurize parliament, then retreated on receipt of sympathetic overtures. To their practical demands for pay and indemnity, and their broadest concern for the settlement of the nation, the army had added a demand for the impeachment of eleven members of the House of Commons whom they regarded as their chief Presbyterian opponents, amongst them Massey, Waller, Holles, Stapleton, and the city’s Recorder Glyn. When, in Edwards, The Casting Down, sig. A2, 1–2, 218. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 479, 503–4; Mahony, ‘Presbyterianism’, 108; DWL, MS 24.50 fos. 104v–105r, 107v–108r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 152–3, 156–7). Juxon describes how Stephen Estwicke tried to resist the imposition of the Covenant, as he had in February 1646. 184 185

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concessions to the army in June and July, the eleven members were forced from the parliament, many remained to stir up trouble in the city. A vivid royalist description of Massey in early June, ‘as he passed through the Streets in his Coach exhorting the Cittizens to defend themselves against the Madd men in the Army, who if they should prevaile would demand the heads of best cittizens and of the chief men of the parliament as well as his head, saying that Cromwell had betrayed them all and was fled from London’, is echoed by Juxon’s more sober comment for the following month that the impeached members ‘hould private meetings with all sorts of persones for to countermine the army’. Petitions from the eleven members were issued by Gangraena’s publisher, Ralph Smith.186 In June it seemed that the army, poised at St Albans, might indeed occupy the city, as the London militia committee in cooperation with a parliamentary Committee of Safety established on 11 June proposed to augment its forces by recruiting reformadoes. At this point one experienced Presbyterian activist had had enough: as Juxon reported, ‘Collonel Bellamii the Bookseller Made a Motione that all waies might bee taken to avoide the sheeding of more bloud’, and the Common Council itself urged conciliation in the face of the militia committee’s drive for confrontation.187 This month’s emergencies passed with hasty concessions to the army, but hectic petitioning (often in the name of city apprentices) and pamphleteering provided all too obvious evidence of the profound divisions that now existed over a peace settlement, religious liberty, and, most urgently, military authority in the city.188 Radical petitions complained about the removal of men of ‘known fidelity’ from the city militia and continued to denounce ‘all manner of invectives of the clergie or others’.189 Presbyterians called for a peace settlement restoring the king and preserving parliament’s privileges according to the Covenant, for the disbanding of the army and the dismantling of civil war administration (as Edwards had argued in Gangraena, Part Three) in addition to their concern with church government and religious radicals. One July pamphlet adopted an Edwards-style promiscuous attack combining hostility to the army, and its 186 Bodl., Clarendon MS 29, fo. 236, royalist newsletter, 7/17 June; DWL, MS 24.50 fo. 112r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 161). A petition from the eleven Presbyterian MPs presented to parliament on 29 June was printed for Smith: The Petition of the Members of the House of Commons (London, 1647). 187 Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 238–48; Ashton, Counter Revolution, 179; DWL, MS 24.50 fos. 110v–111r (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 159–60). 188 See e.g. Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 258–9. 189 The Humble Petition of Many Thousands of Yong Men and Apprentices, 4–5.

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‘seducing Chaplains’ such as Peter, Dell and Saltmarsh, with opposition to a petition from Lambe’s congregation attacking the Lords.190 As the army again approached the city and the parliament again promised concessions, the city’s Presbyterian activists—citizens, officers and men of the trained bands, and apprentices—raised the stakes with a ‘Solemn Engagement’. Evoking, again, the Solemn League and Covenant, and fearing that ‘Religion, his Majesties honour and safety, the Priviledges of Parliament, and liberties of the subject are at present greatly endangered and like to be destroyed’, they made a solemn vow to bring the king to London for a personal treaty with the parliament and the Scots, based on his recent responses to peace propositions. A brief hostile account described this as a covenant ‘to oppose the Army. To represse all Independents’. Following the agreement of the Common Council this was presented to the House of Commons on 22 July. The next day, however, the parliament passed a new ordinance for the London militia returning it into the Independent-leaning hands of the pre-4 May committee. On 24 July the Solemn Engagement was declared treasonous.191 Two days later parliament rejected the petition of the city governors for the restoration of the militia ordinance of 4 May. The two Houses were promptly invaded by a London crowd of apprentices and reformadoes who coerced the members into repealing their votes on the city militia and the Solemn Engagement, and into voting to restore the eleven members and to invite Charles I to London. According to Juxon, Presbyterians amongst the city governors, notably Alderman James Bunce, along with many of the eleven members, were deeply implicated in the mob violence.‘Uppon which [the rejection of the petition] severall of them tould th’apprentizes and others whoe were there in great numbers that they had don what they could: and that now it rested in them to Play their Partes’. The Lords were threatened until they submitted, the Commons’ door was forced open, and the crowd 190 To the Right Honourable The Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament The Humble petition of those well-affected to Government, both young men and Apprentices of the City of London (London, 1647) E398 (23), printed date 16 July. An earlier version (dated 8 July) is BL 669, fo. 11 (41); it was presented on 14 July and claimed 10,000 hands. Works of Darkness Brought to Light (London, 1647), BL E399 (26), Thomason date 23 July. The designation of a petition that some historians would label ‘Leveller’, as from Lambe’s General Baptist congregation is worth noting. 191 BL 669, fo. 11 (47), Thomason date 21 July and his manuscript heading,‘presented to ye Cittie Comanders at Skiners Hall’, has the petition to city governors containing the Solemn Engagement. A Petition from the City of London (London, 1647), BL E399 (35), Thomason date 24 July, 2. BL 669, fo. 11 (49) is a copy of parliament’s order against it; Ashton, Counter Revolution, 137, 183.

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refused to stir until the militia vote was passed, ‘themselves standeinge at ye Barr: and proposed what they would have voated and tho desired would not withdraw to permitt them liberty of voatinge’. Juxon claimed the apprentices voted along with the members and were only content when the votes were entered in the Commons’ Journal. At the very least, the city authorities did nothing to deter the crowds and made no effective response when parliament sent for help.192 As Independent and uncommitted members of both Houses (including both Speakers) slipped quietly away to the army complaining of mob coercion, the city authorities and the remaining members sought to mobilize forces for the defence of the city. Massey was made commander-in-chief of the city forces, and both he and Waller were added to a revived Committee of Safety. A declaration of the city justifying their proceedings looked back to the May 1646 Remonstrance and the December petition which had called for the disbanding of the army. London had been ignored while the army had seized the king and impeached the eleven members and the city militia had been altered at the ‘pleasure of the army’.193 On 28 July, the regular fast day, Presbyterian preachers sought to bolster citizens’ resolve. The Earl of Leicester noted in his Journal: ‘On Wednesday, 28, being the fast day, Mr Edwards and divers other ministers in London stirred up the people in theyr sermons to rayse armes to suppress the army, abusing the day which was sett apart for the calamityes of bleeding Irland, and exciting the people to put this kingdom again into bloud and so to make it bleeding England also’.194 Newsbooks note Ashe and Calamy preaching before the Common Council, and Jaggar and Whitlock at Westminster, but do not mention Edwards. There must be suspicions that Leicester was assuming that Edwards was the kind of man to preach in this situation, rather than demonstrating actual knowledge of events on that day.195 The notion that Edwards’s participation was more symbolic than real is perhaps given added weight by his greater prominence in hostile pamphleteering than in the Presbyterians’ own works. An intemperate attack 192 DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 113r–v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 162); Ashton, Counter Revolution, 350–3. BL 669, fo. 11 (50) for a copy of the order repealing the 23 and 24 July votes on the militia and the Solemn Engagement. 193 A Declaration of the Lord Mayor (London, 1647), BL E400 (29); the printed order, 1 Aug., for the city to stand to its defences is BL 669, fo. 11 (54); Ashton, Counter Revolution, 184–5. 194 HMC, Viscount de L’Isle, vol. vi. Sidney Papers, 569. 195 A Continuation of Certaine Speciall and Remarkable Passages, 23–30 July 1647, BL E400 (25); The Perfect Weekly Account, 21–9 July, BL E400 (16).

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on a sectarian army dated 30 July by Thomason attacked Nye and Marshall as ‘too good friends to Cromwell and that party’ and urged the city to resist the New Model. If they failed, city government would be turned over to ‘all the Armies Saints and gifted Brethren’; under Mayor Lilburne, Aldermen like Overton the Seeker and Writer the ‘Anti-Scripturist’ would destroy order and true religion. The city would have to ‘bid adieu to the Gospel, and thy faithfull Ministers’. Here the author named Calamy, Roberts, Cawton, and Case—but not Edwards.196 On the other hand, Edwards featured prominently in a royalist satire attacking Presbyterians and Independents alike in a dialogue between London and ‘thy elder in evill’, Amsterdam: Six years ago we had of Sects fourscore, Which are increast now to one hundred more, A book that’s called the Gangrene, printed late Their Authors and Opinions doth repeat, Nine score opinions that book sheweth clear, Lord, what a harvest hath the Devill made here!197

The genre of radical pamphlets lampooning ‘Sir John Presbyter’ and ‘Sir Simon Synod’ inaugurated by Richard Overton’s The Arraignement of Mr Persecution had a new lease of life in these weeks and Edwards appeared in several of the summer’s tracts. In The Last Will and Testament of Sir John Presbyter Who Dyed of a new Disease Called the Particuler Charge of the Army, Edwards, like Case, Burgess, and Calamy, featured among the mourners and was bequeathed ‘500 acres of Bishops Lands, with all the timber growing thereon, to be by him converted to Gibbots to hang up the Independents’. In The Ghost of Sir John Presbyter, Edwards was ‘another of my newer able brats’, doing much better service for evil in England than he would do in hell. Finally The Infamous History of Sir Simon Synod and his sonne Sir John Presbyter featured Edwards as ‘that Presbyterian Hercules hewing downe all the godly, whom his venerable Ignorantship in his hodg-podg’d Gangrena terms hereticks, Sectaries and Schismatics’. Here again Sir John and Sir Simon sickened and died (despite the attentions of Dr John Bastwick) when faced with a messenger, ‘bringing letters of the frontispiece whereof were written the desires of 196 Some Queries propounded to the Common Councell and Citizens of London (London, 1647), 3, 9. 197 Londons Metamorphosis: Or a Dialogue Between London and Amsterdam. Discoursing Compendiously of the change of Government, Alteration of Manners, and the Escapes of Sectaries (London, 1647), BL E399 (21), Thomason date 22 July, 4.

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the army’.198 A rare Presbyterian riposte, The Last Will and Testament of Sir James Independent, had many of the same targets as Edwards: Sir James’s body was to be wrapped in sheets of evil books such as The Arraignment of Mr Persecution, Archer’s Comfort for Beleevers, and Williams’ Bloudy Tenet. The chief mourners were Burton, Knollys, Simpson, Saltmarsh, and John Goodwin, who as the author of the blasphemous Hagiomastix was the obvious choice to preach the funeral sermon. But neither Edwards or Gangraena was mentioned.199 Edwards’s energy may well have been failing, his health no longer robust enough for aggressive preaching. Henry Pinnell’s and John Saltmarsh’s remarks about Edwards’s sickly ‘complexion’ and Edwards’s own caution about further instalments of his work on toleration—‘if God spare life and liberty’—may have been more than rhetoric, for he was to be dead within the year.200 He is certainly absent from the sources for the denouement of the crisis, surfacing only on his deathbed in Amsterdam. As reformadoes were enlisted in ever greater numbers, plans were made to bring Charles to London without conditions, and the New Model came ominously closer, even some of the zealots got cold feet. Stephen Marshall, as the hostile account already quoted suggests, had long been searching for a compromise, but on 2 August the broad majority of the Westminster Assembly made overtures for peace, when they established a committee to mediate between the city, the parliament, and the army. Stanley Gower and Jeremiah Whitaker, whose zeal for the Presbyterian way could not be doubted, were among those involved; while in a parallel initiative by the city clergy, twenty ministers signed a declaration for peace, taken by Ashe, Calamy, and Case to the militia committee.201 198 The Last Will and Testament of Sir John Presbyter Who Dyed of a new Disease Called the Particuler Charge of the Army (London, 1647), BL E399 (22), Thomason date 22 July; The Ghost of Sir John Presbyter (London, 1647),‘Printed in the yeare, of the Presbyterian feare’, BL E401 (22), Thomason date 1 Aug.; The Infamous History of Sir Simon Synod and his sonne Sir John Presbyter (London, 1647), BL E401 (31), 12 Aug., 3–4; Smith, Literature and Revolution, 299–301; Smith, ‘Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts’, 42–3; for the genre. Other examples published in these weeks did not mention Edwards: The Lamentation of the Ruling Lay-Elders Sadly bemoaning the death of their late foster-father Sir John Presbyter, deceased (London, 1647), BL E402 (1), mentions only Cornelius Burgess by name. 199 The Last Will and Testament of Sir James Independent (London, 1647), BL E400 (30), 31 July 1647. 200 ‘An Answer in few words to Master Edwards his second Part of the Gangrena’, no pagination, annexed to Saltmarsh, Reasons for Unitie, Peace and Love; Gangraenachrestum, 8. 201 As early as 22 June, Sir Robert Harley (whose son Edward was one of the eleven members) had written to Marshall in search of a compromise: Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War

