Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

REASON AND RELIGION IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

This book provides a significant rereading of political and ecclesiastical developments during the English Revolution, by integrating them into broader European discussions about Christianity and civil society. Sarah Mortimer reveals the extent to which these discussions were shaped by the writing of the Socinians, an extremely influential group of heterodox writers. She provides the first treatment of Socinianism in England for over fifty years, demonstrating the interplay between theological ideas and political events in this period as well as the strong intellectual connections between England and Europe. Royalists used Socinian ideas to defend royal authority and the episcopal Church of England from both Parliamentarians and Thomas Hobbes. But Socinianism was also vigorously denounced and, after the Civil Wars, this attack on Socinianism was central to efforts to build a church under Cromwell and to provide toleration. The final chapters provide a new account of the religious settlement of the 1650s. s a r a h m o r t i m e r is University Lecturer and Student and Tutor in History, Christ Church, University of Oxford.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH HISTORY

series editors John Morrill Professor of British and Irish History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow, Selwyn College Ethan Shagan Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley Alexandra Walsham Professor of Reformation History, University of Exeter

This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books, which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research into our broader perspectives, and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers. For a list of titles in the series go to www.cambridge.org/earlymodernbritishhistory

REASON AND RELIGION IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION The Challenge of Socinianism

SARAH MORTIMER

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517041 © Sarah Mortimer 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Mortimer, Sarah. Reason and religion in the English revolution : the challenge of Socinianism / Sarah Mortimer. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in early modern British history) isbn 978-0-521-51704-1 (hardback) 1. Socinianism. 2. Great Britain – History – Puritan Revolution, 1642–1660. 3. Great Britain – Church history – 17th century. 4. Religion and civil society – Great Britain. I. Title. II. Series. BT1480.M67 2010 273′.70942–dc22 2010000384 isbn 978-0-521-51704-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and conventions

page vi vii 1

Introduction 1

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

13

2

Socinianism in England and Europe

39

3

The Great Tew Circle: Socinianism and scholarship

63

4

Royalists, Socinianism and the English Civil War

88

5

Socinianism and the Church of England

119

6

Reason, religion and the doctrine of the Trinity

147

7

Anti-Trinitarianism, Socinianism and the limits of toleration

177

8

Socinianism and the Cromwellian Church settlement

205

Conclusion: the legacy of Socinianism

233 242 259

Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgements

I have benefited from the help and generosity of many people while writing this book, and it is a pleasure to thank all of them. It began life as an Oxford DPhil, funded by the AHRC, and was revised during my Unofficial (Research) Fellowship at Gonville and Caius; I am grateful to both institutions for the support I have received. I was fortunate to have two supervisors: John Robertson, with whom I began to think through my ideas in a scholarly way, and Clive Holmes, who helped to guide me through the rocky terrain of civil war history. John’s continuing interest and encouragement were extremely valuable as I reworked my thesis into the present book, especially his judicious comments on an earlier draft. My examiners, Noel Malcolm and Blair Worden, gave me many helpful suggestions, and I am grateful to Blair for reading some of the present chapters also. At Caius, I have benefited from Annabel Brett’s expertise in scholastic philosophy and political thought, and specifically from her comments upon a draft chapter. And I owe my thanks to the editors of this series, especially John Morrill, for their help and guidance throughout the process of writing. Parts of the thesis or the book were read by several scholars and friends, including Kate Armstrong, Knud Haakonssen, Jim Kloppenberg, Anthony Milton, Jon Parkin, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Malcolm Smuts, Noël Sugimura and Richard Tuck. To all of them I am grateful for their comments and their interest. Similar material was presented at Florence, during one of the meetings of the network studying ‘Freedom and the Construction of Europe’, and I would like to thank the organisers, Quentin Skinner and Martin Van Gelderen, for this opportunity, from which I have gained a great deal. I would also like to thank Nick Hammond for allowing me to stay in his flat in Paris while I worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale. My friends and family have been supportive – some have even been enthusiastic – about the book and they all deserve my thanks. Most of all, I am grateful to my husband for keeping me relatively sane when sometimes the words just wouldn’t come. But I dedicate this book to my parents, for their kindness and their love. vi

Abbreviations and conventions

BW CJ CSPD EHR HJ HP HLQ JBS JEH JHI ODNB P&P SP

Molhuysen et al. (eds.) Brief wisseling van Hugo Grotius Commons Journal Calendar of State Papers Domestic English Historical Review Historical Journal Hartlib Papers 2nd edition (2 CD-ROMS, Sheffield, 2002) Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of British Studies Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of the History of Ideas Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Past and Present State Papers

All dates are in Old Style, with the year taken to begin on 1st January, unless indicated by the initials NS, denoting a date in New Style. Where there are different versions of a person’s name, I have opted for the one by which he or she was most commonly known at the time; for example, Grotius’ name has been Latinised while Crell’s has not. All translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

vii

Introduction

On the fertile banks of the river Czarna, in the south of the Polish Commonwealth, lay the town of Rakow. In the early seventeenth century it was a peaceful, idyllic town, filled with craftsmen and workshops and dominated by its flourishing Academy. Its atmosphere of learning and of harmony made such an impression on one visitor that he felt himself ‘transported into another world’. For, as he recalled, all its inhabitants were ‘calm and modest in behaviour, so that you might think them angels, although they were spirited in debate and expert in language’.1 Yet Rakow was the centre of Socinianism, a theological position perceived as so dangerous that it could only have been raked out of hell by men intent on blaspheming against God. It was denounced in lurid terms, by Protestants and Catholics alike, and outlawed in almost every country in Europe.2 From Rakow, the Socinians produced a series of religious and political works which spread across Europe, capturing the attention of scholars, clerics and educated laymen. Few religious groups inspired such extreme reactions, or found such careful readers. The people of this quiet, well-ordered Polish town had a lasting impact in Europe and this book will explore the English reaction to their potent theology. It was widely agreed that the Socinians posed a serious challenge to European religion and society – and yet the nature of the challenge they presented has never been fully explored or explained. The fascination with Socinianism so evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has not been shared by modern historians. In so far as Socinianism has been studied at all, it has been from a strongly confessional point of view, by Unitarian historians anxious to understand – and often to reshape – their own theological tradition. But, as I hope to show in this book, Socinianism needs to be integrated into the broader political and religious landscape of 1 2

Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1946–1952), vol. i, p. 361. J. Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, transl. T. Westrow, 2 vols. (London, 1960), vol. i, pp. 421–3.

1

2

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

the period, for only then can the real importance of Socinian ideas be understood. Scholars from every confessional and political background read and engaged with Socinian writing, developing their own thoughts and programmes in the process. Socinianism was a central part of early modern political and religious debates and, as we shall see, those debates can look very different when the Socinian dimension is restored to them. i At the centre of Socinian theology was a claim about religion, freedom and human nature; and it was this claim which both intrigued and appalled those who encountered Socinian ideas. Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), from whom the Socinians took their name, insisted that religion must be freely chosen if it were to be at all praiseworthy. In Socinus’ mind, moreover, there was a sharp distinction between those actions that were free and those which were natural, and if religion had to be freely chosen then it could not be natural to man in any sense. Human beings had no natural or innate conception of a deity, he argued; their knowledge of God came only from revelation, which they could then choose to accept or reject. In this way Socinus drove a wedge between religion and nature, a wedge which he believed was necessary if religion were to be both free and virtuous. His contemporaries, Protestant and Catholic alike, were horrified by such notions, convinced that human beings were necessarily religious creatures who could not simply opt into (or out of) a relationship with God. To them, religion was part of the universal human condition. The efforts of Socinus to preserve human freedom and to divorce religion from nature worked in two directions. Most strikingly, the Socinians began to develop an argument about individual freedom and responsibility which they cast in terms of legal rights. Socinus came from a legal background, while his later followers had all studied jurisprudence and law at university. They used a language of individual rights to discuss freedom, both human and divine, and they began to reject the mainstream language of natural law. According to the Socinians, Christianity could not be judged by the norms of the natural world or human civil society and, by the same token, it was wrong to assume that what made for a comfortable life here on Earth was necessarily pleasing to God. The Socinians’ arguments helped to separate Christian ethics from natural laws, cutting Christianity free from political power and from the institutions and norms of human social life. Arguing in this way, the Socinians set themselves against a broad tradition of natural law thinking, according to which God endorsed the principles of

Introduction

3

human social life. On the other hand, however, Socinus maintained that Christianity was known from a series of religious texts which had to be interpreted using the tools available to humans and part of the natural (nonreligious) world. Although Socinus had eschewed all innate knowledge of God, he did think that men were possessed of a critical reasoning faculty which they must use to interpret revelation. Precisely because religion was alien to human nature, men and women had to make sense of it using human ideas and human principles. On these grounds Socinus rejected several orthodox doctrines, including the Trinity. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, it was the Socinians’ radical restatement of the relationship between civil and religious life which caught the attention of English readers. These were years of intense political and religious turmoil, when plans for change were made, defended and discussed in both theological and secular terms. No one identified him or herself as a Socinian, but the writings of this Polish group circulated quite widely and my focus will be upon the role which those writings played in England. To those men who sought to prise apart Christianity and natural law, or church and state, the Socinians provided useful intellectual resources, although the debt was rarely acknowledged. To those who saw human society as fundamentally religious, however, Socinianism was a terrifying heresy whose spectre could be conjured to frighten opponents. Even where the unity of church and state was accepted, Socinianism still caused consternation, for it undermined the Trinitarian basis of contemporary Christianity and provided resources for those who sought a broad toleration of religious opinions. This book will examine the ways in which Socinian writing forced Englishmen to reconsider the meaning of Christianity and the role of religion in human social life. And it will demonstrate how important these questions were in the political and religious debates which took place between around 1630 and 1660. In discussing the impact of Socinianism I have sought to bring together politics and religion, political ideas and theology. In seventeenth-century England it was impossible to discuss one without touching upon the other, and my exploration of Socinianism shows some of the many ways in which political and religious arguments went hand in hand. In the context of upheaval and instability which prevailed in the 1640s and 1650s, these arguments often proved important and influential – they can help to explain the course of events on the ground. Indeed, the central characters in this story are men, often clergymen, who were instrumental in shaping the religious and political agenda. By studying their response to – and use of – Socinian writing we can see more clearly the aims and ideals of these

4

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

English writers and political actors. The conflicting agendas of the mid seventeenth century, and their successes and failures, become clearer and more comprehensible when we are sensitive to both their political and their religious elements. The focus of the book is on events in England but the story is necessarily European in scope. It has become commonly accepted that English history cannot be written in isolation from the history of Scotland or Ireland, but the important interconnections between England and continental Europe – especially the United Provinces – are rarely acknowledged. The book includes several brief ventures into the history of the Low Countries, for the English story could not be told without reference to Dutch events. People, books and ideas circulated widely in the seventeenth century, and Latin provided an important lingua franca for the educated men and women of Europe. The Socinians wrote in an elegant but fairly simple Latin, which made their theology accessible across the continent; it also meant that the reaction to Socinianism was international and often co-ordinated across state boundaries. Usually this co-operation was limited by confessional alliances and Protestants responded quite differently from Catholics to the Socinians. Here, my discussion of Catholic engagement with Socinianism is necessarily brief, for in this book I have concentrated on the Protestant world of which England was an important part. ii Although the Socinians were notorious in their own time, they have been neglected by recent historians and their contribution to civil and moral philosophy has hitherto gone unnoticed. In so far as the Socinians have been studied, it has been in isolation, or at best in conjunction with other specifically religious movements. Yet any treatment of Socinianism must acknowledge the indispensable foundations for study created by the Unitarian scholarship of the first half of the twentieth century, for this scholarship provides a valuable guide to the personal and biographical history of the Socinians and early Unitarians. But the religious and political ideas of the Socinians received rather less effective treatment at the Unitarians’ hands, and this has had unfortunate consequences for later historians. The Socinians’ similarities with the Unitarians of modern times have been exaggerated; and the distinctive conception of religion held by the earlier Socinians has been played down. As a consequence, historians who view Socinianism through the lens of Unitarian scholarship have found it difficult to place this movement within the early modern

Introduction

5

world. As we shall see, it is only by returning to the writings of the Socinians themselves that we can gain a proper understanding of Socinian religion. In the decades before the Second World War, American Unitarians sought to recover their heritage and much of the pioneering work was done by Earl Morse Wilbur at the Pacific Unitarian School. After discovering that little was known of the early days of the Unitarian movement, he spent the early 1930s in European archives researching his religious forefathers. The result was the two-volume History of Unitarianism: the first part, Socinianism and its Antecedents, appeared in 1945, followed in 1952 by the second, subtitled Transylvania, England and America. These, based on research in Eastern European archives subsequently closed or destroyed, provided excellent narrative foundations for subsequent research. Another American Unitarian scholar, George Williams, continued this project in his Radical Reformation (1962) and through the texts he edited under the title Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (1957). Both Wilbur and Williams presented an account of Socinianism and Unitarianism which, although based firmly on written evidence, highlighted the continuities within the movement. It was the tolerant, critical mindset of their spiritual ancestors which appealed to them, and which they brought out in their own writing. Indeed, Wilbur understood the Unitarian tradition to be marked by the ‘three principles of freedom, reason and tolerance’, a tradition which had culminated in the rational, ethical religion which they themselves practised and preached. It was not a creedal religion, but one based – as Wilbur saw it – upon an openness to reason and to the development of the human spirit. Only in the nineteenth century, he argued, did Unitarianism mature, when it finally abandoned its thrall to Scripture in favour of free enquiry, with all the doctrinal diversity which that would bring.3 In a slightly different vein, Williams was primarily concerned to argue that the Radical Reformation could be understood as a coherent movement with a theological core, but for him as for Wilbur, this core was both liberal and reasonable.4 In England, Herbert John McLachlan, Unitarian minister and historian, also argued in his Socinianism in Seventeenth Century England (1951) that Socinianism should be seen as a spirit of enquiry rather than a dogmatic position. Yet McLachlan placed this Socinian spirit firmly within the Church of England, tracing it to William Chillingworth (1602–1644) and 3 4

The argument of the works is summarised in Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism vol. i, pp. 4–6 and vol. ii, pp. 486–7. The quotation is taken from page 5. G. H. Williams and A. Mergel (eds.), Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers (London, 1957), pp. 19–38; G. H. Williams, Radical Reformation (London, 1962), pp. xxv–ix.

6

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

John Hales (1584–1656), and arguing for its embodiment at Great Tew, the house of Lord Falkland (1610–1643). Although he gave a brief summary of Socinus’ theology, McLachlan emphasised that none of these Englishmen held strictly Socinian positions on any major doctrine; instead they absorbed the Socinians’ emphasis on tolerance and the importance of a rational reading of the Scriptures if Christian unity were to be maintained. It was the irenic work of Jacob Acontius (1492–1566) rather than the exegetical theology of Socinus which captured the imagination of these Englishmen. For McLachlan it was only after the Civil Wars, when John Biddle (1615–1662) began to translate continental Socinian works, that there was any real engagement with Eastern European theology. This engagement was short-lived, and it was the Anglican clergyman Stephen Nye (1647–1719) who kept alive the flame of rational religion in the late seventeenth century; and as McLachlan pointed out, he preferred to be described as a Christian rather than a Socinian.5 By the 1960s, then, Socinianism had been characterised by its indifference to doctrinal niceties, its liberalism and criticism. This reading was then adopted by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his articles on the religious origins of the Enlightenment and the Great Tew Circle, as John Robertson has shown.6 Largely through these articles, Socinianism was brought into the historical mainstream, but there it occupied an anomalous position. For a creedless Socinianism was difficult to integrate into later work on early Stuart religious and political history, dominated as the field was by the clashing theologies of Calvinism and Arminianism. Revisionist readings of consensus prior to the civil wars have proved particularly difficult to sustain where religion is concerned. The dramatic effect of the aggressive, anti-Calvinist agenda propelled by William Laud and supported by Charles I was described by Nicholas Tyacke, who emphasised the role of disputes over predestination. Building on this, Peter Lake showed how Charles’ subjects read this as a descent into Arminianism and popery, and sought accordingly to prevent it. He has provided a wealth of detail establishing that seventeenth-century men and women viewed their world in polarised terms, and has stressed the part which this played in destabilising Charles’ regime. When combined with John Morrill’s account of the civil wars as a conflict driven by religion, the result has been to marginalise the Socinian spirit of Great Tew, and to suggest its fragility in the face of religious and political realities.7 5 6 7

H. J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1951), esp. pp. 54–89. J. Robertson, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper on “The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment”’, forthcoming in EHR in December 2009. N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987); P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart

Introduction

7

Socinianism has played little part in any account of the 1640s, but the continuities between the spirit of Great Tew and the latitudinarian divines of the Restoration period has drawn comment. Anglican ministers found in Chillingworth’s magnum opus, the Religion of Protestants (1637), a plausible account of the relationship between reason and religious truth, combined with a call for moral conduct. After the Calvinist excesses of the 1640s, this ethical version of Christianity offered a more promising basis for preaching and for re-establishing the moral and institutional authority of the Church of England. Whereas McLachlan had deliberately sought to connect such sentiments to Socinianism, historians of the Restoration Church have been less willing to do this. Instead, they have tended to assume that the association between ‘reasonableness’ and Socinianism was a polemical construct of the Anglicans’ opponents, and largely dismissed these charges. The actual role which Socinian theology might have played in shaping the thought of these clergy has rarely been discussed.8 Guided by the Unitarian account of Socinianism, historians have found it difficult to explain why this heterodox movement provoked such a dramatic reaction in the seventeenth century. Moreover, the intense engagement with Socinian writing that is evident in so many scholarly works of the period has largely been overlooked. Only in the cases of John Locke, John Milton and Isaac Newton has any attempt been made to address more closely the nature of their engagement with Socinianism. Here, however, the focus has tended to be on the private, doctrinal writings of these men rather than their more public works or their broader thought. John Marshall has shown that some of Locke’s thoughts about the Trinity might be connected to his reading of Socinian writing, although he has played down Locke’s doubts about this doctrine and it is with McLachlan’s Socinian spirit that he prefers to identify the philosopher.9 The writing of Milton and Newton has been analysed for traces of Socinian influence, and both have been found to hold Arian rather than Socinian Christologies (that is, they held Christ to be preexistent but not equal to God). Although Socinian works may have contributed to their beliefs here, little can be said with certainty and Socinianism

8

9

England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (Harlow, 1989), pp. 72–106; Cust and Hughes, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ’Orthodoxy’, ’Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001); J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays (London, 1993), esp. p. 47. This is true of J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (London, 1991), pp. 254–7; but cf. N. Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Theology of the Restoration Church’, in Aspects of English Protestantism, c.1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 320–39. J. Marshall, ‘Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism”, and Unitarianism’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford, 2000), pp. 111–82; cf. D. Wootton, ‘John Locke – Socinian or Natural Law Theorist?’, in J. Crimmins (ed.), Religion, Secularization and Political Thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (London, 1989).

8

Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

remains marginal to our interpretation of the intellectual contributions made by these men.10 Only when we restore the civil and political dimension to Socinianism itself will we be able to understand fully the impact which Socinianism had upon the European intellectual scene. Complicit in this portrayal of Socinianism as a vague and largely apolitical movement have been historians of political thought, for they have tended to ignore Socinian writing. This is unfortunate because – as this book will demonstrate – Socinian ideas were central to one of the main strands of European thought in this period: the development of a language of natural law and, particularly, natural rights. In the late 1970s, Quentin Skinner portrayed the early modern concept of natural law as a non-confessional, and by implication non-theological, concept, taken up by Protestants, especially the French Huguenots, to market their resistance theories to as wide an audience as possible. To him, this interest in natural law was part of a broader story, in which early modern political philosophy emerged as a subject of its own, independent of theology.11 More recently, Sachiko Kusukawa has shown that leading Lutheran writers placed ethics and civil philosophy firmly within the sphere of the Law, including the natural law, rather than the Gospel. In this way they opened up space for a discussion of civil and political issues which was independent of theology but quite compatible with the Christian message. This move enabled Protestants to act in the political sphere, to resist their rulers and to establish their own societies and to base their actions upon natural and civil laws rather than the words of Christ.12 Again, this has suggested that early modern natural law arguments are quite distinct from theological speculation – and that the Socinians can be safely confined to the latter arena. The most exciting challenge to the sixteenth-century concept of natural law came from a new and increasingly influential language of natural rights, as Richard Tuck has argued, but again the theological dimension has been largely ignored. For Tuck, rights had to be understood in contradistinction to laws; they could be assigned to individuals who then possessed ownership 10

11 12

Much of the recent Milton scholarship on this question is summarised in M. Lieb, ‘Milton and the Socinian Heresy’, in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. M. Kelley, M. Lieb and J. Shawcross (Pittsburgh, 2003), pp. 234–283; Newton’s alleged similarities with Socinianism have been most energetically investigated by Steven Snobelen; see, for example, his ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and “the One Supreme God”’, in M. Mulsow and J. Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Leiden, 2005), pp. 241–98. Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), vol. ii, pp. 349–58; these claims form part of the conclusion. S. Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995).

Introduction

9

and discretion over them. In his Natural Rights Theories (1979) he argued that in the seventeenth century this individualist concept of rights re-surfaced, and it enabled its exponents to provide imaginative solutions to some of the conflicts around them, and particularly to conflicts over property and sovereignty.13 Some of these ideas were later developed in his Philosophy and Government, and fleshed out through his description of the ‘new humanism’ of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this work, Tuck focused upon conformity rather than resistance, suggesting that in the early seventeenth century the prevalence of war and upheaval led men to see the political process as a kind of damage limitation exercise. This was a view of civil life which found the work of Tacitus, the detachment of the Stoics and the criticism of the Sceptics far more congenial than the active republicanism of Cicero. In order to secure basic agreement, certain individuals began to construct a minimalist doctrine of natural law, based upon the universally recognised (subjective) right of self-preservation – the only right able to withstand the arguments of the Sceptics. For Tuck, Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679) was the exponent par excellence of this doctrine, but he also sought to show that Hobbes was building upon the work of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and John Selden (1584–1654). And he emphasised that all these men were chastened by religious conflict; in so far as they were interested in theology it was to diffuse its disruptive potential. Instead, it was to the ancients and to modern natural philosophy that they looked for inspiration.14 Different geneses for the notion of natural rights have been suggested by Brian Tierney and Annabel Brett, but both have argued that a concept of subjective right, similar to that which Tuck found in Grotius, Selden and Hobbes, can be found in the juridical tradition. Tierney has pointed to the roots of this notion in the canon law of the twelfth century while Brett has also emphasised that this stemmed from a legal rather than a theological tradition. She has shown how the writers of the second Spanish scholastic, in the late sixteenth century, offered sophisticated analyses of subjective iura.15 They have offered a fuller picture of the language of rights in the period, providing the context for the reception and development of the works of well-known philosophers like Hobbes and Grotius. But the theological roots of this language, especially those laid down in the Protestant world, have not been studied in any detail. 13 14 15

R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979). R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 190–201 and 346–8. B. Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150– 1625 (Atlanta, 1997); A. Brett, Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge, 1997).

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Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

The Socinians, like the philosophers and jurists described by Tuck and others, developed claims about the rights of individuals using legal language. Moreover, they did so in a way which quite explicitly challenged the vision of natural law to which most of their contemporaries subscribed. Yet they did so because they objected to that vision on theological grounds and because they wanted to advance a very different theological agenda. They wanted to preserve space for individual moral responsibility and human freedom, concepts which they saw as essential to the Gospel message and which they feared had been lost or obscured during the Reformation. Their arguments were made in works which dealt with theological topics, like the satisfaction of Christ or the doctrine of predestination, but these arguments – as they well knew – had important implications for civil life. And, precisely for this reason, their works were widely read and discussed by jurists and civil philosophers as well as clergymen. Socinian ideas need, therefore, to be seen in the context of this broader early modern discussion about natural laws and natural rights, and about the ethics appropriate to an individual and to a society as a whole. This was a discussion with particular resonance in mid-seventeenth-century England and the fate of Socinian ideas is extremely revealing of the political, religious and intellectual developments at this time, as this book will show. iii No adequate account exists at present of the Socinians’ ideas and for this reason I will begin by setting out a new interpretation of the Socinians’ thought. In Chapter 1 I outline the Socinians’ distinctive views on freedom, human nature, and the Gospel message. In the half-century after Socinus’ death, the thought of the community developed, and the civil and political implications of these changing ideas will be emphasised as well as their more narrowly religious significance. The Trinity will be discussed quite briefly, for this is a subject to which I shall return in more detail in Chapter 6. Once the intellectual basis to Socinianism has been outlined, it will be possible to show how their ideas engaged and affected English (and some Scottish) readers in the turbulent decades of the mid seventeenth century. Chapter 2 introduces the problem of Socinianism in England and suggests why interest in it was relatively muted until the 1630s. Having seen how destructive both Socinian ideas and charges of Socinianism were in the Netherlands during the 1610s, Englishmen were reluctant to discuss the Polish group at all. Only in the 1630s did some theologians begin to use it as a polemical weapon, hoping to defend their own brand of Reformed theology by presenting it as an antidote to Socinianism. These men were

Introduction

11

not interested in Socinianism for its own sake; instead they saw it as a useful tool in their battle against Archbishop Laud. At the same time, however, the intellectual opportunities offered by Socinian ideas were explored in the writings of the Great Tew Circle, the subject of Chapter 3. This circle found in Socinian writing important materials which they could use to explain the moral and ethical dimension to Christianity, although they were always selective in their use of Socinian works and they played down the extent to which they drew upon such writing. As these chapters make clear, there were two different approaches to Socinianism, one negative and one positive. Some people attacked ‘Socinianism’ as a pernicious heresy, while others read Socinian writing and drew inspiration from it. War broke out in 1642 and among the men of Great Tew were some of the staunchest supporters of Charles’ cause. Chapter 4 shows how they used Socinian ideas to demolish Parliamentarian resistance theories based on natural law, arguing that nature gave humans rights – not laws – which they ceded to enter civil society and which they could not, as citizens and as Christians, take back. They also began to create a model of Royalism which placed the free individual at its centre, again using Socinian ideas. Meanwhile, Parliamentarians condemned such Royalist arguments as Socinian. Here again I emphasise the importance of the European intellectual context for English writers and politicians, showing that the controversy over Socinianism in the United Provinces helped to shape both Parliamentarian and Royalist arguments. After the First Civil War, one of the survivors of the Great Tew Circle – Henry Hammond (1605–1660) – continued to use Socinian ideas, but this time to defend the Church of England. At the start of the decade he had maintained a distinction between natural and Christian laws in order to critique resistance theories, but later in the decade he did so in order to preserve the independence of the episcopal church. Chapter 5 discusses his agenda – and the problems which he encountered. Later chapters take up the story from the Parliamentarian point of view. After the Royalists had been defeated, the Parliamentarians turned their attention to the construction of a church settlement. The settlement would be, it was hoped, based upon the clear words of Scripture and it became increasingly evident that it would be underpinned by the authority of the magistrate. Here the Socinians’ ideas were important in two interrelated ways. Most obviously, the Socinians’ assault upon the Trinity undermined efforts to establish a Trinitarian settlement based on Scripture; the problem of the Trinity will be the subject of Chapter 6. But the Socinians had also challenged the very notion that the magistrate could have any authority in religious matters, by urging that religion must be a free choice made by individuals.

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Reason and Religion in the English Revolution

Those who sought to promote an Erastian settlement found Socinianism a useful target because, against the Socinians, they could portray religion as natural to humans and therefore a matter for the magistrate. And they could, by denouncing the Socinians, also imply that this natural religion was Trinitarian. Chapter 7 explains why the problem of suppressing heterodoxy and defining toleration in the late 1640s came to centre upon the problem of Socinianism – even though no one in England identified themselves with this continental group. Chapter 8 continues this story into the 1650s, showing how John Owen (1616–1683), perhaps the most influential clergyman of the interregnum, used Socinianism as a polemical target to promote his own version of church settlement and why this failed. It also suggests that this period also saw some positive engagement with Socinian ideas, especially the ideas of the later Socinians, which would be significant for the Restoration church. As this outline might suggest, the focus of my book is very different from McLachlan’s account of Socinianism in England, and this will be particularly evident in the chapters which deal with the civil war years. McLachlan concentrated upon those who specifically rejected the Trinity, notably Paul Best (1590–1657) and John Biddle, highlighting the irenic and rational dimension to their writings. He provided a full account of their sufferings and tribulations, complete with discussion of the refutations which they provoked.16 Rather than revisit the cases of Biddle and Best, or duplicate his scholarship, I have taken a broader view of Socinianism at mid century. I have relied upon his scholarship in numerous places, and have found few details to add to his biographical narratives. Viewing Biddle and Best through a different lens has, however, led to a reassessment of the significance of these two men in the 1640s and 1650s. While I have not attempted to provide a narrative of events in these years, the context of the discussions of Socinianism has been included. Given both the complexity of events and the recent outpouring of work upon the period, my treatment is necessarily highly selective but, I hope, sufficient. For it is part of the present argument that the challenge – and opportunity – of Socinianism must be situated within the political and religious context of the English Revolution, broadly defined. Both Royalists and Parliamentarians had specific and often sound reasons, sometimes theological and sometimes more earthly, for using and refuting Socinian ideas. The Socinians’ challenge cannot be separated from the broader intellectual and political developments of these years; but these developments cannot be fully understood without the Socinians’ challenge. 16

McLachlan, Socinianism, chaps. 9 and 10.

chapter 1

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

Resting at an inn one day in Basle, in about 1576, the Huguenot minister Jacob Couet found himself dining with men who denied that Christ’s death was necessary to satisfy divine justice. Appalled by such heresy, Couet saw his chance to win them for the Reformed religion and brought the conversation round to the atonement.1 Yet the task he had set himself proved difficult, for he was up against Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), the Italian theologian whose interpretation of Christianity would become notorious across Europe. Couet’s stay in Basle lasted just one night; he was to leave early the next morning for Geneva. Unwilling to end the discussion so soon, both he and Socinus agreed to continue their arguments in written form, through correspondence. The papers circulated extensively in manuscript and were finally printed in 1594 as De Jesu Christo Servatore. It became clear that Couet’s alarm, his interest, and his keen desire to refute Socinus’ heresy were shared by scholars and theologians across the continent. For more than half a century the controversy over Socinianism kept Europe’s presses busy. Yet the exact nature of Socinus’ ideas has received little recent attention. What follows in this chapter is an attempt to remedy this deficiency and to outline the broad contours of Socinian thought in the early seventeenth century. Socinus challenged Couet on the question of divine justice and, as we shall see, Socinus’ understanding of divine justice was one of the most significant aspects of his thought. But it was intertwined with his broader reinterpretation of Christianity, a reinterpretation which sought to place morality at the heart of religion. Socinus feared that his contemporaries had badly misread Scripture, obscuring or even contradicting its most important message, and in numerous tracts and pamphlets he sought to explain why. Soon a movement associated with his name grew up, based initially in Poland. This community developed Socinus’ theology further, in the 1

Socinus’ description of the meeting is in F. Socinus, Fausti Socini Senensis Opera omnia in duos tomos distincta 2 vols. (Irenopoli [i.e., Amsterdam], post anno 1656 [i.e., c.1668]), vol. ii, p. 120.

13

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process altering it in several, often very significant, ways. The writing of the Socinians spread across Europe, offering to contemporaries a new version of Christianity which many readers found appalling and compelling, often at the same time. Couet had expected an easy victory over dinner but he was caught off guard by Socinus’ erudition, and particularly by the Italian’s approach to the problem of divine justice and forgiveness. Socinus, far more than most Protestant theologians, drew heavily on the principles of Roman private law. Yet if Couet had known Socinus’ background, then he might have been less surprised by his opponent’s learning – and by his theological stance. Socinus hailed from an illustrious line of Italian jurists, several of whom combined their legal studies with a critical approach towards the Catholic Church. Their learning rubbed off on the young Faustus, who began to approach the problems of theology with concepts drawn from the Roman legal system in his mind. He also absorbed the familial tradition of religious heterodoxy. Several of his uncles had been in trouble with the Catholic Church, but one, Laelius (1525–1562), had gone all the way to Protestantism and beyond. Laelius knew the leading Reformers well, he was on friendly terms with Bullinger and Melanchthon, but he maintained serious doubts about the truth of some of their doctrines. Exchanging long and earnest letters with John Calvin (1509–1564), Laelius questioned some of the central tenets of the Genevan Reformation. Gradually he began to work out his doubts on paper, and after his death in 1562 at the age of only thirty-seven, Faustus came to inherit these writings.2 In his own work, Faustus blended the legal, theological and ethical thought of his family, but he created from these elements his own distinctive synthesis. When Couet met Socinus in Basle, the Italian had not been in Switzerland long. Between 1562 and 1574 he had lived the life of a courtier in Florence, favoured and protected by Grand-Duke Cosimo de Medici I (1519–1574). On Cosimo’s death, however, Socinus decided to join the large group of Italians in Basle, who had exchanged the increasingly oppressive Catholicism of their homeland for the freer air of the Swiss plain. Yet Socinus never felt comfortable with the Reformed Protestantism of Basle and in 1579 he travelled to Poland. Here he aligned himself with an existing community of anti-Trinitarians and Anabaptists based at Rakow, known as the Polish Brethren. The community led a precarious existence, surrounded 2

For Laelius Socinus, see Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism, vol. i, pp. 240–7; M. Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c.1540–1620 (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 56–8; F. Church, The Italian Reformers, 1534–1564 (New York, 1932), pp. 133–5, 161–4.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

15

by enemies on all sides, but Socinus helped to sustain them through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf. By 1596 he had become the leader of their church, responsible for bringing some order and coherence to their theology and to their beliefs about the social duties of Christians. The most important result was the Racovian Catechism, printed in Latin in 1609, five years after the death of Socinus himself. The community continued to flourish and to develop its theology; the Catechism was re-issued and revised several times before the end of the century.3

i justice and virtue in socinus’ writing Socinus’ most striking claim – the claim that had so shocked Couet – was that Christ saved men through his teaching and his example, not by atoning for their sins on the cross. For Socinus, Christianity was above all an ethos of virtue, revealed by God through Christ, but within the reach of all human beings. Salvation came through following the life of Christ, through good works and repentance for sins. Christ’s death and resurrection were important in so far as they showed how God would reward those who lived as Christ had done. Socinus drew on Italian traditions of reform which had been smothered by the Protestant churches, asserting strongly his ethical interpretation of Christianity and his individualistic account of religion.4 It is worth outlining first the broad contours of Socinus’ thought before returning to the inn at Basle, for then it will be possible to draw out the full meaning of Socinus’ encounter with Couet. Central to Socinus’ project was an explanation of how and why a person might choose to follow Christ’s commands. This was a complicated and extensive project which involved Socinus in reworking almost every aspect of contemporary Christianity. For he wanted to show that religion was inevitably a matter of choice, that human beings could – and should – make decisions about their faith and about the consequences of such a faith for their daily lives. Once he had established that humans could make up their own minds in such matters, he then needed to persuade them that following Christ was a sensible course of action and to spell out what that might mean. Almost all of his writings were devoted to these themes, as he sought to counter the interpretations of Christianity (and of humanity itself) offered 3

4

R. Wallace, AntiTrinitarian Biography 3 vols. (London, 1850), vol. ii, pp. 306–9; Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. i, pp. 387–407; T. Rees (ed.), The Racovian Catechism: with Notes and Illustrations (London, 1818). Church, Italian Reformers, pp. 1–10.

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by Protestants and Catholics, and to replace them with his own reading of the scriptural text. Socinus consistently emphasised that both religious faith and virtuous actions must be voluntary, for only voluntary actions were praiseworthy and meritorious. For Socinus, this meant that human beings had to enter freely into a relationship with God; there was nothing in their nature which put them inevitably into such a relationship. Socinus feared that his contemporaries devalued the voluntary aspect of religion with their doctrines of man’s natural immortality and of original sin, for these doctrines implied that all men had fallen from an original state of righteousness and now lay under the just wrath of God. The consequences of Adam’s sin lay upon all mankind, according to this picture – and one of these consequences was the inherent depravity of the human will. No one could rescue himself from this plight and it was only through the sacrifice of Christ that men could be redeemed, according to most of Socinus’ contemporaries.5 In response, Socinus wanted to show that human nature had not been altered by the sin of Adam, leaving humans with both the freedom and the ability to choose the path of religion and virtue. At the same time, however, he wanted to make clear that this path was not one to which men were inclined by their own natures; to walk down such a path must always be a conscious choice. To show how humans could be capable of making decisions in matters of religion, Socinus had to discuss mankind’s condition and to go back to the story of creation. According to the Italian, the account in Genesis made clear that men were made from the earth and subject to the natural processes of change, decay and corruption. Adam was not naturally immortal, but would grow and then perish like all other living beings in Eden. Nor was he inherently virtuous or just; Socinus rejected any suggestion that Adam had been created in a state of original righteousness in which his natural inclination was to obey God’s laws. Socinus felt that this was nonsense, for righteousness that came naturally and with the assistance of the appetite had no moral value. Instead Socinus argued that human beings were created with reason, which enabled them to recognise what was right and to carry out good and virtuous actions if they so chose. Yet people also had appetites and they had a strong sense of what would be beneficial to them in the here and now. Usually, the virtuous course of action was damaging to their own earthly interests, leaving people with a choice between following reason or appetite. This had also been Adam’s situation, hence Socinus described him 5

For an overview of the Protestant doctrine of original sin, see P. Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 52–66.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

17

as ‘fit for’ justice and righteousness. When Adam sinned, he lost the access to the tree of life that could have enabled him to live for ever, but he did not lose his natural immortality or his inherent righteousness because he had never had these in the first place. All his successors were in the same position, men and women who were born, lived and died, and who were always able to carry out good and virtuous works if they wanted.6 Like virtue, religious belief was, in Socinus’ view, a matter of choice and therefore not a tendency or inclination implanted at creation. Socinus emphasised that while men might perceive the demands of reason or righteousness, they had no innate or natural knowledge of a deity, or of a being who might back these demands with divine sanctions. ‘For’, he argued, ‘if the opinion of a deity were joined together with nature, certainly it would not be of faith’. He added empirical evidence for his claim and, drawing on recent travellers’ tales from the New World, Socinus suggested that there were whole peoples in Brazil and the Indies who had no religious worship.7 Elsewhere he went on to explain that men were created mortal, had no intrinsic connection to anything beyond this earthly realm, and that without specific divine intervention their deaths would be final.8 Religious faith had nothing to do with nature, natural instinct or any human concept of an immortal soul; only God’s own revelation could provide mankind with any evidence for the existence of a deity or the possibility of an afterlife. Here again Socinus set himself against the current of Protestant thought; following Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), most Protestant theologians had strongly asserted that men had an innate knowledge of God and his law which was not dependent on revelation.9 Yet Socinus’ consistent aim was to separate the voluntary religious choices which men made from any natural compulsion or instinct, in order to place all the emphasis upon men’s own will. Without natural knowledge of God, the only information which human beings had about the deity came from revelation. Here, Socinus also insisted that people must decide for themselves whether to accept the accounts they heard of divine revelation. And here their most valuable resource was their 6

7 8 9

See Socinus’ De Statu Primi Hominis Ante Lapsum Disputatio (Rakow, 1610), printed in his Opera Omnia, vol. ii, pp. 253–369; his Brevis Discursus de Causa (Rakow, 1614), in Opera Omnia, vol. i, pp. 455–6 and his Praelectiones Theologicae, in Opera Omnia vol. i, pp. 534–600; on pp. 539–40 Socinus describes Adam as ‘fit for justice’. Ibid., pp. 537–8. These points were made at length in his De statu primi hominis ante lapsum disputatio and are also summarised in his Prælectiones Theologicæ. C. Manschreck (ed. and transl.), Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555 (New York, 1965), pp. 51–3, 73–5; C. Bauer, ‘Melanchthons Naturrechtslehre’, in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 42 (1951), pp. 64–100.

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own reasoning power. They had to decide, not only of the plausibility of the Christian revelation, but also its relative merit compared with alternative religious traditions. To assist fellow enquirers, Socinus composed a defence of the New Testament as a credible text: his De Auctoritate Sacrae Scripturae (1580, composed 1570). Here he applied to Scripture humanistic methods of historical and textual criticism, examining the relationship between the authors and the texts to show that they were written by men with adequate knowledge of the events they described. In the first three-quarters of this work Socinus wrote, he said, of the ‘history of Jesus of Nazareth and of things in the past relating to him and his religion’; he then went on to show how history and doctrine were inextricably linked together.10 For Socinus, Christianity was credible because it was based upon sound historical testimony, and this testimony ought to be examined and interpreted in the same way as any other historical text. On Socinus’ reasoning, scriptural text included nothing to indicate that Christ was divine or pre-existent – on the contrary, the Bible described Christ as a human being. Socinus refused therefore to accept the doctrine of the Trinity, and in the final section of this chapter we shall return to examine the Socinians’ views on this subject. Socinus presented Christ as a historical figure who had revealed the way of salvation which was hitherto unknown, even to the Israelites. Christ had explained to men the conditions under which God would grant them eternal life after their earthly death, and by his resurrection he had proved the truth of his claims. Through the ministry of Christ and through the example of his resurrection, God had made a promise of eternal life to those who obeyed his laws. This reward Socinus saw as a gift of God to assist those who struggled to act virtuously, through which human beings could be assured that their efforts would not be in vain, nor would they go unrewarded. Although men were able to live peaceably without religion, Socinus felt that they found it difficult to fulfil the high standards of virtue without the promise of a future reward. The great advantage of Christianity was that it provided such a reward – it solved the problem of human motivation for righteous action. Through Christ, therefore, God had brought men’s ratio – and therefore their understanding of righteousness – into line with their long-term self-interest.11 Socinus’ emphasis on human freedom and moral responsibility had led him to deny that religion was in any sense natural to man, and he believed that men could live sociable and peaceful lives without any religious belief whatsoever. Furthermore, he described God’s relationship to men in 10

Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. i, p. 277.

11

Ibid., pp. 455–6.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

19

dynamic terms: it changed throughout history as God made different promises with different people. Where his contemporaries saw humanity as inescapably enmeshed in religion, lying under the curse they inherited from Adam or saved by the intervention of Christ, Socinus suggested men could function as men without involving themselves with religion at all. Men without the Christian religion had no guarantee of eternal life, but unless they specifically rejected Christ they need not fear the flames of hell or punishment in an afterlife. At the same time, Socinus was also suggesting that the moral demands of Christianity could be (and were) more stringent than any other moral or religious system, because they were backed with an impressive reward. His theology began to prise the Christian religion away from the natural condition of man or the religion of the Israelites. The distinctiveness of Christianity was discussed most intensively when war loomed on the horizon, for the attitude of Christ towards warfare appeared to be very different from that of his Jewish forebears. This was a particularly pressing issue in the late sixteenth century, when the Polish community within which Socinus lived was tearing itself apart through disagreement over whether war was legitimate for Christians. Turkish invasions meant that soldiers had to be levied and that all Polish nobles eligible for military service were called to serve their country. The Racovians were most reluctant, refusing as far as possible to take up arms on the grounds that it was inconsistent with their Christian faith. They were censured severely for their pacifism, and their critics pointed to the numerous examples of warfare undertaken with God’s blessing recorded in the Old Testament.12 In a response printed in 1581, Socinus began to distinguish the standards required by God from Christians with the morals permissible under the Old Testament, and to explain why God had allowed resistance and war to the Israelites. His answer was that God had granted to them a temporal and territorial kingdom, which then required defence. Under the New Covenant, however, the situation was very different. Now, as Christ had explicitly said, God’s kingdom was not of this world, but was a heavenly realm. As such, there was no need to defend it from physical assault; the warfare which the (private) Christian was called upon to wage was entirely spiritual. Since ‘the possessions and goods of Christians are not earthly, but heavenly’, he argued, ‘a Christian man ought not to labour for the conservation of his earthly goods’. It would be especially unworthy and unchristian of him to endanger anyone else’s life to defend them.13 This did not mean that one’s life and earthly 12 13

S. Kot, Socinianism in Poland, transl. E. Wilbur (Boston, 1957), pp. 50–68. Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. ii, p. 73.

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goods were to be thrown away carelessly, and Socinus did allow men to defend themselves where there was no risk of killing another.14 But Socinus and his followers insisted that the laws brought by Christ were stricter than those given to the Israelites. In the same work, Socinus launched a scathing critique of contemporary resistance theories which, he felt, were responsible for the turmoil engulfing France and Germany at this time. He insisted that Christians were bound by the New Testament injunctions to ‘obey the powers that be’; the Apostles had taught, he argued, that all powers, whether good or bad, were in no way to be resisted, and they taught openly enough that it was better to forsake one’s life, than to attempt anything against those who rule, even if there seemed to be the most just cause, and even in cases when God had approved of this under the law of Moses.15

On Socinus’ reasoning, no sensible person would take up arms against their ruler, or shed the blood of an invader, because they would thereby forfeit eternal life. As always, Socinus’ argument was designed to persuade the rational person to live their life in accordance with the strict laws of Christ. Christianity had to be chosen, but God had provided powerful incentives to sway that choice. If people committed themselves to follow Christ, then, Socinus insisted, God would forgive their sins and give them eternal life. His understanding of salvation was, as this suggests, very different from his Protestant and Catholic contemporaries and it was on this question that the argument had flared up at the inn at Basle. There, the central topics were divine justice, divine forgiveness, and the crucial question of salvation. For Couet, a Huguenot and a Calvinist, men were depraved through original sin and could only be saved through faith in Christ and his sacrificial death. Only through the death of Christ, Couet thought, could the sins of human beings be forgiven by a just and vengeful God. Socinus rejected all these notions, arguing that God was free to forgive sinners without requiring any sacrifice at all. The Italian insisted that God was not under any obligation to punish sinners or to demand satisfaction from them. On the contrary, God could simply choose to forgive those who were penitent and who earnestly sought to amend their lives. To Couet, such free forgiveness was impossible, for it would be a violation of divine justice. He saw justice as the wrath of God against sinners, wrath that had to be appeased through sacrifice and that 14 15

Rees included a letter from Socinus to this effect in his edition of the Racovian Catechism, pp. 178–80. Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. ii, pp. 79–80.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

21

could not just be brushed aside. Socinus, however, objected to this as a definition of justice: what Couet was describing was God’s anger, not his justice. In De Jesu Christo Servatore, the written account of this dispute, Socinus offered his own interpretation of punishment and forgiveness. There he maintained that God had a right of punishment against sinners which he could use if he so wished.16 Underlying this position were a number of ideas which helped to preserve God’s freedom of action. Firstly, Socinus took very seriously the idea that a sin was like a debt, it gave to the injured party a right of punishment over the sinner which was just like a creditor’s right over his debtors. This notion, that sins were like debts, was fairly common among theologians; it was supported by verses such as Matthew 6:12, where Christ teaches his followers to pray for forgiveness of their debts. But Socinus went on to make a more unusual claim. He understood this right of punishment or debt through the lens of Roman private law, and therefore he refused to see it as a duty. For Socinus a right, and particularly a right of punishment, was something which gave an element of discretion to its owner, who could use it or not use it as he saw fit. The Latin word he uses is ‘ius’ and, as is well known, ‘ius’ could mean both right and law – it could have a subjective and an objective meaning.17 But Socinus consistently refused to see a right as a duty, maintaining that no one could be forced to act upon their rights. Furthermore, he added, surely God, as a sovereign ruler, could not be constrained by any higher authority to punish sinners; even human princes use their rights of punishment as they choose.Where sinners repented, God could simply choose to forgive their sins.18 Socinus assumed in De Jesu Christo that the authority which God had over mankind was similar to that possessed by human rulers and that it could be understood as such. The norms of political practice and Roman law were therefore helpful, he felt, in elucidating what God might or might not do. Like any human ruler, God interacted with men by means of laws, backed by rewards and punishments, and these laws were known through scriptural text. By presenting religion in this way, Socinus was rejecting the complicated philosophical speculations of his contemporaries, suggesting that Christianity should be approached upon lines similar to those used in law or history. Socinus was also implying that Christianity involved a series of transactions between God and men, and that these transactions could be understood in legal or political terms. The parties on 16 18

Ibid., pp. 186–94. 17 Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, p. 109. Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. ii, pp. 186–8.

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each side were, Socinus thought, rational agents capable of making decisions and being held accountable for them – any doctrine which undermined these points he saw as destructive of religion. Christianity, for Socinus, was a religion which took seriously human responsibility and freedom of choice. Christ came to persuade men to live moral lives and to encourage them by providing the perfect example of such a life. If humans made a real effort to live in this way, then God – being also free in his actions – would forgive their sins and grant them eternal life. In his attempt to preserve human freedom, Socinus had also come to argue that Christianity had nothing to do with human nature, but was based instead upon the revelation made by Christ in time, at a particular point in history. These two themes, of human freedom and of Christianity as a religion grounded in history, would be taken up and both condemned and copied by Socinus’ readers across Europe. ii socinianism across europe Couet was not alone in expressing his horror at the pernicious doctrines of the Socinians. The Dutch theologian Samuel des Marets (1599–1673) was one of the most outspoken, describing Socinianism as a hydra of heresies brought up out of hell by Satan, a beast of many heads which exhaled foul blasphemies against both God and Christ.19 More specifically, Protestants agreed that men were justified by faith alone, not by their works, and they rushed to denounce the Socinians for their strongly ethical interpretation of Christianity. The Socinians were attacked for their refusal to accept that Christ had atoned for men’s sins and for refusing to see him as a divine redeemer figure. Indeed, for most Protestants the Socinians were deeply blasphemous in their objections to the divinity of Christ. Protestants complained that rather than gratefully acknowledge the work of Christ in saving fallen humanity, the Socinians preferred to pin their hopes of heaven on their own efforts. In so doing they rode roughshod over the Protestant scheme of salvation, proving themselves even worse than the Catholics. Catholics also objected to Socinus’ ideas, particularly his rejection of the authority of the Church, but our focus here will be on the Protestant reaction to Socinian writing, for this would be more important in an English context. The Socinians provided plenty of material for their opponents to attack, but their interpretation of Christ’s teaching came in for some of the most 19

S. des Marets (Maresius), Hydra Socinianismi expugnata 3 vols. (Groningen, 1651–1662), vol. i, sig. (*)3r.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

23

powerful criticism. When Socinus began to contrast Christ’s law with the commands found in the Old Testament, he touched one of the Protestants’ rawest nerves. From the 1520s, the Anabaptists had tended to appeal to the teachings of Christ in justification of their radical social programme, and leading Reformers had turned to the Old Testament and to the natural law in their defence of the old order. Starting with Philip Melanchthon, it had become common to claim that the natural law – or the moral law found in the Old Testament – contained all the duties required of men, including Christians. The moral law was the perfect law written on Adam’s heart and then, when obscured by sin, revealed to Moses and the Israelites. And this law contained not only men’s duties towards God but also to each other; it provided the rules for a godly society. To say that Christ had altered the moral law was to suggest that God changed his mind when it came to moral standards. It was also to introduce a notion of perfection above the natural law, and to open the door to some serious errors. One was the Catholic argument that some of Christ’s commands were counsels of perfection, which could only be fulfilled by a few saintly people. Secondly, it could lead to a rejection of civil government as incompatible with the Christian virtues of charity and forgiveness. In his celebrated Loci Communes, therefore, Melanchthon insisted that the natural law, including the provisions that it made for human authority, was a branch of the divine law and to be respected as such.20 When later Protestants came to discuss the relationship between Christianity and the natural law, they tended to follow the lines set down by Melanchthon. Faced with the task of wooing rulers to their cause, it made sense for Reformers to emphasise the strong connection between true Christianity and human social life. When, later in the century, persecution of Protestant groups began to increase, the need to hold together natural law and Christian duty became ever more pressing; only by arguing in this way could the Protestants appeal for support beyond their own confessional horizon. In the process, as is well known, Protestants – and most particularly the French Huguenots – borrowed their natural law arguments from the Catholics. But it needs also to be stressed that the Protestants emphasised the divine perfection of this natural law, at least where outward actions were concerned, and thus the duty which Christians lay under to obey it. These Protestant natural law arguments help to explain why, as we shall see, there was a strong reaction against Socinianism.21 20 21

Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy, pp. 67–74; M. Scattola, Das Naturrecht vor dem Naturrecht: zur Geschichte des ‘ius naturae’ im 16. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1999), pp. 29–55. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, esp. vol. ii, pp. 318–23; R. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), with the assistance of M. Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 193–218.

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By the 1610s the Socinians had come to be seen as the most sophisticated and most dangerous opponents of several key Protestant claims, especially the Protestant interpretation of natural law and the doctrine of justification by faith. Their emphasis on Christ as a teacher rather than the Incarnate God who redeemed the world by dying went down very badly with Protestants both Calvinist and Lutheran. In the flagship Lutheran University of Wittenburg, for example, the errors of the Socinians on this score were denounced repeatedly. Wolfgang Frantzius (1564–1628), professor of theology there, spent most of his (and his students’) time attacking Valentine Smalcius (1572–1622), a German Socinian. He hoped to show that Smalcius’ theology was based upon a false conception of Christ’s ministry and particularly of the relationship between Christ’s commands and those of the Old Testament. Smalcius had suggested that ‘the divine moral law [of the Old Testament] and with it the law of nature, is to be reformed, restricted and moulded to the laws of Christ’.22 Keen to counter such ideas, Frantzius insisted in numerous lectures and disputations that the divine moral law of the Old Testament was still the perfect standard for Christians. Christ had come to die for our sins, he lectured, not to give us ethical guidance. Frantzius argued that God had provided plenty of moral instruction in the Old Testament, but men were simply too depraved to follow it. What they needed was a sacrificial victim, not a philosopher.23 Frantzius’ concerns were echoed by other theologians, particularly on the Lutheran side; readers across Europe, even in England, became familiar with the image of the Socinians presented by these critics.24 Frantzius’ concern over the spread of Socinian ideas had good cause: by 1616 a coterie of Socinian sympathisers had been found at – and expelled from – the Academy of Altdorf, a town near Nuremberg in Germany. One Altdorf student, Johan Crell (1590–1633), had left the Academy even earlier, in 1613, when his religious views had come under serious suspicion. He moved to Rakow, where he would serve as Rector of the Socinians’ own Academy there.25 From the surviving evidence it is clear that what attracted the Altdorf students was the Socinians’ focus on virtue and good works, which they contrasted with the stale solefideism of the Lutherans. Martin 22 23

24 25

V. Smalcius, Refutatio thesium D. Wolfgangi Frantzii (Rakov, 1614), p. 393. W. Franzius, Vindiciae disputationum theologicarum pro Augustanâ Confeβione habitarum adversus valentinum Smalcium (Wittenburg, 1621), especially the ‘Disputatio de rebus civilis’. See also his Schola Sacrificiorum (Wittenburg, 1617). See below p. 55. S. Wollgast, Philosophie in Deutschland zwischen Reformation und Aufklarung, 1550–1650 (Berlin, 2nd edn, 1993), pp. 373–81. A full account of Socinianism at Altdorf can be found in Gustav-Georg Zeltner, Historia Crypto-Socinismi Altorfinae quondam Academiae infesti arcana (Leipzig, 1729).

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Ruar (1589–1657), later an active Socinian adherent, wrote from Altdorf to a friend in 1616 that ‘nothing is more highly commended by sacred scripture, than piety or innocence of life’; one of his fellow students quipped that the Lutherans ‘often talk about the person of Christ, rarely or never about following him’.26 The Socinians presented an ethical version of Christianity that seemed to Ruar to be closer to the message of Christ than the Lutheranism he had grown up with. These Altdorf converts formed the core of a second generation of Socinians, who, as we shall see, would shape – and at times repudiate – Socinus’ theology in important ways. It was not only at Altdorf that Socinian ideas were beginning to provoke controversy. Two Polish sympathisers brought Socinus’ works to the United Provinces in 1598, and after this the Dutch – and European – debate over Socinus’ ideas really took off.27 For in Holland, those who opposed a strict doctrine of predestination and sought to reinstate human free will were already beginning to coalesce into a group which, after 1610, would be known as the Remonstrants. As at Altdorf, many found Socinus’ ethical Christianity appealing. One student at Leiden even recalled that Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), the theologian whose views on grace and predestination caused so much uproar, recommended Socinus’ writings in his classes.28 Strong links were soon forged between the Socinians from Altdorf and the Remonstrants. Martin Ruar travelled to Holland around 1618, and there he became acquainted with several of the leading Remonstrants, including the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the Episcopius family. So close was Ruar to the latter that in 1618 he asked for his letters to be sent to the house of Rem Episcopius, brother of the more famous Simon (1583–1643) who would lead the Remonstrant party after Arminius’ death.29 The Remonstrants and the Socinians shared a commitment to an ethical interpretation of Christianity, but their theologies were built upon different foundations. Like Socinus, Arminius believed that men must have some control over their own salvation or damnation, on the grounds that rewards and punishment must relate to human beings’ own voluntary actions. Yet Arminius had no wish to distinguish between the free and the virtuous on 26

27 28

29

M. Ruari, …, aliorumque virorum doctorum … ad ipsum epistolarum selectarum centuria 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1677–1681), vol. i, p. 8; Ruar also described his spiritual journey in a letter of 1623 in vol. ii, pp. 172–9; G.G. Zeltner, Historia Crypto-Sociniana (Lipsiae [Leipzig], 1726), p. 436. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. i, pp. 537–40. R. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the thought of Jacob Arminius (Grand Rapids, 1991), pp. 27–8. For Hugo Grotius’ use of Socinian writings, see J. P. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: a study of his work De veritate religionis Christianae, 1640, transl. J. C. Grayson (Leiden, 2004), pp. 116, 118–20. M. Ruari … epistolarum, vol. i, p. 23.

26

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the one hand, and the natural on the other, as Socinus had done. He was willing to accept the doctrines of original sin and atonement, believing that men who suffered from Adam’s sin required a divine redeemer and the gift of grace to restore them to their full humanity. He believed that men were created with natural knowledge of God and he could not conceive of men outside the Christian schema of Fall and Redemption. The atonement remained centrally important to him, as the means by which sinful men were reconciled to God; he also emphasised men’s need for the gift of grace which would influence their moral actions. Where Socinus had begun to imagine human nature, with its moral norms and values, as separate from Christianity, Arminius was anxious to preserve the strong connection between the two.30 Arminius left a large body of theological writing, some of which was accepted by the Dutch Remonstrant group. But the Remonstrants did not feel themselves bound to preserve Arminius’ system in its entirety, and from the start they began to alter and reshape it. In particular, the leader of the Remonstrant party from the 1610s, Simon Episcopius, produced his own theology which differed in significant ways from Arminius’. His writing reflected his own engagement with Socinian thought (and with Socinians themselves), and he tried to find a place for Socinus’ rather stronger concept of human freedom within it, limiting the role played by grace in directing the will.31 We shall return to these themes in later chapters, for the ongoing discussion in the Remonstrant or Arminian community about the relationship between Christianity and human nature would be important for English theologians after the First Civil War. Among the Socinians, however, the most important Dutch influence on the development of their thought was the writing of Hugo Grotius, the impact of which must be discussed next.

iii grotius and the second-generation socinians The Socinians’ ideas proved particularly interesting – and alarming – to Hugo Grotius, who was in the 1610s one of the chief architects of the Remonstrant position. Grotius at this time was Pensionary of Holland and attorney-general to the States of Holland, and a man increasingly frustrated 30 31

See Mark Ellis, Simon Episcopius’ Doctrine of Original Sin (New York, 2006), pp. 63–86, and Muller, God, Creation and Providence, esp. pp. 233–4. John Platt notes Episcopius’ engagement with Socinian thought in Reformed Thought and Scholasticism: the Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology, 1575–1650 (Leiden, 1982), pp. 196–238; Ellis argues instead that Episcopius worked out the implications of Arminius’ ideas more fully, see Simon Episcopius’ Doctrine of Original Sin, esp. pp. 178–85.

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by the accusations of Socinianism he saw hurled at the Remonstrants. In an effort to clear the Remonstrants’ name, he wrote his own reply to De Jesu Christo Servatore, in 1614–15; it would be printed in 1617 as Defensio Fidei Catholicae de Satisfactione Christi adversus Faustum Socinum. Reading Socinus’ work, what struck Grotius was the absence of any communal or social context for his concept of both justice and punishment. By describing the right of punishment as the right of a creditor, belonging to the injured party and to be used for that individual’s own benefit, Socinus had implied that decisions over punishment could be made by this individual alone because no other interests or rights were at stake. To Grotius this was an absurd notion; he was convinced that the purpose of punishment was the common good. For him, the ‘power of punishing’ did not exist ‘for the sake of the punisher, but for the sake of some Community; for all punishment hath the common good proposed’.32 Socinus’ analogy between private debt and public punishment was, for Grotius, unsustainable because men did not live as isolated individuals but in a community, where the misdeeds of one affected all the others. ‘The right of property’ or a private right was, according to Grotius, ‘for the sake of the Owner; but the right of Punishment, [was] for the sake of the Common Good’; it could not simply be renounced. It is noticeable that here Grotius altered his earlier belief that the right of punishment belonged to individuals, and tied it much more firmly to the good of the human community.33 Grotius was not content merely to demonstrate the utility of punishment, however. He wanted also to show that the necessity of punishment was grounded in the natural order of things, that it was part of the moral norms of the universe which applied to God as well as to man. Only by doing so could he maintain that satisfaction had to be made for the sins of mankind. Once this natural basis for punishment had been asserted, however, Grotius went on to limit the role played by the laws of nature. Although the necessity of punishment was part of the natural order of things, the level and subject of that punishment was not.34 The future good of the community and the potential for correcting the offender needed to be taken into account here.35 In this way Grotius could argue that nature 32 33

34

Hugo Grotius, A Defence of the Catholick Faith concerning the Satisfaction of Christ, transl. W. H. (London, 1692) p. 70. Grotius, A Defence of the Catholick Faith, p. 77. On his earlier position, see his Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty, ed. and transl. M. Van Ittersum (Indiana, 2006), pp. 136–7; and R. Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1998), p. 82. Ibid., p. 85. 35 Ibid., pp. 64–7, 86–8.

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laid down a basic pattern to be followed but human decisions then shaped the exact course of civil affairs. Neither nature nor God himself provided an absolute standard for society; men were free to choose from a range of possible options. Although Grotius did not make clear in this work the exact relationship between nature and the common good, he was quite explicit that together they provided a standard independent of Christ’s revelation, and one which was acknowledged and observed by God. Grotius would return to develop these points in his masterwork, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), for in the early 1620s it was more important than ever to defend the legitimacy and independence of civil authority against an array of religious critics. Several Remonstrants were drawn to the thoroughgoing pacifism of the radical wing at Rakow and they came to regard magistracy as unchristian. One Remonstrant later recalled that this problem then troubled ‘not only the Anabaptists, but also many others, including men whose erudition was equal to their piety’.36 De Jure Belli ac Pacis should be seen, at least in part, as his response to these ideas. In it Grotius persisted in his refusal to equate Christianity and natural law, but he made rather more effort to examine the foundations of natural law and civil authority, tracing these to man’s natural sociability as well as to his will.37 Whereas Socinus had treated man’s nature as morally neutral, placing all virtue in human will and free choice, Grotius rejected this dichotomy. Instead, Grotius rooted human concern for the common good in the very nature of man, and he then based a system of rights and laws upon this. In so doing, he provided legitimacy for human government – and even for warfare – which was independent of Christianity yet complementary to it. While Grotius clearly did not share the Socinians’ position on the questions of justice and atonement, he had come to agree that the natural law did not include all the demands which God made upon those who sought eternal life. The natural law might be morally significant, but it was not complete and God demanded greater perfection from men under the new covenant. Thus he, like the Socinians, considered the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) as an amendment of the previously valid laws of nature and of Moses; contrary to mainstream Protestant exegesis, he did not believe that Christ merely rescued the old Law from the erroneous interpretations of the scribes and Pharisees. On this point he was at one with the 36 37

S. Episcopius, Opera Theologica, vol. ii, ed. Philip Van Limborch (Gouda, 1665), p. 467. The comment is from Limborch. Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, ed. R. Tuck as The Rights of War and Peace 3 vols. (Indiana, 2005), esp. vol. i, pp. 79–90, 126, and pp. 106–7 where Grotius describes pacifism as an extreme position.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

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Socinians, but where he took issue with the Socinians was their claim that Christ had there prohibited war and all taking of life.38 It would be wrong to extrapolate from this that Grotius was in any sense a Socinian, but we have seen that the notion that Christ had brought new laws was commonly associated with Socinianism. Protestant theologians set up a sharp contrast between the conventional position that the natural law was perfect and the Socinians’ claim that Christians should follow instead the new law of Christ. What Grotius did, however, was to posit a middle position. He argued that Christ demanded a degree of virtue from his followers, such as a willingness to lay down one’s life for others, which was not demanded by the natural law but which was still broadly consistent with its ideals.39 This enabled him to distance natural law from the more perfect law of Christ, without entirely devaluing natural, social life as Socinus had threatened to do. On the Socinian side, it was felt that Grotius’ critique of the master demanded a response. The obvious candidate to provide one was Johann Crell, once one of the brightest students at Altdorf and now Rector of the Socinians’ own Academy. Crell’s skills in ethics and jurisprudence had impressed the Altdorf authorities enough for them to offer him the valuable post of ‘Inspector of Alumni’; now he could put those skills to work in the service of the Socinian cause. In 1623, the Rakow press printed his Ad Librum Hugonis Grotii (1623), and this was soon exported to the United Provinces and beyond. While the title might not display much imagination, the work itself was a sustained reflection upon the nature of rights, and their relationship to both human freedom and to the natural order. Indeed, Crell translated Socinus’ emphasis on free will, human and divine, into a discussion of the relative rights of God and mankind, producing a theology in which Socinus’ emphasis on human liberty and free will was expressed in juridical terms. Socinus had separated natural instinct from virtue or justice, arguing that the latter must be acts of will. His opponents had reasserted the connection between justice, including punishment, and the natural order, and it was this relationship which Crell set out to analyse. Crell agreed that the ius of punishment arose from the natural order, he accepted Grotius’ claim that nature itself called out for redress when injured. But Crell understood ‘nature’ to be the natural instincts within individuals, not any natural order or harmony within the world. He claimed that nature had implanted 38

39

Ibid., vol. i, pp. 126, 195–222; cf. e.g., Beza’s annotations on Matthew 5:19 in The Geneva Bible, ed. G. Sheppard (New York, 1989), and D. Pareus, In S. Matthæi Evangelium commentarius (Oxford, 1631), pp. 100–103. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, vol. 1, pp. 195–7.

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anger into men, and from this anger arose the desire to harm those who harmed us – a desire which, Crell insisted, was not in itself unjust. The origins of retribution were thereby traced to the emotions of the individual, which Crell suggested gave rise to a right of punishment. From his argument it followed that this right belonged originally to the injured party, and that it existed for the benefit of the injured party.40 In defending God’s full discretion over his rights of punishment, therefore, Crell began to develop a broader argument, which included the origins, transfer and use of rights more generally. Furthermore, it was an argument which took seriously Grotius’ criticisms of Socinus, which was refreshingly free from polemic or bitterness, and was clearly designed to win over the man so admired by Crell and his friends. The Remonstrant Caspar Brandt wrote that through Crell’s work, ‘composed in a modest, civil, serious and artful manner, many of those of the same sect with Crell, believed that Grotius was quite overthrown’.41 And, as Crell had hoped, relations between Grotius and the Socinians soon strengthened. By this point Grotius had also read Socinus’ De Auctoritate and Crell’s reply to his Defensio. In 1629, Grotius published his De Veritate Religionis Christinae, in which he insisted that faith had to be voluntarily chosen and it had to lead to virtuous action. The similarities between this work and Socinus’ De Auctoritate Sacrae Scripturae have been noticed by J. P. Heering, who has shown that Grotius included substantial portions of De Auctoritate in books two and three of De Veritate.42 Later Grotius would become acquainted with several Socinians, praising their work De Vera Religione (1630) and corresponding with them regularly as fellow labourers in the cause of European peace. He assured Crell that, ‘If I am able to contribute to your efforts, I will do so most willingly’.43 These contacts and the resulting exchange of ideas between Grotius and the Socinians did much to shape the thought of both sides. 40

41 42

43

J. Crell, Ad librum Hugonis Grotii, quem de satisfactione Christi adversus Favstvm Socinvm Senensem scripsit, responsio (Rakow, 1623), printed in J. Crell, Opera didactica et polemica (Irenopoli [i.e., Amsterdam], post anno 1656 [i.e., 1666–1668]), pp. 1–231, esp. pp. 71–3. For more detail of Crell’s argument, see my article, ‘Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers’, JHI 70 (2009), pp. 191–211. G. Brandt, The History of the Reformation and other Ecclesiastical Transactions in and about the LowCountries 4 vols. (London, 1720–1723), vol. ii, p. 314. H. Grotius to W. De Groot, 2nd November 1626 (NS), P. C. Molhuysen, et al. (eds.), Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius (Gravenhage, 1928–2001) (hereafter: BW), vol. iii, p. 1105. J. Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion, pp. 120–37. See Grotius’ letters to Crell in BW, vol. iv, p. 392 and vol. v, p. 146; for Grotius’ friendships with Socinians in Hamburg, see G. Cohen, ‘Une biographie inédite de Grotius par Sorbière’, in Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres et des Sciences (Brussels) 19 (1933), pp. 235–44.