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On the same day, a number of citizens ‘of worth and qualitie’ petitioned the Common Council to avoid a renewal of war. They were viciously attacked, according to Juxon, by swaggering reformadoes under the command of Massey and another Presbyterian commander, Sydenham Poyntz, although a later account claimed Poyntz was defending himself from a ‘most rude rabble of Anabaptists and such like seditious sectaries and schismaticks’.202 Nonetheless, Waller was appointed as commander of the city’s horse on 3 August, although by then the game was up. The army, mustered on Hounslow Heath, had resolved to march on the city to restore the MPs and Peers who had fled, and the Southwark trained bands had refused all cooperation with the city forces. On 6 August the parliament revoked all its votes since 26 July.Waller amongst other Presbyterian members, aided by sympathetic naval commanders, had fled the country before the army marched through the city streets on 7 August 1647. It would be good to know if Edwards went with them but the sources are silent.203 John Glyn, city Recorder and MP, stayed behind and was soon imprisoned along with the ‘malignant’ Lord Mayor John Gayre, and the Presbyterian Aldermen Bunce, Langham, and Adams. In late September the Mayor and Aldermen were voted guilty of high treason, while Edwards’s ally, Colonel John Jones, was found guilty of high misdemeanors.204 In the immediate aftermath of 7 August, the Presbyterian clergy kept their heads down; Juxon claimed that ‘not an ingeniouse man that was ingaiged in it that was willinge to owne it’. The high-profile sermons reflecting on the crisis were given, predictably, by the pivotal figures of Marshall and Nye. On Sunday 8 August Marshall preached on Jeremiah 45, which, according to John Harrington, he used to argue that God’s people might ‘suffer outward afflictions but then they get increase of grace . . . of inward peace; of glorys’. Thursday 12 August was a day of thanksgiving voted when (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 188; Mitchell and Struthers, Minutes, 407–8; LJ ix. 367 for the Assembly’s mediation. It was the conciliatory Marshall who liased with Fairfax and the New Model; Burgess, Sion College, 22–3. 202 A peaceable petition (London, 1647), BL 669, fo. 11 (58), presented 2 Aug., Thomason’s date for the broadside is 4 Aug. DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 117r–v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 166–7); Ashton, Counter Revolution, 313 (quoting a pamphlet of Dec.). 203 Waller fled on 5 August (see e.g. Bodl., Clarendon MS 30 fo. 30); the Presbyterian naval commander William Batten and his chaplain Samuel Kem helped in the escape: Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 15–17; J. R. Powell and E. K. Timings (eds.), Documents Relating to the Civil Wars, 1647–1648 (London, 1963); DWL, MS 24.50, fos. 114v–115r, 119v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 166, 169); Ashton, Counter Revolution, 184–5. 204 Gentles,‘The Struggle for London’, 284.

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the army approached the city; Marshall preached this time on a most appropriate text, Joshua 22: 33:‘And the thing pleased the children of Israel, and the children of Israel blessed God, and did not intend to go up against them in battel, to destroy the land wherein the children of Reuben and Gad dwelt’. As Harrington who had remained in the city noted, the doctrine was ‘A great mercy for which the greatest thankfulnes du when God restrains his people when ready to shed one the others bloud’. Nye’s text was Psalm 107: 21, ‘Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness’.205 Edwards, we can be sure, did not agree. gangr aena and presbyterianism We will conclude this chapter with a summing-up of Edwards’s impact on developments in 1646–7, and a discussion of the slightly different issue of what an examination of events taking Edwards’ s Gangraena as its focus can add to our understanding of parliamentarian divisions in general and Presbyterianism in particular. We must remember always that Gangraena did not stand alone, but was the most startling and notorious example of a broader Presbyterian polemical campaign. Edwards’s crucial, and from some perspectives disastrously successful, argument was to insist on an unbreakable connection between heresy and schism. Only a comprehensive and compulsory national church with no allowance for tender consciences could, in Edwards’s view, combat error, heresy, and blasphemy. It is a particularly poignant linkage given Edwards’s own lack of positive enthusiasm for Presbyterianism as such; his conviction that error was indivisible drove him to an abhorrence of any degree of toleration, and so to a national church. This linking of opposition to heresy with commitment to a specific form of church government was by no means obvious or necessary. It is possible to conceive of the sort of practical cooperation at parish level between men broadly agreed on doctrine illustrated at the start of this chapter, permitting both some liberty of conscience and a determined joint assault on more radical errors, overcoming divisions on church government. As Michael Winship has eloquently demonstrated for 1630s New England, disagreement over how to combat error could be as debilitating 205 DWL, MS 24.50, fo. 118v (Journal, ed. Lindley and Scott, 168); Diary of John Harrington, 56–7; Marshall preached again on Jeremiah on Sunday 15th. His 12 Aug. sermon was published as A Sermon Preached to the Two Houses of Parliament (London, 1647).

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as the original cleavages.206 Gangraena did much to create an atmosphere of panic which prompted rigorous measures, and regarded more confident or relaxed attitudes with horror. Edwards reported with paroxysms of rage that Hugh Peter had claimed ‘the Sects and Schismes did us no harme’ (an opinion that could also be derived from his printed works): how could Peter call ‘Scismaticks and Opinionists’ ‘harmelesse Anabaptists’; had he not heard of the ‘Tumults, Wars, Tragedies, Out-rages, Rapes, raised and committed’ by them; ‘Are they harmlesse who in contempt of Baptisme have pissed in the Font’, assault ministers, kill ‘tender young persons and ancient with dipping . . . in the depth of Winter’, and so on.207 We have quoted already much contemporary evidence for Edwards’s influence on readers and activists. The impact of an approach that implied anyone who did not share the panic was condoning evil is also seen in a letter from the Suffolk Puritan Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston to John Winthrop in March 1647. He bemoaned the pride and contention amongst the godly, which had begun in New England and had now spread to an old England devastated by civil war: ‘Sir, I acknowledg myselfe a presbiterian (yet such a one as can and doe hartely love an humble and pious independant such I meane as are with you for ours differ much generally from them’. Presbyterianism was best suited to ‘our government’, yet Barnardiston would support Independency in New England, ‘for truly I cannot yet see any certayne and generall forme of dysipline set downe in the word of God’. His judgement on English independency, however, could have come directly from Gangraena: ‘But Sir, with Horror and greefe I speake it, noe opiniones and blasfemy is so bad but that our Independantes heer generally will shelter and countenance, for all Heresyes and sectes wilbe Independants under the notion that none should be trobled for ther contience though hurtfull to others.’208 We know another MP, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, bought copies of Parts One and Three of Gangraena and they seem to have influenced him; in his parliamentary journal, especially in passages worked over after the event, he used Independent as ‘a multi-purpose’ term of abuse for ‘sectaries of every kind, political extremists and habitual critics of peace propositions’, just as Edwards did. As we saw in Chapter 4, even a hostile reader like Cheney Culpeper might be reluctantly and partially convinced.209 206

Winship,‘ “The most glorious church in the world” ’. Gangraena, iii. 125, 138–9. 208 Winthrop Papers, 145. Barnardiston also reported that the New England radical Samuel Gorton, noticed in Gangraena, was under examination by parliament for blasphemy. 209 Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict, 102. 207

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Edwards’s Gangraena helped construct polemic communities, in which divisions on some issues—liberty of conscience, in particular—were maximized, while connections founded on other issues were exaggerated. On the one hand unity in opposing error was taken to imply membership of the ‘Presbyterian’ camp (including Prynne as well as Bastwick and Edwards) while any opposition to Presbyterian church government implicated respectable Independents in the most terrible blasphemy and heresy. The debate for and against Gangraena helped to bring about some of the alliances Edwards described. Vicars, Ricraft, Jones, Prynne, and Bastwick demonstrated the support for Edwards’s account, while we have described in Chapter 4 an opposing community of those prepared to challenge him in print, ranging from the respectable Jeremiah Burroughs and Samuel Eaton, through more controversial figures like Peter, Saltmarsh, and John Goodwin, to the radicals such as Walwyn and Webbe. When John Goodwin in Cretensis defended in print the opinions of Burroughs, Eaton, and Robert Cosens, he proved, according to Edwards, his argument of ‘the Independents holding with all other sects, not dividing from them’. The licenser Bachelor’s help for Webbe showed ‘the Independents will not lose any of the most blasphemous, Atheisticall hereticall men, but further them, and joyn with them against the Presbyterians, licensing their Writings, helping them to conceale, and deliver more cautelously their dangerous opinions’.210 Edwards’s attacks provoked real, but contingent alliances, of men who united, despite their differences, to defend themselves.William Walwyn, on his own account, had been disappointed by the caution of the Apologetical Narration, yet he became a prominent element in the broad Independent alliance of Edwards’s victims.211 In the city of London in 1646–7 these polemically constructed communities can be seen mobilizing in practice to fight for the parliamentarian cause—each side convinced its very survival was at stake. Leaders on both sides featured in the enterprise of Gangraena as subjects, opponents, allies, or collaborators and there were many echoes of Edwards’s programme and of his language. Some historians have suggested that by early 1647 ‘the major issues concerning Parliament and the city were decidedly political in character’. As Gangraena, Part Three gave more prominence to political errors so a political programme had overtaken the settlement of church government as the priority of city Presbyterians.212 Edwards’s work, however, does not 210 211 212

Gangraena, ii. 37, 138–9. Walwyn’s Just Defence, in Haller and Davies (eds.), Leveller Tracts. Mahoney,‘Presbyterian Party’, 197; Brenner’s view is similar.

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support a sharp distinction between religious and political aims. The political Presbyterians of 1646/7—led in parliament by Holles, Stapleton, and Essex—were a complex coalition united in opposition to radical sectarianism as well as in the more positive desire to dismantle the wartime administration and settle with the king. In Gangraena, Edwards consistently associated himself with an English Presbyterian party aligned with the Scots, and in Part Three he specifically endorsed the broader Presbyterian programme as well as describing or constructing a wide-ranging and interconnected radical opposition in city and New Model Army. He might even be read as inciting resistance to an Independent parliament. Edwards’s relative reticence on the details of church government was reflected in the range of preferences for a national church within the ‘Presbyterian’ camp. Despite his opposition to a clericalist Presbyterianism, William Prynne is usually, and legitimately, labelled a Presbyterian by historians—for he and Edwards clearly recognized each other as on the same side and engaged in the same enterprise. Their agreement was based on what they opposed—not on their positive visions of church government.213 Edwards had in Part Three a clearer sense of a radical political challenge, connected to, yet distinguishable from, the heterodox religious opinions and activities that were his initial concern. Mid-seventeenth-century commentators were perfectly capable of distinguishing between political and religious issues, and they did so distinguish. But in any specific petition or campaign a variety of issues were combined into a more or less coherent programme. There would seem little reason to accept the view that in 1647 the political demands of London Presbyterians came to take priority over religious aims, given their own repeated evocations of the Covenant and their insistence that their estates, their liberties, and their lives meant nothing ‘if the Arke of God be taken’. Political questions—in particular the control of the city militia—had an obvious urgency in the summer of 1647, but immediacy is not the same as significance. The city’s military automony, like its privileges in general, were crucial to the godly householders of London Presbyterianism, but they were particularly pressing issues when threatened by a sectarian army that, according to Edwards and others, was intimately connected to well-known, long-established city troublemakers—John Lilburne, and the members of John Goodwin’s and 213 William Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 1600–1669 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), might dissent from a simple Presbyterian label, but most historians do use it: Ashton, Counter Revolution, 163, is an example.

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Thomas Lambe’s congregations. Equally, the issue of liberty of conscience, broadened out into other aspects of personal autonomy and freedom from coercion, remained central to radical campaigns and alliances from 1646. Connected to the relative weight of political and religious aims is the issue of how far there was a growing rapprochement between Presbyterians and royalists in these months. The most startling vote by parliament between 26 July and 4 August was the decision to invite Charles to London, to settle a ‘well-grounded’ peace. Whatever the formal conditions Presbyterians sought to impose—and in 1647 Presbyterian demands on religion, the control of appointments and of the armed forces, were more stringent than the terms offered the king in army-independent negotiations—the return of Charles to London when parliamentarians were so divided would have immensely increased the potential for a restoration of royal power. Valerie Pearl and Robert Ashton have described the events of late July as an attempt at counter-revolution, at a settlement that would have negated many of parliament’s war aims.214 At issue is the degree to which city Presbyterians, through war-weariness and fear of radicalism, had abandoned support for parliament and were willing to cooperate with thoroughgoing royalists. Exploring these issues from the perspective of a study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena is illuminating, if not without problems. Edwards was a singular, perhaps ‘extreme’ figure although I have presented much evidence from city petitions and Presbyterian pamphlets, on the one hand, and radical arguments, on the other, which reveals that Edwards’s priorities and obsessions were widely shared. As the army itself recognized he had done as much as anyone to define it as a hotbed of sectarian disorder and unorthodox speculation, bent on political domination. A report from the English army occupying Edinburgh in October 1648 complained, ‘Master Edwards his Gangrene I perceive was good Gospell here, what seed it hath sowne, you may imagine’. Many of the Scots were surprised that the ‘sectarian’ army were ‘not as bad and dangerous as we were suspected to be by false informations of us’. From London, John Price in 1648 accused the Presbyterian clergy more generally of provoking the people to resist the army: ‘Did not those men . . . stirre up the people, 214 On 1647 see John Adamson,‘The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987); Pearl, ‘London’s Counter-Revolution’; Ashton, Counter Revolution, 182–3, 349–52; Kishlansky, Rise of the New Model Army, 285, 341 n. 80, is more sceptical, partly because he regards the attempts to raise military forces as rather half-hearted (at least before late July), but also because he sees the crisis as being over different interpretations of the parliamentary cause. A version of this latter argument has been adopted here.