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The most significant Socinian work of this period was De Vera Religione, for it provided a new summary of Socinian thought which took into account the intellectual developments of the previous decades. Indeed, it is a crucial guide to second-generation Socinian thinking. It was begun by Jan Volkelius (d. 1616) but was left unfinished at his death; Johan Crell then took over and saw it through the press. De Vera Religione discussed the relationship between God and man, describing in detail the religions of the Old and New Covenants. Although it used some of the language of Protestant Covenant theology, the authors were insistent throughout that God had given free will to human beings and that any covenant between God and men must be conditional. Crell added a work of his own, De deo et ejus attributis, to the start of De Vera Religione; here he discussed the knowledge that humans could have of God from the natural world and from revelation. Throughout, he assumed that God was a sovereign ruler, but one whose relationship to human beings could be understood in terms of rights. On Crell’s account, God gave to men free will and thereby made them at least in part sui iuris, able to act in a legal capacity in their own right, even in matters pertaining to their salvation.44 In this and other works, Crell also began to argue that God wanted human beings and human communities to preserve themselves and to flourish, retreating at least to some extent from the pacifism of the earlier Racovians.45 This concern for human society can also be seen in the writings of Jonasz Schlichting (1592–1661), a Polish nobleman who had become increasingly concerned by what he saw as the adverse effects of Socinian pacifism. In the late 1630s he published his Questiones duae, ostensibly a response to the attack upon Socinus’ pacifism by the Lutheran Balthasar Meisner (1587– 1626).46 Given that it appeared decades after Meisner’s work, it may also have been an attempt to update Socinian ideas in the light of the work of Grotius.47 Here, Schlichting argued that magistrates had to use force in order to preserve order within society and that the coercive power employed by the magistrate must meet with God’s approval. Since the magistrate ‘accepted from God an office, which cannot stand without the power of the sword, the power of the sword ought to be considered as one with the office, 44 45 46

47

J. Crell, De Deo et ejus Attributis (Rakow, 1630), p. 237. Ibid., pp. 19–22, also Crell’s ‘Oratio tertio de amore sui’, in his Ethica Aristotelica ad sacrarum literarum normam emendate 2 vols. (Selenoburg [Amsterdam], 1650), vol. 11, pp. 654–74, esp. pp. 670–3. Kot, Socinianism in Poland, pp. 143–5; P. Brock, ‘Dilemmas of a Socinian Pacifist in SeventeenthCentury Poland’, Church History 63 (1997), pp. 190–200. For the dating of the Questiones duae, see H. Swiderska, ‘Socinian books with the Rakow imprint in the British Library’, British Library Journal 8 (1982), pp. 206–17. Meisner’s work was entitled Brevis consideratio theologiae Photinianae (Wittenburg, 1619). Kot, Socinianism in Poland, pp. 143–5.

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both given by God’.48 This suggested a different account of the origins of political power than that offered by Crell, who had considered the magistrate to have the same right to use violence as any private individual in a state of nature. Schlichting could then deny that Christ’s prohibition on the taking of life extended to capital punishments and he could argue that magistracy was a role worthy of a Christian. Schlichting maintained his predecessors’ prohibition upon resistance, however, and thus created an even stronger account of magistracy than that found in Grotius. This prohibition was based upon the commands of Christ and the Apostles, and it therefore outweighed any natural right to self-defence. God might approve of the preservation of life, both for the individual and the community, argued Schlichting, but he preferred private men to lay down their lives rather than take up arms against their rulers. Because God would reward those individuals who complied by giving them the gift of eternal life, the Socinian could, like his predecessors, argue that the reasonable individual would agree to this and that it overrode any commitment to the earthly community. These ideas provided the foundation for his answer to Meisner’s claim that resistance and even war could be justified by the natural and divinely ordained right of self-defence. Schlichting agreed that the taking of another’s life in self-defence was ‘agreeable to the nature of man’, but he claimed that reason ordered men not to do this where it would deprive them of the possibility of eternal life.49 He went on to add that The law of religion is able to take away the law of nature. It does not matter that the law of nature has its origin from God. God is free to abrogate laws made by himself in favour of new and better ones.50

In this way he married the Socinian distinction between the natural law and the law of Christ with a more conventional endorsement of the moral significance of the natural law. The result was a theory which promised to the magistrate the advantages of divine endorsement while offering to the subject considerable incentives to obedience. Schlichting suggested that men lay under two tiers of obligations: those which arose from nature and those which were commanded by God. Unlike most of his contemporaries he held that these might, and often did, conflict; thus a person could not argue from the dictates of the law of 48

49

J. Schlichting, Quæstiones duæ: vna Num in evangelicorum religione dogmata habeantur, quæ vix ullo modo permittant, ut qui ea amplectatur, nullo in peccato perseveret? ([Rakow], 1636), p. 426, cf. Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (ed. Tuck), vol. i, pp. 195–7. Schlichting, Quæstiones duæ, pp. 365–6. 50 Ibid., p. 368.

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nature to the commands of God. While self and communal preservation might be important and even approved by God, in Schlichting’s eyes they could be overriden by the clear words of Christ. God could supply to men a new revelation which rendered their previous rules and norms inadequate. It was this willingness to embrace a conflict between the laws of nature and of religion which demonstrated Schlichting’s debt to his Socinian predecessors.

iv the trinity Now that the ethical and natural law ideas of the Socinians have been outlined, it is time to look in more detail at their objections to the Trinity. Although Socinus took seriously the Aristotelian logical and syllogistic method, he had little time for the philosophy to which it had been allied.51 Yet the doctrine of the Trinity, as it was understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, required certain metaphysical concepts, if it were to be rendered comprehensible. The final section of this chapter will present a brief outline of the place of the Socinian critique of the Trinity within the wider theological context. It is a subject that we shall also return to in later chapters, when discussing how the Socinians’ ideas were used and received in England. It will be helpful first to describe the orthodox position, in order to illustrate the nature of the Socinian critique. The first important statement of the doctrine of the Trinity dates from the Council of Nicaea (325) where it was agreed that Christ was ‘of one substance’ (homoousion) with the Father. Later the statement known as the Athanasian Creed (c. 500) explained that Christians worshipped ‘one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons (hypostases), nor dividing the Substance (ousia)’. The purpose of these statements was to ensure that Christ was considered fully divine, for the prevailing neo-Platonic philosophy drew a clear line between God and his creation. These statements were designed to rule out the position taken by Arius (d. 336), for Arius did not believe that Christ was consubstantial with God the Father. For him, the Logos which became incarnate in Christ was created by God before anything else, and as such it was distinct from God and inferior to him.52 The doctrinal formulations of the early church were shaped by philosophical (and political) considerations, and they required certain 51 52

His work Elenchi sophistici … in gratiam amicorum explicati & exemplis theologicis illustrati (Rakow, 1625), was written to improve the syllogistic method. For an extensive discussion of Arius, see R. Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London, 1987).

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philosophical assumptions if they were to be coherent. The Nicene and Athanasian Creeds took for granted that distinctions could be made between entities at a personal level which remained united at a substantial level; the term ‘substance’ (ousia – sometimes also translated as essence or essentia) was therefore highly important. Aristotle had used the same word, albeit in a number of different ways, in his Categories and Metaphysics, and this facilitated the application of Aristotelian concepts to the Trinity, which the medieval scholastics were to do with vigour. But this was to harness the Aristotelian understanding of substance, itself already unstable, to a doctrine predicated upon a neo-Platonic world view. The result was a rather unsteady combination, and discussion continued within the tradition over how Christ’s divinity and the Trinity should be understood.53 Similar terminological confusion stemmed from the lack of any obvious Latin equivalent for the Greek word hypostasis. Indeed, the Latin term substantia was a viable translation of both ousia and hypostasis, the two terms which had to be kept apart if the Trinity was to be explained. Tertullian (c.160–c.220) solved this problem by using the Latin word persona, but this word – equivalent to the Greek prosopon – implies a legal or dramatic character which is not necessarily intrinsic to a human being and can be put on or cast off at will. The difficulties involved in translating the Trinitarian explanations of the Greeks into the language of the Western church were clear to Augustine (354–430) – and he was certainly right to see the possibilities for divergence within and between the traditions. Boethius (480–525) paved the way for reconciliation, defining persona as ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’ and making it much more central to individual identity. Aquinas (1225–1274) then availed himself of this definition, asserting the compatibility between the Greek hypostasis and Latin persona, and imposing a degree of order upon the doctrine. Yet, as even this extremely brief survey suggests, the process by which the doctrine of the Trinity was drawn from the Scriptures was not only complex and contested, but it also involved several assumptions about the nature of substance and personhood.54 53

54

This paragraph is a necessarily brief summary. A full account of the Reformed position can be found in R. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725 vol. iv, The Divine Triunity (Grand Rapids, 2003); for earlier problems with the doctrine, see M. Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford, 1996), pp. 1–27 and, for the confusion over substance which the Aristotelian categories injected, see W. Alston, ‘Substance and the Trinity’, in The Trinity – An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall and G. O’Collins (Oxford, 2002), pp. 179–201. R. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics … vol. iii, The Divine Essence and Attributes (Grand Rapids, 2003), pp. 231–8.

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The earliest Reformers saw no reason to discuss the Trinity in any detail, but this state of affairs could not long continue. Not only were there internal pressures for greater clarity, but the rise of humanism and textual scholarship in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exposed the Trinity to a series of challenges. Calvin and Melanchthon included progressively longer discussions of the matter as they revised and republished their main theological works. Yet the humanist and bibliocentric language in which most of the Reformers’ theology was expressed was inadequate where the Trinity was concerned, and they were forced to resort to the language and methods of scholasticism. Calvin’s discomfort with this was evident from the apologetic statements with which he surrounded his discussions.55 What was clear to all sides was that any exposition of the Trinity would require ideas drawn from beyond the biblical text – even if the doctrine itself was supposed to be present within the Scriptures. Socinus’ own views on the Trinity seem to have owed much to the legal background so important for the rest of his thought. As he well knew, the Roman jurist Gaius (fl. 130–180) had claimed that all Roman law ‘has to do with persons, things and actions’, and the implication was that personality (not essence or substance) was the key characteristic of an active entity. Indeed, Donald Kelley has suggested that the effect of the spread of Roman law was to endow communal and corporate bodies with personalities, which would provide further proof of the centrality of this concept in the legal world.56 Only if God were a person could he be an active agent able to relate to other persons and things in legal terms; this consideration seems to have provided the foundation of Socinus’ critique of the Trinity. At the same time, the Italian also drew on humanist scholarship to argue that the term God, unlike person, was not a specific and unique proper name, but could be common to a number of different beings. Rather than see the universe as divided between that which was essentially divine and that which was not, as had been the prevailing view in the early church Councils, he argued for a more flexible view of divinity. This would redefine it as power or authority which could be transmitted and transferred, replacing the traditional emphasis on divinity as a property belonging to the essence. The way was 55

56

Recent discussions of these points include R. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics … vol. iv, pp. 64–74; P. Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford, 2004), pp. 35–57. The growing gulf between humanist and scholatistic theology in the sixteenth century is usefully explored in N. Scott Amos, ‘New Learning, Old Theology: Renaissance Biblical Humanism, Scripture, and the Question of Theological Method’, Renaissance Studies 17 (2003), 39–54. D. Kelley, ‘Civil Science in the Renaissance: The Problem of Interpretation’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 57–78, esp. pp. 64, 67.

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then open to grant to Christ a kind of subordinate divinity, based upon the authority given to him by God the Father, and Socinus went on to make these ideas explicit in his commentary upon the first chapter of the fourth Gospel.57 The relationship between God and Christ could then be understood in legal rather than philosophical terms, as one of delegated sovereignty rather than shared essence. In the seventeenth century, Crell and others came to develop a sharper critique of the Trinity. They made it much clearer that the root of their arguments lay in a rejection of the fundamental assumptions of the metaphysics used to defend the Trinity. They began to replace these with different assumptions – assumptions which they presented as more reasonable and which drew strength from their compatibility with certain strands of contemporary thought. Partly this represented a continuation of Socinus’ legal and juridical interpretations of theology, and the Socinians would emphasise further their mentor’s claim that divinity should be understood as a form of rule or power. As such, the highest God must be, by definition, the person who enjoyed supreme power. This person must be single, for, Crell argued, supreme power could not be divided without chaos and confusion. He put it thus: ‘Ruling and reigning are [actions] of nothing if not of persons. Who then says that God is one, says that he is one person, endowed with supreme authority’. Crell drew the analogy with monarchical rule, refusing to accept that there could be independent loci of power where there was a supreme single ruler. Any inferior officials must hold their power from the monarch and it was both absurd and dishonourable to the monarch to attribute any authority to them in themselves. This political argument underlay his theological claim that the saints of Roman Catholicism (and, implicitly, Christ also) could be likened to inferior – but thoroughly dependent – magistrates. To regard the power of God’s greatest servants as inherent in themselves was idolatrous, paralleling the crime of lèse-majesté in an earthly monarchy.58 Although Crell included a reference to Aristotle when he asserted the indivisibility of sovereign power,59 his more immediate source may well have been the French jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596). Bodin’s thought dominated German jurisprudence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, as his readers grappled with the unique power structure of 57 58

59

F. Socinus, Explicatio Primae Partis Primi Capitis Evangelistae Iohannis in Opera Omnia, vol. i, p. 79. Crell, De Deo et ejus Attributis, pp. 111–16, quotation from p. 114. Also pp. 57, 166 (regarding saints) and 205. His argument can be read in part as a contribution to the running debate between Reformed theologians over the ‘aseity’ of Christ, that is, whether his power is of himself (a se) or from God. Ibid., p. 112, with a reference to book 12 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

The Socinian challenge to Protestant Christianity

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the Holy Roman Empire. From his Six Livres de la Republique (1576), it was possible to arrive at a number of conclusions about the Empire, and this ambiguity ensured that the work was widely debated.60 At Altdorf, an academy renowned for its teaching in law and jurisprudence, Crell, Volkelius, Ruar and the other future Socinians must also have engaged in these discussions.61 Another work of Bodin, perhaps even more widely read and more explicit on the unity of sovereignty, was certainly read by Crell.62 This was De la Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580), in which the invocation of spirits was condemned because it involved the worship of subordinate beings and therefore dishonoured the one true God. Bodin argued that demons played a useful role in the administration of divine government, but that their authority must – and must be acknowledged to – stem from God himself.63 Crell seems to have applied Bodin’s arguments about demons to Christ and the saints, extending Bodin’s discussion of the political relationships in the spirit world. In Crell’s most devastating work, De Uno Deo Patre (1631), he attacked the metaphysical foundations of the Trinity. He insisted that it was impossible to combine the doctrine of the Trinity which had arisen in a neo-Platonic context with an Aristotelian natural philosophy. God could not be both one essence and three persons according to any Aristotelian understanding of individuation or personhood. In the conflict over the Trinity, those who supported the doctrine were forced to defend a certain type of metaphysics which provided them with the necessary concepts of essence, substance and person. Yet this understanding of essence or substance as something which could be distinguished from individual existence was coming under attack from a number of quarters, not only in Germany but, most dramatically, in France.64 From the 1620s and 1630s, Socinians exploited this in their dismissals of the Trinity – and the metaphysics on which it was based – as absurd and unreasonable. Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre made great play with the problems involved with the notion of independent essences, pointing to the 60 61

62 63 64

J. H. Salmon, ‘The Legacy of Jean Bodin: Absolutism, Populism or Constitutionalism?’, History of Political Thought 17 (1996), 500–22, esp. 507. Altdorf enjoyed the services of the leading jurists Hugo Donnellus (or Doneau, 1527–1591) and Scipio Gentilis (1563–1616). A. Eyssell, Doneau, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Dijon, 1860); W. Mährle, Academia Norica: Wissenschaft und Bildung an der Nürnberger Hohen Schule in Altdorf (1575–1623) (Stuttgart, 2000), chap. 5, esp. pp. 438–52. Crell, De Deo et ejus Attributis, p. 60. J. Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, transl. R. Scott and ed. J. Pearl (Toronto, 2001), pp. 23, 70, 84–5, 95–6. Most obviously from René Descartes. See R. Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in seventeenth-century Metaphysics (London, 1993); Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics … vol. iv, pp. 99–103.

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incoherence to which this led even within scholastic terms.65 The Socinians, at the same time, began to redefine the relationship between God the father and Christ, as well as that between God and mankind, in terms drawn from civil life, particularly as described in the Roman law. For God and Christ to function adequately within such a system, the qualities necessary for legal personhood and agency had to be attributed to them. No longer could they be considered as neo-Platonic entities operating outside the human perception of space and time. As this brief outline of the Socinians’ ideas suggests, Socinianism was a dynamic and wide-ranging theological tradition. Yet it was a tradition which remained united in its insistence upon the role of human beings in their own salvation, in its rejection of the Trinity and its commitment to Christianity as a religion of supernatural rewards and stringent ethics. The Socinians sought to provide a coherent and credible account of Christianity, and one which would also appeal to men’s moral ideas and to their own interests. Exactly how they did this changed over the years, as fresh recruits to Rakow brought with them new skills and new learning. The connections and friendships which the Socinians formed with men outside their own theological grouping, and particularly with the Remonstrants, also ensured that Socinian theology was never staid or static. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Socinians had generated a sizeable corpus of material; in the 1660s and 1670s it would be collected into nine folio volumes.66 Together, these volumes amounted to a radical new interpretation of Christianity, and it was with this interpretation that Trinitarian European Christians had to contend. The story of the English response to these ideas will occupy the remaining chapters. 65 66

J. Crell, De Uno Deo Patre (Rakow, 1631). These were collectively known as the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum; on their genesis, see A. Kis, ‘Adamus Francus and the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum’, in L. Szczucki (ed.), Faustus Socinus and his Heritage (Crakow, 2005) pp. 243–50.

chapter 2

Socinianism in England and Europe

The Socinians were vigorous evangelists of their gospel, travelling across Europe and zealously distributing texts that promoted their cause. They had had some notable successes in Germany, particularly at Altdorf, and they had certainly managed to raise interest and some limited support in the United Provinces. In the early years of the seventeenth century they hoped to persuade English men and women of the truth of their message. How they fared in the years before the Civil War will be the subject of this and the next chapter. England must have seemed fertile ground for Socinian ideas in 1609 – certainly the editors of the Racovian Catechism thought so when they dedicated their work to King James I. But, as we shall see, English soil proved stonier than the editors expected; King James was outraged by the dedication and in 1614 he had the work publicly burnt in central London. Although the Catechism provoked this harsh response, interest in Socinianism seems to have died down fairly quickly. Indeed, it did not last much longer than the flames which had destroyed the Catechism at Paul’s Cross. In Europe, however, the Socinians continued to attract outrage and opprobrium throughout the 1610s and 1620s. English people certainly knew of the Socinians’ reputation in Europe, not least from the refutations written by countless Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics. By the 1630s that knowledge had increased greatly, and Socinianism was beginning to be taken seriously by scholars and by theologians in England.

i the first racovian catechism and its reception The years around 1609 were significant ones for the Socinians and for their enemies. Not only was the Racovian Catechism printed in Latin for a European audience, but many of Socinus’ works also saw the light in these 39

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years.1 At the same time, some of the first substantial refutations of Socinian writing were produced, by leading scholars both Reformed and Lutheran.2 Socinianism was not merely an intellectual or narrowly theological issue, however, it was bound up with broader concerns about the survival of Protestantism in the face of a powerful Catholic resurgence in Europe. The military and political might of the Catholic Habsburgs was growing, the Protestants began to arm themselves in response and by the late 1610s war seemed inevitable to many. German and Dutch theologians believed that Socinian arguments weakened the ability of the Protestants to withstand this Catholic threat, something which helps to explain the often lurid terms in which they denounced Socinus and his followers. In England, where the theological and political battle-lines were drawn rather differently, we shall see that the Socinians appeared rather less troublesome. In England, anti-Trinitarian sentiments had been heard well before Socinus began to develop his ideas, and those who objected to the Trinity were usually described as ‘Arian’. During Edward VI’s brief reign (1547–1553) there was a flurry of concern over the spread of such ‘Arianism’, concern which resulted in the burning of Dr George Van Parris in 1551. The removal of Van Parris did not mean the eradication of anti-Trinitarianism; in Norfolk a small knot of men were found who denied that Christ was God. The terms of their condemnation were vague, although their punishment was severe: three were burned between 1579 and 1587. Their heterodoxy was probably sparked by Bible reading, by their contact with Dutch Anabaptist circles, and by their discontent with the more obscure elements of theological doctrine. Their experiences point to the difficulty of reconciling the Protestant commitment to the Scriptures with an equal commitment to the Trinity.3 The case of Bartholomew Legate (d. 1612), a cloth merchant with links to Holland and to the Anabaptist communities there, may indicate that Socinian ideas were beginning to penetrate English society. Legate’s primary concern, in typical Anabaptist fashion, was with the location of the true church, but he was said to understand Christ as God by his office rather than his nature, an argument commonly made by the Socinians. If he had come across Socinian ideas, his support for them was certainly less than wholehearted; he never accepted that it was legitimate to pray to or to worship Christ as the Socinians did. In any case Legate fared no better than the Elizabethan anti-Trinitarians 1 2 3

E.g., F. Socinus, Prealectiones Theologicae (Rakow, 1609); idem., De Statu primi hominis ante lapsum (Rakow, 1610); idem, Tractatus De Ecclesia (Rakow, 1611). Most notably D. Pareus; In diuinam ad Romanos S. Pauli Apostoli epistolam commentarius (Frankfurt, 1609), the full title of which proclaimed that it was written against the Catholics and the Socinians. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. ii, pp. 171, 176.

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and he went bravely to the fire at Smithfield in March 1612.4 When the Racovian Catechism was published, therefore, its authors may have hoped to build upon the anti-Trinitarian ideas already circulating in England. The Racovian Catechism was not merely a critique of the Trinity, however. As we have seen, it contained a coherent interpretation of Christianity with a strong emphasis on morality and individual effort. The ethical ideas found in the Catechism and elsewhere were, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, making headway in the United Provinces and in certain parts of Germany. In these areas, Socinianism had provided useful material for those who also wanted to highlight the moral dimension of Christianity. The editors of the Catechism (Valentin Smalcius, Jan Volkelius and Hieronimus Moskorzowski) perhaps hoped to find a sympathetic reception for their work in England, and to engage the attention of scholars of the calibre of Grotius and Crell. The editors were certainly ambitious with their publication and particularly the dedication. They targeted the most influential scholar in England, King James himself, dedicating the Latin version of the Catechism to him. This was a clear effort to capitalise on the new King’s reputation for theological learning. In the dedication, Moskorzowski maintained that the fame of James’ royal virtues – including his theological writings – had spread to the small Socinian communities in Eastern Europe, where they revered and admired the wisdom and learning of the King of Great Britain.5 The Socinian leaders hoped that James, and his fellow countrymen, would assess their own scholarship and find their interpretation of Christianity consistent with the record of Scripture. They seem to have been confident of English support; the English agent in Danzig (Gdánsk), William Bruce, explained to Secretary of State Robert Cecil in 1608 that one of the German Socinians there, Christoph Ostorodt (d. c. 1611), ‘allegged he hathe favourers in Ingland who exhortethe him to dedicate his book to his Majestie’.6 Danzig was an extremely cosmopolitan trading city, and Ostorodt must have found at least some sympathetic support from the many English merchants there. Yet his hopes for the immediate success of the Catechism were misplaced; it is very difficult to find overt support in Britain for the Socinians in these years. James himself was incensed by the dedication, describing the book and its authors to be ‘most certainly the spawn of the devil’.7 4 5

6 7

D. Como, ‘Bartholomew Legate’, ODNB; McLachlan, Socinianism, p. 32. The Dedication is printed in translation in G. H. Williams (ed. and transl.), The Polish Brethren: Documentation of the History and Thought of Unitarianism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Diaspora 1601–1685 (Missoula, 1980), pp. 212–4. Quoted in Williams, The Polish Brethren, p. 210. I. Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London, 1614), sig. [***3r].

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In setting their sights so high, the Socinians were engaging in some wishful thinking. Yet it was not unreasonable for them to believe that, as in the United Provinces, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire, they would find some sympathetic readers. On mainland Europe, the Socinians had appealed to men disillusioned with both Lutheranism and with Reformed Protestantism, providing them with the means to emphasise individual moral effort. There, the critique of predestination was also a critique of the authority of theologians; when Christianity was redefined in more ethical terms the importance of correct theology (and therefore of the theologians) was diminished. In this way, the Socinian objections to clerical and ecclesiastical authority could be taken up and echoed by the Remonstrants and by the students at Altdorf. When predestination came under fire in England, however, the aim was usually rather different. Most English anti-Calvinism was allied to a sacramental, clericist agenda and its proponents wanted to elevate, not to reduce, ecclesiastical authority. The ambitions of English anti-Calvinists were, as Nicholas Tyacke has shown, very different from the Dutch Arminians to whom they are sometimes connected. English anti-Calvinists were often men in prominent positions in the Church; the most influential in the 1610s and early 1620s being Richard Neile (1562–1640), Bishop of Durham from 1617. At his official residence in London, Durham House, Neile brought together some of the rising stars of the anti-Calvinist wing of the church, including John Cosin (1595–1672), Neile’s chaplain and later Master of Peterhouse, and William Laud (1573–1645), later Archbishop of Canterbury. These men wanted to develop and to implement a religious programme which they hoped would strengthen the English Church, and it was one for which the theology of Arminius, let alone Socinus, was not serviceable. They sought to promote a vision of the church as a holy and sacramental place capable of conferring grace upon all. They emphasised the role of the sacraments in mediating the grace of God, and they urged the importance of properly (that is, episcopally) ordained clergy who could officiate at communion services. They also revered the traditions of the Church throughout its history, arguing that God had always demanded decent and orderly worship. For them, the New Testament was but a part of the larger pattern of religious practice which had been carried out since the creation of the world. The church, on this account, could sanctify the nation as a whole; Laud emphasised its inclusive and comprehensive nature. This was a picture of hierarchy and order, in which the Puritan drive to purify communities through reforming individuals was suppressed. In its place Laud and his allies promoted harmony and stability through conformity and unquestioning

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obedience. There was little room for the emphasis on individual faith and morality, based primarily upon the Gospels, characteristic of both the Dutch Arminians and the Socinians.8 With the elevation of Laud to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1633, the movement really took off, but momentum had been building from the late 1610s. Enjoying the favour of Charles I, king from 1625, the English anti-Calvinists also began to assert themselves within the commonwealth. Laud believed that the clergy had an important public role to play, bringing their spiritual gifts and expertise to bear on matters concerning the common weal. In several of his sermons Laud discussed the unity of the church and state, temple and throne, the authority of monarch and archbishop as mutually reinforcing.9 Such an emphasis on the importance of the clergy in both spiritual and civil life was not to be found in Dutch Arminian thought. Indeed, when it came to ecclesiology, the English anti-Calvinists looked a lot more similar to the Dutch Contra-Remonstrants than to their Arminian opponents. This political dimension to Laudian thought helps to explain why, whatever scraps the English anti-Calvinists gleaned from across the English Channel, Socinianism was not among them. For it was in contesting clerical power within the commonwealth that Grotius and his friends had made use of Socinian ideas in the 1610s, and this side of Remonstrant thought was unlikely to appeal to the Laudians.10 Rejected by the proponents of a sacramental, clerical Christianity, Socinianism failed to register elsewhere on the English theological spectrum. Whereas Dutchmen (and Germans) uncomfortable with a strong doctrine of predestination clearly found Socinian insights helpful, at least upon occasion, English divines with similar concerns showed far less interest in the Polish sect. Partly this was because English Calvinism was much less rigorous and strict than its Dutch sister in the early seventeenth century, and English theologians could explore the tensions and the ambiguities within their 8

9

10

N.Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987); P. Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church 1603–1642 (London, 1993), pp. 161–86; idem., ‘The Laudians and the Argument from Authority’, in B. Kunze and D. Brautigam (eds.), Court, Country, and Culture: Essays on Early Modern British History in Honor of Perez Zagorin (Rochester, 1992), pp. 149–76. See especially Laud’s sermon of February 1625/6, printed in J. H. Parker (ed.), The Works of … William Laud 9 vols. (Oxford, 1847–60), vol. i, pp. 63–90; the political aspect to Laudianism is also discussed (in different ways) in K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London, 1992), pp. 289–91; H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Laudianism and Political Power’, in Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (Chicago, 1987), pp. 40–119. Although we shall see in Chapter 4 that Grotius and others could use Socinian arguments to defend clerical authority which was independent of the magistrate.

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doctrinal system without needing to look outside their own theological tradition. From the 1600s there were theologians, notably John Davenant (1572–1641), James Ussher (1581–1656) and John Preston (1587–1628), who were concerned to soften the Calvinist system and to answer some of the criticisms voiced both by Arminius and, it seems, by their own parishioners. Pastorally minded, they concentrated on the concerns of their own flocks and showed little interest, at least in public, in the theological system offered by Arminius – let alone the Socinians. They preferred to develop their ideas from within what they conceived to be Reformed Protestantism, moving towards a position which can be described as hypothetical universalism: Christ died for all men in at least some sense, even if only the elect could benefit from his death.11 Among the next generation of theologians, John Goodwin (1594–1665) took their ideas even further, decisively rejecting the Calvinist understanding of predestination. And he did so without reference to the Socinians’ writing, for in 1647 he revealed that although he had sought their books, he could not get hold of them in London.12 It would be wrong to suggest that English minds were entirely closed to all Socinian arguments in the 1610s and 1620s, however. When Martin Ruar came to England in 1618, already well-versed in Socinian theology, he clearly made a good impression in academic circles. Later he recounted to a friend the splendid job which had been offered to him at Cambridge: someone evidently had wanted him to stay there, and he was assured that the money would be good and the teaching light. The circumstances around this offer are shadowy; our only source is Ruar’s own letters.13 Ruar does seem to have made some English friends during his trip, and he would later regret that he had not kept up his English language skills. In 1623 he would look back to that time wistfully, recalling how well he had been treated and how, even at that point, he had friends in favour at court – though he added that the situation did not look promising for his English acquaintances.14 The offer of a university post to Ruar points to another remarkable feature of the English theological scene in these years: the relative lack of open hostility towards Socinianism. Attacks upon the Socinians were mounting in Germany and in the United Provinces, but English divines had more important enemies with whom to contend and they tended not to accuse their enemies of Socinianism. Well into the 1620s the polemical 11 12 13

J. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids, 2007), esp. chaps. 6 and 7. J. Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in SeventeenthCentury England (London, 2006), p. 39. M. Ruari … epistolarum vol. i, p. 71. 14 Ibid., p. 112.

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fire of English Protestants was directed towards Rome, partly because the Catholics were the most pressing enemy, and partly because this helped to keep English Protestants united.15 England therefore remained aloof from the arguments about Socinianism on the continent, except for a brief period in the early 1610s. In those years, charges of Socinianism swirled around several theologians in the United Provinces, seriously destabilising the Dutch political system. Given the fraught situation in Europe and the imminent threat of war, the English authorities could not ignore the troubles faced by one of their most important allies. English theologians seem to have realised that these accusations were themselves dangerous and the whole episode discouraged them from making any similar charges. It was, however, from the Dutch that Englishmen gained an impression of what the accusation of Socinianism might mean, and for this reason events in the United Provinces do form part of our story.

ii crisis in the united provinces Over the English Channel, the appointment of the German theologian Conrad Vorstius (1569–1622) to a chair at Leiden University was tearing the newborn United Provinces apart. His predecessor, the similarly controversial professor of theology Jacob Arminius, had died in 1609 and from that point onward the theological divisions present since the late sixteenth century widened into yawning chasms. Moreover, it was not only theology that drove the parties apart: the dispute between Arminius and his supporters (the Remonstrants) had become bound up with problems of ecclesiology and of foreign policy. Within a few years of Arminius’ death, the tensions in the United Provinces became so bad that they threatened to cripple the political system and to hamstring the Dutch military forces. Willingly or not, Vorstius played a significant role, both in exacerbating these problems and, in the end, in ensuring the victory of the Contra-Remonstrants. One victim of this affair was the reputation of the Socinians, in continental Europe and in England. The dispute began with Arminius, whose views on the resistibility of grace and therefore on predestination had angered his colleagues. They feared that the interpretation of grace and human free will which he proposed threatened to undermine the Reformed theological system as a 15

P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), esp. pp. 55–115; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed: Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–40 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 31–60.

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whole, by elevating the role of human decisions and detracting from the sovereignty of God. The fears of the Calvinists were not assuaged when Arminius requested a revision of the Belgic Confession, the doctrinal statement which underpinned Dutch Reformed theology. Under serious pressure, Arminius appealed to the magistrates in Holland for protection from his Calvinist enemies. The magistrates were supportive, but their intervention added an ecclesiological dimension to the dispute. It raised the vexed question of the relationship of the Dutch church to the civil magistrates, and particularly to the authorities in the individual, sovereign states which made up the United Provinces.16 Unfortunately for Arminius, his theological ideas could not be divorced from the tense military situation. During these years the Dutch political leaders were considering the best means to end the ongoing war with Spain and the political and religious questions soon became intertwined. Both involved the future of the Reformed Church; Spanish victory, even more than Arminian ascendancy, would spell disaster for the Reformed religion. But the negotiations for peace also turned on complex commercial and political questions which proved difficult to resolve. Finally, in 1609, a truce was agreed with Spain to last twelve years, although groups of Calvinist ministers and Dutch merchants found this hard to swallow. Within the United Provinces, however, it proved far more difficult to engineer even a temporary armistice between the fractious groups, divided as they were by attitudes towards the truce and towards the legacy left by Arminius.17 The Calvinists who had opposed Arminius had needed a careful strategy, for they did not want to question the authority of the civil magistrate in secular affairs, nor even in matters involving the public church. It had been difficult to oppose Arminius’ theology and his presence in the public church, for both were backed by many local officials – especially in the province of Holland. But Vorstius handed the Calvinists a golden opportunity to present their intervention in politics as a defence, quite simply, of the Christian religion. For all Arminius’ differences with his colleagues, no one had doubted that he and his followers were Christians, and most probably Protestants. With the appointment of Vorstius, however, that perception changed. Vorstius, formerly of Steinfurt in Germany, was an academic of the most troubling kind, who pushed the framework of scholastic theology to 16 17

On Arminius, see C. Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, 1971). J. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), esp. pp. 421–32; M. Van lttersum, Profit and Principle: Hogo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden, 2006).

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its limits. He began to argue that God was not infinite in essence, that his knowledge of the future was limited and that he could not be wholly present in every part of the universe. Though, Vorstius noted, he could not be sure of any of these claims – it was said that he began every theological proposition with the phrase ‘it seems that’.18 Not only did Vorstius appear heterodox but also deeply sceptical, and he convinced many of his hearers and readers that his beliefs and arguments went beyond Christianity, even beyond theism. Vorstius’ theology found no defenders. Even those who had backed his appointment dissociated themselves from his opinions. Rather, they concentrated upon the ecclesiological issue, arguing that it was for the civil magistrate and not the clergy to decide who would instruct students at Leiden University. This position was taken up by the Remonstrants, the supporters of the late Arminius, who had no desire to see their beliefs squeezed out of the public church by an intolerant crowd of Calvinist ministers. They consistently sought to portray Vorstius’ enemies as rabblerousing demagogues, anxious to extend their own power and authority over the civil magistrate. Grotius was perhaps the most vocal defender of the rights of the States of Holland to appoint university professors, and he wanted to disentangle this issue from the separate question of the legitimacy of Remonstrant (not Vorstian) theology.19 Vorstius’ ideas roused such strong passions, however, that it was difficult to maintain any such separation between the issue of his heterodoxy and of the rights of the States. Contra-Remonstrant ministers seized upon his works as blasphemous and irreligious, lambasting the authorities in Holland for appointing such a man to instruct the young in religious matters. Vorstius gave his enemies plenty of material to use against him, and it was characteristic of the man that he barely troubled to conceal his links to the Socinians. Not only did he converse with Socinians and circulate Socinian books among his students, he even offered to the world his own edition of one of Socinus’ works.20 His opponents pounced upon all this evidence and the Dutch offensive against Socinianism went hand in hand with the assault upon Vorstius. Both campaigns emphasised the objections which Socinus and his 18

19 20

The Palatinate theologian David Pareus wrote to Vorstius: ‘sceptice interim omnia vestra per VIDETUR proponitis’. See M. Slade, Cum Conrado Vorstio … De blasphemiis, haeresibus et Atheismus (Amsterdam, 1612), p. 62. Hugo Grotius, Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas (1613): Critical Edition with English Translation and Commentary, ed. E. Rabbie (Leiden, 1995), esp. pp. 124–31. Vorstius was responsible for an edition of Socinus’ De Auctoritate Sacra Scripturae (Steinfurt, 1612); he claimed he did not know who the author was. See also the correspondence in Praestantium ac eruditorum virorum epistolae ecclesiasticae et theologicae varii argumenti (Amsterdam, 1660), pp. 275–6, 373.

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friends had raised towards the concept of God as both Trinitarian and infinite in essence which was current in the Reformed Church. By assimilating Vorstius to the Socinians, and by showing that both stepped way beyond the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, the Calvinists could show that the dispute was not so much about predestination or grace, as about the defence of Christianity as a whole. Vorstius’ own indiscretions and unusual opinions did much to confirm this view.21 In the vanguard of the Calvinist campaign was Sibrandus Lubbertus (1555–1625), professor of theology at Groningen and author of a relentless series of tracts against the German theologian and his defenders. Lubbertus denied that he sought to encroach upon the authority of the magistrates, or to interfere in civil matters. But he insisted that the ministers could not stand idly by while such a man was appointed; both magistrates and ministers had a duty to God to uphold true religion and the magistrates needed, Lubbertus felt, to be reminded of this. Lubbertus, like many of his colleagues, assumed that true religion and successful statecraft went hand in hand, and both were in short supply in Holland. He warned repeatedly of the dangers which religious division brought to the state, and accused the magistrates of fomenting such divisions.22 In response, Grotius began to stress ever more forcefully that civil authority could not be judged on religious grounds; the right of the magistrate to rule and to make decisions was independent of his religious learning or beliefs.23 With the truce with Spain set to expire in 1621, these debates took on an extra urgency. The defence of Protestantism was intimately linked to the defence of the United Provinces, that part of the Netherlands which had broken from Spain in order to preserve its liberty, both religious and civil. The Vorstius affair was particularly worrying when the Dutch were discussing whether to renew their truce with Spain and when the Calvinist cause abroad seemed so fragile. The Dutch Calvinists felt that they needed to destroy this heterodox scholar and to reaffirm their commitment to the Reformed religion. They also wanted to build up the military establishment under the impeccably anti-Catholic Count Maurice of Nassau (1567–1625), Captain General of the armed forces, and to fight once more against the Spanish Anti-Christ. The Remonstrants tended to be supported by magistrates 21 22 23

See the introduction to Grotius, Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas, ed. Rabbie, pp. 16–25, 34–5, 61–72. S. Lubbertus, Commentarii, ad nonaginta novem errores Conradi Vorstii (Franeker, 1613), esp. pp. 11–15; idem., Responsio ad Pietatem H. Grotii (Franeker, 1614), ‘prefatio’ and pp. 86–90. H. Grotius, De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra: Critical Edition with Introduction, English Translation and Commentary, ed. H-J Van Dam (Leiden, 2001), esp. p. 169.

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who wanted a more pacific, pro-French foreign policy – and the Remonstrants were often accused of being far too soft on Catholics and on Spain.24 Both sides wanted to see the problems at Leiden University resolved as quickly as possible in order to concentrate on these pressing issues of foreign policy, and yet it was precisely because the Vorstius affair was so closely entangled with Dutch foreign and military policy that it was so difficult to settle. Dutch discussions of Socinianism were part of a broader and complex struggle for political and ecclesiastical power. On the Calvinist side, Lubbertus soon teamed up with the English rector of the Latin school in Amsterdam, Matthew Slade (1569–1628), and between them they enlisted the English Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot (1562–1633), to their cause. Abbot – like them – was deeply concerned to promote the Reformed cause in Europe and he also saw the divisions in the United Provinces as a serious setback to that cause. The Archbishop presented King James with Vorstius’ De Deo, the work in which the German scholar presented his most worrying claims about the finite essence of God. James had himself already been linked to the heresies of Vorstius by the Jesuit Martin Becanus (1563– 1624) and this charge, coming so soon after the European controversy over the Oath of Allegiance, may have strengthened James’ resolve. James rose to the bait, and a declaration against the errors of Vorstius was printed in his name in 1612.25 Not only did the Calvinists have James on their side, they also shored up their alliance with Maurice. The upshot was that in 1617 Maurice finally managed to crush the Remonstrant party and to push Dutch foreign policy in a bellicose, anti-Spanish direction.26 One year later, in 1618, not only had Vorstius been expelled but Arminius’ supporters in the ministry and in the upper echelons of the Dutch administration had also been removed. Grotius, Episcopius and their friends went into exile, no doubt bitterly regretting having ever heard the name of Conrad Vorstius. But even then the storm over Vorstius, Socinianism and Remonstrantism did not die down. Throughout the 1620s the Remonstrants were accused of Socinianism; their enemies were determined to show that their theology lay well beyond the boundaries of acceptability. Reluctantly, the Remonstrants issued a Confession of Faith from Antwerp in 1621, designed to show that their theology was much less extreme than their 24 25

26

Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 433–49; Bangs, Arminius, p. 295. His Maiesties declaration concerning his proceedings with the States generall of the Vnited Prouinces of the Low Countreys, in the cause of D. Conradus Vorstius (London, 1612). The declaration was also printed in Latin and French. On the Lubbertus-Slade campaign, see F. Shriver, ‘Orthodoxy and Diplomacy: James I and the Vorstius Affair’, EHR 85 (1970), 449–474. Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 450–74.

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enemies supposed. The Leiden theology faculty professors later produced a rejoinder to the Remonstrants’ Confession of Faith, making continual reference to the similarities between the Remonstrants and the Socinians.27 In 1638, as we shall see in a later chapter, evidence of private communication between the Remonstrants and Socinians was uncovered and the issue blew up once more. Yet, although Englishmen were well aware of these debates, and had at least some access to Socinian texts, England remained relatively uninterested in Socinianism and there was little discussion of the sect before the 1630s. This is perhaps best explained by the differences between the religious and political situations of England and the United Provinces in the 1610s and 1620s. In England, unlike the United Provinces, Protestant tensions did not get out of hand in the 1610s, not least because England remained at peace with its European neighbours and its political élite were not so deeply divided. Furthermore, no one in England – except perhaps Bartholomew Legate – was willing to go to such theological extremes with so little regard for the consequences as Vorstius. The German professor’s own opinions may even have acted as a warning for any English academic tempted to experiment too radically with scholastic philosophy. On the other hand, however, the Vorstius affair had shown just how destructive a weapon the charge of Socinianism could be in certain cases. The net effect in England of the Dutch controversy was to keep the ideological temperature down and to strengthen the mechanisms of consensus among the theologically minded in these years. In the career of the London minister George Walker (1581–1651), which began in earnest in the early 1610s, we can see how differently the charge of Socinianism resonated in England and the United Provinces. Walker’s career has been discussed by Peter Lake, who highlights the minister’s pugnacious character and his desire to make a name for himself in theological combat. Walker’s target was Anthony Wotton (1561–1626), a well-established puritan divine, and the young man’s attack involved a strident denunciation of Wotton’s alleged Socinianism. As Lake shows, Walker’s campaign was more damaging to himself than to Wotton, and the affair was ultimately smoothed over by an influential clique of the London godly. Only with the breakdown of censorship (and much else) in the early 1640s did Walker have his chance to put what he saw as the full story before the world.28 27

28

J. Polyander à Kerckhoven, Censura in Confessionem sive Declarationem, sententiae eorum qui in fœderato Belgio Remonstrantes vocantur (Leiden, 1626), e.g., p. 141, where the authors write that on the subject of the teaching of Christ, the Remonstrants ‘prefer to speak with Socinus than to believe and to teach with the Reformed Church’. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge, pp. 221–46.

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Walker’s understanding of Socinianism came from his reading of continental theological controversy, especially Lubbertus’ writings. He saw true Reformed theology through the eyes of the Contra-Remonstrants, envisioning a doctrinal succession that ran from Theodore Beza (1519–1605) in Geneva, through the celebrated Heidelburg theologian David Pareus (1548–1622) to Lubbertus himself. From his heroes Walker learned that true theology was constantly being undermined – and that the Socinians, assisted by the Arminians, were especially destructive to the cause of God. At the centre of Walker’s own theology was the belief that God had made two parallel covenants with men, the covenants of works and of grace. The covenant of grace involved the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer and through this he was saved absolutely, without any effort or endeavour on his own part. The covenant of works, on the other hand, contained the moral duties that lay upon every human being. God could forgive the failure of the elect to live up to the standard of the covenant of works because they benefitted from the righteousness of Christ. Along these lines, Walker could insist upon the justice of God while still assuring the elect that they would be saved regardless of their sins. For him, the problem with Arminian and Socinian theology was that it confused these two covenants, failed to grasp the meaning of divine justice, and thereby stymied the whole Reformed system.29 What worried Walker was the ‘Socinianising’ tendencies described by Lubbertus in his Episolica [sic] disceptatio de fide iustificante (1612).30 In this work the Dutch Calvinist accused one of the Remonstrants, Petrus Bertius (1565–1629), of ‘Socinianising’ because he suggested that God would accept faith in place of the complete fulfilment of the law. Lubbertus insisted that God was just, that faith was not the same as perfect obedience and that it could not be accounted such. Only the full imputation of the righteousness of Christ could guarantee salvation for the believer without violating God’s just nature. Lubbertus accepted that Bertius was no Socinian; his concern was that his fellow theologian had already strayed too far from the paths of Reformed orthodoxy and needed to be rescued.31 Walker drew from this the lesson that Socinianism was to be avoided and combated, but he also held that anything which might detract from the absolute and 29 30 31

G. Walker, The Manifold Wisedome of God In the Divers Dispensation of Grace by Iesus Christ (1641), esp. pp. 1–11. (Walker explained in the preface that the work was based on lectures given in 1616.) G. Walker, Socinianisme in the fundamentall point of justification discovered (1641), ‘preface’. Walker cites Lubbertus’ text as ‘Epistolica collatio cum Bertio’. S. Lubbertus, Episolica disceptatio de fide iustificante: deque nostra coram deo iustificatione habita inter præstantissimum virum Sibrandum Lubberti … et Petrum Bertium (Delft, 1612).

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unchanging justice of God weakened the Reformed defences against this pernicious heresy. When Walker got hold of papers on justification written by Anthony Wotton, the renowned and scholarly lecturer at Allhallows, Barking, he concluded that the enemy was at the gates. For Wotton argued that men were justified by faith and by the forgiveness of sin which resulted from it, not by the imputed righteousness of Christ.32 Wotton wanted to encourage the sinner to believe and to repent; he was much less concerned to show that God fulfilled the strict demands of retributive justice. To Walker these ideas were not simply heretical, they were tantamount to Socinianism and he provided parallels from Socinian works for many of Wotton’s statements. What troubled Walker most was that Wotton ‘utterly renounced the law’ and that in doing so he made both God’s justice and man’s salvation deeply uncertain.33 He pressed these themes against Wotton openly between 1611 and 1614, resisting the efforts of a panel of godly clerics to impose a settlement upon the warring parties. After that Walker was forced to nurse his anger in private and at the dinner tables of his friends. Unwilling to put the matter behind him, he also drafted a long manuscript tract which dwelt at length upon the necessity of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer, given the immutability and stability of divine justice.34 The heroes of Walker’s theology were all respectable academics who had lambasted the Socinians as part of their efforts to defend their local churches. Both Pareus and Lubbertus had poured much of their intellectual resources into defining their own beliefs against the heresies they considered most extreme, particularly Socinianism, and both had done so successfully. Walker, however, found himself relatively isolated, especially before the 1640s. He found it very difficult to persuade his readers and hearers that Wotton really did present a serious threat to Reformed theology, or that Socinianism was infiltrating English theological ranks. Partly, of course, this was because Wotton’s theology was indeed very different from the Socinians’, and he was always careful to distance himself from this heretical sect.35 Partly, though, it was because English Protestants were not deeply divided along theological lines in the 1610s and few divines had any interest in exacerbating potential problems by exaggerating their opponents’ views. 32 33 34 35

McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 48–9. G. Walker, A defence of the true sence and meaning of the words of the Holy Apostle, Rom. chap. 4, vv. 3, 5, 9 (1641), ‘preface’. On the settlement, see Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, pp. 224–32. Walker’s lengthy tract is preserved in the Hartlib Papers, Sheffield University; see HP 25/12/1–46. McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 48–9.

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Instead, godly ministers sought to establish consensus by patching over disputed points, discussion of which they felt might endanger the unity of their cause. There had to be some space for ambiguity within the mainstream, because men whose definitions of grace and justification differed still wanted to work together. Such a consensus could not be maintained if men began to argue, as Walker did, that their opponents were in fact echoing pernicious heretics.36 In England, Walker’s attempt to parallel Wotton’s writing with Socinus’ was seen as a dangerous and rather crude attack. In the United Provinces, where the time for consensus had passed, such parallel texts were both common and effective.37 Even Walker’s sporadic engagement with Socinian writing soon died away. Walker did not return to the theme of creeping Socinianism until the late 1630s, for he believed that the heresies of Wotton had been eliminated from England. Instead he turned to combat the Catholics and the Arminians, threats he believed to be of greater importance in the 1620s and early 1630s. It was only when confronted by the opinions of John Goodwin (himself no Socinian) that Walker believed he saw the recrudescence of Socinianism, and from 1637 he turned his attentions to this colourful London preacher.38 With the rise of the anti-Calvinists in the 1620s, English Reformed theologians had far more pressing matters to worry about than a heretical group based far away in Poland.

iii socinianism and true protestantism It was in the 1630s that English interest in Socinianism began in earnest, when Englishmen became involved in European efforts to reunite the Protestant churches and to define the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Any such definition would, of course, exclude the Socinians, but this could only be done if the Socinian position – and its errors – was properly understood. In these years, Englishmen also came to see the value of Socinianism as a polemical target. With a government clampdown on religious controversy in place, the Socinians were one of the few safe targets left. Moreover, by attacking the distant Socinians, English theologians hoped to shore up the central doctrines of the Trinity and of justification by faith. This would undermine the Socinian position but it would also (its proponents hoped) 36 37 38

Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, pp. 221–46, and passim. One famous Dutch example is N. Bodecherus, Sociniano-Remonstrantismus (Leiden, 1624). G. Walker, A true relation of the chiefe passages betweene Mr. Anthony Wotton, and Mr. George Walker (London, 1642) p. 25; Coffey, John Goodwin, pp. 55–6.

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help to prevent the growth of Arminian or Catholic positions within the English church. More than a decade of war in Europe had begun to convince Lutherans and Calvinists that their best chance of peace and stability lay in some kind of accord or agreement that would enable them to pool their resources. The Catholics had inflicted some crushing defeats upon the Protestants in the first decade of the Thirty Years War, and chastened by these defeats the Lutherans and the Calvinists became more open to the possibility of reconciliation and co-operation. Perhaps the most optimistic sign of this process was the Leipzig Colloquy in 1631, at which both sides showed uncharacteristic restraint and moderation.39 John Dury (1596–1680), one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan divines and at this point resident in the Polish trading city of Elbing, wanted to encourage the English Church to lend its support to these moves towards Protestant rapprochement. When Dury moved to London in the summer of 1630, therefore, he tried to drum up English support for such irenic schemes. He approached a wide range of men from across the theological spectrum, including Archbishop Laud and Bishop Davenant, and he began to organise and to encourage the circulation of position papers on the subject of Christian union.40 Dury’s efforts met with little success, but they did help to generate English interest in the problems of continental theology, including the questions raised by the Socinians. In England, Dury’s closest ties were with the emigré intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), through whom he managed to keep in touch with a wide circle of continental theologians and scholars. Dury and his associates knew that both the Lutherans and the Calvinists were anxious to prove their anti-Socinian credentials and all their irenic projects were designed specifically to exclude the Socinians. Dury made this so explicit that one of Hartlib’s correspondents described Dury’s efforts at scriptural interpretation as his ‘method against the Socinians’.41 But the Socinians could only be excluded if their positions were made clear, and to this end Hartlib provided information about the Polish group to the members of his circle. In 1634, for example, Hartlib circulated ‘Acta Socinianorum’ among his acquaintances, sending them to the Puritan divine Philip Nye and to a Mr White.42 39 40

41 42

B. Nischan, ‘Reformed Irenicism and the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631’, Central European History 9 (1976), pp. 3–26. G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers (Liverpool, 1947), pp. 132–222. See also T. Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: the Caroline Puritan Movement, 1620–1643 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 255–67. In September 1638 Hartlib received a letter from the diplomat Johann Bisterfeld, who wrote ‘Methodum Duræi contra Socianos vehementer approbo’. See HP 27/7/4B. HP 29/2/26B, 27B.

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One divine who was concerned both about the reconciliation of European Protestants and the crushing of Socinian heresy was John Prideaux (1578–1650), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford. Prideaux realised that many of his colleagues had not begun to deal with Socinian theology; indeed, he felt that English theologians lagged behind their European colleagues when it came to refuting these Polish heretics. Prideaux decided to take on this task himself, probably influenced in his decision by the delicate political and ecclesiastic situation in which he found himself. He was a staunch Calvinist, opposed to the agenda of Archbishop Laud, and as such he found himself increasingly isolated in Oxford as the 1630s progressed. Laud had put him under intense pressure to conform, but Prideaux remained determined to bolster English Reformed theology as best he could. After the Proclamation of 1626 which banned all further dispute on the subject of predestination, it became difficult to criticise English antiCalvinism (or even Dutch Arminianism) directly. In this situation the Socinians must have seemed to him the perfect target. Not only did everyone agree that they were heretical, even blasphemous, but it was entirely possible to oppose them using principles central to Reformed theology.43 Between 1632 and 1636, in the sermons he preached at the Oxford Act, the annual ceremony of graduation, Prideaux directed his fire against the Socinians.44 The Trinity and the satisfaction of Christ were his main themes, and he picked his way through the continental discussions of the Socinians’ positions to offer his own version of orthodox Christian theology. At these very public occasions, Prideaux could show to his students the importance of good Reformed scholarship for defeating such pernicious heresies. Prideaux certainly read up on the German and Dutch debates for his lectures, providing his audience with an overview not only of Socinian ideas but also of the various answers provided by Lutheran and Reformed scholars.45 Yet he was not content with these existing refutations, and he offered his own preventative against Socinianism. He wanted to show that the Socinian errors could be avoided if the Bible were studied correctly and he wanted to provide the students with the theological tools to understand the Scriptures aright. The Socinians, he claimed, were driven to their heresy by their inability to understand the biblical text, a fault which stemmed from their poor grasp of the fundamental terms of metaphysics. Thus in 43 44 45

N. Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, in The History of the University of Oxford volume IV: SeventeenthCentury Oxford, ed. N. Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 569–619, esp. pp. 587–9. J. Prideaux, Viginti-duæ lectiones de totidem religionis captibus (Oxford, 1648), pp. 261–346. Ibid., pp. 262–3, 277.

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1632 he expressed indignation that the Socinians refused to admit the basic principles of metaphysics, learnt by all schoolboys, including the distinctions between essence and subsistence, nature and suppositum. Once these principles were accepted, he argued, it would be clear to any reader that his own position was drawn directly from Scripture. In 1634 he used his sermon ‘De Spiritu Sancte Deitate et Personalitate’ to insist upon correct definitions of ‘persona, suppositum and individuum’.46 The implication was that these were stable, universal and necessary terms, and he maintained that the doctrine of the Trinity was coherent when they were used correctly. For Prideaux, it was necessary to approach the Bible with a proper understanding of philosophy and metaphysics. In this respect he was part of a broader trend among Protestant theologians towards the use of scholastic tools and methods.47 Confessional controversy had made these tools necessary, but they also fitted well with the Protestant insistence on God and his decrees as standing beyond time or history. Metaphysics dealt with entities which, like God, did not change. To argue in this way was, of course, to reject out of hand one of Socinus’ key points: that theology dealt with past events. For Socinus, as we have seen, Christianity involved the study of a particular set of historical events known to us through specific texts. For this reason Socinus preferred to interpret the Scriptures using the tools of historical and philological criticism rather than terms drawn from metaphysics. Naturally, Socinus brought his own philosophical assumptions to the Scriptures, but what frustrated theologians like Prideaux was the fact that in treating theology as history he refused to play by the conventional rules of theology or metaphysics. Prideaux’s attack upon the Socinians may have gathered pace in the mid 1630s, when there began to be more positive interest at Oxford in Socinian ideas. In 1634 Sampson Johnson (1613/4–1666), a divine and fellow of Brasenose, returned to Oxford, after spending time in Hamburg as a military chaplain.48 In Germany he had met Grotius and some of the leading Socinians, and he brought up their objections to Reformed doctrine against other Oxford divines, notably Prideaux and William Ames (1576–1633). Hartlib recorded from Johnson that ‘Prideaux and Ames have not been able to satisfy Ionston in resolving the many arguments of the Socinians 46 47 48

Ibid., pp. 271, 312. For an overview, see C. Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in E. Kessler and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 537–636. Johnson’s activities in the 1630s can be ascertained from his correspondence with John Dury, preserved in HP 42/13/1–9, from his correspondence with Grotius, printed in BW, vol. v, pp. 515–6 and from Hartlib’s ‘Ephemerides’.

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which are objected to those of our side.’49 Johnson himself was suspected of sympathy towards the Socinians, although he consistently denied this. Later he even referred to theses which he had written specifically against Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre. He added, though, that this book was ‘the most dangerous that was ever written’ and he seems to have enjoyed discomforting Prideaux with the arguments of Crell and Ruar while he was in Oxford.50 The university reader in metaphysics at Oxford, Thomas Barlow (1608– 1691), also sought to defend Reformed theology by attacking the Socinians in the 1630s. Barlow decided to provide his students with a metaphysics textbook and this gave him the opportunity to discuss the Socinians and their errors. Rather than write a fresh textbook, Barlow chose to republish at Oxford the work of the German Lutheran Christoph Scheibler (1589–1653). Scheibler’s metaphysics were very similar to those of the great Catholic scholar, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617); indeed, Scheibler had intended to make Suarez’s ideas available in acceptable format to the Lutheran world. But Scheibler had originally presented his textbook as a contribution to the Lutheran battle against the Calvinists; it was, he argued, written to defeat the false, Calvinist ideas about the Trinity and the union of Christ’s natures. This line was obviously unacceptable in England, and Barlow had to refocus the work if he and his Oxford friends were to recommend it to their own students. His solution was to shift the target from the Calvinists to the one heretical group condemned on all sides: the Socinians. Barlow therefore replaced Scheibler’s preface with one of his own in which he emphasised that it was the Socinians and Arians who had got their Christology wrong and who needed to be countered.51 As the activities of Barlow and Prideaux show, one effect of the Caroline clampdown on controversial theology was to encourage Reformed divines to be more creative and adventurous in their choice of theological subject matter. They were forced to consider a wider range of religious material – and they began to see the usefulness of the Socinians as a polemical target. At the same time, they became ever more concerned to demonstrate their scholarly skills and the intellectual coherence of their own Reformed position. Barlow and Prideaux presented the Socinians as poor scholars who lacked a basic grasp of academic theology; were they better trained, the argument went, they would see the coherence of Reformed Trinitarian 49 51

‘Ephemerides’ 1634 pt. 5, HP 29/2/40A. 50 National Archives, SP 16/420 fo. 22v. T. Barlow (ed.), Christophori Scheibleri … De locis sive argumentis logicis (Oxford, 1637). Barlow’s own lectures, Exercitationes aliquot Metaphysicae, De Deo, were printed as a continuation of this. See sig. A4r-[A5v] for Barlow’s preface. Scheibler is discussed in I. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 43–4.

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theology. And yet, as we shall now see, the Reformed system was already under considerable strain, and it was not clear that the Socinians could be answered as effectively as Prideaux and his friends would have liked.

iv the difficulties of academic theology English Calvinists denounced the Socinians for their poor scholarship, but their own readings of crucial biblical passages were neither unquestioned nor uncontroversial. The Socinians might have been a useful foil for political purposes, but they raised some important conceptual and intellectual problems with the doctrines of the Trinity and satisfaction. For the Calvinists to move the ground to metaphysics, and to attack Arminian (or Socinian) notions, was a risky move. It focused attention upon the scholastic foundations of the Reformed system, and these foundations were beginning to look shaky. Nowhere was this more evident than in the doctrine of the Trinity, the favoured ground for English Calvinists once the subject of predestination had been banned. As we have seen, this doctrine involved a complex and rather unstable synthesis of Aristotelian and neo-Platonic thought and as such it seemed to exemplify the potential for obscurity and opacity in scholastic thought. The Calvinists’ reliance upon scholasticism and metaphysics raised difficulties, for, by the third decade of the century, the scholastic approach to natural philosophy no longer enjoyed a monopoly at Oxford or Cambridge. A German student, Joachim Hübner, recounted a fairly virulent anti-Aristotelian disputation in Merton in the 1630s, himself describing Aristotle as ‘an old fool’ and this ancient philosophy as badly outdated.52 It is difficult to know how widespread such sentiment was, but recent scholarship, particularly the work of Mordechai Feingold, has shown that both universities were places in which freedom of thought flourished and which were generally receptive to new ideas in natural philosophy. No other single figure or system of thought replaced Aristotle, and the Laudian statutes of 1636 had reaffirmed the centrality of his teaching to the Oxford curriculum, yet dons provided their students with an eclectic range of

52

[J. Hübner] to [S. Hartlib], 9 August, 1637, British Library, MS Sloane 417 fo. 178r ‘Der Alte Narren Aristoteles …’; [idem] to [idem], 5 July, 1637, fo. 162v. Selected extracts from these letters have been printed in J. Kvacala (ed.), Die pädagogische Reform des Comenius in Deutschland bis zum Ausgange des XVII Jahrhunderts 2 vols. (Berlin, 1903); the former quotation can be found in vol. i, p. 96.

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reading.53 Aristotelian philosophy was not the ideal intellectual support for Reformed Christianity. Yet it was difficult to see how the doctrine of the Trinity could be upheld without this metaphysical framework and there is some evidence that, among those who were less than committed to scholasticism, the Trinity was beginning to be called into question. At Cambridge, Samuel Brooke (d. 1631), master of Trinity College, penned several manuscript critiques of orthodox theology, including the doctrine of the Trinity, which he felt ran counter to ‘reason’. His student John Beale (1608–1683), a man fascinated by the new theories of natural philosophy, acquired these at Brooke’s death, and they confirmed his own suspicions.54 Oxford was not immune to such doubts; we have already seen that Sampson Johnson, a man well versed in Grotian and Cartesian ideas, was fascinated by Crell’s critique of the Trinity. Socinian writing was not the only challenge to the Trinity in these years, however, and there was plenty of homegrown heterodoxy where this doctrine was concerned. In England, some of the strongest pressure on the orthodox understanding of the Trinity came from those who conceived of it in deeply spiritual terms. Such men did not believe that there were three persons in one divine essence, but preferred to see the Trinity in allegorical terms, as a figure of speech which suggested that God revealed himself to believers on Earth. Men like John Everarde (1584–1640/41) and Roger Brereley (1586–1637) wanted to minimise the significance of the historical Christ, as a unique figure with a dual nature, in order to emphasise that all believers could be human and divine in the way that Christ had been.55 Connected to such ideas were claims that this advanced spiritual state was only possible after the new dispensation which had begun with Christ, in which God was willing to fill the believer with the fullness of his spirit. David Como has shown that these ideas were current within the antinomian underground prior to the English Civil War, pointing to several works which contrasted the law of Moses with the new and qualitatively different dispensation under Christ. The saint was filled with the spirit of Christ and 53

54 55

M. Feingold, ‘Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford volume iv, pp. 389–397; idem., The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 66–7. J. Beale to ?, 28 November, 1659, HP 60/1/1B-2A. D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in PreCivil War England (Stanford, 2004), pp. 236–8, 293–5; E. Allen, ‘John Everarde’, ODNB; D. Como, ‘Roger Brereley’, ODNB. Another example is Peter Shaw, see D. Como and P. Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: The Strange Case of Peter Shaw and its Contexts’, JEH 50 (1999), 684–715, esp. 702–3, 706–7.

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therefore set at liberty to do God’s works, freed not only from the curse of the law but also from the need to concern himself with its commands.56 These English discussions of Christology tended to be driven by the need to maintain and to stabilise the relationship between law and grace in English theology. They had little to do with the scholastic understanding of the Trinity offered by Prideaux and Barlow, although all of these men were allies against Laudian ceremonialism. Of course, academic exercises were not the same as practical divinity, but it is difficult to see how the likes of Everarde and Brerely on the one hand, and Prideaux and Barlow on the other, could ever agree upon an explanation of the Trinity or the divinity of Christ. And yet it was commonly agreed that these doctrines were central to the Christian faith, and that the Socinians must be rigorously excluded from any pan-Protestant alliance. The very existence of such a range of opinion in the 1630s served to weaken any claim that a single, clear truth could be extracted from the Bible. Even without direct Socinian input, the kind of argument which Prideaux had made in his Act sermons looked difficult to sustain. In this situation, the strident Socinian critique of the Trinity could seem even more devastating. The Socinians attacked the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul as well as the Trinity, and again their ideas seemed by some to be in line with contemporary natural philosophy. One person who became extremely anxious about the Socinians’ views of the soul was John Beale, the student of Brooke who would go on to make his name as a writer on agriculture, especially the cultivation of apples and the making of cider. In the 1630s, though, he was a troubled young man and he later wrote a series of letters describing the spiritual trials and tribulations he had been through during this time. His was a tale of anguish, doubt and the eventual triumph of faith strengthened by religious experience, one perhaps common to many young clergymen. In Beale’s case, the initial problem was his disdain for Aristotelian metaphysics and natural theology, but the real crisis was triggered by his encounter with the Socinians and with their insistence on the natural mortality of man. Indeed, the Socinians played a central role in Beale’s religious journey; it was through overcoming the doubts they raised in his mind that he found himself able to continue in the ministry. Beale’s account of his youth shows just how alarming Socinianism could seem once the certainties of scholastic metaphysics had been removed. He had attended Eton under Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) and John Hales (1584– 1656); there his love of natural philosophy and his interest in Christian teaching 56

Como, Blown by the Spirit, esp. pp. 382–6.