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to withstand the Army, and to this day declaim against the Citie for not standing up at that time’. In response Cornelius Burgess quite correctly pointed out how the London ministers meeting in Sion College had taken the initiative on 2 August 1647 in seeking to avoid bloodshed.215 Burgess, Calamy, Ashe, and Gower, just as much as Marshall, had drawn back from this brink. Edwards chose (if that is the word) flight rather than compromise. The balance of probability is that he had supported the coercion of parliament and the attempt to challenge the military supremacy of the New Model Army. There is no evidence, however, that he had become a ‘royalist’ in the sense of working for peace on easy terms with the king, despite sharing royal contempt for sectaries and schismatics. Edwards’s condemnation of the prelacy of the 1630s is reiterated throughout his writing, and everything we know of Edwards suggests he was and would have remained amongst those Presbyterians who would accept the king only if he signed the Covenant. There is a clear contrast in the summer of 1647 between most city manifestos which called for the return of the king on the basis of the Solemn League and Covenant, linking royal power to the privileges of parliament, the laws of the land, and the reformation of the church, and royalist declarations such as the one couched in the form of an apprentices’ petition, which urged that the king be restored to his full rights and prerogatives and not compelled to anything against his conscience.216 One way of looking at this is to suggest that for Presbyterians the religious aim of godly reformation through a coercive national church took priority over the political desire for pacification. There is some validity in this, but some distortion also. As I have sought to demonstrate, militant Presbyterians should not be seen as lukewarm parliamentarians, but as parliamentarians consistently enthusiastic for the aims of 1642. Brenner’s argument that the army’s march on London represented a completion of the revolution begun in the city with radical pressure for an effective war effort in 1642/3 suggests that there is only one version of what parliamentarianism was or should be.217 Even when denouncing the 215 The Moderate Intelligencer, 191 (9–16 Nov. 1648); I am very grateful to Ian Gentles for this reference. Price, The Pulpit Incendiary, 19; Burgess, Sion College, What it is and What it does, printed Sion College’s proposals of 2 Aug. (22–3). 216 A Remonstrance and Declaration of the Yong Men and Apprentices of the City of London (London, 1647), BL E400 (31), Thomason date 31 July; compare A Petition from the City of London and A declaration of the Lord Mayor (nn. 191 and 193, above). 217 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 512–13. There is a parallel illogicality to Mahoney’s argument (‘Presbyterian Party’, 202–3) that the London Aldermen John Langham and Thomas Adams, whom he judged to have been more moderate Presbyterians than James Bunce, must have been motivated by political considerations into supporting the Scots. It was clearly possible to be both moderate and genuinely religiously motivated.

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regicide in early 1649 the London Presbyterian clergy based their case on a competing vision of the true parliamentary cause, which they argued the army and its supporters had betrayed; they supported a limited monarchy, not a thoroughgoing royalism.218 We cannot know what Edwards’s precise political views were by the summer of 1647, but certainly, despite his fears in Part Three that a facile democratic politics was threatening to destroy monarchy, aristocracy, and good order, Edwards continued to insist on his commitment to limited parliamentary monarchy: Parliaments are the strong Boundaries of the exorbitancies of Princes and their Ministers; they have by the constitution of the Kingdome and the Lawes, power more then sufficient to restraine the Tyranny of Princes, and to correct their greatest Favourits and Officers of State, let the people once lose Parliaments and be out of love with them, and then farewell all Liberty, Property, and slavery will come in like an armed man.219

Two broad issues thus complicated and in the end sabotaged effective Presbyterian cooperation with ‘Cavalier’ royalists from 1647 to 1660 and beyond: the Presbyterian commitment to the regulated monarchy envisaged in 1642, as well as their support for religious reformation according to the Solemn League and Covenant. The hostility to religious radicalism which activated many parliamentarians besides Edwards had a contradictory impact on their attitude to royalism. The desire to eliminate the army’s influence and the long-standing opposition in royalist declarations to sectaries encouraged common ground with the king’s supporters; on the other hand, the conviction that only a compulsory disciplinary church government on the Presbyterian model could eliminate error and heresy drove a wedge between them. Indeed, at almost regular intervals from 1644, and most particularly in the summer of 1647, when the Heads of Proposals were offered to Charles by the New Model Army and its associates in parliament, Presbyterians had justified fears of a royalist–Independent alliance against their hoped-for reformation of the church, based on the restoration of an episcopal church with liberty of conscience beyond it. Lewis Dyve, a royalist who shared imprisonment in the Tower in 1647 with

218 See e.g. A Serious and faithfull representation of the Judgment of Ministers of the Gospel Within the Province of London (London, 18 Jan. 1649). Ralph Smith was one of the booksellers who produced this, and it was licensed by Cranford, who also signed it along with Walker, Roborough, Gower, Samuel Clarke, Roberts, Jenkyn, and Love (amongst Edwards’s connections); and A Vindication of the Ministers of the Gospel in and about London (London, 1649); a full demonstration of this case is provided in Vernon,‘The Quarrel of the Covenant’. 219 Gangraena, iii. Preface, sig. ) (2v.

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John Lilburne, was convinced that the king’s best hopes lay with the Independents. Dyve welcomed Presbyterian attempts to raise forces in the city in July, not because they would aid the royalists, but as a means of bringing the New Model to realize its dependence on Charles.220 Charles’s fatal propensity for negotiating too obviously with all sides at once, and his unrealistic hopes that concessions would only be temporary, more than Independent reluctance, ensured these plans came to nothing. It has been suggested that the Presbyterian bookseller George Thomason was more and more sympathetic to royalism from 1647, but there was no general, neat convergence between Presbyterians and royalists. Colonel Edward King’s diatribe against the sectaries at the Lincolnshire sessions also contained demands for harsher measures against delinquents.221 Charles’s ‘Engagement’ with the Hamiltonian Scots in December 1647 included a commitment to suppress ‘the opinions and practices of Antitrinitarians, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Arminians, Familists, Brownists, Separatists, Independents, Libertines, and Seekers, and generally for suppressing all blasphemy, heresy, schism’. Nonetheless the testimonies against error from Cheshire and Staffordshire insisted their concern was to deflect the Scots from their threat to invade in 1648, not to ratify or endorse their views; and within England, Presbyterians did not rally to the king in 1648. Despite several scares, including a celebration of Charles I’s coronation day and public expressions of support for ‘our brethren of Scotland’, London itself remained sullenly under parliament’s control.222 English Presbyterian allegiances were also confused by the divisions amongst the Scots themselves, with a powerful Presbyterian grouping around Argyll opposed to the faction under the Duke of Hamilton, who had pushed through the Engagement with the king. Almost exactly four years after Edwards fled London, his younger colleague Christopher Love, the minister who had joined the attack on Dell in 1646, was executed for treason after involvement in murky, but at least partly genuine, royalist plotting. The ‘Love’ plot reunites us with many associates of Edwards. The minister at Christ Church, William Jenkyn, was sent to the Tower for his involvement, while Thomas Cawton fled to the 220 The Tower of London Letter-Book of Sir Lewis Dyve, 1646–7, ed. H. G. Tibbutt (Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 38, 1958 for 1957), 49–96; Adamson,‘Projected Settlement’. 221 Spencer,‘Politics of George Thomason’; Ashton, Counter Revolution, 221. 222 Ashton, Counter Revolution, 191–3, 291–2; Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 348, for the Engagement. For London see Gentles, ‘Struggle for London’. The role of Skippon as the city’s military commander was crucial.

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Amsterdam congregation that had sheltered Edwards. Edward Massey was implicated as well as an ancient John Vicars, James Cranford, and the obscurer Christ Church parishioner Henry Potter, who five years earlier had gone with Nicholas Widmerpole and other friends to hear William Dell preach.223 This last stand of the Presbyterian engagés, inveterate opponents of liberty of conscience and a regime backed by the New Model Army, was firmly in the tradition of the ‘Covenant engaged citizens’ of 1646. Fuelled by the fevered imagination of another prominent 1640s figure, Alderman James Bunce, himself by now in Dutch exile, the plotters were part of the moves to bring about a royalist restoration through alliance with hard-line Scottish Covenanters and to sideline the ‘Cavalier’ interest. The Love plot is thus another example of the complications of both Presbyterianism and royalism, and the unresolvable tensions between them. Prominent ministers like Ashe and Calamy supported Love on the scaffold and saw to the posthumous publication of his sermons, but lacked the temperamental edge, the extremism that drove a Love, a Jenkyn, or earlier an Edwards to provocative action. In the Presbyterian networks of London throughout the 1640s differences of temperament as much as policy influenced how men reacted at crucial turning points such as August 1647. In the context of the 1640s Presbyterianism was a radical movement that sought to achieve a dramatic social, moral, and religious transformation of the English people through a revived national church with a robust, participatory discipline, backed by a dynamic godly magistracy. For these ends the most militant Presbyterians, especially in London, were prepared to mobilize a broad range of the population. A variety of media, arenas, and actions were deployed. Petitions, sermons, tracts, and declarations were distributed and discussed in pulpits, bookshops, London streets and public places such as the Guildhall, the Exchange, the Windmill Tavern, and Westminster Hall. Argument, petitioning, lobbying, and in summer 1647 direct action were initiated by Presbyterians rather than the sectaries and Levellers usually credited with political innovation. Through clerical associations and networks in particular, Presbyterian mobilization occurred throughout England. Gangraena was perhaps the richest of the many texts—from broadsides and brief petitions to complex theological tracts—that played a crucial role in Presbyterian activism. Another way of putting this would be that Edwards’s Gangraena both illustrates and was made possible by the existence of a ‘public sphere’ in 1640s London. Historians’ use of the notion of a ‘public sphere’ is derived 223

The best account of the ‘Love plot’ is now Vernon,‘Sion College Conclave’, 342–52.

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from a belated adoption of the work of Jurgen Habermas, who argued for significant change in the eighteenth century. He described the coming together of ‘private’ individuals—in a variety of locations and associations (coffee houses, assembly rooms, societies, and pressure groups) to scrutinize or criticize the state in the press and other public fora: ‘The bourgeois public sphere may be concerned above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves . . . The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.’ The public sphere is bourgeois, modern, secular, and rational,‘Private people come together as a public’.224 Applying Habermasian concepts to the seventeenth century of course involves a challenge to his view that subsequent developments were ‘without historical precedent’, and advances in our understanding of a public sphere in early modern England have generally occurred through a critical engagement with Habermas rather than a wholesale adoption of his work. In an important contribution Peter Lake and Michael Questier have seen the later sixteenth century as crucial and have stressed the importance of religious issues in public debate. According to Lake and Questier, at least three versions of ‘public’ emerged in post-reformation religious debates. There was, first, the drive to convince a general audience, or public, through a variety of means, oral, written, visual, dramatic. There were (rival) claims to represent the public interest, as a means of legitimating sectional arguments, and finally, as a consequence of the first two, there were more or less overt appeals to an audience or public to judge the truth or validity of a position. In a clear departure from the Habermas model, Lake and Questier have pointed to the involvement of the state or monarchy itself in appeals for support and thus to the formation of a public sphere. Their stress on religion, also, sits uneasily with a Habermasian concept of modern rationality, but is clearly relevant for Edwards’s career.225 While there are clear precedents for the political and religious mobilizations of the 1640s—in the 1590s, and the 1620s most obviously—I have argued in this chapter that institutional and political developments in the 1640s, in London especially, made for a change in kind as well as degree. David Zaret too has argued for a wide-ranging and dramatic transformation in the form and content of public mobilization in the 1640s through a study of the impact of rival printed petitions. Zaret argues that the innov224 225

Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 26–31. Lake and Questier,‘Papists, Puritans and the Public Sphere’.

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ative use of petition in the early 1640s, and particularly the printing of opposing petitions, ‘facilitated the “invention” of public opinion’. This was a practical, not a theoretical innovation, fuelled by the need to raise support for competing political positions rather than by an abstract commitment to an open political process. Through discussion of rival petitions people came to ‘public use of their reason’. Other aspects of the process fit less well with Habermas’s account. The men agitating over the meaning of the parliamentary cause were far from acting as private men, for parliamentarianism defined itself overwhelmingly as about the public interest and public service. Many indeed held public office under the parliament. They were by no means unequivocally bourgeois. Democracy’s origins, on Zaret’s account, lie here, long before the enlightenment, and unconnected to any inherent qualities in Protestantism or to any specifically bourgeois or capitalist economic development, for the pragmatic commitment to moblizing public opinion behind rival programmes embodied in petitions was found across the political spectrum in the 1640s from royalists to Levellers.226 Zaret’s description of how ‘Debates over the relative merits of rival petitions led contemporaries to attach importance to informed consent, and open exchange of ideas, and appeals to reason in the petitioning process’, could be paralleled from our discussion of Edwards’s debates with his critics in Chapter 4. But clearly a focus on petitions is too narrow—debates and appeals to judgement appear in many different forms in the mid-seventeenth century. Historians of science too have outlined how the establishing of the scientific truth depended on a public arena in which a reputable audience could scrutinize experimental or observational material in print.227 Edwards’s polemical career is a prime example of the importance of religious divisions in driving public debate. Religious polemic had a central role in the conjuring up of an informed, polarized, mobilized public opinion. How ‘open’, ‘informed’, and rational such opinion was is hard to assess. For most early modern religious 226 Zaret,‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion in the English Revolution’, esp., 1498–1500, 1540–2; see also Zaret, ‘Religion and the Rise of Liberal Democratic Ideology in Seventeenth Century England’, American Sociological Review, 54 (1989), and his chapter in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. Zaret’s book, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), appeared too late to be fully integrated in my discussion. Scribner, ‘Heterodoxy, Literacy and Print’, 262–3, described six forms of ‘public opinion’ in the German reformation, defining them essentially by location—guild, parish, street, or corporation. 227 Zaret,‘Petitions and the “Invention”of Public Opinion’, 1536; Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Johns, Nature of the Book, 468–9.

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campaigners, and certainly for Edwards, truth was believed to be generally knowable, despite being obviously contested. Edwards’s writings depended on the conviction that a properly informed public would share his horror at the spread of heresy, and shun the sects. The importance of London networks and arenas to Edwards’s career, and to the political and religious divisions of the 1640s more generally, suggests further modifications of Zaret’s account. Although all factions in the 1640s had to appeal to ‘public opinion’, there were particular material or social contexts which particularly facilitated extensive and enthusiastic mobilization. The label ‘bourgeois’ is perhaps too simple but the urban, collective structures of London created a public sphere broader, more complex, self-conscious, and sophisticated than the royalist version. Edwards’s activities certainly show there was no inevitable connection between political radicalism, conventionally defined, and the appeal to the ‘public’. He indeed provides the most compelling evidence for the contribution of Presbyterians—conventionally if inappropriately seen as ‘conservative’ parliamentarians—to the public sphere of the 1640s. Within a liberal tradition, we credit Edwards’s victims and opponents, like Walwyn, with his stress on plain men searching for the truth without the oppressive supervision of self-interested clerics, and Milton in Areopagitica, with the founding of a public arena for free debate. In Areopagitica, an attack on the restrictions of the licensing ordinance of July 1643, Milton quoted Euripides: ‘This is true liberty, when free-born men, | Having to advise the public, may speak free’. We are now more sceptical about the plausibility of a liberal, anti-authoritarian Milton.228 But equally, we may have underestimated the paradoxical impact of the campaigning by overtly authoritarian, pro-censorship Presbyterians like Edwards. As we have seen, Edwards urged magistrates to burn ‘wicked books’, and suppress unlicensed printing, and denounced the licensing activities of John Bachelor. On the other hand he had to buy unlicensed books to read and refute them; his sighting of the ‘old wolf ’ Clement Writer came in Peter Cole’s bookshop, ‘I going to him to help me to an unlicensed Book’. In his fury at the lack of response to Antapologia and in his provocative treatment of the books of his opponents, Edwards was setting challenges that were clearly expected to produce yet more wicked books. Gangraena was intended as ‘a manuall that might be for everyone’s 228 Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ii. 1643–1648, 485. See e.g. the essays in Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (eds.), Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York and London: Methuen, 1988).

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reading’, and its author rejoiced at his success in a competitive market with the ‘quick sale’ of his books.229 The contrast between restrictive Presbyterians and liberal sectaries fails on both sides. Apparently open-minded men like Walwyn themselves called for limits on the circulation of books like Gangraena: I cannot see how authority can passe over this unparaleld use of the presse which you have taken, to name in publike so many of their faithfull adherents in so reproachful a manner, to tax their proceedings in the proceedings of their Committees, to affirme and declare to all the world, that the victorious successes of the Parliaments forces, is but the increase of errors and heresies.230

In a later work, Walwyn imagined a repentant Edwards saying: I have done it out of the pride and vanity of my owne mind, out of disdaine, that plaine unlearned men should seeke for knowledge any other way then as they are directed by us that are learned; out of base feare, if they should fall to teach one another, that . . . we should lose our domination in being sole judges of doctrine and discipline, . . . [and] our profits and plentious maintenance by Tithes . . . And all this I saw coming in with that liberty, which plaine men tooke, to try and examine all things.

Edwards, claimed Walwyn,‘loved none, but superstitious or ignorant people’ and feared ‘an understanding enquiring man, studious in the Scriptures’ who would reject his views.231 Although Walwyn did allow that Edwards wanted men to search for knowledge, albeit under the guidance of the clergy, this accusation is misleading for it misses the fact that Edwards did assume that ‘understanding, enquiring’ readers would share his views. Gangraena, as Chapter 4 demonstrated, was a text that both built on and encouraged reader participation. It relied on readers for material, sought to provoke them to militant action, and in general envisaged an active, rational readership, judging good and wicked books for themselves: ‘every indifferent Reader’ was to weigh Edwards’s evidence, using it to ‘ballance, yea to weigh down Cretensis’. Exactly so did the printers of Zaret’s cross-petitions—citing and reproducing conflicting texts—offer Gangraena, i. 171, 8. Walwyn, A Whisper in the Eare of Mr Thomas Edwards (London, 1646), Thomason date 13 Mar. 1645/6, here from the facsimile in Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, iii. 332. The army in 1647 was also presumably calling for the suppression of Edwards’s ‘scandalous’ books. 231 Walwyn, A Prediction of Mr Edwards His Conversion and Recantation (London, 1646), Thomason date 11 Aug. 1646, here from Haller (ed.), Tracts on Liberty, iii. 343, 341. 229 230

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readers a contested narrative on which a judgement was required, imposing a ‘dialogic order on conflict’.232 John Price, Goodwin’s ‘prophet’, claimed the London Presbyterian clergy meeting at Sion College aimed ‘to engage and tamper privatly with chiefe Citizens in publick places, as Common Councell men etc, and publickly in Pulpit, and Presse, stirring up the people, by all possible meanes, under the pretence of the glory of God, a blessed reformation, the keeping of the Covenant’. In response Cornelius Burgess denied some of Price’s specific accusations but he made no apology for the general efforts of the clergy in the ‘public cause’ against errors, heresies, and blasphemies.233 In the early 1640s another close associate of Edwards’s, John Vicars, praised a free press as a means of defending God’s truth: To see God’s Sabbaths more sincerely kept Of Carryers, Fruiterers, Taverns-soyle well swept, And Presses open wide to vindicate The Sabbath’s precious honour.234

It has been amply shown that Edwards and other Presbyterian zealots sought through writing, talking, petitioning, printing, and preaching to communicate a programme and mobilize support for it. Paradoxically according to our assumptions, Presbyterians like Edwards, Vicars, and Burgess saw no conflict between open debate and a predictable conclusion. Opportunities for mobilization were tragically complicated by the increasingly divergent interpretations of what the parliamentarian commitment to reformation implied. From the mid-1640s, orthodox London clerics, politicized members of the army, London sectaries, all claimed to be the true bearers of the principles of the parliamentarian cause, and worked to make their claims reality. It was not in some general coming together of concerned citizens, to criticize the state that a ‘public sphere’ emerged in the 1640s. Neither was it through some tolerant, open-end commitment to a search for truth. The work of Edwards and his opponents reveals the degree to which the expansion of public debate in print 232 Gangraena, ii. 48. See Vernon, ‘Sion College Conclave’, 281–6, for the general Presbyterian conviction that they could defeat Independents in open debate; Zaret, ‘Petitions and the “Invention” of Public Opinion,’ 1530–2. 233 Price, Pulpit Incendiary, 18; Burgess, Sion College, 7, 9–10. 234 Vicars, England’s Remembrancer (1641), quoted in Gerald M. Maclean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 102.

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and otherwise was driven by rigid, partisan positions. An enlarged public sphere arose from rivals fighting their own corner, defending conflicting, deeply held versions of the truth and the parliamentarian cause. Indeed in many ways it was the unattractive, often authoritarian Presbyterians who showed the most energetic commitment to the public arena, a commitment which culminated for Edwards in failure and flight in August 1647.

CHAPTER SIX

Conclusions ‘mr edwards of blessed memory ’—edwards’s ghost In August 1647 Edwards found refuge with the staunchly Presbyterian English church in Amsterdam, whose eminent early seventeenth-century pastor John Paget had been a determined opponent of congregational and separatist opinion amongst English exiles. We know he kept in touch with events in London through correspondence with the pastor of the Dutch congregation at Austin Friars London, Cesar Calendrini. Late in the year he was under consideration for the post of pastor to the Amsterdam church, but by December,‘weak in body’, Edwards was anxious, like others involved in the controversies of the times, to record the self-vindication with which this book began. His declaration was witnessed by Richard Maden, the pastor of the English church, with the pastors of the city’s German and Dutch churches, and confirmed a couple of weeks later in the presence of Edward Massey and William Waller who had come to visit Edwards ‘in his sickness’.1 When Edwards made his will on 3 February, new style, ‘sicke of bodie but of good and perfecte memory’, he described himself as ‘of London, Minister of the Word of God, latelie come from England and nowe lodged att the house of Mr Henry Whitaker in Amsterdam’; Whitaker and his 1 Carter, English Reformed Church, 96–7, 201–2; Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, ch. 4, and p. 387; Ole Peter Grell, ‘From Uniformity to Tolerance: The Effects on the Dutch Church in London of Reverse Patterns in English Church Policy, 1634–1647’, in Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Scolar Press, 1996), 77, refers to the register of Calendrini’s correspondence. GLMS 7424, no. 49 (not fo. as in Grell) notes two letters from Thomas Edwards minister at Amsterdam (which must date from later 1647) as well as letters from Edwards’s informant, Nicholas North minister of Dover, from Thomas Cawton in Rotterdam after the Love plot, and a very wide range of eminent ministers including Thomas Gataker, Thomas Weld, Hugh Peter, and the moderate episcopalians James Ussher and John Gauden. Compare Samuel Rutherford’s advice to his dying friend George Gillespie: ‘If ye leave any testimony to the Lord’s work and Covenant, against both Malignants and Sectaries (which I suppose may be needful), let it be under your hand, and subscribed before faithful witnesses’: Letters of Samuel Rutherford, ed. Andrew A. Bonar (Edinburgh and London, 1891), 645, 27 Sept. 1648. Gillespie followed Rutherford’s advice.

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wife, along with Maden, acted as witnesses. The will, a brief and hasty affair, left minor bequests to his sisters and other close kin, with the rest to his ‘dear and loving’ wife Mary left behind in London, ‘desireinge and reccommending her to be carefull in the education and bringinge upp of my children in the feare of God’. Mary obtained probate on 25 May 1648. Edwards’s funeral turned into a gathering of the Presbyterian exiles. Waller, writing to Hartlib from Leyden two days after the will was signed, was clearly looking forward to seeing ‘Mr Rulice [the Dutch pastor who had signed Edwards’s vindication] . . . upon our meeting att a sadd occasion, the buriall of good Mr Edwards att Amsterdam, whome God hath taken away from the evill to come’. In England, as we have seen, Thomas Hall noted the death of a valiant hammer of the heretics, adding ‘Cuius nomen in benedictione’.2 Edwards’s flight had been precipitate, for Presbyterian fortunes were not ruined by the events of August 1647. Although John Price, a longstanding, determined enemy of the London clergy, was dismissive of the provincial response to the city’s Testimony against error, arguing that all the country ‘motions’ were ‘spirited and enlivened’ from the city, a more detached judgement would suggest that the London Ministers’ Testimony was evidence of a rapid recovery of nerve, and the significant provincial support a sign of orthodox strength.3 During the same months, a long campaign to gain the release of the city figures arrested after August 1647 was finally successful when Glyn was released in May 1648; Gayre, Langham, Adams, and Bunce in June. At around this time also Waller and Massey were allowed to return to parliament.4 No public notice was apparently taken of Edwards’s death in England, but he retained a shadowy afterlife in polemical struggles and satirical dispute, particularly those between John Goodwin’s congregation and the London Presbyterians. In February 1648, Goodwin attacked the London Ministers’ Testimony, feigning incredulity that men like Gouge, Calamy, Case, and Cranford, with reputations as ‘learned and pious men’, had really signed it; and claiming, as usual, that respectable Puritan opinion (again John Ball’s) supported his own position on grace. In passing he referred to Edwards as ‘that great Hyperaspites of this government’, but argued that Antapologia itself had demonstrated that the Covenant did not necessarily Carter, English Reformed Church, 121, 123, 201–2; PRO Prob 11/204, fo. 213 is the same as the copy in the records of the Amsterdam church, printed by Carter; Sheffield University Library, Hartlib Papers, 32/2, fo. 23r; Thomas Hall’s copy of Antapologia is in Birmingham Reference Library, O94/1646/1; see also Ch. 1, above. 3 4 Price, Pulpit Incendiary, 20. Ashton, Counter Revolution, 187–8, 192, 355. 2