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were both nurtured. By 1627 he had broken with Calvinism, and soon he also began to reject scholastic natural philosophy. Leaving Eton for King’s College, Cambridge, in 1629, his scorn for Aristotle only intensified. Later he recalled that he ‘made sport to oppose Aristotle’, though he readily admitted he had no new system in mind to replace the existing one. Quite the contrary: Beale believed he ‘could make newe Physiques a fresh kind for ev[e]ry weeke’.57 One friend feared that this would lead him into heresy, but initially Beale seems not to have worried about the implications for theology of his loose and eclectic views of the natural world. Only when he found the manuscripts of Samuel Brooke, in which the Trinity was portrayed as unreasonable and incoherent, did he begin to question the implications for his faith. It was not until the late 1630s, however, that he really began to experience a crisis of faith. Like so many young scholars, he travelled on the continent as a tutor, and for Beale this involved an extended stay in Geneva. There, he recalled in a later letter, ‘My spirite was much troubled with some of the writings of Socinians & of H Grot[ius] most witty & learned men.’ In another letter, he explained that the problem was Socinus’ rejection of the natural immortality of the soul. He had been reading Socinus and Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), the Italian philosopher famous for insisting that the immortality of the soul could not be proved through natural philosophy. Beale had also discovered from Origen (c.185–c.254), one of the Church Fathers, that there were early Christians ‘of the Arabian heresy’ who also believed that the soul was naturally mortal, and he was well aware that at least one group of Jews, the Sadducees, denied the resurrection. Moreover, Beale felt that his natural philosophy had also inclined him to doubt the natural immortality of the soul. Though he did believe in the resurrection, he seems to have been a lot less sure about the doctrine – so unsure that he considered quitting the pulpit.58 Beale’s faith was saved by a timely dream, a dream which chased away all his doubts. He recalled that In a dreame I had a Vision of one that lead mee to Dr Paschal, (whom at that time I had not seene) shewd mee the Man, directed mee to enquyre Many bookes; I modestly seemd to aske their price. Some hee sold & the reste w[i]th many manuscripts of his owne hee gave. On the morrow morning I pursued the dreame. The figure of the man was the same, The words & deedes in all things the same.59 57 59

HP 62/22/1B. 58 HP 25/5/19B; HP 51/21A-28B. HP 25/5/19B-20A. ‘Dr Paschal’ was probably Petrus Paschali, a medical doctor in Geneva and author of the anti-Socinian work Ad Christophori Lubienicii, Socniani, Epistolam de statu Christi (Leiden, 1638).

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Beale never mentioned the arguments contained within these books and manuscripts, clearly these were secondary to the experience itself of spiritual guidance. The crucial point about the dream for Beale was that it revealed the interdependence of the spiritual and the natural worlds, and it showed that humans could have knowledge of the former. The particular scriptural interpretations offered by Dr Paschal were largely irrelevant; what struck Beale was the night-time vision which had led him to such a man. After this, Beale began to gather evidence of spiritual activity (some of which may have been aided by his own cider-making activities). He hoped that his research would prove that the world was not simply made up of matter and therefore that the soul must be immortal and immaterial.60 Once he had assured himself on this point, he seems to have found it easier to read and to admire Socinian writing. In a poem by his friend Clement Barksdale (1609–1687), published in 1651, he was addressed as ‘You that have read Socinus, Crellius, / And the Interpreter Volkelius [the author of De Vera Religione]’.61 Beale’s experience of the reality of the spiritual world gave him the confidence to reject the mortalism he associated with the Socinians. He could appreciate their moral and ethical insights but he felt that on its own their theology was incomplete. It is impossible to tell how many other people reacted as Beale did to the Socinians, but by the 1630s their ideas were certainly becoming more widely known. In the 1610s, it must have seemed easy to dismiss Socinus, Vorstius and other continental heretics as poor scholars misled by their own arrogance and lack of faith. Twenty years later it was more difficult to avoid the challenge posed by the Socinians to Reformed theology. The Socinians pointed to the difficulties involved in the metaphysics underpinning key doctrines like the Trinity and the satisfaction, and they proposed instead an interpretation of Christianity in which human beings played a much greater part in their own salvation. Most Englishmen were unwilling to engage with these ideas in the 1630s, however, and the theological stage was dominated instead by the conflict between Laud and his more Calvinist opponents. Although Socinianism had a role to play in this conflict, it was quite a minor one. Nonetheless, the Socinians did begin to find interested, even sympathetic, readers in the 1630s. These were men who objected to several aspects of both Reformed and Catholic theology and found in the Socinians useful material with which to make their own religious choices. It is to these men that we turn in the next chapter. 60

61

P. Woodland, ‘John Beale’, ODNB; M. Leslie, ‘The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale’, in M. Leslie and T. Raylor, (eds.), Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester, 1992), pp. 151–72. C. Barksdale, Nympha Libethris, or, The Cotswold Muse (London, 1651), p. 35.

chapter 3

The Great Tew Circle: Socinianism and scholarship

Although there was a hostile response to Socinianism in the 1630s, the English reaction to the Socinians’ ideas was not entirely negative. There were Englishmen who were sympathetic to some of the Socinians’ ideas and it is this, more positive, engagement which will be the subject of this chapter. Those who read and approved of aspects of Socinianism tended not to draw attention to their interest in the Polish group; when Socinianism was discussed in public, it tended to be for polemical reasons. We saw in the last chapter that Reformed theologians like Prideaux and Barlow explicitly attacked the Socinians, hoping to shore up their own understanding of Reformed theology and to show that such a heretical sect lay well outside the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. But there were others who read Socinian works and who found in them a complex and sophisticated collection of theological and moral ideas, and who drew inspiration from certain parts of the Socinian synthesis. To those who objected to the Calvinist system of predestination and who preferred to understand Christianity as an ethical religion which had to be freely chosen, some of the Socinians’ views about the message of the Gospel were appealing. These men read a wide range of theological writing, from the early Church Fathers as well as from contemporaries, and used these materials to arrive at their own understanding of religion. Moreover, they began to think (as the Socinians and Remonstrants had themselves done) about the relationship between the Christian message and the principles naturally known to human beings. The most important venue for this more positive engagement with Socinians lay outside both academia and the established church, away from the running battles between Archbishop Laud and his Calvinist enemies. Indeed, it was at Great Tew, the country estate of Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland, that the most sympathetic readers of the Socinians were to be found, among the many men of letters who visited such a hospitable host. At Great Tew the visitors could study in their host’s 63

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impressive library, walk in the grounds, and dine with the family when they pleased. The village of Great Tew is just eighteen miles from Oxford, a short horse ride for academics who wished to exchange the sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere of their college for a more relaxed, but no less scholarly, environment. Standing at a civilised remove from the universities and from the court, Great Tew provided an ideal setting for theological, ethical and political discussion. The conversations which took place at Great Tew began to move the religious agenda away from the physical and polemical warfare raging between Catholics and Protestants, as Falkland’s learned guests began to think about how religious sincerity and civil harmony could be maintained. Here, as we shall see, the Socinians provided both inspiration and important arguments. The thought of the Great Tew Circle, marked by a commitment to reasoned argument and by literary sparkle, has attracted and inspired historians from Edward Hyde (1609–1674) to the present. Understandably, the interest of Falkland and his friends in the Socinians has not gone unnoticed. John McLachlan was perhaps the first modern historian to draw attention to this, suggesting that the rational and tolerant attitude of the Circle enabled it to sympathise with some of the broad ideals of the Socinians. He was, however, careful to distance these Englishmen from the specific doctrines upheld by the Italian heresiarch.1 Hugh Trevor-Roper later built upon McLachlan’s work and his elegant description of Great Tew as a model of irenic and tolerant conversation is now well known. TrevorRoper suggested that Falkland and his friends were searching for a solution to the bitter religious and theological warfare which surrounded them, and they found one in the ideal of concord and tolerance shared by Erasmus, Grotius and the Dutch Arminians. This irenic, rationalist position was dubbed by Trevor-Roper ‘the wide Socinian tradition’ and within its lineage Great Tew held an important place.2 On this reading, it was the critical, even sceptical approach to Christianity adopted by the Socinians which commended them to this Oxfordshire set. Trevor-Roper’s account of Great Tew has not gone unchallenged, and an alternative reading was offered by Richard Tuck. Tuck questioned the credentials of Falkland’s circle as liberal and tolerant thinkers, and argued that in the 1640s they were responsible for some of the most trenchant defences of royal power and authority. He noticed that several of the men of 1 2

McLachlan, Socinianism, chapter 5. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans pp. 166–230, esp. pp. 186–90.

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Great Tew actually held to very strong notions of sovereignty, and suggested that these political ideas were inseparable from their wider project. These interpretations seem incompatible, but the paradox they create is more apparent than real. Moreover, it is a paradox which can easily be unravelled if the ‘Socinianism’ which appealed to the Circle is defined more clearly. For Socinianism as they understood it was not simply a vague commitment to reason, but a re-interpretation of the relationship between God and mankind. Falkland’s friends put the individual at the centre of their version of Christianity, and they sought to disentangle the religious demands which God placed on individuals from the earthly requirements of civil life. And in the process, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, they began to consider the political implications of the arguments of the Socinians.

i socinianism at great tew Of all Falkland’s friends, it was William Chillingworth (1602–1644) who felt most keenly the attractions of Socinianism and who travelled the most turbulent religious path. It is to him that we will turn first. In 1618 Chillingworth matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford and remained there for over a decade, being elected to a fellowship in 1628. Yet by the time of his election he was highly critical of the Church of England; frustrated by its uncertainties and ambiguities, he longed for an infallible source of truth. It was not long before he realised that Roman Catholics offered the certainty he so desired and he found himself drawn to their Church. Anxious to be instructed in this promising new religion, Chillingworth left Trinity and raced off to the English (and Catholic) College at Douai in France. Once there, however, the young man was soon disappointed. The Roman Church seemed no more certain or coherent than the one he had left behind, and he returned to England with his faith seriously shaken. No longer Catholic, Chillingworth would not hastily commit to the Church of England; only in 1637 would he countenance subscribing to the Thirty Nine Articles, the doctrinal statement of the Church of England. The 1630s were years of intensive study for him as he came to terms with what he saw as the inevitable absence of any infallible clerical authority.3 When Chillingworth returned from Douai, he was in need of support and hospitality in England. Not long after his arrival in England, Falkland’s Catholic mother, Lady Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639), took him into her 3

R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967), pp. 1–44; W. Chernaik, ‘William Chillingworth’, ODNB.

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household, offering him his board and a good supply of intelligent conversation. She, however, believed him still to be within the Roman fold. She was much mistaken; not only had Chillingworth abandoned his Catholicism but he also entertained serious reservations about a range of doctrines, including the Trinity. He made little effort to conceal his doubts and soon Lady Elizabeth became aware of his unusually sceptical stance. When she found out that he had been spreading the seeds of doubt among her children, she was horrified. Immediately, she threw him out of her house.4 Chillingworth soon found a far more congenial environment in which to work out his faith, in the house of Lady Elizabeth’s eldest son Lucius, Lord Falkland. Having inherited the house at Great Tew in 1625 from his maternal grandfather, Falkland settled there in around 1632 and put the house to good use.5 His visitors included the playwright Ben Jonson (1572– 1637), poets such as Edmund Waller (1606–1687), and the divines Henry Hammond (1605–1660), Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677) and George Morley (1598–1684). John Aubrey recalled that ‘all the excellent of that peaceable time’ gathered there, and the civil war Royalist and historian Edward Hyde would immortalise this circle after the Restoration.6 Great Tew was clearly a scholarly place, but its visitors were not there simply to read and debate in the abstract. Falkland’s friends tended to be men of action who sought to engage with questions they deemed important for themselves and for the commonwealth.7 Chillingworth soon settled into this comfortable environment. Here he could indulge his critical, sceptical nature, and he could reflect more deeply on the writings of the Socinians. Much of the conversation at Great Tew concerned religious questions, especially the relative merits of the Protestant and Catholic Churches. Chillingworth and Falkland were attracted to the idea of a strong and confident church, which would provide them with a sure and certain account of the Christian faith.8 In an effort to steer them, Falkland’s Catholic mother, Lady Elizabeth, and her priests, emphasised the merits of the Catholic Church, assuring them both that God’s revelation could only be understood through the medium of the Roman Church. Without 4 5 6 7 8

H. Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (London, 2001), pp. 165–81. David Smith, ‘Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland’, ODNB. O. Dick (ed.), Aubrey’s Brief lives (London, 1949), p. 215; The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1761), vol. 1, pp. 39–45. J. C. Hayward, ‘The “Mores” of Great Tew: Literary, Philosophical and Political Idealism in Falkland’s Circle’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 1982). W. Chillingworth, ‘An Account of what moved the Author to turn Papist’, printed in The Works of William Chillingworth, M.A. (London, 1836); Orr, Reason and Authority, pp. 11–13.

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such an authoritative interpreter, the Catholic argument went, men would be left with theological anarchy – and the diversity of Protestant belief across the continent appeared to bear out this argument.9 Chillingworth certainly saw the appeal of a unifying church, but ultimately he found Catholicism unfulfilling. As he and Falkland read more deeply in the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, they began to uncover the variety of opinions and doctrines within the early Church. The tradition to which the Catholics appealed began to look much less certain and stable. More importantly, they also felt that Catholicism devalued the individual’s own powers of reasoning and his own ability to make moral judgements. From their extensive studies they concluded that salvation was not necessarily to be found within the Catholic Church and both came to prefer the Church of England. By the later 1630s, Falkland and Chillingworth had satisfied themselves of the merits of the Church of England. Both wrote discourses upon this subject and Chillingworth’s was printed in 1637 as The Religion of Protestants, A Safe Way to Salvation. Here, Chillingworth was concerned to show that the individual need not renounce his own judgement over religious matters in the manner demanded by Rome. Far better, he argued, that men should themselves ‘sincerely endeavour to find the true sense of it [the Scripture], and live according to it’.10 Falkland felt no differently, and he emphasised that God called upon human beings to use their reasoning powers to understand the Scriptures. God would, he argued, give grace to those ‘who follow their reason in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and search for tradition’.11 Most repugnant to both friends was the doctrine of the infallibility of the Catholic Church, for it appeared to make salvation dependent solely upon membership of a community rather than men’s own efforts and virtues.12 In their own work, therefore, they wanted to counter Catholic ecclesiology and to present instead a vision of the true church in which individual striving would be recognised and appreciated. In formulating their thoughts about the role of the church in interpreting the biblical text, Chillingworth and Falkland found the writings of the Socinians extremely useful. To illustrate this point, McLachlan pointed to the number of copies of Socinian works in Oxford libraries and showed that 9 10

11 12

Wolfe (ed.) Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland pp. 7–11. W. Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, A safe way to salvation, or, An answer to a booke entitled Mercy and truth. (Oxford, 1638), p. 180. (Although the title page carries the date 1638, it was printed in 1637. See Orr, Reason and Authority, p. 42.) L. Cary, Viscount Falkland, Of the infallibilitie of the Chvrch of Rome (Oxford, 1645). Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, pp. 19–21, 51–3.

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many could be traced to friends of Falkland.13 Furthermore, Falkland’s sister Lucy Cary (b. 1619) attributed her brother’s disdain for the Catholic Church to the evil influence of Socinus. She recalled that he was not hostile to Catholicism, nor settled on strong religious beliefs, until the early 1630s when ‘meeting with a book of Sosinus his it opend to him a new way’.14 She was no more specific than this, but Chillingworth’s friends would remember the texts which he had used. In 1646 Henry Hammond praised Chillingworth’s skill in taking ‘balsome’ from the Socinian Johannes Volkelius; the work he had in mind was probably the substantial De Vera Religione, begun by Volkelius and then edited by Crell. Hugh Cressy (1605– 1674), one-time fellow of Merton and friend of Hyde and Falkland, recalled that in refuting the papists Chillingworth had relied upon Socinus’ ‘Answer to certaine Theses Posnanienses’.15 Socinus had twice replied to theses from the Jesuit College of Posnan in Poland, firstly in his Assertiones theologicæ de trino et vno deo and then in the Defensio Animadversionum Adversus Gabrielem Eutropium, both published posthumously in 1618. Cressy is presumably referring to these texts. He also claimed to have lent Falkland Socinian books; indeed, Cressy boasted that he was the first to bring them into England.16 Since Cressy left for Dublin in 1634, he may have been responsible for introducing Falkland to Socinianism prior to his departure. Clearly Socinian books were digested thoughtfully at Great Tew. Chillingworth and Falkland were, it seems, most interested in the Socinians’ assault upon the Catholic Church – and with good reason. The absurdity and illogicality of Roman claims for infallibility and for special powers of interpretation had been one of the central themes of Socinus’ writing. The Italian theologian provided his English readers with a wealth of useful material on this score. Moreover, Socinus wanted to replace clerical authority with individual critical reason; this approach made his ecclesiology highly distinctive. These were the central themes of the dispute between Socinus and the College of Posnan, which helps to explain why Cressy singled out the texts in which this dispute was contained. At issue here was the authority of the Church, for the Polish Jesuits emphasised the need for an authoritative interpreter of Scripture while Socinus rejected their argument out of hand. He insisted that all teachers (and therefore all doctrines) had to be tried by the Scriptures, not by the church, and that all 13 15

16

McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 118–26. 14 Wolfe (ed.), Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, p. 157. H. Hammond, A View of Some Exceptions which have beene made by a Romanist to the Lord Viscount Falkland’s Discourse Of the Infallibilitie of the Church of Rome (Oxford, 1646), p. 31; H. Cressy, Fanaticism fanatically, imputed to the Catholick Church by Doctour Stillingfleet (place unknown, 1672), p. 167. Dick (ed.), Aubrey’s Brief Lives, p. 215.

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doctrines necessary for salvation were clearly set down in the Scriptures. It was absurd to look to the church for any decisions about doctrine, Socinus argued. Unlike the message of the Scripture, which was plain and simple, the identity of the true church was contentious and uncertain.17 The Italian’s critique of Catholic claims was developed further by Volkelius and Crell in the final book of De Vera Religione, entitled ‘De Christi Ecclesia’ (Of the Church of Christ).18 Here the authors explained that the ‘true’ church was the sum total of all those who obeyed Christ from their own free will and according to their own judgement. In the true church no one followed his or her minister uncritically; indeed, the only real authority possessed by a clergyman stemmed from his ability to persuade his congregation that he interpreted the Christian message faithfully and accurately. And this judgement had to be made by individuals according to the word of God, the sole rule in matters of faith for individuals and for churches. This reliance upon Scripture also meant an important place for ‘sound reason, without which nothing can be decided or concluded from the scriptures correctly’.19 In De Vera Religione, the authors made clear that a person who believed that Jesus was the Christ and sought to live by his commands had little need of an institutional church; in the Bible, men had a sufficient guide to salvation. Indeed, they saw the very quest for a true church as misguided – neither the authority nor the commands of the church added anything to the basic principles of Christianity. Crell and Volkelius poured scorn on Catholic claims for their church, insisting that Christ had given to Peter no more authority than to any other apostle and denying that the powers of the Apostles had lasted beyond their death. The true church was known by the purity of its doctrine, not by false and uncertain ideas about tradition or succession peddled by the Catholics.20 The Socinians were vehemently opposed to the Catholics’ claims, but their argument was not destructive of all clerical authority. They were happy to accept that churches and clerics could play an important role in spreading and defending the Christian faith. Churches could – and should – settle minor matters for themselves in a manner conducive to order and to piety, although it was not necessary to follow the church’s determination to worship God correctly. As to ordination, this was, for the Socinians, a beneficial rite but not a necessary condition for a minister. De Vera 17 18 20

Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. i, pp. 628–32. J. Volkelius, De Vera Religione ([Rakow], 1630), pp. 625–716. Ibid., pp. 661–3, 695–700.

19

Ibid., p. 651.

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Religione also discussed baptism, arguing that although immersion in water was not necessary, some initiation ceremony for new Christians was important.21 It is worth pointing out this more positive side to the Socinians’ ecclesiology, a side often overlooked, for it may have helped to calm some of their readers’ fears about the anti-clerical implications of their assault on papal power. Chillingworth himself was by no means opposed to order and decency in the church, and may well have been relieved to see that the Socinians’ argument could in fact be used to support a respectful attitude towards the church.22 One other work which may have been known to Chillingworth and Falkland was Socinus’ De Auctoritate Sacrae Scripturae, in which the Italian showed that the Scriptures stood up to the tests of humanist and critical scholarship. If they did not have this work itself they certainly had the substance of its argument, for Grotius had made heavy use of it in his own De Veritate Religionis Christianae and had endorsed many of the Italian’s most important claims. Grotius, like Socinus, held that faith was similar to other branches of human knowledge; rather than being infallibly certain, religious faith was simply human assent to a probable proposition. Fortunately for the Christian, the Scriptures provided adequate grounds for such assent. Chillingworth was certainly aware of this argument about the nature of faith, for in his Religion of Protestants he included a long quote from Grotius to this effect.23 Chillingworth was certainly an admirer of Grotius even before he arrived at Great Tew, for in 1632 he had requested a meeting with the Dutch jurist which he hoped would resolve his difficulties about Protestantism.24 In the works of both Grotius and the Socinians, Chillingworth and his friends found much to admire. In particular, they appreciated the emphasis placed by all these authors on the critical and historical arguments for the truth and clarity of the scriptural text. Using these ideas, Falkland and Chillingworth came to understand faith as assent based upon sound considerations of the credibility of human testimony and the coherence of the doctrine in question. And they believed that such faith was, in principle, open to all individuals; it did not depend upon God’s arbitrary decree, as most Calvinists thought. 21 23

24

Ibid., pp. 663–86. 22 Works of W. Chillingworth, pp. 627–8. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 372, quoting Francis Coventry’s translation of De Veritate, printed as True religion explained and defended against ye archenemies thereof in these times (London, 1632), pp. 147–9. In this passage Grotius’ argument is very similar to that of Socinus in De Auctoritate: see Opera Omnia, vol. i, pp. 279–80. Orr, Reason and Authority, pp. 32–3.

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ii genesis of the religion of protestants In 1633, when Falkland and Chillingworth were beginning to mull over the ideas of the Socinians, a short work by one of their Oxford friends caught their attention. This was Want of Charity Justly Charged, written by Christopher Potter (1591–1646), Provost of The Queen’s College, in reply to the Jesuit Edward Knott’s Charity Mistaken (1630). Knott had defended the Catholic claim that men could not be saved outside the Roman Church, urging Protestants to be reconciled to the true faith. In response, Potter maintained that no sensible English Christian would leave the established church, and certainly not for the corrupt and deformed Church of Rome. But Potter did suggest that Catholics were not necessarily excluded from salvation; those ignorant of the demerits of their church would be excused. Soon Knott answered with Mercy and Truth, Or Charity Maintain’d by Catholiques (1634), determined to show – and to show comprehensively – that salvation could not be found within more than one church and that all Protestants were in a state of schism and of sin. At this point Chillingworth entered the fray – apparently Potter had sent for him from his sickbed, aware that the task required a man of Chillingworth’s intellectual calibre.25 Like Potter, Chillingworth denied that Catholics were necessarily in a state of damnation, but he wanted to find some means to demonstrate that there was truth on both sides and to dissociate salvation from membership of a particular church. Indeed, Chillingworth wanted to show that doctrinal conflicts need not be moral issues and to relocate true Christianity in individual ethics and conduct. He took up the gauntlet laid down by Knott, and the result was his Religion of Protestants. Chillingworth could not abandon Potter to the Jesuit onslaught, not least because the Provost’s thinking was similar to his own and to Falkland’s. In Want of Charity, Potter had argued for a broad, irenic notion of the Church Catholic, which included all sincere believers both Protestant and Roman Catholic. Here, Potter’s views were shaped by a work written in the sixteenth century by an Italian refugee: Jacopo Acontius’ Stratagemata Satanae (1565). Indeed, this was a work which Potter admired enough to have reprinted in Oxford in 1631. In it, Acontius had urged Christians to abandon persecution and to unite around the basic fundamental tenets clearly set out in the Gospel. Acontius held that men’s religious opinions ought to be based upon reason and critical scholarship, not clerical 25

D. Lloyd, Memoires of the lives, actions, sufferings & deaths of those noble, reverend and excellent personages … (London, 1668), p. 542.

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authority, and that a range of religious opinions ought to be tolerated within the church. He explained that men came to have faith when they gave their deliberate and considered assent to Christian doctrine, emphasising the practical, ethical results of such a faith. All this was highly attractive to Potter, who hoped that Acontius’ ideas might help to calm the doctrinal and intellectual controversies raging at Oxford over the legitimacy of the doctrine of predestination. At the same time, the early 1630s, Potter began to encourage his students to read Grotius’ De Veritate Religionis Christianae. An English version would be published by two of his students in 1632.26 Grotius (and through him Socinus) provided Potter and his students with a means to justify their own Christian faith; it is no accident that the translation was entitled True Faith Explained. In the Stratagemata and De Veritate, Acontius and Grotius were less concerned with theology or dogma than with providing the individual with grounds for faith which showed itself in the practice of virtue. It was an irenic argument which opened the possibility of a broad and tolerant church, for such faith could not be coerced, and one individual could not prescribe it to or enforce it upon another. Neither Grotius nor Acontius went as far as the Socinians, at least in these works, for they did not apply their critical methods to theology itself or raise objections to existing doctrines. Potter seems also to have been unwilling to take this step and feared that the writings of the Socinians might prove overly destructive. That, at least, is the impression given by his desire to have his own collection of Socinian works kept well hidden from younger students.27 To Knott, all Potter’s arguments for a broad church were irrelevant. The Jesuit felt that Potter never answered the crucial question: whether men of two different religions could be saved. Potter had sidestepped this problem, for underneath his irenicism lay a desire for ecclesiastical leadership and for Christian communion within a single church. These ideals had much in common with the agenda of the English anti-Calvinists around Laud and Neile; certainly Potter himself enjoyed good relations with Laud.28 Although Chillingworth did see some of the attractions of this position, he was much less concerned with restoring the unity (even in an outward sense) of the church and much more interested in encouraging people to 26 27

28

A. Hegarty, ‘Christopher Potter’, ODNB. The students were Francis Coventry and Thomas Crosfield. Potter left instructions on his death that the Socinian works he donated to Queen’s should be stored in the archives, ‘not readily to be come at by the younger sort’. J. Magrath, The Queen’s College (Oxford, 1921), vol. ii, p. 258. I am grateful to Mary Clapinson for bringing this to my attention. Hegarty, ‘Christopher Potter’.

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make up their own minds about the meaning of the Scripture. Through his researches into the Catholic tradition, Chillingworth had come to accept that the opinions of Christians had varied in the past, and that they might never cohere in the future. In his opinion, heaven was wide enough to contain men of conflicting views. Taking up Knott’s question, therefore, Chillingworth set out to show much more clearly that individual sincerity, not church communion or even correct doctrine, was crucial for salvation. He brought to the debate an emphasis on the critical individual believer which was not found in Potter, or his English predecessors. In The Religion of Protestants, therefore, Chillingworth argued that the Scriptures were credible, and that individual people could believe them to be accurate records of the ministry of Christ. He felt that all human beings had to assess them in the same way that they would assess any other kind of historical testimony, and that in this case the ‘Consent of Ancient Records, and Universall Tradition’ proved the worth of the Scriptures. Chillingworth went on to say that the message of the Scriptures fitted well with men’s ideas of God, for ‘the doctrine it selfe is very fit and worthy to be thought to come from God’. Here his own belief that men could have knowledge of general moral principles shared by both humans and God is clear. He thought that all must judge for themselves both the accuracy of the Scriptures as historical texts and the morality of the doctrine which they contained.29 The Catholic idea of infallibility was, thought Falkland and Chillingworth, both logically unsustainable and deeply tyrannical. Falkland began his attack upon this doctrine by pointing out what he saw as the mistake which underlay it. The Catholics, he argued, based their claims for infallibility on ‘Scripture, Reason and Ancient Writers’ – but these were the same, fallible, authorities which the Protestants used to deny these claims. As a result, he argued, ‘we can never infallibly know that the church is infallible’, and the real question must be whether, and how much, we trust the Roman Church.30 Chillingworth agreed, remarking that his opponents ‘dance finely in a round’ when they appeal from the Church to the Scriptures and then back again to the Church.31 Moreover, Chillingworth viewed the Roman Church’s attempt to promote itself as the sole interpreter of the Scriptures as a cynical bid for power over men’s minds. It enabled the Church to establish itself as the authoritative and 29 30 31

Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 220. Falkland, Of the Infallibilitie of the Chvrch of Rome, sig. A2r. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 98.

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infallible source of Christian rules and teaching, and thereby to tyrannise over men’s consciences. Since the Church of Rome was made up of men no less subject to passions and no less swayed by considerations of self-interest than others, there was every reason to expect that its interpretations would be designed to increase its own power.32 Both Chillingworth and Falkland were agreed that there neither could nor should be any such infallible authority as the Catholics claimed, and that human beings were able to read and understand the Scriptures for themselves. Chillingworth’s argument shows that he had come to a view of faith very different to that current among both Protestants and Catholics. For most contemporary Christians, faith was an absolute assurance of truth, occasioned by divine grace and infused into the believer; there was little scope for the individual decision-making to which Chillingworth was so committed. Although controversial, Chillingworth’s concept of faith was important to him because it enabled him to argue for the individual’s capacity to understand the Bible and thereby to have faith in Christ, using only his own resources and outside the community of the church. For Chillingworth, it was through a process of reasoning or critical evaluation that men came to believe in any idea; opinions which were not based upon prior ratiocination and grounded in evidence were almost worthless. In this sense, as Chillingworth’s enemies argued and as McLachlan and Trevor-Roper observed, he endorsed the power of human reason in matters of faith using the same arguments as the Socinians.33 Chillingworth’s debt to the Socinians can probably be taken further, for their writing helped him to accept the diversity of Christianity. Socinian ideas also helped to shape his attitude towards religious certainty, making him more willing to accept that the Scripture could be read in different ways. The sources behind this attitude were apparent to some contemporaries; at least, this is the impression given by a letter written by George Leyburn (1600–1677), one of the Catholic priests close to Queen Henriette Marie (1609–1669). In November 1634 Leyburn reported that Shillingworth … haith now begunne a new sect, and has his followers, and they are called Succinians, and their cheef principall [is] that, wher the holy Scripture may be interpreted two or more wayes, a man may lawfully adhere unto any[.]34

32 33 34

Ibid, pp. 51–2, 103. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, p. 188; McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 76, 82. M. Questier (ed), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule (Cambridge, 2005), p. 235.

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Leyburn’s view sounds similar to Lady Elizabeth Cary’s impression: that Chillingworth was leading people astray with his sceptical comments and that behind his arguments lay the shadow of Socinianism. But the letter also suggests that Chillingworth shared the Socinians’ desire to downplay theological divisions and to include a range of scripturally backed positions within the church. It was a position he continued to hold throughout the 1630s, famously proclaiming that ‘the BIBLE onely is the Religion of Protestants’.35 Although Chillingworth shared the Socinians’ approach to Christianity, he did want to distance himself from their specific theological doctrines. In his published writings he consistently maintained that he believed in the Trinity and the atonement – and denied that the label ‘Socinian’ could be applied to him.36 Yet Chillingworth was caught in a rather difficult position, especially where the Trinity was concerned, for it was not clear how this doctrine fitted into his broader conception of Christian unity. On the one hand, he held that people would agree on all things necessary, that where the essential truths of Christianity were concerned the Scripture could never be interpreted two or more ways. On the other, he was acutely aware that the doctrine of the Trinity had been developed rather late in the history of Christianity, and that the weight of patristic opinion, at least in the period before the Council of Nicea, lay on the Arian side. It was clear to Chillingworth that the scriptural evidence for the Trinity was not conclusive – and Chillingworth was careful to avoid the subject as far as possible. The only extensive discussion he undertook was in a private letter, and here he listed in great detail the patristic evidence for the Arian position in the second and third centuries AD. It had obviously been a subject of intense study for him and this study increased his doubts about the Trinity. His failure to integrate the Trinity into his conception of Christianity would be seized upon by his enemies.37 More generally, the vision of Christianity set forth in Chillingworth’s writings and sermons is not one in which the Trinity or the divinity of Christ play much part. Instead, he preferred to focus on the moral duties which all men lay under. Falkland seems to have been more confident of the doctrine of the Trinity. In his Discourse of Infallibility, he insisted that religious beliefs were based upon reason and probability, and not upon any pretended 35 36 37

Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 375. Orr, Reason and Authority, pp. 97–9. See also Chillingworth’s Fifth Sermon in The Works of W. Chillingworth, pp. 589–98. P. Des Maizeaux, The Life of William Chillingworth: Author of ‘The Religion of Protestants,’ ed. and transl. J. Nichols (London, 1863), pp. 45–59.

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infallibility claimed by the church. Where Scripture and reason could not support a doctrine, Falkland argued, that doctrine ought to be rejected. The example he chose was the Trinity, writing that the Protestants in general believe that ‘the Arrians can give them no probable answer to their places of Scripture’ in favour of the Trinity; the conventional reading of Trinitarian proof texts was, he thought, the right one. And Falkland went on to say, ‘I professe my self not onely to be an Anti-Trinitarian, but a Turk, whensoever more reason appeares to me for that, then for the Contrary’. Falkland eschewed any such profession of anti-Trinitarianism or Turkism, and it seems that Falkland did not intend any irony here. Certainly his good friend Edward Hyde assumed that Falkland accepted the divinity of Christ.38 But Falkland did not elaborate on the doctrine of the Trinity and it is not entirely clear where it fitted in to his understanding of Christianity. Chillingworth and Falkland called upon their readers to consider anew the fundamental tenets of mainstream Christianity, and the epistemological and ethical principles on which they might be based. They suggested that it might be possible to absorb some of the insights of the Socinians – and particularly their critique of Catholic ecclesiology – without ceding central Christian doctrines. Falkland even seems to have believed that the doctrine of the Trinity could be protected from the Socinian onslaught, while the emphasis on good works and human effort could be grafted onto Protestant Christianity. Both men were avid readers of the Church Fathers and their modern admirers, notably Erasmus, and the reconstruction of Christianity they hoped to effect owed much to these earlier authors. Their project had little chance to take root in their own lifetimes, choked first by theological controversy and then by civil war. All was not in vain, however, for after the wars were over, we shall see in later chapters how new life was breathed into Chillingworth’s vision of Christianity.

iii chillingworth accused of socinianism It was not long before accusations of Socinianism were thrown at Chillingworth; Knott wrote that Chillingworth was ‘strongly reputed to be a Socinian’ even before the publication of Religion of Protestants.39 He had been snatching up the pages of this work as they came off the press, and 38

39

T. Triplet (ed.), Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his discourse of infallibility, with an answer to it: and his Lordships reply (London, 1651), p. 241; E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions upon a book intituled, Fanaticisim fanatically imputed &c … (1673), pp. 187–8. E. Knott, A Direction to be Observed by N.N [London?], 1636), p. 3.

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he dashed off a speedy response in his Direction to be Observed by N.N. if hee meane to proceede in answering the booke intituled Mercy and truth. Knott saw that Chillingworth’s principles were not conventional Protestant ones, and he wanted to show that these principles could only help the cause of the Socinians and not the Protestants. The movement to ground Christianity on individual reason rather than clerical authority was doomed, Knott argued. It would end only in an intellectual free-for-all in which ‘Plato, Aristotle, or any other, must be as soone believed, as the testimonies of our deare Saviour; unless he prove by better reason what he saith’.40 The casualities of Chillingworth’s approach would not only be the doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement, but any notion of religious faith as distinct from human knowledge. Knott’s charge drew strength from several recent developments, which were already making English Protestants uneasy. The Socinians themselves were becoming increasingly aggressive in promoting their doctrinal beliefs – and presenting them as the necessary outcome of a rational and critical approach to the Scriptures. Jonas Stegmann’s Brevis Disquisitio (1635) portrayed Socinianism as the result of a thorough application of the principles of the Reformers to Christianity. This tract had great rhetorical power, for it linked the Socinian critique of the Trinity to the Reformed arguments against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Stegmann claimed that the Protestants had rid the church of only some of its absurdities and called upon them to remove them all, including the Trinity.41 The tract was certainly making some headway, especially among Chillingworth’s friends, and it was known well enough for some to speculate that it might have an English author. McLachlan shows that the attribution to the Eton scholar John Hales was mistaken, but clearly this was a tract which seemed to be relevant to the English situation.42 Also circulating was Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre (1631), a work which made nonsense of the Protestant claim to find the Trinity in the Scriptures. Crell argued that the doctrine not only relied upon outdated scholastic concepts but that even within these terms it was incoherent. Although copies of the first edition were rare, it was certainly known in Oxford and Prideaux made reference to it in his Act lectures.43 Both Crell and Stegmann wanted to show that the true message of the Scriptures was incompatible with the 40 41

42

Ibid., pp. 13–14. This tract is discussed in G. Keseru, ‘Religiones Rationales in Transylvania’, in György Enyedi and Central European Unitarianism in the 16–17th Centuries, ed. M. Balazs and G. Keseru (Budapest, 2000), pp. 125–6. McLachlan, Socinianism, p. 89. 43 Prideaux, Viginti-duæ lectiones, p. 273.

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doctrines of most mainstream churches, particularly Protestant ones, and to force their opponents to reconsider their theological beliefs. These works can only have served to deepen the doubts already being voiced by Englishmen over the coherence of the orthodox definition of the Trinity. The approach adopted by the Socinians in the 1630s heightened the tension between Protestant orthodoxy and their own beliefs, as they sought to make nonsense of the Protestants’ claim to base their beliefs upon Scripture. The Jesuits – and especially Edward Knott – seized upon the Socinian arguments and used them as evidence of the instability and incoherence of Protestantism. They recognised the power of the Socinian critique of the Trinity, and claimed that the Protestants could not answer it. Only the doctrine of the infallibility of the Catholic Church could protect the Trinity from such a philosophical onslaught. Knott made great play of all this in his Direction. He described the Socinians as men who were guided solely by their reason and natural light in matters of religion, and who could therefore never attain true faith. Such a ‘graceless sect’ could practise only a morality not dissimilar to that of the pagans. Knott emphasised the difference between faith and all other kinds of natural, human knowledge or reasoning, denouncing the latter as uncertain and lacking in any spiritual significance. Since most Protestants agreed that faith was indeed qualitatively different from human knowledge, he could emphasise the common ground between himself and these Protestants, while also foregrounding the unorthodox nature of Chillingworth’s views.44 Knott then went on to connect Chillingworth’s method of procedure to the Socinians, on the grounds that they all appealed to the reason of individuals. Knott saw that Chillingworth was highly vulnerable to charges of heterodoxy where the Trinity was concerned, for it was unclear how it could be defended within his system. Knott accepted the Socinians’ arguments against the philosophical explanations of the Trinity, suggesting that no process of individual reasoning could ever derive the Trinity from the Scriptures. For Knott, this proved the absolute incompatibility between the arguments of Chillingworth and of mainstream Reformed scholars. As we saw in the previous chapter, it had been the theme of writing by Prideaux and Barlow that the Socinians were poor scholars who were unable to reason well where metaphysics or scriptural exegesis was involved. Knott simply denied what Prideaux and Barlow were so keen to assert: that the Socinians 44

Knott, A Direction to be Observed by N.N., esp. pp. 13–16; idem, Christianity maintained Or A discovery of sundry doctrines tending to the overthrowe of Christian religion ([St Omer], 1638), preface and pp. 1– 12.

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could be answered with Christian learning and erudition. He stressed the instability of the scriptural text, pointing to English divisions over Calvinism, in order to press home the need to contain it through an authoritative interpreter.45 This could not be done through learned exposition alone but required the oversight of the Catholic Church. For Knott, the Socinians were not, as Prideaux had claimed, poor scholars. Instead they were the archetypal Protestants, committed to the duty of the individual to read the text for himself and according to his own lights. Given the growing disenchantment with scholastic metaphysics at Oxford and beyond that we saw in the previous chapter, Knott’s critique of Chillingworth was devastating. He suggested that the Protestants had no other grounds on which to stand against the Catholics other than those of the Socinians, and that to adopt this course was to run headlong into heresy and even atheism.46 A Direction did not stop the publication of The Religion of Protestants, nor does it seem to have altered Chillingworth’s argument in any significant way. But Knott did show the difficulties involved in the kind of partial absorption of Socinianism favoured by Chillingworth and his little tract cannot have done Chillingworth much good in Reformed circles. Chillingworth himself sidestepped these problems as far as possible, reluctant to get entangled in doctrinal discussions. Instead, he was concerned with a rather different aspect of Christianity: the ethical demands which it placed upon the individual. And here he did make an effort to tackle the problems raised by the Socinians’ interpretation of the Scriptures. When Chillingworth considered what it might mean to live as a Christian, his central themes remained individual effort and reason. As he saw it, Christ called upon all of his followers to obey his commands in their lives, to strive vigorously in the performance of good and virtuous acts. Against a contemporary tendency to view faith as a spiritual gift infused into the believer, Chillingworth maintained that faith must not be divorced from the practice of virtue and good works. If ‘unaccompanied with sincere and universall obedience’, he argued, faith was mere ‘presumption’.47 Yet by focusing on virtue and on effort or choice, Chillingworth raised important questions about the relationship between Christian virtue and human freedom. This was a question which we have already seen being discussed in 45

46 47

Knott even quoted from a bill against the bishops filed by Prynne, Bastwick and Burton, using their own view of the displacement of Calvinism to show the Protestants’ doctrinal divisions. See A Direction, p. 23, and cf. Bodleian Library Tanner MS 299 f.156v, quoted in K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (London, 1992), p. 296. Knott, A Direction to be Observed by N.N., esp. pp. 16–17. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 406.

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Europe, involving the Socinians and the Remonstrants. Here, I want to suggest that Chillingworth and some of his friends were also participating in this debate. Preaching on Luke 9:23 (‘let him [the Christian] deny himself and follow me [Christ]’), Chillingworth insisted that Christ’s words must be understood as commands or laws which demanded strict obedience from his followers. In making this claim, Chillingworth knew that he was challenging the standard Protestant interpretation according to which Christ was not concerned with rules or legislation but with the work of salvation effected through his death on the cross. It was, Chillingworth felt, a stand worth taking in order to rescue Christianity from the hands of its contemporary interpreters. In words aimed at the Protestant mainstream, he lamented that ‘we have lost this word law: and men will by no means endure to hear that Christ came to command us anything’; instead men thought only of the promises that God would (they hoped) work in them through Christ. According to Chillingworth, this was not the doctrine of the early church, where Christians were urged to fulfil the high standards expected upon them. More recently, however, the wise words of the Christian Fathers had become associated with a single heretical sect: the Socinians. Venting his disappointment and frustration upon his congregation, he sighed: Among the ancient fathers, we find not only that Christ is a lawgiver, but that he hath published laws which were never heard of before; that he hath enlarged the ancient precepts, and enjoined new; and yet now it is socinianism to say but half so much. Clemens Alexandrianus (3. Strom, in fine) saith, that Christ is more than a lawgiver; he is both Logos kai Nomos, and quotes St Peter for it.48

According to Chillingworth, the Fathers – particularly in the Greek world – saw Christ as the moral teacher par excellence, whose ethical precepts outdid all the previous philosophers for the wisdom and virtue they contained. When he interpreted the message of Christianity in terms of rules and laws, Chillingworth stepped outside the world of Reformed exegesis and onto the sandy ground occupied at that time by the Remonstrants and the Socinians. As suggested earlier, these groups emphasised Christ’s commands at the expense of the Mosaic Law or even the natural law, and encouraged men to put Christ’s words into practice. The immediate issue raised by this approach, however, was the relationship between the 48

Chillingworth, Sermon IV in The Works of W. Chillingworth, p. 568.

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standards apparently demanded by Christ and those necessary for life in a human community. In Poland and the United Provinces these questions had taken on a real urgency, where radical spirits emphasised the pacifist strand in Christ’s teaching and refused to make Christianity compatible with human society. More moderate voices had been heard, notably Episcopius, Grotius and Ruar, who pressed a version of Christianity less destructive of civil society as they knew it – and one less hostile to nonrevealed principles of social life. But all groups emphasised the importance of following the laws of Christ for those who wanted to reach heaven; and they played down the significance of any previous divine commands, whether known from the Old Testament or from natural reason, when it came to salvation.49 Where Christ’s commands seemed impractical or overly stringent, it was common among Protestants to balance them with the rules of the Mosaic Law. But freed from the lens of Mosaic or Old Testament law, Christ’s commands seemed to undermine the mechanisms of punishment and coercion necessary for social life. As we have seen, Socinus was not blind to this problem and chose to solve it by showing that Christians would never actively resist or shed blood, and so would not trouble the magistrate. No Christian would himself serve as magistrate, however, if it involved inflicting capital punishment.50 Crell had revisited some of these themes in his Ad Librum Hugonis Grotii. Here he suggested that civil society could be based upon a transfer of rights of punishment which had nothing to do with religion or religious belief. The civil duties which men lay under stemmed from the need to control the destructive impact of private judgement and could be entered into out of pure utility. Once men had agreed to set up a magistrate, however, they were bound to keep their promises under pain of damnation. On this account, it was not necessary to invoke the Old Testament in order to ensure that Christianity contributed to civil peace and order.51 These arguments were certainly known at Great Tew; Chillingworth was so taken with the Ad Librum Hugonis Grotii, for example, that he refused to return the copy he had borrowed from John Hales.52 For Chillingworth, Christians should be primarily concerned with the ordering of their own lives and faith – and true Christianity could be lived out in a range of imperfect communities. Christ’s commands could be 49 50 52

See above, pp. 22–23, 28–29 and also Mortimer, ‘Human Liberty and Human Nature in the works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers’, JHI 70 (2009), 191–211. Socinus, Opera Omnia vol. ii, pp. 73, 78. 51 See above, pp. 29–30. John Hales, Letter to a person unknown, December 1638, in The Works of the Ever Memorable Mr John Hales of Eaton 3 vols. (London, 1765), vol. i, p. 199.

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distinguished from the rules necessary for human and social life, and no obligation lay upon Christians to coerce others into holy commonwealths or, indeed, to take much part in civil life. Chillingworth seems to have come to this position when forced to defend his suggestion that there was more than one valid denomination or church, and that each person could judge the various claims for himself. Knott had criticised Potter on the grounds that his individualistic interpretation of Christianity would lead to anarchy, and to the disruption of all civil and religious life. The Jesuit had made an analogy with the earthly sphere, and particularly the legal system – surely, he argued, men could not be left to judge for themselves how to interpret the laws of the land, but they must follow their appointed magistrates. Indeed, men had to be shown the correct interpretation of the law by those qualified in such matters. And just as men needed judges authorised by the king to do this, Knott argued, so they needed clergy authorised by the pope to explain to them what the laws of God meant.53 Knott’s argument was based upon the assumption that men lay under a seamless web of obligations including natural, civil and divine law, an assumption which most of his contemporaries shared. Chillingworth rejected his opponent’s analogy as false; although there needed to be some agreement and universal authority in civil life, this was not true in religion. Religion was a matter of internal belief and conviction, while social and civil life required only external obedience. As he put it, In Civill Controversies we are obliged only to externall passiue obedience, and not to an internall and actiue. Wee are bound to obey the sentence of the Iudge, or not to resist it, but not alwaies to belieue it just. But in matters of Religion, such a judge is required whom we should be obliged to belieue, to haue judged right.54

Here we see Chillingworth pulling apart the secular and religious duties under which men lay, in order to show that Christianity was compatible with civil life but could not be collapsed into it. Chillingworth’s old friend Henry Hammond was also turning over these same questions. The two men knew each other from their Oxford days; when they faced each other in debate the result was reckoned to be the best disputation ever held in the Oxford schools.55 Hammond accepted the living of Penshurst in Kent in 1633, but he was still counted by Hyde among the visitors to Falkland’s house. What bound Hammond to Falkland and his circle was not so much physical proximity but shared intellectual and religious concerns. In particular, Hammond, like Falkland 53 54

E. Knott, Mercy & truth. Or Charity maintayned by Catholiques ([St Omer], 1634), pp. 38–42. Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, p. 59. 55 Lloyd, Memoires, p. 542.

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and Chillingworth, wanted to restore the ethical dimension to Christianity by using the writings of the Fathers and of the more recent Arminians and Socinians. Grotius was his favourite author; he described the Dutch jurist as one ‘from whom I have from my first entrance on the consideration of Divine and Moral learning received more useful notions than I have from any Writer of this last age’. These words come from 1654, and he recalled that his interest in Grotius’ theology began ‘above 20 years since’.56 Hammond, like so many others, did fear that his hero was leaning too much towards the Socinians and his fears were based upon Grotius’ kind words towards Crell. Around 1634, after receiving part of one of Grotius’ letters to the Socinian, he even sent a message to Grotius asking him to clarify his position. Grotius replied by pointing to the differences between himself and the Socinians regarding the atonement, thus implying that it was legitimate to share their views on other matters.57 Hammond’s interest in Dutch religious discussions stemmed from his own desire to re-instate the role of the will and of good works within Protestant Christianity. Like Chillingworth he was adamant that if men were compelled to sin then this would destroy all concepts of judgement and accountability. As Hammond put it, then ‘hell might be our fate, but not our wages, our destiny but not our reward’.58 In his view, both faith and salvation must be related to the individual’s own decisions. At the same time, Hammond, like Grotius and Chillingworth, wanted to leave some space within Christianity for ‘counsels’, for ethical principles which men ought to follow but which they were not commanded to obey. The problem for Hammond, though, was how to reconcile his view of the ethical dimension to Christianity with the Protestant emphasis on the unchanging moral demands of God. Here, Hammond turned to Grotius for help, and would later hail the Dutch jurist as ‘an excellent Casuist, exactly distinguishing the severall obligations of Nature, of Moses, and of Christ’.59 It was, however, precisely these distinctions that had brought the wrath of the Calvinists down upon the Remonstrants,60 and Hammond soon found 56

57 58 59 60

Orr, Reason and Authority, pp. 32–3; H. Hammond, An answer to the animadversions on the dissertations touching Ignatius’s epistles, and the episcopacie in them asserted (London, 1654), pp. 126, 131. (Cf. R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government (Cambridge, 1993), p. 272, who dates the interest in Grotius at Great Tew to the very end of the 1630s.) Hammond, An answer to the animadversions, p. 131. H. Hammond, Thirty One Sermons preached on Several Occasions (Oxford, 1849), p. 132. H. Hammond, Of Resisting the Lawfull magistrate under colour of religion 2nd edn (Oxford, 1644), p. 56. See the Contra-Remonstrants’, Censura in Confessionem esp. chap. 10 ‘De Preceptis Christi’, pp. 139– 50.

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himself in similar trouble. One of the dons at Merton, Francis Cheynell (1608–1665), later complained that in the 1630s Hammond had spoken of ‘vacuities in the morall Law of God’ – in other words, Hammond had suggested that Christ demanded more of his followers than obedience to the moral (or natural) law alone. Cheynell was deeply troubled, fearing that Hammond, under the pernicious influence of the Socinians, might devalue the law of nature and therefore the universal obligation of Christian morality.61 It is difficult to say much more than this about Hammond’s thoughts in the 1630s, but he would develop these themes in his writing of the 1640s. A fuller discussion of these issues must, therefore, wait until the next chapter. Hammond, like Chillingworth, was beginning to work out in the 1630s the broader implications of their own insistence on freedom, choice and effort as the basis of Christianity. Both were agreed that Christian faith could not be coerced and Christian action could not be compelled; they felt that the sanctity of conscience and will was paramount in the religious sphere. At the same time, they wanted to distinguish religious obligations from those which pertained to the civil and natural world, for here outward obedience and conformity were legitimate. Indeed, the very possibility of liberty of conscience in religious matters might require the renunciation of active disobedience or resistance by the citizens. The best state for a Christian might not be one in which all of Christ’s laws were imposed upon the citizens, but one where men were free to act virtuously if they chose while restrained from causing trouble. The fate of Grotius and his Arminian friends, coupled with the growing evidence of Laud’s disruptive activities, must have suggested to them the problems involved in any attempt to create a Christian commonwealth. Chillingworth and Hammond would return to these points and consider them in much more detail as the Scottish and then the English political situation deteriorated, as we shall see in the next chapter. Yet their response to the political crisis was part of their own broader reconsideration of the relationship between Christianity and the values necessary to sustain human communities. And this was a project which, as they were well aware, they shared with the Socinians and the Remonstrants.

iv the diversity of the great tew circle It would be wrong to extrapolate from the thought of Chillingworth and Hammond to the Great Tew Circle as a whole or to suggest that these 61

Cheynell’s critique was later printed in A Copy of Some Papers Past at Oxford, betwixt the Author of the Practicall Catechisme, and Mr Ch (London, 1647), quotation from p. 17.

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friends shared a single point of view. The intimacy between Falkland and Chillingworth is well known, but their friendship, like so many others, did not entail intellectual unanimity. Falkland shared his friend’s disdain for the claims of the Catholic Church, but his own understanding of Christianity differed significantly from Chillingworth’s. His ideals were those of the great Dutch writer Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466–1536) and the Christian humanists – and they had a rather different view of the relationship between Christianity and nature. Erasmus, whom Falkland ‘much esteemed’, drew on Platonic and Stoic traditions to portray the natural world as a place of concord, held together by a set of natural laws which regulated and maintained it. Falkland was deeply attracted to Erasmus’ version of this ideal of unity and it appears most strongly in the Platonic passages of Falkland’s poetry.62 Yet Falkland could hardly ignore the shattered state of Christendom. Although England was at peace in the 1630s, it was quite clear to all her inhabitants that the rest of Europe was embroiled in bloody and bitter warfare. Falkland’s explanation for this lapse from harmony into conflict was the intrusion of private interests into the public sphere, with the selfishness and distortion that accompanied this unfortunate development. He called upon men to seek the truth impartially, and looked for a time of liberty, when ‘particular interests were trod wholly underfoot, especially by the greatest’. If this happened, then ‘all would flow again in the same Channel’.63 This is one of the themes of his controversy with the Catholic Thomas White, but the same idea can also been seen in his critique of Laud. For Falkland, the Archbishop was the classic example of a man led astray by his own desire for self-aggrandisement and power, at the expense of both his own conscience and the peace of Christendom. Indeed, in Falkland’s view the clergy were particularly prone to ambition and self-interest, especially when they were allowed to meddle in affairs of state, and they should therefore be kept firmly away from all temptations to civil power. As long as this were done, and private interests and ambitions kept in check, Falkland envisaged a natural return to peace and unity, the true and original state of mankind.64 Far more than Chillingworth or Hammond, Falkland wanted to combine his Christianity with an active role in political life. This, at any rate, is 62 63 64

Triplet (ed.), Sir Lucius Cary, unpaginated introduction; Hayward, ‘The “Mores” of Great Tew’, pp. 124–7, K. Weber, Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland (New York, 1940), pp. 250–3. Triplet (ed.), Sir Lucius Cary, p. 139. L. Cary, A Speech made to the House of Commons concerning Episcopacy (London, 1641).

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the impression given by his poems of the 1630s and by his willingness to join Charles’ expedition against the Scots in 1639. Perhaps the most revealing indication of his views comes from his support for the Psalm paraphrases of George Sandys (1578–1644), expressed in a prefatory poem to the work. Later, Falkland would praise Sandys as the ‘English Buchanan’, an epithet which suggests the appeal to Falkland of Sandys’ work. For, in his edition of the Psalms, Sandys had followed the Scottish author George Buchanan in stressing the legalistic context of the Old Testament monarchy, using them to praise kingship that remained within the boundaries of the law. The law which restrains these kings is God’s law, here assumed to be the natural law upon which all just government was built. The contemporary force and importance of the Psalms was based upon the ideal and timeless model of kingship which they offered, a model which was assumed to have divine support.65 Such a view of the positive value of political institutions and of divine concern for the administration of earthly justice was alien to the thought of Socinus. Later, Falkland was critical of the Socinians and his criticisms may well have been based upon their disregard for political values.66 The tendency of the Socinians to distinguish between the norms of natural or civil life on the one hand, and those required by Christianity on the other could easily undermine patterns of government or self-defence here on Earth. Certainly this aspect of Socinian thought provoked the hostility of some English readers. One of the fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford, Thomas Crosfield (1602–1663), remarked in his diary for 1636: That Socinianisme will never be received within our Kings dominions ‘tis thought, because of these and the like positions thereby maintained w[hi]ch are repugnant to our State & government, as namely 1. That noe magistrats are to be tolerated as we have them 2. That no warre either offensive or defensive is lawfull 3. That in Polonia onely is the pure form of Church government[.]67

Crosfield enjoyed the favour and friendship of his Provost Christopher Potter, whose own sympathy with some of the Socinians’ religious and ethical ideas – and concerns about their implications – has already been discussed. The Socinians were associated with a radical view of human social life, 65

66 67

Sandys’ thought and its relationship to the Great Tew Circle is discussed in J. Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2002). The Psalms are dealt with on pp. 175–211. Falkland’s description of Sandys is taken from the prefatory poem to Sandys’ Christs Passion (London, 1640), a translation of Grotius’ Christus Patiens (publ. 1619). See below. S. Boas (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Crosfield (London, 1935), p. 85–86 (1 February 1636).

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particularly when it came to war and magistracy. This view met with widespread hostility but, as we shall see in the next chapter, it could also provide valuable resources for those seeking to shore up the authority of the king. Before the theological and political questions raised by Socinianism could be discussed in any great detail, the political situation worsened and from 1637 the Scots began to resist Charles’ policies north of the border. At this point the issue of the relationship between Christianity and nature began to take on much greater significance, as the Scottish Covenanters and then the English Parliamentarians appealed to both these concepts to justify their actions. For Charles’ opponents it was now more important than ever to show that natural law and Christianity were aligned, that God demanded of men the duties prescribed by the natural law. Hammond and Chillingworth had already begun to prise the natural and divine laws apart, but they had not made clear the full consequences of doing so. Soon, Hammond and some of his friends would show the earthly implications of their understanding of Christian ethics, and they would do so in an atmosphere charged by events both in England and on the continent. The political uses of the Socinians’ arguments will be explored in the next chapter.

chapter 4

Royalists, Socinianism and the English Civil War

In the 1630s, Falkland and his friends began to use Socinian ideas to re-interpret Christianity and to defend their Church against its Catholic and Puritan detractors. The scholars of Great Tew had found time and leisure to contemplate religious questions during the ‘calm and tranquillity’ that had prevailed in England for much of that decade.1 With the outbreak of rebellion in Scotland in the late 1630s and then in England in 1642, however, the calm was shattered and scholarly retreat was no longer possible. Instead, Falkland’s friends began to turn their attention to more political issues, and almost all placed themselves and their pens at the service of their king. The support Charles received from the Royalist writers associated with the Great Tew Circle was particularly strong; several denounced Parliamentarian resistance in uncompromising terms. Their arguments were striking and, in an English context, quite novel, but this chapter will show that these Royalists make most sense when placed within a broader European discussion about natural law, Christianity, and civil society. This was, of course, a discussion in which Socinianism loomed large. Indeed, some of the Royalists built their critique of Parliament’s actions upon intellectual foundations which they shared with the Socinians. The pamphlets which they produced, and the reactions which these pamphlets provoked, helped to alter the constitutional debate on both the Royalist and the Parliamentarian side. The distinction suggested by the Socinians between nature and the law of Christ was put to important use during the English Civil War. We have already seen that some English scholars had been attracted to this idea in the 1630s because they thought it could be used to encourage people to live virtuous lives. With the advent of war – and war which was often justified upon natural law grounds – the notion of a separate, non-natural law of 1

E. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England 6 vols. (London, 1888), vol. i, p. 94.

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Christ became a crucial part of Royalist propaganda. Indeed, it was in the two decades of war and constitutional experiment in the middle of the seventeenth century that we see the most sustained efforts both to bring together natural law and Christianity, and to drive them apart. A key issue during the Civil War was resistance, for it was on this point that our Royalists from Great Tew were most concerned to separate natural and Christian law, while their Parliamentarian counterparts sought to weld them ever more closely together. After the Civil War, as we shall see in later chapters, the question of Church government became more pressing. And in discussions of England’s ecclesiastical future, it was again this problem of the relationship between the natural law (on which civil society was based) and Christianity which concerned most of the participants.

i defensive arms or non-resistance? By the end of the 1630s, Hammond and Chillingworth had begun to move away from Reformed Christianity, suggesting that Christ demanded from his followers a sincere attempt to live according to his laws. It was these laws, known through the New Testament, rather than the laws of the Israelites or the natural law, that provided the template for a Christian life. As a party emerged at Westminster during the early 1640s willing to use force against Charles, both men began to see the potential uses of these ideas against these ‘fiery spirits’. A similar case was made by a young fellow of All Souls, Dudley Digges (1610–1643), who has sometimes been connected to the Great Tew Circle, though the little we know about him during the 1630s indicates that he spent his time with the literary set around the playwright William Cartwright (1611–1643).2 Still, he had much in common with the men of Great Tew. Whether he knew Falkland or not, he would have been acquainted with Sheldon, the warden of his college, and he certainly came to know Chillingworth. At some point before his death Digges even lent to Chillingworth the sum of forty pounds; when Chillingworth drew up his own will he was most anxious that this debt be repaid to Digges’ executors.3 Most importantly for our purposes, Digges shared with Hammond and with Chillingworth an interest in Socinian writing. Digges was an avid collector of Socinian books and his was probably the largest collection of Socinian works in England at the time. His library, rather than any time spent at Tew, may well account for the similarities between his thought and 2 3

Cartwright’s circle is described in Lloyd, Memoires, p. 437. Des Maizeaux, Life of William Chillingworth, p. 353.

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that of Hammond.4 Like his fellow royalist polemicists at Oxford – which became the king’s wartime headquarters – Digges wanted to use some of the Socinians’ ideas to counter Parliament’s call to arms. The political ideas of this Royalist intellectual circle can be seen in a number of pamphlets and treatises, all of which were successful enough to be reprinted several times. The first to appear on the booksellers’ shelves was An Answer to a Printed Book, available from November 1642. The London bookseller George Thomason regarded this publication as a joint effort on the part of Falkland, Chillingworth, Digges and others at Oxford, although it is much closer to Digges’ other work than to those of the former two.5 In June 1644 there appeared The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects taking up Arms against their Sovereign, which Digges did acknowledge as his own. In this posthumous publication, Digges fleshed out the argument of the previous tract. Hammond also penned a similar work in July 1643, entitled The Scriptures Plea for Magistrates. As with much of Hammond’s work, it went through many editions (five in the 1640s, mostly under the title Of Resisting the Lawful Magistrate under Colour of Religion). A number of appendices were also added to the work in its later editions. These tracts, some of the most well known of all the Royalist works, have been discussed by a number of historians, but here it will be suggested that they can best be understood in the context of the authors’ engagement with Socinianism.6 To this collection of Royalist works can be added several manuscripts among Chillingworth’s papers at Lambeth Palace Library, mostly dating from 1643. Although incomplete, they display Chillingworth’s horror and contempt for the arguments of the ‘rebels’, especially Charles’ Scottish enemies.7 By the time that Hammond and Digges put pen to paper, the political situation had been deteriorating for some time. Charles’ attempt to foist a Prayer Book upon the Scots in 1637 had met with resistance; by 1639 a Scottish army, bound by Covenant to preserve Kirk and monarchy as they understood them, had forced Charles to come to terms and had put paid to his ecclesiastical ambitions north of the border. Charles would not accept 4

5 6

7

For Digges’ library, see Bodleian Library MS DD All Souls c. 389 [f. 5], E. Craster, The History of All Souls College Library (London, 1971). Most of these works are now in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University. [D. Digges,] An Answer to a Printed Book intituled, Observations vpon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (Oxford, 1642); Thomason’s copy is E.242[16]. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 272–8; D. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 223–6; M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 85–9; J. Sanderson, ‘But the People’s Creatures’ The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, 1989), pp. 73–85. Lambeth Palace Library MS 943 f. 899r.

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defeat, but his attempts to assemble a second army were hampered by growing English discontent towards his political and religious policies of the past decade. Reluctantly calling a Parliament in March 1640, Charles saw just how limited his own support was and hastily dissolved it just three weeks later. He pressed ahead with his plans for another war, but his forces were defeated by the Scots at Newburn, in Northumberland, on 28 August. The Scots then occupied Newcastle, and Charles had no choice but to call another Parliament. It assembled on 3 November 1640. Long and tortuous negotiations followed between Charles and the members of both Houses about the future direction of royal government. These negotiations were punctuated by violence and the threat of violence; by 1642 it became clear to all concerned that matters would have to be settled by force of arms.8 Charles and Parliament began to raise military forces during the spring of 1642, and by August the first shots of the English Civil War had been fired. Both sides were wide and often fractious coalitions, made up of men with divergent, even contradictory, aims. Although some on each side wanted the war prosecuted vigorously, and sought to force their enemies to accept harsh terms, others hoped for a more consensual end to the conflict, through a negotiated peace acceptable to both sides. Hopes for a swift peace receded fast in 1643, however, after Charles’ decision to bring troops from Ireland prompted Parliament to ally with the Scots. The conflict was now more tangled and bitter than ever. Each side churned out tracts and pamphlets explaining, defending and promoting their cause, but these tracts – which put forward very specific visions of the conflict and how it should be settled – were often directed as much at the author’s own side as at the enemy.9 The Royalist authors discussed in this chapter sought to counter the most effective arguments of the Parliamentarian war party, but they also wanted to promote a particular concept of monarchical authority which was not shared by all their fellow Royalists. Later in the chapter it will be suggested that in constructing and defending this vision of monarchy they drew heavily on Socinian ideas and sources. Hammond and Digges used Socinian ideas in the first instance to respond to a particular strand of Parliamentarian argument in which the law of nature played a central role. From at least 1640 Charles’ opponents had drawn upon the language of natural law; when the Scots prepared to 8 9

The story is most recently told in J. Adamson, The Noble Revolt (London, 2007). D. Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 37–67; for an overview of print culture, see M. Braddick, ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, 2007), pp. 27–42.

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enter England they justified their actions as defensive, prompted by necessity and grounded in natural law rather than any positive laws. This argument was made most clearly in The Intentions of the Armie of the Kingdome of Scotland, a work which was circulated widely, not only by the Scots themselves but also by their English allies; the most disaffected of Charles’ English subjects clearly approved of the argument of The Intentions.10 As one of the first examples of an appeal by the Crown’s subjects to the natural law of self-defence in a British context, The Intentions was a significant work. But it was also a work which alarmed more moderate Englishmen and MPs, who preferred in the opening stages of the Long Parliament to look to established laws and customs. As the rift between Crown and Parliament deepened, however, it became clear that the English Parliamentarians would need to break with legal precedent. In the spring of 1642 the two Houses issued their Militia Bill as an Ordinance – that is, without royal assent – thereby proclaiming that Parliament could act independently of the Crown to defend the nation. At this point, as Michael Mendle has argued, the leading spokesmen for the English Parliament stepped up their appeal to the concepts of necessity and self-preservation. Ironically, they did so using the arguments which had already been invoked by Charles I in the 1630s to defend his own policies, notably Ship Money.11 Both English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters set their concepts of necessity and natural law within a religious framework; God, after all, was the author of the law of nature. The language of natural law enabled the sense of divine mission felt by godly zealots to be combined with the demands of self-defence and political expediency. Parliamentarian rhetoric drew upon the conventional Protestant belief that the natural law carried full divine endorsement and that it described the duties which men lay under to both God and their own communities. For them, the commandment against murder was particularly important because it could be seen as a prohibition upon suicide, and from it a duty of self- and communaldefence could be inferred. On these grounds Parliamentarians began to argue that to yield to the king would be tantamount to self-murder, and to emphasise the duty of self-preservation. In general, Parliamentarians agreed with the mainstream contemporary view that the natural law was directed to

10 11

D. Como, ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, P&P 196 (2007), 56–7. M. Mendle, ‘The Ship Money Case, The Case of Shipmony and the Development of Henry Parker’s Parliamentary Absolutism’, HJ 32 (1989), 513–36; also Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 226–8.