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imply a Presbyterian system. Consequently, in the ensuing controversy over the ‘Sion College Conclave’, as the radicals termed the city clergy, the Presbyterian combatants felt obliged to defend Edwards, again usually in passing, as when William Jenkyn referred to Mr Edwards ‘of blessed memory’, in a work mostly concerned with the defence of Ball, or John Vicars, Edwards’s loyal ally and neighbour, more enthusiastically berated Goodwin: ‘How most abominably and basely, unscholarly, yea unchristianly hath he also abused learned, religious, pious, and painfull M. Edwards of honorable memory’. Edwards had ‘like a faithfull Physician and skillfull Chyrurgeon or exact Anatomist, curiously cut out, and launched to the quick . . . the most noysome and odious Leprosie of Mr Goodwins pestilent and pernicious rotton heart (both in Mr Edwards his famous Antapologia, and in all the three parts of his gallant Gangrena)’.5 Radical attacks on Sion College, by John Price and others, concentrated on those Presbyterians alive and well in the city, still denouncing the army in their sermons at their morning exercises, still campaigning for the release of their ‘Leaders and Champions’, and still in prison after the summer of 1647. Price continued to oppose those who branded ‘holy, learned, godly, peaceable’ men with ‘the odious names of Heretickes, Separatists, Schismaticks’ etc, but associated this process not with Edwards but with ‘that Metropolitan-like Mr Jenkins of Christ Church’ along with Calamy, Cawton, Ashe, Wall, and William Taylor, the Presbyterian who had taken over Goodwin’s Coleman Street living.6 Name calling and labelling thus remained a crucial element in much bitter debate, and for many this process was still linked to Edwards. A Presbyterian challenged the hypocrisy of Price and Goodwin who had denounced Edwards for ‘particularizing’ and were now doing it themselves. On the other hand, a riposte 5 John Goodwin, Sion Colledge Visited or Some briefe Animadversions upon a Pamphlet lately published (London, 1648), BL E425 (2), Thomason date 1 Feb. 1647/8, 2, 9, 19; hyperaspites means defender, perhaps of a doomed cause, for it comes from the Greek term for warriors who protected their fallen comrades with their shield; William Jenkyn, The Busie Bishop or the Visitor Visited (London, 1648), BL E434 (4), Thomason date 30 Mar. 1648, 22; Vicars, The Coleman Street Conclave, preface, 11–12; C[ornelius] B[urgess], Sion College, What it is and What it Doeth (London, 1648), BL E444 (3), 24 May, 31, defended Jenkyn and Edwards as did a later Jenkyn work, The Blinde Guide or the Doting Doctor (London, 1648), preface dated 23 Nov., 13. But Goodwin,‘Captain Cretensis’, was his main concern. 6 Price, The Pulpit Incendiary, Thomason date 4 May 1648, 14–15, 19, 27. Goodwin, The Youngling Elder or Novice Presbyter, Thomason date 15 June 1648, similarly attacked the London ‘heresiemakers’ who mangled others’ words, but focused on Jenkyn ‘the preaching Elder’ and Vicars, the ‘Teaching Elder’ (77, 97). Ralph Smith published two of the responses to Price: The Pulpit Incendiary Anatomized or A Vindication of Sion Colledge (London, 1648), BL E442 (25), 13 May; and C[ornelius] B[urgess]’s Sion College, What it is and What it Doeth.

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to Presbyterian protests against the regicide denounced those who branded ‘godly Conscientious men . . . erronious and Heretick’ in order to discredit those ‘that crosse your usurpt factious Interest of will and power’.7 Edwards featured in the controversy that attended the collapse of his opponents’ coalition in 1649, when John Price and others of Goodwin’s congregation denounced William Walwyn as a heretic. Walwyn himself asked his accusers, as Goodwin had once asked Edwards, where in Scripture there was ‘a Warrant for such slanderous and backbiting practices as you are accustomed unto, licking up the very foam and dregs of Mr Edwards his Gangraena; yea, your own vomit and poyson which then you cast out upon him’. It was strange, wrote a supporter, that men who had suffered from Presbyterian stigmatizing should use the same tactics against Walwyn: ‘Nay, did not the Presbyter Party, in particular Mr Edwards, Mr Jenkins, and others, do the like upon the Independents, Sectaries, Seekers, etc, inventing strange Designs, like these father’d upon Mr Walwin, and casting them upon any that they had a mind to make odious? And did not Mr Goodwin himself bear an ample share of these Calumnies?’ Goodwin should have remembered his riposte to Edwards, that ‘the testimony of an enemy in matters of obloquy and reproach’ was of no value.8 As the trauma of regicide faded, many of Edwards’s old allies amongst the Presbyterians established an uneasy modus vivendi with the Cromwellian regime in the mid-1650s. In these circumstances, the uncompromising Edwards was not someone to remember with great enthusiasm. When Simeon Ashe printed his funeral sermon for the veteran Thomas Gataker with a dedicatory preface to ‘my much Honoured Brethren, the Presbyterian Ministers of the Gospel in the Province of London’, he noted the ‘smart of that providence’, that God had taken many of the most notable founders of city Presbyterianism in recent years. In his text Ashe re7 Pulpit Incendiary Anatomized, 5–6; A Thunder Clap to Sion College (London, 1649), Thomason date 12 Feb. 1648/9, 4. 8 Walwyn’s Just Defence, 372; Humphrey Brooke, The Charity of Churchmen of May 1649, 346–7, both quoted from the reprint in Haller and Davies (eds.), Leveller Tracts. Marchamont Nedham, who had also written against Gangraena, nonetheless made opportunistic appeals to Edwards’s experience in another later attack on Goodwin. Responding to John Goodwin’s denunciation of Cromwell’s ‘Triers’, Nedham attacked him as an inveterate polemicist, a ‘selfcontradictor and a Calumniator’. His assaults on Edwards (and Prynne, Roborough, Jenkins, Walker, Gataker, etc.) were ample evidence for this: Nedham, The Great Accuser Cast down, or A Publick Trial of Mr John Goodwin of Coleman-Street London, at the Bar of Religion and Right Reason (London, 1657), BL E920 (1), Thomason date 30 July, sig. b2v, b4v, 120–1. This tract replied to Goodwin’s The Triers Tried and Cast.

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ferred to the elder statesmen Gouge and Whitaker as well as Gataker; Edwards featured only in a longer marginal list of ‘Mr George Walker, Mr Herbert Palmer, Mr Edwards, Mr John Geree, Mr Roborough, Mr Love’— eminent but more controversial figures.9 Of the fate of Mary Edwards and her children we know little except for the second son, John, who seems indeed to have been brought up as Thomas hoped in the ‘fear of God’, and whose career echoed his father’s.At Thomas’s death, 10-year-old John entered Merchant Taylors school and subsequently did well at St Johns College Cambridge, under the eminent Presbyterian master Anthony Tuckney, acquiring the fellowship his father never attained. As a convinced Calvinist, John Edwards found his university career languishing after 1660, but unlike his father he obtained parochial livings in Cambridge, and later in Colchester, towns that had featured largely in Thomas’s life. A Doctorate of Divinity, albeit in old age, was another achievement unknown to Thomas. John Edwards received episcopal ordination in 1661. We can never be sure how Thomas would have reacted to the restoration of the ‘prelates’ in 1660–2, but most of his surviving associates of the 1640s, James Cranford, Jenkyn, and Calamy, amongst the most prominent, did not conform.10 John Edwards became, like his father, a notorious controversialist in the service of a fading orthodoxy. He was an even more voluminous author, amongst whose forty-odd publications were several assaults on the religion of John Locke. The younger Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism, included an attack on Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, to which Locke responded in a second edition. Nothing daunted, Edwards returned to the attack with a couple of tracts accusing Locke, with some justification, of Socinianism.11 John Edwards, like Thomas, quoted 2 Timothy 2: 17, and appealed to the authority of Augustine and Theodoret. Like his father, he bemoaned the ‘Numerous Swarms of Errors, Sects, and Wild Opinions, which have troubled the Reformed Churches. Hence have we been alarm’d with the pernicious Doctrines of Anabaptists, Familists, Libertines and Enthusiasts’. Like his 9

10 Ashe, Gray Hayres Crowned with Grace, sig. A3r. Matthews, Calamy Revised. John Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism (London, 1695). Edwards published A Brief Vindication of the Fundamental Articles of the Christian Faith (London, 1697) against Locke’s Of Education; John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (London, 2nd edn., 1696); John Edwards, Socinianism Unmask’d (London, 1696); id., The Socinian Creed (London, 1697). For Locke’s heterodoxy see John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), passim, and esp. 131, 140–4 for Locke’s probable Socinianism and 370, 415 for John Edwards. I am grateful to John Marshall for discussion of John Edwards and Locke. 11

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father also, John found it hard to structure and finish his works, reacting speedily to new material: ‘When half of the sheets of my foregoing Discourse were printed off, my Bookseller sent me a little Piece with Mr Bold’s name to it’.12 One hostile commentator on John Edwards may have been referring to his parentage when he wrote, ‘As for his insolent way of expressing himself, and his ill Language, which is his peculiar Talent, I pass it by, because I know he cannot help it, when he writes Controversy, it proceeds from his Nature, improved by long Custom’. I have found no overt references to Thomas or Gangraena in the controversies that engaged his son. The entry in the old Dictionary of National Biography regarded John Edwards as a more temperate man than Thomas, but such stern defence of truth against error in the changed intellectual climate of the end of the century suggests this is a generous judgement—for Justin Champion, John Edwards, was ‘as bigoted an adversary as his father’.13 the afterlife of gangr aena So much for Edwards’s son of the body. In 1641 he had referred to Reasons Against the Independant government as the ‘first born’ of his literary productions; let us now trace how Gangraena, in particular, has been cited as a source or authority by later religious activists and historians. In the process we confront the central paradox that from the later seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, Edwards’s Gangraena has been absorbed most enthusiastically by readers he would have denounced as erroneous, from Restoration Anglicans to modern radical historians. We will discern also changing approaches to the English revolution and to understanding Presbyterianism. In the 1650s many respectable Independents drew closer to Presbyterians, once the battles over church government were won and lost, and all educated, ordained ministers faced provocative assault from audacious Quakers. As already suggested, in this climate ‘Gangraena Edwards’ was not someone to be memorialized with enthusiasm and his most famous 12 John Edwards, A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error, Especially in Matters of Religion (London, 1701), 297, 327, 339, 369. The title of course is most worthy a son of ‘Gangraena Edwards’; Edwards, Socinian Creed, 239. 13 Robert Lightfoot, Dr Edwards Vindication Considered (London, 1710), 5; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 111; cf. DNB.

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literary creation was not an obvious authority. Gangraena was not one of the ‘most vendible books’ advertised by a north-eastern bookseller in 1658, although works by Pagitt, Ricraft, Saltmarsh, and Goodwin (including his reply to Antapologia) featured. Ralph Smith continued to advertise Edwards’s works for sale but they seem to have been available at bargain prices.14 When Edwards’s informant Richard Hollingworth and other trustees were purchasing books for the church and town libraries established by the will of the Manchester merchant Humphrey Chetham, they hastened to include Gangraena and other Edwards’s works amongst the ‘English Bookes that came with the 1st parcell for Churches and Chappells’ in August 1655. Gangraena, Antapologia, and the early Reasons against Independant Government together cost only 6s.—6d. less than Baxter’s Saints Everlasting Rest.15 Gangraena could be found in parish, town, and university libraries from mid-century. Thomas Hall left a copy for the use of the ministers and schoolmaster of King’s Norton, while the Restoration minister of the Yorkshire parish of Stainton, Richard Lumley, bought a third edition of Parts One and Two, and presented it to the parish library in 1694. Other parish libraries such as that set up by the ‘parson-scholar’ Thomas Plume in his native town of Maldon, Essex for the use of the minister, neighbouring clergy, gentlemen, and scholars included Antapologia, Baillie’s Dissuasive, and Goodwin’s Anapologesiates but not Cretensis and not Edwards’s Gangraena.16 Gangraena was frequently found, as we have seen, in the massive libraries of Edwards’s clerical contemporaries, sold off from the 1670s, and it was among the books left to the Bodleian Library by Thomas Barlow,

14 William London, A Catalogue of the most Vendible Books in England (London, 1658), BL E955 (1), Thomason date 25 Sept.; a list of Smith’s publications is in David Dickson, A Brief Explication of the First Fifty Psalms (London, 1653), Thomason copy, BL E1249 (2), date 2 Feb. 1652/3, including ‘Master Edwards Gangrena compleat. His Antipologia.’ 15 Chetham’s library, Manchester: ‘This booke containes a paticuler account of all the bookes in the publicke Librarys of Humfrey Chethams in Manchester’, fos. 19v–20r; A. C. Snape,‘Seventeenth-Century Book Purchasing in Chethams Library, Manchester’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 67 (1984–5), 783–96. 16 Hall’s library catalogue is at the end of his manuscript life in DWL, Baxter Treatises, vol. 9. Gangraena does not survive with the rest of Hall’s books in Birmingham Reference Library. York Minister Library, Stainton 116; The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England (Central Council for the Care of Churches, 1959), 99; Venn and Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, for Lumley who matriculated at St John’s Cambridge in 1662, and was vicar of Stainton 1667–89; S. G. Deed and Jane Francis, Catalogue of the Plume Library of Maldon Essex (Maldon, Plume Library Trustees, 1959), pp. vii, xiii–xiv, 10, 41, 58, 75. Plume died in 1704; he was vicar of Greenwich from 1658 until his death. The library had Cloppenburg’s 1645 Latin Gangraena, and John Edwards, The Socinian Creed.