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the common good; the safety of the individual would be secured through the preservation of the community.12 Perhaps the most ambitious use of the natural law argument by Parliamentarian polemicists came from the pen of Henry Parker (1604– 1652), the pamphleteer of choice among the Parliamentarians leading the war effort. In the early stages of the war Parker’s works had a semi-official status, for he was the nephew and the client of Viscount Say and Sele, one of the most active and hardline of Charles’ noble opponents. Moreover, he was appointed secretary to the Earl of Essex, the commander of Parliament’s main field army, in late 1642.13 To Parker fell the task of replying to Charles’ Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642), a vision of legal and mixed monarchy written partly by Falkland and by Sir John Culpeper. In this work, Charles and his advisors had rejected Parliament’s Nineteen Propositions, the two Houses’ most recent proposals for settlement, on the grounds that these Propositions would alter the balance of power within the polity. To Falkland and Culpeper, the Propositions represented an unreasonable attempt to force Charles to cede the powers that belonged to him rightfully and legally.14 Theirs was a strong argument, designed to appeal to men’s respect for the established laws and constitutions, and to expose the radical nature of Parliament’s demands. The Answer could not be countered with history or legal precedent; Parker saw that only an appeal to natural law would serve his turn. This he provided in his Observations on some of His Majesties Late Answers (1642). Here, Parker simply denied the premises of the Royalists’ argument, taking it for granted that the law of nature could – and must – override any written or positive laws. He espoused a Parliamentary absolutism which defended the resort to arms as the legitimate exercise of the natural right to self-defence. Parker began with the claim that power was inherently in the people and that government must have been established for their benefit. For this reason, he went on, the ‘Paramount law’ in every polity ‘is salus populi’, with self-defence as the most important element of the people’s ‘salus’ (or welfare). By the law of nature, every community was entitled to act for its own preservation; therefore its members could not have agreed to a government which would bring about their ruin. They must retain the right to 12 13 14

J. Sommerville provides a good summary of these ideas in Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (1992), pp. 34–7. On Parker’s career, see J. Peacey, ‘Henry Parker and Parliamentary Propaganda in the English Civil Wars’, unpublished PhD dissertation (Cambridge, 1994). The text of this is printed in J. L. Malcolm (ed.), The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-century English Political Tracts 2 vols. (Indianapolis, 1999), vol. i, pp. 154–177.

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defend themselves against a king who sought to destroy them; their resistance was grounded upon the fundamental laws of nature. At the same time, Parker argued that this defence must be undertaken and organised by a legitimate authority, namely Parliament. Parker was clearly moving away from the framework of a mixed monarchy and was beginning to argue instead for a single locus of sovereignty whose authority was based on natural law principles rather than historic agreements or precedents.15 The challenge for the Royalists was, therefore, to demonstrate that Parker’s version of natural law was not the ultimate touchstone of obligation and that obedience to the monarch was not only commanded by God but also reasonable in terms of individual self-interest. It was this challenge which Digges and Hammond took up. Digges and Hammond came closest to the Socinians’ views as they questioned Parker’s view of the natural right of self-preservation. For Parker this right was the cornerstone of an obligatory natural law, but Digges and Hammond refused to accept this interpretation of natural right or natural law. They rejected the Parliamentarian assumption that the natural law must be the most important law, and they sought instead to distinguish between nature and Christianity. Digges in particular sought to unpick Parker’s case by re-interpreting the concepts of self-preservation and natural law, and by separating both from Christianity. He argued that the right of self-preservation was a right like any other, that it could not be construed as a duty, nor as part of a web of communal obligations. Instead, he claimed that a man’s natural right – like any right – could be deployed at the discretion of its bearer. In civil society, however, all individuals had agreed to yield up their natural right to preserve themselves and they had agreed to rely upon the protection of the magistrate instead. Once this natural right had been ceded, it was lost and it could not be reclaimed as the Parliamentarians imagined. For Digges, however, this was an eminently reasonable course of action. As he wrote: The law of nature doth allow a man to defend himselfe, and provide for his own preservation. But the Observer [i.e., Parker] takes no notice, that it is in our power to part with this right, and yet doe nothing contrary to nature, if reason tell us, we shall thereby obtain a more excellent good, the benefit and peace of society [.]16

15

16

H. Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesties late Answers and Expresses ([London], 1642), quotation from p. 3. On Parker’s tract, see also Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War, pp. 70–89. [Digges,] An Answer to a Printed Book (London, 1642), p. 20.

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Men could use their natural right of self-preservation as they chose, and Digges felt that that there were good reasons for ceding it in order to enter society and to enjoy the peace and security which generally followed. The crucial consequence, for Digges, was that men could not take back their right of self-defence even if they felt threatened; the Parliamentarian appeal to natural right to justify resistance was both illegitimate and unreasonable. It was illegitimate because it involved the violation of an agreement, and men ought always to keep their promises; while it was unreasonable because men who broke their promises offended God and forfeited their chances of eternal life. In advancing this line of argument, Digges seems to have put together Socinus’ and Crell’s ideas to create a stronger and more coherent version of Christian non-resistance. Socinus had emphasised that resistance, even if justifiable in terms of self-preservation, was prohibited by Christ and may well lead to the loss of eternal life.17 Crell had construed the power to punish and therefore to defend oneself from injury as a natural right, which men yielded to enter civil society.18 Digges drew out more clearly than either Socinus or Crell had done the consequences of these ideas for the standard Protestant arguments for resistance, in which natural law and the right of self-preservation played a large part. If self-preservation were a natural right and not a law, then it could not be invoked against the clear dictates of positive law; nature could not provide the moral standards for life in a settled society like England. Moreover, Digges insisted that no reasonable person would want to reclaim his natural right. Not only would they be opening a door to anarchy, but they would thereby jeopardise their chances of eternal life. These claims could be found in the Socinian corpus, but Digges drew them together and stated them with greater clarity and sophistication, using them to undermine the validity of Parliamentarian natural law arguments. In doing so, Digges offered an argument for nonresistance which was much stronger and more cogent than anything from the Rakow press. The supernatural quality of Christianity was crucial to Digges’ argument. Although he pointed to the benefits which would flow when men renounced their rights of self-preservation, he was aware that sometimes men lost out in society, that sometimes rulers could threaten an individual’s self-preservation. At this point he brought in the Gospels, for these showed that men could be certain of eternal reward if they refused to resist an unjust government. Christianity – not nature or natural reason – commanded and 17

Socinus, Opera Omnia, vol. ii, p. 78.

18

Crell, Opera Didactica, pp. 69–70.

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made rational the duty of non-resistance. Richard Tuck has claimed that Digges lacked a strong notion of obligation, particularly when it came to non-resistance.19 Yet Digges’ insistence on the heavenly rewards of obedience to Charles suggests otherwise. Digges saw non-resistance as ‘very reasonable’, for ‘if we submit nature to religion’, in losing our present lives ‘we shall receive them hereafter with great advantage’.20 Obligation had to be understood in terms of effective sanctions, and only those who remained loyal to Charles could hope for eternal life. The Socinians’ refusal to permit any recourse to natural right for a Christian may have seemed to Digges the ideal argument with which to counter Parliamentarian claims. Digges’ large Socinian collection shows that he was interested in Socinian writing, and his own work suggests that it was the Socinians’ views on nature and natural right which caught his attention. In response to Digges’ argument, the Parliamentarians reasserted the harmony of the natural and divine laws. This can be seen most clearly in A Copy of a Letter (1643), written by the prominent Parliamentarian divine, Stephen Marshall (1600–1660). Marshall cited numerous examples of Old Testament resistance, to show that God was not opposed to men taking up arms against unjust rulers. The use of Old Testament examples was a common strategy among the Parliamentarians, enabling them to complicate the prohibitions upon resistance found in the New. Since both Testaments were assumed to refer to the same moral law, Marshall then felt able to discuss such instances in the New Testament in the light of his reading of the Old. Foremost among these was Matthew 26:52, in which Christ chided Peter for cutting off the ear of the slave of the high priest. Marshall used the four Church Fathers cited by Grotius in his Annotationes (1641–1650) as authorities for his claim that ‘Christ doth not rebuke Peter for using defensive Arms, but to let Peter know that he need not snatch Gods Work out of his hand’; even if it were a reproof, it was directed against Peter’s rashness, not his resort to arms as such. It was not, therefore, a condemnation of the use of the sword in just defence.21 Indeed, just defence, as one of the laws of nature, was nowhere condemned by Christ, in Marshall’s view. Against the contractual argument of men like Digges, the Parliamentarian minister also insisted that the agreement through which society was established must have allowed its participants the liberty to 19 21

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 275. 20 Digges, Unlawfullness, p. 123. S. Marshall, A Copy of a Letter written by Mr Stephen Marshall to a Friend of his in the City, for the Necessary Vindication of Himself and His Ministry (London, 1643), p. 16. On Grotius’ Annotationes, see below pp. 153–4, 228–30.

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defend themselves against violence when the law offered no protection.22 Even in civil society the possibility of defending oneself by the law of nature must remain. Hammond attacked Marshall’s brand of Parliamentarian reasoning in Scripture’s Plea and again a central theme of this work is the reasonableness of laying down one’s natural right, both for the benefit of society and – more importantly – for the sake of one’s soul. The second edition included an analysis of Romans 13 that featured several quotations from Volkelius’ De Vera Religione, suggesting that Hammond had Socinian works by him when composing the work.23 Hammond made clear that he did not agree with Volkelius’ specific interpretation of the Greek word krima (damnation), but this was a relatively minor point. In general he shared Volkelius’ insistence upon the contrast between the Old and New Testaments, for it enabled him to agree with Marshall that resistance had been entirely justifiable for the Israelites.24 Resistance was neither obligatory or even rational, however, for a Christian who hoped to enjoy the blessings of heaven. For Hammond, most of the evidence which Marshall brought was irrelevant, for it illustrated only the Old Testament laws and not the higher law of Christ. The prohibitions upon resistance brought by Christ and the Apostles were, for him, quite straightforward; they were restrictions upon a right which had previously been valid.25 In Chillingworth’s manuscripts, similar themes are evident. He copied out extracts from the Scottish declarations, including The Intentions of the Armie, as well as setting down some of his own thoughts relating to these. The extracts focus upon the Scots’ appeal to natural law, an appeal which Chillingworth clearly saw as an invitation to anarchy. Chillingworth felt that the Scots had used natural law to justify breaking their vows of loyalty and allegiance to the king, a move which, he felt, threatened to undermine all bonds and agreements between men. He noted that the Scots, especially in 1643, claimed that they would respect English property rights, but he asked what guarantee Englishmen could have that they would not also break this promise. If, as the Scots had shown, vows of allegiance could be broken, he argued, then no oaths or promises would be held sacred and the cement which held together civil society would crumble. Disorder and confusion must follow.26 At the same time, Chillingworth reminded his 22 23 24 25

Ibid., pp. 7–8. H. Hammond, Of Resisting the Lawful Magistrate, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1644), pp. 31–2. Volkelius, De Vera Religione, esp. pp. 36, 192–3; (also book iv, ‘De Praeceptis Christi’, passim). Hammond, Of Resisting, pp. 49–61. 26 Lambeth Palace Library MS 943 f. 890r.

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readers of the commands of the Apostles and their injunction to obey the powers that be, however tyrannous the government might appear. He insisted that ‘Religion commands to pay all manner of Subjection and obedience, not only to lawfull Princes, but to ye most Impious Infidell and Idolatrous Princes.’ Given the clarity with which this command was spelt out in the New Testament, Chillingworth really could not see how anyone – certainly not the Scots – could justify their rebellion. No law, not even the putative law of nature, could run counter to God’s express word. However bad the situation might be here on Earth, the subject’s only recourse was prayers, tears, and the comforting hope that one day they would be rewarded in heaven.27 Chillingworth’s thoughts lack the sophistication of his friends’ published writing, but they reflect the same concerns. Civil and religious laws protected men from anarchy and would guide them to heaven; no sensible person would abandon them for the rights, or even the laws, of nature.

ii dudley digges and thomas hobbes The roots of these Royalist arguments concerning natural rights have often been traced to Thomas Hobbes, but the story is more complicated than that – especially once Socinian writing is taken into account. Hobbes allowed his manuscript Elements of Law, completed in May 1640, to circulate among a group which probably included Falkland and his friends, and they found much of interest in this work.28 In it, Hobbes had put forward a political theory which was overwhelmingly Royalist in its strong claims for the absolute nature of sovereign power and which explicitly denied that subjects possessed rights in their property which could be held against the sovereign. So strident were Hobbes’ arguments that he became fearful of the reaction that they might provoke in Parliament and he fled to France in late 1640. There he wrote another, similar, work, De Cive, which he completed in November 1641. Whether any of his English friends read De Cive before 1647 is a matter of conjecture, but some, including Digges, had certainly read Elements with intense interest. Neither Digges nor Hobbes had much time for mixed monarchy as described by Falkland and Culpepper; instead both understood sovereign power as indivisible. But while there was shared conceptual and political ground between Hobbes and Digges, their arguments were in fact rather different. Both Digges and 27 28

Ibid. ff. 895r–897v, quotation from 895r. See, in particular, P. Zagorin, ‘Clarendon and Hobbes’, JMH 57 (1985), 593–616, at 598–606.

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Hammond realised that Hobbes’ ideas would need to be modified if they were to be brought into line with true Royalism and Christianity. How Digges sought to rework and adapt the exiled philosopher’s ideas can be seen in his second work, The Unlawfulness of Subjects taking up Arms, completed at some time after April 1643, when the Treaty of Oxford ended. In this later tract, Digges again drew upon Socinian arguments, this time to counter the difficulties he associated with Hobbes’ work. In Elements, Hobbes explained why a strong sovereign was required, but he did so quite differently from Digges or Hammond. He offered his own variation upon the theme of a founding pact, but this was one in which the subject agreed to renounce not only his right to defend himself but also his ability to make judgements about how that defence should be carried out. For Hobbes, it was this conflict over how best to achieve the common goal of self-preservation that led to instability, and which needed to be countered through sovereign power. At the same time, however, Hobbes did allow the subject to take back that right in extremis, and when faced with imminent death to take all necessary measures to stay alive.29 In De Cive, Hobbes developed his argument further, emphasising more strongly the disruptive consequences of divergent opinions, especially when those opinions involved conscience and religion. Indeed, Hobbes associated liberty of conscience with sedition and rebellion and, to prevent these evils, he wanted to align the private consciences of subjects with the public conscience of the sovereign as far as possible.30 Moreover, Hobbes insisted that the natural laws were also divine, and in Elements he devoted a chapter to producing scriptural confirmation for them.31 Hobbes’ version of the law of nature was designed to prevent any appeal to a higher divine law by individuals, on conscientious grounds. This, he thought, was the best way to strengthen the monarch’s rule. For Digges and Hammond, it was this strand of Hobbes’ thought, his hostility towards individual judgement, which they found deeply alarming. Their whole argument turned on the role of Christianity as a set of obligations higher than the natural law, accessible to the individual conscience, whose fulfilment could be understood as voluntary and meritorious. When Digges drew on Elements in his own work, therefore, he was careful to re-introduce the distinction which the Socinians had made between nature and religion. For him this was the purpose of separating 29 30 31

T. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. F. Tonnies, 2nd edn (London, 1969). T. Hobbes, De Cive, ed. and transl. by R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne as On the Citizen (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 131–3. Hobbes, The Elements of Law, ed. Tonnies, pp. 95–9.

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ius and lex, right and law, and he distinguished them much more thoroughly than Hobbes had done. By nature men had rights, but these did not bring with them any obligations. Indeed, it made little sense to speak of a ‘law of nature’, there were only the rights of nature and these could in no sense be construed as commands.32 Because natural rights were not commands or duties, Digges did not believe that they could provide the basis for a law or set of obligations, as the right of self-preservation did in Hobbes’ system. Only by construing the right of self-preservation as a special kind of right which could not reasonably be renounced could Hobbes generate a set of laws from it. Yet no right functioned in this way for Digges; all rights existed for the benefit of their possessors and therefore all could be renounced. Moreover, Digges believed (as Hobbes did not) that Christ had revealed to men a new set of laws and sanctions, which gave them a strong incentive to renounce their right of self-preservation completely. He wrote that although ‘Nature doth not forbid any man to defend himself … yet the Gospell doth, as it restrains many innocent delights, if we measure them onely by natural right.’33 For Digges, liberty of conscience was essential to his account of the relationship between nature and grace; it also marked the difference between his understanding of the origins of society and the explanation offered by Hobbes. Hobbes insisted that men must renounce the right to make judgements about their own preservation (except in extremis), but Digges required men to cede only the right to act upon the judgements they made against those in authority. In Digges’ account it was the right to put one’s beliefs about the supreme magistrate into action which needed to be yielded, and not the right to hold opinions about his conduct.34 Digges’ men could retain the ability – as they could not in Hobbes’ system – to choose between good and evil. In one passage, Digges discussed reasons which had been given ‘for an absolute and unlimited obedience’, reasons broadly similar to those given by Hobbes for the submission of judgement to the sovereign. Although it is not clear whether Hobbes was the sole target of these pages, one of Digges’ examples was the unusual point made by Hobbes in De Cive, where the emphasis on the renunciation of judgement was stronger than it had been in Elements. In the later work, Hobbes argued that to take upon oneself the definition of good and evil was to commit Adam’s sin, when he ate of the tree of knowledge, for it was to make oneself a god in opposition to authority. Digges’ response was to deny this, and to claim that God demanded from men in certain matters ‘a liberty of 32

Digges, Unlawfulness, p. 120.

33

Ibid., p. 122.

34

Ibid., pp. 6, 53–4, 135–6.

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judging’, and this included religion. Yet because Christianity included the command of non-resistance this could never be disruptive.35 It is possible, then, to see in the works by Digges and Hammond a continuation of the arguments for liberty of conscience which had been made by Chillingworth and Falkland in the 1630s. Digges praised Charles because he ‘doth not desire to captivate any mans understanding to his authority, but is willing to make all the world the Judge of his Actions’.36 All these men were opposed to any concept of law which automatically bound in conscience, whether it stemmed from the Pope, the King or even God himself. It has recently been suggested that Royalist texts – including those of Digges – presuppose passive readers and that Royalism was a system designed to subdue individual will and subjectivity.37 Yet Digges and Hammond sought to engage their readers and to show that will and conscience need not be sacrificed to the Royal cause. They wanted to create active, reasoning subjects, who realised that it could not be in their own interest to take up arms against the king. Closer attention to these works also suggests the diversity of both thought and argumentative strategy among those who supported Charles. In separating the natural from the divine law, Digges and Hammond distanced themselves from those Royalists who looked to a hierarchical and allencompassing natural law, given by God. John Daly has shown that this concept of law underpinned the writings of Bishop John Bramhall (1594– 1663), another prolific controversialist for the Royal cause. For men like Bramhall, it was this natural law which bound both the king and his subjects, ensuring order and harmony within the world. Bramhall had no desire to question the obligations of the natural law; instead he wanted to show that it simply did not permit resistance along Parliamentarian lines. Where Parker – and Hobbes and Digges – saw natural law in terms of self-preservation, Bramhall insisted that it included the full range of moral demands which God placed upon human beings. Bramhall saw little advantage in jettisoning the traditional, Thomist language of natural law for the heady concoction of natural right and Christian law which Digges was brewing.38 35 36

37 38

Ibid., pp. 10–12; Hobbes, De Cive, Tuck and Silverthorne (ed. and transl.), pp. 131–2. [Digges], An Answer, p. 35; see also Unlawfullness, p. 86 and p. 73, where he writes that men are only bound in conscience ‘not to revenge the not performance’ of trust on the magistrate’s part. In other words, they can make but not execute judgements. J. De Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 61–5. J. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 41–5; J. Malcolm, Caesar’s due: Loyalty and King Charles 1642–1646 (London, 1983), pp. 133–7; J. Daly, ‘John Bramhall and the Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation’, JBS 11 (1971), 26–44.

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Other Royalists were even more critical of Digges’ account of the genesis of civil society and kingly power, preferring to emphasise the role of God in establishing monarchy. One such Royalist was John Maxwell (d. 1647), a Scot who had been appointed bishop of Kilalla in Ireland in 1640. In his Sacra-sancta regum majestas (1644), he explained why he had initially supported such a view and why this support had soon changed to hostility. Maxwell outlined the many advantages of an argument for royal authority based upon a general renunciation of the natural right of vindicating one’s own injuries – in other words, the argument of Digges’ An Answer – and he recalled that he was himself ‘sometime in Love with this Opinion’. But he emphasised that he had abandoned this position when he found he could not square it with the Scriptures.39 Maxwell leaned heavily on the Old Testament for his evidence; biblical history and prescription are central to the argument of Sacra-sancta regum majestas. Clearly the bishop felt unable to combine the argument offered by Digges with a more traditional, scripturally based defence of royal power, and he may also have seen the heterodox theological implications of Digges’ political argument. There is no evidence that Maxwell had met with Hobbes’ version of the Diggesian argument, but if he had, then he may have been even more concerned to prevent the spread of these novel ideas about natural right and Christianity. By recognising the controversial nature of the position adopted by Digges and Hammond, we can begin to see some of the intra-Royalist divisions – and the subtle argumentation on which they were based. Jon Parkin’s recent analysis of the reception of Hobbes has brought some of these tensions to light, but Royalist thought remains understudied. Furthermore, the difference between Hammond’s thought and that of some of his fellow Royalist clerics has long been obscured by the attribution to him of a tract entitled A Vindication of Dr Hammond (1649), when his authorship of this work is far from clear. The Vindication contained reflections on the law of nature along the same lines as that of Bramhall or even Stephen Marshall – presenting it as a divine law – and it has been influential in more recent accounts of Hammond’s thought. Yet throughout the tract, the author makes a distinction between his own position and that of Hammond; and the style as well as the general thrust of this work is different from Hammond’s own.40 39 40

J. Maxwell, Sacro-sancta regum majestas, or, The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings (Oxford, 1644), pp. 17–19, quotation from p. 18. A Vindication of Dr Hammonds Addresse &c. from the Exceptions of Eutactus Philodemius (London, 1649). See p. 4 for a discussion of the author’s own conception of the laws of nature, and see p. 8 for one example of the author distancing himself from Hammond, adding his own views to a slightly different argument made by Hammond. Although Hammond did reply anonymously to criticisms of

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He was almost certainly aware of its publication, however, for it was published by the noted Royalist publisher Richard Royston, and Hammond maintained a strong relationship with Royston, his own publisher, throughout the 1650s. Reliance on the Vindication of Dr Hammond as a guide to Hammond’s thought has led historians to play down the distinctive position of this divine, but some of his fellow Royalists may have sought to do the same. Indeed, this may explain why Hammond’s authorship was not disputed. Reservations had already been expressed in Royalist circles about an argument which cut the natural rules off from religion or morality, for it could seem to imply that the moral law was not universally obligatory. At the same time, the arguments used against resistance could easily be deployed against any insistence upon one’s lawful rights, opening the prospect of slavish subservience and devaluing the role of law in resolving disputes. For this reason Digges and Hammond seem not to have won over all their friends; there is nothing to suggest that Edward Hyde shared their views, for example.41 If the ‘rule of law’ became the Royalists’ mantra in the 1640s, and the king’s criticism of Parliament was based upon their attempt to deprive him of his rights,42 then Socinian arguments were a double-edged sword. Not only might they undermine the religious basis of monarchy, but the civil and legal basis also. Falkland, at least, seems to have been alive to the potential difficulties with his friends’ position. One piece of evidence for his concern, and for the political importance of Socinianism to him and his friends, is an account of the conversation between him and Chillingworth during the Royalist siege of Gloucester in August and September 1643 – just a few weeks before Falkland’s fatal charge at the first battle of Newbury. The Royalist grandee Robert, Lord Spencer recalled that Chillingworth had ‘dispute[d] last Night, with my Lord Falkland, in Favour of Socinianism; wherein he was by his Lordship, so often confounded’.43 McLachlan concluded that this exchange between the two friends was part of a theoretical disputation and

41 42 43

another of his works, the Practical Catechism, he did so as the author of the work and not as a third person (A Brief Vindication of Three Passages in the Practical Catechisme, London, 1648). Ascham replied to the Vindication of Dr Hammonds Addresse, assuming it to be Hammond’s, and his attribution took hold. Tuck made use of this tract (esp. p. 4) in his account of Hammond in Natural Rights Theories, p. 108. For an account of the ways in which Hyde held together religion and civil policy, see B. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640–1660 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 177, 290–1, 297–303. This was one argument of the Answer to the xix Propositions, see The Struggle for Sovereignty, ed. J. L. Malcolm, vol. i, p. 167. A. Collins (ed.), Letters and Memorials of State… Written and Collected by Sir Henry Sidney [etc.] 2 vols. (London, 1746), vol. ii, p. 669. The letter is dated 25 August, 1643.

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that it did not reflect any serious divergence of opinion. Yet behind this discussion may not have been playful debate about the Trinity, but rather an exploration of the powers of the magistrate and the legitimacy of resistance. Hyde later recalled the ‘dejection of spirit’ which Falkland suffered at this time, as his political ideals were assaulted from all sides.44 Spencer’s letter suggests that he saw Socinianism behind the position of his intellectual opponents, especially those on his own side. iii the european war on the racovian antichrist Whether Falkland detected the influence of Socinianism in his friends’ arguments or not, this view of Royalism as tainted with Socinian thinking soon took hold in Parliamentarian circles. Some Parliamentarian divines began to link Socinianism to the rejection of the mainstream view of natural law, but they did so in large part because that connection had already been made in the United Provinces, by their Contra-Remonstrant friends. Indeed, the denunciations of Royalist Socinianism can only be understood with reference to recent developments across the English Channel. Dutch and French accusations against the Socinians became especially vitriolic and politicised in the late 1630s, when the arrival of Socinian refugees in the United Provinces was widely feared and when delicate peace negotiations with Spain were underway. The controversy over Socinianism soon came to include English affairs, as all sides sought to win foreign as well as domestic support. No full account of this episode exists, and yet it was extremely important to its English as well as its Dutch and French participants. Even just a brief sketch will demonstrate the relevance of these European events to Englishmen and will illuminate the English side of the debate, which is our focus here. The issue of Socinianism in the United Provinces had died down in the early 1630s, only to receive a new lease of life in 1638. In that year persecution of the Socinian community in Poland increased, and some of its members sought refuge in Amsterdam where they hoped to take advantage of their links with the Remonstrant community. The Socinians’ expectations were raised after a letter from Johannes Sartorius, a former minister of the Rakow church who was convalescing in Holland, to Adam Franck, Unitarian minister at Koloszvar (now in Romania). This letter suggested that Franck’s flock would find welcome in Holland among the many closet Unitarians and Arians already sheltered there within the Remonstrant 44

McLachlan, Socinianism, p. 87; D. Smith, ‘Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland’, ODNB.

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community.45 Unfortunately for Sartorius, the communication was intercepted and caused panic among the Dutch Calvinists and their allies, heightening their complaints against the Remonstrants. The Dutch Calvinists also sought to enlist the assistance of the English in their campaign to protect the Provinces against infiltration by the Socinians. In April 1639 Sir William Boswell (d. 1650), the English resident at The Hague, received a copy of Sartorius’ letter and, as he related to Laud, he had urged strong action against the Socinians ‘as well because [they are] wicked in themselves, as of great danger to His Ma[jes]ties Subiects and States’.46 The Dutch and English authorities were worried not only about the Socinians’ heresy, but also about the consequences of their ideas, especially those which related to pacifism and non-resistance. In the late 1630s, the United Provinces and the French were at war with Spain, although there was a growing desire among the Dutch for peace. The States of Holland, and in particular the town of Amsterdam, was reluctant to fund any more spending on the army, on the grounds that the Spanish monarchy was in deep financial trouble and unable to fund its own war effort; but the stadtholder, Frederick Henry (1584–1647), supported by the cloth towns of Haarlem and Leiden, was keen to continue the war with the assistance of France.47 The wealthier towns, like Amsterdam, were controlled by men whose religious sympathies tended to be with the Remonstrants and it was easy for their opponents to conclude that they had absorbed the pacifism of the Socinians. Furthermore, given the fears that Spain still posed a threat to the United Provinces, this pacifism could be seen as unwillingness to prevent popish expansion. It could be argued that Socinianism and Catholicism had effectively joined hands and needed to be countered by a vigorous military policy. Before the connection between Socinianism and Catholicism was fully formed, however, a further twist was added by the policies of Archbishop Laud and his English agents. There was already suspicion in the United Provinces as to Laud’s intentions, not least because the English community there included many Puritans who had been driven by his policies into voluntary exile. The Archbishop’s reputation among the Dutch Calvinists 45

46 47

A copy of this letter is in the Hartlib Papers: HP 46/4/1–2. More details about Sartorius (also known as Stantorius or Stoinsky) can be found in National Archives SP 84/152r-v. See also Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. i, pp. 448, 552. W. Boswell to W. Laud, 16/26 May 1639, National Archives, SP 84/155 f. 143r. Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 539–42; his, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606–1661 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 310–17; S. Groenveld, ‘The House of Orange and the House of Stuart, 1639– 1650: A Revision’ HJ 34 (1991), 955–972, esp. pp. 956–7.

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was also suffering as a result of his commands to the English military chaplains, for he had forbidden them from preaching in favour of war with Spain.48 As Laud attempted to tame the Puritan community in Holland, most particularly at The Hague, he only increased further the perceptions of the Dutch (and their friends in England and Scotland) that England’s adherence to the Protestant cause was waning. All these suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Charles and Laud sought to impose the new Prayer Book upon Scotland. The Dutch were quick to see parallels between the Scots’ resistance to the English imposition of idolatrous worship and their own struggle against Spain. One of Laud’s correspondents reported from The Hague that that ‘’tis strange to see what influence the Scottish tumults have here, they [the Dutch] stick not to say ’tis just as their case was’.49 Alongside accusations of popery and Catholicism, the charge of Socinianism began also to be heard against the proponents of the English policies of peace and the extension of the Church of England’s control over churches abroad. This was true both in the local power struggle at The Hague, and in the wider contest over the direction of Dutch affairs. In the United Provinces, as in Scotland and Ireland, Laud was seeking to strengthen the presence of the Church of England and to bring to heel the quasi-autonomous churches. The primary faultline within the English community at The Hague ran between the English congregation, led by Samuel Balmford (d. 1657) and under the jurisdiction of the Synod of Holland, and the agents of Archbishop Laud – including the chaplain to the court of the Prince and Princess of Bohemia. In 1638 Laud chose Samson Johnson, the learned and well-travelled fellow of Brasenose, to fulfil this important role, but Johnson incurred Balmford’s wrath when he promoted the Laudian ceremonial agenda. Balmford appealed to the Dutch authorities against Johnson, and, crucially, from 1638 he began to use the issue of Socinianism as one of the chief weapons in his armoury. As noted above, Johnson had been in contact with Socinians earlier in the decade and was certainly acquainted with their ideas. He had also made some incautious remarks about their ‘vera et solida theologia’, which had not been well received. At this time Balmford was unsuccessful in his attempts to have

48 49

W. Nijenhuis, ‘Resolutions of Dutch Church Assemblies concerning English Ministers in The Hague 1631–1651’, Nederlands Archief voor Kirkgeschiedenis 62 (1982), 77–101, esp. p. 96. S. Johnson to W. Laud, CSPD 1639, p. 35. See also K. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), pp. 288, 302–4.

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Johnson removed, but Parliament would force Princess Elizabeth to dismiss him in 1644.50 Johnson was no Socinian, but rather a staunch defender of the Crown’s authority. The charges against him suggest the beginning of a process whereby Socinianism and undue deference to authority came to be conflated. This was brought to the attention of a European public when Johnson’s case became caught up in a much more public and visible controversy between Grotius and André Rivet (1572–1651). Rivet was a French Huguenot who was appointed tutor to Frederick Henry’s son William in 1631, and he was one of the leading ministers in The Hague. It was he who informed Princess Elizabeth of Johnson’s alleged Socinianism in 1639, at about the same time as he began to accuse Grotius of Socinianism.51 Rivet was opposed to the Socinians’ theology, of course, but what he seems most to have feared was the way in which Grotius and Johnson echoed the arguments of the Socinians for obedience to authority, rejecting the natural law arguments broadly used by Protestants. Rivet was concerned that Socinianism weakened the campaign to defend true liberties and true religion against the continuing Catholic threat. Natural law, resistance and Christianity became some of the central subjects in a heated exchange between Grotius and Rivet, and it was one in which Socinianism would also play an important part.52 It began in September 1641 when Grotius published his Via ad pacem ecclesiasticam, setting out plans for doctrinal accommodation between moderate Protestants and Catholics. He included a commentary on the work of the Flemish theologian George Cassander (1513–1566), who had written on the same theme in the sixteenth century. Grotius also made some more obviously political points, defending those who scrupled to take up arms and arguing that it was better to lay down one’s life than to resist one’s magistrate forcibly, even where he commanded an action contrary to the word of God.53 Rivet feared that Grotius was abandoning the key 50

51 52

53

S. Johnson to W. Laud, 5 Oct/25 Sept 1639 National Archives SP 84/155 f. 254v; K. Sprunger, ‘Archbishop Laud’s Campaign against Puritanism at The Hague’, Church History 44 (1975), pp. 308–320, esp. pp. 317–19; CSPD 1639 pp. 35, 41–3, 76–7; CJ, vol. iii, p. 544. National Archives SP 16/420 no. 12 ff. 22–3; Andreæ Riveti Apologeticus, pro suo de verae & sincerae pacis ecclesiae proposito (Leiden, 1643), pp. 20–4. For an outline, see H. Bots and P. Leroy, ‘Hugo Grotius et la Reunion des Chrétiens: Entre le Savoir et l’Inquietude’, XVIIième Siècle 35 (1983), 451–469; P. Blet, ‘Le Plan de Richelieu pour la Réunion des Protestants’, Gregorianum 48 (1967), 100–29. The original edition was published at Paris. A second edition was also printed in March 1642, and a third in Amsterdam in July 1642. Grotius (and then Rivet) discusses resistance under article xvi; this part of the exchange can be found in Grotius’ Opera Omnia Theologica 3 vols. (London, 1679), vol. iii, p. 622.

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theological principles of the Reformation, but he also saw in the work an argument against defensive action for the protection of religious and civil liberties on natural law grounds. For these reasons he refuted Grotius’ notes on Cassander in April of the following year, and he provided a defence of the right of inferior magistrates to preserve true religion and liberty.54 Rivet also insisted, however, that Grotius had fallen under the pernicious influence of the Socinians and that this explained his reluctance to support any defensive warfare. In response, Grotius attacked the Reformed ministers for stirring up the people against their rulers, in direct contradiction to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles. Rivet countered by distinguishing between resistance from private men and from publicly authorised bodies of inferior magistrates.55 The controversy continued until 1645 and, as it progressed, English issues figured increasingly prominently in it. Grotius became concerned to show that his work would promote the cause of English Royalism because he advocated obedience to superior magistrates, particularly kings, argued that inferior magistrates had no special authority against superiors, and praised episcopacy. His letters suggest that he hoped for patronage from some of those around Queen Henriette Marie, although he seems to have been disappointed in this.56 The impression of Grotius’ Royalism may have been furthered by his firm friendship with Johnson, a friend of both Hyde and Hammond, who was busily encouraging Princes Rupert and Maurice to fight for their Uncle Charles in the English Civil War.57 Grotius, like the English Royalists who so admired his work, appealed to a higher law of Christ when he opposed arguments for resistance based upon natural law. On the other side, Rivet seems to have been a particular favourite of the Presbyterians. He enjoyed the close friendship of William Spang, cousin of the leading Scottish minister Robert Baillie, and this opened an important line of communication with the Scottish Kirk.58 Rivet’s English connections developed further when he visited London in 1641 for the marriage of 54 55 56

57 58

A. Rivet, Hugonis Grotii in consultationem G. Cassandri annotata. Cum necessariis animadversionibus Andreæ Riveti (Leiden, 1642); see his Operum Theologicorum vol. iii, p. 952. Grotius, Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. iii, pp. 661–3; Rivet, Operum Theologicorum, vol. iii, pp. 1010, 1020. Hugo Grotius to William Grotius, March 7 (NS) 1643, BW, vol. xiv, p. 139, where he reports the interest of Henry Jermyn in a new refutation of Rivet; the same, March 21 (NS) 1643 p. 164, where he (H. Grotius) argues that ‘Regis enim Angliae et episcoporum eius regni causa hic vel maxime agitur’. D. Moore to S. Hartlib, 24 August 1642, HP 21/5/1–2. For Scottish approval of Rivet, see, for example, G. Gillespie, Aaron’s Rod Blossoming or, The Divine Ordinance of Church-government Vindicated (London, 1646), pp. 185, 262; anon., The Last Houers, of the Right Reverend Father in God Andrew Rivet (The Hague, 1652), p. 32.

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his pupil, William of Orange, to Princess Mary, and he also became worried at this time that Laud, assisted by Grotius, hoped to deliver England over to the papacy. While in England, Rivet had canvassed the opinion of English divines and in a work of 1643 he included extracts of letters from those who supported his refutations of Grotius.59 Rivet’s defence of the resistance of magisterial bodies could be interpreted as an endorsement of the English Parliament’s position; certainly some of the Parliamentarians saw the relevance of his arguments. And in England, as elsewhere, the general impression was that the Frenchman had gained the victory in this contest. Rivet could claim, with some truth, that ‘I have shown that his [Grotius’] laborious work was very displeasing, in France and elsewhere, especially England.’60 It was Rivet’s reading of the danger of Socinianism which was taken up by some English Parliamentarians and it runs through Francis Cheynell’s The Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianism (1643). Cheynell was an Oxford don with strong Calvinist credentials; a fellow of Merton who would leave his college during the First Civil War to serve as a chaplain in the Earl of Essex’s army. In The Rise, he did not confine himself to a discussion of Polish and Italian heretics, but sought to explain why the ideas of the Socinians were so ruinous to the English kingdom. For him, certain aspects of Socinianism had become fused with popery to create a pernicious heresy which threatened to reduce England to slavery. He subscribed wholeheartedly to the belief that Charles had succumbed to a popish plot, masterminded by Queen Henriette Marie; and he threw in his lot with Parliament in its attempt to oust the popish delinquents from His Majesty’s service. But he feared that the antichristian designs of the Queen and her allies drew their real intellectual power from Socinian writings. Now, he exclaimed, ‘the Romane and Racovian Antichrist, are made friends here in England’.61 Cheynell was an avid reader of Rivet’s works, and in May 1643 he would recommend to Parliament a ‘book of Christian Pacification’ which the ‘learned and judicious Dr Rivet’ had recently republished. This was a work of Calvin which Rivet had added to one of his attacks upon Grotius; in it the perils of peace without truth and godliness were exposed. 59 60

61

Correspondance intégrale d’André Rivet et de Claude Sarrau, eds. H. Bots and P. Leroy 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1978–82), vol. ii, p. 23; Rivet, Operum Theologicorum, vol. iii, pp. 1125–6. Rivet, Operum Theologicorum vol. iii, p. 1124. Rivet was even able to write to his friend Claude Sarrau that Grotius’ reputation in The Hague was so low that the letters of recommendation which Samuel Sorbière had from him were worthless, letter of 29 July (NS) 1643, printed in Correspondance intégrale, vol. ii, p. 206. F. Cheynell, The Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianism (London, 1643), sig. A4v.

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The implication was, of course, that warfare might sometimes be necessary to defend society and Christianity.62 Alerted by Rivet to the need to hold together divine truth and natural law if Parliament were to sustain its claim to authority, Cheynell feared that the Royalists, like Grotius, were pulling the two apart. He realised that Grotius and the English Royalists could use the Socinians’ claims about the higher – and peaceful – law of Christ to undermine Protestant efforts to defend themselves on natural law grounds. The direction of Royalist counsels troubled Cheynell; he feared that men like Chillingworth and Digges were exerting a malign influence over the Oxford court. Moreover, in 1642 he discovered that John Webberly, the Sub Rector of Lincoln College, had been translating a Socinian work. There could be no doubt of Webberly’s allegiance, for in September 1642 he assisted with the quartering of Royalist troops and he would remain at Oxford until 1648, when forcibly ejected by Parliamentarian soldiers.63 According to Cheynell, Webberly’s translation was part of an orchestrated propaganda campaign by the King’s supporters: the Lincoln man was, apparently, ‘so famous that there was notice given of his good service intended to this nation’ by the translation.64 Webberly’s project provided Cheynell with clear evidence that the Royalists were promoting Socinianism to advance their designs and to undermine the rights and liberties of subjects. In 1643, it seems, Cheynell feared the political potential of Socinian ideas at least as much as their heretical implications. His Rise, Growth and Danger was written as an exposé of the alarming direction which Royalist thought had taken, under the influence of Italian and Polish heterodoxy. The result was an eclectic and often ill-digested set of claims, but the themes are worth disentangling. Cheynell viewed the central characteristic of Socinianism as the reliance upon individual reason, rather than on Scripture read through the lens of faith. This, for him, was the sin par excellence of Chillingworth and, to a lesser extent, Laud. As a result, both men had effectively abandoned Protestantism for a religion of their own making. Once men turned to their private reason as the basis for their beliefs, they lost all certainty and began to construct for themselves all manner of theological and political doctrines. In the process they cast doubt upon the Trinity, the satisfaction of Christ and the doctrine of justification by faith alone.65 But they also 62 63 64

The original work can be found in J. Calvin, Interim adultero-Germanum: cui adiecta est, Vera Christianæ pacificationis, et Ecclesiæ reformandæ ratio ([Geneva], 1549). A. Clark, Lincoln College (London, 1898), pp. 99, 111. Cheynell, Rise, Growth and Danger, sig. A3v. 65 Ibid., pp. 24–30.

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began, he feared, to imagine the political world anew, eschewing conscience, faith and historical experience in favour of the speculations of their own brains. Cheynell saw that the Socinians were particularly prone to do this by cutting Christianity adrift from human nature or civil society – once they had divorced Christianity from nature they could claim that Christ demanded peace and non-resistance from his followers. Some of the Royalists, Cheynell feared, seemed to be following the Socinians’ lead and travelling a path that led to both anarchy and absolutism.66 As for Webberly, he was primarily interested in Socinianism because it undercut any claim that subjects might have rights in their property which they could defend by force. At least, this is the impression given by Cheynell’s brief remarks upon Webberley’s translation, and no other record of the work survives. Cheynell mentioned no theological doctrines such as the Trinity or the satisfaction of Christ, and he was not a man to play down the heterodoxy of his targets. Indeed, his comments suggest that the sole purpose of Webberly’s work was to encourage people to submit to the ruler. According to Cheynell, Mr Webberly would teach the people that they must not defend their possessions against invading enemies, by force of Armes, because God hath not given his people any earthly possessions by Covenant under the Gospell, as he did under the Law.67

Webberly may have been using Socinus’ defence of the Racovians which, as we saw in Chapter 1, contained similar arguments against resistance, but he would have wanted to remove from it some objectionable theological ideas, most obviously anti-Trinitarianism. In that work, Socinus had urged men not to resist for the sake of material goods, on the grounds that these were not worth the risk of eternal damnation. Webberly had seen the usefulness of this argument, taken it up, and now it was, Cheynell claimed, ‘Courtdivinitie’.68 Cheynell also complained of Digges’ An Answer, which again, he felt, encouraged men to submit to slavery and tyranny – and then claimed that such subjection was both reasonable and Christian.69 The Rise, Growth and Danger was licensed on 18 April 1643, a particularly worrying time for a man of Cheynell’s views. It was four days after Charles rejected Parliament’s terms at the Treaty of Oxford, showing himself more recalcitrant than many moderates had expected. The Queen and her popish allies were widely blamed for the failure of the treaty, and Parliament 66 67 68 69

Ibid., esp. pp. 57–60. Cheynell would also attack Chillingworth’s adherence to private reason in military matters, see sig [B4v]. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., pp. 23–26, 30, 52; cf. p. 52 with Socinus, Ad Iac. Paleaologi, in Opera Omnia, vol. ii, p. 75. Cheynell, Rise, Growth and Danger, p. 58.

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stepped up measures against her and other Catholics in the Spring.70 Cheynell’s tract was not only designed to expose the Royalists’ intellectual strategy, it was also a demonstration of what he perceived as their intellectual incoherence. He wanted to show that the principles which they borrowed from the Socinians would not strengthen the monarchy but would rather divest it of its authority. By denying property rights to Christian subjects, they called into question the property not only of the King, but of all landowners. And by rejecting the received principles of Protestantism in favour of a religion which was but ‘morally certain’, they were opening the door to religious anarchy, where the magistrate had no authority to police men’s beliefs. Fundamentally, he argued, the Royalists were using a newfangled mix of ideas which they had not properly thought through, while the Parliamentarians continued to emphasise conscientious obedience to the monarch where his commands were compatible with divine law. Cheynell’s tract was a restatement of the popish plot theory, designed to account for recent alarming developments in Royalist political thought by denouncing them as Socinian and to present the Parliamentarians as the true guardians of the English constitution. After the publication of The Rise, Growth and Danger, Cheynell continued to serve the Parliamentarian cause. He was called upon to preach his first sermon before the House of Commons in May, and he would go on to preach before Parliament several more times. Sometime in 1643 he was rewarded with the profitable rectory of Petworth in Sussex and, while in Sussex, he encountered William Chillingworth, a man he evidently respected but whose religious and political views he abhorred. Chillingworth had been taken prisoner when the Royalists at Arundel Castle surrendered in December 1643 and he then fell dangerously ill. Cheynell attended him on his sickbed and later wrote an account of this episode entitled Chillingworthi Novissimi (1644). This work reveals much about Cheynell’s view of the conflict – including the role played by Socinianism. For here he argued that Chillingworth had ‘runne mad with reason’, developing a theology with little place for faith, the Holy Spirit or a Christian civil society while at the same time he invented engineering schemes for the Royalist army which had earned him the scorn of several commanders. Cheynell consistently sought to bring Chillingworth back to the Reformed fold, but he also sought to convince him that Parliament’s war effort was justified, that they had no choice but to take up arms to rescue Charles from the papists and to save the country from tyranny. He 70

C. Hibbard, ‘Henrietta Maria’; ODNB.

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urged Chillingworth to accept that God approved of Parliament’s actions, that he wanted tyrannous rulers to be checked, and that Christianity did not simply advocate pacifism and non-resistance in the political sphere.71 Cheynell insisted that Christianity demanded instead a certain kind of political commitment, designed to protect and preserve the human community. Grievously ill, Chillingworth could offer little in reply before his death at the end of January, but Cheynell clearly hoped that his readers would grasp the lesson that Chillingworth missed. The Parliamentarian war effort was designed to restore and to protect the constitution, from both papists and Socinians. Cheynell’s Chillingworthi Novissimi was dedicated to the ‘friends’ of the dead man, to Sir John Culpepper and a group of Oxford divines including Christopher Potter, Gilbert Sheldon and John Prideaux – the last on the grounds that he had licensed Religion of Protestants. Cheynell portrayed Chillingworth as rather isolated among the Royalists, dependent upon the Queen’s favour, and part of a small court faction. He may have hoped to persuade more moderate Royalists that the ground they shared with Parliamentarians like himself was broad, and that many on both sides wanted to see a settlement that preserved the established laws and liberties of the kingdom. The threat to those liberties came, Cheynell suggested, from the men of Socinian principles like Chillingworth and Webberly, who peddled outrageous ideas destructive of those laws and liberties; ideas which severed English laws from Christianity and which purported to base monarchy on reason alone. If Cheynell was aware of Hobbes’ writing – likely enough given his contacts in Oxford and beyond – he may have seen Elements as part of this trend. And he must have been aware that there were many Royalists who shared his own concerns, and who preferred to argue from laws, customs and traditional Protestant doctrines rather than from a non-Christian natural right or from New Testament ideas of non-resistance.

iv bridging the divide: the work of anthony ascham Cheynell’s worst nightmares about the Socinian direction of Royalist argument were not to be realised. His fear that the ‘Court-divinitie’ beloved of Webberly and Chillingworth might spread to infect the entire Royal party was not fulfilled. Webberly seems to have abandoned his literary ambitions 71

F. Cheynell, Chillingworthi Novissima. Or, The Sicknesse, Heresy, Death and Buriall of William Chillingworth (London, 1644), unpaginated prefatory ‘Letter to the Friends of Mr Chillingworth’.

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after the discovery of his translation, Digges succumbed to the Oxford camp fever of 1643, and Chillingworth did not survive the illness he endured in 1644. The vast majority of the tracts and pamphlets written to defend Charles’ cause took the concept of natural law and English legal precedent very seriously; unlike Digges, they insisted that the natural law, and the natural rights which could be drawn from it, provided a guide for Christians. Perhaps the most sophisticated rejoinder to the position taken by the Socinians and by some of the Royalists came from the hand of Anthony Ascham (1614–1650), a scholar and, during the late 1640s, tutor to the King’s younger children. It is worth examining some of his writing in this present chapter, even though his work was published at the end of the decade, because he considered very carefully the issues raised in the early stages of the English Civil War. Ascham’s output is usually seen as a contribution to the ‘Engagement Controversy’ of 1649–1652, a prolonged pamphlet debate about the lawfulness of submitting to the regime which then prevailed. But Ascham’s work did not only address the specific problems of the late 1640s and it can be misleading to look at him solely in this light. Here I will suggest that it is better to place him within a broader European argument about the relationship between Christianity and natural right or natural law – an argument which had troubled English minds since at least the early 1640s. His works can therefore be seen as an attempt to solve some of the problems which he felt had arisen in the early 1640s, when Christianity and natural law had been pulled apart by some of the Royalist writers. Ascham made the most sustained effort of any English writer at this time to bring the two back together and to show how they might complement each other. To this extent Ascham can be seen as the heir to Grotius’ project in De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Ascham’s first work did not come out until 1648, but one of its themes is closely related to the discussions of resistance which had occupied Parliamentarian and Royalist writers earlier in the decade. Like Digges, Hammond and their Parliamentarian opponents, Ascham discussed whether Christ had forbidden his followers from deploying their rights of self-preservation. His answer came in a work entitled A Discourse wherein is Examined what is Particularly Lawful during the Confusions and Revolutions of Government, published in July 1648, during the Second Civil War, and clearly designed to support the settlement which would follow this conflict. In this tract, Ascham encouraged men to submit to whatever government they found themselves under, hoping to reassure them that such submission was enjoined by the law of nature because it was necessary for the preservation of self and society. In making these claims Ascham drew heavily on

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Grotius and on earlier Parliamentarian writers.72 But he knew that to make his argument stick he would need to deal with the objection raised most famously by the Socinians: that the law of Christ was different from the law of nature. At the start of his Discourse Ascham made clear that he understood the need to address this question if his argument for natural law and self-defence were to stand. As he put it, ‘what advantage is it to have deduc’d out of the former parts, a Morall and Civill Latitude for the defence of our persons and fortunes, if Christianity disarme us totally?’73 This pacifist position, in which men were ‘disarmed’ by Christianity, he associated with Erasmus and with the Socinian Jonasz Schlichting, but it was also a position which can be found in the works of Hammond and Digges. Ascham clearly felt that it was deeply misguided and he set out to explain why Christ had not taken from us the right of self-defence. He focused specifically on Schlichting’s Questiones duae, a work which he understood as a forceful critique of Grotius’ position in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, but he hoped that in answering Schlichting he would contribute to the Parliamentarian cause in England. Ascham concentrated on Schlichting’s view of the relationship between the laws of Christ and of nature, in particular Schlichting’s central claim that ‘Lex religionis tollit legem naturae’ (the law of religion takes away the law of nature). In response he insisted that although the law of religion might circumscribe the law of nature, it did not abolish or replace it.74 He agreed that Christ might have brought new moral commands and obliged his followers to greater acts of virtue than the natural law had ever done, but he did not accept that Christ called on his followers to endanger their lives. For Ascham, the law of nature, which mandated the preservation of individual rights even where violence was involved, must enjoy divine approval. At the core of Ascham’s work was the simple, mainstream claim that God wanted men to preserve themselves, that he ‘would not have us justifie disorder and cruelty’ and these would surely follow if evil was not punished.75 Christ’s laws could not endanger human society, for God wanted the human race to continue. To follow the law of nature could not therefore be sinful or jeopardise a person’s chance of salvation. In this way Ascham sought to show that the law of Christ had not taken away the individual’s right to self-defence nor the magistrate’s natural right to punish offenders, with execution where necessary. But for all Ascham’s desire to 72 74 75

Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 254–9. 73 Ascham, Discourse, p. [v]. Ibid., pp. 106–7. Ascham includes this quotation from Schlichting (on which see above pp. 31–3). Ibid., p. 126.

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refute Schlichting’s arguments about self-preservation, he did accept one of the central premises of the Socinians’ theology. Indeed, he referred to Schlichting and his friends as ‘not a few, perhaps, of the best Christians’.76 Like them, he was reluctant to equate Christian ethics and natural law; for him Christ was a teacher who called on his followers to act virtuously and morally. It was only when the Socinians suggested that Christ’s laws had affected the natural right of self-defence that the Englishman protested. Like Digges, Ascham is sometimes seen as indebted to Hobbes for his views, although he seems not to have read Hobbes before writing his Discourse. When Ascham did read the older philosopher, he was also both critical and sympathetic – and again his criticism centred upon Hobbes’ hostility towards individual judgement. Ascham, Hobbes, Digges, Grotius and the Socinians all believed that individuals transferred or laid down their natural rights when they entered into civil society. The Socinians, and especially Crell, held that men possessed a cluster of limited natural rights, only some of which were transferred to the magistrate. Crell wrote of men transferring the right to execute punishment, but he clearly believed that men retained their rights over their possessions and consciences.77 For the Socinians, but also for Digges and Ascham, it was primarily their rights to coerce and to resist coercion that the subject yielded, not the right to make judgements themselves about when such action was legitimate. For Hobbes, on the other hand, the natural right which was yielded by subjects was the single, unlimited right of self-preservation which formed the basis of the natural law. Ascham read Hobbes’ writing not long after his Discourse went to press and in the second, revised, edition, he included a stab at Hobbes’ account of the genesis of civil society. He saw that Hobbes had removed the space for individual conscience through his description of the transfer, and in 1649 he complained that ‘such a totall resignation of all right and reason, as Mr Hobbes supposes, is one of our morall impossibilities’.78 Ascham is best seen as one contributor to a wider debate over the relationship between the natural law and the law of Christ, a debate which had begun in Europe over Socinus’ writing but which had particular relevance in mid-century England and Scotland. Indeed, Ascham can be 76 77 78

Ibid., p. 94. Crell, Opera didactica, pp. 69–70, and cf. his, A Learned and Exceeding Well-compiled Vindication of Liberty of Religion, transl. J. Dury (London, 1646), esp. pp. 46–7. Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Government (London, 1649), p. 121. On this point see also K. Hoekstra, ‘The de facto Turn in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, in T. Sorrell and L. Foisneau (eds.), Leviathan after 350 Years (Oxford, 2004), pp. 56–7.

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seen as part of a wider trend towards bridging the divide between the natural and divine laws, while preserving the perceived advantages of a Socinian version of Christianity, which demanded greater virtue from Christians than the duties of the natural law alone. Ascham’s solution to what he saw as the Socinians’ conundrum was to bring the laws of Christ and nature into alignment, but without uniting them completely as Hobbes had sought to do. This solution, similar in many ways to the position of Grotius in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, had many advantages. It enabled men like Ascham to accept the government of the day as it stood, but to distance themselves, their consciences and their Christian faith from the practical and often messy compromises of the political world. As such, it was attractive to many of his contemporaries in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I in 1649, when submission to an apparently unlawful government appeared necessary.79 Whether Ascham himself would have developed his thought further is impossible to say, for his life was cut cruelly short. In 1650 he was sent by the new Commonwealth to Madrid, to serve as their ambassador at the court of King Philip IV. Madrid was a centre of Royalist activity and Ascham was fearful for his safety from the moment he arrived. His fears were well founded, and in June he was murdered by a band of Royalist assassins.80 Ascham had seen that the Socinians – and perhaps some of their English readers – wanted to drive apart natural law and Christianity in order to delegitimise resistance. It should be clear by now that this had indeed been the aim of Digges and Hammond, when they countered Parliamentarian arguments for resistance. Ascham provided the most thoughtful rejoinder to this line of thought, insisting that while Christ might have improved the natural law he had not undermined its rationale of self-preservation. By the time that Ascham’s Discourse came out, however, the debate had moved on. Although people were still extremely concerned about the relationship between natural law and Christianity, it was no longer in the context of resistance. Instead, it was the problem of establishing a church settlement which forced men to consider how the laws and commands of Christ might relate to the natural rules on which civil society was based. The questions which exercised Digges, Hobbes, Ascham and their friends, questions about the relationship between nature and Christianity, continued to be discussed after the First Civil War. Yet the context for this discussion was more obviously religious and ecclesiological than it had been in the early 1640s. 79 80

Q. Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Visions of Politics: Hobbes and Civil Science, Volume iii (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 287–307. G. Baldwin, ‘Anthony Ascham’, ODNB.

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With the victory of Parliament in the First Civil War, ecclesiological problems came to the fore as English – and Scottish – men and women agonised over the shape of the new Church settlement. The religious and ecclesiastical settlement will provide the focus for later chapters, for central to it was a long-running argument over how to understand the relationship between natural laws and the teaching of Christ. No one was more fascinated by this question than Henry Hammond, and it is to the writing of Hammond and his fellow clergymen that we shall turn in the next chapter.

chapter 5

Socinianism and the Church of England

Defending the monarchy from the rebellious forces of the Parliamentarians and Covenanters, Hammond found Socinian ideas helpful, but he soon realised that they could be put to better use defending the Church of England. From the middle of the 1640s, Hammond devoted his time to producing tracts and pamphlets in support of the Church of England and its episcopal structure. In these works, he continued to develop his ideas about the relationship between Christianity and nature, but he did so in the context of a discussion about the future of the Church, rather than the legitimacy of resistance. Of course, Hammond rejected many of the tenets of the Socinians, and his faith had a place for the doctrines of the Trinity and the atonement. But he did begin to draw some ideas previously associated with Socinianism into the theological centre of the Church of England, on the grounds that these would strengthen the Church against attacks from its critics. In particular, he wanted to show that the Church’s doctrines and government must be based upon the law of Christ, and not the law of nature. How and why he did so will be the focus of this chapter. Hammond’s writing is often characterised as Arminian,1 but in this chapter we will see why it echoes more closely the thought of Socinus than the writing of Jacob Arminius. Hammond realised that the ideas of Socinus could be used to defend an episcopal church far more effectively than the theology of Arminius, not least because Socinus divided the natural from the supernatural in a way that Arminius did not. Moreover, there was no settled theology of ‘Arminianism’ in the 1640s – and if there had been, it is unlikely that Hammond would have signed up to it. Instead, there was an ongoing debate among the Remonstrant heirs of Arminius, in which they struggled to reconcile his thought with some of the insights they had gained from Socinian writing. These Socinian insights also appealed to Hammond, 1

E.g., H. de Quehen, ‘Henry Hammond’, ODNB; M. McGiffert, ‘Henry Hammond and Covenant Theology’, Church History 74 (2005), pp. 255–85. N. Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, p. 592.

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and he welcomed the direction in which some Remonstrants were moving. We have already seen that Grotius (not Arminius) was his favourite modern theologian and it was Grotius’ blend of Arminian and Socinian ideas that Hammond most admired. Hammond, like his friends at Great Tew, drew on Socinian and Grotian writing as he developed his own thoughts, and some of his fellow episcopalians did the same. As they did so, they developed English theology in a particular direction and helped to shape what would become known as Restoration Anglicanism in significant ways. It is necessary to sketch first of all the difference between the theologies of Socinus and Arminius, along with the efforts at synthesis made by the Remonstrants, before we come to Hammond. The Remonstrant tradition has never been examined in any detail, although it helped to shape theology and ecclesiology across the continent of Europe – especially in England. In this brief outline, our focus will be upon the different ways in which the Remonstrants viewed nature and Christianity, and, as a consequence, their different conceptions of the role of Christ himself. This discussion of the continental debate will start to make clear why Hammond might have welcomed some of Socinus’ ideas, and why he might have preferred these to Arminius’ writing. Then we shall see how Hammond drew on Socinianism to promote his own moral theology and his vision of the Church of England. Without accepting Socinian theology wholesale, he drew from their writings those ideas which suited his own ends. Hammond’s selective approach to his theological sources did leave some ambiguities and some unanswered questions; indeed, Hammond never quite made clear just how distinct nature and Christianity were. In the final section of this chapter we shall see how another episcopalian, Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), sought to resolve one of these areas of tension, namely the subject of original sin – and why his proposed solution caused such concern. The one subject which neither Hammond nor Taylor wanted to deal with head on was the Trinity, and the evasiveness of Hammond on this point will become clear. Evidently Hammond was aware of the critique of the Trinity generated by the Socinians and by others, but he did not seek to engage with it. The Trinity will be the subject of our next chapter, and so discussion of this particular doctrine will be delayed until then, after we have seen why Hammond found other aspects of Socinian writing much more agreeable. i socinus, arminius and the remonstrants The views of Socinus and Arminius about the relationship between religion and nature, and of the role of Christ in securing men’s salvation, were very

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different. The tension between them proved creative, however, and was extremely important for the subsequent discussion of this matter both in England and in continental Europe. In the United Provinces, Remonstrant theologians and scholars found much to admire in both Arminius and in Socinian works, but they quickly discovered that reconciling the two was a difficult task. To begin with Socinus, the central difference between him and other Protestants, including Arminius, was his desire to pin salvation firmly and exclusively to the ministry of Christ.2 Socinus refused to see anything in nature or the Old Testament that indicated in any detail the means by which men could be saved. The new moral precepts and the new offer of reward were, for him, inseparable. For him it was Christ’s life and death in first-century Palestine that brought in a new covenant, and only those who accepted – and fulfilled – the conditions brought by Christ could be sure of their salvation. Of course, God could choose to save those who lived virtuous lives prior to the advent of Christ, but they had had no certainty of their salvation.3 This same theme was developed further in the key Socinian text De Vera Religione; the authors insisted that only with the earthly ministry of Christ could men enter into a covenant relationship with God which would lead to eternal life.4 Arminius’ view of the covenant of grace was very different from Socinus’. He dated this covenant all the way back to Adam, arguing that although all men fell in Adam, all had also been blessed in Adam and given the promise of a saviour. For him, the covenant of grace was inseparable from the act of creation. Although Christ’s ministry and sacrificial death were enacted in time, Arminius argued that their effect could be felt throughout eternity, right from the moment when Adam fell. Grace and forgiveness were available to all men, through the preaching of the Gospel and through the extraordinary working of the Holy Ghost. For Arminius, therefore, there was no sharp break between the time before and after Christ. Moreover – and this was crucial – Arminius shared the Protestant belief that Christ brought no new laws or commandments; he was a redeemer rather than a teacher. Those whom the Holy Spirit enlightened, and restored to their original condition, knew the true moral law even before they heard Christ’s words. For this reason Arminius could trace the history of the Church back to the Fall, when God had offered grace even to the sinful Adam, whereas for Socinus the true Church only began with the death of Christ.5 The 2 3 4 5

A point most clearly made in The Racovian Catechism, ed. Rees, pp. 159–61. See, e.g., Socinus’, Brevis Discursus in his Opera Omnia, vol ii, pp. 455–6. Volkelius, De Vera Religione, pp. 55–65. Muller, God, Creation and Providence, pp. 244–6; Ellis, Simon Episcopius, pp. 78–80; The Works of James Arminius, transl. J. and W. Nichols, 2nd edn, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1986), vol. ii, pp. 410–12.

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ministry of Christ here on Earth and within human time was much less important for Arminius than it had been to Socinus. Socinus felt that salvation came from a conscious choice to accept the specific message of Christ revealed in the Scriptures, while Arminius preferred to rely on the working of the Holy Spirit and on divine grace throughout time and space, with which men needed only to co-operate. As critics of Arminius noted, he was so keen to make the offer of grace universal that it was difficult to distinguish his concept of grace from human nature itself.6 Socinus placed heavy weight on the teaching and the activities of Christ, rather than any universal offer of grace, and this emphasis was taken up by two of Arminius’ friends and successors: Simon Episcopius and Hugo Grotius. Episcopius, unlike Arminius, was prepared to argue that Christ had brought a new set of precepts, even though it brought upon him the charge of Socinianism. As Episcopius saw it, there was no need to worry about how – or even whether – the Israelites had known the true divine law with its eternal sanctions. It was much more important to focus on the New Testament and the message contained there.7 Grotius took a similar view, especially towards the end of his life.8 But whereas Episcopius saw Christ’s role as a lawgiver in moral terms, Grotius also began to consider whether he might have given instructions for the ordering of the Church. Grotius’ earlier insistence, in De Imperio, that it was up to the magistrate to decide on the form of Church government soon became qualified by a much more positive view of episcopacy. In his later works, Grotius claimed that Christ had provided leaders for his Church in the form of bishops, who were the successors of the Apostles.9 It is hard to imagine Arminius arguing in this way, because the historical actions of Christ were much less important to him than the universal operation of grace and the Holy Spirit. Grotius took the historical dimension to Christianity one step further than the Socinians. From the late 1610s he had begun to work on a massive project of biblical commentary on all the books of the Bible, later published as the Annotationes in libros Euangeliorum (1641, 1646 and 1650) and Hugonis Grotii annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (1644). In these works (which I will refer to collectively as the Annotationes), Grotius sought to explain the words of each author as clearly as possible, and for him that meant 6 7 8 9

This was the English theologian Daniel Featley’s charge in Pelagius Redivivus (1626): see D. Wallace, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, 1982), p. 85. S. Episcopius, Apologia pro Confessione sive declaratione sententiae eorum, qui in Foederato Belgio vocantur Remonstrantes ([Leiden], 1629), pp. 181, 237–8. Grotius, Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. iii, pp. 656, 716. Ibid., pp. 659, 695–6, 714.

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elucidating what the words might have meant in their original context. Grotius’ Annotationes made clear that God’s revelation took place in time and that it could change. In several places, for example, Grotius suggested that the rewards offered to the Israelites through the Mosaic Law were temporal rather than spiritual; and like the Socinians he felt that Christ was important because he brought new sanctions and new precepts. He added that some of the Israelite patriarchs had hoped for a spiritual reward, but only with the coming of Christ had humans had any certain knowledge of eternal life.10 Most importantly, the Annotationes suggested that theology was history – it could be understood through a historical and philological analysis of the scriptural text rather than through scholastic or metaphysical investigations. Moreover, Grotius emphasised that the revelation made through Christ had not only included moral precepts and the promise of eternal life or death, but also rules for the government of the Church. In this way Grotius emphasised the supernatural and revealed quality of Christianity, a quality which Arminius himself had played down. By now the complexity of the Remonstrant or Arminian tradition will be apparent. Henry Hammond and his friends were clearly fascinated by the works of these European authors as they sought to preserve the structure of the Church of England – and to purge its soteriology of any traces of Calvinism. They could not simply turn to ‘Arminianism’ to solve their theological problems, but what they could – and did – do was to read Remonstrant, Arminian and Socinian works, and to draw from them useful arguments and materials. Indeed, they were engaged in a process of theological development parallel to that of the Dutch Remonstrant community and even of the Socinians themselves. For Hammond, it was the Grotian element to this tradition, itself quite distinct from the theology of Arminius, which most appealed to him because of the emphasis on moral theology and clerical authority which he found there. And it was in Grotius’ writing that some of the central principles of Socinus’ and Crell’s thought were both preserved and developed.

ii socinianism and henry hammond’s moral theology From 1643 Hammond was ensconced in Oxford in the midst of the King’s wartime court, writing the important works in which his engagement with 10

See Grotius Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. i, p. 50 (his discussion of the Decalogue) and vol. ii, p. 38 (Matthew 5:20).

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Socinian writing can be traced. From there he also witnessed the political and religious turmoil around him, and the declining fortunes of the Royalist cause. His thoughts had quickly turned to teaching, an activity in which he had excelled before the country descended into war. During the 1630s he had catechized the young people in his parish of Penshurst, and after he moved to Oxford he drew the materials he had used into a Catechism of his own. He showed it to his friend Christopher Potter, still Provost of Queen’s, who immediately encouraged Hammond to make it public. In 1644 or 1645 the work was printed as A Practicall Catechisme, and in 1646 Hammond provided ‘large additions’, which were incorporated into the later editions of the text.11 The Practicall Catechisme soon proved popular and, realising his success, Hammond poured his energy into tracts and books designed to preserve Christian piety and the Church of England. According to his friend and biographer, John Fell (1625–1686), he studied hard, pausing only to munch his beloved apples and to sing – although when the King noticed the poor condition of Hammond’s voice he set about restoring a ‘decent modulation’ to it, perhaps for his own sake as much as Hammond’s.12 Whether the apples and the singing lessons helped or not, all Hammond’s works proved successful and were printed in multiple editions. But the Royalist military effort was crumbling, and in 1646 even Oxford, the Royalist capital, would be surrendered to the Parliamentarians. Hammond could take solace from his new-found tunefulness and from his literary endeavours, chief among which remained the Practicall Catechisme. By 1650 it had reached its seventh printing. The Catechisme was no conventional work of Reformed, or even Protestant, piety, although it began in irenic vein. The author explained that it was designed for students who knew the basic principles of Christianity but wanted directions for the practice of their religion. The focus was, therefore, on those doctrines and scriptural texts which would encourage people to live as good Christians. But Hammond clearly felt that Christian living required the rejection of several Reformed ideas – notably predestination – and an understanding of salvation very different from Calvin’s. Christ had died for all men without exception, Hammond thought, and God would only exclude men from the kingdom of heaven if they rejected his gracious offer of eternal life. Human beings must, he felt, 11 12

H. de Quehen, ‘Henry Hammond’. The additions were printed as H. Hammond, Large Additions to the Practicall Catechisme (London, 1646). J. Fell, The Life of the Most Learned, Reverend and Pious Dr H. Hammond (London, 1662), pp. 88–9, 108.

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be persuaded that their salvation lay in their own hands and was conditional upon their obedience to the precepts of Christ. Only then would England see the practice of true Christianity. Hammond’s strong emphasis on the moral teaching of Christ and the superiority of Christian ethics ran through his Catechisme and distinguished it from other Protestant catechisms. His treatment of the Decalogue was particularly unusual. It was the conventional practice of Protestant catechisms to treat the Ten Commandments as a summary of the universal, unchanging moral law.13 Hammond, however, explained that Christ had filled up or perfected the Commandments, so that more was required from Christians than had ever been demanded of the Jews. Whereas the third commandment delivered by Moses had, for example, merely prohibited men from forswearing or perjuring themselves, now Christ ordered his followers to abstain from all vain swearing or frivolous oaths. Hammond’s views may have stemmed from his reading of the Greek Church Fathers, and these authors are cited abundantly in his footnotes. But he had also read at least one modern work in which the same case was made. This was the Racovian Catechism, the sole contemporary catechism in which it was argued that Christ had added new moral precepts to the Decalogue. Hammond cannot have been unaware that he shared the Socinians’ view on this issue – and that he was distancing himself from a broad Protestant consensus. He, like the Socinians, evidently felt that the high ethical standards required from Christians simply could not be found in the Old Testament or in nature.14 As this suggests, Hammond’s emphasis on the historic action of Christ brought him closer to Socinus and to the Grotian strand of Remonstrantism than to Arminius. Although Hammond was happy to profess his faith in the Trinity and the atonement – all editions end with a prayer to the Trinity – he did believe that the earthly ministry of Christ altered the relationship between God and man in an important way. The theology outlined in the Practicall Catechisme reflects Hammond’s own extensive knowledge of patristic sources, particularly the Greek Fathers, but it also reflects his reading of Remonstrant and Socinian theology. In a previous chapter we saw that his admiration for Grotius dated back to the mid 1630s,15 and this deepened in the 1640s as 13

14

15

See I. Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), chap. 10. On pp. 428–9 he notes that Hammond is the first in England to argue that Christ added to the Decalogue, but he sees this as well within the English Protestant tradition. Hammond, A Practicall Catechisme (Oxford, 1645), pp. 158–60. Hammond revealed that he had read the Racovian Catechism in [H. Hammond], A Copy of Some Papers Past at Oxford, betwixt the Author of the Practicall Catechisme, and Mr Ch, (1647), p. 31. See above p. 83.

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Grotius’ commitment to the Church of England and to episcopacy grew more evident. Both Grotius and Hammond found that Arminius’ ideas were not enough for their own purposes, for Arminius left too little space for distinctively Christian ethics or institutions. The difficulty lay in balancing the relative weight of Christ’s specific historical revelation with the ongoing work of God in eternity and outside all human time. Hammond continued to see God in Trinitarian terms, but he tended not to discuss the relationship between the historical Jesus and the second person of the Trinity.16 Hammond must have been braced for criticism, and it was not long in coming. Preaching in Oxford at St Mary’s, the University Church, in October 1646, Francis Cheynell lambasted the author of the Practicall Catechisme for leading his readers astray. Cheynell was one of the seven preachers appointed by Parliament to minister to Oxford after its surrender and to win over the former Royalist capital to the Parliamentarian cause. Word soon reached Hammond of Cheynell’s comments, and he demanded an explanation. The resulting exchange of letters was printed the next year, and it reveals the nature of the controversy. It also makes clear why Cheynell felt Hammond was overly indebted to a particularly heretical Italian. Cheynell minced no words in his initial response to Hammond’s enquiry. The Practicall Catechisme, he said, ‘seemes to evacuate the morall Law, under pretence of filling up its vacuities, and it doth in effect overthrow the sum and substance of the Gospel’.17 Later Cheynell elaborated. He objected that the first edition of the Catechisme neglected all mention of the Trinity apart from the closing prayer, it taught that the Decalogue was incomplete and it made faith a condition of justification. On the first point, Cheynell was willing to accept that Hammond believed in the Trinity, though he made clear that suspicions of Socinian-style heterodoxy hung over him. Cheynell said that he had found it necessary to assure a friend of Hammond’s ‘that you [Hammond] did acknowledge the Trinity, though you maintaine many errours, broached by them that deny the coeternall Trinity in unity’ – hardly a ringing endorsement of Hammond’s orthodoxy.18 Cheynell was adamant that Hammond stepped out of the Protestant mainstream and into heresy when he began to talk about the new light brought by Christ. Indeed, the Parliamentarian divine was particularly worried about the antinomian implications of Hammond’s theology, for if the moral law had not been perfect 16

17

Here see also Hammond’s letters to Bishop Matthew Wren on the problems with the two natures of Christ, printed in N. Pocock, ‘Illustrations of the State of the Church of England during the Great Rebellion’, Theologian and Ecclesiastic 7 (1849), pp. 289–93. [H. Hammond], A Copy of Some Papers Past, p. 2. 18 Ibid., p. 12.

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before Christ, then that might imply that it was not binding on all people at all times.19 Since Cheynell was desperately trying to convince the people of Oxford to obey the moral law as he understood it, he feared that Hammond’s Catechism would undermine his own work. Hammond could only reply that his was a doctrine taught by the Fathers, at which he had arrived long before he read the Racovian Catechism. He added: But whatever you say of the Morall Lawes perfection, I hope it must not so bee understood as to deny that Christ (as hee gave more grace then was ever allowed in the state of nature, or by the Law, so) might, if he pleased, improve the obligations which either the naturall Law, or that given by God through Moses had laid on men[.]20

He did not deny that men could be saved through Christ even though they lived before his coming in the flesh, but he refused to relinquish his emphasis on the distinctiveness of Christ and his commands. As would become clear, this emphasis was the foundation of his ecclesiology as well as his theology. It enabled him to show that Christians were called to live holy lives, which went beyond the ethics of nature, but it also enabled him to defend the embattled Church of England. Cheered by the evident popularity of the Practicall Catechisme, Hammond went on to publish a steady stream of tracts, all designed to encourage his readers to live as true Christians and to hold fast to the Church of England. One of these, Of the Reasonableness of Christianity (1650), indicates just how far Hammond had moved from the Calvinist doctrine he had heard in his youth. Here, he assumed that men must be free to choose or to reject Christianity, and that they should make this decision based upon a careful evaluation of the benefits and costs on either side. The Gospel was, he argued, a credible text, proving that Christ’s message was of divine origin, and this should convince our understanding. Meanwhile, the promise of eternal life was sufficient to bring our passions and our will into line. In arguing this way, Hammond was following Grotius, but it was a line of thought which can be traced back to Socinus.21 And as Knott had explained to Chillingworth a decade earlier, it destroyed the model of faith as a free gift of God. By the 1650s, that model was losing its grip both in England and on the continent, and Hammond’s writing was helping to ensure that it would be replaced by one in which the agency of humans played a much greater part. 19 21

Ibid., esp. pp. 17, 61–2. 20 Ibid., pp. 31–6, 41. Hammond refers to Grotius’ De Veritate, which he saw as one of the predecessors to his own work, Of the Reasonableness of the Christian Religion (London, 1650), p. 2.

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It was one thing to share ideas and argumentative strategies with Socinus but quite another to endorse his theology, and Hammond always maintained his belief in the Trinity, the atonement, and original sin. He believed that Christ played an expiatory role, for he was appointed ‘to offer up sacrifice for the sinnes of the world’ and this sacrifice had been, at least in some sense, necessary if God were to forgive men’s sins.22 Yet there was a logical connection between Socinus’ various doctrines which made it more difficult to cherry-pick from them. For the more one emphasised religious belief as a human choice based upon Christ’s revelation in time, and upheld by a Church based upon that revelation, the harder it was to find a place for the pre-existent Christ or, indeed, the Holy Ghost. And the more one emphasised the need for individuals to live virtuous lives, the more difficult it was to find a place for the doctrine of the atonement. Throughout Of the Reasonableness, Christ was presented as a moral teacher, whose purpose was to reveal the will of God and to oblige men to a higher set of precepts. Hammond did say that Christ was God incarnate, arguing that this made his commands truly authentic, and later he would criticise the Socinians for seeking to undermine this doctrine.23 Throughout the tract, however, he emphasised the novelty of Christ’s teaching, contrasting it with the teaching of previous philosophers and even of nature. Similarly, in this work there was no sense of any covenant of grace prior to the advent of Christ (though God could, of course, still choose to save those who lived virtuously). And if Christ’s teaching and the salvation he offered were new, then it was more difficult to see what role Christ played prior to his incarnation or, indeed, to make much sense of his pre-existence. Moreover, if the point of Christ’s divinity was, for Hammond, that it made his commands authoritative, then here the Socinians would have agreed with him. When Hammond embraced the Socinian view of Christ as a moral teacher, he began to undercut the theological reasoning which underpinned the doctrine of the Trinity as laid out in the Church’s Creeds.

iii hammond, the church of england and thomas hobbes It was not just the moral theology of the Socinians which appealed to Hammond. He also drew on their ideas to defend his ecclesiology, although here he used the Socinian corpus much more selectively and creatively. 22 23

Hammond, Practicall Catechisme, p. 28. Hammond, Of the Reasonableness, esp. p. 33; idem, Of Fundamentals (London, 1654), pp. 45–7.

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Hammond had discussed the importance of the Church in his Practicall Catechisme, mostly in the two books (numbered five and six) which he added to editions printed after 1646. Here he described the Church as a society of believers ruled according to the ordinances of Christ and the Holy Ghost, initially governed by those whom Christ and the Holy Ghost had designated and then by their duly ordained successors. Christ also ordained two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which his followers ought to observe.24 Whereas the Socinians argued only that Christ had brought new moral laws and new incentives for his followers, Hammond – like Grotius – suggested that he had also established a particular form of Church government, one which was episcopal, and that he had instituted sacraments. Hammond shared the emphasis of the Socinians and some of the Remonstrants on the distinctiveness of Christianity when contrasted with all other religions and cults, including the religion of the Israelites, but he argued that this distinctiveness included matters of Church structure as well as ethics. Here he was following Grotius rather than any of the Socinians, for although the Socinians had recognised that the Apostles had special authority and special powers, they had argued that these were not communicated to the Apostles’ successors. In De Vera Religione, which contained the Socinians’ fullest discussion of ecclesiology, Volkelius argued that the Apostles had needed extraordinary powers and authority because their doctrine was new, but their successors were simply repeating a well established teaching and so they had not required any such powers.25 Hammond took issue with this argument, maintaining that bishops played a very similar role to the Apostles. As we shall see, Hammond cast his own argument as a refutation of the Socinians on several occasions, emphasising the points of difference and playing down the similarities. Hammond was to defend the specific structure of the Church of England on one of the greatest stages of the Civil War – the peace negotations between the King and his Anglo-Scottish opponents at Uxbridge in the early months of 1645. Around the time of the publication of the Practicall Catechisme, in early 1645, he went to Uxbridge in the retinue of one of the principal royal commissioners at the negotiations, the Earl of Southampton.26 Hammond probably arrived at Uxbridge in February with Southampton and his fellow royal commisioner the Duke of Richmond, to whom he had preached the Sunday before the negotiations began. At Uxbridge, Charles was asked to 24 25 26

Hammond, A Practicall Catechisme (1649), pp. 297–8. Volkelius, De Vera Religione, pp. 660–2, 692–3. Lords Journal, vol. vii, p. 151.

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consent to the abolition of episcopacy, but his chaplains were strongly opposed to the idea. In mid February, Hammond and the other chaplains – including Christopher Potter and Richard Steward – debated with Scottish and English Presbyterians the role of bishops in Church government.27 The danger to episcopacy was clear and present; the Scots saw the bishops as an obstacle to the true Reformed Church and some English MPs agreed. Moreover, it was not just the Parliamentarians who were willing to abandon episcopacy. Hammond was concerned by the willingness of even his fellow Royalists to see episcopacy as peripheral, as a matter of conveniency and national law rather than an essential part of a Christian Church. Indeed, what troubled devout sons of the Church was not so much that the Commons seemed keen to reform or abolish episcopacy but that there was a constituency among MPs that was prepared to do so unilaterally, without the consent of the King.28 The implication was that the Church could be legally altered if this became necessary and if consensus on such alteration could be achieved. Hammond’s late friends Falkland and Chillingworth would certainly have agreed with this proposition.29 If episcopacy were merely one arrangement among others, albeit one from which England had benefitted, then there was nothing to stop Parliament and the King agreeing to change it for a Presbyterian system if that seemed likely to secure a settlement. And that, to Hammond, was a disastrous prospect. From early 1645, therefore, Hammond’s energies were turned to the defence of the episcopal structure of the Church of England. Hammond launched a stern defence of episcopacy in his Considerations of Present Use Concerning the Danger Resulting From the Change of Our Church Government. The bookseller George Thomason received his copy sometime in February, during the Uxbridge negotiations; the timing was hardly coincidental. The message of the work was uncompromising: Church government was no less important than doctrine and both rested upon apostolic authority.30 The model for Church government which had received the endorsement of the Apostles was just as binding as the precepts of Christ which they had set down. For Hammond, this meant that the justification for episcopacy was not its ‘conveniency’, or its benefits in this 27 28 29

30

J. Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State 8 vols. (London, 1721), vol. v, pp. 811–24. D. Smith, Constitutional Royalism, pp. 154–5. L. Cary, Viscount Falkland, Speech pp. 14–15; W. Chillingworth, The Apostolical Institution of Episcopacy Demonstrated (London, 1644), also argued for the ‘conveniency’ rather than the necessity of episcopacy. H. Hammond, Considerations of Present Use Concerning the Danger Resulting From the Change of Our Church Government (London, 1645), pp. 6–7.

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earthly world, but its origins as part of the new covenant revealed by Christ. Like the doctrines of Christianity, episcopacy could neither be known nor defended by natural law arguments, but must be accepted on the strength of the historical record. Later, Hammond would describe Church government as among the ‘matters of Christs institution, which have no foundation in the Law of Nature’ and which must therefore be determined by the record left of Christ’s original revelation.31 Not only did Christ clarify the ethical rules by which a Christian should live, he also left instructions for the running of his Church. In matters of both moral theology and ecclesiology, Hammond argued, nature was not enough. The Uxbridge negotiations failed, but when the King was offered more sympathetic proposals for the reform of the Church of England, in mid 1647, Hammond responded by engaging specifically with Socinian ecclesiology. In June and July of that year Charles was negotiating with one wing of the erstwhile Parliamentarian coalition, the Independents, over a document known as the Heads of the Proposals. Hammond and his friend Gilbert Sheldon had been allowed by the Independents to attend the King at this time as his personal chaplains.32 Hammond is sometimes seen as an uncompromising opponent of the Heads of the Proposals, although the fact that he was present at the negotiations suggests that the Independents themselves did not share this view.33 Indeed, a closer examination of his writing during this period suggests that it was not the Independents, but the Erastians on both sides, Parliamentarian and Royalist, that troubled Hammond. The royal chaplain hoped to persuade Charles, and his fellow Royalists, not to abandon episcopacy during these negotiations nor to dilute too far the bishops’ powers. This is clear from his tract Of the Power of the Keyes or Of Binding and Loosing, published in September and probably written during the negotiations over the Heads. In this work he defended excommunication as a spiritual sanction which could only be rightfully administered by a bishop. Of the Power of the Keyes was designed to show, against the Erastians, that a moderate clerical power could be preserved which need not undermine the civil magistrate. In making this case, Hammond discussed the Socinian writer Johannes Volkelius, highlighting the similarities between his own position and that of the Socinians. Given the reputation of the Socinians as staunch opponents of ecclesiastical 31 32 33

H. Hammond, Of the Power of the Keyes, or Of Binding and Loosing (London, 1647), p. 1. H. Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War in England, 1646–1652 (London, 1842), vol. i, p. 297. J. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), p. 112; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, p. 277.

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authority, both Catholic and Protestant, Hammond must have hoped that his comments would reassure readers hostile to clerical power – a group that straddled the Royalist–Parliamentarian divide. Hammond was anxious to present Volkelius as an ally. Despite the Socinian’s clear rejection of Catholic clerisy, Volkelius still thought that any Church must be able to determine its own membership and based this claim on the words of Christ. In this case, Hammond concluded that Volkelius must believe that the churches themselves had the power of excommunication and Hammond proclaimed that he could ‘willingly embrace’ the Socinians over this issue.34 Volkelius did not believe that the involvement of bishops was necessary for excommunication, of course, for his vision of a Church was not hierarchical or episcopal in structure. Yet both Hammond and Volkelius saw the Church as a voluntary community, quite separate from any civil commonwealth, with the ability to govern its own members. For this reason Hammond felt that Volkelius was much closer to his own position than to that of many Erastian Englishmen – notably Thomas Hobbes. To see why Hammond looked favourably on Volkelius, it is necessary to examine his opponents’ ideas. The central target in Of the Power of the Keyes was the view that excommunication was an act of the commonwealth and that final judgement must rest with the supreme magistrate, a view which Hammond attributed to Thomas Erastus (1524–1583), John Selden (1584–1654) and Thomas Hobbes. All these men thought that the commonwealth and the Church were coterminous, that the Church was simply the commonwealth considered as a worshipping community.35 On these grounds they all insisted that the civil magistrate must have supreme authority over the Church – including the final judgement on all cases of excommunication. This issue of excommunication had been debated intensely from 1645, as Hammond was well aware. In that year, the Westminster Assembly, a group of divines set up to advise Parliament on Church reform, had claimed that ministers had the power to exclude men and women from the sacrament, and that this authority was jure divino, by divine right. Selden was one of the lay members of the Westminster Assembly and he had vigorously opposed the majority view, preferring to see the Church under the control of the civil power. One of his allies, 34 35

Hammond, Of the Power of the Keyes, pp. 60–1, referring to Volkelius, De Vera Religione, p. 689. Hammond discusses Erastus on pp. 64–80 and Hobbes on pp. 80–7. Hammond does not mention Hobbes by name, but quotes the 1647 edition of De Cive and refers to its author as the ‘loyal gentleman’. Since Sheldon was aware of the manuscript Elements of Law, and De Cive is very similar in places, the probability that Hammond could ascertain the author’s identity is high.

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Thomas Coleman (1597/8–1646), had been translating the work of Erastus just before his death, a work which he realised would benefit his and Selden’s case. The House of Commons did not welcome the Assembly’s assertion of clerical power and they insisted that Parliament should act as the highest court of appeal when it came to excommunication. On 30 April 1646 a delegation of the Commons presented a set of Questions … Touching the Point of Jus Divinum in Church Government to the Assembly, making its rejection of clerical claims clear.36 When Parliament finally passed an ordinance later in the year for the establishment of a Presbyterian Church system, it was careful to ensure that supreme authority remained with Parliament.37 Of the Power of the Keyes was, at least in part, Hammond’s response to the Erastian position expressed during this debate, a position which was strong among the Parliamentarians. But Hammond was aware that Erastianism was not limited to the Parliamentarians, and that some of the King’s leading supporters were no less averse to clerical authority. Of Hammond’s Erastian opponents it was Hobbes whom he had to treat most carefully, for he was a fellow Royalist – and one whose star seemed to be rising. Hobbes had recently been appointed mathematics tutor to the Prince of Wales, now based in Paris, and Hobbes’ patron, the Marquess of Newcastle (1593–1676), was one of the leading Royalists encouraging Charles to ally himself with the Scots, even at the expense of episcopacy.38 Whether Hobbes shared Newcastle’s political views is unclear but the notes he added to the second (1647) edition of De Cive included, as Hammond pointed out, sharp words against episcopacy.39 Believing that discretion was the better part of valour, Hammond took a conciliatory stance towards the man he referred to as ‘the loyal gentleman’, but his concern about the ideas expressed in De Cive was obvious. Hobbes had made, in strikingly clear terms, an Erastian case based upon the identity of the natural and divine laws, and of commonwealth and Church.40 It was in countering this case that Hammond found himself echoing several Socinian ideas. Hobbes, as we have seen, insisted that Christ had not affected the natural laws, and he was equally anxious to show that Christ had not brought into 36 37 38

39 40

R. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 506–9. CJ, vol. iv, pp. 562–3. W. Cavendish to J. Pell, 27 November, 1646, in N. Malcolm and J. Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (Oxford, 2005), p. 495; M. Cavendish, The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1907), p. 47. Hobbes, De Cive, annotation to chap. vi:11 (Tuck and Silverthorne, eds., p. 81). Ibid., chap. xvii esp. 21 (Tuck and Silverthorne, eds., p. 221).

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being any form of clerical authority. All that Christ had done was to institute the two sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. The powers of the Christian Church or commonwealth were, Hobbes felt, no different from those enjoyed by Jewish rulers, in whom both civil and religious authority was vested. Although Hobbes held that Christ would have a kingdom, this lay in the future, after the second coming; Christ could not therefore have given any legislation to his followers.41 All these were standard Protestant principles and so Hammond had to tread carefully in his response, but once more it was to the historical record that he turned for support. The early Church had, he argued, originally been a separate society with its own sanctions, and so Christ must have given authority to the Apostles and their successors the bishops which was independent of the civil magistrate. While the magistrate could appoint bishops and prescribe rules for them to follow, their power stemmed from the original grant made by Christ and the Holy Ghost.42 Throughout Of the Power of the Keyes, Hammond argued that the New Testament and the records of the early Church showed that Christ had established a new set of institutions for his Church, including bishops with powers to excommunicate. What the records revealed, Hammond argued, no man should deny.43 Bringing Volkelius, a Socinian theologian, into the argument might seem an unusual strategy for Hammond, but he shared the Socinians’ belief that in matters of religion, the only tribunal could be the revelation made by Christ and known to us through the Scriptures. The arrangements in place among the Israelites had little to do with the Christian Church. Indeed, by endorsing the main tenets of Socinian ecclesiology Hammond sought to lend weight to his key argument against Hobbes and the Erastians: that the powers of the clergy and the magistrate were separate, and that the former must be traced to the words and actions of Christ.44 Again, Hammond and the Socinians based their arguments upon Christ rather than nature. At least one writer thought that Hammond had swung too far towards the Socinians, however, and in a satirical Presbyterian pamphlet the royal chaplain was described as ‘the great Socinian’ because of his willingness to distinguish between the Church and the civil community.45 Like Cheynell, this author realised that, for some Royalists, Christ’s laws and institutions

41 42 43 45

Ibid., chap. xvii: 6 (Tuck and Silverthorne, eds., p. 209). Hammond, Of the Power of the Keyes, pp. 81–5; see also Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 63–5. Hammond, Of the Power of the Keyes, pp. 18–41. 44 Ibid., pp. 60–1, 86–7. [Anon.], A Coppie of a Letter, Sent From One of the Agitators in the Army, to an Agitator in the City (London, 1647), p. 1.

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were distinct from the laws or rights of nature, and worried that by prising religion away from the civil magistrate Hammond and his friends might open the door to religious anarchy. It is not known whether Hammond welcomed the King’s rejection of the Heads of Proposals. What we can say is that the defence of the Church that Hammond formulated in response to the debates over the proposals remained fairly consistent over the next decade – and he continued to engage with both Hobbes and the Socinians on ecclesiological questions. In A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres (1652), Hammond dealt with the question of ordination, arguing that only a bishop had the necessary authority to ordain. This authority he traced back to the Apostles, who had communicated it to their successors the bishops. Numerous testimonies from the early Church were brought in to buttress his argument, and here he could draw on his research confirming the authenticity of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written at the end of the first century AD, which contained some of the earliest references to episcopacy as a separate order.46 Casting the Socinians as the most sophisticated opponents of his position, Hammond described them as ‘men to whom the late Divinity of these evil times oweth so extremely much’. Where they went wrong, he felt, was in their belief that the authority of the Apostles had diminished once churches had been established and the Gospel firmly planted. Since the work of proselytising went on, the Apostles’ successors needed just as much spiritual authority as their predecessors. All that the bishops, who succeeded the Apostles, had lost was the power to work physical miracles.47 At the start of A Letter, Hammond criticised the Socinians for their ‘unreasonable’ rejection of Christian tradition and history; he felt that they had not drawn the right lessons from the practice of the early Church.48 In this sense, the Socinians provided Hammond with the perfect foil. He and they agreed that Christ had given authority to the Apostles, authority which no one had enjoyed before, and, against the Catholics, both accepted that a Church or a bishop could err. But the Socinians felt that now the Apostles were gone, there was no longer a hierarchy within the ministry, while Hammond insisted that the Apostles’ authority had continued in their successors the bishops, therefore only the bishops could ordain new ministers. Here Hammond had good grounds to believe that the testimony of the early Church was on his side. 46 47 48

See J. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism: With Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, 1969), pp. 104–28. H. Hammond, A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres of Present Use in the Church of England (London, 1652), pp. 367, 372–3. The discussion of the Socinians can be found at pp. 367–84. Ibid., pp. 31–2.

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Having dispatched the objections of the Socinians to episcopacy and to hierarchy within the church, Hammond turned to Hobbes. Here his tone changed from one of respect to one of scorn. Hobbes’ theology was ‘a Rapsody of as strange Divinity, as since the dayes of the Gnosticks, and their several Progenies, the Sun ever saw’.49 The central problem for Hammond was that Hobbes refused to accept that the ordination of Christian ministers was a ceremony which conferred specific spiritual powers and which was, therefore, quite different from any civil endorsement like election. For Hammond, it was important to show that the ordination carried out by the Apostles and their successors the bishops was an essential part of the framework of the new Church: the Church which came into being with the ministry of Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost. What the royal chaplain objected to most about Hobbes was his refusal to accept that any such Church had been created – or, indeed, that Christ had established any new laws, sanctions or institutions. Hobbes portrayed ministers as men elected in the same way as civil officers, usually by the consent of the people, whereas Hammond saw them as men ordained directly or mediately by the Holy Ghost. By dealing with Hobbes after Volkelius, and by emphasising the novelty of Hobbes’ theology, Hammond could imply that Hobbes’ ecclesiology was rather more unusual than it was. If even the Socinians accepted that the Apostles were granted some powers, then Hobbes’ flat rejection of this proposition appeared extreme.50 Yet Hobbes was by no means as isolated in his Erastian views as Hammond hoped to suggest; a strong body of opinion in Parliament and in the Parliamentarian Army sought to curtail the powers of the clergy and refused to accept that Christ had given to his ministers any special powers. This aspect of Hobbes’ thought was welcome to many of the men who made the political and military running in the late 1640s and early 1650s. Hammond’s discussion of the Socinians should therefore be seen as part of a broader strategy designed to counter this growing Erastian sentiment.51 It was only Hobbes’ ecclesiology which Hammond discussed in any detail, but it is tempting to see a dig at the doctrine of De Cive (as well as the views of Henry Parker) in his 1650 publication, Of the Reasonableness of Christianity. In this work, Hammond called on his readers to obey Christ’s call (in Luke 9:23) to take up their crosses, a command which implied that 49 51

Ibid., p. 384. 50 Ibid., pp. 384–409. Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, chaps. 5 and 6; J. Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism and the History of the Jews’, in G. A. J. Rogers and T. Sorel (eds.), Hobbes and History (London, 2000), pp. 160–88.

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Christians ought to follow their master even when this imperilled their own lives. Hammond then suggested that some might object that this command was contrary to ‘that liberty of self-defence, and to that Law of self-preservation; which nature is supposed to dictate to every man’.52 Hammond, of course, went on to say that the objection did not hold where men had received the promise of eternal life, a promise which made it perfectly reasonable to lose one’s earthly life in the service of Christ. Hobbes put the case for the unity of natural and divine law so strongly, and with such heterodox consequences, that Hammond was able to imply that his own view was quite mainstream. He could thereby bring into English theology a number of ideas usually associated by contemporaries with the Remonstrants and Socinians, and use them in the service of episcopacy and moral reform. In particular, he sought to disentangle Christianity from natural law in order to preserve both the Church of England and the distinctive ethical precepts which he thought were necessary for entrance into the kingdom of heaven. iv original sin, henry hammond and jeremy taylor Hammond wanted to distance Church government and the practice of Christianity from the laws and norms of nature, and yet he still hoped to show that men and women stood in need of an episcopal Church. Here Hammond departed most clearly from the Socinians, insisting that all men stood under Adam’s curse and could only be cleansed by the atoning death of Christ and by the subsequent grace which came through the Church. Original sin, the notion that all had somehow fallen in Adam and needed to be restored, appealed to Hammond because it enabled him to explain why Christianity was a universal religion applicable to all people and why human beings could not live outside a Christian framework. Since everyone needed the redemption brought by Christ, they must, Hammond argued, also need the episcopal Church which Christ had established and the grace channelled through that Church. Hammond’s commitment to original sin and to the means by which it could be erased distanced him from the Socinians and from the Remonstrants, but it also introduced some serious tensions into his thought. These tensions would be highlighted by Hammond’s fellow episcopal divine Jeremy Taylor. As Taylor perceived, by accepting the doctrine of original sin, Hammond had implied that men and women who had no access to the sacraments of the Church would be damned and, in the case of unbaptised infants, they would be damned through no 52

Hammond, Of the Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 52.

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fault of their own. These notions seemed to run counter to Hammond’s insistence elsewhere on the responsibility of every individual for his or her own salvation or damnation. This section will examine the importance of original sin for Hammond and Taylor, and its implications for their understanding of the supernatural quality of Christianity. Hammond’s views on original sin can be explained through a discussion of his ecclesiology – and the delicate situation in which he found himself in the late 1640s. By 1646 most of the structure of the old Church of England had been outlawed, and Parliament had begun to put in place a new religious framework. The Book of Common Prayer was banned in January 1645, when a Presbyterian Directory of Worship had been drafted to replace it. The next year Parliament passed legislation which set up a Presbyterian Church, while the bishops’ lands began to be sold in significant quantities. Although many people remained loyal to the old Church of England and continued to use the Prayer Book, the authorities hoped that these old and ‘popish’ religious loyalties would soon die out.53 In this context it soon became clear to Hammond that if the Church of England were to exist without any support from the civil magistrate, the English people had to be persuaded by non-coercive means of the importance of remaining within its fold. This required a rather different strategy from that used to defend episcopacy; indeed, it was one thing to show that a Church needed an episcopate, and quite another to show that men and women needed a Church. While the historical record might prove that the Christian Church had always had bishops, it would not show that all peoples had been obliged to join that Church. On this latter point, moreover, the ideas of the Socinians and the Remonstrants were much less helpful. They had argued that Christianity must be voluntarily embraced, that all men and women must be free, at the very least, to reject the offer of grace which God made to them.54 Arminius had suggested that grace could be offered and accepted outside any formal human institution, while the Socinians had stated quite explicitly that membership of a particular Church was not necessary for salvation.55 Hammond, by contrast, was adamant that membership of a Church was necessary for salvation – a position he justified on the grounds that all people were naturally sinful 53 54 55

For the fate of the Church of England in these years, see J. Morrill, ‘The Church in England 1642– 1649’, in his, The Nature of the English Revolution, pp. 148–75. Volkelius, De Vera Religione, pp. 554–5; The Works of James Arminius, transl. J and W. Nichols, vol. i, p. 664. Volkelius, De Vera Religione, pp. 695, 389–94; The Works of James Arminius transl. J and W. Nichols, vol. ii, pp. 20–22, 232.

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and that this original sin could only be removed through baptism. Not everyone accepted Hammond’s compromise and Taylor was perhaps the harshest critic. Drawing on Episcopius and Socinus, Taylor insisted that a theology based upon individual effort and repentance could have no place for original sin. Taylor exposed what he saw as the central problem with the theology of Hammond, causing consternation among the Church of England’s defenders. In the Practicall Catechisme, Hammond included a long section on the benefits of infant baptism, for this was the rite which ensured that all members of the community entered into the Church. He called upon all parents to ensure that their children were baptised, for ‘this grace of baptism, is this strength of Christ, of supernatural ability to forsake sin’. Men’s natural inability to obey the laws of the second covenant meant that the grace which came through the sacraments and which began with baptism was necessary for everyone. Hammond also tied this grace, albeit quite loosely, to the death of Christ on the cross.56 By 1651, he connected baptism much more closely to original sin, seeing baptism as the means by which infants were cleansed of original sin. He wrote that ‘as habitual sins may be remitted by repentance and baptism, so original sin may be remitted by baptism alone’. Parents who baptised their children showed them love and charity, doing all they could to remove the sin which they had transmitted to their offspring.57 Christ, for Hammond, had been more than just a moral teacher: his death on the cross was also important for the restoration of a human race which in some sense participated in Adam’s guilt. Through his death, Christ had removed the effects of Adam’s sin and made forgiveness possible for all people, but this forgiveness needed to be applied to the individual through baptism. Baptism did not, of course, diminish the need for individual faith, repentance and good works, but it illustrated the need to obey Christ’s laws within the communion of a true Church. To Jeremy Taylor, Hammond’s arguments were nonsense, and in a series of works in which he drew upon Remonstrant and Socinian writing, he set out to show why. Taylor was a scholar and divine, a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who had been installed by Laud as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1636, over the head of the warden, Gilbert Sheldon. He served briefly as a parish priest and then returned to Oxford in 56 57

Hammond, Large Additions, pp. 34–5. Hammond, Letter of Resolution, p. 263. C. H. Lettinga also discusses Hammond’s changing views of baptism, comparing A Practicall Catechisme with Of Fundamentals; see C. H. Lettinga, ‘Covenant Theology and the Transformation of Anglicanism’, Unpublished PhD dissertation (Johns Hopkins University, 1987), pp. 192–6.

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1642, preaching frequently before the Court until he left to serve as chaplain to the Royalist Army. He was forthright in his defence of episcopacy, arguing that the records of Scripture and the early Church proved the necessity of bishops. Yet he felt that few matters in religion were equally indisputable, which helps to explain why he was also committed to some degree of toleration.58 At some point he began to read Remonstrant writing, and by 1660 he could write that the ‘whole works’ of Simon Episcopius are ‘excellent and containe the whole body of orthodox religion’.59 Few of Taylor’s contemporaries would agree that Episcopius could be described as orthodox without qualification; as this statement suggests, Taylor’s views were unusual. It was in the 1650s that he really began to challenge the doctrines of the Church of England, using material taken from Episcopius’ writing and perhaps from Socinus also. In his Unum Necessarium (1655), Taylor launched a full-scale critique of original sin, and when his fellow episcopal clergymen objected, he proved only too willing to defend himself in print and in private. Taylor’s rejection of original sin was the culmination of his theology of ‘holy living’ (as the title of one of his works put it), a theology which he began to develop in earnest from the end of the 1640s. Like Hammond and the Socinians, he held that Christ was a lawgiver, and in his Great Exemplar (1649) he discoursed at length on the additions made by Christ to the Ten Commandments. It was, Taylor argued, through obedience to these laws – and through repentance for sin – that men could become acceptable to God; and with the promise of eternal life which Christ brought, such obedience was within the reach of all people.60 Obedience and repentance were the cornerstones of Taylor’s theology, and he seems to have set remarkably little store by the atonement. Christ’s role was educational rather than sacrificial, for he came to redeem men from sin by calling them to a holy life and inspiring them to follow the example of his life. As to the death of Christ, Taylor skipped quite quickly over this in his Great Exemplar; he suggested that it displayed God’s hatred of sin but he played down the notion of expiation or atonement.61 Indeed, Taylor viewed Christ as primarily a moral teacher and he did not suggest that Christ had needed 58 59 60 61

John Spurr, ‘Jeremy Taylor’, ODNB. Cambridge University Library, Add MS 711 f. 8v. R. Heber and C. Eden (eds.), The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor 10 vols. (London, 1850–56), vol. ii, pp. 410, 448–64. Ibid., pp. 707–8. In Deus Justificatus, or, A Vindication of the Glory of the Divine Attributes in the Question of Original Sin (London, 1656), pp. 78–9, Taylor provided a paragraph summary of the work of Christ which in no sense implied that his death atoned for human sin.

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to save or redeem men from any natural sin or guilt which they inherited from Adam. In general, Taylor stressed that a person was responsible for his own salvation, which was dependent upon his commitment to follow Christ. The doctrine of absolute reprobation – or, indeed, election – was anathema to Taylor. Hammond’s theology, in which salvation depended partly upon one’s own effort and partly on grace mediated through the Church, did not satisfy Taylor. He feared that it left unbaptised infants in a state of original sin and therefore deserving of eternal torment – and he refused to believe God guilty of such cruelty. Punishment and guilt were personal as far as Taylor was concerned; they could not legitimately be transmitted from one person to another. All that Adam’s sin had done was to return men to their natural state of mortality; it had not brought eternal damnation upon them. Like Socinus, Taylor felt that human beings were mortal creatures and that they would have existence after their death only if God chose either to reward or to punish them. Unbaptised infants remained in their natural condition of mortality, deserving neither heaven nor hell; if they died then we must assume that God dealt fairly with them and refrained from punishing them with damnation. By rejecting original sin, Taylor implied that human beings started off with a clean slate; they were not born fallen and in need of redemption through Christ. Instead, their fate in the afterlife depended upon their own actions here on Earth. In Deus Justificatus (1656), his clearest and most accessible discussion of original sin, he wrote: That for the sin of another their God should sentence all the world to the portion of devils to eternal ages; and that he would not be reconciled to us, or take off this horrible sentence, without a full price to be paid to his justice; by the Saviour of the world, this, this is it that I require may be reconciled to that Notion which we have of the Divine justice.62

In short, Taylor simply could not see how the doctrines of original sin and the atonement could be made to fit with the justice of God. Taylor’s bid to save the unbaptised from the torments of hell did not go down well among his fellow clergymen. For although Taylor had defended baptism in most of his writings, he had heavily undermined the rationale behind it. In his 1647 work Liberty of Prophecying he had even suggested that toleration be extended to those who objected to infant baptism. The problem was that on Taylor’s version of Christianity, individual obedience and repentance had become so important that there was little space left for 62

Taylor, Deus Justificatus, p. 61.

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grace as channelled through the Church. A troubled Henry Hammond wrote to Sheldon in September 1655 that ‘Dr Tayl[o]rs book is matter of much discours, & in th[a]t point of Orig[inal] Sinn disliked by every one.’63 Taylor threatened to undo all Hammond’s work, by relegating the Church to the position of a useful but unnecessary adjunct to the Christian life. Given the pressures under which the episcopalian ministry was operating as it struggled to hold its loyal flock together, Taylor’s writing seemed to be a betrayal of the Church of England. Taylor was widely perceived as indebted to the Socinians for his beliefs; Bishop Brian Duppa, for example, assumed that he drew on the heirs of Pelagius: the Socinians and Anabaptists.64 Although there is no concrete proof of this assertion, Taylor’s arguments do closely echo those made by Socinus. Like the Italian, Taylor denied that men’s moral capacities were damaged in any way by the sin of Adam. More specifically, Taylor made the same exegetical moves as Socinus to counter the common understanding of original sin, and both men read the key verse Romans 5:12 in the same way. Taylor translated it as ‘death passed on all men, in as much as all men have sinned’, rephrasing the King James Bible’s ‘for that all have sinned’ to make clear that death was the result of individual sin rather than any inherited guilt which might stem from Adam. Here Episcopius rather than Socinus may have been Taylor’s immediate source; but Episcopius was himself following Socinus on this point. These two men replaced the Vulgate’s ‘in quo omnes peccaverunt’, or ‘in whom [i.e., Adam] all have sinned’, with ‘quatenus omnes peccaverunt’, the very different ‘in as much as all men have sinned’, claiming that this was more faithful to the original Greek text.65 The central tie uniting Socinus, Episcopius and Taylor was their strong insistence upon individual responsibility and choice. They all rejected any theological system in which salvation depended upon an event outside a person’s own control. Whether that event was the arbitrary decree of God, as the Calvinists thought, or the parents’ decision to baptise a child, was less important than the fact that the individual could not be held responsible. Similarly, they did not want to suggest that a person’s ability to make moral 63 64 65

British Library MS Harleian 6942 f. 124r-v. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 52 f. 94r-v. See also W. Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 40–57, for more on the reaction to Taylor. Heber and Eden (eds.), The Whole Works of … Jeremy Taylor, vol. vii, pp. 244–5. Socinus’ most succint discussion of original sin is in the Praelectiones Theologicae chap. 4, in Opera Omnia, vol. i, pp. 540–1; Episcopius deals with it in his Institutiones Theologicae, in his Opera Theologica, vol. i, ed. S. Curcellaeus (Amsterdam, 1650), p. 403. Richard Serjeantson identifies the parallel with Episcopius in, ‘Conscientious Innovation in Some Writings of Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)’, unpublished M Phil dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1994), p. 26.

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choices was in any way damaged by the actions of Adam and Eve in Eden so many millennia ago. Taylor was no slavish disciple of Socinus, however, and it is best to see him as engaged, like Episcopius, Crell and others, in rewriting the Italian’s arguments to his own satisfaction. Indeed, Taylor struggled with the central problem faced by both the Remonstrants and the Socinians: what exactly was the relationship between Christianity and human nature? Socinus had presented Christianity as a religion applicable only to those who heard Christ’s message and chose to follow it. However, few of his readers were willing to abandon the notion that Christianity was a universal religion. Hammond had turned to the doctrine of original sin to explain why everyone lay under an obligation to join the Church, but Taylor chose a different route. He sought to integrate nature and Christianity without collapsing them into each other; to align Christianity with nature and natural religion while still preserving a unique role for Christ. At the start of his Great Exemplar, Taylor explained that ‘the holy Jesus restored and perfected the law of nature’, which until that time had been incomplete, even in the version delivered by Moses.66 Christ’s law was, therefore, nothing other than the true law of nature, properly explained, and the life of a Christian was natural and universal because it was the life for which human beings had been created. Taylor’s views on natural law appeared to be very different from those of his fellow Royalists Dudley Digges and Henry Hammond. For Digges and Hammond, it had been important to preserve a contrast between the rights of nature and the laws of Christ; this contrast strengthened their critique of Parliamentarian resistance theories and Erastian ecclesiology which, they felt, were based upon false ideas about natural law. They did not want to suggest that what Christ taught was the natural law because they feared that Christian ethics (and Christian non-resistance) might be diluted by evidence drawn from human nature or the Old Testament. Taylor, however, felt that by presenting Christian ethics as the natural law he could encourage all his readers to seek to uphold this standard. In the preface to the Great Exemplar, Taylor argued that all the laws which Christ had given his followers were ‘very consonant to nature and to the first laws of mankind’. Christ came, he argued, to make people perfect by ‘discovering, and restoring, and improving the law of nature, and by turning it all into religion’. What was special about Christ was that he had revealed the sanctions of the afterlife, sanctions which ensured that all people had a strong incentive to 66

Heber and Eden (eds.), The Whole Works of … Jeremy Taylor, vol. ii, pp. 28–9.

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obey the natural law. Christianity thereby enabled men to attain the end for which they were created and to fulfil their true nature. Arguing in this vein, Taylor insisted that ‘Christ hath given us no new moral precepts’ but had instead ‘furnished him [mankind] with new revelations’ concerning the eternity felicity which awaited those who obeyed God’s commands.67 Yet Taylor’s natural law was not as natural as he sometimes suggested, and at times it looked quite similar to what Hammond and Digges called the law of Christ. For it was only with the advent of Christ that the penalties which God attached to the natural law became clear, and that the law became truly obligatory. Indeed, the Israelites, who lacked knowledge of eternal life, had been allowed by God to practise a lesser standard of morality. But, as this suggests, what Taylor described as the natural law was dependent on revelation for its sanctions and, for him, it was the penalties attached to a law which gave it the power to oblige.68 Indeed, as Taylor argued in a different work, God superinduced laws against our natural inclination, and yet there was in nature nothing sufficient to make us contradict our nature in obedience to God; all that being from a supernatural and divine principle[.]69

The natural law, according to Taylor’s argument, was inseparable from the revelation brought by Christ. Moreover, at times Taylor argued that it could not be measured by the ‘permissions and licences’ which God gave to men and women prior to Christ’s coming – in other words, Christ altered the content of the law as well as providing the sanctions necessary for it to operate.70 It was from Christ alone that men and women could discover the natural law. Taylor’s portrayal of Christ’s law as the true law of nature would be extremely significant after the Restoration. His model, in which Christianity was presented as the perfect version of a broader natural religion, soon became extremely popular among English divines.71 Moreover, Taylor’s own works proved bestsellers. By 1695 both his Holy Living and Holy Dying had reached their nineteenth edition, fast becoming staple reading for those committed to the Church of England. Like Ascham, Taylor sought to bridge the divide between nature and Christianity, while still preserving space for Christian ethics which were not based solely on self-interest or self-preservation. As the 67 69 70 71

Ibid., quotations from pp. 22, 27. 68 Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 112. Taylor, Deus Justificatus, p. 40. Heber and Eden (eds.), The Whole Works of … Jeremy Taylor, vol. ii, p. 29, see also p. 450. I. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1991–2000), vol. i, pp. 66–77.

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writing of both Taylor and Hammond showed, if Calvinism were to be replaced then it was necessary somehow to strike a new balance between Christianity and nature, God’s grace and the individual’s effort, the words of the Scripture and human reason – and yet neither man was able to create a new and stable synthesis. Their theological heirs would continue to wrestle with these problems after the Restoration. The theological approach of Hammond and Taylor differed in important ways from their Reformed contemporaries. They both began to present the scriptural text as the historical record of the early formation of a new community of believers, and to stress the moral obligations under which this community lay. For both men, the stories of Jesus’ ministry and of the fortunes of the early Church were crucial sources of information about how a Christian life should be lived and how a Christian community should conduct itself. In the 1640s and 1650s, Hammond’s writings on Christianity became much more obviously historical and moral, designed to persuade his readers to follow the practices of Christ and the early Christians. As he did so, he found that the Socinians’ arguments and ideas were often helpful, not least because they were engaged in a very similar project. This is hardly surprising, for the lines of Hammond’s own theology seem to have been set by Grotius, a man who himself heartily approved of the Socinians’ historical approach to the Scriptures (even if he did not approve of all their conclusions). Hammond’s movement towards a historical theology, then, is best seen as part of a broader European trend in which the Socinians play an important role. In the next chapter we shall see how this emphasis on the historical development of Christianity could be used by others to undermine the Trinity. Similarly, Hammond found Socinian and Remonstrant theology helpful as he sought to re-instate free will and human liberty within Protestant Christianity. To Hammond this was essential because his understanding of moral responsibility was predicated upon the ability of men and women to choose their actions for themselves. If people’s actions were determined by God or by any outside influence, then they could not in Hammond’s view be the basis for a system of reward or punishment – and he was convinced that Christianity was itself such a system. Yet the story could not be as straightforward as this, for the Socinians and Remonstrants had already discovered that it was much more simple to denounce predestination than to analyse human will and human freedom in any systematic way. In English episcopalian circles, the problem of free will and moral responsibility remained current because of the uncertainty over original sin. Taylor refused to accept that humans could be damned for sins they had not

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voluntarily committed; Hammond agreed and yet he still felt that men and women needed the assistance of a Church and the cleansing rite of baptism if they were to be saved. Again, the thought of both men is best understood as part of an ongoing debate in the Protestant world over how best to replace the Calvinist theological system. As the English episcopalians sought to keep the Church of England alive through the dark years of the 1640s and 1650s, they did so using materials that were often drawn from the continent, and from heterodox continental writers. Although several of their contemporaries – notably Francis Cheynell – objected to the novel and unorthodox nature of their theology, Hammond and his friends won many admirers. Moreover, they managed to imply that their teaching was the true and authentic interpretation of Christianity, in a manner that would have been unthinkable a generation before. Of course, Hammond was careful not to acknowledge the Socinian contribution to the theology of the Church of England in some of its most difficult decades, and yet the traces of that contribution remain. Like the Socinians, Hammond felt that Christianity could only flourish if it was based upon the ethics and precepts of Christ rather than nature. This chapter has shown that it was not merely the problem of resistance which generated discussion of the relationship between the law of Christ and nature, but a whole set of theological and ecclesiological ideas including episcopacy and original sin. One subject which Hammond did not discuss in detail, and which has been largely absent from this chapter, is the doctrine of the Trinity. Hammond could avoid the subject by treating it as a matter on which the Christian Church had been agreed since the earliest times and which ought therefore to be accepted by individuals. His robust concept of a Church enabled him to place doctrinal decisions in the hands of those with authority to deal with such matters, namely the bishops. Indeed, Hammond’s writing of the 1640s and 1650s rarely touches upon doctrinal issues; he found moral theology and ecclesiology more pressing topics. Yet not all of his contemporaries shared his priorities, and there was intense interest in the Trinity in the middle years of the seventeenth century. In the next chapter we will turn to discussion of the Trinity and we shall examine the controversy which surrounded this doctrine.

chapter 6

Reason, religion and the doctrine of the Trinity

Socinus’ understanding of human nature and religion, of mankind and God, had no place for the doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, his rejection of this fundamental doctrine was closely bound up with his re-interpretation of Christianity and its relationship to nature. After Parliament’s victory in the First Civil War, attention turned to the problem of church settlement and here the Socinians’ anti-Trinitarianism became increasingly important. All plans for church settlement in England required a broad commitment to the Trinity, on the grounds that it was an intrinsic part of the Christian religion without which men could not have any meaningful relationship with God. During the 1640s and 1650s, however, a growing number of people began to argue that the Trinity had not been part of the original message and that human beings could in fact worship God in an acceptable way without subscribing to the Trinitarian Creeds. They suggested that true religion was not inherently Trinitarian, and that God revealed himself in different ways at different times. We have seen how the issues of resistance and church government forced people to consider whether the advent of Christ had altered the relationship between God and humankind, but this question was also important as the Parliamentarian victors struggled to construct a church settlement. They wanted to include in this settlement the fundamental principles of religion, but the controversy over the Trinity revealed deeper divisions over just what those principles were. This chapter will focus on the arguments over the Trinity in the mid seventeenth century, and the next chapters will show how important those arguments were in complicating and frustrating plans for religious settlement after the First Civil War. The Parliamentarian victors of the Civil Wars could not avoid discussion of the Trinity as Hammond and the friends at Great Tew had sought to do. In Hammond’s arguments for Christian ethics and for episcopacy he had focused on the teaching of Christ and the experience of the early Church. The doctrine of the Church could, he thought, be determined in a similar way, by looking at the New Testament and the decisions made by the early 147

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Church Councils – including the decisions at Nicea and Chalcedon to accept the doctrine of the Trinity and to incorporate it into the Church’s Creeds. But the Parliamentarians, particularly those who emerged victorious in late 1648, did not want to rely on ecclesiastical authority in determining the contours of religious orthodoxy. They preferred to argue that the civil magistrate, qua civil magistrate, could establish a Church settlement using the biblical text, interpreted through reason and through the natural light which all men had. Like all Protestants, these Parliamentarians felt that the scriptural text alone was sufficient to provide men with knowledge of salvation. And yet they also wanted a Trinitarian church settlement. As they soon found, defending the Trinity on these grounds was neither easy nor straightforward. It has seemed obvious to historians that when a church settlement was constructed after the Civil Wars it would be Trinitarian.1 The Trinity was one of the central doctrines of Christianity, one which distinguished the Christian religion from all others; all Protestants – and most Christians – agreed that it was at the heart of their faith. Furthermore, the Trinity was woven into the liturgical fabric of the English Church and many prayers contained in the Book of Common Prayer were dedicated to the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity also enabled Christians to explain how there could be a relationship between the eternal God and finite human beings, while preserving distance between the two. God was incarnate in Christ and entered the human realm, saving mankind by his death on the cross. God could therefore be seen and understood (at least to some extent) in human terms, but no other human being could claim the kind of authority that Christ had possessed. As this suggests, the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ were important because they made God accessible to Christians, while at the same time preventing Christians from seeking Christ-like authority or status for themselves. Given the important social and political implications of the Trinity, as well as its centrality within Christian theology, it is easy to see why there was a strong body of opinion in favour of a church settlement which retained this doctrine.2 1

2

J. Coffey, ‘A Ticklish Business: Defining Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Puritan Revolution’, in D. Loewenstein and J. Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 108–36; B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, in W. Shields (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford, 1984), p. 203; A. Hughes, ‘Religion: 1640–1660’, in B. Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003), p. 359. P. Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2003), chap. 1; R. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC, 1986), pp. 177–82; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 22–7.

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Although the Trinity was seen by most people in the mid seventeenth century as a fundamental part of the Christian religion, not all contemporaries thought that the church settlement should be Trinitarian. There was a heated controversy over the Trinity in England in the late 1640s and 1650s and the debate repays close examination. The focus of this present chapter will be the range of scholarly (and sometimes less scholarly) objections to the Trinity. As we have seen in Chapter 2, there was some scepticism expressed about the Trinity before the Civil Wars, although usually in private. From the late 1630s, however, a growing chorus of voices cast doubt upon the biblical basis of the doctrine. Some, like the Socinians, denounced the Trinity as an absurd notion cooked up by clerics to increase their own power. Others, however, claimed that the Trinity was a relatively late development in the history of Christianity, quite unknown to the earliest disciples of Christ. On both arguments, true Christianity was not inherently Trinitarian; it was not always necessary, the doctrine’s critics claimed, to believe in the Trinity to please God. Yet most Protestants felt that the Trinity was a fundamental part of Christianity, and English men and women had particularly strong reasons in the 1640s and 1650s to insist upon its retention – as we shall see in this and the next two chapters. i the trinity undermined The doctrine of the Trinity underwent serious critical scrutiny in the late 1630s and 1640s in a series of theological works on the continent. At the same time, European scholars were also beginning to question the origins of Trinitarian theology, suggesting that it had not been part of the message of the earliest Christians. Inevitably, these continental works questioning the Trinity found an interested English audience. In fact, English opponents of the Trinity began to draw some of their inspiration from these continental sources. As a result, those English theologians who sought to defend and to explain the doctrine of the Trinity realised that they needed not only to deal with home-grown anti-Trinitarianism, but also with continental arguments, which were often more coherent and sophisticated. Indeed, English criticism of the Trinity appeared to many contemporaries to be so strong because it was part of a broader European theological current. For this reason the state of the continental debate will be outlined first before we turn to the English controversy over the Trinity. Perhaps the most important and notorious of the continental antiTrinitarian works was Johan Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre. It was originally printed in 1631, but copies were hard to get hold of before the end of the

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decade and therefore its impact was muted. In 1639, however, it was reprinted in Leiden with a refutation from the German theologian Johannes Bisterfeld (1605–1655) and in 1642 it was appended to the second edition of De Vera Religione, making access to it much easier.3 In this work, Crell insisted that it was impossible to make any sense of the doctrine of the Trinity within the Aristotelian categories used by academics. However one sought to explain it, absurdity would soon follow, for the metaphysical framework used by theologians to explain and interpret the Trinity was itself incoherent. What Crell most objected to was the Trinitarians’ efforts to separate the person of God from his essence. He felt that it was impossible to imagine an entity which lacked an essence, while the concept of an essence on its own or in the abstract was meaningless. To strengthen his argument, he offered Unitarian readings of every important text used by Trinitarians; these were designed to show just how much more compatible his theology was with the Scripture itself. He concluded by appealing to his readers’ own experience: ‘However hard you try, you will never be able to conceive in your mind one and the same essence of three persons really distinct from each other.’4 According to Crell, the Trinity was simply inconceivable and could not therefore be imposed upon men by God (or, indeed, by any human authority). For the Socinians, the doctrine of the Trinity set forth in the Church’s Creeds was unacceptable not only because it failed to make sense, but also because it undermined the model of freedom and responsible agency which was central to their theology. For Socinus and Crell, God had to be a person because only persons could be the subjects of actions. At the same time, a person had to be a complete entity; they felt it was impossible to separate essence or existence from personhood without destroying the capacity of a person to act and to be responsible for his actions. In De Uno Deo Patre, but more fully in De deo et ejus attributis (1630), Crell insisted that God, Christ and individual human beings must all be distinct persons, able to relate to each other as separate legal and moral beings.5 He also presented his own reading of the relationship between God and Christ, designed to rival the orthodox Trinitarian version. Jettisoning metaphysics as a way to make sense of this relationship, Crell turned instead to politics and to ideas of sovereignty. In De deo et ejus attributis, the Socinian argument that God was 3 4 5

Bisterfeld’s refutation was entitled De uno deo, patre, Filio ac Spiritu sancto, mysterium pietatis … (Leiden, 1639). J. Crell, De Uno Deo Patre (Rakow, 1642), pp. 609–10. (The 1642 edition gives the 1631 page numbers.) See Crell, De deo et ejus attributis, pp. 237–40, where he writes of the various rights (iura) which God and men can hold against each other.

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a single person was defended by Crell on the grounds that God was sovereign ruler of the world, and ultimate sovereignty was indivisible. To imply that others could share the attributes of kingship without the king’s express permission and delegation was to dishonour the true sovereign. God had, however, chosen to delegate some of his authority and sovereignty – not his essence – to Christ, whom Crell presented as an inferior magistrate, or vicegerent.6 Crell hoped that his readers would find this account of Christ’s role much more coherent than the orthodox description of him as co-essential with the Father. Crell believed the doctrine of the Trinity to be absurd, but he also argued that it contravened the knowledge which men could have of God from the natural world. Unlike Socinus, Crell did hold that men could apprehend God’s existence simply by contemplating the world around them. (This is not to say that Crell believed in any innate idea of God; he made it clear that men needed to use their reason and intelligence to establish the existence of a deity.) For Crell, the careful design of the universe pointed to a creator who was intelligent and all-powerful.7 Here he was hardly original; the main lines of the argument seem to have been taken from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. But Crell gave this Stoic story a strongly Unitarian spin. For, he insisted, if we can work out from our surroundings that there is a God with sovereign power, then it must also follow that God is a single person with a single, indivisible essence. The religious principles that we can obtain from experience prove, Crell thought, not only that God is the almighty sovereign ruler of the world, but also that any attempt to dilute that sovereignty will detract from the honour of the one true God. By making Christ equal with God, Crell argued, Trinitarians failed to pay God the respect he was due and were guilty of lèse-majesté. The doctrine of the Trinity was, Crell insisted, impossible to reconcile with any argument from nature for the existence of God.8 Protestants and Catholics across Europe rushed to refute Crell, but they soon found themselves divided over how best to achieve this task. Bisterfeld, in his influential response to Crell, used neo-Platonic ideas of universal, triadic harmony, which he also developed elsewhere.9 Crell’s belief that nature disclosed a single sovereign deity was misleading, Bisterfeld felt, for God – and the world which he created – was inherently and necessarily 6 9

Ibid., pp. 173–5. 7 Ibid., pp. 7–56. 8 Ibid., pp. 112–20. M.-R. Antognazzi, ‘Immeatio and emperichoresis. The Theological Roots of Harmony in Bisterfeld and Leibniz’, in S. Brown (ed.), The Young Leibniz and his Philosophy, 1646–1676 (Dordrecht, 1999), pp. 41–64.

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Trinitarian. All who worshipped God correctly must therefore have acknowledged the Trinity. However, not every supporter of the Trinity felt that this was a compelling argument; Abraham Calov (1612–1686), the Lutheran scholar appointed rector at Danzig in 1643, wrote to the Socinian Martin Ruar that he wished Bisterfeld’s book had never been published because it was full of caballistic arguments rather than true theology.10 Others who rushed to reply to Crell included the Calvinist minister at Danzig, Johan Botsak (1600–1674), and the Huguenot scholar Joshua De La Place (1596–1665).11 Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), the Minim monk around whom the scholarly elite of Paris gathered, also encouraged his friends to supply an answer to De Uno Deo Patre, albeit without much success.12 Writing to Mersenne, Ruar could not help but sound rather smug as he remarked upon the contradictions in the Trinitarian case.13 For most of the sixteenth century, the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ had been relatively uncontroversial. By the 1640s, this was no longer the case – not only was there disagreement over the truth of these doctrines, but also the Trinitarian camp was deeply divided over how best to substantiate its argument. The notion that Trinitarian doctrines might simply be deduced logically from the Scripture was becoming hard to sustain. Even more worrying for the Trinitarians was their growing realisation that the Socinians were not the only people uncomfortable with the doctrine of three persons in one essence. The Remonstrants in the United Provinces had already begun to imply that the Trinity was not a necessary or fundamental part of Christianity, suggesting that it had developed only several centuries after the death of Christ and that it was not to be found in the Gospels. In general, the Remonstrants eschewed non-scriptural terms and phrases, particularly in their confessional statements, preferring to stick with the words of the New Testament text. In his ‘Apology for the Remonstrant confession of faith’, Simon Episcopius argued that only the doctrines which were clear in the Scriptures could possibly be seen as necessary for salvation. Those doctrines which depended on philosophy or on a long line of consequences drawn from a few scriptural references must, he thought, count among the matters which could be legitimately 10 11

12 13

P. Tannery and C. De Waard (eds.), Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne 17 vols. (Paris, 1932–1988), vol. x, pp. 742–3. J. Botsak, Anticrell, hoc est … De Uno Deo Patre confutatio (Danzig, 1642); for La Place’s writing, see H. Bots and P. Leroy (eds.), Correspondance intégrale d’André Rivet et de Claude Sarrau 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1978–1982), vol. 1, p. 37. Tannery and De Waard (eds.), Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, vol. xi, pp. 235–6, 267–9. Ibid., p. 62.

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disputed. Since he felt that the Scripture spoke only ‘sparingly’ of the persons of the Trinity or the union of Christ’s natures, these concepts must belong to the latter group of disputable doctrines.14 In a later work, written sometime before his death in 1643, Episcopius would date the doctrine of the eternal generation of Christ (an integral part of Trinitarian theology) to the Church Councils of the third and fourth centuries. It was, he said, unknown to the earliest Christians, who simply did not discuss the relationship between God and Christ in these philosophical terms.15 When Stephanus Curcellaeus (1586–1659), who followed Episcopius as Rector of the Remonstrant Academy, edited his predecessor’s works, he included a preface in which he also insisted that Christianity was completely viable without the concept of the Trinity and without the philosophical terms alien to the early Christians. Indeed, he argued, the only way to restore peace among Christians was to return to the pure and simple words of the Scripture and to reject words like ‘Trinity, essence and person’.16 The pleas of Episcopius and Curcellaeus for a return to the original and simple meaning of the scriptural text were echoed by the most illustrious of the Remonstrants’ supporters: Hugo Grotius. In the 1640s Grotius’ several volumes of biblical criticism, his Annotationes, finally went to the press and his historical, critical method of biblical interpretation was made widely available.17 We will return to Grotius’ Annotationes in the final chapter, for they were extremely influential in 1650s England. But from the moment they appeared, the unusual nature of the Annotationes was clear. Where Grotius might have been expected to defend the divinity of Christ or the Holy Ghost, he resolutely refused to do so. Discussing the Old Testament, he explained that he had not related the words of the prophets to Christ or the time of the Gospel, preferring to explain them within the context of the prophet’s own era.18 Similarly, when Grotius came to the passages in the New Testament which discussed the nature of Christ, he interpreted them without recourse to later philosophy or to the views of later Christians. To many readers, Grotius’ interpretations of key verses seemed to come close to those of the Socinians, especially to those of Crell, whose biblical commentaries had been circulating from the early 1630s. Certainly Grotius cast 14 16 17

18

Episcopius, Apologia pro confessione sig. i3r. 15 Episcopius, Opera Theologica, vol. i, pp. 339–40. Ibid., sig. ***2v. These were the three-part Annotationes in libros Euangeliorum (Amsterdam, 1641, 1646 and 1650); and the Hugonis Grotii annotata ad Vetus Testamentum (Paris, 1644). For hostile comments, see, e.g., Bots and Leroy (eds.), Correspondance intégrale d’André Rivet et de Claude Sarrau, vol. ii, p. 140. See the prefaces to his Annotationes ad Vetus Testamentum, printed at the start of Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. i.

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doubt on the Trinitarian reading of verses such as 1 Timonthy 3:16 (‘great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh’) where he, like Crell, insisted that the original manuscripts made no mention of God. Instead, argued both Grotius and Crell, what was revealed and made manifest in the flesh was not God but the Gospel message. Similarly, Grotius and Crell both argued that when Christ was described as ‘being in the form of God’ (Philippians 2:6), this meant only that he could work miracles and that he thereby displayed the power of God. Given the widespread knowledge of Grotius’ friendship with the Socinians, many readers feared that he had absorbed too much of their theology.19 Now that the scriptural foundations of the Trinity had begun to look shaky, the Jesuits saw their chance to gain the polemical upper hand. Against William Chillingworth, Edward Knott had already argued in the 1630s that this doctrine simply could not be read off from the Scriptures and had to be based upon the authority of the Church. This argument was given much greater weight in 1644, however, by Denis Petau (1583–1652), professor of divinity at the flagship Jesuit college of Clermont. In the second volume of his Dogmata Theologica (1644), Petau showed the diversity of opinion among Church Fathers on the doctrine of the Trinity – in particular, he suggested that most of the Greek Fathers had held to a subordinationist Christology in which the Father was greater than the Son. Like Episcopius, Petau did not believe that the Trinity had been a settled doctrine in the early Church. For the Jesuit theologian, however, the diversity of opinion among the Church Fathers proved the need for divine guidance when it came to scriptural interpretation. That divine guidance came, he thought, from the Holy Spirit working through the Catholic Church. Petau went on to provide a refutation of Crell, in which he patiently went through the errors in reasoning and interpretation to be found in De Uno Deo. Ultimately, however, he admitted that the conclusive evidence in his own favour was the judgements and decisions of the Catholic Church. Only the authority of the Church could provide truly solid foundations for the doctrine of the Trinity; the Scripture alone was insufficient.20 19

20

Grotius, Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. ii, pp. 969, 912; cf. Crell, Opera Omnia Exegetica 3 vols. (Eleutheropoli [i.e., Amsterdam] post anno 1656 [i.e., 1666]), vol. ii, p. 18, vol. i, p. 506. For the accusations of Socinianism against Grotius, see Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of his Work De veritate religionis christianae, 1640 (Leiden, 2004), pp. 202–8. D. Petau (Petavius), Dogmata theologica 4 vols. (Paris, 1644–50). Vol. ii, book 1 chaps. 3–6 deal with the Greek Fathers; vol. ii, book iii discusses Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre. See esp. pp. 299–307 for his reliance on tradition. Also P. Galter, ‘Petau et la preface de son ‘de trinitate’; Recherches de science religieuse 21 (1931), pp. 462–76.