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Bishop of Lincoln and librarian in the 1650s.17 Neither Locke nor Pepys, amongst notable late Stuart figures, had or kept Gangraena, but Jonathan Swift had ‘Edwards Gangraena compleat’. Despite not being regularly reprinted and consequently not featuring amongst Ian Green’s ‘steady sellers’, Gangraena was widely available for polemicists and scholars throughout the seventeenth century.18 Edwards’s works, already more use to his enemies than his friends, could thus be deployed in a range of disputes often remote from his own preoccupations. His authority was, bizarrely, cited by the Laudian Peter Heylyn against the more moderate Anglican Thomas Fuller’s account of the Dutch exile of Thomas Goodwin and the other ‘Dissenting Brethren’. The precise passages concerned Antapologia, but Edwards’s reputation centred on his authorship of Gangraena. Fuller had rejected Edwards’s account of the exile in favour of the brethren’s own complaints against the ceremonies of the church. Heylyn argued that Edwards’s version, ‘coming from the Pen of one who was no friend unto the Government and Liturgy of the Church of England, it might have met with greater credit in our Author’. Fuller drew on personal knowledge in his response: ‘I knew Mr Edwards very well, my contemporary in Queens Colledge, who often was transported beyond due bounds with the keenness and eagernesse of his spirit, and therefore I have just cause to suspect him’. Another Queens College man was cited in support: ‘Yea, I am most credibly inform’d, by such who (I am confident) will not abuse me and posterity therein, that Mr Herbert Palmer (an Anti-Independent to the heighth) being convinced, that Mr Edwards had printed some false-hoods in one sheet of his Gangraena, proferred to have that sheet re-printed at his own cost, but some intervening accident obstructed it.’19 Gangraena proved irresistible to late Stuart defenders of an Anglican Church; for them it vividly demonstrated the dangers of religious liberty, McLachlan, Socinianism, 121–3. Barlow’s books have the shelf-mark Linc. William Le Fanu, A Catalogue of Books belonging to Dr Jonathon Swift (Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph 10, 1988), 17; John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford Bibliographical Society, ns 13, 1965); N. A. Smith, H. M. Adams, and D. P. Whiteley, Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. 1. Printed Books (Ipswich: Brewer, 1978); Green, Print and Protestantism. 19 Ironically, as Champion stresses (The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 73), Heylyn’s central attack on Fuller’s church history was for its sympathy to Presbyterianism. Fuller’s account of the ‘dissenting brethren’ is in The Church History of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ Untill the Year 1648 (London, 1648), 209–10. It was attacked in Peter Heylyn, Examen Historicum: or A Discovery and Examination of the Mistakes, Falsities, and Defects in some Modern Histories (London, 1659), 256–7, while Fuller’s response is The Appeal of Iniured Innocence Unto the Religious, Learned and Ingenuous Reader (London, 1659), iii. 58–9. 17 18

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and was used to show that Presbyterian opposition to crown and episcopacy had spawned anarchy, rather than, as Edwards had argued, providing a crucial hedge against heresy and schism. William Assheton, chaplain to the Duke of Ormonde, drew widely on the polemical literature of the civil war, Gangraena included, to show, at length, the need to oppose toleration. He had consulted some hundred sermons given to parliament by Presbyterian divines as well as anti-sectarian preaching before the city authorities and quoted the London ministers’ letter against toleration of 1 January 1645; five full pages from Gangraena, Part One were offered in the shape of ‘A serious and passionate Admonition to the Clergy in the words of M. Thomas Edwards in his Gangraen’. Of course, Assheton’s strictures against toleration applied as much to Presbyterians as to their sectarian rivals of the 1640s and 50s.20 For William Dugdale, writing at the height of the ‘Exclusion Crisis’, religion was a cloak for rebellion and the origins of the civil war lay in the subversive doctrines first vented by German Anabaptists and then smuggled into England. His account of the lamentable political impact of religion also made no distinction between orthodox Puritans and radical sectaries, but quoted indiscriminately from Simeon Ashe and Richard Vines, amongst Presbyterians (and Vines from many perspectives was a very moderate Presbyterian), mainstream Independents like Philip Nye and Joseph Caryl, and more radical figures such as Hugh Peter and Christopher Feake. Like Edwards, Dugdale also highlighted radical pamphlets on the mortality of the soul and the validity of divorce, and he quoted extensively from the Epistle to Gangraena, Part One. The testimony of Edwards, ‘one of their own Ministers of the Gospel (as he stiles himself)’, was, in Dugdale’s account, particularly damning. ‘In his Book, from pag 18 to pag 36 he instances no less than one hundred seventy six Heretical and Blasphemous Tenets, broacht by the Sectaries (the Offspring of the Presbyterians)’.21 A final Anglican example is Mary Astell, now best known as a ‘feminist’ writer, but as eminent in her own time for her defence of Tory Anglicanism against Whigs and Dissenters. Her invocation of Edwards (and other interregnum Presbyterian opponents of toleration) echoed both Dugdale and Assheton. Like them she mobilized 1640s Presbyterians against the 20 [William Assheton], Toleration Disapproved and Condemned (London, 1670). See e.g. pp. 33, 49–51, for sermons by Calamy,Vines, and Cranford; I have discussed many of the same sermons in Ch. 2. Ibid. 53–7, for extracts from the twelfth Corollary, urging ministers to action. This is 153–64 (1st edn.), although 84–9 in Assheton’s copy (3rd edn.). 21 William Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England (Oxford, 1681), 573–5.

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Presbyterians of her own day, notably in two pamphlets of 1704, directed against the practice of occasional conformity whereby Dissenters sought to evade the prohibitions on their holding public office. Edwards’s ‘Epistle’ to Gangraena, Part One was again quoted along with works by Prynne and Rutherford. Defending her methods against James Owen, her chief Presbyterian opponent, Astell insisted that ‘those Expressions about Schism, which our Author is so offended at, are the very words of Mr Edwards the Presbyterian’.22 As Edwards was exploited by his enemies, so he became an embarrassment to his friends. When Presbyterians lost any hope of returning to a national church and increasingly sought religious liberty for their own congregations, it is not surprising that they became increasingly sceptical about Gangraena. Richard Baxter, who had provided information for Edwards is a well-attested example. By the 1680s Baxter had come to regard the religious unorthodoxy of the parliament’s soldiers as a trivial phenomenon in comparison to the defects in the Church of Rome or his contemporary Church of England where cynical speculation about the fundamentals of the faith went unpunished:‘whats the absurd Speeches of a few ignorant Souldiers, that are dead with them, to the Heresies and Schisms that these 1000 or 1200 years continue in all the Roman Communion’.23 Such a repudiation became increasingly characteristic of Presbyterian readings.

eighteenth- and nineteenth -century readings For later Stuart readers, the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s were clearly relevant to their own confrontations over dissent, popery, arbitrary government, and religious liberty. The immediate cogency of Gangraena inevitably faded with time, but for some the doctrinal issues contested in

Astell’s Moderation Truly Stated (London, 1704) was a riposte to Owen’s published support for occasional conformity. In a postscript to another work published later that same year, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, Astell defended her arguments against a second Owen attack. The latter pamphlet is reproduced in Astell: Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1996). For Astell’s appeals to Edwards see pp. 115–16, 119, 121; and for her generally hostile attitude to Presbyterianism, pp. xvi–xvii. 23 William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millenium (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 252–3, discussing Baxter’s 1682 work, The True History of Councils Enlarged and Defended. 22

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the 1640s remained important. Many obscure but serious-minded owners read Gangraena with attention in later centuries as surviving copies reveal: a C. Rowsell put her/his name and the date 18 April 1714, on a copy of the second edition of Part One, which cost 2s. Like the William Cole who recorded his ownership at Cambridge in 1747, Rowsell added pencil marks for emphasis against some passages. Cole read for controversies that still mattered: against error 47 on page 23 of Part One:‘Christ by his death hath freed all men from a temporall death . . . thus far he died for all, no farther for any,’ he wrote, ‘Coll[ossians]. 1. 13 opposed’. For a nineteenth-century Unitarian, reading Gangraena was part of a broader study of seventeenthcentury controversies: ‘Milton, Goodwin vs Presbyterians Adam Stewart, Prof Rutherford, Thos Edwards’.24 In 1730 Daniel Neal published his influential History of the Puritans. He regretted the ‘unhappy rise of the sectaries in the army’, and quoted from the beginning of Gangraena, Part One, the Epistle, the 176 errors, and the ‘sixteen heads’ under which Edwards defined sectarianism (not unlike the procedure of William Dugdale). Edwards was the ‘most furious’ anti-sectarian author, whose exaggerations and distortions arose from his basic purpose, ‘to blacken the adversaries of Presbyterian uniformity, that the parliament might crush them by sanguinary methods’. Neal quoted Fuller’s criticisms, as I have done, and concluded,‘our author went on publishing a second and third Gangraena, full of most bitter invectives and reproaches, till his own friends were nauseated with his performances’. Neal himself preferred the mainstream Independents of the 1640s; he denounced the blasphemy ordinance finally passed in 1648, and dismissed the 1647–8 ‘Sion College’ defences by ‘Old Mr Vicars and some others’ as ‘not worth remembering’. In both instances, though, he stressed that Presbyterians ‘of the present age’ were very different. They had ‘openly renounced and disavowed’ the principles of their ancestors and wished the blasphemy ordinance could be ‘blotted out of the records of time’.25 24 Rowsell’s copy is in CCL, Coles’s in John Rylands Library 10985; notes on Rylands UCC 1701, a copy of Part One from the Unitarian Library. Collossians 1: 13: ‘Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear son’. 25 Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans; or Protestant Nonconformists from the Reformation in 1517 to the Revolution in 1688 (1730; here quoted from the 3 vol. 1837 edn.), ii. 420–3, 438, 509–11. Neal’s 19th-cent. editor, however, insisted that the ‘monstrous opinions’ revealed in Gangraena helped to explain the blasphemy ordinance: 509 n. Raphael Samuel, ‘The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914: A Preliminary Sketch’, here taken from his Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (Theatres of Memory, vol. ii., London: Verso, 1998), 276–322, has been very helpful in understanding the 19th-cent. interpretations of the English revolution.

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Nineteenth-century nonconformist histories were equally squeamish about the intolerant Edwards. Benjamin Brook’s Lives of the Puritans, three substantial volumes published in 1813, was in its subtitle an account of divines ‘who distinguished themselves in the cause of religious liberty’. Edwards was treated at some length, with a fairly accurate account of his troubles in Cambridge, and generally denounced as a ‘bigotted and furious zealot’ whose opposition to toleration ‘rose almost to madness’. Even as Gangraena was plundered as a source for many of Brook’s lives, Edwards’s ‘severe and unworthy reflections upon some of the most worthy persons’in the book were condemned.Amongst Brook’s heroes were some of Edwards’s bitterest foes, such as the ‘pacific’ Jeremiah Burroughs, or John Bachelor.At the end of his, Edwards-dependent, account of the latter, Brook moralized: ‘Such are the reproaches cast upon our divine, who was greatly celebrated for Christian moderation, liberty of conscience, and free enquiry’.26 Unsurprisingly Benjamin Hanbury’s Historical Memorials Relating to the Independents, a similarly thorough work, published a generation later for the Congregational Union, also managed, in the manner of modern tabloids, to combine elaborate disgust with extensive use of Edwards’s Gangraena. Hanbury had an extensive acquaintance with the religious polemic of the 1640s ranging from Bastwick to Saltmarsh and Katherine Chidley. Although he quoted a nineteenth-century judgement on Gangraena as ‘the most singular farrago of intolerance and defamation that ever issued from the British press’, and described himself proceeding ‘in the loathsome task of wading through the receptacle’, he nonetheless provided a detailed, critical account of Edwards’s work.27 The general histories of the English civil war produced in the eighteenth century showed much less concern for the details of religious division. 26 Benjamin Brook, The Lives of the Puritans. Containing A Biographical Account of those Divines Who Distinguished Themselves in the Cause of Religious Liberty, 3 vols. (London, 1813), iii. 82–8 covers Edwards, 32–4 are on Bachelor. Gangraena was the sole or major source for many other biographies including Collier, Thomas Moore, John Durant, John Price, Samuel Oates, Thomas Lambe, and the two Symonds, of Rotterdam and Sandwich: see iii. esp. 27–40, 427–31, 461–5. Gangraena and Antapologia are listed on 538 amongst Brook’s ‘principal authorities’. 27 Benjamin Hanbury, Historical Memorials Relating to the Independents, or Congregationalists, From their Rise to the Restoration of the Monarchy, 3 vols. (London, for the Congregational Union, 1838–44). Volume ii (e.g. pp. 108, 370–5) discusses Edwards’s 1641 work against Independency and Antapologia. Volume iii has detailed treatment of Gangraena, Baillie’s Letters, and other Presbyterian material (esp. pp. 157–83); 157 (where Thomas Jackson’s Life of John Goodwin (1822) is quoted) and 177 are quoted. Hanbury noted e.g. how Edwards elided sectaries and Independents.