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Petau was not the only reader of Crell who came to the conclusion that an authoritative Church was necessary to protect the doctrine of the Trinity. By 1647 one of Lord Falkland’s friends had converted to Catholicism after reading De Uno Deo Patre. This was Hugh Cressy, who had been associated with the Carys from the 1620s when he was at Merton College, and who later proved to be a frequent guest at Great Tew.21 After the outbreak of civil war, Cressy went to France; it was here that he first came across De Uno Deo Patre and that he lost faith in the Church of England. The two were not unrelated. For, in Exomologesis (1647), his account of his conversion, Cressy revealed his conviction that ‘if reason be the judge’, Crell’s argument against the Trinity and incarnation was unanswerable.22 No reasonable person could deny that the Socinian understanding of these doctrines was, at the very least, highly plausible and a valid reading of Scripture. Cressy had come to the conclusion that any church which claimed, as the Protestants did, to be based upon the Bible alone could have no grounds to exclude the Socinians from communion. Unwilling to abandon doctrines which he considered central to the Christian message, Cressy felt that he had no choice but to join the Catholic Church. As Cressy’s experience shows, one way to respond to the growing pressure on the scriptural foundations of the Trinity was to seek out an authoritative Church, but others chose instead to rewrite the doctrine of the Trinity in line with their own interpretation of the scriptural text. This was the approach of another Englishman based for a time in France: Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was not opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity, but he did want to reinterpret it in line with his broader political and philosophical project. And that would involve such a radical redefinition of the Trinity that many of his contemporaries would see it as barely Christian.23 In his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes made crystal clear the problems involved with the language of essences and substances, the language on which the Trinity of the Athanasian Creed depended. In this respect, Hobbes’ work was part of a broader rejection of scholastic metaphysics – a project that the Socinians also contributed to, as did, to some extent, the Remonstrants. Like the Socinians, Hobbes argued that contemporary Trinitarian Christianity was incoherent and needed to be rewritten. Hobbes’ Christianity was very different from the Socinians’, of course, but all these men hoped to cleanse 21 22 23

P. Brückmann, ‘Hugh Cressy’, ODNB; Trevor-Roper, ‘Great Tew Circle’, pp. 182–5. H. Cressy, Exomologesis (Paris, 1647), pp. 483–4. (Cressy refers to the work as De uno vero deo.) He makes similar points on pp. 411–12. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 338–42; see also G. Wright, ‘Hobbes and the Economic Trinity’, in idem, Religion, Politics and Thomas Hobbes (Dordrecht, 2006), pp. 176–210.

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Christianity of the mysteries on which clerical power could be based and to return to what they saw as the true meaning of the scriptural text. It is difficult to know with certainty how familiar Hobbes was with Socinian writing, though it is easy to show that he had several opportunities to acquaint himself with their thought. Hobbes may well have read Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre in the autumn of 1642, when his host in Paris, Marin Mersenne, was encouraging all his friends to answer this dangerous book. It seems likely that Hobbes was involved in at least one discussion of a proposed refutation to this book; in one of his letters, Mersenne described the arrival of a ‘philosopher as great in spirit as in body’ who gave the refutation rather short shrift. The editors of Mersenne’s correspondence conjecture that this was Hobbes, who stood over six feet tall.24 But even if Hobbes did manage to ignore his host’s obsession with the Socinians in the early 1640s, he may have learnt of them through Samuel Sorbière (1615– 1670) when he made the acquaintance of this young French philosopher in 1645. Sorbière had met some of the Socinians in Paris in the early 1640s, and he was so impressed with them and their theological views that he entered into a warm correspondence with Martin Ruar. Sorbière soon realised that aligning himself with a group as heretical as the Socinians was not going to help his career, however, and quickly broke off contact.25 Perhaps he was chastened by the experiences of Sampson Johnson, a friend of both Hobbes and Sorbière, whose troubles with Rivet and with Laud over some illconsidered praise for Crell’s De Uno Deo Patre have already been mentioned.26 With the works of Crell and other Socinians causing this kind of stir among his acquaintances, Hobbes may well have been curious. And if Hobbes had read Crell’s writing, then he must have been sympathetic to some of the Franconian’s ideas, including his critique of orthodox Trinitarianism and its incoherent mix of scholastic terminology. He would also have approved of the Socinians’ emphasis on the need to believe only a single article of faith: that Jesus is the Christ.27 But Hobbes, unlike the Socinians, did not want to abandon the doctrine of the Trinity; instead, he hoped to maintain it by redefining the terms in which it was represented. Since Hobbes was not concerned to preserve the free agency of God or men, that left him free to define person in a rather different way from the Socinians, for whom person was inseparable from 24 25

26

Tannery and De Waard (eds.), Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, vol. x, pp. 268–70. Two letters from Ruar to Sorbière are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: MS fonds latin 10352, ff. 41, 43. See also N. Malcolm (ed.), The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), vol. 11, pp. 893–9. See above pp. 106–7. 27 Volkelius, De Vera Religione, p. 178; and Schlichting, Questiones Duae, p. 472.

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essence. Instead, Hobbes understood ‘person’ along the lines of the Latin word persona, a word used by the Romans to mean a role or a quality which could be taken on by someone for a particular purpose. Using this definition he could complicate the connection between personhood and agency, arguing that a person’s actions or words could be attributed to someone else, and that it was possible to draw a distinction between personhood and individual existence. This definition of person enabled Hobbes to identify three moments when the person of God had entered history, in the form of Moses, Christ and the Apostles. For him, Moses, Christ and the Apostles were the three ‘persons’ of God, but this did not mean three Gods or that the divine substance was divided. Indeed, Hobbes could also emphasise the continuity between these three moments for, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was extremely important to Hobbes to close off any suggestion that Christ might have brought new laws or given spiritual powers to his followers.28 Hobbes’ views were very different from the Socinians, who insisted time and again on the humanity of Christ and the importance of his ministry in revealing a new dispensation. For Hobbes, it was important to retain the doctrine of the Trinity, not least because it prevented people from making claims about the novelty of Christ’s teaching. Yet for all Hobbes’ protestations of orthodoxy, his new interpretation of the Trinity seemed to cast doubt upon the doctrine as it was set forth in the Church’s Creeds. By the late 1640s the European controversy over the meaning of the Trinity was in full swing. Although it was often Socinian works which prompted, intensified or helped to shape doubts about the Trinity, this section has shown that a range of men had come to see this doctrine as problematic for their own reasons. European scholars were starting to argue that the earliest Christians had understood the world rather differently to their successors in the third and fourth centuries and that they simply did not have the philosophical language with which to describe God as triune. In that case, the doctrine of the Trinity could not have been part of the original Christian message. Few European scholars outside the Socinian community took these ideas to anti-Trinitarian conclusions, but they did begin to play down the importance of the Trinity or to reinterpret the doctrine. In England, however, anti-Trinitarian ideas began to be expressed in new and forceful ways, as we shall see in the next sections. And it was in England, where a new Church settlement had to be constructed in the aftermath of the Civil Wars, that anti-Trinitarianism proved most problematic. 28

Hobbes, Leviathan (R. Tuck, ed.), pp. 338–42.

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Reason and Religion in the English Revolution ii english anti-trinitarianism

It did not take long before the problem of the Trinity appeared on the English religious and political agenda. During the Civil War a handful of people began to pour scorn on the Trinity and, by the end of the 1640s, explicit attacks upon the Trinity were becoming less rare. During the Civil War period many Englishmen sought to reinterpret Christianity, purging from it mysterious doctrines like the Trinity. Sometimes these English antiTrinitarians drew on Socinian arguments to make their case, although here, as elsewhere, establishing the influence of specifically Socinian writing can be difficult. Often they were drawing on general Protestant principles, especially the sufficiency and clarity of the Scripture, or upon a broader anti-clerical tradition. They took from the Socinians what they wanted but there is no evidence that any English writer wanted to take up Socinianism wholesale. Indeed, given the growing continental critique of the Trinity, much of which came from outside Socinian circles, there was plenty of material for English anti-Trinitarians to draw upon. The first to launch an explicit attack upon the Trinity after 1640 was Paul Best (1590–1657), a soldier, amateur theologian and a man to whom the Socinian objections to the Trinity clearly appealed. Best was a scholar, who had performed well enough as an undergraduate to be elected a fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Leaving academia, he went to fight against the Habsburgs in central Europe during the Thirty Years War and while in Pomerania and Transylvania he came across anti-Trinitarians and Socinians. Their views on the humanity of Christ won him over, and he also absorbed some of their millenarian and anti-clerical fervour. His was an apocalyptic theology, probably acquired from the millenarian antiTrinitarians who remained strong in Poland.29 Returning home, Best expressed these views with all the passion of a convert and the academic rigour of a former Cambridge don. It was not long before a manuscript of his was brought to the attention of the authorities and in early 1645 he was sent to London for trial and questioning. By 10 June he found himself a prisoner in the Gatehouse. His case was discussed by London divines and by the Parliamentary Committee for Plundered Ministers. He was even 29

Fuller discussions of Paul Best can be found in McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 149–62, and S. Snobelen, ‘Paul Best’, ODNB. On the connection between anti-Trinitarianism and millenarianism, see H. Hotson, ‘Arianism and Millenarianism: The Link between Two Heresies from Servetus to Socinus’, in J. Laursen and R. Popkin (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. Book 4: Continental Millenarians: Protestants, Catholics, Heretics (Dordrecht, 2001), pp. 9–35.

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brought before the House of Commons, charged with ‘horrid blasphemies’, but MPs were content to delay his case indefinitely. While in prison, Best arranged for the printing of an inflammatory theological work entitled Mysteries Discover’d (1647). In this work, Best denounced the superstition fostered by the clergy, and his chief example was the doctrine of the Trinity. This, he argued, was an absurd concoction developed by the clergy, who shrouded it in mysterious language in order to awe the people and to keep them in thrall to the Church. Best wanted to protect his readers from the grip of ecclesiastics and their false, self-serving glosses upon the biblical text. To this end, he set about deconstructing the language of the Bible with the academic tools used to analyse rhetorical and figurative speech. Scriptural metaphors and figures had often been used to justify the Trinity but Best insisted that when one looked more carefully, one could see that their original meaning was quite different. Unfortunately, the verses used to justify the Trinity had been overlaid with the clergy’s ‘verball kind of divinity’, which obscured rather than illuminated their true meaning. The pernicious effects of such theology were immense and the clergy now spoke the language of Antichrist: their words were ‘the froglike croaking of the Dragon, the beast and false Prophets’.30 Best’s work was a full-scale assault upon the power of the clergy based upon their malign and incomprehensible interpretation of the Scripture. It was also an impassioned plea for a return to what he saw as the true meaning of Scripture. The authorities were at a loss as to how to deal with Best. Prior to the Civil War, heretics had been dealt with by bishops in the ecclesiastical courts and then turned over to the civil authorities for punishment. This was what had happened to the Jacobean anti-Trinitarian Bartholomew Legate, for example. With the abolition of episcopacy such a procedure was no longer possible, for no machinery for the exercise of ecclesiastical authority had been put in its place. Parliament had set up a body of divines, the Westminster Assembly, to advise them on ecclesiastical issues, but the Assembly had no power to deal with Best. All they could do was hand him over to Parliament. The House of Commons then referred the case to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, who were to report to the House ‘what they think fit to be done in this business’.31 The report of the Committee put the problem bluntly: ‘the former Course of Proceeding against Hereticks is, by the Taking away of the Power of Ecclesiastical Courts, defective’. The Committee desired the judgement of the House, and this 30

P. Best, Mysteries Discover’d ([London], 1647), pp. 11, 14.

31

CJ, vol. iv, p. 170.

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was swift and draconian. It was resolved that an ordinance be prepared ‘for punishing with Death Paul Best, for his abominable, prodigious, horrid Blasphemies’. All the lawyers of the House were added to the Committee for Plundered Ministers, which was charged with drafting the desired ordinance. They were also asked to state what the law was at present concerning such cases; clearly the provisions against blasphemy and heresy needed to be tightened.32 Parliament wanted to take ecclesiastical matters into its own hands and to show that it would not tolerate the opinions expressed by Best. Exactly why Best’s views were such horrid blasphemies was not explained. The MPs thought that they could scare Best into a recantation, but he was made of sterner stuff. On 28 March 1646 an ordinance was read twice for his execution, but the members of the Westminster Assembly were also asked to talk him out of his heresies. When they failed, Best was brought before the House. There he explained that he ‘acknowledged the Holy and Heavenly Trinity’, indeed, he ‘hoped to be saved by it’. But he remained, however, adamantly opposed to the ‘Tripersonality of Athanasius’, which he considered ‘Romish and Popish’.33 A small group of MPs, including Sir Henry Vane junior, was appointed to confer with him, and his case was repeatedly postponed throughout the spring and summer of 1646. Parliament was clearly loth to inflict any form of capital punishment upon a man who appealed to the Scriptures and to scholarship to substantiate his position. Yet they could not allow him to vent what they saw as blasphemies against Christ and against the Trinity. The problem of defining heresy and the limits of toleration will be dealt with more fully in the next chapter. Here, let it suffice to say that Best was simply left in gaol. Later, after the publication of his Mysteries Discover’d, he would be released and die quietly in his native Yorkshire. In the Gatehouse prison, Best had been joined for a time by another critic of the Trinity: John Biddle (1615/16–1662). Biddle had become notorious when, as a schoolmaster in Gloucester, he had begun to question traditional teaching on the Holy Ghost. He was dismissed from his post in 1645 but his determination to combat the Trinity only increased. Even when in the Gatehouse, from 1646, Biddle still managed to get some highly heterodox works printed. The first was a series of syllogisms, characteristically based on very literal reading of the biblical text, designed to show that the Holy Ghost had different attributes from God the Father himself. Applying the skills of logic and analysis that he had learned at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he 32

Ibid., p. 420.

33

Ibid., p. 500.

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insisted that the Holy Ghost must be separate in both person and essence from God the Father. The Holy Ghost was God’s messenger, it received instruction from God and it spoke of God. As such, it could not be God itself without violating every rule of logic, but was rather ‘chief of all ministering spirits’.34 Like Best, Biddle could not see how the doctrine of the Trinity could be drawn from Scripture using any process of reasoning or analysis recognised by academics. Later he offered the world his own Confession of Faith (1648), in which the Trinity was decisively rejected. Throughout these works, Biddle implied that his Trinitarian opponents were guilty not only of absurdity but also of idolatry, for they worshipped Christ and the Holy Ghost as if they were the Most High God himself. Given his aggressive anti-Trinitarianism, Parliament was in no hurry to release him and he would remain in prison, apart from a brief spell in Gloucester, until 1652.35 Biddle seems to have been driven by a hatred of what he saw as idolatry within the English churches. He criticised the worship of his fellow countrymen, denouncing them for ‘giving the glory of God to another’ when they included prayers to and praise of the Holy Spirit in their church services. Biddle found this extremely objectionable, for he could find no warrant for it in the Scripture. Indeed, he related how he had made himself unpopular by forcing his adversaries to confess that they themselves could not justify their practice from the Scripture.36 Later he pointed out that most ministers in most church services assumed that God the Father was different from the Son or the Holy Spirit anyway, and tended to address their prayers to the Father.37 As his objections to current English prayers showed, the doctrine of the Trinity was woven into the liturgical fabric of the Church of England. Biddle wanted to do away with this devotional legacy and to return to the simple worship which he felt was commanded by Scripture. Divine service could then be cleansed of anything that implied the worship of intermediary beings. Socinian writings seem not to have been the initial inspiration for Biddle’s position, which owed more to the Protestant tradition. His understanding of the Holy Spirit was very different to that of Socinus or his 34 35

36 37

J. Biddle, XII Arguments drawn out of the Scripture, Wherein the Commonly-received Opinion touching the Deity of the Holy Spirit is clearly and fully Refuted (1647), ‘Letter written to a certain Knight’. McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 163–217; S. Snobelen, ‘John Biddle’, ODNB; N. Smith, ‘“And if God was one of us”: Paul Best, John Biddle, and Anti-Trinitarian Heresy in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Loewenstein and Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature and Politics, pp. 160–84. See his comments in the ‘Letter to a certain Knight’, XII Arguments drawn out of the Scripture. J. Biddle, A Confession of Faith touching the Holy Trinity (1648), ‘The Preface’.

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continental followers, for they consistently understood the Holy Spirit to mean the power of God and not a distinct person or ‘ministering spirit’. Biddle himself always insisted that his theology was his own and not taken from any other sect or group. Instead, he argued, it was based upon the ‘common notions’ which men had of God, namely that he was the necessary first cause, and upon the plain language of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, not the monstrous terms of the schools.38 The Gloucestershire Unitarian was always anxious to present himself as a simple but attentive reader of the Scripture, who brought to it only his reasoning ability. As this suggests, Biddle was never simply a disciple of continental masters. Not only did he retain his idiosyncratic view of the Holy Spirit, but his thoroughgoing literalism led him even further away from mainstream orthodoxy. Taking the Scriptures at face value, Biddle believed that they told of a divine being who shared the characteristics of human beings. These themes come out most clearly in his writings of the 1650s, to which we will return in the final chapter. Exactly what Biddle made of the Scripture may have owed something to the Socinians, however, for his definition of God did look remarkably similar to theirs. Biddle wrote that ‘God is the name of a Person, and signifieth him that hath sublime dominion.’ He refused to countenance any separation between person and essence, of the kind necessary to explain the Trinity of the Athanasian Creed, and he insisted that God must be a person because he was a lord and ruler.39 We have seen that this emphasis on God as sovereign and therefore as a person could also be found in Crell, especially in De deo et ejus attributis, and this may well have been the source for Biddle’s own views.40 Biddle may have been introduced to Socinianism by Best; in any case, he had certainly encountered the writing of this Polish group by the early 1650s. Then, he would translate several Socinian works for an English audience and he even produced an English version of the Racovian Catechism in 1651, altering the original text to reflect his own views on such issues as the Holy Spirit.41 In the late 1640s Biddle also found that his scepticism over the doctrine of the Trinity was increased by study of the early Church; he, like Episcopius and Grotius, considered the doctrine of the Trinity to be a later development. Biddle collected numerous testimonies from the early Fathers to show that belief in the Trinity had not been considered an essential part of Christianity and, just as importantly, he noticed that many of the earliest Christians simply had no 38 40

Ibid. 39 Biddle, XII Arguments drawn out of the Scripture, p. 2. Crell, De deo et ejus attributis, p. 114. 41 Snobelen, ‘John Biddle’.

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concept of the Trinity. To prove these points he collected together testimonies from the Church Fathers designed to prove that they believed in one Most High God, to whom Christ was subordinate. In the conclusion of his 1653 publication The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, [etc.], he suggested that the development of false and Trinitarian notions was due to the intrusion of Platonic philosophy into Christianity, taking his cue from one of Justus Lipsius’ letters.42 His aim, therefore, was to cleanse Christianity of this contamination and to restore it to its pristine and Unitarian form. Although his writings met with a storm of criticism, Biddle’s words did find some sympathetic listeners. While in Gloucester, he most probably came into contact with John Knowles (c.1625–1677), the future antiTrinitarian preacher and religious controversialist. Knowles soon began to argue for an Arian Christology, presenting Christ as a created and subordinate being, albeit the first and most important being created by God. Knowles insisted that his theology was drawn directly from the Scriptures, but Biddle probably played a larger part in the development of his Christology than he cared to admit. Knowles attracted some attention for his heterodox ideas while in Gloucester, but it was after his appointment as preacher to the garrison at Chester in 1650 that the real controversies began. He succeeded the veteran preacher Samuel Eaton (1596–1665), who then became increasingly concerned about the direction in which his former flock was being led. A series of pamphlets and tracts passed between them and the exchange became very bitter. Angry that Knowles was able to generate quite extensive support, Eaton enlisted all his friends and contacts to oust the younger man from Chester. At some point late in 1650 he succeeded, and Knowles would remain in quiet retirement in Worcestershire until after the Restoration.43 Best and Biddle presented themselves as educated men, but their attacks upon the Trinity were made from outside academia. Soon, however, antiTrinitarian sentiments were being aired at Oxford, in the heart of the academic establishment itself. One fascinating collection of manuscripts written by a chaplain of New College survives, in which the notion that men had natural knowledge of God was scrutinised, as well as the doctrine of the Trinity. The author was a man named Robert Grebby (d.1653), whom Anthony Wood described as a ‘true Scholar, [who] spent all his time in reading and writing, especially in Divinity and Philosophy, in which last he 42 43

J. Biddle, The Testimonies of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, [etc.] … concerning that One God, and the Persons of the Holy Trinity (London, 1653), p. 84. McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 263–73.

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was a great Sceptick’.44 Wood went on to say that Grebby wrote many pieces which circulated among his acquaintances, though none were ever published. Just a cursory glance at manuscripts sent by Grebby to Thomas Barlow at Queen’s, is enough to understand why.45 Grebby echoed several of Socinus’ most heterodox positions in a blunt, plain style that must have sent shivers down Barlow’s spine. Grebby denied that men had any natural knowledge of God, urging them to rely on revelation mediated through the Scriptures. And he was quite clear that the revelation which God had made through Christ did not include the Trinity. Although Grebby did not cite any modern authors, on several points he came very close to Socinus’ position. Like the Italian, he insisted that Christ had come to reveal the will of God to human beings and to call upon them to repent of their sins. If people obeyed they would be rewarded in heaven; for Grebby, self-interest ought to persuade men to follow Christ. Like Socinus, Grebby was sceptical of the possibility of any knowledge of God other than through revelation; and revelation for him told us only that we must honour God, repent of our sins, and obey the teachings of Christ. In a theology such as this there was no place for the Trinity. For, Grebby argued, it added nothing to our worship of God: the doctrine of the Trinity did not imply that God was ‘either stronger or wiser, or better, or truer or holyer or iuster’. Since no one understood what the Trinity meant, it was absurd to suggest that men could honour God by describing him in these incoherent terms. As he put it, ‘They that tell us of a Trinity of p[er]sons in ye Godhead doe tell us onely of 3 empty names.’46 But Grebby was not just saying that the doctrine was irrelevant. Instead he thought that the Trinity was a figment of clerical imagination, conjured up by divines to increase their own power. For this reason he was insistent that non- and anti-Trinitarians ought to be tolerated and protected by the civil magistrate.47 Most dramatically, anti-Trinitarian and anti-clerical views were heard inside the Palace of Westminster. The recruiter MP John Fry (c.1609–1656/7), one of the commissioners at King Charles’ trial, began to express his disquiet with the Trinity in early 1649. He became involved in a heated exchange with Colonel John Downes (1609–1666), another trial commissioner, in one of the intervals between the judicial proceedings against Charles. Fry rejected the Athanasian Trinity as absurd and unscriptural; for him it was merely a 44 45 46

A. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of all the Writers and Bishops Who have had Their Education in the University of Oxford 5 vols. (London, 1813–20), vol. v, col. 387. The Queen’s College Library, Oxford, MS 205. This consists of several of Grebby’s tracts bound together. Ibid., f. 8r-v. 47 Ibid, ff. 61r-62v.

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device to increase the power of the clerics. He was questioned by the House soon after, and later he published to the world his stridently anti-clerical views. For a while he was allowed to remain in the House; clearly his argument met with some sympathy. But in February 1651 Fry was finally thrown out after a debate which had lasted the entire day. As Blair Worden has shown, the proceedings against Fry were recorded in Mercurius Politicus, perhaps the most influential of the newsbooks of the Commonwealth period, in a highly sympathetic way. Fry’s pamphlets were quoted at length, exposing the readers of Politicus to his complaints about the ‘chaffy and absurd’ doctrine of the Trinity. The colloquial and engaging style of Fry combined with the high circulation of Politicus no doubt helped to spread anti-Trinitarian sentiments further afield.48 All the English anti-Trinitarians viewed the clergy as the promoters of mysterious and esoteric religious doctrines designed to conceal the truth from the people and to increase their own power. By constructing their own language and metaphysics around the scriptural text, the clergy were able to elbow out other Christians from their Church. These priests seemed to restrict access to the Word of God and to deny to individuals the use of their reason – reason which God had given to humans for a purpose. According to these anti-Trinitarians, both Scripture and reason clearly spoke of a single, supreme God, to whom Jesus Christ was subordinate. In Biddle’s view, the clergy also promoted idolatry by encouraging men to worship that which was not the Most High God, and by setting themselves up as mediators between men and God. English Protestant ministers were, on this argument, no better than the handmaidens of the Whore of Babylon. The Trinity had come to symbolise clerical power based on deceit. With scepticism over the Trinity being heard even in the House of Commons, the time must have seemed right for a new edition of the Racovian Catechism. On November 13, 1651, William Dugard (1606– 1662), a printer and former schoolmaster, entered the work onto the Stationers’ Register and it appeared a few months later. In July 1652, an English translation of the Racovian Catechism was also printed; the translator was almost certainly John Biddle. Dugard had until 1650 been a successful headmaster and Royalist printer, though a spell in Newgate prison for printing Royalist works soon brought about his conversion to the Commonwealth’s cause and he began to print for the Council of State. 48

McLachlan, Socinianism, pp. 239–49; B. Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), p. 251. Fry’s pamphlets were The Clergy in their Colours (London, 1650) and The Accuser Sham’d (London, 1651).

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Exactly what his interest in the Racovian Catechism was is unclear, but he had probably got hold of copies of the text when he bought his press from Robert Young after Young’s death in 1647. Young, also an official printer and Royalist, had quietly printed two versions of the Catechism in the late 1630s. They are distinctive enough for modern scholars to attribute them to Young’s press, but Young sensibly refrained from advertising his own involvement in such a controversial text. Dugard’s version is identical to the second Young edition except for the new title page which it bears. Probably Young’s caution got the better of him and he held back most of the copies of his second edition. Dugard then just printed a new title page, added it to the existing copies and sent out the work once more.49 Dugard may have been loth to see such a work as the Racovian Catechism go to waste, but he may also have hoped that the ideas it contained would be discussed. He was certainly interested in textual biblical criticism; indeed, he had bought Young’s press because it contained Greek letters and he hoped to print a corrected version of the Septuagint.50 He also had connections to others engaged in similar work, such as Francis Gouldman (1607–1688/9), also questioned by Parliament for his involvement with publishing the Racovian Catechism. Gouldman spent much of the 1650s working on the Critici Sacri (1660), a mammoth project of biblical scholarship, before making his name as a lexicographer.51 Dugard also knew John Milton (1608–1674), the Commonwealth’s Secretary for Foreign Languages and a man himself wrestling with Trinitarian and antiTrinitarian ideas. Milton may even have been responsible for licensing the work in 1650, indicating his own commitment to open discussion of antiTrinitarian theology.52 McLachlan suggested that John Biddle was behind the 1651 edition of the Catechism, but there is no evidence for his involvement. Indeed, Biddle may have obtained his own copy of the Catechism from Dugard, for he certainly had connections with Dugard’s circle and later in the decade would translate a different work for this 49

50

51 52

W. Meyer, ‘William Dugard’, ODNB; L. Rostenberg, ‘William Dugard, Pedagogue and Printer to the Commonwealth’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 52 (1958), 179–204 esp. 186–7; A Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, eds. A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave (London, 1976–1991), vol iii, Addenda and Corrigenda, ed. K. Pantzer, p. 300; M. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Anti-Trinitarianism’, in S. Achinstein and E. Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), pp. 171–85, esp. pp. 177–8. HP 31/22/26A (‘Ephemerides’ 1648 pt 2). On Milton’s possible role in licensing the Catechism, see S. Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, in S. Dobransky and J. Rumrich (eds.) Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 142–4. For Gouldman, see: J. Bately, ‘Francis Gouldman’, ODNB; Notes and Queries 57 (1857), p. 86. Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Anti-Trinitarianism’, p. 181; S. Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, pp. 139–58, esp. pp. 142–4.

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printer.53 This new edition of the Racovian Catechism seems not to have been an attempt to proselytise on the part of Biddle or any English Socinians in any strong sense, but designed instead to generate discussion (and, of course, revenue for Dugard). The publication of the Racovian Catechism raised a chorus of protest and Parliament voted to have it burnt. But if MPs hoped to remove the work from circulation they were soon disappointed. As some disgruntled stationers bitterly noted, Parliament had only caused ‘a few that could be taken to be burnt’, and the English translation was still widely available.54 While Socinianism and anti-Trinitarianism remained very marginal theological positions in England, by the early 1650s English men and women were much more aware of their existence – and the challenge they posed to mainstream Christian theology – than they had ever been before. Not only did the Trinity seem to many people to be distant from the scriptural text, but the process by which it had been inferred from the Bible had also been called into question. At best it was part of the historical development of Christianity; at worst, it was simply a clerical plot.

iii rethinking the trinity As the printing of the Racovian Catechism shows, Best, Biddle and Fry were not the only people willing to see the formulation of the Trinity laid down in the Church’s Creeds discussed and questioned. Although no one else in England was as strident in their anti-Trinitarianism as this trio, some of their contemporaries were beginning to put serious pressure on the doctrine of the Trinity in a more subtle way. Some believed that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity fitted ill with their own conception of Christian life, others objected to the language and the philosophy of those Christian Creeds in which the doctrine of the Trinity was set out. In sermons and in printed tracts people explored the relationship between God, Christ and humankind, and in the mid 1640s there were some dramatic attempts to narrow the gap between the human and the divine by suggesting that all human beings could be filled with the spirit of God. Several Englishmen insisted that Christ’s experience was not inaccessible to others, because the spirit of God which had animated Christ was also present in the saints. Others suggested that the true pattern for Christian living was to be found 53 54

HP 14/3/4A-5B, (letter to S. Hartlib, 7 July 1656). L. Fawne, A Beacon set on Fire: or The Humble Information of Certain Stationers, Citizens of London, to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England (London, 1652), p. 16.

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in the New Testament, and began to reject the Old. These ideas were often backed by a spiritualised reading of the Scriptures, in which the importance of biblical texts lay in their ability to describe, capture and influence the internal working of a person’s soul. This mystical reading of Christianity was not always explicitly anti-Trinitarian and it did not need to be allied to a critique of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. But it did put pressure on the doctrine by suggesting that Christ was not unique and that God was often incarnate in the bodies of the saints on Earth. This strand of heterodox thinking is therefore best described as non- rather than anti-Trinitarian. Importantly, such a mystical version of Christianity seemed highly subversive, for it implied a kind of spiritual egalitarianism in which every saint could claim for himself (or even herself) the power of Christ. The doctrine of the Trinity, in which Christ alone among men was truly divine, was seen as increasingly important in preventing such claims. One particularly flamboyant and idiosyncratic English preacher was William Erbery (1604–1654), a man who demonstrated to full effect the subversive potential of a non-Trinitarian Christianity. Erbery was a Master of Arts from Queens’ College, Cambridge, who served as chaplain to the regiment of the Parliamentarian commander John Lambert. In 1646 he was in Oxford, with the Parliamentarian garrison stationed there after the surrender of the Royalist capital. There Erbery proclaimed to troops and to townspeople a new spiritual dispensation, in which every believer would be filled with the Holy Ghost and would experience the power of the Godhead dwelling within them. Erbery took the Protestant emphasis on the relationship of the individual with God through the Holy Ghost to its extreme, suggesting that this relationship could be as intense for any believer as it had been for Christ. Such heterodox ideas soon brought him into conflict with the clerics sent by Parliament to ensure the conformity of both university and city. Erbery simply refused to recognise the authority of these divines, insisting that it was the presence of the Spirit, rather than Parliamentary commissions, which gave men authority in matters of religion. For him, earthly powers and institutions were entirely subordinate to Christ and his kingdom; the magistrate’s duty was to wait upon the workings of the Spirit, manifested through the saints. He was sharp enough in debate to humiliate his clerical opponents, who found their authority seriously undermined by Erbery’s rhetoric.55 Erbery had read some works from the Rakow press, but he was no Socinian. His own penchant for an ecstatic and spiritualist understanding 55

W. Erbery, Nor Truth, nor Error, nor Day, nor Night (London, 1647), esp. p. 8.

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of Christianity meant that the Socinians’ logical approach and biblical literalism left him cold. He lamented that ‘though learned men, yet [the Socinians] look no higher than the flesh’; their theology was little better than the dry scholasticism with which he had grown up.56 Moreover, what marked out the Socinians’ critique of the Trinity was, as we have seen, their insistence on human and divine agency and their belief that God, Christ and human beings must all be distinct persons (who cannot share an essence) if they are to act in any meaningful way. Since Erbery believed that the Holy Spirit would work through the saints, he had no desire to make persons the sole subjects of actions or, indeed, to press individual agency too far. But Erbery did share the Socinians’ commitment to an egalitarian reading of Christianity in which all mankind, armed only with the scriptural text, could understand and fulfil the demands of God. These demands had to be inferred from the New Testament, and they were quite different from the moral laws, or guidelines for earthly living, to be found in the Old Testament. Christianity, for Erbery as for the Socinians, was a religion accessible to men of this world but designed to fit them for heaven. Where the Socinians looked to reason to interpret God’s revelation, Erbery preferred to invoke the continuing presence of the Spirit in believers, but the effect in both cases was a religion quite distinct from all earthly powers, offering salvation to all individuals. With his growing following among the soldiers and townspeople at Oxford, Erbery could not be ignored. The Presbyterian divine Francis Cheynell, now one of the Parliamentarian visitors, challenged Erbery to a disputation at St Mary’s Church, calling him a ‘seeker and a Socinian’. For Cheynell, as we have seen, such an accusation implied that Erbery’s entire approach to the Bible was flawed. Moreover, Cheynell’s evidence for Erbery’s Socinianism illustrates the way in which a man like Erbery could draw on Socinian writing to strengthen his own case. Erbery appears to have used the Socinians’ interpretation of John’s Gospel to avoid the common, Trinitarian reading of the first chapter. On this point, wrote Cheynell, Erbery ‘took the scriptures in the same sense, and cited them in the same order, as they were taken and cited in Volkelius, and the Socinian Chatechism [sic]’.57 Erbery needed to show that the divine presence in Christ was not evidence of his unique essence, for it could be experienced by all the saints, and in making this claim he apparently echoed some of the 56 57

W. Erbery, The Testimony of William Erbery, left upon Record for the Saints of Suceeding Ages (London, 1658), p. 71. F. Cheynell, Truth Triumphing over Errour and Heresie (London, 1647), pp. 5–6.

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arguments used by the Socinians to show that Christ was not essentially divine. Cheynell was a vigorous hunter of Socinian heresy, but the specificity of his charge suggests that Erbery was indeed drawing on the resources provided by continental anti-Trinitarians to make his own, rather different, point. The contribution of Socinian writing to Erbery’s theology was indirect, but it lent strength to Erbery’s own doubts about the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity. Although Erbery moved further away from any orthodox understanding of Christ in the next few years, he was one of the ministers appointed under the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, of February 1650. In 1653, however, he was called before the Committee for Plundered Ministers and questioned about his heterodox views; the most serious charges levelled against him were those which dealt with his Christology. Erbery was charged with preaching ‘that Christ is a Beast’, with denying ‘his God head and perfection of his nature’, and with ‘undervaluing of Christ’. Erbery sought to clarify his views before the Committee, but what he said was hardly likely to reassure them. He maintained more clearly that the union which the saints had with God came through Christ, explaining that the saints were not ‘perfect with God, as Christ was, but perfect with Christ, in God, we [the saints] are’.58 Indeed, the Spirit of God was more manifest now through the saints than it had been even in Christ; for Erbery it was the Spirit’s work in the present which was important and which lay at the centre of his theology. For this reason he had little patience with existing churches, denouncing their formalism and their system of tithes, and he preached instead a strongly egalitarian gospel. In Erbery, the subversive potential of anti-Trinitarianism became all too obvious.59 Erbery was not alone in reinterpreting the relationship between God and man. Some of the most prominent chaplains to the New Model Army, Parliament’s most effective fighting force, preached a similar gospel in which every individual could experience the spirit of God. Perhaps the most notorious was William Saltmarsh (d. 1647), a Cambridge man with a Master of Arts from Magdalene College, who served as chaplain to the army’s commander-in-chief Sir Thomas Fairfax in 1646 and 1647.60 In Freegrace (1645), a work which had run into ten editions by the end of the century, Saltmarsh announced that the advent of Christ had annulled the old law and enabled men and women to obey God through the working of the Spirit. Another influential chaplain, William Dell (d. 1669), held similar 58 60

Erbery, Testimony, p. 316. 59 For Erbery’s career, see S. Roberts, ‘William Erbery’, ODNB. R. Pooley, ‘John Saltmarsh’, ODNB.

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sentiments; like Saltmarsh he was one of Fairfax’s chaplains and a Cambridge man – in this case a fellow of Emmanuel. Preaching before Parliament in November 1646, he urged MPs to listen to the word of God within the hearts of the saints rather than the outward, written words of the law.61 This emphasis on the present, contemporary reality of the Spirit to all the saints was highly indebted to the Protestant, indeed the Puritan, tradition; there is no evidence at all that Saltmarsh or Dell had ever read the Socinians. Yet a theology which was based so heavily on the direct spiritual experience of the individual seemed to have little room for Christ as the unique divine mediator or, therefore, for the Trinity, and as such was aligned with key Socinian tenets. Although these chaplains were not Socinians, their contemporaries perceived some alarming similarities. They felt that the pressure which the likes of Dell and Saltmarsh were putting upon Reformed theology was not unlike the critique offered by the Socinians. These chaplains understood the revelation of God as a continual process, rejecting the Old Testament in favour of the New, and they emphasised the role of each individual in interpreting that revelation for himself or herself. On these points they could be – and were – accused of Socinianism; Dell, for example, was denounced before Parliament as a ‘a downe-right Socinian’ because he denigrated the law of Moses and refused to see in it the spirit of Christ.62 Like the Socinians, Dell had suggested that true Christianity had only come into being with the earthly ministry of Christ – raising questions about whether Christ had existed before he came to Earth and implying that God’s revelation was changeable and unstable. For Dell, as for Biddle, Best and the Socinians, God’s demands had altered, and they had altered most significantly when Christ had come to Earth. The views of all these men were difficult to square with the doctrine of the Trinity, which in Reformed theology was thought to explain how Christianity had been the one true religion from the beginning of creation.

iv defending the trinity There were some attempts by English theologians to defend and explain the doctrine of the Trinity, but they were surprisingly few in number. When 61 62

W. Dell, Right Reformation: or, The Reformation of the Church of the New Testament, Represented in Gospell-light (London, 1646), esp. pp. 16–19. C. Love, Short and Plaine Animadversions on Some Passages in Mr. Dels Sermon (London, 1647), pp. 2–3, 6.

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theologians did try to present God as a single essence with three persons they continued to use scholastic language, rejecting the anti-Trinitarians’ objections to such terms. Nowhere was this adherence to traditional theological terms more evident than in John Prideaux’s Oxford Act lectures, discussed in Chapter 2, which were first published in 1648. Here Prideaux offered a thorough discussion of the scholastic metaphysics behind the doctrine and a comprehensive critique of what he saw as the poor scholarship of the Socinians.63 His academic approach might have comforted and reassured those willing to accept the validity of such theological terminology, but it was not likely to win over any of the anti-Trinitarians or, indeed, anyone who preferred the language of Scripture. By 1650, as we shall see, even academic Trinitarian theologians found it difficult to explain in a convincing way a doctrine agreed by all to be mysterious. The earliest specific reply to Biddle came from Nicholas Estwick (d.1658), minister of Warkton in Northamptonshire; the bookseller George Thomason acquired his copy of Pneumatologia: or, A Treatise of the Holy Ghost, on June 6, 1648. Estwick’s tract was structurally rather similar to Biddle’s 1647 publication, XII Arguments: he laid down twelve syllogisms of his own in order to show that the Holy Ghost was truly and absolutely divine. Estwick clearly believed that the argument could still be won in scholastic terms, through the application of syllogistic logic to the scriptural text.64 But his optimism in 1648 was not borne out by events and he soon found, to his dismay, that the heresies of Biddle and Best – which he considered to be minor offshoots of the devilish Socinian party – were spreading through England. In 1656 Estwick published a much weightier tome, over five hundred pages of detailed refutation of Biddle’s several writings. As Estwick found, however, Biddle and his supporters were indifferent to such counter-arguments; Estwick was appalled that Biddle took absolutely no notice of his endeavours.65 Estwick was also disturbed by the unwillingness of his fellow ministers to counter such a serious threat; he wondered why he was not joined in his efforts by more of his colleagues. Yet the difficulties involved in providing a successful refutation of antiTrinitarian writing may have deterred others. The task of providing a semi-official defence of the Trinity could not be ignored for ever, and it eventually fell to Frances Cheynell, that veteran anti63 64 65

Prideaux, Viginti-duæ lectiones, pp. 261–75. N. Estwick, Pneumatologia: or, A Treatise of the Holy Ghost (London, 1648). N. Estwick, Mr. Bidle’s Conffession of Faith, Touching the Holy Trinity (London, 1656), esp. ‘The Preface to the Reader’.

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Socinian. In 1648 he was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, shortly after he had taken on the presidency of St John’s College. In February 1650 he was asked at a meeting of the University delegates to ‘set forth a book touching the vindication of the Trinity’ and a few weeks later appeared The Divine Trinunity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.66 Cheynell must have been planning this for some time, perhaps even from the middle of the 1640s. At any rate, he explained that the work was necessary because ‘since the beginning of the year 1645, there have been many blasphemous books to the great dishonour of the blessed Trinity printed in England’.67 Cheynell had, as we have seen, been concerned about the spread of some Socinian ideas about the moral law in the 1630s and early 1640s; and now anti-Trinitarianism was growing apace. Cheynell knew that English attacks upon the Trinity were not the only, or perhaps even the most important, problem he faced, and he took great care to answer the points made by the Socinians, the Italian tolerationist Jacob Acontius and by the Jesuits, especially Petau. The Divine Trinunity was an attempt to show the centrality of the Trinity in Christianity, to show that the Bible could not be understood without this central principle. Because, on Cheynell’s reading, any sober reader could see that the Scriptures displayed a triune God, he felt that those who rejected this doctrine must be malicious, blasphemous men who ought to be punished by the magistrate as well as the Church. In his discussion of Acontius’ writing Cheynell made this particularly clear.68 In the Divine Trinunity Cheynell struggled to balance reason and faith. He was anxious to show that the Trinity was not an absurd or unreasonable doctrine; but at the same time he was clear that it could only be received by faith. He felt that the ‘Grand Mystery of the Divine Trinunity’ should be soberly explained, but he recognised that it was a subject far beyond the capacities of men to understand or to grasp. Even as he embarked on his lengthy and learned discussion of the distinction of the divine nature and the three persons within it he reminded his readers that ‘no language is rich enough … to declare this profound Mysterie’.69 Not even the angels and saints could understand it – some consolation to the reader perplexed by a deluge of scholastic terms. And yet Cheynell’s problem was quite simple. Ministers were used to explaining the Trinity within a sympathetic environment, to people keen to believe and understand. Once doubt set in, 66 67 68

Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. iii, col. 704. F. Cheynell, The Divine Trinunity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (1650), sig. B3r. Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, esp. pp. 464–80. 69 Ibid., pp. 19, 98.

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however, they were faced with the thankless task of persuading men through tracts and scholarly discussions to believe a doctrine which they agreed to be a mystery, inaccessible to human comprehension. As Cheynell’s work showed, the Trinity was difficult to explain and defend but it was no less crucial for being opaque. Unless the doctrine of the Trinity were accepted, Christian worship could look like idolatry – exactly the charge which Biddle had made against it. Moreover, the relationship between God and man would be thrown into confusion: men and women could claim for themselves divine power and authority, making themselves equal to Christ. Cheynell could see what was at stake as he laboured to convince his readers of the merits of belief in the Trinity. Yet his work illustrates the problems involved in any scholarly defence of the Trinity – problems which meant that the anti-Trinitarians in England and abroad could not be effectively dealt with through the force of logical argument alone. And this helps to explain why, as we shall see in the next chapter, many Englishmen were eager to close down discussion of the Trinity, calling simply for the imprisonment of Best and Biddle. Socinian arguments formed a significant part of the growing scepticism towards the Trinity (especially as set out in the Athanasian Creed) heard in England in the 1640s and 1650s. In England as in Europe, scholars and theologians were beginning to peel back the layers of scholastic and Platonic philosophy which, they feared, had shrouded the biblical text. The result was a range of new and heterodox ideas, many of which had little to do with the more positive tenets of Socinian theology. Some, like Biddle, opted for a version of the Trinity with three spiritual beings; others, like Erbery, saw the Trinity as a symbol of God’s unity with his human creation. Together, these arguments suggested that, at the very least, the doctrine of the Trinity was far from uncontroversial. That point on its own made it more difficult to include the Trinity in any Church settlement or any definition of the fundamentals of Christian faith or, conversely, to outlaw antiTrinitarianism. At the same time, the historical dimension to theology was generating increasing interest. The new practice of biblical criticism became more appealing, as scholars sought to explain the scriptural text by analysing the original context. The effect was to show just how far the Church’s theology had developed in the first four centuries and to undermine those theological doctrines which were based on Hellenistic philosophy unknown to the earliest disciples. Chief among such doctrines was, of course, the Trinity. Usually the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was presented as

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merely a clarification of ideas present from the start of Christianity, but Hobbes and the Socinians both endeavoured to show why this could not be so, given the incoherence of the doctrine itself and the great intellectual distance between the first Christians and the later Church Councils. The argument for doctrinal development need not be made in an explicitly antiTrinitarian or Socinian way, as Grotius, Episcopius and Petau showed, but it still had a very damaging effect upon any arguments for the biblical basis of the Trinity. If the Athanasian Trinity had only been developed in the fourth century AD, then it was hard to explain why Christianity must always be Trinitarian, at least in the form set out by the early Councils. Neither Christ nor the Apostles could have expected their converts to believe in the Trinity. As this suggests, both the biblical and the philosophical foundations of the Trinity were starting to look less secure. This chapter has shown that a small but significant number of individuals in England had begun to challenge the doctrine of the Trinity in the 1640s and 1650s, sometimes (but not always) drawing on continental ideas, including those associated with the Socinians. What united these men was their reluctance to accept the relationship between humanity and God implicit in the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, in which God and mankind came together in the incarnate Christ. They refused to believe that Christ was uniquely divine in essence, arguing that he was a human being whose experiences could, in principle, be repeated; and they insisted that God’s revelation to humanity was dynamic, that his commands and demands could change – all ideas that the Socinians had developed in one form or another. Not infrequently, contemporaries accused English antiand non-Trinitarians of Socinianism because of this shared ground, especially when they heard preachers criticising the law of Moses. Although these charges were, strictly speaking, false, they do suggest the extent to which a wide range of European Christians shared in a project of rewriting Christianity without the Athanasian Trinity. And these charges suggest that Socinianism was seen as a particularly sophisticated part of this broader project. The immediate effect of all these writings about and against the Trinity was a conservative and clerical backlash. Ministers and laymen alike feared that Christianity was in disarray and they rushed to close down heretical and unorthodox opinions. Convinced of the truth of their own religious views, they were quite willing to use force to suppress the recalcitrant if necessary. The urgency of their task was all the greater after the Parliamentarian victory in the First Civil War, because a new settlement had to be agreed for both Church and state. At the same time, however, a chorus of voices demanded

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liberty of conscience, at least for sincere and godly Christians. Moreover, the controversy over the Trinity alerted men to the problems involved in determining exactly what a Christian might legitimately believe or doubt. The debates over the limits of liberty of conscience – and the role played by Socinianism and anti-Trinitarianism in them – will be the subject of the next chapter.

chapter 7

Anti-Trinitarianism, Socinianism and the limits of toleration

Although support for liberty of conscience was strong in the late 1640s, most people drew the line at those beliefs which they considered blasphemous or subversive. Indeed, there was serious concern in England over the growth of radical and heterodox ideas, especially anti-Trinitarianism, and widespread support for legislation that would outlaw the most extreme beliefs. Parliament’s efforts to provide such legislation proved controversial, however, raising several questions about the nature of human authority in religious matters. Those who came to dominate ecclesiastical policy from the late 1640s held that it was the civil magistrate who had responsibility for the Church and they were reluctant to allow clerics any independent authority. As a result, it became necessary to explain how and why the civil magistrate could restrain those who expressed heterodox or blasphemous ideas – and this was not an easy task. For although it was widely agreed that religion was natural for human society and that, therefore, it fell within the magistrate’s remit, the content of this natural religion was more difficult to define. Specifically, it was hard to explain why the magistrate should uphold the doctrine of the Trinity, even when the revelation contained in the Scriptures was taken into account. By early 1652, however, there was a concerted attempt on the part of some influential ministers to refocus the debate by concentrating on Socinianism, rather than the broader phenomenon of heterodoxy or even anti-Trinitarianism. Socinianism provided them with a convenient target, as it had done for Dutch Calvinists from the 1610s, but it also enabled them to put forward their own vision of Christianity and to sell it as the antidote to Socinian heresy. This chapter will examine the issue of toleration in the late 1640s and early 1650s, and it will suggest why the problem of heterodoxy became recast as the problem of Socinianism. The focus of this chapter will be the controversy over toleration and liberty of conscience from roughly the end of the First Civil War to the dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1653. It was not a period in which there 177

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was sustained engagement with Socinianism among the Parliamentarians; for although some accusations of Socinianism were heard in the 1640s it was only from the early 1650s that Socinianism began to become an important polemical concept. To be sure, anti-Trinitarianism was often condemned, but only rarely was this associated with Socinianism. On the other hand, it is difficult to find much evidence of positive engagement with Socinian ideas outside the anti-Trinitarian and episcopalian circles already discussed, at least before the 1650s. Neither the slur of ‘Socinianism’ nor the ideas of the Socinians themselves made much impact in the early discussions among the Parliamentarian victors of the First Civil War. This situation would change from the early 1650s, when accusations of Socinianism would become more common and much more politically charged. Indeed, in the mid 1650s the architects of the Cromwellian Church settlement presented their theology as an answer to Socinianism. To understand why they chose to do this, however, it is necessary to examine the difficulties they and their contemporaries encountered as they sought to restore order in the religious sphere in the aftermath of the Civil War. The importance of Socinianism in the 1650s was due in large part to the unresolved religious tensions of the 1640s, tensions which will be discussed in this chapter. By the middle of the 1640s, England was home to a dizzying array of heterodox beliefs. So, at least was the impression given by a host of tracts and pamphlets denouncing the errors and ungodliness of the times. All the heresies of contemporary Europe and of the past ages of the Church seemed to have combined in an England fast becoming ‘a common Receptacle of all the sinful dregs’ of the Christian world.1 Many ministers and laymen presented this situation as an unmitigated disaster, a dreadful disease that could only be remedied through serious surgery. There were, however, others who sought to contain this diversity without crushing it, to allow liberty of conscience while preventing ungodly licence. Striking that balance proved to be one of the most difficult intellectual tasks after the First Civil War, and was made much harder by recent developments in biblical scholarship. In particular, the objections to the Trinity discussed in the previous chapter complicated matters. It has long been recognised that the vast majority of Englishmen and women believed there must be limits to freedom of conscience and to religious toleration. As Blair Worden has shown, toleration was ‘a dirty word’ and what was desired by English men and women was almost invariably liberty of conscience, a term which carried much more circumscribed connotations.2 1 2

A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, and to our Solemn League and Covenant London, (1648) p. 2. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, p. 200.

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This liberty was, however, defined in very different ways, leading to serious controversy and contention in the 1640s and 1650s. Almost everyone agreed that the magistrate should take action against those who expressed blasphemous, idolatrous or seditious opinions, but they found it much more difficult to reach consensus on what that might mean in practice. In these attempts to define the limits of toleration, the relationship between human, natural reason and the revelations found in the Scripture were discussed. Many writers wanted to show that the fundamentals of Christianity were not unreasonable and that they were clear to any person willing to read the Bible carefully. In this way the magistrate’s religious authority could be traced back to the natural law and to the clear words of the Scripture, removing the need for any separate clerical caste to look after the Church. Yet this argument proved highly problematic, for it was not at all clear that such crucial doctrines as the Trinity could indeed be defended simply from Scripture and natural light.

i religion and the civil magistrate The Parliamentarian victors of the First Civil War agreed that reform of the Church must be carried out by the civil magistrate and not entrusted to the clergy. This had been clear from the start of the Long Parliament in 1640, when both Houses had set about reversing the recent ‘innovations’ undertaken by Archbishop Laud and his allies. They had also begun to eject ministers deemed ‘scandalous’ or ungodly, and to replace them with lecturers chosen and approved by themselves. Although some MPs and peers (usually future Royalists) felt that alterations in the church required the king’s approval, few would dispute that it was a matter for the civil authority, and not for the clergy or Convocation. But faced with the need to come up with a new Church settlement, Parliament chose to gather an assembly of leading clergymen to advise them and made the necessary arrangements in June 1643. The Westminster Assembly (as it came to be known) had no more than an advisory role and Parliament insisted upon its own supreme authority in religious matters.3 Yet even with the Assembly to advise them, Parliament-men still found it difficult to agree on ecclesiastical legislation. Although there was a loud clamour for action to be taken against sectaries and heterodox preachers, only in 1646 did a draft ordinance for the 3

See D. A. Orr, ‘ Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil War’, History 87 (2002), 474–490; J. Morrill, ‘The Puritan Revolution’ in J. Coffey and P. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 67–88, esp. pp. 69–70; Paul, The Assembly of the Lord, pp. 52–71.

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punishment of heresy and blasphemy come before the House. At this point the competence and authority of the civil magistrate to define heresy was challenged by the Scots and their Presbyterian allies in London, sparking some fiery pamphlet exchanges about the role of the civil magistrate in determining true religion. The controversy surrounding the Blasphemy Ordinance set the terms for the discussion of toleration, and this episode is therefore worth outlining in some detail. To the authors of the Ordinance and their supporters, there could be no doubt about either the need for such legislation or its legitimacy. The text was introduced into the House of Commons by Nathaniel Bacon and Zouch Tate, both zealous and uncompromising proponents of a Presbyterian settlement, in September 1646. The ordinance comprised two parts; in the first, the most heinous offences against the being and attributes of God were listed and in the second the less serious heresies. The former were to be punished with death, the latter with imprisonment. The crimes attracting capital punishment included denial of the Trinity, the atonement and the resurrection of Christ, but also denial of the authority of Scripture. A wide range of positions was listed under the second category, including mortalism, denial of infant baptism and Arminian ideas about justification. The Ordinance was designed as a serious effort to suppress not only antiTrinitarianism but also a string of other positions considered dangerous.4 Nowhere were the Ordinance’s theological underpinnings explained; the authors simply assumed that all the positions listed were indisputably heretical or blasphemous and therefore their proponents ought to be punished by the magistrate. The draft Ordinance reflected the views of a large body of opinion in both London and the provinces, as well as the strategy used to promote those views. From the spring of 1646 a series of tracts and pamphlets called upon Parliament to take action against what was seen as a growing swarm of heretics, blasphemers and sectaries. This campaign was part of a broader conservative reaction which only gained strength now that the fighting between King and Parliament had ceased. Those involved were often termed Presbyterians because one aspect of this conservative reaction was support for a national, hierarchical church which, for practical as well as ideological reasons, would be Presbyterian rather than episcopal. The Presbyterians’ assault upon heterodoxy and sectarianism was usually far from subtle, as they rushed to denounce all activity they deemed radical or heterodox. The most passionate and energetic of all the Presbyterian 4

An Ordinance presented to the House of Commons (London, 1646).

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activists was Thomas Edwards (1599–1648), and his three-part Gangraena exemplified (and helped to shape) the basic strategy of the Presbyterians. Through Gangraena, Edwards drew the public’s attention to the anarchic, seditious and immoral side of sectarian activity, presenting heresy as a social rather than an intellectual problem. As he saw it, the civil authorities needed to clamp down hard on all forms of heterodoxy rather than wasting time refuting or confuting the heretics themselves. Although he presented himself as a ‘heresiographer’ – a cataloguer and taxonomist of heresy – what Edwards offered in Gangraena was far from being a sophisticated analysis of theological variety. Instead, the work was full of shocking tales, carefully calculated to provoke the maximum outrage. He wanted to terrify the authorities in London and in Parliament into taking action and into supporting a Presbyterian Church settlement.5 As this suggests, the Presbyterians tended not to discuss either the basis of the magistrate’s authority or the definition of heresy; in general they preferred to assume that heresy was obvious to any good Christian and therefore must be suppressed. In so far as the Presbyterians did begin to justify their campaign, they tended to rely upon either the Old Testament or the obligations of the Solemn League and Covenant – the engagement to God which both the Scottish and English had sworn to fulfil in 1643. In the Old Testament, the kings and judges of Israel were often told to take stern action against those who strayed from the true religion; one particularly harsh verse is Leviticus 24:16: ‘he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death’. The Old Testament indicated clearly at several points the need for strong magisterial action against religious deviance, but without setting down explicitly the nature of that deviance. In a similar way, the Covenant committed its subscribers to a programme of religious and political reform which included ‘the extirpation of … heresy’ and all that was contrary to godliness.6 Yet although the Covenant contained strong words against heresy and blasphemy, nowhere did it indicate precisely what these ungodly opinions might look like. From the mid 1640s the Presbyterian ministers and their lay supporters in London began to describe themselves as the ‘CovenantEngaged citizens’ and to emphasise the importance of this vow.7 The clear requirements of the Covenant and the Old Testament seemed to provide firm 5 6 7

A. Hughes, Gangarena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), esp. pp. 324–5; also Coffey, ‘Ticklish Business’, pp. 108–13. S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1958), pp. 268–9. E. Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 1999), p. 301.

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grounds for establishing a religious settlement, and doing so quickly. Moreover, by appealing to these documents the Presbyterians could sidestep discussion about just what exactly constituted heresy and why the magistrate should punish it. The Blasphemy Ordinance was soon leaked to the press and it generated a heated controversy. Particularly galling to several of its opponents was the high-handed way in which the authors defined heresy and blasphemy. A spate of pamphlets portrayed the ordinance as capricious and arbitrary in its interpretations of both error and heresy. Their authors refused to accept that such rigid and unsubstantiated opinions could be imposed upon the consciences of Christians. John Goodwin, minister of Coleman Street in London and staunch opponent of any form of clerical tyranny, led the charge against the Ordinance. In Some Modest and Humble Queries (1646), he argued that many of the so-called errors of the second part had actually been held by luminaries in the Protestant firmament. Under the terms of the Ordinance, both Luther and Calvin would end up in an English prison, the first for his errors on the sacrament and the second for allowing some recreation on Sundays. This, for Goodwin, was proof positive that the Presbyterian clergy were setting themselves up as infallible interpreters of the Scripture in order to strengthen their influence in national politics.8 Goodwin’s argument received short shrift from the Presbyterians in A Vindication of a Printed Paper (1646). The author of A Vindication insisted that both the law of God and the light of nature proved it to be ‘just and necessary to preserve the honour of God from notorious violations by blasphemies and hereticall opinions’. Rejecting Goodwin’s claims about the partisan nature of the Ordinance, the author assured his readers that the Ordinance was designed ‘onely to assert the fundamentall Doctrines and Truths of Jesus Christ’. It was not necessary to be infallible in matters of religion to know with certainty that those who denied the being of God or the deity of Christ were wrong. For, the author felt, these doctrines were stated clearly by the Scriptures and could not be gainsaid by any reasonable or conscientious person.9 The definition of blasphemy was not quite so clear to MPs, however. Perhaps the case of Paul Best had caused them to reconsider just exactly what it meant to deny such doctrines as the Trinity. The Ordinance was referred to a Committee of the Whole House, which

8 9

J. Goodwin, Some Modest and Humble Queries concerning a Printed Paper (London, 1646), esp. pp. 2–3; Coffey, John Goodwin, pp. 141–2. A Vindication of a Printed Paper (1646), quotes from pp. 1, 3.

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discussed it intermittently throughout the autumn and winter of 1646. But then nothing more was done in the matter for the next twelve months.10 During 1647, the Presbyterians maintained their campaign against sectaries, radicals and heretics, but they continued to eschew any attempt at defining heresy. In December a group of London ministers composed their Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ, in which they listed the most egregious errors and heresies as evidence of the sad condition of religion in England. Parliament was then reminded that magistrates have ‘sufficient warrant from holy Scripture’ to punish all offences against both tables of the Decalogue, and exhorted to put this duty into practice. The ministers also emphasised the obligations of the Covenant which, if fulfilled, would mean an end to the ‘hideous Monster of Toleration’.11 The bulk of the document was given over to a vivid and dizzying catalogue of errors, none of which were explained or refuted and all of which were assumed to be unequivocally wrong. Heading the list of errors were quotes from John Biddle and Paul Best in which they attacked the Trinity, but the authors did not fail to include opinions which were more widely held. The words of John Goodwin and Henry Hammond both made appearances in the document for their emphasis on the role of good works in the salvation of human beings. The Testimony to the Truth was a powerful document, and among its fifty-two signatories were some of the leading ministers of the Parliamentarian cause including John Downham (1571–1652), Edmund Calamy (1600–1666) and Thomas Gataker (1574–1654). It was quickly sent out to the provinces for subscription, and copies of the petition from eleven counties and two cities were eventually printed.12 The subscribers must have been pleased when the Blasphemy Ordinance was finally passed on 2 May 1648, at a time when it was politic to appease both the Scots and the Presbyterians.13 At last it appeared to the Presbyterians as though England had stopped ignoring its obligations under the Covenant. These Presbyterian activists had portrayed blasphemy and heresy as primarily problems of social order rather than theological or doctrinal error. As such, they could be dealt with forcefully, and their perpetrators reduced to silence by the coercive power of the law. The proponents of this 10 11 12

13

Progress on the Ordinance is referred to in Perfect Occurrences of Both Houses of Parliament (27 November/4 December 1646). A Testimony to the Truth, pp. 31, 33; the Covenant is invoked between pages 26 and 35. For more details see Y. Chung, ‘Negotiating Orthodoxy: Parliament, Toleration and Godly Settlement in England, 1642–1649’, Unpublished DPhil dissertation (University of Oxford, 2007), pp. 230–1. CJ, vol. v, p. 549.

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Presbyterian policy assumed that the line between orthodoxy and heresy was clear and undisputed, and that there could be no intellectual justification for the opinions proscribed. They also assumed that the civil magistrate had a duty to punish those with heterodox opinions, a duty which sprang both from the natural law as expressed in the Ten Commandments and from the Covenant. Yet all of these assumptions were controversial, and it was through the efforts to counter them that some of the most sophisticated discussions of both orthodoxy and the relationship between Christianity and natural law took place.

ii the civil magistrate and liberty of conscience The Presbyterians were passionate and vocal in their denunciation of blasphemy, but it was their opponents who grappled most tenaciously with the problem of defining heresy and who would, in the end, focus their energies on opposing Socinianism. The attempt to suppress sects and heterodox ideas through the establishment of a coercive Presbyterian Church quickly generated a serious backlash; and by the mid 1640s there was a sizeable group of men (and some women) anxious to preserve a wider space for liberty of conscience and for the independence of particular Churches. Contemporaries recognised the existence of an Independent party opposed to the Presbyterians, within the erstwhile Parliamentarian coalition. While the Presbyterian movement attracted those laymen and clergy (especially in London) who feared the breakdown of social order, the Independents were strongly represented in the New Model Army and in the gathered churches. The Independents’ name refers to their ecclesiology, for they wanted greater autonomy for individual churches, but they were primarily a political movement, committed to imposing a more stringent settlement upon the King than that proposed by the Presbyterians. From the mid 1640s these two factions clashed repeatedly, and sometimes violently, divided as they were on both political and ecclesiastical issues.14 While the Independents proclaimed their respect for ‘tender consciences’, they did not want to tolerate all errors and opinions either within the Church or within the state. Most Independents maintained that they sought liberty only for conscientious Protestants who differed from others in disputable matters of ceremony or doctrine. Indeed, they were vehemently opposed to the free expression of ideas which were atheistical, 14

M. Mahoney, ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645–1647’, HJ 22 (1979), pp. 93–114; Morrill, ‘The Puritan Revolution’, pp. 73–9.

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blasphemous or destructive to religion itself. They were particularly conscious of the need to reiterate this point because there was a small but vocal minority of men who did want to see a much broader toleration of religious opinions, who sought liberty even for men whose religion might be considered false. This group of radical tolerationists has been studied by John Coffey, who has shown just how remarkable – and rare – their views were. Unlike the small band of English separatists, most Independents emphasised the need for a godly magistrate to take action when the fundamental principles of religion appeared to be in danger. In this respect there was common ground between the Independents and Presbyterians, although the latter wanted the magistrate to take much more aggressive action against heresy – and to do so at the behest of the ministry.15 As the Presbyterians stepped up their campaign against blasphemy and heresy, the Independents soon found that many of the beliefs and principles which they held dear were castigated as heretical and erroneous. Presbyterian publicists had denounced a wide range of opinions quite indiscriminately, lumping together views which were truly radical like anti-Trinitarianism, with mildly controversial positions on justification.16 In response, the Independents began to consider more carefully which kinds of beliefs or opinions ought to be tolerated and which outlawed. And they did so by examining the basis of coercive authority in religious matters and, in particular, the religious content of natural law or natural light. Most of the leading Independents were agreed that the job of protecting the truly conscientious and suppressing ungodly opinions fell to the magistrate. They were committed to this position from the start, taking their cue from John Cotton (1585–1652), the leading Congregationalist minister in New England. In 1644, two leading Independent ministers, Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) and Philip Nye (1595–1672), republished Cotton’s The Keys of the Kingdom with a commendatory preface. In the work itself, Cotton argued that it was the duty of the civil magistrate to maintain the civil peace – and that he must ensure ‘the establishment of pure religion, in doctrine, worship and government, according to the word of God’.17 Those who opposed this pure religion should be exposed to civil penalties, although some diversity in matters indifferent should be allowed. Many laymen concurred; the Independent grandee Viscount Saye and Sele, for 15 16 17

Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’; J. Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, HJ 41 (1998), pp. 961–85. Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 107–10. J. Cotton, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (London, 1644), p. 50.

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example, explained in his Vindiciae Veritatis the important role that the godly magistrate should play.18 As this suggests, the Independents had no desire to adopt the Socinians’ ecclesiology, in which the individual and voluntary nature of religion meant that neither clergy nor magistrate could have any real authority over men’s consciences. Although a translation of Crell’s Vindiciae pro Religionis Libertate appeared in 1646, it attracted little attention.19 Squeezed between the Presbyterians and the radical separatists, Independents needed to show why the civil authority could tolerate some, but not all, unorthodox opinions. The civil and religious spheres were widely assumed to overlap because human beings were religious creatures, naturally inclined to some form of religious worship, and some writers began to argue that it was the beliefs which contravened these natural religious inclinations which ought to be restrained. This point was made in an anonymous pamphlet of 1645, entitled The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience tenderly Stated, and probably written by the veteran MP Francis Rous (1580–1659) with some assistance from the Independent divine Joshua Sprigge (1618–1684).20 In this work Rous (assuming he was indeed the author) defended a limited liberty of conscience, guaranteed and policed by the magistrate – and the arguments he put forward would be taken up in later debates. He began from the assumption that every society had a basic knowledge of God and of the manner in which he ought to be worshipped. From the light of nature itself all peoples knew that polytheism and idolatry were wrong; even without a specific revelation they knew the duties contained in the first table of the Decalogue. As this suggests, the prohibition on images of the deity was seen as universally valid, just like the prohibitions on murder, theft and adultery in the second table; the magistrate could therefore take action against Catholics when they violated this commandment. For in every society, the magistrate had a duty to ensure that its members kept every one of the Ten Commandments. The ruler did not need to go any further in his government of the Church; indeed he ought not to impose 18 19

20

J. Adamson, ‘The Vindiciae Veritatis and the Political Creed of Viscount Saye & Sele’, Historical Research 60 (1987), pp. 45–63 at pp. 57–60. J. Crell, A Learned and Exceeding Well-compiled Vindication of Liberty of Religion (1646). According to, a copy in Trinity College Library, Cambridge (shelfmark 14.11), the translator was Stephen Anstey, a fellow of King’s College. I am grateful to Richard Serjeantson for showing me this copy. [F. Rous and J. Sprigge], The Ancient Bounds, or Liberty of Conscience, tenderly Stated, modestly Asserted, and mildly Vindicated (London, 1645); on the authorship of the pamphlet, see J. Sears McGee, ‘Francis Rous and “scabby or itchy children”: The Problem of Toleration in 1645’, HLQ 67 (2004), pp. 401–22. McGee argues convincingly that Rous was the main author but Sprigge was also involved.

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disputable opinions in worship or doctrine. All he needed to do was to ensure that the provisions of the Decalogue were kept by outlawing all blasphemous, idolatrous and scandalous opinions and this would, Rous assumed, mean that he protected all good Protestants. In a widely read pamphlet of 1645 calling for moderation between godly Protestants, the leading Independent Jeremiah Burroughes (1601–1646) made similar points. He also emphasised that it was a ‘Dictate of Nature, that Magistrates should have some power in matters of Religion.’21 Both Rous and Burroughes agreed that religion was a fundamental and universal human activity which ought to be overseen by the magistrate. Yet Rous and Burroughes were aware that their argument was incomplete in a Christian society and it was here that they began to run into difficulties. The Decalogue called for the worship of God, but it said nothing which might imply that Christianity was the one true religion. Moreover, it was a commonplace of Protestant theology that the light of nature did not reveal to men the mysteries of salvation or the incarnation of Christ. Of course, Christians did not need to rely only on natural light for they had the scriptural text, God’s word to human beings. The magistrate could, therefore, enforce not only the religious beliefs enshrined in nature, but also those clearly set out in the Gospel; indeed, the Gospel clarified some of the principles found in nature and in the Old Testament. The light stemming from the Gospel of Christ had, according to both Rous and Burroughes, the same status as the light of nature. Because the fundamental truths of Christianity, once they had been revealed, were clear and undeniable, they could be upheld by the magistrate. Rous argued that the ‘impressions [which] are made upon every naturall conscience by the Gospel’ ought to be protected by the magistrate. For him these included the Trinity even though, as he admitted, this is not ‘cruable [i.e., something that we can believe] by the light of Nature’.22 Burroughes’ argument was similar; he wrote, we have the candle of the light of nature; if we sin against that, our darknesse can be no plea for us; and if he be a professed Christian, and sinnes against the common light of Christianity, which he cannot but see, except hee will shut his eyes, he is to be dealt with as a man that sinnes against the light of nature.23

Both Burroughes and Rous held that certain Christian doctrines came under the magistrate’s cognisance once they had been revealed to the 21 22

J. Burroughes, Irenicum, to the Lovers of Truth and Peace (London, 1646), p. 23. [Rous], Ancient Bounds, p. 8. 23 Burroughes, Irenicum, p. 35.

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people. For them the civil sphere in England necessarily had a Christian dimension, for no one could deny the clear truths of Christianity without relinquishing something of his humanity. The doctrine of the Trinity was the weak point in the argument of Rous and Burroughes. They assumed that the Scripture was clear and sufficient, at least in all matters fundamental to the Christian religion – including the Trinity. The Trinity marked off the Christian religion from all others, it provided the rationale for many of the prayers used in English churches, and it prevented the kind of claims for the authority of the saints made by men like Erbery. And yet, as we have seen, it was no longer agreed to be evident in the Scriptures. Rous, Burroughes and their allies wanted a Trinitarian Church settlement to be constructed – and anti-Trinitarianism outlawed – on the basis of natural light and the scriptural text. Although they did not engage with Socinian ideas, they may have been aware that the Socinians had provided some strong arguments against the possibility of such a settlement. It was for this reason that some of their fellow Independent ministers would seek, in the 1650s, to gather support for a Trinitarian godly settlement through an attack upon Socinianism. As the writing of Rous and Burroughes suggests, those who sought limited liberty of conscience had to consider what knowledge men might have naturally of God and of how he was to be worshipped. Their thinking on this score developed in tandem with the dramatic political events of the late 1640s – and in 1647 these events moved extremely fast. In the spring and summer the Presbyterians sought to reduce and subdue the New Model Army, but their efforts backfired and the Army emerged more united and more politicised than before. Meanwhile, negotiations for settlement continued, but Charles would not accept the terms offered by Parliament or by the Army. Towards the end of 1647 he finally decided to accept the proposal made to him by the Scots, signing an Engagement with them on 26 December. His northern subjects agreed to provide him with an army which he could use to regain his English crown. Shocked and angered by this action, the English quickly made military preparations of their own. The New Model Army was once more required to fight the King and his forces, and once again it proved its worth on the battlefield. The Scottish and English Royalists were routed at the Battle of Preston, in Lancashire, on 17 August 1648. The New Model Army and its leaders had always believed that God was on their side and that their success on the battlefield bore witness to this, but their victory at Preston left them even more confident of God’s involvement in English affairs. Charles had, they thought, offended God by his actions

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and they were certain that he was responsible for the blood of God’s people spilt during the Civil Wars. By the end of 1648 the soldiers and many of the officers of the New Model Army were convinced that God wanted them to call Charles to account and to punish him. Behind this belief lay the assumption that God and his will could be known through history and through the natural concepts of justice and punishment which all men had. As we shall see in more detail later in this chapter, the Independents became much more convinced of the strong connection between the Christian religion and the natural order during the late 1640s, and more willing to interpret religion using natural light. The Presbyterians, on the other hand, remained wedded to the Covenant, which had included a commitment to the person of the king as well as to religious and political reform, on the grounds that such a sacred oath could not be violated. The Independents refused to accept this reading of the Covenant. Confident of the justice of their cause and frustrated by Presbyterian attempts to silence them, the Independents insisted that the will of God for England could not be found in the strict terms of the Covenant but instead in the principles of righteousness made clear in the Bible and known to all men. All these themes were drawn together in the Remonstrance drafted by Commissary-General Henry Ireton (1611–1651) and approved by the Council of Officers on 18 November 1648. Two days later it was laid before the House of Commons.24 The Army leaders’ religious convictions took on even greater significance in late 1648 after they seized the King, and with him the political initiative. The two Houses of Parliament, which had been terrified by the Army’s stance, had sent commissioners to treat with Charles at Newport on the Isle of Wight, in September 1648, and these negotiations had continued throughout the autumn. Charles had held his nerve, refusing to accept Parliament’s terms, hopeful that MPs and Lords would eventually agree to restore him on acceptable terms. Early in December the Army’s patience snapped – it took direct custody of the King and set up its headquarters at Whitehall. Yet still Parliament refused to abandon the treaty negotiations. Early on the morning of 5 December the Commons agreed that Charles’s latest answers were a viable basis for settlement. The Army and their radical Independent friends at Westminster could not countenance such action and on the morning of 6 December they purged Parliament. The remaining 24

P. Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, JBS 16 (1977), 41–61; [Ireton] A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord Generall of the Parliaments forces (1648); A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 420–4; D. Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), pp. 116–27.

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MPs, men sympathetic to the Army’s agenda, began to consider how Charles should be dealt with and to ensure that he was indeed brought to justice. To this end they set up a specially constituted High Court of Justice to try him. Yet there remained great uncertainty among the Army leaders and their allies as to the ideal outcome of the trial, and for most of the trial proceedings they continued to negotiate with him, perhaps hoping that even at this late stage he could be persuaded to abdicate in favour of his youngest son, Henry Duke of Gloucester (1640–1660).25 Given the pressing need to settle the country along peaceful lines, the Army’s General Council of Officers continued to meet and to consider plans for England’s future. Among the subjects up for discussion was the one that had proved so intractable for so long, the question of the power of the magistrate in matters of religion. The Independents were particularly committed to the principle that the Church should be firmly under the control of the civil magistrate and to the eradication of any kind of clerical tyranny. Given their ascendancy in late 1648, it was clear that a new Church settlement would be implemented on the authority of the magistrate, with little space for independent clerical power. The interregnum years saw the most strenuous efforts to create a settlement that would be true to the Scriptures and to the natural ideas which men had of God, and which would win the acceptance of the people of England. To make the settlement work, natural law and Christianity, reason and religion would have to be brought together. Most of the leading Independents were also strongly committed to Reformed (and Trinitarian) Christianity, and in their efforts to combine the principles of their theology with their Erastian ecclesiology they would find it helpful – indeed, often necessary – to invoke the spectre of Socinianism.

iii the whitehall debates Only after the difficulties involved in creating a Trinitarian Church settlement had been brutally exposed would Socinianism itself rise up the political agenda; and it was in the tense weeks after the purge that the Army leaders came face to face with these difficulties. Some of the Army leaders – especially Henry Ireton – began to consider exactly what the new 25

Underdown, Pride’s Purge, pp. 143–72; J. Adamson, ‘The Frightened Junto: Perceptions of Ireland, and the Last Attempts at Settlement with Charles I’, in J. Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 36–70; D. Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649 (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 186–92.

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Church settlement might look like, and they encountered resistance from men committed to a much greater degree of liberty of conscience than themselves. In particular, they realised that ensuring that the doctrine of the Trinity formed part of the doctrine of the established Church would be less than straightforward. At a series of meetings held at Whitehall in early December, the Army’s Council of Officers met to discuss a proposed new constitution, and these discussions would form the basis of later plans for Church settlement. The Whitehall debates merit our attention, for here the relationship between natural light, Scripture and liberty of conscience was analysed in the most explicit terms so far. Here, the problems involved in crafting a Trinitarian religious settlement were exposed for the first time. On the agenda at Whitehall was a constitutional proposal which had been drafted in early December by a select group of men drawn from the Army and from their civilian allies; the approach it took to liberty of conscience was striking – and highly controversial. The moving spirit behind the draft constitution was John Lilburne (1615–1657), the Leveller leader, and the committee took as the basis for their discussions the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, which had been drawn up in 1647. Lilburne had persuaded Ireton, the most intellectually astute of the senior Army officers, to involve the Army in drafting a new version of the Agreement, and on 11 December the committee’s text was submitted to the Council of Officers. The text called for a liberty of conscience which was almost complete, forbidding the magistrate from any kind of compulsion or restraint in matters of religion. All the magistrate could do was to provide some public instruction in religion which must remain voluntary. Some of the committee members, including Ireton, had already expressed their dissatisfaction with this proposal and it would prove to be one of the most divisive parts of the Agreement.26 The discussion of religion began on 14 December and from the start it was the relationship between magistrate and Church, natural law and Christianity which dominated proceedings. Although there were many participants, the central faultline lay between Ireton and the Independent divine Philip Nye on one side, and Nye’s clerical colleague John Goodwin and the Leveller John Wildman (1622–1693) on the other. Goodwin and Wildman sought to curtail the magistrate’s powers over religion, and they had the backing of many of the junior officers. Confident of their position, 26

J. Lilburne, The Legall Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived, Asserted and Vindicated (London, 1649), pp. 30–5; his, Foundations of Freedom (London, 1648), p. 11; C. Polizzotto, ‘Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648–9’, JEH 26 (1975), pp. 69–82.

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they went on the offensive; Goodwin proclaimed near the start of the debate that ‘God hath not invested any power in a civil magistrate in matters of religion.’27 Lilburne and Wildman, along with several officers, seconded this claim. But Ireton could not let it pass. He insisted that the magistrate could prevent men from breaking any of the Ten Commandments, including the first four which related to the worship of God. For, he argued, both the light of nature and the word of God in the Scriptures made clear that it was wrong to violate the Decalogue. It was not necessary to be a Christian to realise this, because there are some matters of divine worship for which, he was adamant, there is ‘a perpetual rule by the law written in men’s hearts, and a testimony left in man by nature’. Ireton added that ‘in these things the Magistrate by the light of nature he has as a man may judge’ – fundamental religious ideas were no different from other moral principles which must be upheld in a civilised society. The duty of all magistrates was to keep the peace and to preserve order in society, and this necessarily included some care of religion. Indeed, Ireton explained that the magistrate’s responsibility for basic religious practice was not tied either to his own or to his subjects’ membership of any particular Church or religious denomination. He emphasised that the magistrates of the Old Testament acted against idolatry and blasphemy as civil and not as ecclesiastical officers; the coming of Christianity had not altered the ruler’s duty in this respect.28 For him, as for Rous and Burroughes, human nature and human society had a religious core. Ireton’s argument assumed that all people could know enough about God to keep the first Four Commandments, but Goodwin and Wildman refused to accept this. Goodwin felt that the light of nature offered only the slenderest of information about the deity; though it was possible to reason from this light to a fuller conception of God, it took more time, effort and intelligence than could be expected from the average person. Wildman was even more sceptical, having given up entirely on the possibility of a coherent natural theology. For both men, the civil sphere was quite distinct from the religious. As to arguments from the Old Testament, they refused to accept that the example of the Israelites should guide their contemporaries. For if that were the case, they argued, England ought to wipe out all the Catholic and Turkish idolaters, the modern-day Canaanites, and no one was suggesting that.29 Instead, English people should heed the words of the New 27 28 29

C. H. Firth (ed.), The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke 2nd edn, 2 vols. (London, 1992), vol ii, p. 74. Ibid., pp. 112–14. Ibid., pp. 115–21; also J. Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty revisited: The case for toleration in the English Revolution’, HJ 41 (1998), pp. 961–85, esp. p. 970.

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Testament and prevent their magistrates from exercising power in matters of religion. No agreement could be reached at Whitehall and the tensions evident in these debates would be incorporated into the finished constitutional blueprint. A committee was soon formed of eighteen men, including ten moderate ministers who were in favour of some magisterial control over religion, to draft some new clauses for the Agreement. The proposal they came up with would later be accepted by the Council, and would be included in the revised version of the Agreement presented to Parliament. The first section called upon the magistrate to own, encourage and reform the Christian religion and to provide public instruction. The civil ruler was also to arrange for the confutation of error and heresy, with the implication that the magistrate would encourage a spiritual onslaught against those who objected to the public doctrine. This section would no doubt have been welcome to the conservative Independents, ensuring that the magistrate promoted religious belief without resorting to compulsion and acted against those who undermined the fundamental principles of true religion. The third clause, however, set forth a different scenario. It called upon the magistrate to protect and not restrain ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ, however differing from the doctrine, worship or discipline publickly held forth’.30 The authorities would then be able to take action only against those whose opinions were not covered by this definition, a definition whose relationship to the public profession of faith suggested by the earlier sections was left vague. This third clause may have been designed to counterbalance the first and to offer greater scope for liberty of conscience. Ireton soon saw the ambiguities of this new text when the committee’s work was placed before the Council of Officers and debated on 8 January 1649. Only a small fragment of the discussion remains, but it is clear that Ireton found the third clause much too vague. He was concerned that those who ‘do not own Jesus Christ as a second Person from the Father’ would be protected by this clause. They could argue that they fulfilled this condition by ‘acknowledging the man Jesus Christ as the person through whom God hath revealed himself’.31 The only other speaker recorded was William Erbery, whose presence – and highly heterodox Christological views – was 30 31

S. R. Gardiner, (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1958), pp. 369–70. Firth (ed.), Clarke Papers, vol. ii, p. 172; cf. I. Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 289–90.

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not likely to reassure Ireton. Ireton must have known that Erbery did not subscribe to the orthodox version of the Trinity found in the Church’s Creeds, and he was certainly aware that other ministers doubted the Athanasian doctrine. At Ireton’s own wedding in 1646 the minister officiating had been William Dell who, as we saw in the previous chapter, had begun to play down the historical role of Christ and to suggest that his death and resurrection ought to be understood in spiritual or allegorical terms. But Ireton could do little about the committee’s clause; he was well aware of the strength of opposition to his position and the consequent need to tread carefully. No further attempt at definition was made that day.32 Nevertheless, during that day’s discussion, Ireton must have found himself in a serious quandary and, as we shall see, this was a predicament which his friends would later seek to overcome by attacking Socinianism. Ireton had lectured the Army General Council on the natural and universal foundations of the magistrate’s power in religion, emphasising that it was only matters pertaining to the first table of the Decalogue that came under his aegis. Having found it difficult to persuade Goodwin and Wildman that men had any natural knowledge of God he could hardly argue that such knowledge extended to the Trinity or the divinity of Christ. And even if it were accepted that the Scriptures provided an acceptable guide for the magistrate, then it was still far from indisputable that these included the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet the concept of the Trinity was so strongly linked to the definition of idolatry and blasphemy that it could hardly be left as a matter indifferent. Ireton must have been aware that more definition was required than the Officers’ Agreement provided. A stronger religious framework was necessary but, ideally, it ought to be one which relied as far as possible on the universal, natural principles of religion and the clear words of Scripture, showing how they could be extended to support the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. Ireton’s concern to exclude anti-Trinitarianism from any Church settlement was shared by John Owen (1616–1683), a young but increasingly influential minister within the Independent camp. Owen had ministered to Ireton’s troops when they were besieging Colchester in 1648, and there Ireton had admired his fiery sermons about the judgement of God upon his enemies. Having won the respect of the Army grandees, the young chaplain 32

Firth (ed.), Clarke Papers, vol. ii, p. 173. The distance between Ireton and the junior officers on the question of toleration is shown by the surviving records of the votes cast at the end of the debates; see B. Taft, ‘Voting Lists of the Council of Officers, December 1648’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 52 (1979), pp. 138–54.

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was then asked to preach the fast sermon on the day after Charles’ execution on 30 January 1649. To the printed version he added a Discourse about Toleration. There, he argued that truth, unlike error, had a right and title to the protection and support of the civil magistrate, who should provide for true public worship and suppress that which was false. Erring persons, however, were to be dealt with by spiritual means; only when their opinions contravened Scripture and the natural principles of reason and were expressed with ‘reviling, opprobrious speeches’ could they be forcibly restrained. The example he gave here was of those who attacked the Trinity, specifically those who had called it ‘Tricipitem Cerberum’. This was unacceptable because there could be no cause to read God’s revelation in this way, no principle of reason or conscience could lead them to reject the Trinity outright. The phrase ‘three-headed cerberus’ was a reference to Michael Servetus, burnt at Geneva in 1533 for his anti-Trinitarianism, but some of Paul Best’s rhetoric echoed this sixteenth-century heretic.33 By focusing upon Servetus and those who explicitly rejected and denounced the Trinity, Owen could show that anti-Trinitarianism was beyond the pale of toleration without entering into any detailed discussion of how the doctrine might be defended on intellectual grounds. Owen’s emphasis was on persuasion rather than coercion, although the Discourse also dwelt upon the role of the magistrate in upholding and promoting the true religion. He accepted that no one would be forced to join the public Church and that it would provide for a broad spectrum of opinion in the case of those issues that could not be resolved by a combination of Scripture and the natural light shared by all mankind. But in practical terms, though, the state-supported Church would enjoy a massive advantage, for even the rival gatherings which were tolerated would not receive any positive (or financial) support from the magistrate. In effect, Owen hoped that by placing the public Church in a highly privileged position, materially and legally, its rivals would wither away, removing the need to suppress them by force. This would, he hoped, lead to godly union, as the public Church persuaded the reluctant of the truth of its broad claims.34 Indeed, his was a rather positive view of man’s natural capacities when enlightened by the Spirit, and therefore of the possibility of peaceful 33

34

W. H. Goold (ed.), The Works of John Owen 24 vols. (Edinburgh, 1850–1862), vol. viii, p. 196; in a letter to one of Calvin’s followers Servetus wrote ‘pro uno deo habetis tricepitum cerberum’ and Calvin brought this up at his trial. Wilbur, History of Unitarianism, vol. i, pp. 136, 168; Hotson, ‘Arianism and Millenarianism’, p. 27. This discourse is printed in Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. viii, pp. 163–206; see also Owen’s sermon of October 1652, esp. pp. 393–5 in the same volume, and his short tract printed under the title

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social and religious life. More broadly, the Independents’ agenda was designed to avoid coercion as far as possible, with restraint threatened only to those who blasphemed. Instead, the emphasis was on education. Men were to be encouraged to use their own natural light in order to interpret the words of God (and his providential actions) correctly. Socinianism played no explicit part in these discussion of late 1648 and early 1649. But, when the same themes re-emerged in 1652, Socinianism would be at the centre of the debate. By then, the political landscape had changed. In January 1649 Charles I had been put on trial. Refusing to plead, the King was condemned for treason and executed at the end of the month. Parliament proclaimed that England was a free state and Commonwealth, abolishing both the monarchy and the House of Lords.35 Though there were only isolated patches of military resistance in England, Ireland was still highly unstable and was almost entirely in Royalist hands. No sooner had this been dealt with by English forces than Charles Stuart, son of Charles I, managed to agree an alliance with the Scots which provided him with an army. Only with the Parliamentarian Army’s victory over Charles Stuart’s Scottish soldiers at Worcester in September 1651 was the threat from Scotland finally crushed. With the Commonwealth now at last secure from its external enemies, the possibility of reforming and settling Church government arose once more. At this point Socinianism began to be discussed in earnest as part of this ongoing quest to justify and win acceptance for a Trinitarian Church settlement. iv the racovian catechism and the humble proposals It was in February 1652 that Socinianism began to attract large-scale criticism, as part of the ongoing efforts to clarify the religious duties of the magistrate. On the 10th, John Owen arrived at Parliament’s door, accompanied by nine clerical friends and wielding a petition against a most scandalous and heretical book: the Latin Racovian Catechism. He was anxious to see action taken by Parliament on the ecclesiastical front and he knew that there would be a strong consensus among MPs against the Racovian Catechism. From this point onwards Owen was keen to link plans for a Trinitarian settlement and legislation against extreme heresy to the

35

Unto the Questions Sent Me Last Night, I Pray Accept of the Ensuing Answer, Under the Title of Two Questions Concerning the Power of the Supream Magistrate About Religion (London, 1659), and to be found in Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen vol. xiii, see esp. pp. 509–10. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 384–8.

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suppression of Socinianism, rather than any other form of heterodoxy. This was not prompted by a sudden upsurge in Socinian sentiment; instead, Owen found in Socinianism a convenient and suitably unpopular target against which he could put forward his own ecclesiastical vision. The recent publication of the Racovian Catechism by William Dugard gave Owen and his allies the ideal opportunity to urge Parliament into taking action. By the beginning of 1652 the leading Independent ministers were becoming impatient, for the purged Parliament (or the Rump, as it was now derisively known) had done little to curtail sectarianism or to support a godly ministry. The ministers wanted to suppress opinions they considered to be blasphemous and to encourage Parliament to uphold the central principles of the Christian faith. And if ever there was a work which the magistrate ought to suppress it was, they thought, the Racovian Catechism. The House evidently agreed. A lengthy statement of the errors of the Catechism, translated into English, was read out from the Committee to which the matter had been referred and on this evidence the Racovian Catechism was condemned to the fire.36 The ministers realised that such negative action was insufficient, however, and looked for more positive measures. They did not want Parliament merely to destroy this offending book, they also wanted it to step up its provision for a Christian ministry. They ensured that not only did Parliament commit itself to action against this evidence of Socinianism, but also that it created a committee to confer with the ministers and to report to the House on proposals for the propagation of the Gospel. Owen was not just reacting to Dugard’s publication or to a perceived threat of Socinianism. Although, as we shall see in the next chapter, he had become concerned about Socinian theology, the petition against the Racovian Catechism in 1652 is best understood as part of a broader strategy designed to counter certain native forms of heteredoxy rather than heretical ideas imported from the continent. The Racovian Catechism was not a new work, it had been circulating in various forms for some time and the version issued by Dugard had been licensed back in 1650, although it seems not to have been published until much later. Martin Dzelzainis has even suggested that the Racovian Catechism was issued early in 1652 precisely because Dugard and his friends feared an imminent clampdown by the ministers.37 It is quite possible that the ministers’ action had been planned for early February independently of the publication of the Racovian Catechism, for many of the leading officers and chaplains of the New Model Army were 36

CJ, vol. vii, pp. 86, 113.

37

Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Anti-Trinitarianism’.

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already in London for the funeral of Henry Ireton. The funeral itself took place on 6 February and it was a grand affair, involving a procession complete with heralds and trumpets.38 Owen had been right at the centre of events, preaching the funeral sermon for his late friend.39 Since Ireton’s own support for a limited liberty of conscience had been made abundantly clear in late 1648, Owen may have hoped to capitalise on the funeral and to persuade Ireton’s friends and admirers to support his project. If so, the recent publication of the Racovian Catechism must have seemed a godsend. Action against sectarian and heterodox beliefs could be dressed up as a response to a continental heresy which most people considered shocking. When Owen and his ministerial allies offered their positive proposals to Parliament, it was clear that their concerns spread far beyond Socinianism. The Humble Proposals were first printed just one month after the ministers’ petition of February 1652, and were subscribed by the same set of clergymen. The title page advertised the twin aims of the document: to ‘supply all Parishes in England with able, godly and Orthodox Ministers’ and to prevent the airing of ‘dangerous Errors and Blasphemies’ in public meetings. To this end the proposals outlined a process by which clergy could be approved before they received any public money, and called for the registration of any religious meeting led by men outside the public ministry.40 At the same time the ministers also began to discuss a statement of fundamental beliefs which would provide the doctrinal foundations of the public Church; the second edition of the Humble Proposals, printed in December 1652, contained a set of statements against which no one was to preach or teach. According to the printed version, these were principles ‘without the belief of which, the Scriptures doe plainly and clearly affirme, Salvation is not to be obtained’. The ministers called upon the magistrate to suppress those who taught anything contrary to these principles, thereby suggesting that they could form the basis of legislation against heresy as well as a test of orthodoxy for prospective ministers.41 The principles included provisions designed to exclude anti-Trinitarians and Roman Catholics, but among Protestants, they permitted a fairly broad range of opinions. Concerning the vexed question of justification, for example, it was merely stated ‘that we are 38 39 40 41

H. Stanford London, ‘The Heralds’ Tabards under the Commonwealth’, Notes and Queries 198 (1953), pp. 276–7. The sermon was printed as The Labouring Saints Dismission to Rest (London, 1652). The Humble Proposals of Mr Owen, Mr Tho. Goodwin, Mr Nye, Mr Sympson and Other Ministers (London, 1652). This was entitled Proposals for the Furtherance and Propagation of the Gospel in This Nation (London, 1653). (George Thomason corrected the date on his copy to 1652.)

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justified and saved by Grace, and faith in Jesus Christ, and not by workes’.42 Even an Arminian could have endorsed such a statement. Owen and his friends wanted to reassure their contemporaries that it was the extreme heresies – notably Socinianism – that they were worried about, not the lesser errors of their brethren. In the list of doctrinal fundamentals, however, their focus was not so much on the errors and heresies of the Socinians, but rather a certain kind of disruptive anti-Trinitarianism that we have seen championed by men like William Erbery. Spiritual re-interpretations of the Trinity were seen as increasingly dangerous, as tales multiplied of men – and even women – claiming divine authority for themselves. Such ideas posed a threat to theological and social stability far greater than anything to be found in the Racovian Catechism. The Rump had passed a Blasphemy Act designed to outlaw certain extreme opinions, particularly those associated with the Ranters, and the doctrinal fundamentals of December 1652 would certainly have tightened the legislative provisions against this kind of heresy. Yet judging by the content of the propositions of Owen and his allies, it is clear that their primary purpose was to prevent claims to divine authority or for the merging of the saint with the Godhead. Among the statements to be upheld by the magistrate were: that ‘God … is eternally distinct from all the creatures in his being and blessedness’ and that ‘Christ … remains for ever a distinct person from all Saints and Angels, notwithstanding their union and communion with him’.43 These phrases had nothing to do with Socinianism and they seem to be directed against William Erbery, the popular and influential Army chaplain who had apparently preached that ‘fulnesse of the Godhead … dwells bodily in the saints’, not against any Socinians.44 It may be that Owen used the petition against the Racovian Catechism to avoid any direct confrontation with the influential Welsh chaplain and his sympathisers. The Independent ministers hoped to minimise confrontation with English radicals by focusing on the Racovian Catechism. Since the Socinians were almost universally decried in England, the ministers assumed that their denunciation of the Catechism would go unchallenged. Yet if they wanted the magistrate to ban Socinianism, they still had to show why it ran counter to the universal principles of conscience and the consensus of all good Christians. They could not escape the problem which had plagued them since at least the mid 1640s, that is, the problem of bringing specifically Christian doctrines under the magistrate’s cognisance, especially when these 42 44

Proposals for the Furtherance, p. 17. 43 Ibid., pp. 8, 15. [Cheynell], An account given to the Parliament p. 30.

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doctrines were far from clearly stated in the Scriptures. Owen and his allies would have to show that doctrines like the Trinity and the Atonement were obvious to all conscientious readers of the scriptural text if they were to win over the small but vocal group of men who, from at least 1646, had objected to the imposition of disputed doctrines on Christian consciences. They felt that the Racovian Catechism was a useful foil in demonstrating not only the truth of the Trinity, but also of Reformed Christianity as these ministers understood it. It was by engaging with Socinianism that they hoped to deal with the problems involved in defining liberty of conscience. If Owen’s intention in 1652 was to keep controversy to a minimum, he was soon disappointed. Almost immediately, the Humble Proposals provoked intense hostility, not from anyone seeking to defend Socinian ideas, but from those utterly opposed to such magisterial intervention in matters of conscience. The more extreme proponents of toleration realised that they could no longer rely upon the Independent divines for support, and they orchestrated a campaign against the Humble Proposals. This campaign was masterminded by that indefatigable proponent of liberty of conscience, Roger Williams (1606–1683). He drew in the MP Sir Henry Vane junior (1613–1662), Marchamont Nedham (1620–1678), the leading government journalist, and even John Milton. All these men insisted that religion must be free from state control and looked for the separation of the Church from the state. On these grounds they objected to any set of proposals for defining orthodoxy, arguing that it was a restriction upon individuals’ freedom to judge for themselves in theology and in religion. These radical tolerationists made their case in printed pamphlets and manuscript petitions. Several pamphlets repeated that the magistrate was charged only with the protection of the outward man and insisted that conscience must always be left under the authority of Christ alone. The doctrinal fundamentals were particularly unpalatable, because they implied a single, static interpretation of God’s word. For Williams, the very notion that any group could set themselves up as official exponents of the word of God was anathema; it was a high road to spiritual tyranny and theocracy against which God had warned his people repeatedly.45 The fundamentals listed by the Independent ministers were supposed to be non-controversial, but Williams and his allies were not convinced that the Scriptures were so unequivocal. One opponent of the Humble Proposals attacked the ministers’ support for the Trinity, which he considered to be a 45

C. Polizotto, ‘The Campaign against the Humble Proposals of 1652’, JEH 38 (1987), pp. 569–81; Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Anti-Trinitarianism’, pp. 179–80.

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particularly obscure doctrine and hardly necessary for salvation. In Severall Queries, an anonymous tract which came out in April 1652, the author pointed to the shaky scriptural foundations of the Trinity, insisting that a ‘pretended consequence from a doubtfull text’ was not sufficient to establish the articles necessary for salvation. Furthermore, he went on, it was not clear that either Christ or the Apostles required from their converts belief in the Trinity – a precedent which he thought the Independent ministers would do well to heed.46 This author resisted the attempt made by Rous and Sprigge in Ancient Bounds, and by Owen, to portray belief in the Trinity as a natural and necessary consequence from the Scripture. Although there is no evidence that the author had come across any Socinian writing, the notion that Christianity was not inherently Trinitarian was gaining ground. Two months later, in mid June, Sir Henry Vane junior published his contribution to this debate, Zeal Examined, and again the doctrine of the Trinity was challenged. Vane insisted that men had such a slender natural knowledge of God that they knew only that they should worship one God – natural light told them nothing about how this should be done. They certainly could not know anything of the Trinity, which was in any case a complicated concept which relied on some heavily contested terms, such as person and essence. Vane realised that discord over the Trinity made it impossible to define idolatry, and from this he concluded that extensive toleration was necessary. If the magistrate was allowed to restrain those who practised idolatry, as Rous (for example) had suggested, then the definition of idolatry could always be extended so as to include an almost infinite range of theological positions. Charges and counter-charges of idolatry would fly around, and persecution would continue. As he put it, those that understand not the term Person as it is applied to the Trinity, in that curious Metaphysical sense which some speak of, will call all others Idolaters that use that terme … and so of every Difference among us, we should still charge one another with Idolatry, to act the same thing of persecution under that name, which hath hitherto been acted under the names of heresie and schism.47

Fundamentally, Vane refused to allow that the magistrate could judge in these matters, for they were beyond the comprehension of natural men. For him, the only thing which the light of nature said about God was that he wanted people to do to others as they would be done to, and that this did 46 47

Severall Queries now Published and Propounded to be Considered of By All, especially, of Those which Assume a Power of Propagating the Gospell (London, 1652), pp. 1–2. [H. Vane], Zeal Examined (London, 1652), p. 13 (see also pp. 9–11). For Vane’s authorship of the tract, see Polizzotto, ‘Campaign against the Humble Proposals’, pp. 579–80.

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not include persecution for their beliefs. There simply was no agreed doctrinal core that could be upheld by the magistrate from either the Scriptures or the light of nature. The Independent ministers preferred not to reply to these criticisms, but Owen did begin to construct a strong argument against Socinianism which will be outlined in the next chapter. Meanwhile, he and his friends continued to encourage the authorities to implement the Humble Proposals. Parliament proved reluctant, however, and by the autumn of 1652 the ministers were becoming ever more anxious. In October, Owen preached before Parliament and called upon MPs to promote the work of God and to propagate the Gospel, tasks which he feared they had been neglecting. He felt that they needed to be reminded ‘to take care that the faith which you have received … may be protected, preserved, propagated to and among the people which God hath set you over’. The magistrate, he argued, had a paternal power over the people, and just as a father was bound to educate his children in the Christian faith, so the magistrate was bound to educate his subjects. As Owen was at pains to stress, however, this did not mean that the magistrate could claim any spiritual power.48 Yet Parliament did not respond to Owen’s sermon immediately, and it was not until February 1653 that the Humble Proposals were resurrected. In that month the first eleven proposals were brought before the House; and, revealingly, the controversial clause calling for conformity to the fundamentals of faith had been dropped. Even then, the House proceeded at a very slow pace and by April it had only reached the third clause.49 With the revival of the Proposals in Parliament, John Goodwin moved to denounce them again in his Thirty Queries of March 1653. This time he provoked a response and the anonymous author of the ironically titled An Apologie for Mr Iohn Goodwin sought to answer Goodwin’s challenge. The author insisted that the magistrate was able to make religious legislation because he had power from the natural law. Indeed, the magistrate lay under a duty to use that power to ensure that religion was upheld and blasphemy suppressed. The magistrate could do this, the author went on, because he could be assured of some religious truths; he could be certain, for example, that idolatry was against the light of nature.50 Goodwin claimed that the pamphlet was written by someone close to the ministers, ‘a Graceling of the Greatness of this World’, perhaps even someone close to 48 49 50

Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. viii, p. 386. B. Worden, Rump Parliament 1648–1653 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 326–7. Anon., An Apologie for Mr Iohn Goodwin (London, 1653), pp. 5–6.

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Nye. If so, the pamphlet reveals much about the way in which the ministers sought to undergird their arguments with the language of natural law.51 In reply, Goodwin pointed to the central problem with his opponent’s argument. He asked the Apologist to consider whether ‘the teachings of the Law of nature in this great Affair of Christian Religion, [are] as complete and absolute, as the teachings of the Scripture’, but he quickly went on to add that this was a proposition ‘which (I know) is none of my Apologists thoughts’. That being so, Goodwin asked the Apologist to determine which parts of Christian teaching were replicated by the law of nature, and then to confine the magistrate to the protection of these.52 If magisterial intervention in religious affairs were to be justified by the Independent ministers on natural law grounds, from the natural and universal duty that all rulers had to uphold religion and suppress blasphemy, then the ministers needed to show how the central Christian doctrines could be clearly known to all men. Even if the ministers confined themselves to asking the magistrate to protect only those doctrines which were evident to all who read the Scripture, they still faced a difficult task. For, as these chapters have shown, it was becoming increasingly difficult to claim that even such doctrines as the Trinity and the atonement of Christ were undisputed Christian verities. Defining the limits of toleration in this period was no easy task and in the next chapter the importance of Socinianism in continuing efforts to solve this problem will be discussed further. The boundaries of any Church settlement must exclude the tenets contained in documents such as the Racovian Catechism, or so most Englishmen thought, but they must do so by showing why they these tenets were wrong and why the magistrate ought to have power to curb them. Yet, as we have seen, the problems involved in demonstrating the errors of the heterodox – and particularly the antiTrinitarians – were not insignificant, nor was it a straightforward matter to explain why they should not be tolerated within England. With the dissolution of the Rump Parliament by Oliver Cromwell on 20 April 1653, the question of toleration was temporarily shelved as the Army and its allies struggled to find a new form of constitutional settlement for the country. But it did not disappear. After the establishment of the Protectorate in late 1653, Owen and Thomas Goodwin would emerge as two of the new regime’s leading clergymen. As we shall see in the next chapter, they resumed their 51

52

J. Goodwin, The Apologist Condemned: or, A Vindication of the Thirty Queries (London, 1653), p. 1. (See also p. 23, where Goodwin quotes the apologist’s phrase ‘come yet a little nearer’ and adds ‘even as Nye as you will’.) Goodwin, The Apologist Condemned, p. 18.

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efforts to persuade English men and women that Socinianism was a serious threat to the religion of the nation and that their own brand of Reformed theology was the only real remedy. To their distress, however, they found that many of their contemporaries, far from sharing their views, were beginning to see the attractions of some aspects of Socinian thought, and that the task of building a consensus against the Socinians was likely to be an uphill struggle.

chapter 8

Socinianism and the Cromwellian Church settlement

In 1652, John Owen and his fellow Independent ministers had assumed that Socinian ideas found little support in England, yet by 1655 they feared that this Polish heresy was infiltrating England, rivalling the appeal of true Reformed theology. The Independents recognised that the Socinians offered a new approach to the scriptural text, which supported a new interpretation of Christianity, and they realised that this alternative reading could seriously damage their plans for a Church settlement. At the same time, however, they believed that by demonstrating the errors and absurdities of the Socinians they could prove the superiority of their own version of Christianity. Whereas in 1652 they had used a petition against the Racovian Catechism to bolster support for a Trinitarian settlement, by the middle of the 1650s they were more ambitious, hoping to discredit several theological positions at once by associating them with Socinianism. Yet Owen and his friends also became genuinely anxious about the spread of Socinian ideas – and there was some truth in their fears. There is evidence from this period for positive engagement with Socinian ideas, but most especially with Socinian ideas as they were mediated through the Remonstrant tradition. The result was a clash between different views of what constituted a ‘reasonable’ reading of Scripture – a clash that damaged the prospects for Church settlement in the short term, but which also revealed some serious tensions within English Reformed theology and intellectual culture. In the early 1650s, the future of the English Church was far from clear and it was in this atmosphere of uncertainty that concern over Socinianism flourished. In April 1653 Cromwell had dissolved the Rump Parliament while it was still considering the Humble Proposals (the projected religious settlement of Owen and his allies). Eight months later, after a brief constitutional experiment with a nominated Parliament, Cromwell himself was formally installed as Lord Protector under terms laid out in a written constitution, the Instrument of Government. The religious clauses of the Instrument were based heavily on the Officers’ Agreement of the People, 205

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from 1649, and they offered liberty to all those who professed ‘faith in God through Jesus Christ’.1 With Owen and the Independent ministers, Cromwell sought to unite the godly within a broad ecclesiastical framework, a framework established and policed by the magistrate. Unity would, they hoped, be maintained by shared commitment to the central principles of Reformed theology. The Independents who held the reins of power in the 1650s wanted to rely upon the scriptural text for their theological principles, for they remained opposed to strong clerical power.2 Yet they knew how difficult it was to demonstrate that the scriptural text supported the doctrine of the Trinity, let alone the increasingly controversial doctrine of justification by faith alone. Owen in particular hoped that his campaign against Socinianism would demonstrate the destructive consequences which would follow if the principles of Calvinist theology were abandoned. English theology was in flux in the 1650s – with many of those disillusioned by Calvinism turning to Remonstrant and even Socinian theology for inspiration. Socinian theology and biblical scholarship were central to religious debate in England at this time, but the full impact of Socinianism cannot be understood if Socinianism is defined too restrictively. Some people were attracted to Socinus’ writing and to the interpretation of Christianity laid out in the Racovian Catechism, but Socinianism had developed since the original publication of the Catechism in 1609 – and in a direction which brought it closer to Protestant theology. Moreover, a distinctive strand of thought containing some of the Socinians’ central tenets persisted within the Remonstrant community, particularly in the writings of Episcopius and Grotius; and the writing of these Remonstrants circulated widely in the 1650s. Any assessment of the impact of Socinianism needs, therefore, to take into account the full range of Socinian writing and the Socinian strand to Remonstrant theology; only then can the importance of Socinian ideas both for the Cromwellian Church settlement and for the future of English theology be properly assessed. Socinianism in England should not be associated exclusively with the small circle around John Biddle, the idiosyncratic Unitarian theologian whom we encountered in Chapter 5, for such a narrow focus misses both the extent of contemporary engagement with Socinianism, and contemporary anxieties over its spread. 1 2

Gardiner (ed.), Documents of the Puritan Revolution, p. 416. On the Church settlement, see J. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History 85 (2002), pp. 18–40; S. Cook, ‘The Congregational Independents and the Cromwellian Constitutions’, Church History 46 (1977), pp. 335–57; P. Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor, Educator, Theologian (Exeter, 1971), pp. 91–4.

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The controversy over Socinianism in the 1650s was a battle for the future direction of English theology. Owen and his Independent allies wanted to persuade Englishmen to read the Scripture so that it would yield Reformed (and Trinitarian) theology, and to secure Reformed doctrine with a strict confession of faith for the public Church. They failed to implement any such statement; and without a confession, the Independent ministers could not ensure that all ministers held – and taught – sound Reformed doctrine. As the decade wore on, Owen became increasingly concerned that clergymen and university students – the ministers of the future – read the scripture in a way which he considered dangerously close to Socinianism. This chapter will examine the reasoning behind Owen’s concerns, and his response to this nascent Socinianism.

i john owen and socinianism When Owen brought to Parliament the petition against the Racovian Catechism in February 1652, he was only just beginning to realise how dangerous Socinian ideas could be to his own ecclesiastical project. For several years Owen had been concerned about the spectre of Socinianism, but he had assumed it was little more than a variant of Arminianism; proponents of both positions angered him because they rejected the Calvinist scheme of justification by faith alone and insisted that men and women had a role to play in their own salvation.3 In the early 1650s, however, Owen came to see that Socinus’ ideas were in fact much more alarming than anything Arminius had written. For, he thought, Socinus’ writing not only attacked Reformed views of justification – it also undermined those principles on which religious unity in England was to be based. Socinus had insisted that Christianity was an ethical religion, which demanded good works from all its adherents, and he had also denied that men had any natural knowledge of the deity, emphasising instead the role of the historical Christ in revealing the will of God. Owen quickly came to see that this aspect of Socinus’ writing – his sharp separation between Christianity and the natural ideas of humans – was potentially the most damaging of all to his own plans for the English Church. It implied that religion was an individual and voluntary matter which need not concern the magistrate and it suggested that humans could live quite independently of God or religion. At the same time, however, Owen could count on a strong 3

In his Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesu or The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (London, 1648), printed in Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. x, pp. 139–428, Owen refers to the Socinians only in passing.

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native opposition to Socinianism and to this particular dimension of the Polish group’s ideas. Owen saw that by denouncing Socinianism, he could emphasise the natural knowledge of religion which all men had, thereby defending the role of the civil magistrate in ecclesiastical affairs, and he could suggest that this natural knowledge pointed to a Reformed understanding of Christianity. As we shall see, Socinianism was an important polemical weapon for Owen between 1651 and 1655 although, as the 1650s progressed, he also became genuinely concerned about the spread of Socinian ideas in England. As one of the ministers closest to the leaders of the New Model Army, Owen was deeply involved in all official plans for Church settlement in the 1650s and his passionate engagement with Socinianism has to be seen in this light. Owen had been a committed participant in the Second Civil War, and in March 1649 he was appointed an official preacher to the Council of State. Owen did not stay long in England, however, for his services were soon needed in Ireland and then in Scotland, where he served in both cases as chaplain to Cromwell and his troops. Only in early 1651 did Owen finally return to England, and from this point he began to help co-ordinate the efforts of the Independent ministers to set up a religious settlement under the aegis of Parliament. Owen sought to promote a Church settlement which was Congregationalist and Erastian in structure, and united around the central doctrine of justification by faith alone. He hoped that English men and women would join this Church willingly, convinced of the truth of its message, and for this reason education was an important element of the Independents’ agenda. Here again Owen played a leading role, for he was sent by Parliament to Oxford University to win the students’ hearts and minds to godly religion and to the Commonwealth’s cause. In March 1651 he was made Dean of Christ Church and then, in the autumn of 1652, he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the university.4 Owen used his position at Oxford to denounce the Socinians and, like Prideaux and Barlow before him, he did so in order to promote his own religious agenda. He produced two significant refutations of Socinian ideas, the Diatriba de Iustitia Divina (Dissertation on Divine Justice) (1653) and the Vindiciae Evangelium (Defence of the Gospel) (1655). Because Owen believed that the public Church must be both Reformed and non-coercive, he was anxious to show the students at Oxford, and the wider public, the truth and the coherence of his own theology. In both works he took the Socinians to task for denying the natural conceptions of God which all men 4

Toon, God’s Statesman, p. 42; Greaves, ‘John Owen’, ODNB.

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shared, arguing that this refusal to accept the verdict of both reason and common consent lay at the heart of their heresy. But the Socinians were not the only targets of his works. Owen was keen to demonstrate that true theology depended upon a correct understanding of those natural principles – and he feared that too many English theologians, even on the Reformed side, had failed to grasp this connection. Instead, they portrayed God as unknowable or they offered a misleading account of his justice. By 1655, as we shall see, Owen was particularly concerned about the new vogue for historical theology, exemplified by Grotius’ Annotationes, for this approach entailed the rejection of those universal natural principles on which Owen’s theology depended. Owen launched his critique of Socinianism in a series of lectures in Oxford between November 1652 and March 1653; the lectures provoked a storm of controversy, prompting Owen to issue the Diatriba de Iustitia Divina, a long Latin account of his opinions.5 In the Diatriba, Owen hoped to persuade his readers and students of the importance of men’s natural knowledge of God – and to explain why this knowledge pointed to a Reformed understanding of justification by faith alone. He argued that all human beings had natural knowledge of a deity who punished evil and that such universal notions could give real insight into the nature of God. Moreover, this natural knowledge was of what he called the ‘vindicatory’ justice of God, that is, the kind of justice which must see that sin is punished and which cannot allow malefactors to go free without requiring satisfaction. Owen pointed to the widespread practice of sacrifice, suggesting that this practice revealed men’s common belief that the deity insisted upon atonement and expiation for the sins of human beings.6 Of course, the Bible provided the only real explanation of the means by which this atonement could be made, but human beings did not need the Bible to see that some form of expiatory sacrifice had to be made for their wrongdoings. On these grounds, Owen could argue that the Socinians were wrong to suggest that God could forgive sins freely, without requiring satisfaction.7 Men could only be saved though Christ’s redemptive death and through the free decision of God to accept that sacrifice as payment for their sins. For Owen, the only route to justification lay through the cross. The Diatriba was a remarkable work and it signalled an important shift in Owen’s thinking. In his works of the 1640s, Owen had been extremely sceptical about the possibility of any natural knowledge of God or his 5 6

The Diatriba is printed in Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. x, pp. 481–624. Ibid., pp. 517–41. 7 Ibid. esp. pp. 561–4.

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attributes, but now natural knowledge provided the core of his argument. Indeed, in the Diatriba Owen drew heavily on the Thomist natural law tradition.8 His shift seems to have been prompted by the delicate political and ecclesiastical situation in which Owen found himself. He needed to show not only the truth of the doctrines of justification by faith alone and of the Trinity, but he also needed to show why the magistrate – and not an assembly of clerics – could promote and uphold such doctrines. Tying his religious views to the innate sentiments of all mankind enabled him to explain why all people could and should accept Reformed theology, without the need for any special or esoteric skills possessed only by clergymen. This last point was important, because there were plenty of Presbyterian clerics who believed that only a synod could determine doctrine and who objected to the firm grip of the civil authorities on religious affairs. One of the leading representatives of this school of thought was the Scottish divine Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), who was among the most committed adherents to the Covenant and a man who refused to accept the legitimacy of any nonPresbyterian Church settlement. Owen attacked Rutherford’s recent Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia (1649), arguing that he (Rutherford) seemed to make God’s ways arbitrary and unknowable, at least to laymen. For if this were so, Owen thought, then it would be impossible to show why the Socinians were wrong or to exclude them from the public Church.9 Owen’s colleague at Oxford, Thomas Goodwin, also began to take Socinianism seriously in the 1650s – and to construct his own theology as a remedy for Socinian error. Goodwin had seen the impact of Socinianism upon young minds at first hand, for one of the students at Magdalen College, Zachary Mayne (1631–1694), declared himself in 1651 to be ‘of the Socinian Persuasion’. Mayne’s Socinian phase did not last long, partly because he was dissatisfied with Biddle’s ‘odd notions’, though Mayne continued to entertain doubts about Reformed theology. These doubts were eased by his conversations with Goodwin, the President of his college, and later in life Mayne even wrote a defence of the deity of 8

9

For a discussion of this shift in theological terms, see C. Trueman, ‘John Owen’s Dissertation on Divine Justice: An Exercise in Christocentric Scholasticism’, Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998), pp. 87–103, and Wallace, Puritans and Predestination, pp. 150–5. Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. x, pp. 607–18; S. Rutherford, Disputatio scholastica de divina providentia (Edinburgh, 1649), Owen’s discussion focused on pp. 348–55 of this work. For Rutherford’s faith in the power of a synod to interpret Scripture, see the prefatory epistle to his Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London, 1648). For the conflict in Rutherford’s thought between nature and grace, see J. Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 248–50.

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Christ.10 Around this time, in the early 1650s, Goodwin began to write a system of theology which would bring together those principles he considered important, including the Trinity and justification by faith – and would show just how erroneous the Socinians’ ideas were. Although most of Goodwin’s writing was published by his son in the 1680s and 1690s, Thomas Lawrence has shown how much was composed during the 1650s – and how important Goodwin believed the task of refuting the Socinians to be. According to Lawrence, Goodwin’s work may have been conceived as the pastoral response to Socinianism, complementing Owen’s academic and polemical version.11 Much of the polemical force and the coherence of Goodwin’s works has been lost, for they suffered from the heavy editorial hand of his son. Yet the basic outlines of Goodwin’s theology remain clear. Goodwin insisted that all men were aware of their own guiltiness and of the wrath of God which must consequently lie upon them. Indeed, original sin, for which eternal damnation was the punishment, was the precondition for Goodwin’s claims about Christ, whom he saw as a divine mediator who became incarnate and died to atone for the sins of the world. As this suggests, Goodwin shared Owen’s belief that all people were aware, however dimly, of a divine figure who must punish them for their many transgressions.12 Goodwin was not so aggressive in his treatment of the Socinians as Owen, and he certainly had other opponents in mind as well as this Polish sect. Yet the projects of the two men are quite similar, for both sought to show that religion, as described in the Scriptures and confirmed by universal human sentiments, centred around the doctrines of the satisfaction of Christ and the Trinity. In the early 1650s it became clear to Owen and Goodwin that Socinian theology began from a very different starting point to their own. The Calvinists assumed that all human beings were sinful and that they wanted to find, as Owen later put it, some means of atoning for ‘that guilt which naturally they are sensible of’.13 Because humans were so deeply entangled in sin, their only means of redemption came through Christ’s death and through the free decision of God to apply the benefits of Christ’s death to them. These fundamental principles guided the way in which Owen and 10 11 12

13

Z. Mayne, The Snare Broken (London, 1692); see p. 5 for his account of the Socinian phase. T. Lawrence, ‘Transmission and Transformation: Thomas Goodwin and the Puritan Project 1600–1704’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2002), esp. pp. 44–9. See especially Goodwin’s treatises ‘An Unregenerate Man’s Guiltiness before God’ and ‘Of Christ the Mediator’, which comprise volume iii of The Works of Thomas Goodwin, D.D 5 vols. (London, 1681–1704). Lawrence discusses these works in ‘Transmission and Transformation’, pp. 41–4. Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xvi, p. 338.

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Goodwin interpreted the Scriptures, and they could assume that every verse had some connection to this great plan of redemption. The Socinians, of course, dismissed these ideas and preferred to believe that God dealt with individuals on their own merits. Yet there were also people in the middle, like Arminius, who had sought to find some place for human effort, and like Rutherford, who denied that men knew how God’s justice operated. Owen and Goodwin rejected both positions, and feared that those writers and theologians who did not adhere to their general scheme would either fall into Socinian heresy themselves or, at the very least, fail to protect the Church from such heresy. ii socinianism and remonstrantism in the 1650s Although Owen charged some of his fellow theologians with aiding and abetting the Socinians in 1653, it was only after the publication of the Diatriba that he became convinced that Socinianism was actually spreading in England. Certainly there is some evidence from this period for an increasing engagement with Socinian ideas, while Remonstrant writing (which was in places quite similar to Socinianism) also gained ground. The 1650s saw a growing disillusionement with Calvinism, particularly Calvinist ideas about justification by faith alone, and the ethical interpretation of Christianity found in both Socinian and Remonstrant writing found a sympathetic audience. Henry Hammond, as we have seen, had been successfully promoting a moral theology quite similar to the Socinians’ for some years. But whereas Hammond maintained Socinus’ separation between nature and Christianity in order to defend the independence of the English Church, many of those who read Remonstrant or Socinian writing preferred to align religion and nature more closely, insisting that all men had an immortal soul and some natural sense of religion. Moreover, few English theologians were willing to accept even Remonstrant ideas wholeheartedly, and they were much more anxious than their Remonstrant contemporaries to defend the Trinity and the immortality of the soul. Indeed, they preferred to see the Remonstrants as the heirs of a solidly Protestant Arminius who had sought only to show that humans played some small part in their own salvation. By the early 1650s it was much easier to get hold of Socinian texts and this certainly helped to encourage interest in the Socinians’ ideas. The Racovian Catechism had been issued by William Dugard in 1651; although it was ordered to be burnt, only a few copies seem to have been consigned to the flames. Moreover, Biddle’s English translation appeared in the

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summer of the same year, making this central Socinian text available to a wider public. English readers also benefitted from Dutch printing activity; in 1642 Volkelius’ De Vera Religione had been reprinted twice in Amsterdam and from there it could easily reach an English audience. In the same city, a new edition of Crell’s Ethica Christiana was printed in 1650, and this generated plenty of excitement. The physician Benjamin Worsley (1618–1673) announced from Amsterdam to his friend Robert Boyle (1627–1691) that Crell hath collected all the com[m]ands and precepts almost in Scripture that concerne the doing of any moral duty, or abstaining from any moral evil, and hath handled them and compiled them under an Ethica Christiana w[hi]ch booke truly is much pleasure … There are many Copies of them sent into Engl[and].14

Those unable to buy their own copies could have consulted the 1635 version of Crell’s ethics in the Bodleian from 1652. In that year, the library received two gifts of £10 each and used them both to buy a large collection of Socinian books. The Register of Benefactions records the purchase of fifty works written by Socinus or his followers, although the details surrounding the purchase remain mysterious. This was a large addition to the library and the sudden acquisition of so many heretical books must have generated at least some interest. Oxford academics were now well equipped to judge the ideas of the Polish group for themselves.15 As Worsley’s comments show, some Socinian writing was admired because it encouraged virtue and because the teaching it contained was securely grounded in Scripture. We do not know Boyle’s reaction to Crell’s Ethica, but we do know that by 1659 he had come to admire the prominent Socinian writer Jonasz Schlichting. Boyle recognised that Schlichting had modified Socinus’ theology in significant ways, giving much greater weight to the role of divine grace in assisting the sinner. He praised the Polish nobleman because he ‘labours to reconcile Socinus his Doctrine with the Freenesse of Gods Grace’; to Boyle, Schlichting had struck an acceptable balance between individual effort and divine assistance in the process of man’s redemption.16 The second-generation Socinians, like Crell and Schlichting, were more comfortable with the concept of divine grace than Socinus had been and they did not share Socinus’ belief that such grace 14 15 16

B. Worsley to R. Boyle, 18/28th May, 1649, Royal Society MSS, Boyle Letters 7.1 1B, reprinted in Hartlib Papers. Bodleian Library, Register of Benefactions, pp. 371–4. R. Boyle, Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (London, 1659), p. 115.

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would undermine human freedom.17 Their efforts to combine grace and human freedom may have made them more acceptable to English readers, many of whom were involved in a similar project. A similar view of the importance of human effort could be found in Remonstrant writing, and this also became more prominent in the 1650s. Episcopius drew heavily on the second-generation Socinians, and his understanding of justification, the process by which men were reconciled to God, was strikingly similar to that found in De Vera Religione. Episcopius, like Crell and Volkelius, insisted that the New Covenant was conditional and that Christians who hoped to benefit from it must repent of their sins and practise obedience to the commands it contained. Though God would assist all Christians with his grace, the responsibility for their own salvation lay largely with themselves. But Episcopius had also been influenced by Arminius and he still insisted that Christ had died to atone (at least in some sense) for the sins of mankind. The Arminian element to Episcopius’ writing may have helped to make his ideas more palatable to an English audience.18 The Remonstrant leader’s views on justification became well known once an edition of his works came out in 1650, and this edition found many sympathetic readers. In particular, the Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, John Wilkins (1614–1672), and his many friends were said to have ‘read Episcopius much’.19 And this admiration does appear to have begun in the 1650s; by 1655 Robert Boyle, at Oxford with Wilkins, saw Episcopius as ‘one of the best Elenchtical [i.e., critical] Writers ag[ainst] Papists’.20 When the second and final part of Episcopius’ collected works was printed in 1665, the editor Arnold Poelenburgh (1628–1666) included a dedication to all the clergy of England, especially those of the universities. Their Church was, he claimed, ‘chief among Reformed Churches’ – and not least because they agreed on so many matters with the Remonstrants.21 The Remonstrants and the Socinians were admired because they focused 17

18

19 20 21

See, e.g., Crell, De deo et ejus attributis, pp. 305–6; J. Schlichting, Commentaria posthuma, in plerosque Novi Testamenti libros 2 vols (Irenopolis [i.e., Amsterdam] post anno 1656 [i.e., c. 1670]), vol. ii, p. 286, and his, Questiones Duae, pp. 96–100. On the extent to which Episcopius borrowed from Crell and Volkelius, see Platt, Reformed Thought and Scholasticism, pp. 232–4, and S. Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), pp. 74–5. G. Burnet, History of My Own Time, ed. O. Airy, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1897–1900), vol. i, p. 334–5; see also Spurr, Restoration Church of England, pp. 314–15; Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol. i, p. 5. HP 29/5/34B (‘Ephemerides’ 1655, pt 3). The phrase is Constantin Schaum’s but Hartlib noted Boyle’s concurrence. S. Episcopius, Operum theologicorum. Pars altera. ed. P. Limborch (Amsterdam, 1665), sig *2r.

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on the practical and ethical dimension to Christianity, a dimension which seemed to many to have been lost during the turbulence of the Civil Wars.22 As this support for Episcopius and Schlichting suggests, Englishmen saw the value of the broader project in which these men were engaged – a project designed to align the natural and divine laws without merging them completely. We saw in Chapter 4 that this project appealed to Anthony Ascham, who sought to preserve space for individual moral effort without undermining the natural desire for self-preservation. Ascham put these arguments to use in a political sense, and when the circle around Wilkins acquiesced in the rule of the Commonwealth they justified their action on similar grounds. Yet they preferred to use Remonstrant arguments in the service of religion and morality, as they turned their backs on Calvinist theology and struggled to make sense of human free will.23 Socinus’ strident views about human freedom and human nature may have been largely rejected in England, but few English divines could ignore the wider religious tradition which he had set in motion. Socinian ideas about justification also reached a broad audience through the biblical commentaries of Hugo Grotius. Grotius’ commentaries were evidently very popular – according to Owen they were ‘in the hands of most students’ by 1656. This impact was lasting; and Nicholas Tyacke argues that quotations from the Annotationes were ‘de rigeur’ for scholars after the Restoration.24 The Annotationes contained several short discussions of justification, in which Grotius made clear that human beings had to work for their own salvation. For example, when Paul described Christ as the means by which men were reconciled to God, Grotius explained that this was because Christ revealed and announced the way of salvation to human beings. And, Grotius added, this reconciliation involved the fulfilment of conditions on the part of humans.25 Grotius, like the Socinians, had rejected the mainstream Protestant 22 23

24 25

Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 314–17. R. Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700, eds. R. Kroll, R. Ashcraft and P. Zagori (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 151–77; N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the Royal Society’, in his Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 326–8. Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xii, p. 626; N. Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, in his Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), p. 330. See, e.g., Grotius’ comments on Romans 5.10 and 2 Corinthians 19, in his Opera Omnia Theologica, vol. ii, pp. 705, 842; and cf. the comments of Crell on the Romans verse, in J. Crell, Opera omnia exegetica, vol. i, p. 124, and of Schlichting on the verse from 2 Corinthians, in Commentaria posthuma, vol. ii, p. 118–19.

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approach to the Scriptures, according to which the Bible contained the tale of Fall and Redemption, and which explained the human sense of guilt and need for reconciliation. Instead he believed that the Bible contained a core of moral precepts and the offer of eternal life to those who obeyed them. Yet Grotius still had a place for divine grace in the process of justification; he did not believe that men could fulfil God’s commands on their own. And here he was much closer to Crell and Schlichting, the second-generation Socinians, than to Socinus himself. Indeed, it may be that most of Grotius’ English readers (with, as we shall see, the exception of Owen) tended to connect his Annotationes much more to the Arminian version of Protestantism than to Socinus or even the later Socinians. Here they may have been swayed by their reading of Grotius’ earlier writing, including both his Defensio Fidei and his De Jure Belli ac Pacis, for we have seen how Grotius rejected many of Socinus’ arguments in these works. One English theologian who admired Grotius but who placed him firmly within a Protestant context was Richard Baxter (1615–1691), an increasingly influential Parliamentarian divine during the 1650s. Baxter had been horrified by the antinomian beliefs he found at the Parliamentarian army quarters at Leicester, where the New Model Army was stationed after the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. He worried that the Calvinist doctrine of justification by faith alone was encouraging anarchic and subversive activities among the soldiers and he became extremely disillusioned with this doctrine.26 He began to draw on Remonstrant writing – particularly the early work of Grotius – as well as English theologians like John Davenant to promote a theology of justification in which individual effort played some part in men’s salvation. In his Aphorisms of Justification (1649), he sought to persuade his readers that the saving power of Christ’s death was, at least potentially, available to all and that salvation depended in some small measure upon a person’s own faith and works. Baxter clearly found some Remonstrant writing helpful, but he was not interested in the Socinian strand of this tradition and he had no desire to divorce Christianity from human nature or the natural world. Instead he preferred to combine Grotius’ ideas with more mainstream Protestant writing, and thereby to emphasise the importance of both Christ’s sacrifice and the divine gift of grace in the salvation of the believer. Although Baxter’s work was highly controversial, 26

N. H. Keeble, ‘Richard Baxter’, ODNB.

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he found many defenders equally anxious to find a place for ethics and morality within Protestant Christianity.27 Another theologian who found inspiration in Remonstrant and Arminian writing was John Goodwin. In his Redemption Redeemed (1651), he provided a strident defence of free will and of the need for human cooperation in the process of salvation. Goodwin insisted that the very notion that God might condemn or save men irrespective of their actions cut across every notion of justice and fairness present either in the Bible or the mind of man. The Calvinist doctrine of absolute election or reprobation was, he argued, not only untrue but also unfair.28 As this shows, Goodwin had reversed the position he held at the Whitehall debates, where he had argued that men knew very little of God through nature.29 Now, he appealed to common assumptions about fairness to condemn the Calvinist system of absolute election as a horrific – and all too human – invention which was entirely unworthy of God. Indeed, the power of Redemption Redeemed lay in Goodwin’s appeal to the notions of justice and moral responsibility which he felt were shared by God and mankind. By 1647 he had certainly read Remonstrant works, but he also claimed in this year that he had been unable to get hold of any Socinian writing.30 If he did subsequently come across Socinus’ works, he would have been uncomfortable with the Italian’s objections to any natural knowledge of God, as well as his critique of the Trinity. Although Goodwin was sometimes charged with Socinianism, his views were quite different from those of Socinus himself.31 Goodwin may have had more time for the moral and ethical writings of second-generation Socinians like Schlichting and Crell, men whose theological views often meshed with those of their Remonstrant friends. Whatever the precise sources of Goodwin’s thought, it is clear that he was, like the Remonstrants and second-generation Socinians, seeking to preserve both the voluntary aspect to religion and the strong link between Christian principles and human nature. The reaction to Redemption Redeemed was mixed. On the one hand, condemnation was not slow in coming. Soon after its publication, it was denounced by Dr Thomas Hill (d. 1653), Master of Trinity College, 27

28 29 30 31

For a detailed discussion of Baxter’s theology and the reaction to it, see H. Boesma, A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification in its Seventeenth-century Context of Controversy (Zoetermeer, 1993); G. Nuttall, ‘Richard Baxter’s “Apology” (1654): Its Occasion and Composition’, JEH 4 (1953), pp. 69–76. J. Goodwin, Redemption Redeemed (London, 1651), sigs. b1v-[b4v], pp. 65–7, 73–153; also Coffey, John Goodwin, pp. 214–20. See above p. 44. J. Goodwin, Hagiomastix, or The Scourge of the Saints (London, 1647), p. 104 and see above p. 192. E.g., R. Resbury, The Lightless-Starre, or, Mr John Goodwin Discovered a Pelagio-Socinian (London, 1652).

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Cambridge, before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London. Hill claimed that it advanced human reason far beyond acceptable limits and that it undermined the sovereignty and grace of God. Hill was not alone in his objections, and soon Goodwin could complain that other Independent ministers were poisoning the minds of their flocks against him, emphasising passages of the book which they thought were particularly dangerous. But Goodwin was not attacked by everyone, and silence from other leading Cambridge divines was taken to suggest at least some degree of sympathy. Indeed, his views were well received in some quarters, particularly by young scholars and students who had seen the darker side of Calvinism in the disruption of civil war. At Cambridge, increasing numbers of young divines were drawn to the Remonstrant message, including men like William Sancroft (1617–1693), John Tillotson (1630–1694) and Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699) – all future bishops in the Restored Church of England. Certainly Remonstrant ideas were being heard in England.32 English theologians wanted to take over the ethical part of Remonstrant theology but they also wanted to break the connection with antiTrinitarianism (and with mortalism). This was an urgent task in the 1650s when opposition to the doctrines of the Trinity and the immortality of the soul increased, and seemed to presage a flood of atheism and immorality. In his Mans mortalitie (1643), the Leveller Richard Overton (fl. 1640–1663) set out to prove that (in the words of the subtitle) man was a ‘compound wholly mortall, contrary to that common distinction of soule and body’, while Hobbes poured scorn on the concept of an immortal soul in his Leviathan (1651). Wilkins’ circle was particularly troubled by these ideas and in response its members sought to prove, from the evidence of philosophy and experience, that men were religious creatures with souls who would all experience an afterlife. In 1652, Wilkins’ colleague Seth Ward (1617–1689) published A philosophicall essay which was designed to prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul and both men insisted throughout the 1650s on the reality of spiritual substances, mainly against Hobbes. As this suggests, Wilkins and his friends wanted to disentangle themselves and their theology from Calvinism and to promote an ethical interpretation of Christianity; but they still wanted to portray religion as a natural part of human life and to assure their readers that they would be judged by God after their death.33 32 33

Coffey, John Goodwin, p. 227. See Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 118–19, 164–70; B. Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 61–80.