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David Hume drew on available printed sources—Clarendon, Rushworth, Nalson, Carte’s Life of Ormonde, and the parliamentary Journals, but took little account of the pamphlet literature. He had no taste for seventeenthcentury Presbyterians who ‘menaced all their opponents with the same rigid persecution of which they had themselves so loudly complained’.28 In this view, if little else, the republican Catherine Macauley concurred. Her multi-volume history was, essentially, a political and military account. Insofar as she was interested in religion, her sympathies lay with Milton and the second Lord Brooke, whose tolerant approach was ‘not the spirit of the Puritans’. Her account of parliamentarian divisions in 1646–7 was sharply critical of the ‘Presbyterian sect’ who had turned on an army ‘to whose heroic exertion they owed their present security and splendour’. Amongst her extensive sources—memoirs, legislation, parliament’s journals and History, and contemporary pamphlets—she quoted ‘that sour Presbyterian Prynne’ but ignored Edwards.29 In the nineteenth century, religion came to be placed at the heart of what came to be known as the ‘Puritan revolution’, the focus for general accounts as well as the nonconformist memorializing already discussed. At the same time, an abundance of source material became accessible, most notably the Thomason collection in the British Museum. Pioneers in its use included (besides Benjamin Hanbury, as we have seen) the republican William Godwin, Thomas Carlyle, and the ‘remarkable historical scholar’ David Masson, the biographer of Milton.30 Godwin declared his interests from the outset:‘I have no desire to be thought to look upon such transactions with indifference’, and he was predictably, but self-consciously committed to Independency, noting: ‘It is difficult at this time of day to do justice to the views and motives of these men [the Presbyterians]. The

28 Hume: The History of Great Britain, ed. Duncan Forbes (1754; repro Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), at 616. Samuel, ‘Discovery of Puritanism’, 278–9 for Hume and Macauley on religion. 29 Catherine Macauley, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, 4 vols. (1765; London, 3rd edn., 1769)—a fifth volume was published in 1772; but the enterprise only reached 1660; iii. 414 n. for Brooke and Milton; iv. 299, 315 for 1646–7, 253 n for Prynne. Macauley, iii. 251, did praise Presbyterians as ‘the only known party, who, in the commencement of the civil war, had opposed the tyranny of the times’. 30 For Carlyle and Masson, see Samuel, ‘Discovery of Puritanism’, 284–8; for their use of the tracts, Spencer, ‘The Professional and Literary Connexions of George Thomason’, Library, 5th ser. 13 (1958), 103 n. For Godwin, Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations. The English Civil Wars and the passions of posterity (London: Penguin, 2001), 231–2; Worden, ‘The Levellers in History and Memory’, in Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates, 271, where Godwin is praised as the most impressive historian before Gardiner.

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arguments in favour of toleration, which was the cause maintained by the independents, are familiar to every reader.’ There was only one reference to Edwards, citing his first book, Reasons.31 For Carlyle, researching his massively influential edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches in the 1840s (it was first published in 1845), the publication of Baillie’s letters in 1841 proved a most useful source, and may well have brought Edwards to public attention also. When Carlyle discussed soldiers’ reluctance to take the Covenant, ‘at a time when Heresy seemed rising like a hydra’, he offered a footnote, ‘See Edwards’s Gangraena (London, 1646) for many furious details of it’.32 In the two centuries following its publication, Gangraena was gradually transmuted into a historical source, whose content had a validity not wholly compromised by distaste for its author. Gangraena was, admitted the religious historian Robert Barclay,‘one of the most intemperate books ever written, yet we must recollect he was furnished with material by such men as Baxter, and his book gives a vivid picture of the mind of the nation breaking loose from its fetters, and daring to think for itself on religious matters’.33 But it was, above all, David Masson who, in his Life of John Milton, established the great ironic reversal wherein Gangraena became a central source for religious radicalism while its author was denounced. Masson was a reluctant admirer of Edwards’s polemical career. Amongst his extensive citation of the pamphlet literature of the 1640s—Baillie, Pagitt, John Goodwin, Prynne, Bastwick, Lilburne, Burton, and Vicars— Edwards’s works had a prominent place. Antapologia was ‘a most remarkable treatise’; it ‘ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries’. By the time of Gangraena’s appearance its author has become ‘our friend, Mr Thomas Edwards’, whose work was ‘much cleverer and more spirited’ than W. A. Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England, vols 1–2 (London, 1824–6), vol. ii. p. vii (preface), 252. The comment on toleration was part of an extended discussion of the fate of Paul Best and the arguments over the heresy ordinance. Godwin drew heavily on the journals of the Commons and Lords as well as the tracts donated to the British Library by George III (the ‘Thomason’ tracts). Godwin had some reluctant admiration for the Edwards of 1641: there was ‘something daring and comparatively generous, in a presbyterian writing against the toleration of all churches but his own’ at a time when Presbyterians were themselves oppressed: i. 348. 32 Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, vol. i (1845), ed. W. A. Shaw (London: Everyman, n.d.), 151–2. 33 Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876), 168 for the quote; 142, 160, 170 for other references. Barclay also used Prynne and Baillie. 31

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contemporary anti-heretical writings. ‘He was a fluent, rancorous, indefatigable, inquisitorial, and, on the whole, nasty kind of Christian’.34 In his analysis of the religious radicalism of the 1640s, Masson adopted, with some qualifications, the ‘sectarian’ framework of Ephraim Pagitt, fleshing it out with examples from Edwards. Noting that Pagitt gave no names to the ‘Anti-scripturists’, Masson supplied Writer, Miles, and Marshall from Gangraena. He also used Edwards to explain the increasing hostility between a sectarian army and a Presbyterian city.35 Booksellers’ records and library catalogues reveal the continuing availability of Gangraena. Thomas Rodd had an enormous amount of civil war material available in his Long Acre bookshop around 1820. Gangraena in two parts cost 10s. 6d., a bargain compared to Stephen Marshall’s funeral sermon for John Pym at 6s. Richard Byfield’s Temple-defilers was 2s., while a modest purchaser could acquire ‘Petitions, Remonstrances’ at 1s. each.36 A generation or so later Gangraena was cheaper but more elusive. The copy of the combined Parts One and Two, bound with Part Three, donated to Exeter Cathedral Library by its Chancellor Edward Harrington with his other books in 1881 is priced at 4s. 6d. and includes a note that it was the only copy to be found in ‘all the great booksellers’ of London. Nineteenthcentury editors and obscurer antiquaries as well as the giants of historical scholarship made use of Gangraena. The Devon antiquarian John Ingle Dredge provided a manuscript index to his copy of the combined Parts One and Two in 1881, while in the next decade one E. J. Nowelll was extracting material on Welsh radicals from all three parts.37 S. R. Gardiner, the most eminent of all historians of the period, hardly used Edwards— surely deliberately. Gardiner commended Masson’s work and made copious use of Thomason material including sermons by Lazarus Seaman and 34 Masson, The Life of John Milton . . . with the . . . History of his Time, iii (London, Macmillan, 1873), 130–1, 135, 141–3. As Masson noted, 110, Edwards’s first pamphlet with ‘that thrashing from the Lady-Brownist’ had already been discussed in vol. ii (Macmillan, 1871), 594. 35 Masson, Life of John Milton, iii. 143–59, 189–91, 406–9, 536. Masson noted, 159, that the different sects shaded into each other, and that there was no sect of atheists in either Pagitt or Edwards. 36 Thomas Rodd’s Bookseller’s Catalogue of Tracts and Pamphlets (1819, 1823; facsimile reprint: London: Bloomfield Books, 1975), 32, 220, 232–3. 37 Dredge’s copy is now in Manchester Central Reference Library. He was the author, amongst other things, of A Few Sheaves of Devon Bibliography (Plymouth: privately printed, 1889–90). Nowell’s copy is NLW, BX5202, dated 1896. Edwards also began to be used as a work of reference as in the Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Political and Personal Satires (London: British Museum, 1870) to identify sectaries in religious prints, or in Bonar’s 1891 edition of The Letters of Samuel Rutherford.

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tracts by Katherine Chidley, but he did not use Edwards in his main narrative of the 1640s, confining himself to a brief dismissal of Gangraena as ‘a venomous attack on toleration’ in a general discussion of the later 1640s. With his determination to see the 1640s as a cradle of liberty of conscience, nurtured by open-minded royalists and radical Puritans alike, Gardiner presumably found Edwards too distasteful to contemplate or write about at length although he used Baillie, Bastwick, and Prynne. The more determinedly radical Masson, on the other hand, robustly asked, ‘Did Mr Thomas Edwards in all this represent the whole body of the Presbyterians of his time?’ and as staunchly answered his own question, ‘I am afraid he did . . . they were all Anti-Tolerationists’. C. H. Firth, Gardiner’s successor, was also less squeamish, using Gangraena in his path-breaking edition of the Clarke papers for fair summaries of Levellers’ ideas.38 the t wentieth century Barclay and Masson set the tone for most twentieth-century uses of Gangraena as a guide to the radical ferment of the 1640s, with a rival scholarly tradition, as we saw in Chapter 1, rejecting (through overt assault rather than Gardiner’s silent contempt) such a distasteful and intemperate source. A brief synopsis will bring us full circle to the confrontation of Davis with Hill, described at the beginning of this book. Rufus Jones used, with caution, ‘old Ephraim’ [Pagitt] along with Edwards’s ‘still more hysterical account of the swarm of sects’ as sources for Seekers and other ‘mystics’ of the mid-seventeenth century. David Petegorsky noted Edwards’s shift in emphasis in Part Three of Gangraena to political radicalism, as did Gertrude Huehns in her study of Antinomianism.39 The modern 38 Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, iv. 81; cf. vol. ii, ch. 35, ‘Currents of Opinion’, which offers a long account of Hugh Peter (pp. 321–6), along with discussions of the army and of Lilburne (327–34), without mentioning Edwards. Gangraena is not one of the sources mobilized in the account (vol. iii) of the religious and political divisions of 1646–7, where Gardiner’s hostility to Presbyterianism is most pronounced; see pp. 310–11 for an account of tolerant opinion. Masson, Life of John Milton, iii. 135; Clarke Papers, ed. Firth, vol. i, p. lx, for the comment that the views of ‘the extreme party’ are ‘well summarized’ in Gangraena. Part Three is extensively quoted in succeeding pages. Michael Mendle reminded me of Firth, shamefully omitted in an early draft. 39 Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London: Macmillan, 1909), 450–1, 457–8, 484–5. Some of Jones’s discussion was derived from Barclay. David Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London: Left Book Club, 1940), 85–6. Petergosky drew on Jones and Haller. The classic socialist account of English radicalism, Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism:

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historians of Socinianism and of ‘Christian mortalism’ found rich material in Gangraena. McLachlan used Edwards for his account of Paul Best and Thomas Webbe, as well as for general remarks on the spread of Socinian books. Norman Burns, as we have seen in Chapter 4,‘sectarianized’and made coherent Edwards’s more diffuse material on soul-sleeping. Burns associated this error with experimentalist thought and a belief in universal redemption, attributing the package to ‘familism’—although he acknowledged that the Family of Love was no longer significant as an organized sect. Edwards’s material on Giles Randall, Thomas Webbe, Clement Writer, Richard Overton, Mrs Attaway, and William Bowling was woven into this fabric.40 Until very recently, Edwards has not been an object of scholarly study in his own right, although W. K. Jordan covered him as one of the ‘Irreconcilables’ opposed to the development of religious toleration in the 1640s.41 For the most part, as we have seen, Gangraena has been a source for historians such as Hill and Tolmie. gangr aena as a source How securely based is the use of Edwards’s work as a source for religious radicalism? Edwards himself had no doubts about the rigour of his methods. Given his obsessive thoroughness, he was predictably indignant when Jeremiah Burroughs claimed he never checked his material: Is it likely that I who have gone on purpose to so many, and do dayly upon all occasions, that have write [sic] so many Letters even to remote places to know the certainty of things reported, that imploy others to inquire out the truth where I cannot so well do it my self, that intreat persons who relate things to me, to send the eare witnesses and proofs to me, that reject many reports of things which may be true, and are reported with much confidence because I canot see a full proof of them, that I should decline to speak with those who send to me to satisfie me in the truth of things, and whom I own to be godly? No, this is utterly Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (1930; Nottingham: the Spokesman Press, 1980), mentioned Edwards very briefly (53), and probably knew him from Barclay. Huehns, Antinomianism in English History (1951), 78–9, 87–9, 107 for uses of Edwards. Huehns does not depend on Edwards as much as implied by Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 6. 40 McLachlan, Socinianism, 96, 119, 151–2, 155–6, 163–4, 218; Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton, 75–9, 127–35. 41 W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), iii. 281–7. Other ‘irreconcilables’ included Bastwick, Pagitt, Rutherford, Baillie, and Adam Stewart.