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Among those who sympathised with the Remonstrant views on justification, the Trinity was a much less common subject of discussion than the inmortality of the soul. Among Wilkins’ circle, this may perhaps be attributed to a certain reluctance to use the scholastic terminology necessary for a description of the Trinity, for the circle were keen to move beyond Aristotelian language and natural philosophy. Ward, for example, denounced Hobbes’ heterodox views on the Trinity but he did not provide any alternative reading.34 John Wallis (1616–1703) did try to make sense of the Trinity four decades later, in the 1690s, although he then became notorious for his unusual analogy between the Trinity and a mathematical cube.35 Richard Baxter found it more difficult to avoid the question of the Trinity, especially when he came to write a confession of faith for his Worcestershire Association, a cross-denominational group of clergy and laymen. But Baxter struggled to defend the Trinity – and particularly the divinity of the Holy Ghost – while remaining close to the scriptural text. He decided to consult with John Dury and Archbishop James Ussher, both of whom insisted that the doctrine must be included, and the three of them managed in the end to arrive at a compromise formula.36 John Goodwin preached a series of sermons on the Trinity during the 1650s, although these were prompted by his own experience of anti-Trinitarians on the fringes of his congregation. In these sermons, Goodwin pointed to the Church’s consensus on the doctrine of the Trinity throughout the ages, although such a resort to tradition was unusual for him.37 As this suggests, those English theologians who admired elements of Remonstrant writing remained strongly attached to the doctrine of the Trinity and did not accept the Remonstrants’ suggestion that the Trinity was not central to Christian doctrine.38 Inevitably, Calvinist theologians objected to the new, Remonstrant-style views which they believed were now penetrating England. Wilkins and Ward were assailed as ‘meer moral men, without the Power of Godliness’.39 The conflict between the Calvinists and the ‘moral men’ was particularly 34

35 36 37 38 39

For the attitudes of Ward and Wilkins to new currents of learning, see S. Ward and J. Wilkins, Vindiciae academiarum (Oxford, 1654); Ward commented on Hobbes’ view of the Trinity in idem, In Thomae Hobbii Philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (Oxford, 1656), p. 327. Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, pp. 116–22. P. Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, Unity and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in its Seventeenthcentury Context (Leiden, 2004), pp. 168–71. J. Goodwin, A Being Filled with the Spirit (London, 1670), esp. pp. 382–6; Coffey, John Goodwin, pp. 246–8, discusses this work and argues for consistency in Goodwin. On the Remonstrants’ views on the Trinity, see above pp. 152–4. W. Pope, The Life of Seth, Lord Bishop of Salisbury, ed. J. B. Bamborough (London, 1697), p. 46.

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important because the boundaries of the English Church had not yet been properly drawn, and a party of Calvinists wanted to exclude Remonstrant and Arminian views from the public church. To them, as will be discussed in the next section, the fundamental principles of Christianity laid down in 1652 in the second edition of the Humble Proposals were no longer enough. John Owen, who spearheaded this Calvinist party, decided in 1654 and 1655 that the best way to promote a strictly Calvinist settlement, in which the public church was committed to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, was to link all versions of Remonstrant-style theology to Socinianism and to anti-Trinitarian heresy. The effect of his decision was to hamstring efforts for theological unity and to ensure that no confession was agreed in 1654.

iii settling the church in 1654 It was in 1654 and 1655, in the context of the broader debate over the Church settlement, that the English controversy over Socinianism reached its peak. The Instrument, the constitutional document which underpinned Cromwell’s Protectorate, guaranteed a broad liberty of conscience but its ambiguous wording was widely regarded as unsatisfactory. The growing diversity of English Protestant theology had strengthened the desire of many ministers and laymen for a more stringent religious settlement than that provided by the Instrument. Cromwell and his allies soon made it clear that they planned to supplement the clauses of the Instrument with a confession of faith, and in February 1654 the newly installed Protector encouraged a series of meetings at which he hoped leading ministers would draft such a confession. These meetings were attended by Presbyterians as well as Independents; clearly there was widespread support for a confession which would prevent some of the more outrageous opinions being voiced in the mid 1650s.40 Agreement could not be reached, however, and instead the mid 1650s saw a bitter conflict emerge between those who sought to maintain a rigidly Calvinist framework and those who preferred something that looked more Remonstrant or Grotian. The Calvinists feared that any relaxation of the Reformed theology of the public church would open the door to Socinianism and they sought ever more anxiously to show why Socinian ideas contravened both the scriptural text and men’s natural religious sentiments. 40

Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, p. 217; H. Powell, ‘The Last Confession: A Background Study of the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order’, unpublished M Phil dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2008), p. 58.

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There were, in effect, two rival plans for Church settlement in these years – underpinned by very different conceptions of Christian unity. One was associated with Owen, Thomas Goodwin and other Independent ministers, who looked to the civil magistrate to uphold the core of Christian truth while preserving the autonomy of individual churches. What they wanted in 1654 was a confession of faith, to which all statesupported ministers would subscribe. This would ensure that only ministers with Reformed beliefs entered the public church; these ministers would then maintain true Christianity among the people of England.41 The second plan can be traced to Richard Baxter, who had already set up an Association movement to ensure that ministers received support from each other and upheld broadly similar ideals of doctrine and discipline. But Baxter’s doctrinal ideals involved a strong concern for the ethics and morality of church members, and an aversion to any doctrine which might imply that works were irrelevant. Indeed, he was willing to admit men to church membership on the basis of the Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments alone. Baxter hoped to bring as many people as possible into his Association and thereby to strengthen their Christian faith. For him, purity of doctrine was much less important than it was for Owen and his allies.42 Owen’s case for a strict confession seemed to be reinforced when John Biddle’s latest publication hit the booksellers’ shelves in February 1654. This work, the Twofold Catechism, was an audacious attempt to rewrite Christianity, in which not only the Trinity but also a range of commonly held views about God and Christianity were dismissed. Biddle described God as a single body, with a location and even a shape – a semi-human figure whose right hand could even be distinguished from his left. But Biddle’s masterstroke was to use the text of Scripture itself to make his points, claiming that he was merely allowing the Scripture to speak for itself. In his work, the subtitle asserted, the chiefest points of the Christian religion, being question-wise proposed, resolve themselves by pertinent answers taken word for word out of the Scripture, without either consequences or comments.

What Biddle had done was to take very seriously Socinus’ view that men had no natural knowledge of God at all, reading all the verses of the Bible in the most literal way possible. According to the English Unitarian, men 41 42

Toon, God’s Statesman, pp. 91–4; also Collins, ‘Church Settlement’, and Cook, ‘Congregational Independents’. Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, pp. 123–38.

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could only conceive of God and spiritual beings as largely similar to earthly creatures – hence both God and angels must have bodies and shapes. Similarly, Biddle argued that the verses which attributed passions to God, such as anger, sorrow or repentance, must be literally true. God, for Biddle, was an actor in time, affected by the course of external events about which he had no knowledge and, at least implicitly, over which he had no control.43 In dramatic fashion, Biddle had shown just how simple it was to interpret the words of Scripture in a manner that was deeply heterodox, and which Parliament would soon agree contained ‘blasphemous and heretical opinions’.44 A complaint was swiftly made to the Protectoral Council, prompting the Cromwellian authorities to request Owen to write a refutation of Biddle’s new work.45 This commission must have deepened Owen’s conviction that it was necessary to tighten the religious provisions of the Instrument, and that the scheme outlined in the Humble Proposals did not go far enough. But in writing his refutation, published in May 1655 as the Vindiciae Evangelium, Owen became acutely aware of the problems not only with Biddle and Socinus, but also with the writings of the Remonstrants, and particularly of Grotius. The Remonstrant tradition contained an erroneous understanding of justification, he thought, but this error stemmed from a more fundamental problem which it shared with Socinianism. Owen felt that Grotius’ theology, like that of Socinus, was not based in men’s true and natural religious sentiments and that it did not take the Trinity or the role of Christ seriously. Before his dissection of Socinian and Grotian ideas was published, however, Owen was involved in a series of moves in late 1654 and early 1655 designed to create a more restrictive (and, it was hoped, workable) Church settlement than currently existed under the Instrument. And here he made clear his desire to exclude all Remonstrant views from the new Church. The issue of church government was debated as part of an attempt by the first Protectoral Parliament, which began in September 1654, to give legislative form to the Instrument of Government. In October, Parliament appointed a committee to confer with ministers over a statement of doctrinal principles which would define both the limits of toleration and the new orthodoxy of the public church more fully.46 Here Owen and his 43 45 46

J. Biddle, A Twofold Catechism (London, 1654), esp. pp. 7–20. 44 CJ, vol. vii, p. 416. CSPD, 1654, p. 4. CJ, vol. vii, p. 373; D. Smith, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the First Protectorate Parliament and Religious Reform’, Parliamentary History 19 (2000), pp. 38–49.

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Independent allies were pitted directly against Baxter and the promoters of the Association movement, for both Owen and Baxter were nominated to advise the committee. Baxter’s closest ties were with the MP and leading Irish politician Roger Boyle (1621–1679), Lord Broghill, with whom he lodged while in London in 1654. An influential figure in Cromwellian councils, Broghill sought to rally moderate opinion in Cromwell’s Parliaments, and would play a central role in 1657 in encouraging Cromwell to take the Crown.47 Broghill wanted to see a national and hierarchical Church established, with a confession designed to maximise membership. Such a Church would also have disciplinary powers, primarily excommunication, and these powers would, it was assumed, carry much greater weight because they came from a Church which encompassed most of the population. Baxter and Broghill therefore wanted a broad and uncontroversial statement of Christian orthodoxy, and they suggested that it might be based upon the Creeds, or, failing that, the confession of the Worcestershire Association.48 Owen, however, sought a much more restrictive statement which would encapsulate his own understanding of justification, and exclude those with reservations about this doctrine. He had no desire to extend the boundaries of the Church to include those with alternative understandings of core doctrines. To prevent settlement on Baxter’s terms, Owen accused him of promoting Socinianism, even if indirectly. Only in the light of this bitter dispute over the future direction of the Church can Owen’s attack be understood. The obvious starting point for the Parliamentary committee was the fundamentals of 1652, and in November 1654 they were reissued from the press of Robert Ibbitson, a printer with strong links to the government. He had been responsible, among other things, for the original version of the Humble Proposals and for many of the tracts defending the regicide.49 The implication of the reprinting of the Humble Proposals was that the government expected these fundamentals to form the basis of the new profession. Yet by 1654 several of the Independent ministers were dissatisfied with 47

48

49

H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Oliver Cromwell and his Parliaments’, in I. Roots (ed.), Cromwell: A Profile (London, 1973), pp. 91–135, esp. p. 126; P. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 80–2, 125–60. R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, or, Mr. Richard Baxters Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times, ed. M. Sylvester (London, 1696), part ii, pp. 197–9; see also R. Baxter, Humble Advice: or The Heads of Those Things which were Offered to Many Honourable Members of Parliament (London, 1655), pp. 2–3. The Principles of Faith, Presented by Mr Tho. Goodwin, Mr Nye, Mr Sydrach Simson and other Ministers, to the Committee of Parliament for Religion (London, 1654). On Ibbitson, see A. Tubb, ‘Printing the Regicide of Charles I’, History 89 (2004), pp. 500–524, esp. p. 509.

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them, including Owen, whose name did not appear on the reprint of the original proposals. The Parliamentary committee probably began with the 1652 text, but the advisory panel of ministers succeeded in revising it and it was this new version which was presented to Parliament in December 1654. The amended text was printed only for the private use of MPs, but, fortunately for the historian, the bookseller George Thomason also obtained a copy and this survives as a record of the new confession.50 Baxter later claimed that the ‘great doer of all that worded the Articles was Dr. Owen’, and certainly the changes suggest the hand of Owen.51 In the new text, the section which described Christ’s redemptive role was amended to emphasise that Christ had made ‘full satisfaction’. The previous version, which was shorter and lacked the word ‘full’, had been compatible with the doctrine favoured by Baxter (and the Remonstrants): that Christians needed themselves to make some effort if they were to benefit from Christ’s death at all.52 Furthermore, the discussion of original sin was extended to make clear that every human being began in a state of sin from which only Christ could redeem them.53 As these changes suggest, the revised version was designed not merely to exclude extremists, but to embed the Calvinist view of justification by faith alone firmly in the public church. In theory, this clause would exclude from the national Church many ministers sympathetic to a view of salvation which included a place for individual effort. The new proposals were presented to Parliament on 12 December 1654, when MPs were discussing the religious clauses of the Instrument. After thanking the ministers, and ordering their text to be printed, the House put the issue of a new religious settlement to one side and discussed it only once more, later in the week. On the 12th, however, they took up instead the case of the Unitarian John Biddle, ordering some of his more recent books to be burnt.54 They managed to do no more than this on the ecclesiological front before Parliament was dissolved by Cromwell on 22 January 1655. Since Cromwell would later send Biddle to the Isles of Scilly with a pension, in order to keep him out of both controversy and an English jail, the Unitarian’s case is often seen as evidence of the gulf between the Cromwellian and the Parliamentarian views of the extent of an acceptable 50 51 52 53 54

This untitled text is preserved in the Thomason Collection as E.826[3]. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, part ii, pp. 197–9, quotation from p. 198. E. 826[3] p. 14; cf. Proposals for the Furtherance, p. 13. E. 826[3] p. 11; cf. Proposals for the Furtherance, p. 16. Ibid., esp. chapters 3 and 4: the committee report is quoted on p. 187; K. Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 233–51; J. T. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton 4 vols. (London, 1828), vol. i, pp. 24–5.

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liberty of conscience.55 Yet the story may not have been as simple as this suggests, and some of Cromwell’s Independent allies may have been more willing than the Protector to see action taken against Biddle. Indeed, Biddle’s appearance in the House at this point may well have been welcomed (or even engineered) by the Independents. There was widespread agreement that Biddle’s heresies needed to be suppressed, but opinion was divided over how that should be done. Biddle’s case was useful to the Independents because it dramatised the difficulties which would attend a broad confession of faith, or one which was based upon Scripture alone. And this was, of course, the point which Owen had been emphasising against Baxter. Biddle’s case seemed to show that Christian doctrine could not be adequately defended using the scriptural text alone. The Unitarian relied upon scriptural verses for the bulk of his work, and had shown how easy it was to construct a version of Christianity from the Scriptures which did not include the Trinity. We have already seen that from the 1630s the difficulties involved in defending the Trinity from the scriptural text had been made increasingly apparent. In highlighting the case of Biddle, Owen could exploit contemporary concern to protect the Trinity, and he could harness this concern to his own views on justification. The Trinity had to be shown to be consistent with Scripture and reason if those who denied it were to be restrained, and Owen saw in his method of biblical interpretation the means to do this where others, including Baxter, had failed. John Biddle may have been brought before Parliament in January 1655 to speed the process of drafting both a confession of faith and new legislation covering heresy. If so, the gambit failed, for Parliament was dissolved by Cromwell on the 22nd before any further plans for Church settlement could be agreed. Cromwell solved the immediate problem himself by spiriting Biddle off to the Isles of Scilly, but it was clear to all that the theological issues raised by the Unitarian remained very much alive.

iv owen’s vindiciae evangelium Owen saw in Biddle’s case the chance to succeed where the Parliamentary committee had failed and consequently to prevent the spread of the Socinianism he considered so pernicious. For he had still to write the refutation of Biddle commissioned by the Council of State, and Owen was 55

Smith, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, p. 40; also P. Little and D. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 201–5.

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determined to make this serve his wider purpose of constructing a Reformed confession of faith. In this work, the Vindiciae Evangelium, he not only addressed Biddle’s writing, but sought to prevent once and for all the rise of Grotian and Remonstrant opinions, by emphasising their similarities to Socinianism. For Owen there was little difference between the first- and second-generation Socinians – or, indeed, between them and Grotius – for they all rejected the basic principles of Christianity known from nature and from the scriptural text. Through the Vindiciae Evangelium, which was written in the vernacular, Owen sought to reassert these principles and, in the process, to shape the direction of theology in England. He sought to defend his proposed fundamentals, particularly against criticism from Baxter, and to make up for the lack of any official doctrinal statement by putting forward his own detailed views on true doctrine. But he also wanted to demonstrate to students and fellow scholars how to approach the study of theology. Indeed, the work was an intervention both in the debate surrounding a confession and in a broader controversy over the direction of theology. As Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, Owen was well placed to influence religious education and thereby to ensure that future ministers were persuaded of the truth of the Calvinist theology to which Owen adhered – and of the errors of the Socinians’ ideas. Owen began with Biddle, highlighting his philosophical shortcomings and tracing them to Biddle’s rejection of any innate knowledge of God. Against the Unitarian, Owen insisted that it was possible to draw conclusions about God from both Scripture and the premises which all men share; these conclusions made it absurd to talk of God in finite terms. All men agreed, he argued, that God was infinite in essence; the deity could not therefore be limited in any way. The Scripture, speaking to human beings, might at times use tropes or allegories which suggested that God had a shape or figure, or that he was located in heaven, but these texts should not be interpreted literally. Instead, they should be read in the light of our concept of God as infinite; a concept which precluded any spatial limitation.56 Similarly, Owen rejected Biddle’s argument that God was subject to passions, explaining that all peoples agreed that God must be infinitely blessed, not liable to fits of anger or melancholy.57 Given the sheer audacity of Biddle’s re-reading of the Scripture, Owen could expect mainstream Christians of all stripes to concur with his argument. 56

Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xii, pp. 93–107.

57

Ibid., pp. 108–15.

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Biddle’s claims challenged Owen’s high estimation of man’s natural knowledge of the spiritual world, but they were also threatening and damaging to Baxter and to those who had already begun to insist, against Socinus and Hobbes, upon the reality and certainty of a spiritual world. Indeed, in the immediate context of philosophical debate at Oxford it may be that Owen’s argument was not only directed toward Biddle but also towards Hobbes. Hobbes’ materialist version of Christianity, and his attack upon the language used by theologians to describe the spiritual world, had angered several Oxford scholars, including Wilkins and Ward.58 According to his acolyte Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), Owen had read Leviathan by 1656, and while Owen may have been sympathetic to some of Hobbes’ ecclesiastical ideas he would have been vehemently opposed to his theological views – especially Hobbes’ scepticism about the possibility of comprehending God in any way. According to Owen, all human beings shared a common concept of God and it was legitimate to speculate about God’s nature, based upon this common concept. Those who rejected this universal understanding of God ended up spouting absurdities, in Owen’s opinion, and he may have hoped that the example of Biddle’s strange and anthropomorphic theology might encourage students and others to rely upon natural ideas of God – even in the face of Socinus’ and Hobbes’ critiques. Having defended God’s infinity against Biddle (and, by implication, the Socinians), Owen went on to champion the doctrine of the Trinity. Here Owen could not turn to common consent; rather he insisted that the doctrine of the Trinity was clearly delivered in the Scriptures and that it made sense, given the idea of God as an infinite essence which he felt all men shared. An infinite essence must be different from a finite one, as all agreed, and it could therefore be divided into three persons. It was quite wrong of Biddle and the Socinians to suggest that God’s essence must conform to the rules governing the natural world, he claimed. He could then go on to argue that the texts of the Scripture all made much more sense when read with this Trinitarian picture of God in mind, and he engaged in some exhaustive textual exegesis to prove his point.59 To Owen, it was not Biddle but Grotius who had done the most to undermine this Trinitarian reading of the Scriptures, by providing a very 58

59

D. Jesseph, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Chicago, 1999), pp. 313–18; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 145–53, 164–70; S. Probst, ‘Infinity and Creation: The Origins of the Controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis’, British Journal of the History of Science 26 (1993), pp. 271–9. Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xii, esp. pp. 169–333.

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different reading of the key proof texts for the Trinity. Grotius had sought to explain such verses of the Bible in their original context, without placing them in the broader Christian scheme of man’s Fall and Redemption through Christ and without referring to the judgements of the later Christian Church. Owen objected strongly to this approach, fearing that it undermined the central Christian doctrines of the Trinity and of the satisfaction of Christ – and that it illustrated all too clearly the influence of the Socinians upon the Dutch jurist.60 He singled out the parts of the Annotationes in which Grotius came closest to the Socinians, and in which he seemed to deny or sidestep the doctrine of the atonement or the divinity and uniqueness of Christ, using these passages as evidence for the destructive effect of Grotian biblical criticism upon what Owen regarded as Christian orthodoxy. Grotius’ claims detracted from the Gospel message, Owen thought, because they pushed Christ and his satisfaction to the sidelines and implied that God’s favour and approbation could be won (and lost) by other human beings independently of Christ. If this were so, then the whole Protestant message of justification by faith alone would be in tatters. The success of Grotius’ Annotationes epitomised for Owen the changing intellectual climate, in which the justice of God had been rendered uncertain and men could no longer be assured of their salvation.61 As Owen was well aware, it was his criticisms of Grotius which were the most controversial parts of the work. At the start of the Vindiciae he proclaimed that it was for ‘meddling with Grotius’ Annotations’ that he was most likely to be criticised.62 The immediate result was a further round of controversy with Henry Hammond over the Annotationes, although during the course of this exchange Hammond admitted that Grotius had indeed echoed the Socinians in several places. To explain Grotius’ apparent debt to the Socinians, Hammond pointed out that several volumes of the Annotationes were published posthumously and that they did not reflect the final and considered sentiments of the great man.63 Grotius was the subject of much discussion during the 1650s; and Owen was joined in his efforts to undo his influence by John Conant (1608–1694), the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Conant lectured 60 61 62 63

Ibid., p. 74. Owen also refers to Grotius over one hundred times between p. 222 and the end of the work (p. 747). He also devoted a chapter to Grotius’ annotations on Isaiah 53 (pp. 433–45). Ibid. p. 8. See Hammond’s A Second Defence of … Hugo Grotius (London, 1655), answered by Owen in his Review of the Annotations of Hugo Grotius (London, 1656). Hammond then wrote A Continuation of the Defence of Hugo Grotius (London, 1657), and Owen replied in the preface to Kendall’s Fur pro tribunali. Examen dialogismi cui insribitur fur praedestinatus. (Oxford, 1657).

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weekly upon Grotius’ Annotationes and in these lectures, according to his son, he ‘vindicated the scriptures from such of his [Grotius’] expositions as the Socinians had taken any advantage from’.64 Unfortunately no record of Conant’s lectures survives, but what has survived are some notes from a sermon he preached on Isaiah 53 (the passage describing the ‘suffering servant’). In this sermon Conant insisted that the subject of this Old Testament chapter was Jesus Christ and placed the words of the prophet Isaiah firmly in a Christian context – quite the opposite of Grotius’ discussion of the chapter.65 This suggests that Conant was making a similar point to Owen: that the verses of the Bible have to be read with the benefit of hindsight and the broader Christian tradition, and therefore in a Trinitarian light. Through his discussion of Grotius, Owen implied that a strict confession of faith which excluded Arminians was necessary and would discourage heterodox readings of the Scripture. Owen made this point more clearly in an appendix added to the work, in which he criticised Baxter for his lax approach to doctrinal purity. He included long quotations from Socinian writers to show that once men began to move away from the doctrine of justification by faith alone, they inevitably ended up calling into question the justice of God and the divinity of Christ. Baxter was not convinced by Owen’s argument, but the friction between the two continued to obstruct efforts to establish a more definitive Church settlement.66 Owen and his Calvinist allies did their best to defend the Reformed tradition from the forces which seemed to assail it, and they met with some success. Although they could not dampen the vogue for Grotius’ Annotationes, Calvinism remained strong at Oxford University until at least the end of the seventeenth century.67 Moreover, those scholars and academics who read Episcopius, Grotius and the Socinians tended to prefer those aspects of their writing which owed more to Arminius or to the views of the second-generation Socinians and which suggested that religious belief was natural. Apart from Biddle, there was little support for the original message of Socinus, with its strong dichotomy between nature and Christianity. Moreover, overt anti-Trinitarianism remained very limited in university circles. In the immediate context of the mid 1650s, however, the scholarly approach of the Oxford Calvinists toward religious 64 65 66 67

J. Conant, The Life of the Reverend and Venerable John Conant, D.D (London, 1823), p. 20. Bodleian Library MS Eng. theol. g. 2 ff. 41v-44r; cf. Good (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xii, pp. 433–45. Goold (ed.), Works of John Owen, vol. xii, pp. 591–616; Lim, In Pursuit of Purity, pp. 161–87. Hampton, Anti-Arminians, esp. pp. 265–71; Tyacke, ‘Arminianism and the Restoration Church’, pp. 333–4.

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controversy seemed insufficient. Heterodox and subversive religious opinions continued to take root, and soon forceful measures would be necessary to restrain the proponents of such ideas.

v after the vindiciae – james naylor and the quaker threat From 1656 until the Restoration period, the issue of Socinianism was overtaken by more pressing problems related to a political settlement. Socinianism was an intellectual threat to the integrity of English Reformed theology, but it was not a creed which inspired its adherents to violence or subversion. Biddle’s ideas may have been shocking, but his life was by all accounts a model of sobriety and godliness. The same could not be said of all the heterodox preachers of the 1650s, however, and in the Second Protectorate Parliament action was taken to prevent disruptive and subversive opinions. This action included measures to prevent antiTrinitarianism, for we have already seen that opposition to the Trinity often went hand in hand with anti-clericalism and claims for the equality of all true Christians. By the mid 1650s, a growing number of Quakers were putting such spiritual egalitarianism into practice, while also calling into question the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Quakers looked to the spirit within every Christian as the ultimate source of authority and they believed that this spirit enabled all believers to participate in the sufferings – and glory – of Christ. They refused to accept either the social or the ecclesiastical hierarchy, they failed to pay tithes and some Quakers interrupted church services to denounce the clergy. They justified their actions by appealing to the light within every Christian, a light which did not distinguish between rich and poor. All this caused consternation among property owners and clergymen.68 Opposition to the Quakers came to a head in October 1656. In this month the Quaker leader James Naylor (1618–1660) rode into Bristol on a colt, echoing Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion. Naylor’s symbolic gesture was seen as an unacceptable claim of equality with Christ, suggesting Naylor’s rejection of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. In the Parliament of 1656, MPs rushed to denounce Naylor and his fellow Quakers as blasphemers who deserved serious punishment. A Parliamentary committee examined Naylor, declaring that he had ‘assume[d] 68

L. Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Naylor and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996).

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the gesture, words, honour, worship and miracles’ as well as the ‘names and incommunicable attributes and titles’ of Christ.69 Yet MPs struggled to define the nature of Naylor’s crime. Some insisted that he claimed divinity for himself and therefore sought to usurp the very throne of God, while others suggested that Naylor simply took the Protestant emphasis on the indwelling of the spirit to an extreme conclusion. Finally the House resolved to condemn Naylor to severe corporal punishment.70 By this time it was clear that Owen’s response to religious heterodoxy was inadequate, based as it was upon persuasion as much as compulsion. When a group of civilian politicians, headed by Lord Broghill, drafted a new constitution to replace the Instrument of Government, they tightened up the religious clauses considerably. Under this new document, known (after much revising) as the Humble Petition and Advice, anti- and nonTrinitarian belief was outlawed and protection was accorded only to those who profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His eternal Son, the true God, and in the Holy Spirit, God co-equal with the Father and the Son, one God blessed for ever.71

The Humble Petition and Advice also called for a confession of faith to be drafted, and although no one would be forced to subscribe to this confession, no one would be permitted to ‘revile or reproach’ it. Cromwell, after much hesitation, decided in 1657 to accept this document as the new constitutional basis of his rule, to the relief of most MPs and civilians.72 The problem of protecting the Trinity and outlawing anti-Trinitarian ideas had been solved by fiat, although the draconian punishment meted out to Naylor also helped to dampen any similar claims to spiritual authority. As Naylor showed so dramatically, theological speculation in the 1650s was a dangerous business – and too dangerous to be allowed to grow unchecked. On this point there was, and remained, broad consensus. And yet the experience of the 1640s and 1650s had shown that there was also deep controversy over the correct approach to theology, let alone the correct lessons to be drawn from the Scripture. Few Protestants had ever doubted that their religion was to be found in the Scripture, that the Scriptures were in principle open to all, and that human reason enlightened by the spirit of 69 70 71 72

CJ, vol. vii, pp. 400–1; Diary of Thomas Burton (London, 1828) p. cxix. Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, pp. 196–221. The MP and diarist Thomas Burton recorded the debates between 5 and 16 December, in Diary of Thomas Burton, vol. i, pp. 24–159. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, p. 454. Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union, pp. 153–7.

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God provided the best guide to their meaning. The conflicts of the 1650s had shown how divided English scholars and theologians were over the way in which Scripture ought to be studied, and over the philosophical and theological frameworks which should guide their interpretation of the scriptural text. At the same time, the case of Biddle had made quite clear that it was impossible to rely upon Scripture alone. The connection between Christian religion and human nature was, by now, highly contested and with this uncertainty came a variety of approaches to the scriptural text. The authors of the Humble Petition and Advice set the trend for the rest of the century when they turned to authority, both civil and religious, to uphold their ecclesiastical settlement. But the central questions raised by Socinian writers, about religion, human nature and the coherence of mainstream Christianity, could not be so easily dismissed and would continue to exercise the minds of English scholars and theologians throughout the seventeenth century.

Conclusion: the legacy of Socinianism

Socinian ideas – and the challenge they posed – were crucial to intellectual and political developments during the English Revolution and the issue of Socinianism remained very much alive after the Restoration. In the later decades of the seventeenth century they were, however, shaped and modified in important ways. Some of the issues once raised by the Socinians moved into mainstream political and ecclesiastical debate, taking on a life of their own. No longer were the Socinians’ ideas about natural right and natural law associated exclusively with Socinianism. At the same time, however, the term ‘Socinian’ came to be associated most strongly with a particular approach to theology, and one which was extremely damaging to such central Christian doctrines as the Trinity. In this final chapter, we will consider how Socinian ideas, and the public perception of Socinianism, altered over the course of the later seventeenth century. i christianity and natural law Socinus’ theology was predicated upon his particular and distinctive views about nature and about freedom. He drove a wedge between nature and Christianity, arguing that religious belief must be freely chosen – and that it could not be free if it were natural. He and his followers drew upon legal language to explain this freedom, suggesting that human beings had rights which they could use as they wanted. In his view, men should use their rights as God directed, but the effect of his argument was to open up space between the rights and laws derived from nature, and the laws given by God. We have seen the role which his ideas played in the 1640s, when English Royalists began to develop a language of natural rights to counter Parliamentarian arguments based on a mixture of natural and divine law. These Royalists insisted that natural rights should be yielded up, even yielded up irrevocably, in order to create a settled civil society. Some (notably Dudley Digges) even contrasted these rights with the laws given 233

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by God through Jesus Christ. Their arguments quickly moved to the centre of English political argument, and soon the Socinian roots of these ideas were buried. Grotius had already begun to bring the concept of natural rights to the Protestant world, by drawing on both Socinian and Catholic writing, and when Hobbes and Digges also began to argue in this way the theological and confessional dimension receded. By the end of the 1650s it was no longer necessary to look to Socinus or Crell for inspiration when developing an argument based upon natural rights. Their approach, if not always their views, had now become mainstream. At the same time, the Socinians’ views on nature and religion no longer seemed so extreme. Socinus had worried his Protestant and Catholic readers because he made religious belief optional and he refused to see it as intrinsic to human beings or human societies. He had suggested that certain natural actions, like self-defence and retaliation, had been prohibited by Christ and should be eschewed by all Christians. But his followers began to retreat from this position and to move towards Arminius’ views, in which God’s power and his purposes were manifest in creation – and most particularly in his creation of human beings. For the second-generation Socinians and the Remonstrants, nature was no longer a neutral source of rights but instead a source of moral obligation, albeit one which was always inferior to the revealed laws and commands of Christ. Through works such as Crell’s Ethica Christiana and Episcopius’ Institutiones Theologicae, this synthesis of Socinian and Arminian ideas was widely propagated. This movement towards Arminianism by the Socinian community increased after 1658, when its members were expelled from Poland and forced to seek shelter wherever they could find it. Most were anxious to reassure their hosts that their beliefs were not anarchic or threatening – and that they would uphold the civil and natural laws. By the 1650s, therefore, it was no longer Socinus or the Socinians who represented the most serious challenge to Christian natural law thinking; instead it was Thomas Hobbes. It was Hobbes who did most to detach natural right, in his case the right of self-preservation, from a Christian context and to undermine any sense of natural moral obligation. Hobbes therefore came to play an important part in discussions of natural law and right, especially when these intensified from the late 1650s. The collapse of the Protectorate offered an important opportunity to reshape the political and ecclesiastical landscape, but few people wished to adopt an unqualifiedly Hobbesian approach. They feared that Hobbes’ ideas placed the interpretation of the natural law entirely in the hands of the magistrate, cutting it free from any moral or religious grounding. In response, several

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writers sought to reassert the objective foundations of the natural law while maintaining that this law was often permissive, in that it allowed a range of options which were all legitimate. Sensible people would, however, allow the magistrate to settle such matters, yielding their right to decide for themselves in order to prevent disagreement. Edward Stillingfleet took this approach and applied it to religious worship in his Irenicum (1658), arguing that the magistrate was able to determine public religious worship – although not, of course, fundamental doctrinal questions.1 The Socinian contribution to the natural right tradition was not forgotten immediately, however, and in the 1660s Stillingfleet preached a number of sermons in which he took Crell to task for failing to understand natural law correctly. His work was designed to show that God and men shared in the same moral community, in which justice limited the role of any arbitrary will, human or divine. It was a careful balancing act designed to show that all sovereigns, including God, remained guided by the norms of the natural law, though these were norms which would allow some limited discretion. The target of Stillingfleet’s sermons was Crell’s Ad Librum Hugonis Grotii, and Stillingfleet presented his own work as a reaffirmation of the Grotian line against the ill-considered objections of Crell.2 Importantly, the Socinians themselves had come to conclusions not unlike Stillingfleet’s own: that the concept of natural right which Crell presented in that work needed to be placed within a broader framework of natural law, applicable to men and to God. In some ways, Stillingfleet’s sermons can be seen as an attempt to banish the demons of Socinus and first-generation Socinianism from what was now a much more acceptable Remonstrant and Grotian tradition of thinking about natural law. Certainly the Remonstrant approach to natural law and Christian ethics caught on after the Restoration. Like their Dutch counterparts, many Anglican divines sought to blend natural and revealed morality and to show that Christ’s teaching was the apogee of natural moral philosophy, known only in part by pagan philosophers and by the Jews. This synthesis proved popular and was echoed in numerous tracts and sermons.3 But it was never stable, for the precise role of Christ’s revelation remained unclear. 1 2

3

J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 18–23; idem, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 207–8. E. Stillingfleet, Six Sermons with a Discourse Annexed, Concerning the True Reason of the Suffering of Christ, wherein Crellius His Answer to Grotius is Considered (London, 1669). On this work, see D. Levitin, ‘Anti-Socinianism, and the Use of “Reason” in the Early Philosophy of Edward Stillingfleet’, unpublished M Phil essay (University of Cambridge, 2008). Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol. i, pp. 66–77.

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If the teaching that he brought was, in principle, accessible to reason then he might seem to be superfluous; this was the conclusion drawn by the deists. Yet, if Christ’s revelation was indeed necessary, it implied that natural reason could not generate morality. The most sustained attempt to wrestle with these questions was made by John Locke, in his Reasonableness of Christianity. Even he found it difficult to balance natural law and revelation, however.4 Although Locke’s relationship to Socinianism is usually evaluated by looking at his views on Christian doctrine, it should by now be clear that his engagement with Socinian ideas went deeper. His attempts to bring natural law and revelation together without undermining either were part of his own efforts to solve the challenge which Socinus and the Socinians had bequeathed to their readers.5 Throughout the seventeenth century the relationship between nature and Christianity remained extremely fraught, for the political and ecclesiastical stakes involved were high. In the early 1640s it had been the problem of resistance which engaged the attention of English writers, as they questioned whether resistance based on the law of nature was acceptable for Christians. Later, it was the twin issues of Church government and Christian morality which led people to examine whether, and how far, Christianity and natural law or rights might diverge. The English discussion of these issues was heavily influenced by Socinian and Remonstrant writing, and Anglican divines, like their Remonstrant counterparts, often struggled to bring together the emphasis on freedom and individual effort they found in Socinus, and the commitment to natural law which they saw as essential to Christianity. For this reason the problem of reconciling nature and Christianity would remain a central topic of discussion throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.

ii reason and religion The emphasis on reason which had been characteristic of Socinian writing, especially from the 1630s onward, also struck a chord in Restoration England. As John Spurr has shown, reason was usually portrayed in a positive light in the later seventeenth century and credited with the ability 4 5

J. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, ed. J. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999), pp. ci–cviii and 150–9. See Higgins-Biddle’s discussion of Locke and Socinianism in ibid., pp. xlii-lxxiv; also Marshall, ‘John Locke, Socinianism, “Socinianism” and Unitarianism’. David Wootton does show the importance of Socinian ideas about nature and revelation to Locke in his, ‘John Locke – Socinian or Natural Law Theorist?’

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to play a role – even, perhaps, to judge – in matters of religion.6 It was contrasted to clerical obscurantism, to priestcraft and to enthusiasm, but it was also enlisted on the side of the Church of England, which offered, its apologists claimed, a religion based upon reason. Few would wish to suggest in the 1660s or 1670s that their religion was not at least rationally defensible; that way, Protestants thought, lay Catholic absurdities like transubstantiation. But Spurr also notes that reason was a versatile concept, and it is worth drawing out more thoroughly the specific role played by the Socinian (or, indeed, Remonstrant) version. In his De deo et ejus attributis, Crell argued that human beings could come to know that there was a God by investigating the world around them. Like Socinus he rejected the possibility of innate knowledge of God, but he did suggest that through reflection all people could obtain some idea of the deity. For Crell, it was through reason, understood as a critical faculty, operating upon the evidence brought by the senses, by which humans gained knowledge of God in the absence of revelation. This knowledge was then supplemented by the Scriptures, which had also to be read critically, using the tools appropriate to natural philosophy and history. Crell did not see reason as inherently divine, unlike the Platonists; for him it was primarily an instrument which men could, if they chose, use to gain credible information about the world around them. His argument was echoed (in large part) by Episcopius and we have already seen that by the mid seventeenth century this approach to religion had won some admirers in England. The work of John Yolton has revealed that English writers and theologians prior to 1688 held a variety of positions on the question of whether men had innate ideas of God or morality, and it is worth connecting these English authors to the continental debate.7 For the Socinians and Remonstrants provided some of the most useful arguments for those who sought to show that the idea of God was not straightforwardly innate but required the use of critical reason, operating on sensory experience. Reason, as the Socinians and the Remonstrants understood it, dealt with religious claims in the same way as all other propositions, drawn from any branch of human knowledge whatsoever. On these grounds they felt able to discuss theology without recourse to any specialised technical theological language. The revelation made by God through Christ was, they thought, quite simple to understand – the hard part lay in putting it into practice. They had little time for the subtleties of scholastic theological discourse, 6 7

J. Spurr, ‘Rational Religion in Restoration England’, JHI 49 (1988), pp. 563–85. J. Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford, 1956), pp. 26–73.

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honed through centuries of reflection and academic discussion. Instead, they concentrated on philology and sacred history, on understanding the literal meaning of the Scriptures in their historical context and on drawing moral lessons from them. The Socinians had never had, nor been interested in obtaining, academic theological training and as a result their theology was couched in fairly simple, even crude terms which could easily be understood by a layman. The Remonstrants adopted a similar approach; Episcopius’ discussion of the freedom of the will, for example, ignored centuries of sophisticated debate and merely asserted that the will must be free.8 When discussing God, as Stephen Hampton has shown, Remonstrants and Socinians turned their back on the rich patristic tradition and instead relied upon analogies between God and other beings. By the end of the seventeenth century, this approach to theology was becoming increasingly widespread, even at the universities, although Hampton shows that there was a vigorous Reformed counter-attack.9 The great advantage for Anglican divines of such an approach to the role of reason in religion was that it enabled them to counter Catholic apologists and to defend the Church of England. Edward Stillingfleet, who would become Bishop of Worcester in 1689, denounced the doctrines of papal infallibility and transubstantiation on the grounds that they were absurd and unreasonable. John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1689, also emphasised the rational basis for the Anglican version of Christianity in controversies with the Catholics. Tillotson eschewed complicated language and metaphors, aiming for a plain style in his sermons and writings which could be readily understood by his audience. Neither accepted Catholic claims for the necessity of ecclesiastical authority, preferring to argue that their Church could stand on the secure grounds of Scripture and reason. In this sense they echoed William Chillingworth and his objections to Roman Catholicism. While they still wanted to find a place for mysteries within the Christian religion, they insisted that these legitimate mysteries lay beyond the scope of human reason, without running counter to it. Moreover, an unbiased reader of the Scripture could, they argued, easily see that such mysteries were contained within it – unlike such fictions as transubstantiation.10 Yet, as Owen had seen so clearly in the 1650s, this rational approach to theology had to be used very carefully. For it required its proponents to 8 9 10

S. Episcopius, ‘De Libertate Arbitrium’, in Opera Theologica, vol i. Hampton, Anti-Arminians pp. 171–5, 195–211 and passim. B. Till, ‘Edward Stillingfleet’, ODNB; I. Rivers, ‘John Tillotson’, ODNB; eadem, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, vol. i, p. 47.

Conclusion: the legacy of Socinianism

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demonstrate that the central doctrines of mainstream Christianity, such as the atonement and the Trinity, could in fact be found by a reasonable person in his or her reading of the Scriptures. We have seen how Owen confronted this problem, seeking to demonstrate that the Scriptures needed to be read through the lens of mankind’s natural religious sentiments and to show that these sentiments supported the doctrines of the atonement and the Trinity. By the 1660s, Owen had turned away from this approach, preferring to stress the workings of the Holy Spirit within the individual Christian. But the experience of radical religion during the Civil Wars, which was often seen as fuelled by enthusiasm and by spiritual excess, encouraged English writers in general to emphasise their attachment to reason, argument and the public debate of religious propositions once the monarchy was restored.11 Theological speculation could no longer be conducted solely in the traditional language of scholastic philosophy; now it was the stuff of coffee-house debate. Furthermore, the growing attachment to ‘reason’ and scepticism towards clerical authority meant that theological doctrines had to be made consistent with other, secular, branches of human knowledge. The doctrine of the Trinity proved even more difficult to explain than the atonement and, in the late 1680s and 1690s, controversy erupted after the publication of a number of anti-Trinitarian pamphlets. These pamphlets spurred the Trinitarians into action, forcing them to defend their beliefs in public. At this point they had to decide whether to continue to uphold the language and metaphysical assumptions which lay behind the Trinity as formulated in the Athanasian Creed, or to redescribe the Trinity in a manner more consistent with contemporary philosophy. In his Vindication of … the Trinity (1690), William Sherlock (1641–1707) famously took the latter approach. He argued that the three persons of the Trinity were distinguished by their own self-consciousness but also united by a mutual consciousness. He sought to avoid terms drawn from scholastic metaphysics and instead to offer an explanation of the Trinity which was accessible to laymen. In a similar vein, John Wallis drew on geometry to describe the Trinity, comparing it to a cube. These writers both hoped to maintain the doctrine of the Trinity while shedding the scholastic philosophy of essences and substances in which it had previously been encased.12 Sherlock soon found himself the target of some bitter attacks by his fellow clergymen. Robert South (1634–1716) pounced upon the unorthodox nature of Sherlock’s theology and in a series of venomous attacks he 11

Spurr, ‘Rational Religion’.

12

Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, pp. 109–25.

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ridiculed his opponent’s writing as incoherent and absurd. South’s intention was to shore up traditional Trinitarian teaching and to inculcate proper respect for the Trinity as a mystery, but he also wanted to alert his readers to the problems involved in re-interpreting doctrine. He, and other high churchmen, feared that the attempts by certain clerics to render their religion ‘reasonable’ could only lead to Socinianism and atheism. Moreover, by suggesting that Christian doctrines, for example, the Trinity, could be understood in several different ways such clerics were weakening the foundations of faith and encouraging people to interpret the Scripture in a multitude of different ways.13 By this time the divisions within English theology were plain for all to see. Variations upon Trinitarian and Unitarian themes were expressed in scores of pamphlets, most of which were aimed at an audience which lacked extensive academic training. It became impossible for the Trinitarians to maintain anything like a public consensus through print or persuasion; the only solution was to impose a ban upon unorthodox speculation. In February 1696, King William III issued directions banning the use of new terms relating to the Trinity and, combined with a clampdown on antiTrinitarian printing activity, this served to dampen public discussion of the matter.14 Although controversy over the Trinity did not end there, in the eighteenth century it is much more difficult to isolate a particularly Socinian line of argument. There were men and women of Unitarian belief both within and outside the Church of England, but they rejected any identification with Socinianism. Yet the questions raised by the Socinians about the role of reason in theology had become central to religious debate in England – and this would remain true throughout the eighteenth century. At the heart of the Socinians’ religious beliefs lay an image of human beings as inquiring, reasoning and active individuals who must take responsibility for their own spiritual lives. This was an image which appealed to many of their readers and which still appeals today, but it was one which could have alarming implications for civil and religious communities. Many feared that it would lead to anarchy or to absolutism. In this study we have seen how the Socinians and their readers grappled with these problems, seeking to reconcile the claims of individual freedom with the need for religious and political government. In the mid seventeenth century Socinianism was central 13

14

R. South, Animadversions upon Dr Sherlock‧s Book (London, 1693), Tritheism Charged upon Dr Sherlock‧s New Notion of the Trinity (London, 1695). Hampton, Anti-Arminians, pp. 143–50; M. Grieg ‘Heresy Hunt: Gilbert Burnet and the Convocation Controversy of 1701’, HJ 37 (1994), pp. 569–92. Hampton, Anti-Arminians, pp. 129–30.

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to this broad discussion, for some of the most sophisticated arguments for individual responsibility were contained within Socinian theology. But it was a debate which captured the attention of laymen as well as theologians, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had moved beyond Socinianism and into the everyday discussion of coffee-house society. The legacy of Socinian writing lies in an ongoing critique of theological doctrines, including those of the Trinity and the atonement, but it can also be found in a conversation which still continues over the place of individuals and individual reasoning within the civic and religious life of a community or society.

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPTS

BRITISH LIBRARY

MS Sloane 417 (copies of letters between Joachim Hübner and Samuel Hartlib) MS Harleian 6942 (letters, mostly between Henry Hammond and Gilbert Sheldon) Add. MS 6394 (letters of J. De Laet to Sir William Boswell, 1639) MS Lansdowne 841 (letters between H. Hammond and G. Sheldon)

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

SP 16/420 SP 84/155 (letters relating to The Hague, mainly 1639)

BODLEIAN LIBRARY

MS DD All Souls c.389 (Dudley Digges’ library catalogue) MS Eng. theol. g. 2 (notes of sermons from the 1650s) MS Rawlinson C 166 (account of a disputation between John Biddle and Peter Gunning) MS Tanner 52 Register of Benefactions

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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Hayward, J. C., ‘The “mores” of Great Tew: Literary, Philosophical and Political Idealism in Falkland’s Circle’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1982). Lettinga, C. H., ‘Covenant Theology and The Transformation of Anglicanism’, unpublished PhD dissertation (Johns Hopkins University, 1987). Levitin, D.,‘Anti-Socinianism and The Use of “reason” in the Early Philosophy of Edward Stillingfleet’, unpublished MPhil essay (University of Cambridge, 2008). Peacey, J., ‘Henry Parker and Parliamentary Propaganda in the English Civil Wars’, unpublished PhD dissertation (Cambridge, 1994). Powell, H., ‘The Last Confession: A Background Study of the Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order’, unpublished MPhil dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2008). Serjeantson, R., ‘Conscientious Innovation in Some Writings of Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)’, unpublished MPhil dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1994). Van Dixhoorn, C., ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly 1643-1652’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2004). Vernon, E., ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1999).

Index

Abbot, George 49 Acontius, Jacopo 6, 173 Stratagemata Satanae 71–2 Agreement of the People 191 (see also Officers’ Agreement of the People) Altdorf Academy 24–5, 29, 39, 42 Ames, William 56 Amsterdam 105, 213 Anabaptists 23, 28, 40 An Apologie for Mr Iohn Goodwin 202 Answer to the XIX Propositions 93 Anti-Calvinists 42–3, 72 Anti-Trinitarianism 14, 40–1, 162–3, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 185, 188, 194–5, 199, 203, 219, 230–1 (see also Trinity) Aquinas, Thomas 34 Aristotle, Aristotelianism 34, 36, 37, 58, 61, 77, 150, 219 Arius 33 Arianism 7, 40–1, 57, 75, 163 Arminius, Jacob 25–6, 42, 44, 45–6, 126, 138, 207, 212, 214, 229, 234 theology of 25–6, 119–23 (see also Remonstrants) Ascham, Anthony 114–17, 144, 215 A Discourse 114 Athanasian Creed 33 Atonement 10, 15, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 55, 75, 83, 110, 128, 137, 140, 209–12, 214, 224, 239, 241 Augustine 34 Bacon, Nathaniel 180 Baillie, Robert 108 Balmford, Samuel 106 baptism 70, 129, 134, 139, 146, 180 Barksdale, Clement 62 Barlow, Thomas 57–8, 60, 63, 78–9, 164, 208 Basle 13, 14, 15, 20

Baxter, Richard 216–17, 219, 221, 223–5, 226, 229 Beale, John 59, 60–2 Becanus, Martin 49 Bertius, Petrus 51 Best, Paul 12, 158–60, 163, 167, 171, 172, 174, 182, 183, 195 Mysteries Discover’d 159 Beza, Theodore 51 Biddle, John 6, 12, 160–3, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174–3, 174, 183, 206, 210, 212, 221, 224–8, 229, 230, 232 Twofold Catechism 221 Bisterfeld, Johannes 150, 151 Blasphemy Act 199 Blasphemy Ordinance 180–3 Bodin, Jean 36 Boethius 34 Boswell, Sir William 105 Botsak, Johan 152 Boyle, Robert 213–14 Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill 223, 231 Bramhall, John 101, 102 Brandt, Caspar 29, 30 Brereley, Roger 59–60 Brett, Annabel 9 Brooke, Samuel 59, 60, 61 Buchanan, George 86 Burroughes, Jeremiah 187–8, 192 Calamy, Edmund 183 Calov, Abraham 152 Calvin, John 14, 35, 109, 110–11, 124, 182 Cambridge University 44, 58, 59, 61, 139, 158, 168, 170 Catholicism 36, 40, 45, 53, 54, 65, 71–3, 107, 109, 135, 198, 238 (see also Church, Catholic) Cartwright, William 89 Cary, Elizabeth 65, 75

259

260

Index

Cary, Lucius, 2nd Viscount Falkland 6, 63, 66–70, 75–6, 82, 85, 88, 89, 90, 93, 98, 103–4, 130, 155 and Catholic Church 66–7, 73–4 and Socinian texts 68, 73 on the Trinity 75–6 Discourse of Infallibility 75, 76–7 Cary, Lucy 68 Cassander, George 107 Chalcedon, Council of 148 Charles I 6, 43, 86, 88, 89, 90–1, 107, 108, 109, 117, 129, 131, 188, 189–90, 196 Charles Stuart (Charles II) 133, 196 Chester 163 Cheynell, Francis 84, 109–14, 126–7, 134, 136, 146, 169, 170, 172–4 Chillingworthi Novissimi 112–13 Rise, Growth and Danger of Socinianism 109–12 Divine Trinunity 173–4 Chillingworth, William 5, 65, 89–90, 103, 110, 112–14, 127, 130, 154, 238 and Grotius 70 and Socinian texts 67–9 on the Catholic Church 66–7, 73–4 on faith 74 on individual judgement 67, 68, 73, 79, 81–2 on laws of Christ 80 on secular authority 81–2, 97–8 on the Trinity 75–6 Religion of Protestants. A Safe Way to Salvation 67, 70, 71, 73, 113 Church of England 5, 11, 65, 66–7, 119, 124, 127, 128–32, 138–9, 142, 146, 155, 237, 238, 240 Catholic 14, 22, 66–7, 68–70, 71, 73–4, 76, 78, 79, 85 Presbyterian church settlement 133, 138 Protectoral church settlement 220–5, 230–1 Cicero 9, 151 Clement of Alexandria 80 Colchester, siege of 194 Coleman, Thomas 132 Conant, John 228–9 Contra-Remonstrants 43, 45, 47, 51, 104–5 Cosimo de Medici I 14 Cosin, John 42 Cotton, John 185 Couet, Jacob 13, 14, 15, 20–1, 22 Covenant, Solemn League and 181–2, 183, 184, 210 Covenanters, Scottish 87, 90–2, 97 covenant theology 31, 51, 119–23 Crell, Johan 24, 29, 30, 31, 36–7, 59, 62, 83, 95, 116, 123, 143, 153, 216, 234 on human societies 81 on natural knowledge of God 150–1, 237

on rights 29–30, 31 on self-preservation 31 on the Trinity 36–7, 77–8 Ad Librum Hugonis Grotii 29–30, 81, 235 De deo et ejus attributis 31, 150–1, 162, 237 De Uno Deo Patre 37, 57, 77–8, 149–51, 154–6 De Vera Religione 30, 31, 68 Ethica Christiana 213–14, 234 Vindiciae pro Religionis Libertate 186 (see also De Vera Religione) Cressy, Hugh 68, 155 Cromwell, Oliver 203, 205–6, 208, 220, 223, 224–5, 228, 231 Crosfield, Thomas 86–7 Culpeper, Sir John 93, 113 Curcellaeus, Stephanus 153 Danzig (Gdansk) 41, 152 Davenant, John 44, 54, 216 Dell, William 170, 171, 194 Digges, Dudley 89, 93, 94–6, 98–103, 114–16, 143, 233 and Hobbes 99–101 An Answer to a Printed Book 90, 102, 111 The Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking Up Arms Against Their Sovereign 90, 99 Downes, John 164 Downham, John 183 Dugard, William 165–7, 197, 212 Duppa, Brian 142 Dury, John 54, 186, 219 Eaton, Samuel 163 Edward VI 40 Edwards, Thomas 181 Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia 106–7 Elbing 54, 56 Episcopius, Simon 25, 26, 49, 81, 122, 139, 140, 142–3, 206, 214–15, 229, 234, 237, 238 on the Trinity 152–3, 162 Episcopius, Rem 25 episcopacy 129–36, 146, 159 Erasmus, Desiderius 64, 76, 85, 115 Erastus, Thomas 132–3 Erbery, William 168–70, 174, 188, 193, 199 Essex, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of 93, 109 Estwick, Nicholas 172 Everarde, John 59–60 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 169, 170 Fell, John 124 Florence 14 France 20, 38, 98, 105, 109, 155 Franck, Adam 104 Franzius, Wolfgang 24

Index Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange 105 Fry, John 164–5, 167 Gataker, Thomas 183 Geneva 61 Germany 20, 24, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46 Gloucester 160, 161, 163 Gloucester, Henry, Duke of 190 Goodwin, John 44, 53, 183, 217–18, 219 and the Blasphemy Ordinance 182 and the Humble Proposals 202–3 at Whitehall debates 191–3, 194, 217 Redemption Redeemed 217–18 Goodwin, Thomas 185, 210–12, 221 Gouldman, Francis 166 Great Tew Circle 6, 11, 63–87, 88–9, 120, 147, 155 Grebby, Robert 163–4 Grotius, Hugo 9, 26–9, 31, 56, 61, 107–9, 120, 123, 125, 129, 145, 162, 206, 216–17, 222, 234 acquaintance with Socinians 25, 30, 83, 154 ecclesiology of 43, 122 and the Great Tew Circle 64, 70, 81, 83, 84 and the Vorstius affair 48, 49 on justification 215–16 on the Bible as history 122–3, 215–16, 227–8 on the Trinity 153, 162 Annotationes 96, 122–3, 153, 209, 215–16, 228–30 De Jure Belli ac Pacis 28–9, 114–17, 216 De Veritate Religionis Christianae 30, 70, 72 Defensio Fidei Catholicae de Satisfactione Christi adversus Faustum Socinum 27–8, 216 Via ad pacem ecclesiasticam 107 view of Christ 120, 123 Hales, John 5, 60, 77, 81 Hamburg 54, 56 Hammond, Henry 11, 66, 68, 82–4, 89–90, 93, 94, 101–3, 108, 114–18, 119–46, 147–8, 183 and Grotius 83, 120, 123, 125, 228 and Hobbes 133–4, 136–7 on baptism 134, 139, 146 on Christ 124–6, 128 on episcopacy 128–36 on free will 83–4, 145 on original sin 137–46 on the moral law 84, 124–7 on the Trinity 120, 125–6, 146 Considerations of Present Use 130 A Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres 135 Of The Power of the Keyes 131 Of the Reasonableness of Christianity 127–8, 136 Practicall Catechisme 124–7, 129, 139 The Scriptures Plea for Magistrates 90 Hartlib, Samuel 54, 56 Heads of the Proposals 131, 135

261

Henriette Marie 74, 108, 109, 111, 113 Hill, Thomas 217 Hobbes, Thomas 9, 98–103, 113, 116–17, 132, 133–4, 136–7, 155–7, 218, 227, 234–5 ecclesiology of 133–4, 136 on the Trinity 155–7, 175 De Cive 98–101, 133, 136 Elements of Law 98–101, 113 Leviathan 155, 218, 227 Hübner, Joachim 58 Huguenots 8, 23, 107 Humble Petition and Advice 231–2 Humble Proposals 198, 205, 220, 222, 223–5 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon 64, 66, 76, 82, 103, 104, 108 Ibbitson, Robert 223 Independents 131, 184–5, 186, 189, 190, 196, 206, 220, 225 Instrument of Government 205, 220, 223–5, 231 Intentions of the Armie of the Kingdome of Scotland 92, 97 Ireland 4, 91, 99, 102, 106, 196 Ireton, Henry 190–4, 197 Remonstrance 189 James I 39, 41, 49 Johnson, Sampson 56, 59, 106–7, 156 Jonson, Ben 66 justice, divine 13, 21–2, 51, 52, 141, 189, 209–12, 217, 225, 227, 228, 229 Knott, Edward 71, 75, 76–7, 78–9, 82, 127, 154 Charity Mistaken 71 Mercy and Truth, Or Charity Maintain’d by Catholiques 71 Direction to be Observed by N.N. 77, 78 Knowles, John 163 Lambert, John 168 Laud, William 5–7, 11, 42–3, 54, 55, 62, 63, 72, 84, 85, 86, 110, 139, 156, 179 and Dutch churches 105–7 Legate, Bartholomew 40–1, 50, 159 Leiden University 25, 45, 47, 49 Leipzig Colloquy 54 Leyburn, George 74 liberty of conscience 84, 99, 101, 102, 176, 177–9, 184–6, 190–3, 198, 200, 220 Lilburne, John 191 Lipsius, Justus 163 Locke, John 7, 236 Lubbertus, Sibbrandus 48, 49, 51, 52 Episolica disceptio de fide justificante 51 Luther, Martin 182

262

Index

Madrid 117 magistrate 108 legitimacy of 23, 32–3, 81, 86–7 religious authority of 11, 48, 133–4, 148, 168, 179, 180, 191–3, 202–3 Marets, Samuel des 22 Marshall, Stephen 96–7, 102 A Copy of a Letter 96 Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange 48–9 Maurice, Prince Palatine of the Rhine 108 Maxwell, John 102 Mayne, Zachary 210 McLachlan, John 5–7, 12, 64, 70 Meisner, Balthasar 31 Melanchthon, Philip 14, 17, 23, 35 Loci Communes 23 Mersenne, Marin 152, 156 Militia Ordinance 92 Milton, John 7–8, 166, 200 Morley, George 66 mortalism 141, 218 Moskorzowski, Hieronimus, 41 Naseby, Battle of 216 natural law 2, 8, 11, 29, 30, 32–3, 80–1, 84, 85, 86, 107–8, 127, 131, 143–5, 179, 191 and Christianity 23–4, 28–9, 32–3, 80–1, 84, 88–9, 92, 114–17, 143–5 and Church settlement 184, 190, 202 and natural rights 8–10, 233–6 in Covenanter thought 91–2 in Parliamentarian thought 91, 92, 93, 94–6 natural light 78, 148, 182, 185, 186–8, 189, 191–3, 196, 202, 208–12, 217, 237, 239 natural religion 2–3, 12, 143, 144, 177, 186–7, 201 Socinus on 16–17, 60 Naylor, James 230–1 Nedham, Marchamont 200 Neile, Richard 42, 72 Newburn, Battle of 91 Newbury, 1st Battle of 103 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 91 Newcastle, William Cavendish, Marquess of 133 New Model Army 170, 173, 184, 188, 197, 216 (see also Whitehall debates) Newport Treaty 189 Newton, Isaac 7–8 Nicea, Council of 33, 75, 148 Nye, Philip 54, 185, 191, 202 Nye, Stephen 6 Officers’ Agreement of the People 193–4, 205 Origen 61 original sin 16–17, 26, 100, 120, 128, 137–46, 211, 224 Ostorodt, Christoph 41

Overton, Richard 218 Owen, John 12, 194–6, 201, 202, 205–12, 220, 230, 231, 238–9 and confession of faith 221–6 and Oxford University 208, 226 and Racovian Catechism 196–200, 205, 207 on divine justice 209–12 on Grotius 228–30 on Hobbes 227 on natural knowledge of God 208–12, 226–7, 239 on the Trinity 227–8 sermons to Parliament 195, 202 Discourse about Toleration 195–6 Diatriba de Iustitia Divina 208–10, 212 Vindiciae Evangelium 208, 222, 225 Oxford 64, 110, 123, 124, 126, 168–9 Charles’ court at 90 Oxford Treaty 99, 111 Oxford University 55–60, 64, 65, 72, 79, 82, 86–7, 139, 163, 173, 208, 210, 214–15, 226, 227, 229 Bodleian Library 213 pacifism 19, 28, 31, 81, 104–5, 113, 115 Pareus, David 51, 52 Paris 133, 152 Parker, Henry 93–4 Observations on Some of His Majesties Late Answers 93 Parliament Long Parliament 91, 177, 196 and blasphemy 182–3 and heresy 159 and Racovian Catechism 196–7 church reforms of 132–3, 177, 179–80 dissolution of 203 Protectorate Parliaments 222–5, 230 Parris, George Van 40 Petau, Denis 154 Place, Joshua de la 152 Plato, Platonism 77, 85, 163, 174, 237 neo-Platonism 33, 34, 37, 38, 151 Poelenburgh, Arnold 214 Poland 1, 13, 14, 19, 42, 53, 68, 81, 85, 86, 104, 158, 234 Pomponazzi, Pietro 61 Potter, Christopher 71–3, 82, 86, 113, 124, 130 Want of Charity Justly Charged 71 Presbyterian church settlement 133, 138, 181 Presbyterians, English 130, 180–4, 185, 188, 189, 210, 220 Scottish 130, 180, 183, 210 Preston, John 44 Preston, Battle of 188

Index Prideaux, John 55–8, 60, 63, 77, 78–9, 113, 172, 208 punishment 21–2, 27–8, 29–30, 119–23, 189 Quakers 230–1 Racovian Catechism 15, 39, 41, 125, 127, 165–7, 169, 203, 206, 212 dedicated to James I 39 petitioned against 196–200, 205, 207 Rakow 1, 14, 19–20, 24, 28, 38 Remonstrants 20, 25–6, 28, 38, 42, 45–7, 53, 63, 80, 84, 129, 137, 138–40, 143, 145, 152, 199, 222, 224, 226, 234 Confession of Faith 49, 152 relationship with the Socinians 25–6, 104–5 theology of 119–23, 206, 212, 219–20, 235–8 Richmond, James Stuart, 1st Duke of 129 right, rights 8–10, 11, 21, 27–8, 29–30, 31, 93, 94–6, 98–101, 102, 111, 116, 233–6 (see also natural law) Rivet, André 107–10, 156 Roman Law 14, 21, 35, 38 Rous, Francis 186–8, 192, 201 Royston, Richard 103 Ruar, Martin 24, 25, 37, 44, 152, 156 Rupert, Prince Palatine of the Rhine 108 Rutherford, Samuel 210, 212 Saltmarsh, William 168, 170, 171 Sancroft, William 218 Sandys, George 86 Sartorius, Johannes 104 Satisfaction of Christ (see Atonement) Saye and Sele, Viscount 93, 185 Scheibler, Christoph 57 Schlichting, Jonasz 31–3, 115–16, 213–14, 216 Questiones duae 31–3, 115 Scotland 4, 87, 88, 90–1, 106, 116, 188, 196 (see also Covenanters, Scottish) Selden, John 9, 132–3 self-defence, self-preservation 32–3, 86–7, 92, 93, 94, 120 (see also pacifism) Servetus, Michael 195 Sheldon, Gilbert 66, 89, 113, 131, 139 Sherlock, William 239–40 Skinner, Quentin 8 Slade, Matthew 49 Smalcius, Valentine 24, 41 Socinus, Faustus 13–22, 28, 42, 56, 61, 62, 95, 111, 127, 139, 141, 142–3, 164, 206, 213–14, 215, 221, 222, 229 and Roman law 14, 21, 35 ecclesiology of 68–9 on Christ 15–26, 119–23

263

on difference between Old and New Testaments 19–20, 121 on divine justice 13, 21–2 on free will 15–22 on human nature 2–3, 16–17, 233–7 on natural religion 2–3, 16–17, 207 on original sin 16–17 on reason 3, 16, 17–18 on rights 21 on the Bible as history 17–18, 56 on the Trinity 35–6, 147 on warfare 19–20, 81, 111 Assertiones theologicae de trino et uno deo 68–9 De Auctoritate Sacrae Scripturae 17–18, 30, 70 De Jesu Christo Servatore 13, 21–2, 27 Defensio Animadversionum Adversus Gabrielem Eutropium 68–9 Socinus, Laelius 14 Sorbière, Samuel 156 Soul 17, 60–2, 212, 218 (see also mortalism) South, Robert 239 Southampton, Thomas Wriothsley, 4th Earl of 129 Spang, William 108 Spencer, Robert 103 Sprigge, Joshua 186, 201 Stegmann, Jonas 77 Steward, Richard 130 Stillingfleet, Edward 218, 235, 238 Stubbe, Henry 227 Suarez, Francisco 57 Tate, Zouch 180 Taylor, Jeremy 120, 137, 139 on natural law 143–5 on original sin 139–42 Deus Justificatus 141 Liberty of Prophecying 141 Unum Necessarium 140 Great Exemplar 140, 143–4 Tertullian 34 Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ 183 The Hague 106–7 Thomason, George 90, 224 Tierney, Brian 9 Tillotson, John 218, 238 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 6, 64 Trinity 33–8, 53, 55–60, 61, 62, 66, 75–6, 77, 78–9, 110, 120, 125–6, 146, 147–75, 177, 178, 194, 219–20, 227–8, 239–41 and Church settlement 147–9, 191, 194 and natural light 151–2, 187–8, 194, 201–2 Crell on 36–7, 77–8 Socinus on 35–6, 147 spiritualised interpretations of 59, 167–70, 194

264

Index

Trinity (cont.) unknown to earliest Christians 33, 75–6, 147, 149, 152–5, 162–3, 174–5, 200–2 (see also Anti-Trinitarianism) Tuck, Richard 8–9, 64 Unitarianism 1, 4, 5, 240 United Provinces 4, 10, 11, 25–6, 29, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 53, 81, 104–7, 121 and Socinian exiles 104–7 truce with Spain 46, 48 Vorstius affair 45 Ussher, James 44, 219 Uxbridge Treaty 129–31 Vane, Sir Henry 160, 200, 201 A Vindication of a Printed Paper 182 A Vindication of Dr Hammond 102 Volkelius, Jan 31, 37, 41, 62, 68, 134–6, 169 ecclesiology of 69–70, 131–2 De Vera Religione 31, 68, 69–70, 97–8, 121, 129, 150, 213, 214 Vorstius, Conrad 45, 46–9, 50 relationship with Socinians 47 De Deo 49

Wales 170 Walker, George 50–3 Waller, Edmund 66 Wallis, John 219, 239 Ward, Seth 214–15, 227 Webberly, John 109, 110–11, 113 Westminster Assembly 132–3, 159, 160, 179 White, Thomas 85 Whitehall debates 190–4, 217 Wilbur, Earl Morse 5 Wildman, John 191–3, 194 Wilkins, John 214–15, 227 William II of Orange 107 William III 240 Williams, George 5 Williams, Roger 200 Wittenburg University 24 Wootton, Anthony 50, 52–3 Worcester, Battle of 196 Worcestershire Association 219, 223 Worsley, Benjamin 213 Wotton, Henry 60 Young, Robert 213