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false, a very legend, against my genius and constant course of proceeding in this work.42

In his Preface to Part Three he offered a most complacent judgement. It might be ‘that some circumstances of order, time, place, number, may in some stories be mistaken, and yet the maine storie true, as we see in Historie of battles and other humane things they often are (though I know none such)’ but of all the ‘thousands’ of ‘matters of fact’ found in Antapologia and the three parts of Gangraena, there was only one he had ‘reason to suspect was not true, and yet that was written me in a Letter by a Reverend and godly Minister and was the voice of the Country, and all I did was only printing that Letter, no otherwise affirming it’.43 My analyses of London and some provincial case studies in Chapter 3, and of printed material in Chapter 4, do not vindicate Edwards, but neither do they support the more extreme sceptical rejections of his work. Edwards’s Gangraena presented itself misleadingly as a comprehensive and systematic account of religious error and sectarianism. It was neither. Often, as I have shown in my discussion of Kent in Gangraena, it was a more random presentation of what came to Edwards’s hands, what his informants (themselves biased) thought would interest him. There are structural slants or biases in Edwards’s coverage. Geographically, the emphasis is on London and the south, determined by his declared focus on the areas where parliament had control and responsibility, and by the range of his Presbyterian networks. Many of his discussions, notably of Essex, assumed that the provinces had been infected with religious unorthodoxy by ‘emissaries’ from London. Edwards had also a bias towards the activists, the troublemakers who could not be ignored; the men and occasional woman who published, travelled, and sought followers in streets, market places, and public halls. Inveterate petitioners, debaters, and preachers such as Oates, Peter, Lilburne, and Walwyn took up more space than the more quiescent mystical speculators such as Giles Randall. The prophecies of Lady Eleanor Davies featured not at all in Gangraena; Edwards had surely heard of her but presumably regarded her as a harmless eccentric with no following and little influence. The most disruptively prominent were those who by later 1646 were engaged in political action in London—hence the increasing but not novel preoccupation with errors and activism in ‘civil’ matters in Part Three. Edwards did not simply exagerrate the extent of religious unorthodoxy 42 43

Gangraena, iii. 288. Ibid. sig. )(r.

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in his detailed narratives. As we have seen, he underestimated what we might call the indigenous, home-grown radicalism in Essex through his emphasis on Oates and Lambe. Heretics and sectarian leaders familiar from other sources such as Praisegod Barebone, John Biddle, or Giles Randall are absent or briefly covered. On the other hand, his repetitious litany of swarming error—of Anabaptism, Antinomianism, and Arminianism—suggested a vague, amorphous, but enormous threat. Edwards also overstressed the degree to which notorious individuals were unorthodox, associating Calvinist baptists like William Kiffin, or even more freeranging figures like Paul Hobson, with a range of errors they never endorsed. Conversely, like most heresiographers, his erection of defined boundaries between truth and error ignored the troubling intimacy of much unorthodoxy—as errors, particularly on church membership and justification, emerged within Calvinist circles, defended by men Edwards knew and had worked with. Above all, of course, Edwards began from the assumption that prelacy had been defeated and that schism and error were the major threats to Presbyterian reform; a judgement challenged by much modern scholarship. The most polarized judgements on the value of Gangraena as a source—the contrast between Colin Davis and Christopher Hill—derive from Edwards’s most important propagandist aim—to associate all ‘Independents’, apparent respectability notwithstanding, with separation and appalling error. To this end he persistently elided any distinction between ‘Independent’ and ‘sectary’ in his text, as we demonstrated in Chapter 2. In his general reflections—the lists of errors, the corollaries, the ‘particular practices’, accounts of the army or of political plots—Edwards tended to write indiscriminately of Independents and/or sectaries. But most of his specific stories are about more radical figures; Independents like Bridge, Nye, or Thomas Goodwin are hardly mentioned. These men are smeared by association and implication, through plausible accounts of radical excess, not through unlikely, sensational stories in which they figure themselves. With the major exceptions, Henry Burton, Hugh Peter, Jeremiah Burroughs, and above all, John Goodwin, there are specific reasons for Edwards’s lengthy coverage. Burroughs answered back, at length, a brief story in Gangraena, Part One; John Goodwin was increasingly heterodox on crucial Calvinist issues, and there was longstanding personal bitterness between him and Edwards; Burton was notoriously provocative; while Hugh Peter had the highest political profile amongst the more mainstream Independents. Where Edwards’s stories can be checked they clearly refer to

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recognizable events, people, and places; I remain convinced that he made nothing up, but so much cannot be checked that this must remain a provisional and contestable judgement. Ideally, the preoccupations of his informants would be subject to systematic analysis, but given the anonymity of most of them this is not feasible. Edwards’s own methods, which involved presenting his evidence in detail, mean that readers can often deduce the status of the material from the text itself: Edwards himself tells us if a story is based on hearsay or if it is surrounded by a more impressive buttressing of eyewitness or written testimony. I have suggested that Edwards was an increasingly poor heresiographer, working under such pressure that his skills at precis and classification, already limited, collapsed completely, so that Part Three hurls a great deal of undigested material at readers. Nonetheless, the ambiguous general assessments of heresiography as a truth-telling genre can be applied to Gangraena. Heresiographers sought to reveal the truth, or their truth, and to that end they were energetic, and unsqueamish investigators whose methods included espionage and provocation, but rarely invention. Although Peter Brown has condemned Augustine’s writings on Donatism as propagandist caricatures and his work on heresies as a ‘mere potboiler’, and although heresiology included many salacious and unlikely stories of gruesomely providential deaths, or exotic sexual practices, a modern editor has offered a more balanced judgement on Epiphanius, considering him a better guide to heretical thought than to movements which he assumed to be more organized and coherent than is probable. Some of his chapters ‘simply repeat baseless legends or gossip, others offer material from unknown sources of uncertain reliability, while still others contain precious documents preserved nowhere else or Epiphanius’s recollections of his own encounters, conversations, and arguments with sectarians and other figures of note’.44 A similarly complex, critical, but not dismissive judgement will suffice for Gangraena. ‘texts’ and ‘events’ There are thus no cut and dried answers to the question of Edwards’s ‘accuracy’; indeed the attempt to check his ‘facts’ brings us face to face with the limitations of the historian’s craft where certainty can never be achieved. Like many of his contemporaries and indeed like many mod44

Brown, Augustine, 228, 273, 412; Williams, Panarion, vol. i, p. xviii.

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ern critical theorists Edwards was well aware that truth was a vulnerable and contested concept. Edwards appreciated the collective and partisan enterprise of book production, and understood the gulf between his purposes as an author and the reactions of readers. In Chartier’s terms he understood that authors were both ‘dependent and constrained’ while readers were prone to ‘rebellious and vagabond’ responses.45 Edwards would, however, have been bewildered by the modern or postmodern notion that no ultimate truth could be attained, that there would be no final vindication by the unimpeachable authority of God, his word, and his church. The encounters between history as a discipline and the body of ideas summed up as the ‘linguistic turn’ have been fraught. For many historians the most thoroughgoing post-structuralist theorists stand accused of purveying a morally bankrupt, practically useless relativism, denying the existence of any reality beyond language, of holding that all representations are of equal value—or none, and thus (amongst other crimes) of dissolving the claims of history as a discipline offering valid knowledge about a real world. Historians are in turn accused of crude rejections of a travesty of post-structuralist theory in order to defend the status of history as a discipline.46 I am only too aware of the limits of my understanding of modern cultural theory, but it has been an important influence on this book. A scepticism about the capacity to distinguish sharply between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ shakes the easy assumption that we can find an untainted source (probably a manuscript) that will enable us to judge objectively the contents of polemical tracts like Gangraena. This evading or postponing of the issue of accuracy has proved liberating for my analyses of Gangraena; it has at a fundamental level made the whole enterprise possible, freeing me to approach Edwards’s texts at a number of levels and from several angles—to explore its place in the events of the 1640s, rather than simply as a flawed commentary on them. Colin Davis quotes, in pessimistic terms, A. L. Morton’s dismissal of Edwards’s account of John Lanseter, the founder of the Independent congregation at Bury St Edmunds, as ‘a vast confusion of charges, Chartier, The Order of Books, pp. 29, viii. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton and co., 1994); Patrick Joyce,‘The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain’, Past and Present, 158 (1998), esp. 221–2; cf. Purkiss, The Witch in History, 68–75, 86 n. for characteristically trenchant comments including an insistence on the illogicality of using historical actors’ (such as Edwards’s) views on truth as an argument against modern cultural theory. 45 46

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rebuttals, and counter-charges from which it is impossible, in many cases, to establish the truth with any certainty’.47 Here lack of certainty suggests the inadequacy of relying on Gangraena as a source, rather than a general, post-structuralist judgement on historical scholarship. There is no need, however, to endorse the most sweeping claims of post-structuralism. I have attempted to assess the accuracy or plausibility of Edwards’s material, to offer some account of what ‘really’ happened. It may always be impossible to establish the truth with certainty, but in my discussions of London, Kent, and Essex, or of Edwards’s printed controversies with Goodwin, Webbe, and Lanseter himself, I have shown that rival sources often do share some common ground, while offering different slants on recognizably similar incidents or developments. Edwards’s material is surely worth considering along with other ‘sources’ in any account of religious developments in these places or of the careers of such men. The choice is not, has never been, between complete certainty and complete ignorance. There are no unvarnished, rhetorically neutral pictures of reality; accepting what Purkiss calls the ‘indeterminacy of truth’ does not invalidate the attempt to compare and evaluate different accounts of past experience, or imply that all representations are of equal value or that there is nothing but representation. I have argued throughout this book that the value of Gangraena as a source for the individuals and activities deplored by its author is only one of its contributions. In the first place it must also be evaluated as an exercise in ‘truth-telling’ rather than as a truthful source. Edwards’s complex, much-contested text depended on a controversial plausibility for its impact; a plausibility that was derived from a whole range of rhetorical devices and narrative strategies, as well as from Edwards’s drawing on a host of pre-existing frameworks and assumptions. Edwards was supreme but not exceptional amongst contemporary religious polemicists in deploying extensive manuscript evidence and offering named witnesses, whose testimony was elaborately validated. Circumstantial details of time and place added credibility to his stories of bowling, cat baptism, or heretical preaching. Analyses of seventeenth-century discourses of truth or probability, of how people became convinced of the ‘factual’ nature of phenomena or the plausibility of theories have focused on science, and, to a lesser extent, on law. From the mid-seventeenth century scientific experiments were validated by publication of descriptions of them, endorsed by authoritative witnesses rather than by replication of their techniques. Legal process, of 47

Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 128.

438

Conclusion

course, depended on reputable testimony and detailed evidence. The stress is on rational processes and if religious attitudes are seen as contributing to these developments, it is the ‘Latitudinarians’ of the later seventeenth century who are seen as most important.48 Edwards often evoked standards of legal testimony and he also compared his truth claims to the ‘Historie of battles and other humane things’, as we saw above. A more specific, instructive comparison was made between his Gangraena and the more famous Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Adversarial writing, religious, historical, or both, was clearly as important to the development of evidence-based truth-telling as more obviously rational or modern discourses. Grafton has shown that ‘savage polemics produced the richest growths of source-notes’ in the work of continental authors such as Pascal or Bayle.49 Empirical, ‘factual’, history, a genre of a lower order in this period than elevated ‘philosophical’ general history, was often, like Edwards’s account of religious divisions, a product of polemical struggle masquerading as objective description. Daniel Woolf has shown how Foxe, Selden in his Historie of Tithes, Rushworth, and the Anglican controversialists Thomas Fuller and Peter Heylyn began to print evidence in their works, and were especially keen (like Edwards) to assert their expertise and neutrality in defence of the truth precisely because they were desperately conscious of the enemies ready to assail them. Edwards’s friend and neighbour, John Vicars, wrote civil war chronicle as well as religious polemic, aiming to ‘set down and insert nothing, but what I partly knew, and partly, on most probable Conjectures conceived, and with my utmost industry and endeavour diligently enquired after and found to be most true and authentick’. From the Presbyterian point of view, the religious writings of Vicars and Edwards had similar methods and similar authenticity.50 Gangraena thus shows that religious polemic, as much as historical or scientific writing, contributed to a new ‘probabilistic rhetoric centred on the deployment of named witnesses and their te